In this podcast episode, I speak off the cuff and informally. It would take a few days to write an article on this topic and longer to refine it for an academic journal. But in my Substack posts and podcasts, I want to speak more freely than possible when speaking in a course on mysticism at a university. It’s more fun this way and allows me more freedom of thought and expression, albeit somewhat imprecisely at times. In this edited transcript of my talk, I have attempted to straighten out some of the tangents and imprecision of a spontaneous talk but without refining away its directness and spontaneity.
Well, it’s afternoon now at the ashram and it’s a lovely sunny day in early April, which in northern Europe is a month when there can be sunshine and rain and occasionally even snow. So if you hear some sounds in the background, it’s because there are people playing with the frisbee and everyone’s really delighting and having some sun after a very long winter. I want to continue talking about the topic of Advaita Vedānta and religious experience. This is a significant issue for me, and I think for many others as well. I want to make some comparisons to clarify what I’m trying to uncover in these informal talks.
As a person who taught comparative religion for many years at the university level and who has written books on this topic and researched in this field, I would assert that comparative religion is a liberative technique in the history of human consciousness. It’s not in fashion currently in academic religious studies, although academic religious studies, as opposed to theology, was largely shaped in its origins one hundred to two hundred years ago by the comparative religionists who discovered commonalities between different religious traditions. Back then, the comparative religionists weren’t clearly distinguished from the comparative theologians, and they often had an ulterior motive in looking for comparisons. They were motivated by theological concerns. But soon there came a new stream of scholars in this field who began to distinguish between comparative theology and comparative religion. The early significant figures in the field undertook a quest to discover commonalities between religious traditions, religious doctrines, and religious experiences in order to demonstrate the underlying unity of human consciousness across different cultural divides.
One of the significant liberative insights that comes through the practice and the study of comparative religion is that religions change, doctrines change, and descriptions of experience change. Religious authorities, religious institutions, religious customs, and religious practices are diverse around the globe. Nevertheless, religions express a set of fundamental ideas, experiences, and teachings. This discovery unveils the spiritually liberative potential of comparative religion when considered as more than just an academic field. When we take a comprehensive and non-exclusivist approach to spirituality, it’s natural to become a comparative religionist. If one has fluency in more than one religious tradition, it’s natural and inevitable that one begins to see the similarities between them. If you study German and English, you can’t help but notice similarities. If you study Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, you also can’t help but notice similarities. It’s harder to discern similarities across different language families, but even there, the quest can be continued to find similarities.
There are scholars and academics who see the search for commonalities as a type of essentializing that does violence to the particularities of different traditions. No doubt a facile comparative approach can generate ahistorical essential concepts that are out of touch with the realities that they express. But generalization is essential to thought. Every concept is itself a generalization. Whenever we use the word dog or tree, we are already engaged in generalizations because all concepts are generalizations. So we inevitably use essentializing concepts. We use them constantly in everyday speech.
These reflections about comparatives studies are meant as prologue to an intriguing comparison that occurred to me earlier today when I was thinking about the last post that I recorded on Advaita Vedānta and mystical experience.
In that podcast, I spoke about four different kinds of Advaita Vedānta that I have detected. (There are others besides the four that I mentioned. Recent scholarly studies of Advaita Vedānta deal comprehensively with traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta in India and the newer, highly erudite expressions of non-mystical Advaita Vedānta. But they don’t venture into discussing more popular forms of Advaita Vedānta, such as Neo-Advaita.) These four varieties of Advaita Vedānta can be illuminated by drawing upon a parallel from Catholic mystical theology.
