The subject/object distinction in mystical experiencing

Abstract

For human beings, consciousness is that which determines and constitutes the content, order and form of all of our experience. It is consciousness which generates our awareness as our own. Both experience and awareness provide the ontological basis to all that is possible for us. The conscious experience that we have - our thoughts, our feelings, our being aware of our existence in the world and our behaviour- either as isolatable goings-on, or in a more general everyday sense, can be divided into the rational and the intuitive. This is a rough division only, and is meant to represent the mediating or non-mediating role which consciousness plays in our experience, in terms of the structures which consciousness imposes to constitute the experience as it is. Generally speaking, rational experience is that which is bounded and constructed by the constraints of logic and language. Rational experience provides the framework within which nearly all of our thinking and behaving is manifested. At a very basic level this is seen in the simple stimulus/response mechanism with which we are all very familiar.(For example, when we are hungry, we know that the hunger can be satisfied by eating.) At a more sophisticated level, it is manifested in the complicated mental processes we might go through in order to solve a mathematical problem…