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Mystical Experiences And The Search For Human Spiritual Connection, Philip Novak

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"...Mystical experiences can come and go, it seems, without altering the fundamental habit patterns and tendencies that vector our behavior. It is precisely this that separates mystical experience from the wider, deeper process of enlightenment. Enlightenment necessarily involves a lasting transformation of character (character is my shorthand for deep structural determinants of consciousness), while mystical experience does not. Enlightenment is an irreducibly moral notion and is, existentially speaking, inversely proportional to stinkerism. At least this is so for Buddhism, the tradition to which we owe, more than to any other, the very notion of enlightenment, and the tradition on …