Catholic mystical theology is a subject that’s long fascinated me, and not for merely scholarly reasons. This fascination began in my personal spiritual quest, which was deeply shaped in my early years by an encounter with devotional Hinduism. After that, there was a deep encounter with evangelical Christianity. The bridge between those two worlds was the writings of Thomas Merton, who opened my mind to a wider spirituality. In learning to engage his writings, I was inevitably led towards other Catholic mystical theologians and the so-called manualists. The most significant of the manualists for me is a French mystical theologian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jesuit Augustin Poulain. His manual of mystical theology, The Graces of Interior Prayer, remains to this day a valuable source of knowledge about mystical experience and the ways in which it has been articulated or schematized in the Catholic mystical tradition. A decade ago, I wrote Yoga, Meditation and Mysticism, a book in which I delved deeply into Poulain’s taxonomy, or mystical map, which he structured on the basis of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross’s mystical writings. The detailed contemplative maps devised by the manualists in the Catholic tradition, a school of thought that extends from the 1700s to the early part of the twentieth century provide significant data for a comparative study of mysticism. After Vatican II, the manualist tradition seems to have slipped out of view in mainstream Catholicism, but among traditionalist Catholics and students of comparative mysticism, Poulain’s manual is still highly regarded.
In Poulain’s highly articulated map of the spiritual life, there are two fundamental distinctions that have to be kept in mind. The first is the distinction between ascetical theology and mystical theology; the second is between acquired contemplation and infused contemplation. For those of you who are more familiar with Hinduism or Buddhism, this will likely be obscure language, but to put the shoe on the other foot, someone coming from the world of Catholic mystical theology would likely find the terminology that is used in Hinduism and Buddhism as equally obscure. The obscurity does evaporate, though, with familiarity. (On a side note I’ve noticed that here in the ashram in Germany where I have spent the last four months, most people are oriented towards Hinduism and to a lesser extent Buddhism. When I teach courses comparing the stages of samādhi in the Yogasūtra, the jhānas in the Buddhist Visuddhimagga, and the degrees of mystical contemplation in the Catholic mystical tradition, some ashramites react to my sudden breaking into what sounds like very traditional Catholic language as if I were speaking a language that they have never before encountered. Or perhaps they have, but their experiences with it have not been positive. It takes a little bit of getting people acclimated to these concepts before they feel at ease with them.)
To say a few words about these two pairs of distinguishing terms, I’ll start with the fundamental division in Catholic mystical theology between ascetical theology and mystical theology. This fundamental division gave rise to two separate bodies of theological analysis in the Catholic mystical tradition. Ascetical theology is concerned, above all, with the penitential disciplinary practices that prepare one to go more deeply into the spiritual life. Mystical theology, on the other hand, is concerned with states of contemplative wisdom that are infused into the soul by God as an act of grace. The word mystical in the Catholic mystical tradition is thus a technical term with a precise meaning. Mystical contemplation is prayer that is infused into the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It’s a gracious gift that cannot be procured by any activity on the part of the recipient. At best, one can only prepare oneself for the possible reception of mystical grace. In the Catholic mystical tradition, mystical theology is concerned with the graces that come gratuitously, or freely, from God, while ascetical theology is concerned with the practices of purification that dispose us and our awareness to the subtle state of consciousness that comes as close as one can come to mystical contemplation without actually producing the states of infused mystical prayer.
On paper this sounds quite complex, and in early Christian mystical settings, these distinctions were not set out so clearly as they were later by Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and manualists such as Poulain, Adolphe Tanquerey, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and Giovanni Scaramelli. But from a phenomenological perspective this distinction is experienced as the difference between laborious ascetical prayer, which Teresa famously likened to drawing water from a well to water a garden, and the more easeful stages of mystical, contemplative prayer that she likened to using a water wheel to irrigate the garden or letting it be watered by a nearby river or rainfall.
There are multiple stages in ascetical theology, and prior to the stage where one moves from ascetical prayer to mystical prayer, potential contemplatives must purify themselves by weaning themselves from any practice or activity that clouds their consciousness. (Some readers will notice that my interpretation of Catholic mystical theology is shaped by Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities, which is a consequence of my having practiced these three traditions in light of each other for over fifty years.) As one changes one’s behavior so that one no longer engages in practices that are harmful to one’s spiritual awareness and to the rights and values of others, there comes a calmness in one’s soul, in one’s mind, that disposes one to the practice of less formal and mechanical styles of prayer. This is the level of spirituality we find in The Imitation of Christ.
