THE ENLIGHTENED PROFESSOR

by John Horgan

In the fall of 1981, when I was in my senior year at Columbia, I took a class called "Mysticism." It was in this class that I was first exposed to the book Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, an attack on the perennial philosophy edited by the philosopher Steven Katz [who is profiled in Chapter Two of Rational Mysticism].

Also in that class was Robert Forman, then a graduate student in religion and a veteran practitioner of Transcendental Meditation. Forman had a much stronger reaction to Katz’s no-pure-unmediated-experiences argument than I did, since it contradicted Forman’s own understanding of his meditative experiences.

So appalled was Forman by Katz’s thesis that he dedicated his career to combating it. He obtained a doctorate from Columbia and became a professor of religion at Hunter College. From this base of operations, he launched counterattacks on Katz. Forman’s first and still most influential book is The Problem of Pure Consciousness, a collection of essays published in 1990; Forman edited the book and contributed two essays.

In defense of perennialism, Forman offers a highly restrictive definition of mystical experience. He excludes experiences with any specific sensory content, and particularly those showing clear signs of cultural contamination, such as visions of angels, Allah, Christ, or Buddha.

Forman focuses on mystical experiences utterly devoid of object, subject, or even emotion. This is the state that the Hindu sage Shankara calls "unconsciousness" and that Meister Eckhart describes as "forgetting." Forman claims to have first-hand knowledge of this extraordinary "pure consciousness event." The event occurred in 1972, while he was on a retreat. "I had been meditating alone in my room all morning," Forman writes,

"when someone knocked on my door. I heard the knock perfectly clearly, and upon hearing it I knew that, although there was no "waking up" before hearing the knock, for some indeterminate length of time prior to the knocking I had not been aware of anything in particular. I had been awake but with no content for my consciousness. Had no one knocked I doubt that I would ever have become aware that I had not been thinking or perceiving. The experience was so unremarkable, as it was utterly without content, that I simply would have begun at some point to recommence thinking and probably would never have taken note of my conscious persistence devoid of mental content."

This passage baffled me when I first read it. Can this be the goal of spiritual seeking? To experience not heaven, hell, or visions but literally nothing? And if you really experience nothing, how can you remember the experience? How do you emerge from this state of oblivion back into ordinary consciousness? How does an experience of nothing support the perennial philosophy, or any belief, for that matter? How can it promote a spiritual life?

Even one of Forman’s presumably sympathetic co-authors voices puzzlement in The Problem of Pure Consciousness over Forman’s description of his experience. "There seem to be certain logical problems with such an account," Paul Griffiths of the University of Notre Dame muses. How does a pure consciousness event, Griffiths asks, differ from ordinary unconsciousness, dreamless sleep, or even death?

Forman and I never met in 1981. We did not realize that we had both taken the same class at Columbia until almost 20 years later, when I called him to ask for an interview and we traded a few facts on each other’s background. Forman, it turned out, lives in a town on the Hudson River not far from my own. On a warm day in early spring, I picked him up at his home, and we drove to a nearby restaurant for lunch.

Forman has a ruddy complexion, thinning hair, and a scruffy, reddish-brown beard. As I drove, he eyed me suspiciously and said, "A friend of mine warned me that I shouldn’t talk to people like you." His friend’s advice is sound, I replied; journalists are not to be trusted.

Forman laughed and seemed to relax (which of course was my insidious intent). Nevertheless, he would not allow me to turn on my tape recorder or ask him any questions until he had grilled me about my intentions. His interrogation continued even after we had been seated in the restaurant, which was packed and clamorous.

As I explained my book project to him, Forman compulsively completed my sentences. I said that when I first heard about enlightenment, my impression was that it changes your entire personality; you are transformed into... "A saint," Forman said. Yes, I continued. But now I suspected that you can have very deep mystical awareness and still be... "An asshole," Forman said. "So that's what you want to think about?" he continued, scrutinizing me. "You want to think about whether enlightenment is really all that cool?"

Forman’s edginess lingered even after he began telling me about himself. Especially when instructing me on fine points of Hinduism or other mystical doctrines, he spoke with an ironic inflection, mocking his own pretensions. His fascination with mysticism and enlightenment dated back to the late 1960’s, when he was an undergraduate studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. He became deeply depressed. He tried psychotherapy and Zen, but nothing really helped until he started practicing Transcendental Meditation in 1969. Introduced to the west by the Indian sage Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Meditation involves sitting with eyes closed while repeating a nonsensical phrase, or mantra.

