An Analogy and Apology for Mysticism

Let us imagine that a thoroughly modern man is transported many centuries back in time. 

Perhaps this was achieved by some bit of technological wizardry still in our future – by a time machine, for instance. His miraculous arrival into the ancient metropolis is witnessed by many and he is shuffled between one curious hand and another until he arrives at court – royal court or legal court, you decide. He must give an account of his mysterious apparition and his general air of mystery. 

He tells his story as honestly as he is able, but not a single word of it is believed. Quite apart from his means of transportation through time which we ourselves would find incredulous if we were not suspending disbelief, almost all the mundane facts of his world are unbelievable to this ancient court. Not even such things as we now take for granted sound plausible to them. An object small enough to fit in one palm with which you could speak to almost any one no matter how distant they are, as long as your would-be interlocutor had a similar object in their hands? How far-fetched. An object much larger than a house hewn almost entirely of metal and as heavy as the chapel building which can soar through the air and cover the distance of a month’s journey before sunrise had become sunset of the same day? How imaginative. We find their incredulity quaint, but they are being very serious. These claims, from where they stand in time, are incredible! One must provide substantial evidence for them. 

Could the man perhaps build the speaking device to prove his case? If he is your average individual – and indeed even if he is a very extraordinary one – he cannot. Not only do most people only just use phones, not knowing how they work, let alone how to build one, but even if our man did know how to build a phone, the components required for one depend on an infrastructure which would be virtually impossible to produce in a world which had not toiled, beforehand, for centuries, one small invention, one small industry, at a time to establish it. He needs microprocessors, and for that he needs rare earths, and for that he needs the know-how and tools and techniques for identifying and mining them, et cetera. Even if he decided to give the whole thing a go, the demands he would make of his ancient hosts would seem so gargantuan and incomprehensible as to sound as though he were trying to finagle or cheat his way out of demonstrating his claim. Our thoroughly modern man would be in a bind: he knows his claims are true but he is faced with a people who find it incredulous and to whom a demonstration presupposes so much that it seems essentially impossible. 

The Mystic and his religious defenders are in a similar position. The mystic’s claims are extraordinary indeed (and just as there are today many pretenders to time travel, there are bound to be many pretenders to his kind of claims) and the demonstration of them presuppose much. They presuppose much because, on the one hand, the first of the two kinds of his claims – of mystical experience – require first hand experience which comes only after a lot of spiritual discipline; and to ask the inquirer to undertake such discipline is the equivalent of asking the ancients to invest in the centuries long project of developing the science and technology it would take to build the components of the miraculous talking device. The whole business sounds like he’s taking us for a ride, trying to get out of putting his money where his mouth is. And they presuppose much, on the other hand, because  the other kind of claims he makes – regarding miracles – are not demonstrable at will. No one simply performs miracles on a whim: this is a point that, of all scriptures, the Quran addresses best (Surah Ibrahim, Verse 11). 

The mystic might perhaps say, “If you stick by me day and night long enough you might witness one of these spontaneous disruptions of natural law.” That also seems like asking for all the investment upfront – it smells fishy – and asking for a Herculean commitment, just as in the previous case. Like the thoroughly modern time traveller, the mystic finds himself in a curious epistemic position: there is an entire world of experience beyond the vision of his interlocutors which would justify his claims, but because of the nature of his case he’s cut off from showing them that domain of experience unless they are willing to make a hefty investment – and indeed a hefty gamble since they might even die before all the pieces are in place. There are some philosophers who might, as they say, bite the bullet on this case and insist that even though we know (or “believe we know,” they might say) that the time traveller is “in a manner of speaking” telling the truth, he cannot claim truth since he can’t demonstrate his case. So be it. These philosophers are in a schizophrenic situation about the nature of truth. We need not follow them into their madness. There are other philosophers who might say, “Well, this case rests on an implausible thought-experiment. Time travel isn’t possible so the case is not convincing as a parallel.” 

Well, if one does not like time travel, one may simply suppose a thoroughly modern man has been shipwrecked on a remarkably isolated island in God-knows-where in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and he finds some natives who have never had outside contact and he has learned to communicate with them. It all comes to the same.

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