Ontological Shifts

Preamble

Before formally beginning this study, I would like to offer a brief biographical sketch that may illuminate my position as a researcher of this subject, my personal involvement, and also the potential biases and tendencies that are part of the transformation of worldview sustained by the investigation of spiritual awakening.

First, this study is inspired and motivated by my own experience of spiritual awakening, which took place some years ago. I was reluctant to present my own trajectory at the outset of this work, considering that this might set aside the theoretical impartiality necessary for the serious exploration of a study of this nature. However, encouraged by colleagues, I decided to sketch something of my personal experience of the subject, so as to make my perspective more transparent and also to emphasize that this work is the fruit of a gaze that is simultaneously theoretical and profoundly experiential.

My personal interest in the theme of spiritual awakening dates back to the beginning of my youth, around seventeen years ago. Philosophical by temperament, existential and scientific questions were part of my field of consciousness from an early age. However, my initial identifications, around the age of twelve, were with a materialist atheism, distant from the considerations that would come later and that will be explored in this dissertation. Such inquiries emerged in a practically solitary manner, with little or no influence from my family environment, where religious and philosophical discussions were not present.

However, relatively early on, through contemporary readings in philosophy of mind—such as the articles of David Chalmers and the books of Douglas Hofstadter—I recognized that the problem of the origin and nature of consciousness was a theoretical gap within the scientific narrative. This motivated me to undertake studies in neuroscience, intuiting that in the functioning of the brain I would find the answer to the problem of consciousness. I began my training in applied mathematics at UFRJ, aiming to establish a solid quantitative foundation for a career as a neuroscientist. I quickly made contact with the Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho and participated in the primate neurophysiology laboratory, alongside the kind Prof. Mário Fiorani, who welcomed me promptly.

After approximately one year in this context, frustrated by a strictly empirical perspective and also led by circumstances to a change of city and academic environment, I made the transition to psychology, considering that I would find in a subjective perspective more interesting facets for understanding consciousness. Unfortunately, I found little academic resonance in psychology, whose research and teaching interests were distant from those that truly nourished me personally. However, during this period of relative contextual aridity, what I would retrospectively call the first spontaneous non-ordinary states emerged—outside a formal religious context and with few prior readings on spiritual themes.

With the advantage of the distance that the passage of years affords, I can report that those were the first glimpses of what years later would emerge as a full spiritual awakening. There was a series of events involving a rupture of what we might call the barrier between consciousness and the material world, presenting the first signs that subjectivity was perhaps not restricted to local brain activity but was perhaps the substrate of the material world. For someone whose ideas had for years been centered on an objective and materialist explanatory framework, such a paradigm shift was surprising and impactful. Interests in spiritual themes, which previously would have been promptly rejected, were included in the field of daily consciousness, and my psychic and practical life gradually transformed so as to seek an intensification and understanding of the new states I had experienced.

I participated in meditative retreats, began a regular formal practice, started corresponding with individuals who reported spiritual realizations, and became, effectively, a full-time spiritual seeker.

After some years, there was a sudden shift in consciousness that unexpectedly triggered the state with the characteristics usually associated with awakening. This difficult and complex interior movement motivated a long period of reflection and investigation, whose theoretical fruits are presented in this research.

1. Introduction

1.0 The Current Context in the Study of Spiritual Awakening

The experience, event, and process of spiritual awakening has received considerable attention in the scientific literature of recent decades.

There has also been a broadening of interest in the general culture for spiritual themes in which awakening appears as a central component, integrating practices and knowledge from Western esoteric philosophies and religious traditions of Eastern origin. This assimilation constitutes the fruition of theoretical and experiential fusions that date back to the first efforts of Swami Vivekananda in introducing yoga to the West (at the beginning of the twentieth century), to the arrival of Buddhist masters of Tibetan lineage and Zen in the first half of the last century, and to the intellectual consideration of important thinkers in the West, such as Carl Gustav Jung, Jean Gebser, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and Mircea Eliade.

Concomitantly, the resurgence in recent decades of research with psychedelic substances, the consolidation of studies on contemplative practices, and the exploration of the phenomenology of the anomalous self have brought into focus debates concerning the nature of the self, the frontiers of consciousness, and their neurobiological correlates (Parnas et al. 2005; Griffiths et al. 2008, 2011; Lebedev et al. 2015; Tagliazucchi et al. 2016). The variety of psychometric instruments (scales and inventories) used for the investigation of these questions demonstrates the renewed interest in these themes (Strassman et al. 1994; Parnas et al. 2005; Studerus et al. 2010; Barrett et al. 2015; Nour et al. 2016; Schenberg et al. 2017; Hanley et al. 2018). Within this flourishing, the event of spiritual awakening, described by contemplative traditions for millennia, has been approached in the literature through several of its central elements (Davis et al. 2013; Yaden et al. 2017; Stein 2019; Josipovic et al. 2020).

We may ask ourselves why there is such interest in practices and forms of knowledge that were previously restricted to an elite of practitioners and scholars. When a contemporary subject turns to texts on Dzogchen or Advaita Vedānta and includes them within their philosophical reflections and lived experiences, what kind of cultural transformation will have taken place for perspectives that were once difficult to access to be now so readily—and even voraciously—consumed by individuals from such diverse cultures? What subjective developments, at the individual and collective level, could explain the integration of conceptions of a mystical order into an essentially secular cultural field? Is this merely a phenomenon explicable within the interpretive schema of the New Age mentality, or, on the other hand, do we find here a new facet or subjective modality that was once uncommon and rare but has now been amplified and become more frequent in the lives of increasingly ordinary people—that is, subjects without formal monastic or esoteric training?

The present work aims to broaden the discussion of these questions beyond a strictly materialist treatment of subjectivity—that is, one that reduces consciousness to the brain. We consider that such a perspective receives significant support in the literature and in the scientific zeitgeist, and for this reason, its arguments and foundations are implicit within the mode of thinking of the great majority of contemporary research. We will seek, on the other hand, to argue that distinct axioms, such as those of idealism, panpsychism, and dual-aspect monism—which are currently widely debated in the field of philosophy of mind—may be better able to explain certain atypical subjective phenomena, such as spiritual awakening, without any loss of established scientific knowledge. This is essentially a change of perspective that could integrate a large number of phenomena currently regarded as anomalous and impossible to include within the theoretical limits embedded in contemporary scientific methodology.

This research has also sought to illuminate and bring to the fore philosophical perspectives that can accommodate and explain the phenomenon of spiritual awakening beyond an anti-essentialist, anti-phenomenological, and rigidly postmodern narrative. We consider that spiritual awakening, and mysticism in general, cannot be adequately addressed within these three theoretical frameworks. However, the argumentative line of this work does not intend to posit in the abstract an essence or universal explanatory principle. We will attempt to find a path of convergence between certain positions of classical and current philosophy, cutting-edge developments in theoretical physics, new reflections on the irreducibility of consciousness, and studies in comparative mysticism. For this reason, the work has a significantly transdisciplinary nature, in which we set aside the artificial postulate that fields of knowledge have well-established boundaries and, differently, aim for a return to an epistemological posture that considers knowledge as a unified theoretical field. Within the paradigm of separate forms of knowledge that can only forcibly dialogue with one another, the fusion or integration of discoveries from philosophy, mysticism, physics, and neuroscience may appear as a confused and chaotic condition. However, from a radically transdisciplinary paradigm, such convergence would be expected to occur; knowledge of objective reality—considered here not as essentially an object, but as invariant, whether objectively or subjectively—would tend to emerge naturally for each of these distinct modes of inquiry into the nature of reality.

This theoretical point of view consequently argues in favor of the position that mysticism constitutes a transversal form of knowledge, beyond the multiplicities of perspectives and socio-historical contexts in which it has taken place. However, one could criticize this choice as problematic, considering that the consensual view of a great number of researchers in the field of religious studies and comparative mysticism is that such theoretical unity—the existence of a transversal knowledge—is a result of perennialist positions that have suffered strong criticism in recent decades (Taves 2009). Here we will not revisit the classical arguments, but will present what we judge to be, in our view, a new elaboration of this position, so as to recover the meaning of mysticism—and of spiritual awakening as its foundational experience—as a third way of knowing, distinct from propositional dialectics and also from the pure belief that constitutes traditional religious knowledge. In this sense, the work follows a theoretical line according to which experience, subjectivity, and consciousness—terms that are conceptually isomorphic—constitute the primary fact in the construction of scientific knowledge, a perspective that goes back to thinkers as diverse as William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and G. W. F. Hegel.

Indeed, as we will elaborate in detail throughout this work, if spiritual awakening possesses any meaning beyond that of an event of a purely subjective order, what it reveals is precisely a facet or dimension of this subjectivity or consciousness that was previously hidden. We do not entirely reject the position that this is merely a cerebral modulation, at least not initially. It is proposed, in the spirit of Hans Vaihinger, as a hypothetical questioning: that if the ontological and phenomenological claims of spiritual awakening are seriously considered, the implications for our understanding of reality will be closer to those presented here than to a point of view that excludes a priori any possibility of a genuinely subjective and simultaneously transversal form of knowledge.

Awakening will be analyzed through some of its central attributes, such as non-duality, unity, and the realization of consciousness without contents by means of the pure consciousness event (Forman 1988; Forman 1990; Josipovic 2014; Josipovic et al. 2020). Here we will use the term consciousness as the capacity to be susceptible to experiences, of "sentience," of the possibility for an organism or entity to recognize itself as existing—a definition close to that used in contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind (Strawson 2006; Tononi and Koch 2015; Goff 2017).

This definition will be important for the development of the argument that awakening is not only a subjective, contingent event, but one that unveils a genuine ontological substrate, grounded in consciousness itself. It is certainly possible to characterize awakening in diverse ways, in accordance with the particular interpretive frameworks of each religious, philosophical, or mystical tradition that contemplates it.

However, the central attributes chosen here demarcate the event of awakening in a relatively clear manner, in contrast to other experiences defined as religious, and point to the hypothesis that awakening is something distinct from a transformation of mental states, possibly demonstrating the irreducibility of consciousness.

Worthy of note in relation to the attributions or interpretations of religious experiences is the work of Ann Taves (2009). The attributional perspective aims to differentiate experiences from the subsequent attributions, interpretations, or characterizations they may receive, so as to achieve a more precise view of religious experiences, free from conceptualizations. We will address the model of religious attributions in order to contrast it with the argument that mystical experiences are causa sui, justifying and validating themselves. Here we will present a consideration that the attributional model tends to presuppose, even if implicitly, that the natural position—in which conventional reality is considered as primary—exists as a background against which experiences that receive diverse attributions, such as mystical or religious ones, are exceptions, whose attributions must be scrutinized in relation to this common natural framework. In contrast, we argue that mystical experiences, or more specifically awakening, emerge in the dissolution of any presupposed frame or referential, and it is precisely at this point that their meaning can be extracted. Put another way, and briefly enunciating one of the points we will elaborate in detail in this dissertation: it is only possible to understand the process of attribution of religious or mystical experiences if we simultaneously illuminate the conventional attributions that provide human beings with the ordinary sense of life. This observation was made by Husserl (1982) and more recently by Hoffman (2019), from distinct theoretical perspectives.

This point of departure will allow for a philosophical analysis that aims to sketch answers regarding the ontological status of awakening and its validity as a source of knowledge about reality, which will transport us to the domain of epistemology. We consider this philosophical deepening important, having observed the lack of analyses of this type in the literature, and also, having identified a lack of dialogue with psychology, particularly with contemporary clinical practice. The central argument, which will be developed throughout this work, is that a genuinely impartial view of religious experiences—in our case, awakening—must consider diverse philosophical prisms, such as idealism and/or panpsychism, so as to produce a more complete theoretical map of the object of study. We think that a strictly materialist approach ignores important contemporary developments in the field of philosophy of mind and also in the history of philosophy. In this way, we seek to fill an existing gap in the literature, through a transdisciplinary study uniting central authors from religious studies, philosophy of mind, and contemporary psychology, with the aim of opening new avenues for the study of mystical experiences such as awakening.

1.1 Terminological and Conceptual Issues in the Study of Spiritual

Awakening The phenomena and processes of the subjective dimension are notoriously more difficult to classify than those of the objective dimension, whose empirical and mathematical refinement over several centuries has yielded theoretical fruits that do not yet have a counterpart in the sciences of the mind. The case of spiritual awakening shares these difficulties.

Within a semantic map that seeks to chart the terms and concepts usually used in its classification—particularly in the current literature of psychology, philosophy of religion, and neuroscience—we have the following: (1) religious experience; (2) mystical experience; (3) unitive experience; (4) self-transcendent experience; (5) ego-loss experience; (6) no-self experience; (7) altered state of consciousness; (8) non-ordinary state of consciousness; (9) pure consciousness state; (10) satori (of particular use in Zen Buddhism); (11) samādhi (in current use in Indian yoga and Vedānta); (12) God-realization; (13) self-realization (James 1902/1961; Stace 1961; Maslow 1972; Tart 1972; Grof 1989; Forman 1990; Suzuki 2002; Feuerstein 2003; Hood et al. 2009; Yaden 2017).

In this theoretical ordering, we have not included all the terms found by comparative mysticism in the study of the most diverse mystical traditions, such as Orthodox Christianity, Kabbalistic Judaism, or Islamic Sufism. Here we concentrate on current discussions regarding spiritual awakening, using the first nine concepts in our discussion and occasionally the terms satori, samādhi, God-realization, and self-realization when particular authors from the field of religious studies are cited, such as D. T. Suzuki, George Feuerstein, and Elaine Pagels.

Within the field of religious studies, such conceptualizations tend to receive two major treatments, or theoretical perspectives: (1) the view that a universal experience or state, encompassing the multiplicity of places, traditions, and socio-historical and linguistic contexts in which such experiences emerge, is impossible; (2) the recognition of a common thread, or of a common state underlying all the reports of historical mysticism or of contemporary records.

The first accompanies what we might call an Aristotelian perspective, and the second, a Platonic one. In the first, the religious, spiritual, or mystical states presented by individuals are absolutely diverse, and from them we can extract only a conceptual unity, not a substantial or ontological one. Interpretations, attributions, and linguistic elaborations tend to receive greater emphasis and are considered central to understanding their meaning. This is the perspective adopted by most contemporary scholars in the study of mysticism and spiritual experiences. The second, on the other hand, is notable for maintaining that such states or experiences transcend language, concepts, and the intellect itself. For this reason, this position tends to be favored by the mystics themselves, but rejected by most scholars, for reasons that have already been discussed in the literature (Katz 1978; Taves 2009).

Indeed, it is common among some celebrated religious figures, such as Ramakrishna and Sri Ramana Maharshi, to emphasize that such states or realizations provide an understanding of the essence of religions and, for this reason, transcend them.

Originally brought from Eastern spiritual traditions, the concept of awakening implies a passage from an existential state of perceptual, cognitive, and affective restrictions to a new state of greater lucidity, enjoyment of life, realization of the unity of existence, and identity between the subject and reality experienced as a totality. It can be attributed to significant events in a subject's life, or it can also be used in its original sense, of a radical transformation and/or access to a new order of consciousness and reality. As we mentioned previously, awakening is a term that belongs to a broad semantic field, which includes other expressions such as spiritual enlightenment, realization of unity, samādhi, satori, peak experiences, and mystical union—terms used by different mystical traditions around the world (Underhill 1911/2002; Stace 1961; Happold 1990; Hood et al. 2009). The word awakening implies a prior condition of drowsiness, a dream state, or a semi-awake state (De Ropp 1968). Here the term is used as a metaphor, although it is possible to argue that the normal state of consciousness of most individuals is a mixture of mnemonic fragments, continuous interior dialogues, sudden fantasies, fleeting perceptions, and spasmodic affects that modulate experience of the world almost uninterruptedly. It is from this angle that the concept of awakening implies a transition from a condition of little lucidity or presence to one of greater freedom and/or psychic autonomy.

The second component of the concept, the term spiritual, could be more adequately translated or understood as consciousness. This is not an out-of-body event, but a significant alteration of the state and quality of consciousness. On this point the literature of mysticism presents a consensus (James 1902/1961; Stace 1961; Forman 1990; Happold 1990; Hood et al. 2009). It should be emphasized that one could consider the terms "spiritual," "consciousness," "subjectivity," and "interiority" as those that come closest to the intuition one aims to apprehend in the philosophical and psychological investigation of awakening.

Throughout the text, we will use the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity as equivalents, but their differentiated use in certain sections seeks to highlight the distinct theoretical associations that are habitually made for each. In particular, the term consciousness has current use within contemporary philosophy of mind and in the neurosciences. In turn, the use of the term subjectivity is more frequent within continental philosophy, particularly French phenomenology, as in the work of Michel Henry (1963/2003); it is also a concept significantly present in psychoanalytic theory.

We also consider a new conceptualization of the experience of spiritual awakening, which we term ontological shifts. By this concept, we aim to highlight the transformation of ontology as the central aspect of the awakening process. There is an emphasis on the emergence of the universality of being, or of existence as such. On the amplification of the meaning of being and, consequently, of reality. The term shift implies a passage, a change of ground that encompasses the complete worldview of a subject. One leaves behind a restricted perspective of being—of existing as a finite individual, in its ontic character—for the recognition of being as principle, the expression of being as a universal, whence derives the ontological character of the process. Its use throughout the text is restricted, and we employ it primarily in discussions specific to the ontology of mysticism. In the remainder of the study, we have opted for the term spiritual awakening, and we use it as the basic referent for our discussions.

1.2 Awakening from Two Central Elements: Non-Duality and Consciousness

without Objects Non-duality is one of the most significant attributes of the event of awakening (Loy 1988). It is characteristic of Eastern philosophical currents, such as Advaita Vedānta, Dzogchen, Zen, and Taoism, but it emerges in the Western tradition as well, albeit under other names: as the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa; as mystical union, unio mystica, in the Christian mystical path, particularly in the work of Meister Eckhart; in the writings of the alchemical tradition; in the work of Carl Jung; and in the writings of humanistic and transpersonal authors such as Abraham Maslow, Charles Tart, and Ken Wilber (Underhill 1911/2002; Jung 1953; Maslow 1968; Jung 1970; Maslow 1971; Tart 1972; Wilber 1977; Wilber 1981; McGinn and Colledge 1981; Happold 1990; Bond 1997). Recent literature demonstrates interest in the phenomenon of non-duality as a notable state of consciousness (Josipovic 2014; Hanley 2018; Josipovic 2020).

Non-duality can remain abstract if it is not lived and, in the case of the discursive universe, contrasted with the conventional state of the great majority of subjects in contemporary Western culture. In the non-dual condition or state, the habitual functioning of the mind—the mechanism of differentiating perceptions, affects, and cognitions into polar categories—ceases. This modification impacts not only the mental faculty of categorization and classification, of establishing classes based on common characteristics, but more significantly, the rigid distinction between self and world, self and Other. It can be argued that the mystical literature points to a similar, if not identical, state or condition when it elaborates the culmination of the process of consciousness development as the realization of unity (Underhill 1911/2002; Hood 2009).

Another central dimension in the event of awakening is the realization of consciousness or subjectivity devoid of contents, or objects (Wolff 1973; Wolff 1994). This aspect of consciousness, which until recently had been studied only in the philosophical literature, has received attention in the experimental literature (Srinivasan 2020; Winter 2020).

Studies have found neurobiological correlates of non-dual states, supporting the thesis that this is a genuine state sustained by specific neural mechanisms. Additionally, an equivalent conceptualization for this aspect of consciousness appears in the literature as pure consciousness events (PCEs) (Forman 1986; Forman 1990; Gennaro 2008).

It is habitually thought that consciousness, or subjectivity, necessarily depends on particular contents. That it cannot be described as a phenomenon in itself. However, the universal literature of mysticism presents diverse assertions that emphasize that nothingness or the void is capable of being experienced directly (Forman 1988; Forman 1990). Initially, one cannot understand what a phenomenology of nothingness, of emptiness in Buddhist terminology, would be; in what way could a state of this type be lived?

There are not necessarily new experiential contents. It is more precisely an intuitive and direct understanding of what consciousness itself actually is; that at its base, subjectivity is akin to a space, and devoid of characteristics, traits, ideas, marks, or forms. The pure consciousness event (PCE) created by Forman (1990) seeks to capture this insight in order to argue in favor of the perennialist or universalist position—that there are universal elements or attributes in mystical experiences that are beyond their historical contexts. We will return to the discussion regarding the universality of mystical experiences later.

In any case, although the concept of void—which is currently rendered as emptiness, from the Sanskrit word śūnyatā—is natural to Buddhist thought, it appears centrally in the writings of Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross in the Christian tradition (Underhill 1911/2002; McGinn and Colledge 1981). However, it might be relevant to explore how ordinary subjectivity shares this quality, even if it is not visible, in order to establish a bridge between ordinary consciousness and the void frequently described in the mystical literature.

The nothingness, or consciousness without objects, frequently cited in mysticism and in the phenomenological tradition, can be attributed to the intrinsic nature of consciousness or subjectivity. In states of deep interiorization, there is no specific object or phenomenon that is seen; this fact can be recognized intuitively from the observation that there is no way to describe what exactly it is to be conscious and to possess subjectivity. Just as sensoriality—the ordinary experience of the senses—is irreducible, not capable of being communicated except to others who also share this sensory experience, or else translated into another sensory modality, the basic experience of consciousness also shares this irreducibility. To say that it is possible to recognize consciousness without contents or to experience a pure consciousness event does not imply a state of torpor or trance; it means that subjectivity finally recognizes itself as distinct from the complete experiential flux, and for this reason, cannot be explained by means of it. That consciousness can be discerned amid the multiple experiences of the senses and of external objects in its basic, fundamental character is certainly surprising. A traditional analogy from Indian philosophy places this intrinsic characteristic of consciousness—of being in itself nothing—as the screen onto which the contents of the world are projected, bringing to mind the image of a film projection; a second analogy, drawn from the Buddhist tradition, compares consciousness understood in this way to a mirror, which contains all phenomena indiscriminately (Maharaj 2016).