"It was magic, hugely effective," Forman said of TM. Over the next decade, he became involved in the TM organization. "I hung out with Maharishi a fair amount." He distanced himself from the TM movement after it began offering seminars on occult practices, notably levitation. "I did that technique," Forman said. "It was an interesting experience, but it sure as hell wasn't levitating."

The Maharishi also proposed that the brain waves emitted by large groups of meditators could reduce crime rates and even warfare. "I thought it was silly," Forman said, "and I didn't want to be identified with it."

But Forman still firmly believes in the metaphysics propounded by Maharishi, which holds that through meditation we can gain access to realms of consciousness and being that transcend time and space, culture, and individual identity. That was why Forman was so annoyed by Katz’s condescending treatment of this metaphysical proposition, which is also a tenet of the perennial philosophy.

"He was so insulting at so many levels," Forman said of Katz. But Forman was grateful to Katz as well, for providing him with a focus for his academic efforts. "I got tenure because Steven Katz was such a jerk."

Forman charged that Katz, in spite of his denials, is trying to preserve the distinctive character of his own religion, Judaism. "The upshot of his argument," Forman said, "is that there's something special about Judaism, and to analyze Judaism as if it's just another perennial philosophy, or just doing mysticism like everybody else, kind of undercuts the authentic idiosyncracy of Judaism."

Forman granted that the enormous variety of mystical experiences—and particularly visions of Buddha, Christ, Allah, which obviously reflect the visionary’s cultural milieu--support Katz’s perspective. The question is whether certain mystical experiences transcend all cultural influences. Mystics from many different traditions, including Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Judaism, have described experiences that are devoid of all content; these are what Forman calls pure consciousness events and what other scholars have called introvertive mystical experiences.

"If you say all crows are black, all it takes is one fucking white crow and you've blown the thesis," Forman said. "We got a whole range of these white crows!"

Forman noted that if he and I each were asked to describe the restaurant in which we were eating, our descriptions would almost certainly diverge. But that would not mean that we were not seeing the same restaurant. Meister Eckhart, the Hindu swami Shankara, and the Zen master Dogen all described their pure consciousness events in slightly different ways, too, but that did not mean that their experiences were not convergent on some deeper level.

Our conversation then took an unexpected turn. I said I was mystified by the notion that enlightenment is nothing more than a "pure consciousness event." After all, other mystics...

"That's not enlightenment!" Forman interrupted. "I couldn't be clearer about that, and yet everybody makes that mistake. Over and over again I say, ‘This is not all there is. This is not enlightenment.’ Whaddaya gonna do?"

He stared at me, and when he continued he spoke in clipped, precise tones, as if trying to physically embed his words in my brain. The pure consciousness event is just a transient mystical experience, a stepping stone, at best, to true enlightenment. Pure consciousness events and other mystical states are "fascinating, interesting, very cool things. But they are shifts in perception, not shifts in the structure of perception. And that's, I think, when things get very interesting, when structural shifts take place."

Forman held up his water glass. Normally, he said, when you look at an object like this glass, you sense a distinction between the object and yourself. He set the glass down, grabbed my pen from my hand, and scribbled on his napkin. He sketched the glass, complete with ice cubes and lemon, and an eyeball staring at the glass. During a "pure consciousness event," the object vanishes and only consciousness remains, Forman said, drawing an X through the glass.

There is a higher state of awareness, however, in which consciousness becomes its own subject and object. "It becomes aware of itself. And there is a kind of, not solipsism exactly, but a reflexivity to consciousness."

Bending over his napkin again, Forman drew an arrow that emerged from the eyeball and curled back toward it. "It's like there is a self-awareness in a new sort of way."

Our Caesar salads arrived. As the waiter grated parmesan cheese over our bowls, Forman told me about the final state of enlightenment, which he called the "unitive mystical state." In this state, your awareness enfolds not just your individual consciousness but all of inner and outer reality.

"What you are, and what the world is, is now somehow a unit, unified." Forman drew a circle around the eyeball and the glass. As far as I could tell, Forman was describing the same state that Ken Wilber calls nondual awareness.

Are there any levels beyond this one? I asked, pointing to the circle. "I don’t know," Forman answered, looking genuinely perplexed. "I haven't read about it, if there is. Some people want to say that there are, beyond here, experiences. But I'm not convinced of that."

So are you enlightened? I asked. "As I understand it, yes," Forman replied without hesitating; he had obviously been expecting the question. He scrutinized me, looking for a reaction. "See, that's tricky. I just gave you a pretty tricky answer. Because I define this stuff pretty narrowly." He might not be enlightened according to others’ definitions, but according to his definition he reached that state in 1995.

