FREE ESSAY ON STEVEN KATZ'S "LANGUAGE, EPISTEMOLOGY AND MYSTICISM"

STEVEN KATZ'S "LANGUAGE, EPISTEMOLOGY AND MYSTICISM"

In Steven T Katz's essay "Language, Epistemology and Mysticism", the "pre-experimental
conditions" he writes of are the circumstances surrounding a person who experiences a
mystical occurrence. The argument is that mystical experience is a personal event that
happens differently for any person who experiences it. If this is true, there is no
"common core" to all mystical experience. This concept brings into view a problem with
writing about or verbally communicating about mystical experience in academics. Since
mystical experience is an extreme personal event, it occurs within the morals and learned
social constructs of the person having the experience. Every human society, even if they
vary little by environment, teaches its inhabitants what to value.. Mystical experience
will vary greatly around the world, as well as in different parts of the same country.
The "pre-experimental pattern" in Katz's essay represents a person's entire life, where
they live and what ideals and values their society holds. According to Katz, the
"pre-experimental pattern" of a person's life is directly related to the kind of mystical
experience they will have. The key tensions here are that of varying life experience (up
to the point at which the mystical experience occurs) and the inability to communicate
mystical experience, since it happens within the context of many different societies and
languages.
In Mysticism: Holiness East and West, the point is stated that while studying mystical
experience, we are forming both personal and academic views. The mystical experience
itself, according to Katz is a varying personal occurrence. If we form our own 
Opinions about another's mystical experience, this raises a question of whether or not we
are actually studying the true experience of another (who has a different
pre-experimental pattern than we do), or are we re-translating their experience to fit in
the confines of what we ourselves understand personally and socially.
"We can learn a great deal from scholars, but textual studies have their limits.
Admittedly, all studies are personal, calling for acts of imagination from their readers,
humanistic studies most of all."(Carmody 21). The student of mysticism, however, in order
to understand the mystical experience of another, must re-create the exact circumstances
surrounding the person to which the experience occurred. The student must go beyond the
regular visual projection into a studied text, to the deep, personal place of another.
This is impossible, according to Katz, since none of us have had the exact same life
circumstances.
To join all mystical experience into the same category, to say everyone who has had a
mystical experience has been to the same "human" place inside themselves, is really all
we might be able to say about the subject. It is fascinating that so many thick books
have been written on the subject of mystical experience, and that in many, unless the
author takes a strict claim on his/her own opinion, the problem of variation and
communication of the experience exists. Unless we learn to communicate interculturally
without using words, we will never know the true contents of mystical experience. 
Bibliography
William James Varieties of Mystical experience