It is perhaps through this realization that consciousness or subjectivity can be seen and recognized in its universal character (Chalmers 1996). If the consciousness present in everyday life can be apprehended as distinct from the entire universe as a phenomenon, and from all the mental and affective constructions that mark the experience of personhood—of existence in the form of a self, of an empirical ego—then the door opens to a radical ontological recognition, in which subjectivity can understand itself as identical to subjectivity as a principle; the individual being identical to the universal being. The German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote: "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me" (Eckhart 2009, 298).

A translation into the language of ontological phenomenology would be:

the individual subjectivity through which universal subjectivity is seen is the same through which universal subjectivity sees individual subjectivity. What this apparently abstract formulation implies is that ordinary human experience is unaware of or ignores the very ground of its experience; the root of subjectivity is rarely scrutinized or seen.

This fact should not necessarily generate surprise. A great part of interior phenomena occur automatically, unconsciously, and below the basic threshold of perception (Kelly et al. 2007). That normal consciousness or subjectivity ignores its own nature and from this point establishes its problematic and unstable ontology is definitively the elementary point brought by most religious, spiritual, and psychotherapeutic paths.

The realization of consciousness without contents, without objects—which Michel Henry (1963/2003) called absolute subjectivity—also has central implications for the experience of mortality and the transience of life. If the subject can discover or recognize their identity with this consciousness at the most fundamental level of their being, then what or who dies? Is it possible to recognize a permanent element amid the uninterrupted impermanence of the world?

This approach does not require the conception of a soul or spirit that reincarnates or is transferred in mysterious ways to other planes of existence. It does not necessarily exclude this possibility, but it dispenses with it. What it affirms is that consciousness or subjectivity without differences or distinctions is primordial in the constitution of the universe and of reality; that it is precisely reality itself (Skrbina 2009; Goff 2017). What emerges in the great majority of reports of awakening, and was one of the attributes most emphasized by Richard Maurice Bucke (1902/2009), is the coextension between the universality of consciousness—which essentially has no attributes, characteristics, or qualities—and the transcendence of the limitations of space and time and, consequently, of bodily limits. This is an observation that surpasses the usual considerations of identity, at least in contemporary neuroscience, with the possible exception of studies of near-death experiences (NDEs) (Irwin 2015). It is not the aim of this analysis to elaborate this point in depth; it is mentioned only to emphasize that awakening is an event of significant implications, still little explored in scientific contexts, and that may promote important reassessments of the current worldview.

1.3 The Psychological Dimension of Spiritual Awakening

The predicament experienced by subjects who encounter anomalous states of consciousness—specifically of a mystical nature, but not adequately explained by a conventional diagnosis—places them in a significant dilemma. Should the subject use the normative models of their culture as an interpretive lens, or can they understand these states through a heterodox perspective that does not necessarily pathologize them (Lukoff 1985; Lukoff 2011)? This is an important subjective problem with regard to the phenomenology and ontology of spiritual awakening. If subjects are led to reject their most significant private experiences because they do not conform to the collective worldview, the tendency is for this to amplify their alienation and distance from any interpretive modality that could benefit them. On the other hand, an uncritical acceptance of their experiences can also lead them, in a similar way, to a distancing from their peers and from the general discursive world. A third way, which would allow for the recognition of anomalous or non-conventional, non-pathological forms of subjectivity, but which at the same time recognized their limitations in the sphere of empirical reality, could provide a broader basis for understanding these states of consciousness, of which spiritual awakening is one of its most notable examples.

The normative bias of our culture can, by itself, generate an important obstacle in the developmental process of many individuals who experience states such as awakening. It is important to emphasize that the field of religious experiences is broad, and here we focus on awakening as a notable experience, setting aside experiences that could be analyzed through other theoretical and cultural prisms. However, our research hypothesis is that awakening consists of a canonical experience or event, best understood through the introduction of a new sense or dimension of consciousness. By this expression, we mean that there is perhaps an impossibility of reducing awakening to sensory and conceptual layers, and that it would be more adequate to characterize it as an emergence or manifestation of an element beyond conventional cognitive structures.

If our hypothesis is correct, some important implications arise for the theory and research of an ontological experience or event such as awakening. First, as some transpersonal theorists have already pointed out, an experience in which the very ontological validity of the world is called into question carries significant questions and problems that differ from those brought by other phenomenologies. In an era in which the intersection of cultures confronts the researcher with a questioning of the values that guide their practice, an investigation of the limits of this classification can illuminate the philosophical presuppositions of research activity and of the understanding of spiritual awakening within the broader field of culture.

An important connection, not explored in this work, is the relationship between mystical states and psychopathological conditions. Some models of psychopathological processes have sought to broaden the understanding of mental disorders in order to include the non-ordinary experiences (sometimes defined as religious and/or spiritual) frequently reported by patients. We can highlight the works of R. D. Laing, Roberto Assagioli, Carl Jung, John Weir Perry, Kazimierz Dąbrowski, Silvano Arieti, Stanislav Grof, Isabel Clarke, and the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) of the United Kingdom (Laing 1960; Laing 1961; Assagioli 1970; Jung 1988; Perry 1974; Perry 1976; Dąbrowski 1964; Arieti 1974; Grof 1989; Grof 1990; Clarke 2001; Downs 2001; Barker 2011). And more recently, in Brazil, studies by Moreira-Almeida (2007, 2011), Alminhana (2016), and Maraldi (Maraldi et al. 2016; Maraldi and Krippner 2019).

In the understanding of these authors, the frequent assertion in reports of religious and/or spiritual experiences, and also of some psychoses, that spiritual aspects may be relevant to the therapeutic process, was considered valid.

It happens that, on the one hand, our presuppositions and our understanding of mental health exclude a priori the possibility that an individual might attribute a mystical/religious and/or spiritual interpretation to their anomalous experiences. On the other hand, such an attribution (mystical/religious/spiritual) is at the heart of the reports of experiences of some psychoses, as well as of many mystical or religious experiences (Laing 1967). Indeed, a recent perspective on the connection between mysticism and psychoses suggests that these are profoundly distinct experiences of the same state of unity (Heriot-Maitland 2008). In the case of mystical experiences, this unity is lived from an intensely positive affectivity, and in contrast, in psychoses, the unity produces a disintegration that is threatening to the subject. This is an important point, as it highlights that underlying apparently diverse experiences we may have the same ontological ground in operation.

1.4 Awakening as an Event Beyond Traditional Religious Denominations

Many individuals today describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" (Assis 2019). This is a recent cultural transformation of great relevance for the research of non-ordinary states of consciousness such as awakening. The popularization of spiritual methodologies such as meditation, yoga, and the use of psychedelic substances has broadened the subjective spectrum to which ordinary people increasingly have direct access—and frequently, without a formal symbolic structure to support them. This raises important questions for understanding eventual spiritual experiences outside a formal religious context. In the case of religious and/or transitory experiences that occur within well-delineated contexts, as is the case with Spiritism, for example, the interpretive path to be used becomes clearer (Moreira-Almeida 2007).

But when these experiences occur without a collective support structure, they can be difficult to understand both for the subjects and for the researchers (Lukoff et al. 2011).

The eventual overlap of their phenomenology with the symptomatology of psychoses and/or dissociative disorders is a relevant topic of investigation (Alminhana 2016; Maraldi et al. 2017). This was the starting point of the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and the generation of the concept of "spiritual emergency" (Grof 1989; Grof 1990). The concept denotes a process of subjective transformation, frequently of a mystical or religious tonality, which—despite the existence of the category of Religious or Spiritual Problems in the DSM-5—is still difficult to understand by means of the usual nosological categories (APA 2014).

Can some subjects learn to "live with" phenomenological anomalies without this causing them significant functional impairment? And in these cases, could clinical practice develop treatment approaches that are not exclusively pharmacological, but that welcome unusual experiences and even seek to understand them or, at least, validate the attribution of meaning that the person gives to their experiences (Perry 1974; Perry 1976; Perry 1977)?

A presupposition of a common, shared, and objective reality is one of the bases for any understanding of the world. However, in some cases, certain modalities of perception and cognition may not be circumscribed to common subjective forms, but at the same time, are capable of providing important existential elements in the lives of subjects. The case of states of consciousness precipitated by the use of psychedelic substances is worthy of note.

In the last fifteen years, there has been an important resurgence of research with these substances in research centers around the world (Griffiths 2011). Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies with psychedelic substances have demonstrated the proximity of the psychedelic state to the psychotic state, reviving the hypothesis made by the first investigators of these substances at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their therapeutic function in mental health clinical practice also seems promising, and favorable results have emerged in several recent studies (Krebs 2012; Griffiths 2016; Ross 2016; Johnson 2017; Nichols 2017).

This is a relevant case, because an important line of research points to the mystical or spiritual attributes of psychedelic states as the reason for their therapeutic efficacy (Griffiths 2011; Maclean 2011). It is a historical fact that the first researchers of the then newly discovered psychedelic substances, such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, immediately recognized their connection with psychotic processes (Grinspoon 1997; Langlitz 2006). It was due to this recognition that the first term used to classify them was psychotomimetics. The possibility that, conversely, psychoses are analogous to spontaneous psychedelic experiences of long duration has not yet been properly investigated. But the connections are significant. In this way, the disturbance of the usual ontological categories can be accompanied by the emergence of states of consciousness relevant to the subjectivity of patients. This would allow us to speculate, preliminarily, that something similar may occur with certain patients without the use of substances as the catalyzing agent. If there is a possible value to be recovered even from the subjective experiences with the greatest apparent degree of disorganization, this would provide an important axiological reorganization of clinical practice in mental health (Maraldi et al. 2020).

1.5 Rationale and Objective of the Study

Since the pioneering work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rudolf Otto, and William James, religious experiences have become an important, if not fundamental, pillar of religious studies. Within this vast phenomenological field, we find mystical experiences and, more specifically, spiritual awakening.

However, although comparative mysticism has advanced in its understanding of the parallels and underlying elements of the mystical experience of spiritual awakening, there is a lack of studies that investigate its philosophical and psychological dimensions from the contemporary literature.

The present work aims to investigate the phenomenon of spiritual awakening through a transdisciplinary dialogue between the fields of religious studies, philosophy, and psychology. We seek to: (a) delimit the concept of spiritual awakening from the recent literature on comparative mysticism; (b) explore philosophically the phenomenon of spiritual awakening from ontological and phenomenological questions; (c) illuminate some of the central attributes of the experience of awakening, such as non-duality, consciousness without objects, and unity, frequently reported in the literature; (d) explore and discuss the ontological implications of the experience of awakening.

1.6 Methodological Considerations

A narrative review will be conducted, based on recent and classical literature, in order to determine the state of the art of research on the theme of spiritual awakening (Silva and Menezes 2005; Brasileiro 2013).

The review has four components: (a) The concept of spiritual awakening will be delimited within the current literature (Josipovic 2014; Yaden et al. 2017; Hanley et al. 2018; Josipovic et al. 2020); (b) A review of classical references in the field of religious experiences will be conducted (Bucke 1902/2009; Underhill 1911/2002; James 1902/1961; Stace 1961; Forman 1986; Forman 1990; Underhill 2009); (c) The philosophical discussion of awakening will be established from basic ontological and phenomenological questions. We will make use of contemporary discussions in the area of philosophy and psychology that recognize in idealism and panpsychism a viable theoretical alternative to conventional materialism (Kelly 2007; Kastrup 2011; Skrbina 2005; Skrbina 2009; Goff 2017).

2. Phenomenological Dimensions of Spiritual Awakening

2.1 Emergence in Everyday Life

It is frequent in reports of awakening to observe that the subjectivity of everyday life is significantly altered. There is an overflow or traversal that erupts from a level of consciousness not normally experienced. In the conventional state, the world is experienced as an external, autonomous entity, and subjectivity consists of a partial representation of the totality of the world that we register in a fragmented and imperfect manner. At least in the state of consciousness considered normal for healthy adults in contemporary Western societies, such is the case. However, the rupture of this conventionality permeates awakening, which we will here call an ontological shift. Subjectivity overflows and is no longer restricted to the particular body experienced centrally by each of us. If before it seemed trivial within the sensory and causal schema of the world, possessing only a private and particular relevance but devoid of ontological implications, now it inverts the world internally, and the world, which before was its space, now emerges as a consequence or expression of subjectivity, which is now the complete space. As Kripal (2019, 17) wrote about what he calls "the flip": "...reversals of perspective, roughly, from 'the outside' of things to 'the inside' of things, from 'the object' to 'the subject.'" This topological transformation brings us back to the famous Möbius strip (see Figure 1), and also to the Klein bottle (see Figure 2), which are perhaps some of the most interesting mathematical representations for a parallel of how post-awakening subjectivity considers the world.

[Figure 1 – The Möbius strip (image by Dimitri Otis/Getty Images)] [Figure 2 – The Klein bottle] The natural attitude toward the world is thus inverted. One can walk down any street and recognize, when raising one's head, that subjectivity (or what we consider an identical term, consciousness) contains the totality of the stage of the world, which before the ontological shift in question had independent existence—was factually causa sui. Now the subject, who before was ignorant of the very nature of their subjectivity, sees themselves as merely a transient psychic emergence within a space that does not seem to possess edges, borders, marks, or anything that identifies and characterizes it. Theoretical associations can be made almost instantaneously, and in fact, now concepts that before were merely labels devoid of their own meaning finally become useful—though obsolete at the moment of their first use.

Is this the void or emptiness (of śūnyatā)? Nothingness? Is this the imageless God of Eckhart? The God beyond God of Paul Tillich?

Subjectivity is experienced as a living space underlying all experiences. An ontological detachment occurs, an experiential differentiation of figure and ground that was not present before. One could say that before the ontological shift, the subject was glued to their stream of consciousness, but did not perceive it; more significantly, they are not able to recognize the objective universe itself as an expression of this stream. We could even affirm that the objectivity of the world depends on this blind spot. If suddenly any individual were to have the experience of subjective overflow that characterizes awakening, even if this were a consequence of a nervous system operating within an anomalous configuration, the experience of reality would be notably different.

The consequence of this is the metamorphosis of the world from a solid, rigid, and objective stage to the nature of a dream. It was a classic observation of the idealist bishop George Berkeley that the idea we have of matter derives essentially from the conjunction of the senses of touch and sight. When we consider the problem of matter abstractly, we tend to ignore its elementary and even primal origins. Innocent sensory experience still dictates our metaphysical and epistemological structure, even though we have generated elaborate theoretical castles apparently in spite of it. This explains why certain philosophical systems that proclaim the dreamlike nature of the world—such as Advaita Vedānta—are peculiarly inaccessible to conventional consciousness. Of course, we can reflect on their postulates, manipulate their concepts, and even formulate correct inferences from their axioms.

However, the feeling or foundational experience that underlies them may be opaque and distant from consciousness. It is this abyss between theory and experience that awakening bridges.

2.1.1 The Transcendence of Corporeality

There thus occurs an attenuation of the corporeal experience, of the objectification of life. This is not a cessation of proprioception, or of corporeal sensory experience, but a disidentification with the body as the central element of personal identity. Indeed, in the conventional state of consciousness, the sense of identity depends entirely on the body. The conception we have of ourselves derives from it, and it is from this base that spiritualist ideas of identity are sustained. It is for this reason that one of the main injunctions of the Indian mystic Sri Ramana Maharshi was the psychic breaking of this identification, so as to promote the state of realization of Ātman (the Self)—spiritual awakening. The underlying conception behind this method is that fundamental consciousness—the Ātman—consists of a witness or observer that identifies with the body through a psychic link (the chit-jada-granthi) that consequently experiences itself as a separate identity located in a finite region of the manifest universe—the personal bodily locus. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges captured this intuition in the following passage: "...the ego is merely a spectator who has identified himself with the man he is continually observing" (Augustine 1996).

There are also important differences in how distinct religious and mystical traditions treat the question of the body. Both recognize the body as an obstacle, the passions as threats, and the senses as sources of poison for consciousness. However, there is in the Indian philosophical tradition, particularly of Advaita Vedānta, an emphasis on the transcendence of the body through a disidentification of consciousness that we mentioned above, and not through ascetic practices, as tends frequently to be the case. A passage from the Advaita Vedānta text Ashtavakra Gītā highlights this point:

"On renouncing the body along with the rest of the manifestation, there has been, as if by magic, a perception of the supreme Self." (Balsekar 1989, 73)

Beyond the transcendence of the link with the body, the notable loss of the objectivity of the world brought by the experience of spiritual awakening has affinity with three classes of states that habitually do not receive sufficient attention—in terms of their ontology:

psychosis, the psychedelic experience, and magical consciousness.

Psychosis and magic are also characterized by this overflow of subjectivity, the radical loss of boundaries between the subjective and objective spheres. The subject merges with their environment, affectivity and intentionality become intertwined with objects, persons, and events, and the silent indifference of an inert cosmos gives way to a powerful and chaotic superimposition of imagination and matter. In the conventional mode of reflection about these states, their aberrant ontological configurations are rarely treated as capable of providing significant data about the nature of reality. Whether through the analysis of their content or form, psychosis inhabits a place of metaphysical exclusion, and nothing it reveals introduces it into philosophical and scientific discourse as a problem for the ontology of conventional consciousness. The same could be said of the state of magical consciousness, whether it is present in the psychic life of most indigenous groups in the world or in religious and esoteric traditions that have cultivated it throughout history. Psychedelic consciousness received the highest consideration by cultures that made use of plants, seeds, and fungi as a vehicle for rupture with conventional consciousness. However, it is only recently within contemporary scientific culture that its possible therapeutic relevance and, more fundamentally, its metaphysical and ontological relevance have been determined.

But perhaps here we must ask ourselves the following question: should this be the case? What kind of scientific discourse would we have if non-conventional states of consciousness were also part of the dialogue and were considered as evidence and facts of another order of the Real (Tart 1972)? As Kripal (2019, 337) wrote:

"What would the philosophy of mind look like if it took flipped individuals like Federico Faggin seriously—that is, if it took mystical forms of all-knowing as seriously as it took abstract philosophical reasoning and the color red?"

This would also allow for the reevaluation of religious superstructures from a new angle. The schism between skeptical rationalists and conventional religious believers is long, persistent, and frequently fruitless. It is a sterile polarization that contributes little to the intellectual enrichment of both sides—with rare exceptions. Once again, Kripal astutely observes: "As it is, the philosophy of mind is almost entirely restricted to ordinary rationalism and easily accessible conscious states" (Kripal 2019, 337).

Spiritual awakening has broad characteristics of being a phenomenon only partially apprehensible within traditional rationalist frameworks, but also within common religious structures. Indeed, we have significantly restricted conceptions of both science and religion. In relation to the former, there is an important exclusion and distortion of its origins and history, so that what we have today consists of a limited excerpt of what a philosophically much richer science could be.

Traditions that fully consider the ontological validity of spiritual awakening, such as the Gnosticism of the second and third centuries CE, affirm that it holds the secret behind the apparently tragic condition of human life. Elaine Pagels writes, regarding the meaning of Gnosticism:

"This religious perspective differentiates gnosticism not only from orthodoxy, but also, for all the similarities, from psychotherapy, for most members of the psychotherapeutic profession follow Freud in refusing to attribute real existence to the figments of imagination. They do not regard their attempt to discover what is within the psyche as equivalent to discovering the secrets of the universe. But many gnostics, like many artists, search for interior self-knowledge as the key to understanding universal truths—'who we are, where we came from, where we go.'" (Pagels 1979, 432)

The Gnostic perspective places mystical experience as a revelatory event, demonstrating secrets of the psyche that previously lay hidden and unrecognized. We will see in what follows how psychic unification lies at the root of this process.

2.1.2 The Unification of the Inner Eye

We previously mentioned the omnipresence of terms and images that associate the single eye with some form of spiritual realization. This makes explicit the presence of some form of psychic unification, the idea of which the image of the single eye symbolizes. Indeed, the conception of unity is so abundant in religious, mystical, and philosophical treatises that it may be surprising that phenomenological explorations of its origin have not yet been systematically undertaken.

We want to point to the fact that unless we are able to identify the state of consciousness or experience that underlies them, our understanding of unity will be only conceptual and theoretical. And yet, in what does this experiential unity consist?

At first glance, the common factor resides in an intensification of subjectivity, reaching at its most radical point a kind of deific solipsism. By solipsism we understand the fundamental consideration that we are capable of determining exclusively the validity of our own consciousness. Of other subjects, we have only indirect inferences. The philosophical literature has provided extensive analyses of the problem, but for the present discussion we will refer primarily to the ideas of Edmund Husserl (1982) on the subject. By deific, a differentiation is established with traditional solipsism, so as to recognize in the uniqueness of consciousness an inclusion and also expansion of it to all phenomena and also to other subjects, which does not occur in classical solipsism, which tends to empty of vitality and consciousness everything that is not the central subject of the perceptual field.

This form of solipsism starts from the same point as classical solipsism, but extends its meaning in the following way. In the latter, the subject centered in the individual body is the only existent, and all other subjects have a dubious existence distinct from that which we attribute to ourselves. I exist in a private world that exists only for me, and all those I see are nothing more than imaginary extensions of my own personal subjectivity. It is in a reductio ad absurdum (that is, in relation to common sense) that classical solipsism exists philosophically only as a philosophical peculiarity. However, the inability to refute it is notable, and not a few philosophers consider this a point to be seriously considered in any discussion of the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the world. In contrast, the form of solipsism we call deific is the logical consequence of many philosophical systems of a mystical nature, such as Indian Vedānta, and also, if we frame them adequately, of monotheistic theological systems.

