paper at www.perspegrity.com/papers

1. Tom Murray
2013 Integral Theory Conference
Paper copy at www.perspegrity.com/papers
MYSTICAL CLAIMS AND EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE
IN A POST-METAPHYSICAL AGE

2. ?
Reality
(it)
Experience
(I)
Belief &
Language
(we)

3. USEFUL CATEGORIES FOR KNOWLEDGE/BELIEF

4. BELIEF/KNOWLEDGE CATEGORIES: EXAMPLES
Linguistic / symbolic
Concepts
• Taste of chocolate; gut
certainty; meditative state;
playing tennis; intuitions…
• Tree, democracy, interior, c
onsciousness…
• Trees are…; We should…;
the cognitive line leads…
• AQAL, SD, CR, Einstein‘s, …
.
4
Non/pre-Linguistic:
Experience
Model/Theory
Statements

6. OVERVIEW
1. What are mystical/metaphysical claims/beliefs?
2. Reasons for caution and reflection
3. What embodied cognition says about
mystical/metaphysical claims and reality <–> idea gap
4. ‗Post-metaphysical‘ approaches to mysticism
―Theories can do shadow work‖
— so can mystical beliefs
Not questioning mystical, magical, or ineffable
experiences, or the need to share and construct meaning
from it

7. WORKING DEFINITION OF
MYSTICAL/METAPHYSICAL CLAIMS/BELIEFS
• Claims about the overarching or underlying nature of the
universe/Kosmos/everything
• Not provable by science or amenable to measurement; i.e. not
purely physical or psychological phenomena – but still being
about ―reality‖ or ―truth‖ (not about the good or beautiful)
• Common themes:
Consciousness, Being, Reality, Spirit, Life, Non-
dual, Cosmology, other Realms
• Have import to human life/spirit, ethics, ultimate ―meaning‖
• Mystical differs from metaphysical in that its source is direct
experience or intuition (purportedly) with ultimate reality or
transcendental truths

8. SOME EXAMPLES OF
MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE AND CLAIMS

9. KEN WILBER — PHILOSOPHER AND MYSTIC
"the great morphic field of evolutionary potential…pulling all
manifest holons back to their ever-present Ground as Spirit--a
Kosmic field of Agape, gently pulling evolution into greater and
greater consciousness, embrace […] The reality, suchness, or
isness of every holon is actually Spirit…a drive which ultimately
wants to embrace the entire Kosmos […] This ultimate realization
[is] of the ever-present, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless
and therefore eternal, formless and therefore
omnipresent, Condition of all conditions and Nature of all natures
and radically groundless Ground of all grounds.‖
Ken Wilber, Excerpt A, Volume 2, Kosmos Trilogy Draft

10. MORE MYSTICAL STATEMENTS
"…perspectives are primordial, which is to say they are the most
fundamental or primeval elements of reality, existing at or from the
beginning of time"
Clint Fuhs, ITC 2010 paper on Perspectival Semiotics
"the dimension of the profound," "mystical deeper reality," "timeless
present," "eternal now," and "infinite spaciousness‖
Jeff Carreira (student of Andrew Cohen) audio dialogue with Patricia Albere
"infinite vastness...open suchness... infinite peace...true
self...always already liberated"
Wilber, audio interview with Alan Coombs

11. DR. BRONNER (THE SOAP GUY)
• ... a sense for work-love-song-art-law-play-beauty, a face turned
up from the sod!
• Absolute...ever- evolving, ever-recreating, ever-loving
order!...guided by One...God...all-embracing,
• Eternal One! — We're One! All-One!
• DILUTE ENJOY — 1 SQAP FOR 18 DIFFERENT USES!

12. NON-AD-HOMINEM
The individuals quotes can be assumed to:
• be sincere and authentic
• have had deep experiences and intuitions
• be pointing to important ―truths‖ or deep meaning
• not be absolutist; allow for fallibility and revision
• have a sophisticated and nuanced understanding

13. DON’T TRY TO USE THESE WORDS AT HOME! :-)
Infinite, Omnipresent, Universal, Ulti
mate, Primeval, Primordial, Eternal,
Formless, Ever-
Present, Supreme, Unbounded, Time
less, Spaceless, Radically
Invisible, Radically Empty, Non-
Dual, Ground Of Being
• Poetry? Metaphor? Inspirational oratory?
•  Truth claims about (exterior) reality
• For what audience, for what purpose?

