Letters to the Editor
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A Supplicant asked Buddah if he was God, and Buddah Said Yes
And then Buddah said, “You are God also. The difference between you and me is that I know it and you don’t."
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Phenomenology
Chad, apologies for my lack of clarity. It might help to draw a contrast between conventional science and an interior science: first, conventional science deals mainly with the world independently of human experience, i.e. objectively, and has a number of tools and methodologies which generate valid, reliable knowledge. Perhaps you have heard the phrase "the view from nowhere", which refers to the supposition of an idealized observer looking at the world without affecting or being affected by it.
In addition to this perspective, some have claimed that we could also uphold an interior, subjective which is "a view from somewhere". Rather than being idealized observers, instead, we all take our experiences quite personally. It's a truism that two people will observe the same objective reality and often come away with markedly divergent interpretations, but we really have no idea why. We generally shrug our shoulders when faced with this question, assuming that such knowledge is not possible, and when you think about it, this is not so different from the attitude you'd find a few millenia ago if you asked someone why it gets cold in the winter.
The truth is that we spend a good part of our life looking at this part of reality -- "What do I want to eat? What do I want to read? Who should I be friends with? What is meaningful to me?" -- and an interior science proposes that we can investigate this reality systematically, generate valid, repeatable knowledge and develop useful tools from that knowledge. There are a number of fields where this information could be very useful, e.g. politics, education, business, psychology, economics. An example of this is the medical field, where doctors understand how the body works, but have virtually no training in dealing with a heart attack victim who refuses to change his or her lifestyle. Subjectivity is highly relevant to the doctor's goal of improving the health of the patient, but our level of knowledge about the field is analogous to atmospheric science saying things like "Red sky at night, sailor's delight."
Under this view, various disciplines traditionally practiced in religious settings are actually interior technologies and methodologies designed to reveal ultimate reality about the nature of consciousness itself. One way of looking at it would be the equivalent of quantum theory for consciousness. If I walked into a room full of quantum physicists writing equations, and they told you that was ultimate physical reality, I probably wouldn't get it, but I'd realize these are very difficult concepts that take a lifetime to understand. But if my understanding of physics was very primitive -- let's say the level of 1000BC -- I definitely wouldn't go for it. In fact, I'd probably say its all bullshit. The good news is that you can learn these technologies (like meditation) and make the observations yourself and see if they hold up. I've read that it takes about 5 years of daily practice for major results to turn up.
Some final caveats: interpretation of such things as "enlightenment" is notoriously tricky, and it's a common misunderstanding to assume that it is a special experience of something in particular. In fact, even though one may (or may not) have experiences of bliss, being filled with light, being connected with all sentient beings, out of body experiences, seeing visions of religious figures, these are not really considered to be very important. In the Zen tradition, they will tell you they are illusions that you should ignore. Because it is not about becoming aware of something, but just awareness itself, it is perfectly possible to have "enlightenment" experiences and interpret it as an atheist, or a rationalist, or as a materialist, or as a religious fundamentalist, or as a new age hippie or whatever you are. There are a variety of ways people fit the experience into their understanding of the world.
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Teleological systems
are bankrupt, plain and simple.
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Mysticism and the Brain
I'm one of those Ph.D's that Wilbur mentions in this passage:
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For the final test, take scientists with a Ph.D. who are studying brain patterns and put them in a contemplative state of the supreme identity and ask them whether they think that state is real or just a brain state. Nine out of 10 will say they think it's real. They think this experience discloses a reality that's independent of the human organism.
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As several letter-writers have pointed out, Wilbur confuses feelings of transcendence that can arise from meditation/religious experiences, as well as from mind-altering substances, with primary evidence for some sort of reality. Such experiences ARE evidence for something -- the way in which the brain reacts to certain types of stimuli/contexts -- and more critically, the kinds of subjective experiences that result. As such, the study of trans-rational states of consciousness can be extremely useful in understanding brain function and the neural bases of consciousness.
Wilbur is absolutely correct that science does not, and probably cannot, get a handle on subjective experience (the "hard problem of consciousness"). One can get an intuition for this by realizing that we wouldn't know what a theory of conscious experience would even look like. It could be staring us in the face and we wouldn't know it. But just because we don't know why certain brain activity feels a certain way (or why it feels like anything at all) does not license one to invoke supernatural explanations. Doing so is an example of "intelligent design" in disguise. For example, the reality of out-of-body experiences (as in, people are not making up their experiences) is NOT evidence for some type of immaterial soul.
The fact that out-of-body experiences can be easily simulated
(e.g., http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12531-outofbody-experiences-are-all-in-the-mind.html)
make this same point. Such demonstrations should not be taken as evidence that it's "just in the head." It's just as much "in the head" as everything else we experience. Rather, scientists and non-scientists should use these types of demonstrations and experiments to construct a framework within which we can better understand both run-of-the-mill and transcendent experiences.
A concrete example may help to illustrate this point.
While under the influence of a certain substance, I have recently experienced a type of synaesthetic state in which I could (1) actually see my body move while my eyes were closed, and (2) see natural sounds and musical notes as visual forms. Were these experiences "real"? Sure, as real as anything else. But there is a much more interesting question we can ask: were my experiences unique, or would other people have similar experiences under the same circumstances? Was the mapping between sounds and shapes that I experienced systematic? Does it have anything in common with congenital synaesthesia? Is there a common neural substrate that represents proprioceptive states or motor outputs, together with vision (well, we actually know that there is, but have no idea what role it plays in regular conscious experience).
In short: we do need to take trans-rational states seriously. This can be done in a traditional scientific paradigm.