In the second stage of the ascetical way, one moves beyond rote recitation of fixed verbal prayers to engage in meditation in the older sense of that word as devout reflection on the teachings and complex visualizations that have been described in detail in numerous traditional Catholic spiritual guidebooks. In mentally laborious type of discursive prayer, one might visualize various scenes from the Bible and from the Christian story of salvation in order to impress them upon one’s heart. As one meditatively reflects on these themes, one attains a sense of their meaning on a spiritual rather than a merely intellectual level. This is the level of spirituality found in the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits. This kind of prayer is called “mental prayer” to distinguish it from the recitation of fixed verbal prayers. In mental prayer one might brood over these visual and doctrinal mediations while on pilgrimage or when praying the Stations of the Cross set up on a rural hillside or in a traditional church.
As mental prayer deepens, it becomes more subtle, and the need for imagery and doctrinal rumination slowly fades. This is the crucial and often fraught moment when one moves from laborious mental prayer to what’s called “affective mental prayer,” or, more simply, “affective prayer.” In affective mental prayer, devotional sentiments intensify while theological reflections subside. Affective prayer culminates in the Prayer of Simplicity (which is also known as the Prayer of Simple Regard or the Prayer of the Heart). This is the last stage of prayer within the domain of ascetical theology.
As portrayed by Teresa and John, the transition from laborious mental prayer to the interiorly simpler stage of affective mental prayer can be an awkward and tense phase in the spiritual life of Catholic monastics and religious. They themselves or their confessors and spiritual directors may not understand the difference between mental prayer and affective prayer. They may also worry that moving into silent, quiet prayer in which the doctrines and images of the Christian faith are no longer central may lead to heresy or unfaithfulness.
Toward the end of one’s abidance in this degree of silent ascetical prayer in which most thoughts have subsided and in which the soul is deeply calm, there sometimes dawns a moment in which one becomes aware of the infusion of a gentle Presence. It’s like the first hint of spring after a long, hard winter. Teresa called it the Prayer of Quiet. The dividing line between the the ascetical Prayer of Simplicity and the mystical Prayer of Quiet is quite subtle. It is distinguished by a sense that one has been gently gripped by a Presence that one could not in any way produce on one’s own. That’s the precise dividing point between ascetical theology and mystical theology. The Prayer of Quiet is thus first stage of mystical, or contemplative, prayer.
The term contemplative, like mystical, has a precise meaning in the Catholic mystical tradition. (These two terms are taken as synonyms by Poulain and other manualists.) Contemplative prayer refers to those stages or states of prayer that are infused without any effort on our part in the soul by God through the Holy Spirit. It is a gracious gift that cannot be produced by ascetical activity. Mystical prayer thus differs from ascetical prayer in that, unlike ascetical prayer, we are unable to generate contemplative states through our own efforts.
The second distinction that I mentioned earlier is a difference between two kinds of contemplation. Numerous controversies arose as Catholic mystical theologians delved more deeply into the differences between ascetical and mystical prayer. The mystical theologians were theologians after all. Not all of them were deeply experiential mystics, but they were students of the mystical condition. So a new distinction arose after John of the Cross, which is the distinction between “acquired contemplation” and “infused contemplation.” Now, in a way, this is a misuse of the word contemplation because, strictly speaking, contemplation is a gracious gift. There’s no way that we can acquire it on our own. Why, then, did these mystical theologians devise the notion of acquired contemplation when contemplation, strictly speaking, can’t be acquired but only be received? There’s a long history behind that move, and I can’t go into it now—but perhaps in another episode.