In deific solipsism, a single element X exists fundamentally, whether it is the anima mundi, God, Brahman, the Spirit, or any conceptualization of an Absolute principle. What differs in our analysis is the attempt to determine the possible original experience that underlies these interpretive modes and to establish it as capable of direct experience by any subject, so as to transcend the frequent limitations of mystical and theological modalities that either start from apparently unique and unreplicable subjectivities or establish discussions about concepts without an experiential referent that sustains them in subjective reality, which we defend as the elementary presupposition of religious experiences in general.

In this way, deific solipsism starts from the same subjectivity of conventional consciousness, but reaches an experiential and interpretive result about consciousness so radically different as to be almost unrecognizable from its common origin. The problem can be easily formulated: the starting point of the conventional consciousness of our era is subjective existence within an objective world that sustains it.

On the other hand, although the starting point of deific solipsism is the same, its consequence is completely different: the consciousness from which one starts is the source of the entire experiential universe and, in this way, receives an absolute designation, an X that can be God, the Tao, or Brahman. From this perspective, the objectivity of the world is secondary to the subjectivity on which it depends, in this case primary. The objective world, as an eternal entity or one of infinitely long duration, acquires a special position within our determinations about the value of phenomena and experiences because it is the most stable base to which we have access; everything is transient and impermanent, but the universe as a totality, although in incessant transformation, remains. In the perspective of "eternalization" of a subjective principle, as in Vedānta, or in what would be more correct, of the recognition of the transcendence of this principle in relation to time, one arrives at a form of solipsism in which the only consciousness or subjectivity that exists fills all spatiotemporal frames, all universes, because it constitutes their only base and foundation.

If this last implication remained on a purely theoretical plane, we would have a beautiful and perhaps astute metaphysical position, but ultimately unverifiable. However, what differentiates philosophical systems of a mystical nature, which serve as a platform for religious experiences such as spiritual awakening, is the assertion that such understanding derives from the same experiential base present in all subjects, but not equally perceived by all. It is this last point that promotes the need for the movement of ontological transformation, of the discernment or metacognition that characterizes and defines spiritual awakening.

However, what would such a starting point be, one capable of providing the same experiential base for any subject? And also, what would be the obstacles to its perception and realization?

It seems to be relatively unanimous among the records of spiritual awakening that it begins with the subject themselves, with an investigation of their own consciousness, in all its phases and dimensions. We find this injunction in a particularly notable passage from the Gnostic Monoimus, cited by Pagels (1979, 35):

"Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, 'My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate... If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself."

One starts from oneself, so as to gradually acquire a greater apprehension of the meaning of the self and also, to gradually differentiate consciousness as a ground from its contents. This seems to be a requirement for the production of a detachment of consciousness as principle (elevated to the status of God or Christ Consciousness, in the case of Christian mysticism) in relation to the ego—individual consciousness or personality. The sense of this lies in that to reach the place in which consciousness contemplates itself universally and, consequently, sees itself as a transcendent principle, any identification with psychic forms, complexes, and elaborations must be undone. Considering that the self or personal identity is the greatest of these identifications, such is the importance attributed to this detachment for the emergence of the experience of spiritual awakening.

This consideration would explain the reason why personal crises are frequently important triggers for experiences of spiritual awakening (Taylor 2013; Taylor 2017). In limit situations, in which egoic functionalities may temporarily not be able to provide rational and stable constructions for subjects to elaborate their experiences, the possibility of transrational states erupting into consciousness becomes more likely. If the ego constitutes a veil so that consciousness may recognize itself more acutely or integrally, then its temporary cessation or occlusion can either bring about a state of psychic confusion—psychosis—or promote an internal space propitious for consciousness to see itself without any associated personality.

This point can provide a relatively simple basis for states lacking ego (self) or aspects of the self to be understood by those who have not experienced awakening. If we imagined the scenario in which we could transplant our subjectivity into another body, with all contents intact, would we still be ourselves? And if some contents were removed, certain memories or fantasies, at what point would we disappear as individual identities? And if only a minimal identity were retained (a minimal self-ego), an elementary point of subjectivity, what would remain? The argument of proponents of spiritual awakening is that in this case the residue, or the remaining consciousness, far from being merely a trivial point of no importance, would be recognized as the fundamental point previously hidden by the complex psychic elaborations that resided in it. If this point can be recognized immediately, through an active discrimination between mental and affective contents and the consciousness that contemplates them, awakening tends to occur as a necessary consequence. Put another way, there is a default state of consciousness, and when accessed, it enables the reconsideration of the phenomenal universe as a whole, no longer as an objective, primary entity, but as a subjective, secondary event.

The internalization of the manifest universe, of empirical reality as a whole, brings to the fore the full meaning of the process of mystical union. In the words of the Indian saint and mystic Anandamayi Ma:

"Supreme union signifies that the whole universe is within you, and you are in it; and further, there will be no occasion to speak of a universe" (Fitzgerald and Lipski 2007, 84).

2.2 Mortality Salience in the Experience of Spiritual Awakening

It is a frequent observation in comparative mysticism that it is necessary to die inwardly before experiencing enlightenment or spiritual awakening. We previously highlighted that the deconstruction of the sense of individuality, self, ego, or self is at the heart of the experience of unity, of identity with the cosmos as a totality. We can then understand the necessity of psychic death for the underlying reality to reveal and express itself. This principle has parallels, albeit to a lesser degree, with the detachment required in the natural sciences. In this case too we have the need for detachment from personal preferences, biases, and affective and cognitive postures that in some way prevent an impartial view of a given phenomenon. This ascesis, which in many cases can be rigorous and difficult, the result of a long trajectory of historical construction of science, still manifests itself imperfectly in the actual human experience of scientific activity.

Mysticism presupposes a similar ascesis, but of greater commitment and identity: whereas in scientific ascesis the subject can remain preserved in general terms, it not being necessary—except in periods of genuine scientific revolutions—for a total detachment from oneself, in the process of mystical transformation such reservation cannot be maintained. The knowledge that is sought, not being of a merely cognitive order, demands a rupture of the very sense of identity, of the basic being presupposed in all experiences. This point is consistent with the notion that in spiritual awakening there emerges a knowledge of an ontological order: the subject becomes identical to the object, whether it is the totality of the cosmos or subjectivity constituted as a fundamental principle.

However, although the formula 'cessation of individuality = realization of unity' can be articulated in a relatively simple manner, its meaning is obscure and difficult to understand. The conventional understanding we have of mortality is perhaps an obstacle to our understanding of the way in which spiritual awakening is even identical with this subjective death. Indeed, the "derepression" of the fact of death is perhaps a central component of the process of spiritual awakening. Here we make reference to the celebrated work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1975) and its subsequent theoretical development by Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski (1990).

Becker's work is notable for bringing to consciousness the fact of mortality as a central psychodynamic element of human experience. Freud was certainly a pioneer in elaborating the concept of the death drive in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but it was in the work of Otto Rank that Becker found a theoretical voice for some of his main existential inquiries. Culture is, in Becker's view, an enormous heroic elaboration that protects human consciousness from the impossible confrontation with the gradual disappearance of all things. The repression of the fact of death is, for Becker, even more important than that of sexuality (Becker 1975).

In Becker's conception, culture is a kind of existential immune system that protects its members from potentially destructive thoughts and observations about life. Culture is an imaginative veil—and this includes religious and secular cultures—that protects human consciousness from the unbearable fact of mortality. How could we love, if we were fully aware that the one we love could disappear from our arms at any moment? What kind of moral courage would be available to us if we had continuous awareness that the greatest of our efforts is null before the unimaginably long time of the cosmos? How could we feel capable of building an entire civilization, if the observation of the ruin of all that preceded us were present at all moments in our consciousness? What esteem could we have for our personal lives, if we could see them from the angle of a history that will dissipate everything that is dear to us in the present?

Becker's position is that only the repression of these facts can keep human experience viable, as we know it. The moment they erupt into consciousness, religious consciousness becomes instantly necessary, and in its absence, all that remains is neurosis and the experience of a tragic, cruel, and meaningless cosmos.

Becker's cultural analysis has gained in recent decades a theoretical and empirical formulation, with broad resonance in the literature. In the theory developed by Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski (1990, 1991), Terror Management Theory, consciousness constructs protective mechanisms to regulate two central components in the human experience of mortality: mortality salience (MS) and death-thought accessibility (DTA). These two concepts aim to operationalize Becker's observations, so as to understand how the emergence of death into consciousness can be a source of profound anxiety and malaise.

How then can we reconcile this perspective with the injunction that mystical death is necessary for the understanding of the fundamental and final reality, present in the great majority of spiritual traditions?

That spiritual awakening is essentially understood as the realization or deep vision of the meaning of death during life is an observation made by many mystics and spiritual traditions. Indeed, the radical transmutation proposed by the awakening process places psychological and spiritual death as a necessary requirement for profound dimensions of consciousness to erupt into the foreground of psychic life.

Here we will develop the following idea: that it is in the intensified consciousness of mortality that the experience of spiritual awakening finds its roots. Simply put, mortality represents the negation of human longings and the inversion of the life drive. In Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy, the negation of the will to live effects the metaphysical realization that is the essence of spiritual awakening (Schopenhauer 1819/2005). It is in the annulment of the vital principle that consciousness can finally recognize itself stripped of the affective and cognitive filters of the organism. And more significantly, of the principium individuationis, what we call the element of differentiation of subjectivity, the self or the ego.

However, such a formulation can remain abstract and not be able to extract the corresponding phenomenological meaning. To make this bridge, between theory and experience, we can illuminate what exactly the consciousness of mortality produces, and why it is apparently a prerequisite for the egoic dissolution that precedes or is identical to spiritual awakening. Possibly death is the most effective element for subjectivity to free itself from identifications of a whole lifetime and perceive itself in its absolute, fundamental character; the world then, existence as a whole, would no longer be seen through the eyes of a being who suffers and is an insignificant part of an immemorial anonymous process, but with a unitary gaze that does not understand itself as different from what it sees. From this state possibly arises the existential love that marks the reports of those who see life with eyes permeated by the full consciousness of mortality.

Acute contact with mortality is perhaps capable of intensely mobilizing consciousness to the following inquiry: what role does subjectivity play in the constitution of reality? If subjectivity is not merely an emergent process, but a central component of the universe, experiences such as spiritual awakening will be interpreted in a radically different way.

From the perspective of idealism or panpsychism, awakening, spiritual enlightenment, or religious experiences in general unveil unexplored facets of subjectivity or consciousness. If in the conventional state of consciousness one lives within a restricted region of the existential spectrum, in anomalous, altered, or non-ordinary states one discovers other spheres of a consciousness that shows itself to be broader and, possibly, not restricted to human experience. Consciousness here is reconfigured and is transformed from an attentional dimension of the nervous system to a fundamental substance or quality of reality. From this perspective, cognitive modalities that expand consciousness effectively expand the scope of what can be known and perceived.

Indeed, it is frequent for people who have experienced some form of spiritual awakening to observe that it is a non-personal condition, beyond egoic activity or an individual self, and establishes or exposes an impersonal, suprapersonal, or transpersonal consciousness or modality of cognition (Taylor 2013; 2017). There is the use of terms such as "great mind," "one mind," "the great eye," "fundamental consciousness," as well as various theological terms such as God, Absolute, Brahman, etc. Without doubt, such concepts have wide use in Eastern philosophical traditions, and their presence in Western narratives is relatively recent—although the imagery of the great eye appears in the work of European alchemists and particularly in the work of the German theosopher Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). However, if the use of these terms is coherent on the part of subjects who have experienced such states, even if merely the attribution of concepts or explanations to their experiences does not guarantee for an external observer the ontological validity of their experiences, at least it demonstrates that the character of subjectivity must have transformed to a degree that justifies their use.

It is also mentioned the feeling of being observed or witnessed by something that lies beyond personal subjectivity. One is struck by the fact that what we really are is this observer or consciousness on which everything depends. And this consciousness or mind-like dimension does not seem to be contained in the manifest universe itself, but in fact, appears to contain it. One transforms into this pure subjectivity, so to speak, and thus sees from an impersonal point of view.

When awakening occurs within theistic religious traditions, particularly in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, it is considered as the realization of God, or of the identity of the individual soul with God (Underhill 1911/2002). Here it is important to underline the presuppositions that ground this analysis, certainly not of universal acceptance. The first: consciousness is identical in all human organisms; the second: this consciousness unfolds (in the original sense of the term evolution, from the Latin evolutio) throughout the history of the human species; third: the total meaning of consciousness gradually reveals itself through the collective consciousness of the species; fourth: this meaning expresses or unveils the nature of the universe as an intelligent entity that is the totality of what exists.

This form of cosmological evolution, close to the conceptions of G. W. F. Hegel, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Alister Hardy is perhaps capable of explaining certain theological frameworks without a complete subscription to their particular mythologies.

One could criticize such a perspective for aiming at a forced integration between distinct theological systems and philosophical conceptions that differ in many of their fundamental points. In part, this criticism has merit. However, we do not seek to dissolve the theological distinctions between each of these three monotheistic systems, but to find a possible common thread that can be transposed to evolutionary models in which an experience such as spiritual awakening could be more easily integrated within scientific discourse.

2.3 The Emergence of the Witness-Observer

The understanding we have about the nature of consciousness may not be only of a cognitive, reflective, and intellectual order, but perhaps depends on an intensification of the capacity of consciousness to become conscious of itself—what we describe here as an ontological shift, spiritual awakening. The emphasis we attribute to reason and the senses as exclusive modes of knowing is perhaps the greatest obstacle for a dialogical bridge to be made between researchers of mystical phenomenology and individuals who experience and report it.

The contemporary mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj speaks about this point:

"This union between the observer and the observed happens when the observer becomes conscious of himself as the observer. He is now not only interested in the observed, which in any case would happen, but is also interested in being interested, giving attention to attention, being conscious of being conscious." (Maharaj 2016, 271)

For those who experience spiritual awakening, this is the intrinsic activity of consciousness, whether it is a cerebral epiphenomenon or the substrate of the material universe. There is an increase in non-conceptual reflexivity that allows consciousness to see itself unlinked from the habitual complex of sensations, emotions, ideas, images, fantasies, and memories that encompass and constitute the experience of personal identity. Within the sphere of the conventional state of consciousness, of contemporary non-pathological individuals, such identity is practically isomorphic with consciousness considered here as a source of attention and sentience. As we will see in the case of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), even a highly developed philosophical mind may not have access to consciousness considered in this way. Critics could argue that perhaps Hume was right; that pure consciousness or consciousness unlinked from all its objects, which here appears as the witness or observer, is merely a metacognitive illusion, a false inference. However, Hume's condition can be understood from the conception and state of a consciousness in itself, which witnesses and is the source of all its objects, but the reverse is not true; the only possible reply to the argument that pure consciousness experienced by mystics is illusory, which would be Hume's position or that of the contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett, is that it requires an almost automatic reductio ad absurdum, attributing to the primary fact of consciousness, the most elementary standard we have of reality, the condition of illusion. There is an immediate contradiction in considering consciousness, the element presupposed in any experience and intellectual construction, as something fundamentally illusory.

Certainly psychic and sensory activity depends closely on neurological functioning, but this does not necessarily include consciousness as an elementary principle of sentience, which, as various contemporary and classical philosophers have argued (in particular recently David Chalmers and Thomas Metzinger), is perhaps irreducible and fundamental (Chalmers 1996; Metzinger 2020).

If this consideration is true, it would allow us to explain the depth of the phenomenological impact that defines awakening. The transition would be precisely the experience of this irreducibility; the passage from an experiential mode in which subjectivity is trivial, accidental, and derivative, to the eruption of a mode in which it is inherent to all phenomena, objects, and events. In this sense, it extends, expands, and broadens to the totality of the field of experiences, previously considered as strictly exterior. The unity frequently attributed to awakening would not consist only in a loss of perceptual and/or cognitive boundaries, but of ontological ones. If it is possible to become one with everything, is it because in fact everything is, despite appearances, a unitary order underlying all differences? Or put more poetically: is there only one being here and not many?

The individual initially considers themselves a particular existence, defined by bodily, social, and psychic boundaries. Although the first-person position shows them that they occupy a central place within the flow of events of the world, contemplation of this fact tends to quickly lead to a poorly understood solipsism, which provokes no additional understanding of their own condition. In the situation in which consciousness finally perceives itself, the ontological shift of awakening, the loss of such boundaries promotes consciousness from a finite position to an infinite one; from a well-defined subjectivity to an undefined one, from a particular state to a universal one. This means that in this ontological movement the subject finally becomes capable of recognizing their existence as such; not from its ontic dimension, of being a specific person within a particular historical context, with their personal identity, problems, doubts, and dramas, but of perceiving in the immediate fact of their existence something in common with the existence of the entire cosmos—that their existence is the existence of the cosmos. It was this feeling of intimate perception of being that Heidegger sought to rescue from philosophical oblivion (Heidegger 1927/2008). The very term coined here, ontological shift, refers to this change of referential in which consciousness finally sees itself as unique and identical at all points.

The English mystic Douglas Harding writes: "In the whole universe there is this one very special spot, this one very special occupant of that spot, which you and only you can observe." This place is the first-person epistemological position of observation that is intimate to any consciousness, which is in fact the essential character of what it means to be conscious. From this perspective, conventional consciousness finds itself clouded in relation to itself, restricting its self-recognition to the complex of psychic formations that define a private, personal, and particular subjectivity. In this way, it is incapable of obtaining a full intuition of what it itself means, and of its centrality in the process of world generation. It is, in this condition, only a receptacle of impressions and a space of mental elaborations, but not a full existential center. It is this last understanding that fills the experience of mystical consciousness. The most elementary and simple fact of self-conscious existence finally constitutes mysticism par excellence. Here we leave aside the multiple sensory and psychic elaborations that can cover mystical states, in order to concentrate on the emergence of this fuller self-recognition as the central fact of the experience of spiritual awakening.

If awakening consists in this unveiling that we propose, in an ontological unfolding that displaces personal experience from the center of the world process and rescues the impersonality of consciousness as the primordial fact, then its meaning will be beyond the particular lives of mystics. In a series of important passages on this point, we have once again the voice of Harding:

"There's no such thing as a true enlightenment which doesn't light up every creature on Earth and in the skies, however grotesque or remote or unlovable. How could we begin to disentangle ourselves from any part of the One in whom we live and move and have our being? Enlightenment is cosmic or an illusion." (Harding 2012, 286)

The cosmic nature of awakening or spiritual enlightenment was recognized by some of the classical authors such as Richard Maurice Bucke and Alister Hardy, but has received less dedicated attention within the contemporary zeitgeist. From Harding's point of view, but also from Buddhism and other religious traditions, spiritual awakening, whether it receives the name of mokṣa, satori, nirvikalpa samādhi, or unio mystica, demonstrates directly—for first-person consciousness—what the phenomenal field actually is. This condition of immediacy is similarly shared with all other senses: sight, touch, hearing, etc. For another subject who does not possess one of these sensory modalities, the translation from one modality to another can at best be made through synesthesia, that is, using one modality to map another; however, in most situations it may simply not be possible to establish a viable bridge of communication.

This quality is capable of providing the experiential epistemological justification for mysticism as a first-person science. Only this can determine what it means to hear a partita by Bach or to taste a fig sweet, and if the capacity for hearing were not shared, from the reference point of non-hearing observers it would be fully valid to question entirely the testimony of a new sensory modality in which mathematical proportions are experienced through the modulation of air.

However, from the reference point of the one who actually hears the partita, it is also equally valid to affirm that there is, in fact, something that could be called sound. This is a problem of what we might call ontological relativity. What a first-person science—that is, a science of consciousness—should aim for is the possibility of a transduction, or of a crossing between the experience of a new experiential modality and its relative absence.

Returning to the cosmic aspect of awakening, we see that the suprapersonal or impersonal characteristic of awakening is the one with the most significant ontological implications. Once again, Harding lucidly observes:

"You and your universe are inseparable, and it must follow that, to be at all real, your enlightenment is necessarily suprapersonal and indeed cosmic." (Harding 2012, 250)

Is this merely a poetic observation? An improper extension of a strictly personal and private experience? Or do we have here the radical ontological dimension on display, in which the event-experience of awakening can be truly apprehended in its full meaning?

In the first case, through some mechanism not yet understood, the brain erroneously attributes to the totality of phenomena qualities or properties that pertain only to itself, to its own activity of elaborating the world. The attribution that awakening is cosmic would be a consequence of a subjective extrapolation, the result of a hyper-activated psyche that would temporarily lose the capacity for differentiation between itself and the world. It would also be viable to consider that in this case, even if the experience of awakening did not extend to the entire cosmos, possibly the nervous system could reach an extreme degree of understanding of its own creative activity, which would explain the attribution that this is not a personal event, but an occurrence that includes the entire universe. It is almost inevitable to consider that a position of this type implies a form of transcendental idealism, in which cognition finally becomes capable of discerning its own fundamental structures (space-time, the basic mental categories, and the pure ego) and perceives that nothing that is experienced exists by itself. However, even though such an observation sounds reasonable for a culture that places the brain at the center of cognitive activities, it is rarely experienced. In this way, the cosmic attribution of awakening would be nothing more than a profound realization of the world as a cognitive construct, whose foundation (its noumenon) would be inaccessible objectively.

