Mystic experience and two modes of consciousness

I stumbled today on an article explaining quite well what the mystic experience is all about. What I like especially about that article is that, instead of suggesting that the mode of consciousness of the mystics is "higher" than our ordinary mode of consciousness, it simply suggests that having access to both modes is superior to having access to only one. Abstract:

"Deikman, an academic medical researcher, proposes that mystic experience is a psychological phenomenon that largely has been ignored by contemporary scientists. This situation is understandable. Scientists have waged a long battle to obtain freedom from religious control, and mystical experiences are usually described within a religious idiom. It is natural that things mystical should be suspect and categorized as part of organized religion. In addition, the content and form of some types of mystical experience seem to give clear evidence of psychopathology. For this reason, the scientist may be tempted to dismiss all such reports as some type of hysteria or madness.

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, to study the mystic experience requires participation on the part of the scientist so that he can stand outside of his customary mode of thought long enough to experience the different mode of consciousness involved in these phenomena. Such participant observation is not a part of the experimental model of contemporary science. Psychologists, in particular, have tended to model themselves after the eighteenth century physicist, who believed he could be "objective" in observing the world. He proposes that it is time to depart from this attitude, and concludes that the broad terrain of mystical phenomena contains within it lawful processes pertaining to a mode of consciousness as mature and vitally practical as the one to which we are accustomed.

Our ordinary and habitual mode of consciousness can be called the action mode, organized to manipulate the environment and featuring an acute consciousness of past and future time. Its basic reference point is the experience of a separate, personal self. In contrast, we have the capacity for a different organization -- the receptive mode -- oriented towards the present, in which the personal self as a preoccupying orientation fades away and the world tends to be experienced as more unified and satisfying. As the action mode is used for problem solving and manipulating the environment, the receptive mode is used for receiving, for providing nutrition and satisfaction.

Which mode is better? Deikman proposes that if we think in such terms, we are missing the point. His claim is that we gain nothing by restricting our functions to one mode or the other. Rather, we need the capacity to function in both modes, as may suit the occasion.

What stands in the way? Deikman points out that the first barrier is a cultural bias that tells us that "mystical states" are unreal, pathological, crazy, or regressive. Without knowing it, under the banner of the scientific method, our thinking has been constricted. He proposes that we have been indoctrinated to avoid looking closely at these realms, but that it is time to make the receptive mode, and the experience which it engenders, a legitimate option for ourselves and for science. If we do so, we will be able to see more clearly the psychodynamic barriers that limit this option: defenses aginst reliquishing conscious control, defenses against the unexpected and the unknown, defenses against the blurring and loss of boundaries defining the self. We will be able to discriminate those instances in which the pathological or regressive are indeed present, but we will not miss seeing and exploring those phenomena that are truly mature and life promoting.

Deikman speculates that our survival as a species may depend on being able to utilize our receptive-mode function so that we can experience the basis for humanitarian values. The action mode that pervades our civilization does not support selflessness; the receptive mode, ordinarily the specialty of mystics, does. From this point of view, mystics have been the guardians of a potentiality that has been ours and that it is now time for us to reclaim. We can integrate this realm with our present knowledge, making it less exotic and less alien. By doing so, we can explore and regain a functional capacity that we may now need for our very preservation. "