Mystical experiences infused by grace are subtle states of spiritual exuberance, insight, joy and delight. In John of the Cross’s cataphatic writings such as The Living Flame of Love, which are quite different from the apophatic The Dark Night of the Soul and The Ascent of Mount Carmel, he describes these subtle mystical states of the soul with richly inspiring poetic exuberance. Because John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila explored these mystical states with subtle experiential insight and described them with facility and eloquence, they have been named doctors of mystical theology and prayer in the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, many subsequent Catholic mystical theologians have held that the sublime contemplative states they described and evoked are not necessary for salvation and sanctification because they are not the ordinary experiences of faithful and devout Catholic Christians. Consequently, these stages of mystical union came to be understood as extra graces, gratuitous graces, which are not necessary for salvation but are given freely to extraordinary souls or to souls who are in need of deeper consolation.
In the generations following John of the Cross, there were ardent spiritual practitioners who didn’t have mystical experiences in the strict sense of that term. They were able to experience the stillness and the quietness of the Prayer of Simplicity, and they yearned for those deep mystical experiences described by Teresa and John, but they didn’t receive them because they come unbidden; they don’t come through our asking for them. They come of their own accord. So, instead of accepting the fact that they just weren’t being graced with them, these devout meditators began to assert that what we now call the Prayer of Simplicity is equivalent to the mystical Prayer of Quiet. They claimed, rather desperately it seems, that the stillness of mind, of soul, that we acquire through ascetical practice is equivalent to the mystical states of the illumined contemplatives. They gave expression to poetic exuberance, but, in the end, according to the later ascetical writers, inner stillness in the presence of God without poetic exuberance amounts to mystical contemplation.
Those who were faithful to the traditional distinction were compelled to acknowledge this innovation, so they developed a new conceptuality that repeats on a more refined level the old division between ascetical and mystical theology. They spoke now of the difference between “acquired contemplation” and “infused contemplation.” Essentially acquired contemplation is a new name for the Prayer of Simplicity, which is the subtlest level of self-generated prayer, while the term infused contemplation now refers to John of the Cross and Teresa’s mystical states of unitive contemplation that lead ultimately to the Spiritual Marriage and the Transforming Union. The purpose of this new distinction was to keep alive the difference between ascetical prayer and mystical prayer. It repeats the older division but at a subtler level.
This discussion is a prelude to the point that I want to make as a comparativist. It can be illuminating to apply the paradigm of ascetical theology and mystical theology and acquired contemplation and infused contemplation to the four variants of Advaita Vedānta that I spoke about in my last post. The Advaita Vedānta of the Pañcadaśī may not be true to Śaṅkara’s intention as understood by some academic scholars of the Advaita Vedānta, but it is clearly a variety of Advaita Vedānta that is supported by the traditional Śaṅkāracāryas in India. As in other writings which, correctly or not, are attributed to Śaṅkara, samādhi as described in Patañjali’s Yogasūtra is synthesized with jñāna that arises through correct understanding of the Upaniṣads. In this variant of Advaita Vedānta the four concepts that underlie fundamental distinctions in mystical theology are also present, although in diverging philosophical and cultural garb. The various stages of samādhi described in the Yogasūtra are equivalent to the degrees of mystical contemplation as described by Poulain. Traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta like that expounded in the Pañcadaśī and the globally prevalent forms of Advaita Vedānta associated with Swami Sivananda and his disciples and also with Swami Vivekananda are thus similar to the full-bodied mystical path as outlined by the Catholic manualists. There is an ascetical preparation for mystical knowledge in the Yogasūtra and in the Upaniṣadic sādhana of śrāvaṇa, manana, and nididhyāsana. This implies that there is an ascetical preparation for mystical wisdom. There’s an asceticism, a tapasya, that must be undergone along with the yamas and the niyamas. These are cultivated alongside samādhi, which the commentator on the Yogasūtra identifies with yoga itself. Samādhi is divided by Patañjali into a hierarchy of increasingly subtle mystical experiences known as the varieties of saṃprajñāta-samādhi. This is allied with the devout reading of the Upaniṣads and the hearing of them from a teacher of the mahāvākyas, such as tattvamasi and so on, which can ignite through their simple hearing and devout repetition direct insight into one’s true nature as formless consciousness. (In traditional interpretations of the Yogasūtra, saṃprajñāta-samādhi is sublated by asaṃprajñāta-samādhi. Given my own philosophical and intuitive mystical knowledge, I would contend that saṃprajñāta-samādhi has an ultimately positive status as revelatory of the nature of ultimate reality, being, or Brahman. This will be a point of contention with many Advaita Vedāntins, so I don’t expect many of them to readily accept that idea. Others, though, may delight in it.)