The second case, that the suprapersonal realization of spiritual awakening occurs factually, extends the Kantian consideration of the last paragraph. Not only does the subject recognize their world as a complex cognitive elaboration and transcend it inwardly, but they also recognize in the foundation of consciousness the source and origin (fons et origo) of all things. They become, effectively, God, considered beyond the usual theological attributions, but as a unitary consciousness underlying the process of existence, spatiotemporal reality. Once again, Harding emphasizes this point of supreme hermeneutical importance:

"The tradition that the Buddha's enlightenment meant the enlightenment of all creatures has a sound foundation. It is as true of your awakening and mine as it was of his. To wake up is to wake the world up." (Harding 2012, 250)

There are multiple implications of this observation for the construction of a contemporary theory of spiritual awakening. The first is that awakening concerns essentially not an individual, a particular subject who witnesses or reports an unusual experience, but the radical consciousness or subjectivity that underlies all entities and phenomena.

This would mean that the universe is more than a complex machine, a conscious structure at all scales. This is a position that resonates with pantheistic and panentheistic conceptions, and also with the thought of many classical thinkers, particularly the pre-Socratic Xenophanes (570–478 BCE) and the Neoplatonic mystic Plotinus (205–270 CE). Curiously, the conception that complex systems, including possibly stars, planets, and electromagnetic fields, possess consciousness has resurfaced theoretically within academic discussions about contemporary panpsychism (Sheldrake 2021).

If, as the theoretical physicist P. A. M. Dirac observed, "the measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research," then here we have a scientific perspective of the highest order. The possibility that experiences such as spiritual awakening unveil a still hidden facet of nature—at least for the contemporary mentality—that of being a kind of massive conscious system, may be of such significant scope in relation to alternative possibilities that it alone demands serious investigation for the potential fruits it can provide for our understanding of reality.

3. The Ontology of Spiritual Awakening: Beyond Being and Non-Being

3.1 The Roots of Mystical Experience

In order to understand the nature of religious experience, and more specifically of mystical states, it is necessary to discuss the most elementary question of the nature of experience as such. This transports us to the domain of phenomenology and psychology, particularly introspection as a valid method of investigation, the possibility of a first-person science, a science of experience, and finally the understanding of the 'hard problem of consciousness' (Kukla 1983; Pekala 1991; Chalmers 1996).

The critical work of Taves (2009), which follows most relevant scholars in the study of mysticism, reiterates that mystical claims are unverifiable. On the other hand, most contemplative traditions emphasize that mystical experiences are not fundamentally unverifiable. However, they certainly require uncommon preparation, which might perhaps be diminished or reduced through certain methods, such as the practice of meditation, the use of psychedelic substances, and specific brain stimulations. Nevertheless, as Kukla (1983) astutely argued, mystical experiences, and indeed any experiences, must be considered as valid empirical data, because otherwise the elementary criterion that validates experiences of the physical world as such would collapse. The very experience of the physical world consists, as the term itself indicates, in an experience, and however much we may objectify it in precise and measurable ways, at its foundation it fundamentally depends on a conscious activity to become valid.

Additionally, the preparation or the internal and external conditions that are required for a mystical unfolding do not essentially differ from those that are necessary for comprehending cutting-edge theoretical physics research or pure mathematics. In both cases, what is involved is the intersubjective perception of highly abstract theoretical objects, whose reality is null for those not possessing the formal intellectual requirements, but highly real for those capable of comprehending them.

We become aware of the meaning behind the idea of experience only when consciousness, or its metacognitive operation, is capable of observing and disposing all the other dimensions or functions that are included in it: sensoriality, affectivity, imagination, conceptualization, etc. From this angle, knowing intuitively and intimately the intrinsic meaning of experience as such opens by itself a valuation of transcendental character. Here the term transcendental simply exposes the fact that in the knowledge of experience, of sentience or consciousness, one arrives at the simplest and most elementary modality of knowledge possible, upon which all other cognitive modalities depend. From this fact, from its irreducibility to other modes of knowing, whether they be sensory or conceptual, derives its specialness, its transcendence; special in this case because it exists in contrast to all other objects, contents, or perceptive and cognitive modes (Taves 2009). Here one can sketch a first glimpse of why this form of intuitive cognition of the elementary sense of experience, referred to by the most diverse terms in the contemplative and philosophical traditions that recognized and developed it, tends to generate a unique valuation.

Religious experience demonstrates that the conventional mode of experiencing the universe is only one among many. Which of them possesses fundamental validity? What criteria should we use to determine its ontological status within the multiplicity of gazes and forms of knowledge that configure human experience? Is there something universal in it, as many have already emphasized? Or is this universal a simplification of profoundly diverse situations, circumstances, and symbolic structures, in which a unity is only forcefully and artificially found?

Although many of the universal attributions present in mystical experiences may be criticized or rejected, the position that no form of unity or common element is present in them has a significant problem. At least the experience of existing, of being creatures in the universe, of thinking and feeling, of having a mind in common, a same nervous system, of being of the same species, of sharing the same existential concerns, of experiencing the same planet, of existing in the same universe, or multiverse---this elementary unity cannot be rejected, or else no common dialogue or discourse could be possible. Science itself presupposes this unity and universality, without which it would not be viable. This is a crucial point and perhaps the most important within the discussion of the ontology of mysticism. The accounts of mystics of all epochs, ancient and contemporary, reveal a peculiar mode of experiencing existence, which does not constitute a private, non-communicable, and non-shareable condition, but simply emerges as anomalies within the spectrum of common human experience (Stace 1961). If a bridge can be established between the mystical experience of the world and the common experience, it is that in the former the elementary fact of our existing, of being conscious, of perceiving ourselves and the universe around us is enormously amplified and intensified.

This observation is important because it emphasizes that in both cases, that of ordinary consciousness and that of mystical consciousness, we have the same experience of existence seen in totally distinct ways. This is the point to be investigated and explored, whether through empirical studies of mysticism or through precise phenomenological analyses.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1953/2010) writes:

"That which binds all men, however, cannot be revelation but must be experience. Revelation is the form assumed by particular historical beliefs, experience is accessible to man as man." (Jaspers 1953/2010, 19)[^16]

If, as Jaspers emphasizes, experience is the common link accessible to all individuals, then the question is to understand what makes one certain experience produce the feelings, cognitions, and attributions that are characteristic of mystical states and others not. The observation that mystics experience the same thing as a common person, but possess a greater intuitive penetration regarding the nature of experience as such, opens important investigative paths for us.

Why does ordinary consciousness experience the present moment as null and trivial and mystical consciousness as eternity? Why does ordinary consciousness perceive itself, as David Hume wrote, within a flow of perceptions without any reference to an observer, witness, or stable consciousness distinct from phenomena, and mystical consciousness as the source of all the manifest universe?

The skeptic David Hume wrote in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739):

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pleasure or pain. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me." (Hume 1739, 252)[^17]

And in the words of the Indian saint and mystic Anandamayi Ma (1896--1982), which condenses a radically distinct vision from Hume's, aligned with the Indian conception of the Upanishads:

"Whatever is revealed or remains hidden anywhere, in any manner, is 'Thou', is the 'I'. [...] You will be able to comprehend this completely only when you find everything within yourself; in other words, in the state in which there is nothing but the Self." (Fitzgerald and Lipski 2007, 81)[^18]

Here we have two opposing visions of self, si-mesmo, I, or consciousness. They are important because they demonstrate two existential orientations, or phenomenologies, very diverse in relation to experience, clearly based on personal experiences. Hume's, which has frequently been compared to the Buddhist position of Anattā, of absence of a fixed I or self, departs not from a doctrine but rather from his intimate and sincere testimony of the functioning of his own consciousness. Similarly, Anandamayi Ma's instruction demonstrates an experience of existence in which all phenomena, all things are seen as oneself, as the Self, the Si-mesmo or Ātman. It is fundamental to recognize in this an intimate description of a phenomenology, and not a doctrine or prior conception, even though the concepts and symbols used are part of an immemorial tradition. Anandamayi Ma's experience, at least in her account, is this, just as Hume's description of absence of an I is an honest attempt at introspection. Without doubt one can question whether the descriptions of both are adequate, precise, and correct; however, such a criterion is of universal applicability and does not discriminate experiences, being a problem faced by all first-person accounts (Kukla 1983).

Anandamayi Ma's observation, which could be extracted directly from many of the great mystical texts of the world, demonstrates a form of being and of perceiving the world that is supremely uncommon and peculiar. It is not a question of belief, or of assuming the veracity of her pronouncements in an uncritical manner; however, the most significant question is perhaps the following: what makes it possible for a human being to see things in this way? What are the conditions of possibility for experiences of this type?

The central proposition of mysticism, if we can consider it as a field of common knowledge, is that the first-person experience we have of the universe contains a fundamental datum about the nature of the universe itself (Underhill 1911; Stace 1961). This means that consciousness, experience, self, or first-person position, frequently left in the background in contemporary discussions about the nature of the universe, and treated as a cerebral epiphenomenon, is, in mysticism, the central element to be understood. In fact, consciousness or sentience assumes ultimate value, and becomes identical to God, in many of the traditional mystical currents.

If the universe is fundamentally objective, a material entity, existing by itself and source of organisms that after thousands of years of natural selection become capable of self-reflection, then any affirmation regarding its nature that implies some subjectivity will be logically considered improper. However, if what mysticism reveals is precisely the opposite, that the objective nature of the material universe is apparent and that it is fundamentally subjective, mental, or endowed with consciousness, then the position of mysticism is transferred from an idiosyncratic religious adornment to a first glimpse of a possible science of consciousness at fundamental and cosmic levels.

Mysticism considers that consciousness seen under this prism can acquire a notable valuation. If consciousness is fundamental, then to understand it is to penetrate the reality underlying the universe itself. One knows not only sensorially and conceptually, but also from consciousness itself. That this experience and idea has become the root of mystical currents demonstrates the exceptional value that it possesses for those who have experienced it, and can help explain the reason why so many religious and philosophical currents saw in it a final meaning for human life.

Without this consideration, possibly no mystical text can be adequately understood. However, this profound metatheoretical and phenomenological inversion can provide the necessary basis for us to understand mysticism as the emergence of subjectivity in evolutionary history that places it on a new plane. Is it only a superimposition of symbolic, conceptual, and cognitive structures on a common experience, or does a new state, possibility, or form of consciousness genuinely emerge in mystical states of perception? This must be elucidated by a science of experience, and particularly by scientific studies of religious and mystical experiences.

It is always important to emphasize that the observations of mystics, and also of poets, artists, and sensitive scientists frequently point to the fact that ordinary consciousness operates under a kind of veil, and that the experience of reality shows itself in a turbid or beclouded form. The existential psychologist Rollo May (1975) writes, regarding his own experiences of expanded consciousness, of mystical consciousness:

"I do believe that the perception is indeed sharper. It is true that one aspect of it resembles a dream, in which the self and the world can become kaleidoscopic [also semiotically kaleidoscopic]; but another aspect of the experience is a sharper perception, a vividness, a translucency of the relationship to things around us. The world becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus, the eruption of contents from the unconscious dimensions consists in an amplification of sensory experience." (May 1994, 114)[^19]

The celebrated poet William Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." (Blake 1790/1975, 7)[^20]

These quotations highlight frequent elements in the mystical transformation of consciousness, of spiritual awakening. The fact that they are present in artistic contemplation and in the exploration of the unconscious within therapeutic contexts reinforces their transversal presence in multiple domains of human activity.

3.2 Ontological Wonder and Perplexity in Mystical Consciousness

It is in Rudolf Otto's important historical work, The Idea of the Holy (1923), that we find one of the first elaborations of religious experience from a subjective prism (Otto 1923/1958). Otto aimed to demonstrate that it is in the feeling of the numinous, arising from contact with the "divine essence," the "divine," or the "sacred," that the meaning behind religious life is to be found.

In the words of Usarski (2004), extracted from his article "The Deceptions of the Sacred":

"'Classical' Phenomenology of Religion, therefore, departs from the anthropological axiom that the human being is equipped with a specific faculty that predisposes him to the sensation of the presence of the sacred. This sensus numinis makes possible the ambiguous sensation of the sacred as mysterium tremendum et fascinosum ('tremendous and fascinating mystery'). In other words, the individual's encounter with the divine essence provokes in him, simultaneously, 'inexplicable feelings of horror and astonishment, on the one hand, and irresistible ecstasy and fascination, on the other'" (Usarski 2004, 77)

When Otto argues in favor of the sacred (numinous) as an a priori category, he grounds it in the ground of the soul, probably appropriating an expression from Meister Eckhart. And the critics would be correct in arguing: what is the ground of the soul? What is really being spoken of? Would it be only a metaphor, a merely poetic expression that has no place within contemporary scientific discourse, or would he be pointing to some important element of consciousness, possibly consciousness itself?

This last option would be aligned with the position of various mystical currents, such as Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, Eckhart's own mystical Christianity, and some texts from the Gnostic tradition, especially after the discoveries of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts (Robinson 1977). There is a recognition that consciousness, or interiority, subjectivity, experience, demonstrates a central fact about the nature of reality. Idealist philosophers, panexperientialists like Alfred North Whitehead, and panpsychists have argued similarly, and temperamentally they are closer to the so-called 'religionists' or 'essentialists.'

There is then an important dialectic between particulars and universals, a question that goes back to scholasticism and the debate between realists and nominalists. The same tension seems to present itself here. On one side those who can be qualified as religionists, such as Otto, Wach, Van der Leeuw, Söderblom, Eliade, and also D. T. Suzuki, the essentialists, and the contemporary view of the field, which expresses a positivism of naturalistic character, anti-essentialist.

Much of the criticism of the phenomenology of religion, condensed in the article cited above by Usarski (2004), deals with a substantial difference in relation to how these temperamentally very distinct fields approach the religious question. If the sensus numinis is simply postulated, or exposed in a dogmatic manner as sometimes occurs in Otto's work, then the critics are right in arguing that it is not clear what it really consists of. However, the position adopted by the "witnesses of the sacred" such as Otto, Wach, Eliade, and others is---although this is not proof---closer to the position of many mystics than that defended by skeptical critics. This observation seeks to emphasize that here perhaps we have a dialectical impasse that requires either a hybrid position, which extracts the best of what each field was able to establish, or then, what could lead to the same place, a logical leap that recognizes a non-dual, paradoxical, and integral position, capable of seeing the dispute from a broader point of view.

There also seems to be an important difference between those who theorized from experience and those who reject or disregard the importance of experience in the construction of knowledge in the science of religion. By itself, this fact does not disqualify theorists like Otto, Van der Leeuw, Eliade, and others, but it certainly can raise suspicions among skeptics that their theories consist merely of rationalizations and justifications of a will to believe, of a reluctance to yield to complete skepticism as the only viable ideal. One could also add that those who have experienced the 'manifestations of the sacred' may have found a central limitation of a skepticism tied to a naturalistic vision of materialistic character, but not necessarily in relation to skepticism as a suspension of judgments or an attitude of complete distancing in relation to phenomena. In fact, Husserl's phenomenological reduction is nothing more than a profound suspension of judgments about the world, especially of the very space-time framework that sustains subjects, and of the cognitive structures that are habitually not recognized within scientific praxis. In the Cartesian meditations, Husserl departs from Descartes's own radical doubt, that the totality of the phenomenal world can be called into question, but not the experience of doubt; this elementary datum cannot be rejected because it presupposes the very capacity to doubt, without which thought as such would not be possible (Husserl 1982).

This is an important point, because it demonstrates that skepticism is not fundamentally incompatible with a gnostic orientation. In fact, it is frequent in comparative mysticism the exhortation of the necessity of a cognitive, emotional, and moral deconstruction in order to obtain knowledge of another order, which we could here recognize as the experience of the sacred or numinous established by Otto. In this sense, the position of mystics could be more correctly understood by the essentialist view than by a positivism that considers only exterior or exoteric aspects, as in the socio-historical perspective presented by Usarski.

Beyond consciousness, another central axiom that allows us to illuminate Otto's observation that the sacred consists in an a priori category is precisely existence. Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that, "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,"[^21] enables us to illustrate the emphasis that mystical experience gives to the fact of existence as a wonder, an event of ontological perplexity. In fact, mystical experience is perhaps precisely this full recognition of existence.

After the central work of Stace (1961) and other important scholars, unity became the central concept for the study of mysticism. However, the concept of unity is not as self-evident as the concept of existence. As the logician Kurt Gödel pointed out,

"The notion of existence is one of the primitive concepts we have to assume as self-evident. It is the clearest concept we have." (Wang 1994, 151)

This is an important philosophical point and one that certainly occupies a central place in the ontological understanding of mysticism. If, as many mystics indicate, the central fact of mystical experiences consists in a more intense, profound, and clear apprehension of the fact of existence, of the experience of being, even in the deification of being, as in the Vedantic construct of sacchidānanda, the understanding of mystical experiences can and should depart from the most elementary fact and concept of all: existence/being. The explanation of mysticism is then displaced to the elucidation of why normal consciousness perceives existence in a certain way and why mystical consciousness perceives the same empirical datum, existence as such, in a completely different way.

Why for a certain individual does the fact of his existence occupy a minimal place in his consciousness and for another, an ungraspable mystery? And why in some traditions is the elaboration of the experience of existence, of being, the ground upon which the entire contemplative system is structured? Why does consciousness turn to its own existence? Why does life turn to itself, seek to contemplate itself, directly seek what it means to be conscious, to exist?

These questions express the core concern of mysticism. Whatever diverse theological and esoteric elaborations superimpose themselves upon this fundamental pivot, the essential concern is with the being or existence of consciousness itself. It is this same concern that forms the foundation of Heidegger's existential phenomenology, and which formed the basis of philosophical investigation for many pre-Socratics. The very question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is not merely speculative but points to an experiential reference. Existence is a mystery, an abyss, and the fact of being conscious is, from a certain angle, a cosmic aberration, an incomprehensible subjective efflorescence of nature.

As Jaspers (1953/2010) wrote,

"Astonishment in the face of mystery is in itself a fruitful act of comprehension, since it provides a point of departure for further investigations. Perhaps it is the very goal of all understanding, for it means penetrating into the greatest possible amount of knowledge in order to arrive at authentic ignorance, instead of allowing Being to disappear, making it absolute in an object of cognition closed in upon itself." (Jaspers 1953/2010, 18)[^22]

This is a particularly important point. When Jaspers writes about astonishment in the face of mystery, it is not only an affective and instinctive register but a cognitive act---considering cognition in the broadest and deepest possible sense. It is important to translate these two symbols 'mystery' and 'astonishment' in a way that rescues their experiential basis and does not remain exclusively in the chain of associations habitually evoked in the already extensive discussions about the numinous in the field of the science of religion. This expression inverts the usual conception of knowledge: we know more when we overcome knowledge itself and enter into an event, state, experience, or act of being, free of any prior understanding. It is this condition of full existential openness, of cognitive emptiness, yet not of torpor, that Jaspers points to as a fruitful act of comprehension, astonishment in the face of mystery. If mystery is a term that designates the most fundamental, simple, and common experience of all, the experience of being and existing, why does it emerge as a distinct occurrence in the experience of mystics? Why is the experience of being for most people not one of astonishment in the face of the mystery of existence? Put formally: what is the new datum in relation to existence, to the basic fact of being, that is brought in the capture of anomalous states frequently present in mystical literature, and here pointed to by Jaspers as states of nescience, ignorance, mystery, but simultaneously, of profound supreme comprehension? What does this say about comprehension, knowledge, knowing---about cognition, fundamentally?

The first point that strikes us is the following: knowledge as we conceive it may be less real than we suppose. And why would this be the case? Here we touch upon a significantly relevant consideration for the understanding of 'mystical knowledge': that knowledge which does not illuminate its axioms and postulates, which does not bring to consciousness its foundations, will be capable only of establishing propositions about the world, but never of answering the fundamental interrogations of philosophy, science, and religion: What is? Why is? Who is? The fundamental questions are symbols precisely for the state pointed to by Jaspers, in which consciousness recognizes itself as being, beyond any additional knowledge, in an act or event of immediate apprehension. In the act of fundamental questioning, in which prior knowledge about the world and about who we are is deconstructed, in the genuine phenomenological reduction considered completely, where not even the empirical subject remains, the remaining consciousness breaks forth and becomes capable of recognizing itself through an absolutely new prism: it sees itself as the first fact in the process of the world.

Here we find a meeting place that enables us to illuminate why the symbols "mystery," "nothing-emptiness-vacuity," and "unity" are frequently used to describe this condition of immediate recognition that characterizes mystical consciousness. These terms are important because they point to a possible structural invariance of consciousness; that consciousness possesses fundamental attributes beyond contingent situations and events. They establish that consciousness, seen beyond the habitual affective and cognitive superimpositions that permeate the conscious life of most people, can occupy a state with the following characteristics:

1) A complete suspension of judgments, evaluations, and interpretations regarding exterior (sensory) and also interior experience. This cognitive cessation extends also to the very space-time framework and to the subjective construct of the I or self. In this state, consciousness sees nothing but itself, and for the first time realizes that the totality of phenomena derives from its own activity. This is the state of pure consciousness described by Forman (1990). In this way, one can more clearly intuit the association of this state with the symbol of mystery and also abyss that emerges in mystical literature.

2) Comparative mysticism provides abundant examples of the symbol nothing, emptiness, or vacuity being used to characterize states of mystical consciousness. This is an additional facet of the state of pure consciousness, described above. If such a state or condition is possible, then we have here fundamental implications for the nature of reality. When mystics describe such states as nothingness, whether they be Kabbalist Jews using the term ein sof, Sufis like Attar describing the nature of Allah as nothingness, Meister Eckhart expounding the nature of God as imageless or empty of senses or ideations, or Nagarjuna establishing the path of complete negation that flows into śūnyatā, it is necessary to inquire whether they are not observing and describing through locally and historically determined prisms, the same state. Nothingness is particularly interesting in this sense. There is no doubt that it is completely neutral and beyond any qualification. In this way, it provides a common existential basis for a transversal vision of mysticism.

