Topic: According to W.T.Stace in “The Teaching of the Mystics”, a sceptical 
           interpretation of mystical experience is that “mystical consciousness reveals
           no reality outside its owner’s brain”.
           Does this sceptical view entail that mysticism is worthless delusion?

In this essay, we are going to try and analyse if the sceptical view of mysticism 
entails that mysticism is worthless delusion. To analyse the view we will focus on the 
following main concerns; Can experiences (of any sort) ever be worthless, Are 
mystical experiences worthless, Are mystical experiences delusions and how useful 
can delusions be anyway. We will attempt to show why mysticism is definitely not 
worthless, on the contrary, we will attempt to show why mystical experiences are one 
of the most relevant/important experience in a mystics life. 


Can an experience be worthless?

We will need to examine the concept of ‘something being worthless’ before we can 
go on to ask if experiences are worthless. We tend to define things as worthless if we 
cannot use them in some way for our betterment; that is, we define the worth of 
things by how much utility they hold for us. Now, the basic characteristic all 
experiences have in common is the fact that they change the way we look at things. 
As can be seen, the utility of the experience lies in how much it changes us towards 
what we feel as better. We can easily deduce from the above that no experience is 
worthless, only that some experiences are better than others. Later we shall try to 
show why a mystical experience is one of the most worthy types of experience anyone 
can ever have.


Are mystical experiences worthless?

Among the special qualities of mystical experiences seem to be the ability to 
transcendent the limiting factors of conditioning, contradictions, rationality, duality 
and even understanding as we commonly conceive of it. When a person returns from 
the realms of the mystical experience, the ‘visible’ qualities that he brings ‘back’ with 
him include those of great love, compassion, joy and contentment. From the social 
point of view people will view his experience as very worthy because his qualities of 
love and compassion go a long way in promoting harmony within the society. From 
his more person point of view though, the experience will be anything but worthless, 
because he will have, to a great extent, seemingly achieved what we all (including 
him) are striving for, and that is blissN1. One would have to have strange concepts of 
worthiness indeed if one is to call such experiences worthless. 


Are mystical experiences delusions?

People claim that mystical experiences are experiences of an objective realityN2. 
However as stated in the question, it is assumed that “mystical consciousness reveals 
no reality outside its owner’s brain”, we are forced to assume that mystical 
experiences are delusions because they tend to show us an objective reality whereas 
they show us no reality outside the owners brain which means that the experiences are 
completely subjective. If we were to follow this trend, we would very soon get to 
solipsism which I think is in itself based on ‘faith’; faith that what we believe of as 
the ‘model of rationality and consciousness’ is correct! However, as stated above, we 
will assume that mystical experiences are delusions as required. 



How useful can delusions be?

Let us now be ‘good sceptics’ and extend out ‘scepticism’ to entail the experience of 
time. That is, let us assume that time does not exist apart from our experience of it. 
However in terms of utility, the experience of time is one of the most useful 
experiences we have. Our whole lives revolve around our experiences of time. We are 
forever trying to learn from the past so that we may anticipate and improve our 
future. We can see clearly that even if time does not exist apart from our experience 
of it, it cannot be said to be worthless. Similarly, mystical experiences have just as 
strong a foundation (as time in someone mind) and cannot be said to be worthless. 

Similarly we can draw an analogy of material/physical substances. Let us take from 
example a person who believes that material/physical things do not exist. Let us also 
assume that once upon a time, this person was hit by a car and that caused him much 
pain. Now, of course, he will believe that it all just happened in his consciousness, 
including his experience of the pain. Yet if he were about to be hit by a car again he 
would probably jump out of the way, not because there exists something 
material/physical in reality called a car, but because he has the experience of 
something physical (be it only within his ‘mind’), and he does not with to feel ‘pain’ 
again. Similarly, once again, we can see how a person who has had a mystical 
experience is likely to treat it as real and conduct his life accordingly.



As can be seen, even if we make the rash assumption that mystical experiences are 
delusions, we can still see that they are definitely not worthless. Empirical 
observation also tend to show great change in the lives of people who had mystical 
experiences, eg. Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Muhammad and various other sages 
of the past and present times.




Notes

N1 On the very superficial level bliss might be interpreted as just happiness.

N2 The mystic would probably not say that mystical experiences show us objective 
realities, they would rather say that the conditioning’s of objectivity and subjectivity 
disappear to form a unity; however since this essay is based upon the readings by 
W.T.Stace, and since he claims that “We may believe that a mystic really is in touch, 
as he usually claims, with some being greater than himself, some spiritual Infinite 
which transcends the temporal flux of things.”B1, it tends to suggest that mystical 
experiences show us the existence of a reality other than ourselves, and hence we are 
forced to assume that mystical experience show us an objective reality for the 
purposes of this essay. 

B1 Klemke, E. D. To Believe or Not to Believe (Orlando, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), p.80.