ceives quite disparate unpacking in different streams of Buddhism. It's plausible to
conclude that distinct experiences were responsible, at least in part, for these differences.
On the one hand, talk about mystical experiences “the same” across all mystical traditions
should be taken with a tablespoon of salt, if scholars claim to have discovered them
solely from isolated descriptions of experiences. It is difficult to assess the nature of an
experience without attending to how it “radiates” out into the structure of the local
mystical theory and life of which it is a part (see Idel 1997). Nevertheless, it does seem
possible to generalize about experiences “similar enough” to be philosophically
interesting.
8. On the Possibility of Experiencing a Mystical Reality
In a position related to constructivism, William Forgie (1984, 1994) has argued that there
could not be an experience “of God,” if we understand experience “of X” to mean that it
is phenomenologically given that the experience is of X. Forgie argues that
phenomenological content can consist of general features only, and not features
specifically identifying God as the object of experience. He compares this to your seeing
one of two identical twins. Which one of the two you are perceiving cannot be a
phenomenological given. Likewise, perhaps you can have an experience consisting of
various phenomenological qualities, but that you experience God in particular cannot be a
phenomenological datum. Subjects must surmise that they experience God. Forgie's type
of argument applies as well to objects of mystical and religious experiences other than
God. Nelson Pike argues, against Forgie, that the individuation of an object can be a
component of the phenomenological content of an experience, drawing on examples from
sense perception (1992, ch. 7).
Forgie assumes that the phenomenological content of a theistic experience must be
confined to data akin to the “sense data” of sensory experience, somehow analogous to
colors, shapes, movement, sounds, tastes, and the like. Individuation is absent from
phenomenological content of that sort. Pike, for his part, teases out alleged
phenomenological content for individuating God from analogies to ordinary sense
perception. Both philosophers restrict experiences of God to phenomenal content
somehow analogous to sense perception. This might be a mistake. Consider, for example,
that God could appear to a person mystically, and at the same time transmit, telepathy-
like, the thought that this is God appearing.
end p.152
Imagine further that this thought had the flavor of being conveyed to one from the
outside, rather than as originating in the subject. The thought that “This is God
appearing” would be part of the phenomenological content of the subject's present
(complex) experience (though not part of the mystical mode of the experience as defined
in section 1.1), and yet not the product of an interpretation by the subject. Indeed, reports