There is an additional and perhaps more important reason that places this aspect of the state of pure consciousness at the center of our reflections. We do not know exactly when such a state was first experienced. In any case, this peculiar way of knowing the world must have occasioned a radical transformation in the human vision regarding death. At least death understood as a negation of the life process, a disappearance of all that is known and the termination of human experience. Here reference is made to an interior death, of psychological character, but which if we consider its ontological implications, can result in a completely new outlook on life. Within an interpretive scheme that considers the universe as fundamentally physical, such an affirmation may at best consist of a poetic metaphor. However, if consciousness is considered as fundamental in the constitution of reality, such subjective death can unveil a hidden dimension of consciousness itself, and in this way resignify death.

We see then that the possible immortality of some principle or element may have been articulated from the emergence of such a state. This would explain the formation of religions around it, and its subsequent systematic cultivation. It is clear that if the universe in its totality is understood as an elaboration or formation of this state of pure consciousness, of nothingness or mystery, then we are no longer in the sphere of strict human experience; possibly here there occurs a transcendence of the cognitive and sensory limitations that characterize all human states, but which would open the door to a broader understanding of what today we call nature.

3) The symbol of unity is frequently used to designate the state without contents or qualities of pure consciousness. The recognition of unity goes back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, to the thought of important pre-Socratic thinkers, emerges as central in Neoplatonic thought, in Gnosticism, in monotheistic theological conceptions, and also in Eastern systems such as Vedānta and ch'an Buddhism. It is clear that a simple list is not capable of doing justice to the importance of the conception of unity in the history of thought. However, it emerges in a particularly notable way in mysticism. Whether in the unity or union with the natural sphere of the world, or in the unity with God or some ultimate principle, the emergence of unity in contrast with the habitual experience of duality, in which the great majority of human consciousness states are situated, was considered by some theorists, in particular Stace (1961), as the central fact that integrates mystical experiences. And why? What does unity tell us about ourselves, about the natural world, and about existence as such?

The conception of unity is close to the idea of identity, and both, in descriptions of mystical states, possibly point to the same ontological place. Is the multiplicity of the objects of the world, phenomena, forms, and beings, fundamental? Or is it, truly, some underlying principle that demonstrates them as being essentially identical to the most real factor? Here we will not enter into the long and historic discussion about the relationship between the One and the Many; we will simply expose for what reasons the phenomenology of mysticism tends to describe many of its states and, perhaps its fundamental state, using Unity. It is this notable experience of unity, which simultaneously with the attribute of emptiness-nothing-vacuity exposed above, illustrates what is perhaps the main dimension of mysticism. What must be understood is that in this sphere ontology and phenomenology become effectively indistinguishable.

It is important to emphasize that this is not the conventional religious attitude. It does not depart from a belief or a set of beliefs, but rather from principles that approach or are identical to those professed by the scientific attitude. This is an interesting point. The investigative attitude that characterizes mystical approaches is perhaps a prelude to what would become the scientific position imbued with naturalistic presuppositions.

For these two paths, that of scientific skepticism and of Gnosticism, conventional knowledge is apparent and of an inferior order of reality. This position is similar to that of some idealist schools of Western philosophy, such as Kant's transcendental idealism, and this is a point that will later be treated in greater detail. The perception that human existence is uninterruptedly established from mental formations equivalent to a dream is what is pointed to in the event of spiritual awakening or enlightenment. This is not fundamentally a positive knowledge, which determines the structure of reality from theoretical propositions or empirical evidence; in truth, it is a radical suspension in the natural movement of human consciousness to project interpretations and judgments about life in an unreflective manner. More profoundly, the very elementary ontological categories, such as space/time and causality, would be emergent and derived from mind, consciousness, or then more precisely, using the terminology of Mahāyāna Buddhism, śūnyatā or vacuity. From this angle, normal human experience would be a dream within a dream, the empirical sensory world also considered as a manifestation of a principle unknowable in conceptual and representative terms, but capable of direct apprehension because we and all things are identical to it.

When consciousness performs this self-reflexive movement, of observing itself or recognizing itself beyond the habitual cognitive and sensory modalities, it finally acquires ontological primacy before all phenomenic contents. By this expression we point to an experience in which consciousness validates itself intrinsically, as fundamental. Upon this insight of the very first order lie all possible mystical attributions. In fact, if mysticism consists in a transversal knowledge rooted in a latent meaning of human consciousness itself, then this must be the basis of this knowledge. If consciousness is this universal, if it is the common element of human experience in all places, in truth, if by experience we point precisely to the fact of being conscious, then this conclusion is inescapable. Only a position that considers consciousness as contingent, variable from nervous system to nervous system, could ignore this dormant universality. But if in consciousness we find a common element, then certainly it is to it that we must look to understand the meaning and enormous implications of mysticism.

What exactly occurs in an experience that is capable of completely transforming a subject's worldview? In many contemplative traditions, such as Vedānta and Zen Buddhism, the foundations of what one thinks and feels around the concepts of 'subject,' 'vision,' and 'world' are directly deconstructed. Not through a theoretical activity, although initially a dialectical and reflexive exercise can initiate an intuitive movement that directs itself to the roots of consciousness; but through a metacognition in which the entire field of experience is understood as such. Said in another way, it becomes possible for consciousness to disengage from natural involvement with its own productions, projections, and ultimately, with the world itself, considered no longer as an objective and independent entity, but derivative and dependent on the very consciousness that sustains and observes it.

This unique form of self-perception, the relatively recent capacity in the evolutionary process for consciousness to radically introvert its attention to itself, receives in this work the name of spiritual awakening. Here we direct our attention to a position in which self-consciousness develops over time, over evolutionary centuries and millennia. This point of view recognizes in awakening an evolutionarily new event, possibly beginning in the period identified by Jaspers and others as the Axial Age, and constituting an evolutionary unfolding with implications for the entire species, which was the position initially formulated by Richard Maurice Bucke and Alister Hardy (Bucke 1902/2009; Hardy 1979). Mysticism conceived as a relevant fact for the evolution of the species' consciousness is a perspective little explored in most contemporary discussions about religious experiences. Hood (2009) briefly considers it in his chapter on mysticism in the book Psychology of Religion. However, the argument that consciousness can develop in directions distinct from contemporary mentality tends to be poorly received by a large number of academics.

3.3 The Common Core View: Mysticism as a Unified Field of Experiences

There exists an important division between defenders of the common core view, also called decontextualist, and the contextualist view, which maintains that mystical experiences---and consequently spiritual awakening---are historically conditioned and specific to each religion or contemplative tradition. As Taves (2009) emphasized, the view that mysticism reveals a substrate or universal basis has been strongly criticized in recent decades. However, the consequence of these criticisms has been the return to a relatively old strict naturalist position that innovates little for the understanding of mysticism. Nothing in this perspective was not already present in the formulations of English empiricists such as Locke and Hume. It seems to us a premature error to disregard the implications of the common core view for a theory of consciousness, for the possible resolution of the 'hard problem of consciousness.'

The position that in mysticism we find an incipient field of investigations about the nature of consciousness tends to receive important criticisms, and perhaps the most notable is the constructivist position of Steven Katz (Katz 1978).

Some of the main ones:

1) What do we understand by 'mysticism'? Is there something like 'mysticism' or is this only a theoretical construct that aims to unify groups of very diverse and historically conditioned religious experiences?

2) Are mystical experiences beyond language and the intellectual frameworks used to comprehend them, or are they a direct product of these frameworks?

3) Mystical experiences tend to sustain very diverse theological or theosophical systems; in what way can one argue that they constitute a common knowledge about reality, God, or self?

4) The unifications of perennialism and traditionalism simply ignore the myriad of differences present in the various mystical spheres and aim for a forced integration.

5) Mystical experiences, like all human experiences, arise essentially from variations in brain activity (the materialist position).

What these criticisms share is the view that there is no universal and invariant element that characterizes mysticism, beyond the abstract category constructed by researchers in the field. As we already emphasized in a previous discussion above, this point has resonances with scholastic debates between nominalists and realists, and also between the position we will call Aristotelian in opposition to the Platonic. However, beyond its historical roots, some contemporary theorists, such as Forman (1986; 1990), Kripal (2007), and Laughlin and Rock (2020) have emphasized that an adequate reading of comparative mysticism tends to make it difficult to defend the argument that there are no transversal elements among the various mystical records of the world. Additionally, Laughlin and Rock (2020) observe that possibly there are various scholars of mysticism who do not possess direct experience of such experiences, which can bias their reading of mystical writings, an opinion that will be expanded throughout this text.

For its part, the elementary propositions that are the foundations of the core view are the following (from an original formulation by the author):

1) Mysticism, despite its diversity, deals with a new datum or fact about human reality; 2) Although the interpretations of this fact are disparate, the fact does not change;

3) The fact dealt with by mysticism is not merely objective, but neither purely subjective, finding itself at an intersection. When we say it is not objective, we point to a knowledge that does not reside in phenomena, but which at the same time shares their invariance in relation to observers. It is not a purely subjective fact because in this way it would be strictly private, personal, and non-invariant; thus, not susceptible to empirical systematization;

4) The fact presented by mystical testimonies is not irrational or strictly rational, but post- or transrational;

5) The terms soul, spirit, consciousness, and subjectivity point to the same element;

6) The datum brought by mystical testimonies is the identity or unity between human consciousness and the totality initially postulated as alien to consciousness, whether it is identified as the Universe, God, the Absolute, or Brahman;

7) This unity or identity is the main fact to be explored, despite its very diverse systematizations by different religious, philosophical, and mystical currents;

8) The factual unity presented by mysticism is not strictly theoretical or conceptual;

9) If consciousness or intelligence is attributed to unity, then unity becomes close to a form of suprapersonal consciousness;

10) Mysticism presents the realization of the fact of this suprapersonal consciousness.

If suprapersonal consciousness were simply postulated, there would be nothing new in mysticism that had not already been established rationally by theological systems. However, mysticism elucidates and also generates the very axioms that allow such systems to be created.

A possible and frequent criticism is that human experiences are inexorably intertwined with conceptual and linguistic systems. In this way, a mystical datum provided by an experience would necessarily be filtered, modulated, and interpreted by specific cultural and historical lenses. Although this may be the case, this does not exclude the datum itself, in the same way that discourses and cultural systems that provide interpretations about vision or hearing do not ignore the existence of these two senses at an elementary perceptual level. In the same way, if mysticism effectively presents a new datum, it approaches a new sense or dimension of consciousness, and not merely a new term, concept, interpretation, or even intensification of habitual human experiences.

A direct implication of this affirmation is that the sensory and conceptual domains do not constitute the totality of consciousness, but only some of its dimensions or phases. In this way, the fact of consciousness could not be completely explained at or only at these levels. If the experience of this suprapersonal consciousness is an anomaly or a distortion of a conventional sense of self, then one must explain what justifies the choice of the conventional state of consciousness as an ontological standard. If rationality is capable of transcending the limitations of the senses and even extending them, then possibly this supraindividual dimension of consciousness can perform a similar operation on the plane of rationality, integrating superficially contradictory conceptual systems.

The use of the predicate suprapersonal in relation to consciousness, frequently employed in mystical states, points to the fact that consciousness in itself possibly lacks a personal or individual factor that is inherent to it. This point does not eliminate conscious activity as a whole, but in fact, tends to unveil new attributes and dimensions previously ignored in normal conscious experience. The most significant of these described attributes is perhaps the non-differentiation of consciousness when seen from this more elementary or fundamental level, devoid of a personal prism that interprets or modulates it.

When in this state, mystics tend to describe reality as identical to consciousness without contents, undifferentiated, unique, and simultaneously the origin of these contents, objects, or phenomena. This is certainly a reading that is not universally accepted among the multiple interpretative currents that constitute the formal and theoretical unfolding of mystical realizations throughout history. However, what we seek to argue throughout the text is that some central and transversal characteristics can be extracted from the multiplicity of individual accounts and from the traditions that collected and unified them, and that, from these common attributes, one can formulate a model of ontological transitions that is compatible with a contemporary scientific vision in which consciousness is considered as fundamental. In fact, comparative mysticism and also a large number of philosophical positions, particularly idealist strands, provide a significant body of knowledge that at least evidences the necessity of a science of religious experiences that is not intrinsically intertwined with realist and materialist postulates. If the last proposition is accepted, it in no way "proves" any particular religion, nor any theological system, but neither does it deny that if mysticism is impartially evaluated, this proposition must be recognized.

An additional important point: the fact of the existence of consciousness as a supraindividual process must be considered as a natural fact. This can lead us to panpsychism, to the consideration that the totality of things is endowed with some form of consciousness, distinct in degrees from human consciousness. It would also be close to classical positions such as hylozoism, the proposition that matter is essentially alive in some form not understood. It can also imply that there exists a form of consciousness broader or superior to human consciousness in its habitual state. Not through an abstract assertion, but through an experience that deconstructs conventional ontological categories and unveils this central fact. This implication would be close to the understanding of theological or mystical systems that establish unity as God, the Absolute, or Brahman.

If the deconstruction of usual ontological categories is a prerequisite for this new fact to present itself to consciousness, then this attributes to human consciousness a central role in the process of elaborating its reality. This is an essentially Kantian point. It also implies that distinct ontological categories would produce completely different realities. In this way, subjectivity possesses a structure that does not simply interpret and organize the phenomena of its world, but in a much more significant way, actively structures this very world.

The structuring of the world is perfectly consistent with a materialist position that identifies this function as essentially cerebral. However, it leads to classical solipsism; here individual consciousness, considered as identical to the brain, would be the source of the entire reality. It is entirely viable to argue that the identity/unity presented by mysticism is only the realization that the world in its totality is a representation, or derived from a cerebral construction (Laughlin and Rock 2020). However, it seems difficult to sustain that if this argument is taken to its ultimate consequences, the very materialist framework that sustains it would not also be dissolved in the process.

A distinct consideration would recognize in this structure a basically Platonic vision, in which these categories are not personal and individual but supra- or transindividual. Thus the individual would recognize in his own consciousness structures that are not only his---which would clearly establish the world or dimension of pure forms, or of fundamental ideas.

We would perhaps be at the core of mystical understanding if we said that human consciousness adequately seen or understood is identical to this supraindividual consciousness. If this is a natural fact, certainly of a broader and distinct naturalism from that currently present in the natural sciences, then a door opens for a study of consciousness that should not restrict itself to current presuppositions.

When we inquire why consciousness is a mystery, or at least a hard problem distinct from all other problems of philosophy of mind and neuroscience, we encounter two points that have a direct affinity with the problems that mystics seek to resolve. There is a point of agreement between the great majority of contemporary philosophers of mind and the position of a transversal mysticism: both recognize the centrality of consciousness as the fundamental philosophical and scientific problem. That consciousness escapes a physicalist and/or materialist reduction exposes a limitation embedded in these two perspectives. We consider that the strict naturalist view incurs the same problem when it prematurely dismisses mystical affirmations about the nature of reality and the self.

Mysticism operates in an epistemologically distinct way from traditional religious thought. In fact, the mystical mode of thinking is closer to the scientific investigative spirit than the religious one from which it tends to emerge. Its flourishing in the bosom of the great religious traditions of the world perhaps reflects an incipient scientific movement of study of the mind and which, in its culminations, reaches understandings that still escape contemporary theoretical models about the nature of consciousness.

We can then inquire: do mystics unveil new understandings about the nature of consciousness? Or are their propositions merely subjective, personal, and, at best, restricted to their particular philosophical or religious circles? Can mysticism reveal a transversal knowledge?

This point of view about the transversal meaning of mysticism dialogues directly with contemporary investigations and discussions about the nature of consciousness in the field of philosophy of mind (Metzinger 2020). This makes mysticism relevant not only as an investigation of an anomalous religious phenomenon, highly peculiar, but as a central path for the understanding and possible resolution of the problem of consciousness. In mystics we see a consciousness radically distinct from that experienced by most individuals. The qualities associated with such consciousness, if we can generalize from the mystical records of the traditions to which we have access, point to a kind of cognitive leap in relation to the meaning that consciousness possesses within the universe.

There is a rupture in the usual interpretative modalities of those who experience its ontological unfoldings. If reality is considered as given, if from it we can discern only an invariance of objective character, then subjectivity, consciousness, and mentality become problems to be resolved through a dissolution of this false dichotomy and its reduction to a physical substantialism. Within this scheme, mysticism is nothing more than a subjective anomaly that unveils the human cognitive constitution but which exposes nothing of the nature of reality as such. However, if consciousness is a fundamental attribute of reality or even its substance, mysticism becomes a class of experiments about the nature and boundaries of this reality. In the first case, human cognition constructs the world from an objective source that is postulated as approximate or at least highly correlated with what we experience subjectively. In the second, cognition is extended not only to the construction of a section of the local sensory and mental universe, of a particular world constructed by a specific nervous system, but to the elaboration of the totality of the world, of spatiotemporal reality. Through this direction, mysticism shows itself as a form of radical deconstruction of the experience of the world. Positive theological attributions are certainly secondary, contextual, and historical, and in this sense those who defend the contextualist line of argumentation are correct. However, regarding the deconstruction of fundamental ontological categories, mysticism reveals itself as a radical skepticism, in which the interpretative modalities of ordinary experience are suspended in a transitory way and, in rare cases, definitively; the ontological irreversibility proposed by many classical paths of contemplative development demonstrates that experience constitutes reality in still unsuspected ways.

3.4 The Mind as Its Own Obstacle: Metacognitions in Awakening

A frequent exhortation in mystical records and texts that promote some form of awakening is mental emptying or quieting. At first it is not exactly obvious why this requirement exists. What is the problem inherent in the cognitive faculty, in thought? Or considering the question more broadly, so as not to exclude affects and complex states of consciousness, why is the dissipation of mental "obscurations," "veils," "filters" that impede the innate comprehension that characterizes awakening emphasized?

The perceptual, cognitive, and existential differentiation established by the functioning of the sense of I, ego, or self, in relation to the totality of the surrounding universe, is frequently pointed to as the main obstacle to obtaining the state, realization, or experience of unity, spiritual awakening. Recent literature (Yaden et al. 2017) has classified events of partial or total transcendence of the sense of self as self-transcendent experiences (STEs). In states of this type, in which spiritual awakening is included, the mental "obscurations," "veils," or "filters" that constitute individuality disappear, and subjectivity or consciousness recognizes itself as undifferentiated, whether from its internal or external contents---and in fact, such distinctions collapse.

To the extent that consciousness becomes capable of self-liberating from the egoic tunnel---using the expression of the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger---it contemplates itself from a new angle, in which the unity of reality shows itself as self-evident. We will not yet enter into the merit of whether this unitary observation is ontologically valid or not, but at the same time, it is important to emphasize that its opposite, the multiplicity and differentiation of the phenomenic field, seems not to sustain itself in certain exceptional states of consciousness. That the ontology of conventional consciousness is called into question by experiences such as that of spiritual awakening is perhaps the most significant contribution that emerges from the formal study of such states.

In fact, a large number of mystical paths that establish the negative way, the apophatic path within Christian mysticism, the employment of the method of neti-neti in Advaita Vedānta, and the systematic negation promoted by Nagarjuna's śūnyavāda, use the activity of negation as a complete deconstruction to obtain the state of realization or spiritual awakening. Rigorously speaking, such a state is not effectively an obtaining or acquisition, but an existential consequence that follows from the loss of the certainties and convictions that sustain the system of differentiated individuality, Metzinger's egoic tunnel.

The remaining existential foundation receives distinct attributions or significations by the various mystical traditions. There is the consistent non-attribution of Nagarjuna and Mahāyāna Buddhism, which considers the basic principle, śūnyatā, practically a non-concept; a pedagogical label but without substance and effectively incapable of describing, except by a supremely indirect pointing, the experience of basic reality that is a consequence of the complete deconstruction of the egoic mental system. We find, in a different way, the positive attribution of Vedānta that the nature of Brahman---the fundamental principle of all things---is sacchidānanda, a term that could be rendered as being-consciousness-bliss. And within monotheistic mystical paths, the basic foundation is, although defined in sometimes contradictory ways, God.

This conceptual multiplicity and divergence is sometimes used by defenders of the non-existence of an underlying unity to mystical experiences as one of their main arguments. It is certain that at first sight these are contradictory conceptions that cannot, at least by the use of conventional, classical logic, be harmonized in a way that makes them rationally coherent. However, perhaps here we have a limitation of common logic and of the type of dialectic that is habitual in theoretical discussions of mystical experiences and particularly unitary or non-dual states of consciousness.

In relation to unity as an elementary concept of mysticism, the important philosopher of mysticism W. T. Stace (1961) promoted the distinction between external and internal unity, from the classification of mystics in comparative literature. However, we can consider such a distinction as pedagogical or theoretical. In fact, if the reported unity is self-consistent, it requires the loss of strict differentiation between the subjective and objective sphere, the internal and external world, but not necessarily through an undifferentiated and confused fusion of both, as occurs in certain psychoses. Unity considered in this way possesses affinity and a possible conceptual and experiential identity with non-dual states reported in comparative mysticism and recently in the scientific literature on spiritual awakening (Josipovic 2014; Taylor 2013; Taylor 2017).

We have here a situation in which the structure of consciousness is not at first obvious to itself. A metacognition like awakening only makes sense if we consider that in the common or ordinary state one lives without the intuitive understanding of what the very faculty of understanding or cognition establishes. When existence is problematized for the first time, we have no consciousness of a prior state of unconsciousness and innocence, although this presents itself through myths and metaphors; we simply find ourselves as sentient and thinking beings in a sudden and complete way. In fact, the problematization of the intellect itself, of consciousness and of interior life in general, which is without doubt the main characteristic of all paths of mystical development, already reflects a step beyond this thinking structure; some element of consciousness, or perhaps consciousness itself, becomes capable of transcending its own productions, projections, or manifestations and re-encountering itself in its basis, that is, as the origin of its own reflections.