15. OUR RELATIONSHIP TO MYSTICAL CLAIMS

16. BERTRAND RUSSELL ON MYSTICAL KNOWLEDGE
• It often deals with universals, infinites, essences, or foundational truths.
• Mysticism has "a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is
believed about the universe." It has a sense of "certainty and revelation."
Though it sometimes uses logic to justify beliefs, the claims seem to come
from "a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted
with the slow and fallible [process of scientific reasoning]."
• Mystics are attempting "an articulation upon the inarticulate experience gained
in the moment of" what is called insight or intuition.
• There is a "sense of a mystery unveiled [and] revelation" of "a reality behind
the world of appearances and utterly different from it." Truth and essence is
found through profound introspective thought, not through sense experience.
• Can be expressed in deeply poignant, poetic, or metaphorical prose.
• There is a common "belief in unity, and its refusal to admit opposition or
division anywhere"—that "reality is one and indivisible." There is also
commonly a belief that reality, or ultimate reality, is beyond time and space.

17. YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH METAPHYSICAL
BELIEFS?
1. Brainstorm mystical/metaphysical claims/beliefs
you hear in the Integral community.
2. How do you feel when others make such claims?
3. What happens when you mention
mystical/metaphysical claims to your
friends/family?
4. When you explain or justify these beliefs, how do
you support them?
5. Does it matter if we can explain or justify such
claims to others? Why or why not?

18. MYSTICAL / METAPHYSICAL
KNOWLEDGE HAZARDS — RUSSELL
• Tendency for the passion of the mystic to
conflate "the good with the truly real"
• Those who "are capable of absorption in an inward passion" can
experience "the loss of contact with daily things [and] common
objects."
• Focus on pure logic to the exclusion of experience or common
sense– "logic used in the defense of mysticism seems to be
faulty as logic‖
• >>Highest form of thought is a combination of mystical and
scientific understanding...

19. MORE CAVEATS RE PROCLAMATIONS OF THE
ULTIMATE OR ESSENTIAL
• Complex philosophical approaches
and worldviews...reach beyond the
boundaries of the academy and into
the lifeworld" where they are subject
to being watered-down, muddied,
and misappropriated
-Stein 2010
• Ultimately can be:
grandiosity, hegemony, elitism,
demagoguery, proto-fascism,
colonization, assimilation,
totalizing

20. EMBODIMENT <-> FALLIBILITY
Fallibility, uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, fuzzines
s, systematic bias, indeterminacy

21. THE IDEA PORTABILITY PRINCIPLE
• Understanding and dealing with the fallibility and
indeterminacy of ideas is more important the greater the
distance between the world views or beliefs of
interlocutors
• Preaching to the (integral) Choir vs.
a) crossing disciplinary boundaries to interact with other
theory/practice communities
b) applying ideas in real contexts
explaining one's purposes to stakeholders
c) disperse ideas into other world views or conceptual frames

22. DISCUSSION:
EMBODIMENT & BELIEF FORMATION
1. How does knowing you are angry, in love, in fearful
resistance, or prejudiced influence what you believe
and how you hold a belief? How does understanding
how shadow works change how you hold a belief?
2. How does knowing that some aspects of love —
such as attraction, bonding, and empathy, are tied to
bio/neuro/chemical processes — change the
experience of being in love?
3. New evidence shows how most
memory, perception, and judgment is influenced by
emotion and cognitive biases — how do you think
this effects the claims of scholars, philosophers, and
mystics?

23. THE EMBODIED MIND
— A Philosophical History of the Fallibility of Reason
1. Traditional Philosophy — mind/reason separate from body (Cartesian) &
pure, universal, transcendent, reliable
2. Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution — removing the influence of
authority, emotion/passion, dogma, instinct/intuition
• Valued: observation, measurement, logic, repeatability/democratic
• But battle: Realists & Empiricists vs. Rationalists & Idealists
3. Kant — reason is limited by underlying structures of the mind
4. Darwin — cognition evolved through natural selection—from animal brains
5. Freud — the unconscious; unpredictable hidden powerful influence on thought
6. Postmodernists — reason is biased by cultural norms & structure of language
7. Cognitive Science — cognitive biases woven into perception, memory, reason

24. EXAMPLE COGNITIVE BIASES
• Confirmation Bias
• Hindsight Bias
• Amygdala Hijack

25. SOURCES OF FALLIBILITY
IN MYSTICAL AND METAPHYSICAL BELIEF
1. Concepts & Abstractions
2. Misplaced Concreteness
3. Mystical Specialness
4. Epistemic Drives

26. 1.