Like Ken Wilber, Forman hastened to disabuse me of various myths about enlightenment. When he started meditating in the late 1960’s, he believed that enlightenment "was all going to be fun and games." He emitted a mock-ecstatic cry and waved his hands in the air. "Just heaven," he added, snapping his fingers, "like that." But enlightenment does not make you permanently happy, let alone ecstatic. Instead, it is a state that incorporates all human emotions and qualities: love and hate, desire and fear, wisdom and ignorance. "The ability to hold opposites, emotional opposites, at the same time is really what we're after."

Although enlightenment is profoundly satisfying and transforming on one level, the mind remains in many respects unchanged. "You're still neurotic, and you still hate your mother, or you want to get laid, or whatever the thing is. It's the same stuff; it doesn't shift that. But there is a sort of deep"--he raised his hands, as if gripping an invisible basketball, and uttered a growly, guttural grunt—"that didn't used to be there."

Far from fostering humility and ego-death, Forman added, mystical experiences can lead to narcissism. Enlightenment is "the biggest power trip you can imagine" and an "aphrodisiac." When you have a profound mystical revelation, "you think you're God! And that is going to have a hell of an effect on people. Second thing, all those cute little nubile yoga teachers, all the little young ladies, run around and say, ‘He's enlightened! He's God! Fuck me!’"

Have you struggled with that problem yourself? I asked.

"Sure!" Forman responded. When he first began having mystical experiences in 1971, he was on top of the world. "And after a while they sort of fall away, and you realize you're the same jerk you were all along; you just have different insights." Forman resumed psychotherapy in 1983 to deal with some of his personal problems. "It was the best thing I ever did. Been in it ever since." (What would it be like, I wondered, to be the therapist for someone who believes he is enlightened?)

Enlightenment cannot provide answers to scientific riddles such as the origin or ultimate fate of the universe, or conscious life, Forman said. When I asked if he intuits a divine intelligence underlying reality, he shook his head. "No, no." Then he reconsidered. He sees ultimate reality as timeless, featureless, planless, Godless, and yet he occasionally feels that he and all of us are part of a larger plan. "I have a sense that things are moving in a certain direction, well beyond anybody's real control." Maybe, he said, just as electrons can be described as waves and particles, so ultimate reality might be timeless and aimless—and also have some directionality and purpose.

Evidently dissatisfied with his defense of enlightenment—or sensing that I was dissatisfied with it--Forman tried again. He has an increased ability to concentrate since he became enlightened, he assured me, and a greater intuitive sense about people. "I can say this without hesitation: I would rather have these experiences than not," he said. "It's not nothing."

What impressed me most about Forman was that he somehow managed to be likeably unpretentious, even humble, while claiming to be--according to his "narrow" definition--enlightened. He’s no saint or sage, just a normal guy who happens to have achieved permanent mystical awareness.

But enlightened or not, Forman could at best achieve a Phyrric victory with his defense of perennialism. In his zeal to counter Katz’s no-unmediated-experiences argument, Forman defines mystical experiences as white crows, pure awareness, devoid not only of cultural content but of any content at all. This definition excludes the visions of Moses, Jesus, Allah, Joan of Arc, Sister Teresa. It eliminates Huston Smith’s vision of a loving God. It even eliminates Forman’s own enlightenment, which, far from being devoid of cultural content, reflects the Hindu metaphysics upon which Transcendental Meditation is based.

In his desperation to prove that pure consciousness events are universally true, Forman tries another dubious gambit. He argues that because these experiences occur to people in many different cultures, they must stem from an innate biological capacity. The implication is that if these experiences have a biological basis, they are natural, true, good, like organic food.

There are a couple of problems with this position. Schizophrenia is also at least partially an innate, inherited trait, but no one would argue on that basis that schizophrenics’ delusions are true. In fact, atheists have often argued that the commonality of mystical experiences reflects not their absolute truth but their common biological origin.

I was still mulling all this over when, not long after my meeting with Forman, I went running in the woods behind my house. After I arrived huffing and puffing at the top of a hill, I flopped down on a patch of moss to catch my breath. Looking up through a lacery of branches at the sky, I thought again about Forman’s pure consciousness event, mystical experience as anti-experience.

I was flat on my back, ruminating over these matters, when a shadow intruded on my field of vision. A vulture, wingtips splayed, glided noiselessly toward me. As it passed directly over me, perhaps 20 feet away, it cocked its wizened head and eyed me. "Go away!" I shouted. "I’m not dead yet!"

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