At this point the relationship with the demand for dissipation of "obscurations," "thoughts," "veils," "vāsanās," and "images" becomes clearer. To the extent that the mind, the thinking faculty, consciousness---used here as synonyms---involves itself with its own productions, it is not capable of recognizing its own creative activity. In this way, it does not intuitively understand its functioning. This remains obscure and one lives blindly. What we could call a self-hypnosis occurs, which is perhaps a more precise term than merely metaphorical, in which the mind or consciousness believes in what it itself establishes. This would mean that, in still unsuspected ways, the elementary activity of consciousness is equivalent to a self-hypnosis, which finds historical parallels in terms such as the Vedantic māyā.

That this self-hypnosis consists in a compulsive, deterministic process is the premise that places awakening as a soteriological event. If thinking activity, or if the structure of consciousness in general, is as well established as sensory experience, such that each impression affects consciousness from repetitive, causal processes, then the mind's attempts to free itself from "obscurations," "veils," "thoughts," and "filters" aim at its emancipation from deterministic structures whose origins are found in itself. Never having emerged or glimpsed a state or condition beyond these structures, the movement or journey of awakening occurs blindly, and possibly in a stochastic manner, so as to promote a mapping of states or spaces of consciousness that finally make possible the metacognition that we define as awakening.

It is also important to emphasize that in the traditions that initially articulated awakening, it extends to the construction of the world as a whole. Awakening is not only an event or experience that concerns the subject, but the totality of the sensory, cognitive, and ontological field that this subject establishes. In this sense, if awakening is a genuine metacognition, it must consequently include a radical transformation of the world experienced by the subject. The transformation of the world and of the subject are indistinguishable. This is an important point that distinguishes awakening from altered states that are restricted to a transformation in the sensory or affective sphere but do not implicate the totality of being-in-the-world of the individual, the ontology of his existence.

In relation to the body, we encounter a peculiar phenomenology in mystical states and particularly in awakening. Here body and matter are considered mere representations or constructions of consciousness or mind. By this expression, we mean to emphasize that a radically distinct relationship with the body can emerge, to the point that it ceases to be perceived as the seat or location of subjectivity. There is a considerable divergence within the various mystical currents in relation to the ontological status of the body. In certain practices and schools, the body is considered an instrument, a vehicle for consciousness; in others as an illusion to be transcended. However, in practically all of them there is a significant change in the normal relation that one has with one's own body.

Let us take the example of one of the greatest mystics of the Christian tradition, Teresa of Ávila (1515--1582). She reports in her Interior Castle:

"I tell you again, or rather, the Lord says so, for I am merely the tool, that when a soul is in this prayer and God chooses to grant it some special grace, the first thing it feels is a sweetness and delight that seem to be located in the innermost part of the soul. I don't know how to explain it better. It's as if the soul is starting to melt in a way that has nothing to do with the feelings of this life, even though they can give us great delight."[^23]

We see here the description of a state in which the habitual relation with the body is transformed. The mystic perceives herself no longer as fundamentally corporal; an interiority or subjectivity is perceived as more real than the body. We will not enter here into the ontological question of whether the body is truly a representation or mental construction or not; we will only seek to understand what the structure of her experience is for her to be able to make such an affirmation.

We could say that similar doctrines---of our not being fundamentally the body---are common within the religious field and perhaps are its most important proposition. That we are a soul, spirit, or consciousness---such assertions permeate many religious currents of the most diverse kinds. However, one rarely scrutinizes what grounds them at the level of the basic experience of subjects. A starting point is to consider the body as a representation, as a mental or cerebral construct that depends on something more fundamental---consciousness, mind, or some other principle. It is clear that this places us in a paradoxical knot, a 'strange loop'---does the body generate the consciousness that perceives itself as distinct from it, or does consciousness generate the body, which then serves as a basis for consciousness to emerge and perceive itself? If we remain on only one side of this dilemma we will surely not arrive at a solution. However, if we grasp both simultaneously, it also does not seem that we will reach an understanding of how this process can occur. Such a paradox, frequently articulated as the mind-body duality, is described by many as unsolvable within a strictly conceptual perspective. We remain open in relation to this point. However, it is relevant for opening a distinct path of inquiry into the problem.

Returning to the question of the transcendence of conceptualization, we find an important element for understanding awakening. If we attribute to ourselves a conceptual existence as souls, spirits, or consciousness, we flow into difficulties similar to those encountered by materialism. In fact, into difficulties faced by any positive system, that is, one that explicitly affirms an ontology or metaphysics as fundamental. This is a consequence of the elementary functioning of the conceptual mind, that is, of dialectic. For each possible positive assertion we can argue the opposite, in a potentially endless cycle. It is clear that this is true when we deal with questions from a supremely general and abstract perspective, but not necessarily with assertions of naturalistic character. In this case we encounter a specific concrete world, one among many, which in experience is not simply a composition of indefinite possibilities but an effective and factual realization. Duality is certainly what constitutes the classical mode of being, and purely theoretical and abstract investigation, on the other hand, formally approaches what non-duality or quantum mechanics proposes.

What the proponents of the event or experience of awakening defend is something distinct: if the mind as a basal epistemological mechanism is completely transcended, if its inescapable dialectic is set aside, in a metacognition that is capable of considering it from a point of view "superior" to it, such conceptual dilemmas and paradoxes will be resolved in one stroke.

This is initially an unsatisfying answer. The central activity of academics, scholars, researchers, and contemporary philosophers is thought. However, a strictly thinking, cognitive, and conceptual approach to the event of awakening does not seem to be possible, since it contradicts its very definition. How to escape this impasse?

There are two particularly relevant options for the Western mind, and, consequently, for contemporary science: the movement initiated by Immanuel Kant, transcendental idealism, and cognitive science, taken to its ultimate consequences. We can briefly review some of their basic ideas, in order to realize the bridge we propose.

3.5 The Reverse Engineering of Cognition: Kant's Transcendental Idealism

Kant's epistemological contributions are particularly important for understanding many of the paths that place awakening as a central experience. In simple terms, Kant demonstrated that the world is a sensory and cognitive construction. That it does not exist as we experience it, beyond a mental configuration that elaborates and contemplates it (Kant 1781/1980).

The first component, the sensory, is perhaps easier to understand, especially because of the discoveries we have made of the sensory systems of organisms of other species. It is not a new fact for us that the visual perception of a bee, a cat, or a dog is profoundly different from ours. And therefore, that the visual world, which is so dear to us, may be simply a particular way of experiencing the richness of the electromagnetic spectrum. This also extends, obviously, to the other senses. However, the critique of the senses made by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is deeper (Kant 1781/1980). Not only do we have variations in our sensory configuration, but the very framework of the sensory world, space and time, also cease to be fundamental, independent of cognition. They are what Kant calls forms of intuition, which is perhaps not the most adequate term to elucidate his profound doctrine. This is an enormous step in the deconstruction of the world. What remains of the world if we extract from it spatiality and temporality, the succession of transformations that reveals space?

If space and time are mental structures or forms that underlie the manifestation of the world, then our understanding of what exactly the world is must be radically rethought. We must remember that we are only at the first step of the Kantian deconstruction, carried out in the transcendental aesthetic, right at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1781/1980). And additionally, that we bring Kant into the discussion in order to establish a bridge with Western philosophical knowledge, particularly European, from which modern science drew nourishment in its foundations. However, the similarity of this way of thinking with Buddhist and also Vedantic philosophy is certainly evident. But we must follow a bit further in our analysis of the Kantian critique.

Through Kant's critique, the sensorially experienced world comes undone, and from it remains an indefinite interrogation of which we can understand little. Still, we are close to perspectives from contemporary theoretical physics that place space-time as emergent, and not fundamental.

However, the cognitive deconstruction elaborated by Kant is even deeper. Here we encounter his famous twelve categories, present in four great classes: 1) quantity; 2) quality; 3) relation; and 4) modality. Kant arrives at these categories from a sophisticated deduction in the transcendental analytic, which we will not explore here. It is in the central intuition behind the categories that we find a point of great relevance for the experience-event of awakening.

The categories are the bases of all concepts. Any thought depends on these four great classes to sustain itself. To clarify their meaning for our discussion, we can use the perhaps most important category, causality, which the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer considered the only genuinely valid one. Causality is so fundamental in our experience of the world that the conception of a world without it seems impossible to us. In fact, all material experience is an expression of causality. It is what makes things be things. It is the main organizing principle of the sensible world. Without the interweaving of causes and effects the world would lose its structuring link and would cease to affect us as such; if the relation between one moment and another disappeared, it would be impossible for perception to exist. The nature of the relation between causes and effects and its asymmetry in the world determines the important second law of thermodynamics, which establishes the entropic irreversibility that grounds the experience of the arrow of time.

However, in a famous argument, the Scottish skeptical philosopher David Hume demonstrated that experience is not sufficient to establish causality. Put simply, if all we have to establish causality as a basic principle is sensory experience, if it is what provides all the data about the world, then we will be in a thorny situation. What guarantees causality in the world? Why must the sun rise tomorrow? Why could water not simply become vapor instantaneously? Hume's argument is that experience alone is not capable of providing this certainty. That is: causality can be called into question. It was this devastating critique that mobilized Kant to provide his own answer. However, the intention here is not to provide an outline of the history of philosophy. For the argument we are building, this matters little. Perhaps this history serves as a record of an important moment in the history of European thought, possibly a culminating point within the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but its relevance transcends its historical specificity. It is a starting point for understanding a practically universal affirmation in records about awakening, which is: the world is in the mind.

That the senses do not unveil the world as it is, but that they diverge among organisms and therefore present very different realities, seems clear to us. However, that the world is the result of our cognitive configuration is a significantly more difficult assertion. Returning to the example of causality that we presented above, if causality cannot be established in experience alone, then what grounds it? Kant's answer is clear: causality is a mental category, and therefore, without the mind there would be no causal experience of the world; absent the mind, there would be no world.

The instinctive rejection we have of this idea is due to relatively simple reasons. When we think of mental structures, we have as an example the conscious mental life, which, in fact, is relatively unstable and contingent. However, the world does not possess such psychic arbitrariness---the capricious fluidity of a dream. It is stable and regular, autonomous, and independent---at least superficially---of our ideas, wills, and desires. However, the Kantian proposition places the mind in the central place on the world stage. The modern response would interpret this point in what we could call the weak version: this construction is equivalent to the elaboration that the brain makes of the world. What Kant proposes, and also idealism in general, whether German, Buddhist, or Vedantic, is that even this idea does not touch the depth of his doctrine. When we say that the world is a mental structure, such a structure must be understood in the spirit of what Jung called the archetypes---although the Jungian vision is sometimes not capable of completely illuminating its meaning. The strong version of the idea that the very causal structure of the world is mental resignifies our elementary understanding that we have of ourselves and of the idea of mind.

This is the basic principle of Kantian transcendental idealism. And its implications are broad: not only would there be no world, but even our most central reflections and questions in relation to existence would also disappear. The key point in the Kantian deconstruction is the reversal of the habitual way of considering understanding. When we scrutinize the very faculty of knowledge, its nature transforms. We cease to postulate a knowledge that is here, in the subjective sphere, and an independent world that is out there, ready to be known. It is important to emphasize that with rare theoretical exceptions, conventional science operates within this postulate. I mention the exceptions because they are fundamental, although they have been set aside in contemporary science---I refer to the ontological implications of quantum mechanics. But in the Kantian conception epistemology and ontology are intertwined: what we recognize as real is due to our mode of apprehension, and this is determined by the invariant structure of the world, which can be attributed to the famous thing-in-itself, or then, as we will argue in this investigation of awakening, to the pure subject of knowledge, what we previously called the observer-witness.

3.6 Idealism and Panpsychism: Promising Perspectives in the Study of Awakening

To understand Kant's point of view more significantly, it may be useful for the discussion to briefly review what, in philosophy, is called the idealist position. Idealism, the philosophical current that establishes the primacy of consciousness, of subjectivity or of the subject of knowledge in opposition to the objective universe, is the main orientation of most Eastern currents, and is also found present in the thought of some significant authors in the history of Western thought (Copleston 2003). Idealism in the West has as its main exponents Berkeley, Kant in his transcendental variety, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in the variety of absolute idealism, and Husserl in his conception of transcendental phenomenology (Copleston 2003).

The central idea of Berkeley's idealist conception, which condenses the main insight of idealist currents, can be summarized in the following Latin phrase: esse est percipi, or to be is to be perceived. Everything that exists depends on an act of perception, on something that perceives it. The world cannot be established as an object independent of perception, of subjectivity. The consequence is the transformation of the world from a being in itself to a being of fundamentally mental, subjective character: a phenomenon of consciousness.

All that is experienced are sensations, ideas, in sum, events of mental order. The world presents itself as phenomenon to the mind, the observer, the subject of knowledge, consciousness, or, in Kant's terminology, the transcendental subject of apperception, the pure subject of knowledge. The meaning of the term mental here is not necessarily clear; it only points to the fact that the experience of reality includes a subjective polarity as significant as or more significant than the objective polarity commonly investigated and analyzed by empirical methodology. It is the emergence of the subjective aspect of reality as central to the experience of the world that constitutes one of the central marks of the event of awakening; its natural alignment with the idealist position only emphasizes this point.

The understanding that reality is a mind or consciousness is close to the conceptions of Jung (1963), Assagioli (1971), Maslow (1971), and most transpersonal theorists. In contemporary philosophy, in which Berkeley's pure idealism or the Kantian variety are relatively rare, the current that most approaches idealism is panpsychism (Skrbina 2005; Skrbina 2009; Goff 2017).

Panpsychism establishes that the universe is a mind, or that mind is a universal property of all things (Skrbina 2005). Its appropriation by important neuroscientists and philosophers of mind demonstrates a preliminary recognition that subjectivity is inherent to nature in forms not yet understood (Strawson 2006; Tononi and Koch 2015; Goff 2017). It is also a philosophical position in which awakening could be integrated and understood in a natural way. A fundamentally mental, conscious, and subjective cosmos could in principle allow an experience of self-recognition that placed it at the core of the experience of the organisms produced by it. This conception, elaborated by Schelling (1799/2004), would allow the understanding of the unity of existence, of the cosmic unification so frequently described in awakening. It is clear that this implies taking awakening seriously and not reducing it to an atypical and transitory phenomenology.

Goff (2017) calls the possibility of the entire cosmos being a mind cosmopsychism, an extension of panpsychism. As we previously exposed in the discussion of the passages by Douglas Harding, regarding awakening constituting an event of cosmic implications, such a contemporary perspective would make possible the inclusion of awakening as a logical consequence. If the universe is a conscious totality, then could we not suppose that such an experience would be viable in some way? Awakening seen from the panpsychist and cosmopsychist perspective would cease to constitute an anomaly, but would become a natural unfolding and no longer anomalous or exceptional. In fact, we could ask ourselves why only some individuals experience the cosmos in this way, while the majority perceives it in a fragmented way and distinct from their consciousness.

3.7 Spiritual Awakening as Radical Skepticism

As we have seen, the observation that subjectivity or consciousness resides at the root of the constitution of reality is the elementary ontological proposition of mysticism. The first reply would be to point to an improper extension of a personal experience to an experience that defines reality. That private and particular contents are erroneously amplified, when in truth they are only epiphenomenal subjective modulations and nothing more. There is certainly an important truth in this consideration. If subjective contents can be amplified at will and their meanings made universal, then the objective or subjective invariance that characterizes science is immediately lost. However, mysticism differs from naïve subjectivism in its search for a structural invariance that is identical to that aimed for in the objective endeavor, which fundamentally characterizes physics, for example, but which is recognized in consciousness. It would not be mistaken to say that the various historical mystical schools or currents constituted a first science of consciousness within the bosom of the various religious traditions that maintained them. This point also opens the important question of why within the same religious tradition such diverse ontological and epistemological orientations emerged and coexisted.

The skeptical orientation makes doubt a fundamental principle. It establishes the cessation of certainties and the complete questioning of all beliefs, including their systematic contrast with opposing positions or beliefs. The second, the gnostic orientation, that a knowledge distinct from the natural can be attained, is apparently the opposite of doubt. How to reconcile them?

This is an important point, which identifies the doubt of knowledge, the knowing of not-knowing. That nothing is obtained or added, as can be clearly understood in the first passage, emphasizes the character of a not-knowing of the gnostic event, of illumination, of awakening, of bodhi. This is certainly an affirmation of difficult understanding. What form of knowledge could sustain itself without basis in sensory experience or in the conceptual faculty? Could one speak of knowledge, in the strict sense of the term? What exactly is known when one denies the very substance and structure of the faculty of knowledge, when epistemology is only negative?

Here we see an intimate connection between Buddhist epistemology, particularly the śūnyavāda school of Nagarjuna, and the skeptical orientation of total suspension of judgments, characteristic of Pyrrhonism. The skeptical school also orients itself by a negative path, of systematic doubt, whose objective is the obtaining of the state of ataraxia, a beatitude or contemplative quietude that resembles a Buddhist equanimity or serenity, but which, on the other hand, does not seem to carry the same force as the terms bodhi and nirvana; neither does it demonstrate the soteriological consequence of Nagarjuna's Buddhist vision. However, its epistemological attitude is identical. What does this epistemology effectively offer and in what way can it result in liberation?

The first consideration is that not-knowing reveals the true nature of knowing, of knowledge as such, previously hidden and not perceived. The skeptical method of complete negation contains a subtle and profound cognitive and conceptual pedagogy. This point can be adequately evaluated considering that the great majority of individuals, even scientists, operate in a condition of great epistemic innocence. The world is taken as certain, in its physical structure, in the phenomenic interrelations that it presents to our minds, in the repetitive movement of daily life, in the experience we have of other people, in social bonds, etc. The orientation of negation of these certainties, which constitute the basic ontology of the human world, is not common nor habitual for most people. Even in a field like theoretical physics, the ontological implications of theories like quantum mechanics remain little explored and constitute a taboo for the great majority of physicists, almost a century after its formulation. The gradual negation of ontological certainties that establishes the skeptical path and Nagarjuna's śūnyavāda promises a fundamental revelation about the nature of the mind, and consequently, of the world: that the world and reality are mental constructions, derivatives of cognitive processes not understood, but which are at the very ontological root of the world.

In fact, the roots of the contemporary scientific spirit are found in Greek skepticism, particularly in Pyrrhonism, the first systematic formulation of the experience of doubt as a fundamental epistemological principle. The suspension of judgments emerges as a central orientation precisely within this Greek skeptical school, around the third century BCE. That Pyrrhonian skepticism, known to us from the writings of Sextus Empiricus, possesses a natural affinity with the mystical, gnostic orientation, is something surprising. Curiously, one of the texts found in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, the greatest discovery of the Gnostic tradition, is a collection of maxims of Sextus Empiricus (Robinson 1977).

A point to be additionally explored is the possible historical connection between the skeptical school of Pyrrho and the Buddhist tradition of Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna (Beckwith 2015; Kuzminski 2008). It is known that Pyrrho was one of two philosophers who accompanied Alexander the Great on his journey to India, at a time when Nagarjuna's school was in full flourishing. We do not know if both met; if Pyrrho influenced Nagarjuna, if Nagarjuna influenced Pyrrho, if both influenced each other mutually---since Pyrrho's stay in India was eighteen months and we know that Alexander's expedition contacted the gymnosophists, the naked Indian philosophers---or if both currents developed in parallel and independently. But there are notable similarities between some of the philosophical formulations of Pyrrho's school, which we explored above, and some canonical Buddhist teachings, particularly in Nagarjuna's formulation.

This observation seems at first sight only a historical peculiarity. However, it is relevant for the following reasons. Nagarjuna's orientation is essentially soteriological; what is sought with the systematic and complete dissolution of all affirmations about the nature of reality is to promote bodhi, spiritual awakening, the realization of śūnyatā. It is clear that this formulation is imprecise. If Nagarjuna's doctrine is correctly apprehended and taken to its ultimate terms, not even the concepts of bodhi, awakening, illumination, or even śūnyatā will remain as elementary. It is a complete negation of all possibility of knowledge. That this negation is a knowledge---in this resides the obscure mystical understanding.

The skeptical understanding of Pyrrhonism and of Nagarjuna is that the complete negation of all ontological categories demonstrates a fundamental fact about reality. In this perspective, at least the recognition that it is the very cognitive faculty that determines the very ontological categories cannot be denied. What exactly this cognitive faculty, the mind or consciousness, is, remains as an indeterminable fact---by definition. To know that nothing can be said about the nature of reality is an intuitive knowledge, if we can use this imprecise expression, and reveals that the cognitive faculty, the mind or consciousness finally understood something fundamental regarding its functioning.

A passage from the records of Bodhidharma, a semi-legendary Indian monk from the fifth or sixth century CE, emphasizes this point:

"To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss. When you seek nothing, you're on the Path. [...] Buddha is the Sanskrit word for what you call aware, miraculously aware. Responding, arching your brows, blinking your eyes, moving your hands and feet, it's all your miraculously aware nature."[^24]

The contemporary bias is to assume the state of rational and critical consciousness as the principal and most relevant in the construction of knowledge. However, religious and mystical literature provides us with abundant examples that anomalous states of consciousness and events that we could characterize as uncommon or paranormal were at the core of the birth of religions (Kripal 2007; 2019; Maraldi 2021). There is certainly an implicit interdict in the modes of thinking of contemporary science of religion that prevents us from truly scrutinizing the structure and dynamics of these states and seeking to understand them in their own terms. Epistemic impositions tend to improperly regulate the boundaries of knowledge and exclude modes of being that could provide perhaps the most important data in the construction of knowledge of the religious phenomenon. In this sense, we must ask ourselves if the intellectual restraint present in the field of science of religion really promotes the development of the field or, as it seems to us, prematurely limits its possibilities by restricting itself to a discourse embedded with scientistic dogmas and biases.