27. SCHOLARLY WORK IS
"NOTORIOUSLY FRAUGHT WITH
DEFINITIONAL DISAGREEMENT"
(SHERMER, 2011)

28. George Lakoff
Subject / Object
Singular / Plural
Cognitive, Emotional line...
Non-Dual (/ non-non-dual)
Good, True, Beautiful

29. Epistemic Distance

30. 2. MISPLACED CONCRETENESS / REIFICATION
(TREATING INTRANSITIVE OBJECTS LIKE/AS TRANSITIVE OBJECTS)

31. 3. ESOTERIC CHOCOLATE —
MYSTICAL FEELINGS

32. STATES REFERRED TO IN BUDDHIST TEXTS
(THE SATIPATTHANA SUTTA, PITAKA SUTTA)
• A series of state experiences (Jhanas) obtainable through
contemplative absorption practices. ...terms include
happiness/joy, rapture/bliss, attention/mindfulness, unification/at
tention/one-pointedness, equanimity/serenity/contentment/utter
peace, infinity of space, and emptiness/formlessness/cessation.
• Common warnings along the path indicated drives (addictive &
obscuring)
• What from the experience gets transferred to theories/concepts
of reality?
• Terms like infinite, boundless, empty, used in mystical ideas may
point to feeling states, more than actual properties of reality.

33. IN "MYSTICISM AND LOGIC" RUSSELL
CONCLUDES THAT
"while fully developed mysticism seems to me [a mistaken
outcome of the emotions], I yet believe that by sufficient
restraint, there is an element of wisdom to be learned by
the mystical way of feeling, which does not seem to be
attainable in any other manner [and which is] to be
commended as an attitude toward life, not as a creed
about the world"

34. 4. EPISTEMIC DRIVES
(FROM COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY TO PHENOMENOLOGY)
Any cognitive drive or tendency that
influences how we produce or share
knowledge or ideas
• Desire for certainty (and the
avoidance of uncertainty and
cognitive dissonance)
• Need to make meaning, see
patterns
• Misplaced concreteness
• Symbolic Impulse

35. EPISTEMIC DRIVES (FOR MYSTICS!)
35
Abstract Concrete
General Specific
Integration Differentiation
Universal Relative
Fundamental Consequential
Permanent Changing
Simple Complex
Oneness/singularity/unity Multiplicity
Whole, Integrated Part, Differentiated
Completeness, Totality Partiality
Similarity Difference (diversity)
Transcendence Immanence
Perfection, purity Imperfection, grittiness
Uniqueness, specialness Ordinariness

36. POST-METAPHYSICS
• Habermas:
1. post-metaphysical era has "replaced
foundationalism with fallibilism‖ and
2. has a procedural conception of rationality — from
―a rational person thinks this‖ to "…thinks like this‖
• In Integral Spirituality Wilber (2006) says that
"[arguably,] metaphysics…ended with Kant [who realized
that] we do not perceive empirical objects in a completely
realistic, pregiven fashion; but rather, structures of the
knowing subject import various characteristics to the
known object. […] Metaphysics is then a broad name for
the type of thinking that can't figure [out that] reality is not
a perception, but a conception…thinking that falls prey to
the myth of the given." (p. 231).

37. WE WILL ALWAYS NEED METAPHYSICS
• To satisfy our epistemic drives toward meaning, certainty, .... in
areas outside the reach of (current) science/measurement.
• Some things may always appear as mysteries to the human
mind: death, life, infinity, subjectivity, being...
• But we can still avoid unnecessary degrees of
certainty, foundationalism, bias....

38. APPROACHES TO METAPHYSICAL CLAIMS
1. Meaning Generative Claims
2.Indeterminacy Analysis
3. Body Awareness of Epistemic Drives
4.Follow Sean Esbjörn-Hargens!

