Gautama the revolutionary

Gautama the revolutionary

Gautama the revolutionary

Posted: 02 Sep 2012 07:00 AM PDT

The intellectual view of mysticism, which has most of its fan base in academia, is led by "constructivism" which assumes that the mystic's background is pivotal in the mystical experience itself.  (This almost suggests that the mystical experience can be deconstructed.)  

"Constructivism is the view that in significant ways the mystic's conceptual and linguistic scheme determines, shapes, and/or constructs his or her mystical experiences" (Robert K.C. Forman, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, p. 1).

We can surmise from this that there is an assumed correlation between the mystic's background and his mystical experience.  But there is a problem with this.  Strictly speaking, there is no actual identity between background and experience since correlation is never identity.  In fact, it could even be argued that the background, at least some portions of it, is the current the Buddha-to-be goes against when he was still a Bodhisattva.  And while it might be true for the general lot of mankind that the world they inhabit is their collective construction which, in Emerson's words, "confines the spirit," this same constructed, oppressive world is the world the mystic longs to transcend—even to put aside the desire to construct.  In plain terms, the mystic is more of a revolutionary.

Certainly, one of the great mystics, if not the greatest, was Gautama the Buddha, the awakened one.  He came from a culture that tolerated diverse religious experiences.  The Buddha's own peak experience certainly went against the worldly culture of his day; nor was his experience like those of other religionists of his day who claimed absolute knowledge.  He also drew a sharp distinction between the worldly (prithagjana) and the noble (aryan).  Only the noble person (arya-pudgala) could become awakened—never a worldly person.

What we can glean from Gautama's mysticism is that it is a first person experience that was not entirely an unsharable experience.  Secondly, it came from the belief that behind the conditioned world is an unconditioned substance that can be awakened to when the states of mind are completely transcended.  Thirdly, the world we perceive is but a projection of the unconditioned which means the things of the world are illusory, that is, there is nothing apart from the unconditioned substance which is free of suffering. 

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