In this sense, an epistemological approach that we would characterize as a 'third way' is necessary. The first way would be that of confirmation of belief, of the search for proofs that establish firmer bases for an intuitive and instinctive religious knowledge---the sphere of theology. The problems of this are clearly visible and notable, and we consider them as sufficiently well established by the literature. The second way concerns the systematic study of religious phenomena through restricted angles and schemes, such as those of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, allied to critical detachment and the exclusion from the field of study of any attributions of epistemic validity of the phenomena---the current perspective of the science of religion. Through terms like 'religionism,' 'essentialism,' and 'universalism,' ideological interdicts are sought to be fomented that remove a priori any possibility of the investigated phenomena exemplifying something sui generis, a genuinely new manifestation or expression in the field of phenomena. It is this position, which we consider as highly problematic, that demands a third way.

When we establish a priori that there is nothing new or sui generis in the religious phenomenon, we commit a number of errors, some explicit and others implicit. The first, and certainly most obvious, is that we cannot determine this point a priori precisely because it is human religious experiences that, expanding the spectrum of common experience, provide us with data about what reality may or may not be. If a religious group experiences the presence of ghosts or apparitions, the reply should not be the immediate 'Ghosts are impossible within a material scheme of reality and here we have only the manifestation of peculiar hallucinatory forms' but the more lucid consideration---as an epistemic suggestion---'What does the datum of the experience of ghosts tell us about the construction of reality as such? Can reality be a broad imaginative construct? Could it be established by the interweaving of imaginations of the multiple observers that sustain it?' This example does not aim to forcefully establish a necessarily more valid metaphysical interpretation, in the case that reality might perhaps be an imaginative construction in contrast to a process primarily of physical order (Kastrup 2011). What is sought to be illustrated is that within an alternative interpretative scheme, a certain religious datum can immediately become significant in epistemic terms, and its study can provoke not only new sociological or cultural understandings, although these have their relevance, but new metatheoretical understandings. Here it is not a matter of the proof or refutation of specific religious propositions, culturally determined and historically conditioned; but of pointing out that if reality can present itself in such diverse experiential ways, then a science of religion that does not seriously consider this experiential diversity will be improperly excluding epistemic possibilities.

An alternative reply could be the anodyne 'This question does not interest us and is beyond the scope of research of the field.' Unlike the first, this one sins by a premature exclusion that tends to trivialize the theoretical and experimental relevance of the field. If the really interesting phenomena are instantaneously divested of importance, and if their investigation is excluded a priori, then it will not be possible to construct a genuinely new knowledge that surprises us; we will only repeat and reproduce consolidated knowledge and research work tends to become merely decorative. In this case, it becomes fundamental to reconsider distinguishing the movements of conventional science and also of its post-paradigmatic modulations (Kuhn 1970; Feyerabend 1987).

It is frontier experiences, potentially extreme, the great subjective and objective anomalies, that perhaps provide us with the most important data for understanding the nature of cognition, consciousness, imagination, and human existence. So if we reduce the imaginative pluralism of religious processes and phenomena to specific cognitive mechanisms, historically determined sociological movements, or cerebral physiological models, perhaps the most important datum is left out of our investigations. As Jeffrey Kripal wrote, "Our conclusions are a consequence of our exclusions" (Kripal 2019, 78). This implicit error within the perspective of the second way is what we will call the early limitation of the investigative scope. It is as problematic the involvement with phenomena from a personal religious belief system, particular to the investigator, as from an implicit belief system of the secular researcher, who convinced and believing in his consensual scientific worldview, is not even capable of perceiving the profound dogmas rooted in his judgments about the nature of the phenomena studied.

Here it becomes important to discuss the state of consciousness of the observer in relation to the study of a given phenomenon. In relation to the investigation of mysticism, this is a crucial point and perhaps reveals the impossibility of constructing relevant knowledge by observers who do not share to some degree a personal and direct knowledge of the states of consciousness that underlie the phenomena studied by them. This consideration has broad implications, not only for the science of religion, but also for fields like psychiatry and psychology. With this consideration we do not seek to limit and restrict the debate; Buddhist academics who do not practice meditation or who have a restricted involvement with Buddhism can produce important and highly relevant works. However, an academic who integrates a direct experiential gaze with critical academic analysis, such as D. T. Suzuki, is in a much more favorable position for the construction of relevant knowledge about Buddhist mysticism than an academic who does not share such an experiential perspective. A psychiatrist who has experienced psychic pathologies firsthand, such as R. D. Laing, may perhaps construct a psychiatric knowledge much more attuned to the experience of his patients than a psychiatrist only committed to theoretical activity (Laing 1960; 1961; 1967). Such considerations are not new and have a long tradition in other areas, such as in anthropology---e.g., the famous critique of armchair anthropologists.

The fact that one must make explicit the necessity of integration between experience and theory demonstrates the central dichotomy in which Western thought has been immersed for many centuries. One theorizes sometimes with very little direct contact with the object of study; this condition is frequently emphasized and considered as the sine qua non for any serious scientific activity. And when experiential approximation exists, it is frequently restricted to the contours and delineation of the object; the final and fundamental questions must be left to philosophical or even theological activity.

However, if this mode of apprehension is functional for the study of material phenomena, it is significantly dysfunctional for the investigation of any human domain in which subjectivity, consciousness, and first-person experience possess a central and preponderant role. Although the discussion is old, the split between experience and theory, between experience and the cognitive activity that follows from it is still deep and problematic. Let us see some of the reasons that may be responsible for this division. The first concerns the emphasis given to the exclusively cognitive dimension of the contemporary academic project. While the Enlightenment promoted a liberation from religious dogmas deeply rooted in the European mentality of recent centuries, gradually its central principles became rigid and endowed rational mentality with the same dogmatic attitude that it itself had deconstructed. The Kantian sapere aude and Cartesian methodical doubt became hollow ideals devoid of relevance (Feyerabend 1987). The first suffered a slow death at the hands of an epistemological paradigm that excludes any validity of first-person knowledge, in which the subject is endowed with epistemic relevance. If by ourselves we can know nothing, if the only source of knowledge worthy of this term is collective scientific consensus, external, validated by a culture of intertwined references that sustains itself, then what remains of individual testimony, of direct access to reality that is the hidden presupposition of all forms of knowledge, including scientific knowledge itself that wants nothing to do with it?

The ramifications of this attitude are broad and impact not only academic and scientific research, but the very ontological validity of subjects in general. If a member of an aboriginal community reports continuous communication with plants of his environment, if from them he extracts information about curative methods, why does such a report not merit epistemic consideration? If we immediately respond that communication with plants is impossible, and that this arises from a form of 'magical thinking' and from an 'animist' belief system, are we not closing ourselves within our own metaphysical schemes without even considering their possible limitations? What if communication with plants is possible? What if forms of communication that we still do not know are responsible for experiences of this type? Notice that in the first case we would not even be able to raise these questions. We could not emphasize that a large number of researchers have reconsidered the perceptual capacity of plants and also possible forms of agency and sentience that they express (Mancuso 2018). The questions would be pre- or pseudo-scientific, simply because they are on the margins of a consensus that is, truly, pseudo-scientific in the strict sense of the term.

The consequences of this attitude for the study of religious experiences, and more specifically for the investigation of mystical experiences, are profound. The great premise of mysticism as an epistemic project is that this direct access exists, since fundamentally, it is established and ontologically rooted in human consciousness. In fact, mystical propositions emphasize and stress that human consciousness is not strictly human, which brings them close to a panpsychist, idealist position, or to a non-dual double-aspect monism, in philosophical terms. If first-person knowledge, if the immediate factuality of consciousness is discarded a priori, then it becomes impossible any type of study of mysticism that is not analysis and systematization of its secondary and derivative aspects. Its theoretical fruits, whether for the corroboration of contemporary theories of consciousness or their refutation, will not be harvested.

However, a perspective that seriously considers mystical propositions, and does not simply discard them as excesses and historical religious anomalies, can elucidate and possibly resolve some of the most important questions in relation to consciousness and its meaning for understanding the nature of reality. There is no doubt that a genuine critique of the proposition that consciousness possesses a preponderant or even total role in the construction of reality must go beyond the usual materialism, reductionism, and physicalism presented in the literature. Mystical writings tend to deconstruct usual epistemic activity, and a large part of the members of the religious, philosophical, and spiritual groups that produced them exemplifies an attitude that frequently takes us back to scientific skepticism. It is not a matter of innocent identification with the symbols or central ideas of a given religious vision, but of the emergence of forms of knowledge and experience that are habitually surprising for those who experience them. This fact cannot be easily explained by a common epistemological reduction.

Here it is not a matter of epistemological questions but of gnoseological politics, politics of knowledge (Kripal 2019). The tabula rasa presupposed in academic activity, whether of student researchers, divests the search for knowledge of any intrinsic value. If knowledge necessarily comes from external sources, whether through reading classical authorities, through internalization of doctrinaire theoretical schemes, or through application of empirical methodologies in a highly restricted manner, then the term knowledge is reduced to a mere triviality with very little impact on the real. Will we be willing as researchers to engage in direct dialogue with sources of subjective experience and transform our way of thinking, feeling, and existing in relation to the religious phenomenon, or will we foster the activity of closing ourselves in our presuppositions and ideologies embedded in an implicit worldview in research activity? What exactly is being researched, and more relevantly, why should one research?

If we seek to apprehend mysticism as a proposition about the possibility of extension of usual forms of knowledge, we must first consider how this knowledge expands and develops. This path leads us to the central motivation behind the mystical movements of religious traditions and also of their spontaneous flourishing among scattered individuals throughout history. The connection between the scientific endeavor and the mystical journey---whether it is a purely subjective process or one with significant ontological consequences---points to a possible common root between the two. Both formally promote the annulment of dogmas and false presuppositions in relation to the nature of reality. The two perspectives aim for considerable cognitive transformation, attributing to knowledge an intrinsic and possibly final value in the field of human experience. This point crosses the minds of thinkers as disparate as Einstein and Shankara, and places the question of the nature of knowledge in the foreground. It is clear that when we deal with epistemology we could simply leave this point as a philosophical question that has nothing relevant for the religious field; on the contrary, we think it is one of the most important questions and one that receives very little serious and dedicated attention.

This perspective recognizes in knowledge a soteriological function, and places it within the long and heterogeneous Gnostic tradition. We see this orientation emerge especially after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts; in various treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum; in alchemical symbolism; in the mystical treatises of Eckhart; in the idealist philosophy of Western thinkers such as Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and of Eastern ones, in all Buddhist theoretical body and in the great majority of Indian philosophical orientations, especially Vedānta. It is also important to emphasize that the position frequently attributed to indigenous peoples of 'animism' possesses similarities, if not an identity with what contemporary philosophers of mind call panpsychism.

This attitude toward knowledge is perhaps the greatest impediment for new understandings about religious experience to emerge. Taking mysticism once again as reference, we see that in mystical epistemology the greatest obstacle is consolidated knowledge itself over many generations. The usual forms of perception and cognition, rigid belief systems---such are the barriers to be crossed for the mystical mode of cognition to flourish. That such transcendence provokes a highly significant epistemic condition or state certainly cannot be easily inferred by a simple reading or even a preliminary immersion in the gnoseological culture of a particular mystical tradition.

The propositions of mysticism are simultaneously open and veiled; the Vedantic tat tvam asi ('Thou art That'), the Christian 'I and the Father are one,' and the Buddhist Longchenpa's 'You are the eye of the world' are on the one hand simple phrases and simultaneously of practically unlimited density. How can we deal with affirmations of this type, which abound in the most diverse mystical texts, in a serious, critical way that does justice to their potential implications? Here an attitude of immediate revelatory acceptance is not proposed; this would violate all the methodological principles of the very mystical processes that produced states capable of being translated into propositions of this type. However, fully consistent logical skepticism must explain why affirmations of total identity with ultimate principles are possible and manifest themselves in the most diverse contexts. What do these propositions say about human consciousness and cognition? What is the nature of this cognition? This direction would certainly reduce the ontological implications of mysticism to a profound reevaluation of human consciousness. It would allow explaining why certain states of consciousness tend to be articulated in this way and not in another. The second option would be to truly recognize in these propositions a supremely profound but still almost totally hidden aspect of reality and human consciousness; surprisingly, we arrive at the same place. When mystics establish that human consciousness is God or the Absolute, what is the experiential basis that justifies such an affirmation? What is happening in their consciousness? And ultimately, is this the true nature of consciousness, when seen beyond ordinary and conventional attributions?

It seems inescapable the conclusion that regardless of which direction we choose to follow, of categorical skepticism or of integral revelatory acceptance, we flow into human consciousness as source and origin. In the first case, however, human consciousness either deceives itself completely, or metaphorically expresses an almost incomprehensible truth about itself; in the second, there occurs an unveiling of a consciousness that finally understands itself on a genuinely new level. The first position certainly produces an important critique. What is the epistemological justification for an individual to proclaim himself identical to God, the Tao, the Absolute, Brahman? Will this not be a transcendental excess that is merely a reflection of religious identification with the center of a belief structure? However, the reply that recognizes in the revelatory event a completely new fact about consciousness, that it is not only an individual capacity or function, concentrated in a particular organism, but the very substance or invariant structure of the entire reality, also presents a valid and peculiarly interesting point of view from a scientific perspective.

The first perspective provides us with special data about consciousness, and perhaps makes possible the formulation of a more complete theory about its meaning. However, it does not present us with anything fundamentally new. The second perspective is scientifically very rich and full of significations. If the propositions of complete identity provided by mysticism portray more faithfully what consciousness and/or reality factually are, then our entire outlook on things must be revisited; the universe immediately becomes a completely new entity and of it our current objective knowledge says only very little; current human mentality becomes not the end of a long evolutionary trajectory but only a modest step, in a process that can possibly reach dimensions that we still little suspect; the identity of the term anthropos, its genuine meaning, becomes exposed in a singular way. If the veracity of a theory is tied to the ramifications it produces if it is true, using a kind of principle of abundance as an epistemic heuristic, then the second perspective unveils completely new scenarios for us.

The possibility that consciousness carries in a hidden way a deeper meaning than that which we currently attribute to it opens a series of truly interesting questions. The access we have to our own subjectivity largely determines how we think about its structure and meaning. This limited access is perhaps analogous or homologous to a computer interface, in which the underlying structure is rarely perceived. Most of the time consciousness would be filtered by a form of cognitive interface structured through the nervous system (Kelly 2007; Hoffman 2019). One can think of mysticism from this analogy, in which the base underlying the cognitive apparatus, consciousness, finally emerges unveiled to itself. The totality of the world resides then in this interface, which only in uncommon or exceptional situations reveals its substrate. Mysticism would consist in the systematic development of this type of rupture, of encounter of the cognitive interstices that would provide clues about how reality is truly constituted: by an intricate and infinitely complex cognitive elaboration in which space-time itself is contained.

Spiritual awakening, and mysticism in general, brings peculiar problems for the third-person epistemology that characterizes contemporary science. While scientific knowledge is grounded in a gradual and provisional process, in which understanding about a certain phenomenon is shared by a community of minds that debate and establish the validity of the structure under construction of knowledge, mysticism defends the gnostic possibility: that there is a knowledge---or a meta-knowledge---that dispenses with external validation and that in fact depends only (and even requires) direct determination by first-person consciousness, the primary and basic subjectivity of any individual. This consideration, which is sometimes called the possibility of knowledge of revelatory order, is perhaps the antithesis of the gradual knowledge edifice established by science, as a collective enterprise.

That an individual can suddenly recognize himself as identical to the cosmos, and in this way apprehend existence from a completely new prism, is one of the most important mystical premises. An understanding of this nature cannot be easily shared---although, if the impossibility of sharing were complete, we would not have seen the formation of religions and philosophical schools throughout history. Neither can it be demonstrated directly, although, once again, the methods elaborated for the induction of such states and experiences demonstrate the viability of access if some basic ontological prerequisites have been fulfilled.

This consideration raises important questions about the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the foundations of religions. First, the very realization that the universe can consist in a representation, in an interface, is in itself a highly significant leap. The emergence of the Platonic cave is certainly not a minor event. If this is the true nature of things, if Platonism and/or idealism have something fundamental to say about reality, then the Gnostic element present in many religious traditions is perhaps not just a chimera or fabrication of notably unstable minds. This places knowledge on a radically distinct plane. One knows something fundamental when one totally deconstructs the experience of the world and of oneself; here one arrives at an ontological foundation of great importance in the study of mysticism, and which makes possible the construction of a transversal vision, which extracts from the large number of traditions, historical and contemporary accounts some central attributes that provide the basis for contemporary models of mysticism, establishing a direct dialogue with other sciences.

3.8 A Critique of Ontological Presuppositions Embedded in Current Mysticism Research Methodology

The contemporary bias is to assume the state of rational and critical consciousness as the principal and most relevant in the construction of knowledge. However, religious and mystical literature provides us with abundant examples that anomalous states of consciousness and events that we could characterize as uncommon or paranormal were at the core of the birth of religions (Kripal 2007; 2019; Maraldi 2021). There is certainly an implicit interdict in the modes of thinking of contemporary science of religion that prevents us from truly scrutinizing the structure and dynamics of these states and seeking to understand them in their own terms. Epistemic impositions tend to improperly regulate the boundaries of knowledge and exclude modes of being that could provide perhaps the most important data in the construction of knowledge of the religious phenomenon. In this sense, we must ask ourselves if the intellectual restraint present in the field of science of religion really promotes the development of the field or, as it seems to us, prematurely limits its possibilities by restricting itself to a discourse embedded with scientistic dogmas and biases.

In this sense, an epistemological approach that we would characterize as a 'third way' is necessary. The first way would be that of confirmation of belief, of the search for proofs that establish firmer bases for an intuitive and instinctive religious knowledge---the sphere of theology. The problems of this are clearly visible and notable, and we consider them as sufficiently well established by the literature. The second way concerns the systematic study of religious phenomena through restricted angles and schemes, such as those of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, allied to critical detachment and the exclusion from the field of study of any attributions of epistemic validity of the phenomena---the current perspective of the science of religion. Through terms like 'religionism,' 'essentialism,' and 'universalism,' ideological interdicts are sought to be fomented that remove a priori any possibility of the investigated phenomena exemplifying something sui generis, a genuinely new manifestation or expression in the field of phenomena. It is this position, which we consider as highly problematic, that demands a third way.

When we establish a priori that there is nothing new or sui generis in the religious phenomenon, we commit a number of errors, some explicit and others implicit. The first, and certainly most obvious, is that we cannot determine this point a priori precisely because it is human religious experiences that, expanding the spectrum of common experience, provide us with data about what reality may or may not be. If a religious group experiences the presence of ghosts or apparitions, the reply should not be the immediate 'Ghosts are impossible within a material scheme of reality and here we have only the manifestation of peculiar hallucinatory forms' but the more lucid consideration---as an epistemic suggestion---'What does the datum of the experience of ghosts tell us about the construction of reality as such? Can reality be a broad imaginative construct? Could it be established by the interweaving of imaginations of the multiple observers that sustain it?' This example does not aim to forcefully establish a necessarily more valid metaphysical interpretation, in the case that reality might perhaps be an imaginative construction in contrast to a process primarily of physical order (Kastrup 2011). What is sought to be illustrated is that within an alternative interpretative scheme, a certain religious datum can immediately become significant in epistemic terms, and its study can provoke not only new sociological or cultural understandings, although these have their relevance, but new metatheoretical understandings. Here it is not a matter of the proof or refutation of specific religious propositions, culturally determined and historically conditioned; but of pointing out that if reality can present itself in such diverse experiential ways, then a science of religion that does not seriously consider this experiential diversity will be improperly excluding epistemic possibilities.

An alternative reply could be the anodyne 'This question does not interest us and is beyond the scope of research of the field.' Unlike the first, this one sins by a premature exclusion that tends to trivialize the theoretical and experimental relevance of the field. If the really interesting phenomena are instantaneously divested of importance, and if their investigation is excluded a priori, then it will not be possible to construct a genuinely new knowledge that surprises us; we will only repeat and reproduce consolidated knowledge and research work tends to become merely decorative. In this case, it becomes fundamental to reconsider distinguishing the movements of conventional science and also of its post-paradigmatic modulations (Kuhn 1970; Feyerabend 1987).

It is frontier experiences, potentially extreme, the great subjective and objective anomalies, that perhaps provide us with the most important data for understanding the nature of cognition, consciousness, imagination, and human existence. So if we reduce the imaginative pluralism of religious processes and phenomena to specific cognitive mechanisms, historically determined sociological movements, or cerebral physiological models, perhaps the most important datum is left out of our investigations. As Jeffrey Kripal wrote, "Our conclusions are a consequence of our exclusions" (Kripal 2019, 78). This implicit error within the perspective of the second way is what we will call the early limitation of the investigative scope. It is as problematic the involvement with phenomena from a personal religious belief system, particular to the investigator, as from an implicit belief system of the secular researcher, who convinced and believing in his consensual scientific worldview, is not even capable of perceiving the profound dogmas rooted in his judgments about the nature of the phenomena studied.

