I am not even an amateur on mysticism, but I doubt the “shared maps” hypothesis. What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps. Another hypothesis I advance is that mystics generally speak with vague terms. I.e., they share very rough templates of their maps that can then be retrofitted to many a different map. Mystics who seek other disciplines out also have an incentive to make themselves seem united and similar. (My propaganda Islamic textbooks often labor on how all religions are essentially the same and Islam is their latest version in a linear space.) It might even be that the process of extracting those vague templates from their maps somehow produces similar templates. Their maps almost certainly share several constraints of medium making them more similar, like the constraint of human appeal and allowing hierarchical growth (so that the novice can always “aspire” to the master’s level.).
What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps.
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.
I am not even an amateur on mysticism, but I doubt the “shared maps” hypothesis. What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps. Another hypothesis I advance is that mystics generally speak with vague terms. I.e., they share very rough templates of their maps that can then be retrofitted to many a different map. Mystics who seek other disciplines out also have an incentive to make themselves seem united and similar. (My propaganda Islamic textbooks often labor on how all religions are essentially the same and Islam is their latest version in a linear space.) It might even be that the process of extracting those vague templates from their maps somehow produces similar templates. Their maps almost certainly share several constraints of medium making them more similar, like the constraint of human appeal and allowing hierarchical growth (so that the novice can always “aspire” to the master’s level.).
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.