Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations. By Paul Marshall

Abstract

Pp. xii, 324 , Oxford , Oxford University Press , 2005 , £55.00. This study of mystical experience examines what are called ‘extrovertive mystical experiences’. These are ‘mystical’ experiences in the sense that they display certain features commonly associated with mysticism, especially the sense of unity, knowledge and contact with reality, and ‘extrovertive’ in that they are experiences of the natural world – where the self and the natural world are perceived as one – rather than experiences of a goal beyond the world, such as the transcendent self or God (which are called the ‘introvertive’ type). The method broadly follows William James' approach in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), using accounts of putative mystical experience as the data and working to explanations using various tools from the contemporary sciences and the philosophy of mysticism. The history of mysticism within the religious traditions and theological approaches to mysticism are excluded. The structure of the book proceeds clearly from the method: three chapters are given to accounts of this kind of experience, and then ‘explanations’ follow in the remaining five chapters. An admirable range of material is set out and analysed. Marshall gives his approval to the ‘transpersonal’ explanations pioneered in the 1890s by R.M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter (with resonances in Christian theology in the work of W.R. Inge and Evelyn Underhill), and to Aldous Huxley's view that the human mind has a ‘reducing valve’ which lets in ‘Mind at Large’, connecting the individual to a cosmic noumenal realm. He provides a detailed sweep of key figures in the field such as Rudolph Otto, R.C. Zaehner, Walter Stace and Robert Forman, also usefully setting out a range of ‘reductive’ accounts, from Freud's tracing of Romain Rolland's ‘oceanic feeling’ to infant cognition, to contemporary neurophysiological explanations. This is a thorough piece of research, taking its place in the historical trajectory of experimental study from William James to Robert Forman. It offers an interesting avenue for thinking about mysticism along transpersonal lines: Marshall advocates a realist form of idealism which acknowledges existence of the external world but takes it to be mental in nature (following J.E. Mercer and Edward Carpenter), suggesting a development in a panpsychic direction, drawing on Leibniz, though this is only briefly sketched at the end. From a philosophical point of view, the book suffers from some weaknesses. The opposition of a group of scholars to this kind of approach, most significantly Wayne Proudfoot, Grace Jantzen, Nicholas Lash and Denys Turner, is mentioned only in a footnote (p. 4). For these scholars, William James was wrong to start with particular experiences and to treat them as if they were stable objects of enquiry, because experience and explanation – and the whole history of ideas bound up with experience and what we mean by ‘experience’– cannot be separated. Marshall notes that the separation of experience and explanation has been criticised widely in philosophical study over the past thirty years (p. 159), but offers no defence of his method in the light of this criticism, while cutting across diverse contexts of meaning to extract experiences which fit into the ‘extrovertive mystical’ type. For instance, he cites a Major Haswell who, on scrambling out of a trench in the Second World War, saw the flames of exploding shells but could not hear them, as he experienced a stillness punctuated only by the singing of birds (p. 71). This is all that we hear about Major Haswell: imagine how much better we would understand his experience if we knew more about him. Marshall notes at one point that locating extrovertive mystical experience within a philosophical worldview ‘seems to offer the best hope for understanding experience in general, ordinary as well as mystical’ (p. 11). Precisely. Why then does he use a method which separates the experiences from the worldviews to which they belong? This is not to side with the ‘radical contextualists’ in the current debate on mysticism, such as Steven Katz, who argue that mystical experience is actually determined by religious and contextual formation – a debate well summarised in Chapter 6 – but simply to ask for a way into these experiences which does not begin by severing them from concrete lives and contexts of meaning. The separation of experience from explanation also causes errors of classification. For instance, the key distinction between extrovertive and introvertive experiences, as concerned with the natural world and ‘beyond the world’ respectively, fails to account for the common claim among mystics to be both in radical communion with the world and beyond it, at once, in the manner of God (e.g., p. 30). To try to separate the two aspects, the immanent and the transcendent, into two separate categories of experience is to misunderstand what is being claimed about the experience, which is that both aspects are present at once. Instead of beginning with this classification, then, it would be better first to ask what the mystic means, in the context. There is too little attention to contextual meaning here. As a commentary on and contribution to the strand in the contemporary study of mysticism epitomised by William James, this is a robust and well informed study. But it sits too comfortably for this reviewer with the questionable assumptions of that approach, and in particular, with the separation of experience from explanation. The result is that, for all the claimed attention given to experience, experience seems only very partially treated.