Here it becomes important to discuss the state of consciousness of the observer in relation to the study of a given phenomenon. In relation to the investigation of mysticism, this is a crucial point and perhaps reveals the impossibility of constructing relevant knowledge by observers who do not share to some degree a personal and direct knowledge of the states of consciousness that underlie the phenomena studied by them. This consideration has broad implications, not only for the science of religion, but also for fields like psychiatry and psychology. With this consideration we do not seek to limit and restrict the debate; Buddhist academics who do not practice meditation or who have a restricted involvement with Buddhism can produce important and highly relevant works. However, an academic who integrates a direct experiential gaze with critical academic analysis, such as D. T. Suzuki, is in a much more favorable position for the construction of relevant knowledge about Buddhist mysticism than an academic who does not share such an experiential perspective. A psychiatrist who has experienced psychic pathologies firsthand, such as R. D. Laing, may perhaps construct a psychiatric knowledge much more attuned to the experience of his patients than a psychiatrist only committed to theoretical activity (Laing 1960; 1961; 1967). Such considerations are not new and have a long tradition in other areas, such as in anthropology---e.g., the famous critique of armchair anthropologists.

The fact that one must make explicit the necessity of integration between experience and theory demonstrates the central dichotomy in which Western thought has been immersed for many centuries. One theorizes sometimes with very little direct contact with the object of study; this condition is frequently emphasized and considered as the sine qua non for any serious scientific activity. And when experiential approximation exists, it is frequently restricted to the contours and delineation of the object; the final and fundamental questions must be left to philosophical or even theological activity.

However, if this mode of apprehension is functional for the study of material phenomena, it is significantly dysfunctional for the investigation of any human domain in which subjectivity, consciousness, and first-person experience possess a central and preponderant role. Although the discussion is old, the split between experience and theory, between experience and the cognitive activity that follows from it is still deep and problematic. Let us see some of the reasons that may be responsible for this division. The first concerns the emphasis given to the exclusively cognitive dimension of the contemporary academic project. While the Enlightenment promoted a liberation from religious dogmas deeply rooted in the European mentality of recent centuries, gradually its central principles became rigid and endowed rational mentality with the same dogmatic attitude that it itself had deconstructed. The Kantian sapere aude and Cartesian methodical doubt became hollow ideals devoid of relevance (Feyerabend 1987). The first suffered a slow death at the hands of an epistemological paradigm that excludes any validity of first-person knowledge, in which the subject is endowed with epistemic relevance. If by ourselves we can know nothing, if the only source of knowledge worthy of this term is collective scientific consensus, external, validated by a culture of intertwined references that sustains itself, then what remains of individual testimony, of direct access to reality that is the hidden presupposition of all forms of knowledge, including scientific knowledge itself that wants nothing to do with it?

The ramifications of this attitude are broad and impact not only academic and scientific research, but the very ontological validity of subjects in general. If a member of an aboriginal community reports continuous communication with plants of his environment, if from them he extracts information about curative methods, why does such a report not merit epistemic consideration? If we immediately respond that communication with plants is impossible, and that this arises from a form of 'magical thinking' and from an 'animist' belief system, are we not closing ourselves within our own metaphysical schemes without even considering their possible limitations? What if communication with plants is possible? What if forms of communication that we still do not know are responsible for experiences of this type? Notice that in the first case we would not even be able to raise these questions. We could not emphasize that a large number of researchers have reconsidered the perceptual capacity of plants and also possible forms of agency and sentience that they express (Mancuso 2018). The questions would be pre- or pseudo-scientific, simply because they are on the margins of a consensus that is, truly, pseudo-scientific in the strict sense of the term.

The consequences of this attitude for the study of religious experiences, and more specifically for the investigation of mystical experiences, are profound. The great premise of mysticism as an epistemic project is that this direct access exists, since fundamentally, it is established and ontologically rooted in human consciousness. In fact, mystical propositions emphasize and stress that human consciousness is not strictly human, which brings them close to a panpsychist, idealist position, or to a non-dual double-aspect monism, in philosophical terms. If first-person knowledge, if the immediate factuality of consciousness is discarded a priori, then it becomes impossible any type of study of mysticism that is not analysis and systematization of its secondary and derivative aspects. Its theoretical fruits, whether for the corroboration of contemporary theories of consciousness or their refutation, will not be harvested.

However, a perspective that seriously considers mystical propositions, and does not simply discard them as excesses and historical religious anomalies, can elucidate and possibly resolve some of the most important questions in relation to consciousness and its meaning for understanding the nature of reality. There is no doubt that a genuine critique of the proposition that consciousness possesses a preponderant or even total role in the construction of reality must go beyond the usual materialism, reductionism, and physicalism presented in the literature. Mystical writings tend to deconstruct usual epistemic activity, and a large part of the members of the religious, philosophical, and spiritual groups that produced them exemplifies an attitude that frequently takes us back to scientific skepticism. It is not a matter of innocent identification with the symbols or central ideas of a given religious vision, but of the emergence of forms of knowledge and experience that are habitually surprising for those who experience them. This fact cannot be easily explained by a common epistemological reduction.

Here it is not a matter of epistemological questions but of gnoseological politics, politics of knowledge (Kripal 2019). The tabula rasa presupposed in academic activity, whether of student researchers, divests the search for knowledge of any intrinsic value. If knowledge necessarily comes from external sources, whether through reading classical authorities, through internalization of doctrinaire theoretical schemes, or through application of empirical methodologies in a highly restricted manner, then the term knowledge is reduced to a mere triviality with very little impact on the real. Will we be willing as researchers to engage in direct dialogue with sources of subjective experience and transform our way of thinking, feeling, and existing in relation to the religious phenomenon, or will we foster the activity of closing ourselves in our presuppositions and ideologies embedded in an implicit worldview in research activity? What exactly is being researched, and more relevantly, why should one research?

If we seek to apprehend mysticism as a proposition about the possibility of extension of usual forms of knowledge, we must first consider how this knowledge expands and develops. This path leads us to the central motivation behind the mystical movements of religious traditions and also of their spontaneous flourishing among scattered individuals throughout history. The connection between the scientific endeavor and the mystical journey---whether it is a purely subjective process or one with significant ontological consequences---points to a possible common root between the two. Both formally promote the annulment of dogmas and false presuppositions in relation to the nature of reality. The two perspectives aim for considerable cognitive transformation, attributing to knowledge an intrinsic and possibly final value in the field of human experience. This point crosses the minds of thinkers as disparate as Einstein and Shankara, and places the question of the nature of knowledge in the foreground. It is clear that when we deal with epistemology we could simply leave this point as a philosophical question that has nothing relevant for the religious field; on the contrary, we think it is one of the most important questions and one that receives very little serious and dedicated attention.

This perspective recognizes in knowledge a soteriological function, and places it within the long and heterogeneous Gnostic tradition. We see this orientation emerge especially after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts; in various treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum; in alchemical symbolism; in the mystical treatises of Eckhart; in the idealist philosophy of Western thinkers such as Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and of Eastern ones, in all Buddhist theoretical body and in the great majority of Indian philosophical orientations, especially Vedānta. It is also important to emphasize that the position frequently attributed to indigenous peoples of 'animism' possesses similarities, if not an identity with what contemporary philosophers of mind call panpsychism.

This attitude toward knowledge is perhaps the greatest impediment for new understandings about religious experience to emerge. Taking mysticism once again as reference, we see that in mystical epistemology the greatest obstacle is consolidated knowledge itself over many generations. The usual forms of perception and cognition, rigid belief systems---such are the barriers to be crossed for the mystical mode of cognition to flourish. That such transcendence provokes a highly significant epistemic condition or state certainly cannot be easily inferred by a simple reading or even a preliminary immersion in the gnoseological culture of a particular mystical tradition.

The propositions of mysticism are simultaneously open and veiled; the Vedantic tat tvam asi ('Thou art That'), the Christian 'I and the Father are one,' and the Buddhist Longchenpa's 'You are the eye of the world' are on the one hand simple phrases and simultaneously of practically unlimited density. How can we deal with affirmations of this type, which abound in the most diverse mystical texts, in a serious, critical way that does justice to their potential implications? Here an attitude of immediate revelatory acceptance is not proposed; this would violate all the methodological principles of the very mystical processes that produced states capable of being translated into propositions of this type. However, fully consistent logical skepticism must explain why affirmations of total identity with ultimate principles are possible and manifest themselves in the most diverse contexts. What do these propositions say about human consciousness and cognition? What is the nature of this cognition? This direction would certainly reduce the ontological implications of mysticism to a profound reevaluation of human consciousness. It would allow explaining why certain states of consciousness tend to be articulated in this way and not in another. The second option would be to truly recognize in these propositions a supremely profound but still almost totally hidden aspect of reality and human consciousness; surprisingly, we arrive at the same place. When mystics establish that human consciousness is God or the Absolute, what is the experiential basis that justifies such an affirmation? What is happening in their consciousness? And ultimately, is this the true nature of consciousness, when seen beyond ordinary and conventional attributions?

It seems inescapable the conclusion that regardless of which direction we choose to follow, of categorical skepticism or of integral revelatory acceptance, we flow into human consciousness as source and origin. In the first case, however, human consciousness either deceives itself completely, or metaphorically expresses an almost incomprehensible truth about itself; in the second, there occurs an unveiling of a consciousness that finally understands itself on a genuinely new level. The first position certainly produces an important critique. What is the epistemological justification for an individual to proclaim himself identical to God, the Tao, the Absolute, Brahman? Will this not be a transcendental excess that is merely a reflection of religious identification with the center of a belief structure? However, the reply that recognizes in the revelatory event a completely new fact about consciousness, that it is not only an individual capacity or function, concentrated in a particular organism, but the very substance or invariant structure of the entire reality, also presents a valid and peculiarly interesting point of view from a scientific perspective.

The first perspective provides us with special data about consciousness, and perhaps makes possible the formulation of a more complete theory about its meaning. However, it does not present us with anything fundamentally new. The second perspective is scientifically very rich and full of significations. If the propositions of complete identity provided by mysticism portray more faithfully what consciousness and/or reality factually are, then our entire outlook on things must be revisited; the universe immediately becomes a completely new entity and of it our current objective knowledge says only very little; current human mentality becomes not the end of a long evolutionary trajectory but only a modest step, in a process that can possibly reach dimensions that we still little suspect; the identity of the term anthropos, its genuine meaning, becomes exposed in a singular way. If the veracity of a theory is tied to the ramifications it produces if it is true, using a kind of principle of abundance as an epistemic heuristic, then the second perspective unveils completely new scenarios for us.

The possibility that consciousness carries in a hidden way a deeper meaning than that which we currently attribute to it opens a series of truly interesting questions. The access we have to our own subjectivity largely determines how we think about its structure and meaning. This limited access is perhaps analogous or homologous to a computer interface, in which the underlying structure is rarely perceived. Most of the time consciousness would be filtered by a form of cognitive interface structured through the nervous system (Kelly 2007; Hoffman 2019). One can think of mysticism from this analogy, in which the base underlying the cognitive apparatus, consciousness, finally emerges unveiled to itself. The totality of the world resides then in this interface, which only in uncommon or exceptional situations reveals its substrate. Mysticism would consist in the systematic development of this type of rupture, of encounter of the cognitive interstices that would provide clues about how reality is truly constituted: by an intricate and infinitely complex cognitive elaboration in which space-time itself is contained.

Spiritual awakening, and mysticism in general, brings peculiar problems for the third-person epistemology that characterizes contemporary science. While scientific knowledge is grounded in a gradual and provisional process, in which understanding about a certain phenomenon is shared by a community of minds that debate and establish the validity of the structure under construction of knowledge, mysticism defends the gnostic possibility: that there is a knowledge---or a meta-knowledge---that dispenses with external validation and that in fact depends only (and even requires) direct determination by first-person consciousness, the primary and basic subjectivity of any individual. This consideration, which is sometimes called the possibility of knowledge of revelatory order, is perhaps the antithesis of the gradual knowledge edifice established by science, as a collective enterprise.

That an individual can suddenly recognize himself as identical to the cosmos, and in this way apprehend existence from a completely new prism, is one of the most important mystical premises. An understanding of this nature cannot be easily shared---although, if the impossibility of sharing were complete, we would not have seen the formation of religions and philosophical schools throughout history. Neither can it be demonstrated directly, although, once again, the methods elaborated for the induction of such states and experiences demonstrate the viability of access if some basic ontological prerequisites have been fulfilled.

This consideration raises important questions about the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the foundations of religions. First, the very realization that the universe can consist in a representation, in an interface, is in itself a highly significant leap. The emergence of the Platonic cave is certainly not a minor event. If this is the true nature of things, if Platonism and/or idealism have something fundamental to say about reality, then the Gnostic element present in many religious traditions is perhaps not just a chimera or fabrication of notably unstable minds. This places knowledge on a radically distinct plane. One knows something fundamental when one totally deconstructs the experience of the world and of oneself; here one arrives at an ontological foundation of great importance in the study of mysticism, and which makes possible the construction of a transversal vision, which extracts from the large number of traditions, historical and contemporary accounts some central attributes that provide the basis for contemporary models of mysticism, establishing a direct dialogue with other sciences.

4. Conclusion: Awakening and Self-Conscious Nature

The vision woven throughout this study seems to us the most likely candidate for a theoretical model of the process of spiritual awakening. In it we find a validation, albeit critical, of the metaphysical insights provided by comparative mysticism, transposed to a philosophical and scientific language. If spiritual awakening is seriously considered as an object of study of the science of religion, and its implications investigated dedicatedly, we will be obliged to reevaluate our basic presuppositions about the nature of consciousness and reality.

If consciousness is fundamental, and not merely an emergent property of nature but its true condition, although latent, then the evolutionary movement must reflect this unfolding. We could say that nature yearns for self-recognition. This would place the possibility of an evolution that is not exclusively random, but that also presents a teleological dimension, whose finality would be found in unveiling the true face of nature. Put poetically, nature is not a dead thing. It is not only natura naturata, but also natura naturans. It feels, reciprocally experiences the eyes that see it. It waits, dreams, and life in its latency gropes toward greater light and understanding. If this poetic formulation is correct, then the material evolutionary movement must possess a subjective, interior counterpart, which concentrates its true meaning. We experience this directionality in the sphere of individual consciousness. Is there some impulse inherent to transcendence? Were Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin correct when they postulated, respectively, a vital élan that nourishes evolution and a telos that retroactively organizes and directs the evolutionary process?

In the contemporary scientific atmosphere, inquiries like these tend to be quickly dismissed and set aside as unverifiable or as speculative excesses lacking empirical foundations. However, in the light of non-ordinary states of consciousness they become not only plausible but probable. There is a metatheoretical framework that currently permeates scientific praxis that possesses nothing objective, but that in truth reflects quite peculiar cultural biases. Within distinct narrative and metatheoretical schemes, scientific data currently not considered valid and exceptional experiences such as awakening would gain meaning and would even become predictable. In a nature that reflected in its total movement the properties of its particular organisms, such as sentience and intentionality, we would see new contours emerge in relation to the process of life. The cosmos would cease to be a dead stage and would become a living mass of consciousness in the process of self-organization, self-exploration, and self-consciousness. And it would not be necessary to break with the established scientific canon, but a transformation of the interpretative system that we use to understand such data.

We could understand nature's gradual search for itself. This would dissolve the boundary between nature as the cradle of life that is currently incomprehensible to us, and our existences as individual organic entities. It would more meaningfully explain states of unity and connection with the cosmos, not merely as healthy experiences, nonetheless without ontological bases, but as a mode of perception that more appropriately captures what nature effectively is. The optical illusion of consciousness mentioned by Einstein, in reference to individual consciousness that experiences itself as distinct, fragmented, and separated, would no longer be the starting point for the construction of the scientific metaphysical castle, but only one within a space of perhaps deeper and more adequate formulations.

Although such a vision is currently a minority in the field of mysticism research, we consider that it follows naturally from an unbiased reading of mystical accounts and particularly of spiritual awakening. The criticisms habitually made to the consideration of the validity of a transversal mystical knowledge rarely come from the mystics themselves, who could, like many religious people, defend the exclusivity of this kind of knowledge as restricted to their own religions. However, we see in the literature of comparative mysticism an expressive number of mystics who emphasize a latent unity among the multiplicity of religious perspectives of the world. We find, therefore, a greater cognitive openness among those who directly experienced such exceptional states, whether they are within the bosom of a religious tradition or whether they are researchers who simultaneously possess direct experience of such forms of consciousness. In this regard, it is possible that the theoretical and doctrinaire dogmatism frequently attributed to religious beliefs has been transferred to certain modalities of scientific investigation in the field of science of religion. If, on the one hand, the field aims at the construction of genuinely scientific knowledge of the religious dimension, on the other, any attempt to establish universal principles---which are the essence of any science---is quickly discarded.

This complex situation impedes the development of truly comprehensive theories of the religious phenomenon. A theory that considered religious activity as the manifestation of processes inherent to the development of consciousness in all its modalities would permit the understanding of the place of religious experience within the cosmos. Not as a human peculiarity, but possibly as the demonstration of an additional layer in the structure of consciousness of the most diverse organisms. In its current state, it would not be possible to understand the emergence of religious phenomena in anomalous forms of consciousness, such as a self-conscious artificial intelligence or intelligent forms of life possibly present in other solar systems. However, a genuinely universal theory about the religious phenomenon should be capable of filling precisely this gap.

The work presented here intended to sketch some reflections toward the construction of a religious theory that considers consciousness as a fundamental principle of reality. We cannot affirm that it is the final configuration of a comprehensive theory of spiritual awakening, but, at least, that it surpasses in its explanatory capacity the contemporary model that attributes to subjectivity only a secondary place in the constitution of an essentially material reality. We think that the philosophical perspectives presented throughout the work can more adequately provide a basis for future studies, whether they are theoretical or empirical.

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Endnotes

1. "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love." (Eckhart, 2009, p.298).

2. "...reversals of perspective, roughly, from 'the outside' of things to 'the inside' of things, from 'the object' to 'the subject'". (Kripal, 2019, p. 17)

3. "De acuerdo con una de las escuelas indias de filosofía, el ego es meramente un espectador quien se ha identificado a sí mismo con el hombre que él está continuamente mirando." (Augustine, 1996)

4. "On renouncing the body along with the rest of the manifestation, there has been, as if by magic, a perception of the supreme Self." (Balsekar, 1989, p. 73)

5. "What would the philosophy of mind look like if it took flipped individuals like Federico Faggin seriously---that is, if it took mystical forms of all-knowing as seriously as it took abstract philosophical reasoning and the color red?" (Kripal, 2019, p. 337)

6. "As it is, the philosophy of mind is almost entirely restricted to ordinary rationalism and easily accessible conscious states." (Kripal, 2019, p. 337)

7. "This religious perspective differentiates gnosticism not only from orthodoxy, but also, for all the similarities, from psychotherapy, for most members of the psychotherapeutic profession follow Freud in refusing to attribute real existence to the figments of imagination. They do not regard their attempt to discover what is within the psyche as equivalent to discovering the secrets of the universe. But many gnostics, like many artists, search for interior self-knowledge as the key to understanding universal truths---"who we are, where we came from, where we go." (Pagels, 1979, p.432)

8. The term 'deific solipsism' was coined by the American mystic William Samuel (1924-1996).

9. "Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, "My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate ... If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself." (Pagels, 1979, p.35)

10. "Supreme union signifies that the whole universe is within you, and you are in it; and further, there will be no occasion to speak of a universe." (Fitzgerald & Lipski, 2007, p. 84)

11. "In the whole universe there is this one very special spot, this one very special occupant of that spot, which you and only you can observe." (Harding, 2012, p. 212)

12. "There's no such thing as a true enlightenment which doesn't light up every creature on Earth and in the skies, however grotesque or remote or unlovable. How could we begin to disentangle ourselves from any part of the One in whom we live and move and have our being? Enlightenment is cosmic or an illusion." (Harding, 2012, p 286)

13. "You and your universe are inseparable, and it must follow that, to be at all real, your enlightenment is necessarily suprapersonal and indeed cosmic." (Harding, 2012, p. 250)

14. "The tradition that the Buddha's enlightenment meant the enlightenment of all creatures has a sound foundation. It is as true of your awakening and mine as it was of his. To wake up is to wake the world up." Harding, 2012, p. 250)

15. ["The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research." (Dirac, 1968)]

16. "That which binds all men together, however, cannot be revelation but must be experience. Revelation is the form taken by particular historical creeds, experience is accessible to man as man." (Jaspers, 1953/2010, pp. 19)

17. "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continuous, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me." (Hume, 1739, p. 252)

18. "Whatever is revealed or hidden anywhere, any way, is "Thou," is "I." [...] You will be able to grasp this fully only when you find everything within yourself; in other words, in the state where there is nothing but the Self." (Fitzgerald & Lipski, 2007, p. 81)"

19. "I believe that perception is actually sharper. True, one aspect of it resembles a dream in that self and world may become kaleidoscopic [semiotically kaleidoscopic as well]; but another aspect of the experience is a sharpened perception, a vividness, a translucence of relationship to the things around us. The world becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus the breakthrough of material from the unconscious dimensions involves a heightening of sensory experience." (May, 1994, p.114)

20. "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." (Blake, 1790/1975, p. 7)

21. "Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." (Wittgenstein, 1933/2009, p. 81)

22. "Wonder at the mystery is itself a fruitful act of understanding, in that it affords a point of departure for further research. It may even be the very goal of all understanding, since it means penetrating through the greatest possible amount of knowledge to authentic nescience, instead of allowing Being to disappear by absolutising it away into a self-enclosed object of cognition." (Jaspers, 1953/2010, p.18)

23. "Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature. This nature is the same as the mind of all buddhas. Buddhas of the past and future only transmit this mind. Beyond this mind there's no buddha anywhere.but deluded people don't realize that their own mind is the buddha." (Pine, 1987, p. 25)