39. 1. MEANING GENERATIVE CLAIMS
(A 4TH VALIDITY TYPE)
True
Good/Right/Just
Beautiful
&
Meaning-generative
39

40. 2. INDETERMINACY ANALYSIS
George Lakoff

41. 3. BODY AWARENESS OF EPISTEMIC DRIVES

42. 4. HUMOR, PLAY, HUMILITY, UNKNOWING, DANCE
(SEE SEAN!)
• Fallibility: "Blind spots and square pegs
and messy -- oh my!‖
• Evolving definition of concept of "integral"
• Ontological (metaphorical) Pluralism:
multiple earths
• Epistemic Drives: "I love
maps, iteration, and symmetry!‖
• Misplaced concreteness: Force-fitting into
quadrants

43. SUMMARY
• Embodiment implies fallibility and indeterminism of
mystical/metaphysical ideas and claims
• Most abstract/foundational/general concepts are the most
indeterminate (epistemic distance)
• The most deeply meaning-full concepts involved highest
epistemic drives (—―ultimate concern‖)
• Honor the mysterious, sacred, mystical, enchanted — and the
need to share and make meaning from them
• With post-metaphysical, fallibilistic, self-critical approaches
• That allows integral theory and meta-theories to do
emancipatory work

45. THANKS!…
tommurray.us@gmail.com | www.tommurray.us

46. A FEW EXTRA SLIDES…

47. POST-METAPHYSICS
• Is not anti-metaphysics
• No view from nowhere (privileged perspective): reality
is not out there waiting to be seen (“misplaced
concreteness”)
• Beyond the “myth of the given:” reality is not simply as
it appears
• Perspectival: all truths/experiences come from a
perspective and are partial
• Misplaced concreteness and “map vs territory:”
abstractions are not “real” (independent of us)
• Knowledge is fallible (no absolutes)
• Knowledge is socially constructed
• Concepts and language are indeterminate
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY
2010
47

48. IDEAS AS REALITY:
STAGES OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS
• Magical thinking – imagination as reality
• Mythical thinking – stories as reality
• Conventional thinking – norms as reality
• Modern thinking – concepts/models as reality
• Post modern — deep knowing/intuition as one truth

49. POSITIVISM/CERTAINTY VS.
FALLIBILISM/INDETERMINACY
• Positivist attitude: clarity, certainty, action
• knowledge/meaning-generative; problem solving, theorizing
• Negative capability: awe, humility, curiosity
• Limits of language & knowledge & method
• Tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, unknowing
• Dealing with the above
TOM MURRAY | WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM |
AUGUST 2010
49
Espoused fallibility vs.
Stylistic (or illocutionary/enacted) fallibility

50. CALLS FOR HIGHER LEVEL THOUGHT
David Bohm: "underneath [humanity's dilemmas] there's something we don't understand about
how thought works" and that what is needed is a "very deep [and] very subtle" awareness of
thought itself.
Albert Einstein: "the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking
we were at when we created them.‖
• Cultural development as skill of understanding mind, thought, language, knowledge, belief…
=> the ―post-metaphysical turn‖
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | AUGUST
2010
50

51. SECOND TIER - GOING ―META‖
(FROM ITC-2008)
• Meta-cognition (thinking about thinking)
• Meta-knowledge (knowledge about the nature and limitations of
knowledge); META-BELIEF!
• Meta-learning (learning how to learn, also called triple-loop
learning)
• Meta-dialog (dialog about how we engage in dialog)
• Meta-decision making (making decisions about how we will go
about making decisions)
• Meta-affect (investigating the feeling of our feelings; somatic
awareness of feeling states)
• Meta-leadership (supporting leadership in others)
TOM MURRAY | WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM |
AUGUST 2010

52. DEVELOPMENT, DISEQUILIBRIUM
AND HUMILITY
 Heart/Empathy: Relationally aware -- opening to the suffering of ever wider
circles of relationship
 Mind/Cognitive: Construct aware -- foundations of certainty in knowing are
shaken
 Spirit/Self: Ego aware -- awake to the profound levels of chaos and vulnerability in
life
 External world: Systems aware – chaos: radical connectivity, unpredictability
TOM MURRAY |
WWW.PERSPEGRITY.COM | MAY 2010
52