In contrast, Neo-Advaita holds to a position reminiscent of Quietism, which long roiled the Catholic Church. What happened to the Quietists was unconscionable and indefensible, but Quietism still raises an intriguing, ticklish, and enduring theological and mystical issue. One way of viewing the Quietists is to see that to varying degrees they taught that what we now call acquired contemplation is the whole of contemplation. More radically, some Quietists claimed that there’s no need to prepare oneself at all for contemplation. All that’s needed is utter passiveness in the face of the Divine—thus the label Quietism. Contemplation is an acquired state attained by making oneself passive before the Divine—that’s the totality of the spiritual life on this approach. Despite the persecutions of various Quietists such as Miguel de Molinos, Jeanne Guyon, and François Fénelon, this spirituality of radical passivity was affirmed later by Jean-Pierre de Caussade, and it forms a part of traditional Catholic spirituality.
Viewed comparatively, Neo-Advaita similarly teaches the rejection of ascetical preliminaries to enlightenment. “Call off the search,” a leading Neo-Advaita teacher exclaimed, and argued that you don’t have to do anything at all to become enlightened because you are already enlightened. There’s nothing to be done. There’s also a denial of the significance of samādhi-type experiences, which would extend to the denial of the mystical unitive experiences of John of the Cross and Teresa. They are a distraction and a detour that has no relevance for the spiritual life. Comparatively speaking, Neo-Advaita arrives at the position that the only thing that’s required is the passivity of acquired contemplation in which you recognize yourself as enlightened and go on with life as you live it. This is equivalent to the radical surrender of some of the Quietists, although in different language. Both schools of spirituality attract the same criticism from their foes that they no longer engage traditional spiritual practices and teachings. The Quietists were often condemned as heretics and severely persecuted. (In the radical rejection of traditional practices and teachings in favor of pure passivity before the Divine, we see another intriguing comparative parallel, this time with the Lutheran stress on faith instead of works and Reformed theologies.)
We turn now to newer variants of Advaita Vedānta, both Indian and Western, which are becoming prominent today. These schools don’t deny ascetical practices. Unlike Neo-Advaita, they would accept ascetical theology, but, like Neo-Advaita and unlike other traditional forms of Advaita Vedānta, they would reject mystical theology insofar as it is concerned with extraordinary states of unitive consciousness, of blissful experiences with subtle entities, God, the Trinity, angels, and saints. They require an ascetical preparation that allows one to correctly understand the statements of the Upaniṣads but hold that verbal understanding unattended by mystical experiences is the content of enlightenment. This is similar to the acquired contemplation of the meditators who came after John of the Cross. They engaged in severe ascetical practices, but they weren’t graced with mystical experiences, so they argued that mystical experiences either don’t exist or that they are identical with a passive state of consciousness before God.
The point of this comparison is not to draw exact parallels between these traditions or to imply that the teachings of these traditions are the same. The point is to recognize that the underlying process of spiritual awakening and mystical illumination is identical across human cultures—a reality underscored by neuroscientific studies of mystics, contemplatives and yogis from diverse traditions. This is a liberative discovery because it suggests that the contours of the spiritual life are universal and that no matter where we begin in our journey, no matter what language we use, and no matter the culture that shapes us, recognizing the landmarks of the mystical journey assures us we are on the path to liberative contemplative knowledge.
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