New lamps for old: psychology and the thirteenth-century flowering

of mysticism

Brian L. Lancaster

In his masterly study of Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Henry
Corbin writes of the ‘extraordinary role of the Image in the spirituality of Ibn Arabi’.1
‘No less extraordinary,’ he continues, ‘is the fact that this spirituality is most often
ignored or passed over in silence by the phenomenology of mysticism.’ Corbin’s
concern was that the scholarly study of mysticism privileged those states in which
union with an infinite Being was emphasised over forms of cognitive mysticism,2 in
which the quest for knowledge is paramount. In the fifty years since Corbin made
these comments, we have witnessed something of a polarisation between those who,
like Corbin, emphasise the cognitive processes of mind engaged in mystical states,
and those arguing that the highest mystical states are beyond meaningful cognitive
analysis. This polarisation of thought is critical for the psychological understanding of
mysticism, for it provides a backdrop to the question of where the limits of
psychological inquiry may lie.

Ibn Arabi was in the early wave of an influential flowering of mysticism in Islam,
Judaism, and Christianity between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries. A
distinctive feature of this flowering was the attempt to interpret transcendent
experience within the context of the schools of philosophical thought prevailing in the
mediaeval period. Thus the major mystical authors of the time, including Ibn Arabi,
the Jewish mystic Abulafia, and the Christian Meister Eckhart, wrote copiously about
imagination and intellect, drawing primarily on the Aristotelian meaning of these
terms as transmitted via Avicenna, Maimonides and Aquinas. In my opinion, it is this
philosophical emphasis, giving rise to what has been termed intellectual mysticism,
which makes these authors of particular interest for Psychology. It raises the question
of the extent to which the categories of explanation available to Psychology in our day
may supersede the Aristotelian categories in meeting the same challenge of placing
mystical experience in a coherent framework of understanding.

To examine this question I will focus on Abulafia’s path of mysticism. Where the
‘image’ was central to the thought of Ibn Arabi, and the ‘logos’ for Eckhart, it is the
‘Name of God’ which is paramount for Abulafia. Abulafia developed a distinctive,
and anomian, approach to the Hebrew language mysticism which is central to
Judaism.

Fundamental to Hebrew language mysticism is the Sefer Yetzirah (‘Book of

Formation’), a short, cryptic exposition, dating from around the fourth century CE, on
the significance of the Hebrew letters and on the ways in which God used them in His

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 Lancaster: New Lamps for Old

work of creation. According to this text, all features in creation derive from differing
permutations of the 22 Hebrew letters. In the words of the Sefer Yetzirah:
22 Foundation letters; He engraved them, He carved them, He weighed them,
He transformed them, He permuted them, and with them He formed all
formation and all future formation…. He placed them in a wheel like a wall
with 231 gates.3 The wheel revolves back and forth…. How? He permuted
them, weighed them and transformed them, alef with them all and all of them
with alef; bet with all of them and all of them with bet. They repeat in a
cycle and are found in 231 gates. As a result, all that is formed and all that is
spoken emerges from one Name.4
In passing, it is worth noting the similarities between this view of a permuted code
underlying manifest forms in creation and our current conception of the permutations
of the bases in DNA determining manifest biological forms. In fact, a major theme
within the more magical traditions stemming from the Sefer Yetzirah involved the
creation of a ‘biological’ creature—the golem.5 Without wishing to digress for too
long from my major theme, it is worth briefly reflecting on the extent to which major
areas of contemporary culture and technology may be seen to derive in a broadly
historical sense from the same three key dynamics on which the Sefer Yetzirah
focuses, namely computation, transformation and hermeneutics. These lines of
derivation are illustrated in figure 1.6

Figure 1. Language mysticism:  School of Natural Sciences

& Psychology

historical developments

Ramon Lull Blaise Pascal  Leibnitz

(1234‐1315) (1623‐1662) (1646‐1716) computer
science
computation

Sefer 
outer
mechanical 
letter wheels
arithmetical 
calculator
reasoning 
machine/calculus { AI
Yetsirah transformation culture/   
Golem      Frankenstein’s creature etc. fantasy
4th Century 
CE?
inner
Abraham Abulafia Sigmund  Freud
{ TP
hermeneutics
(1240‐1291) (1856‐1939) analysis
path of the  primary process/ free  /therapy
Names/prophecy association

Artificial 
AI =
intelligence
“22 foundation letters. He placed them in a wheel, like a wall with 231 
gates. The wheel  revolves forwards and backwards…. How? He  Transpersonal    
permuted them, weighed them, and transformed them .…”  TP =
Psychology
Sefer Yetsirah

2
The science of letter combination lies at the heart of Abulafia’s method. In brief, the
mystic was enjoined to detach from all other activity of the mind and concentrate on
the letters—breaking words down into the individual letter elements; visualising,
chanting, and writing individual letter permutations; and recombining letters together
with those of God’s Names. Chanting was accompanied by a regime of breath control
and prescribed head movements. Semantics would be transcended since ultimately it
was the unintelligibility of the combinations which became emphasised. The subtlety
and complexity of the technique, which are amongst its defining features, can hardly
be conveyed through brief extracts, and I should emphasise that my intention here is
only to lay sufficient groundwork for my later analysis.

Preliminaries to the letter ‘working’ included fasting, isolation, lighting candles,

wearing ritual clothing, and chanting scriptures. Then, in Abulafia’s words to his
pupils,
…begin to combine small letters with great ones, to reverse them and to
permute them rapidly, until your heart shall be warmed through their
combinations and rejoice in their movements and in what you bring about
through their permutations; and when you feel thusly that your heart is
already greatly heated through the combinations ... then you are ready to
receive the emanated influx.7
The immediate intention here is,
To purify the language in the crucible of wisdom and the furnace of
understanding and by the probity of knowledge to have the languages
revolve until they revert to their prime-material state. Then it will be possible
to invent through their agency wondrous inventions.8
As Idel notes, such reversion to the ‘prime-material state’ represents,
An attempt to transcend [language] by deconstructing language as a
communicative instrument, into meaningless combinations of letters which,
following strictly mathematical rules, would lead the mystic beyond the
normal state of consciousness.9
Later I will revisit this point about the deconstruction of language, since it is central
to my arguments concerning psychological features in Abulafia’s mysticism. For now,
we need to elaborate such notions of deconstruction with a recognition of the intense
and disciplined linguistic play undertaken by mystics of the Abulafian school. Some
idea of the complexity of the linguistic operations entailed may be gleaned from a
mystical manual of the techniques written by Yehudah Albotini in Jerusalem some
two centuries after Abulafia’s death. Each of the key terms in the following extract
refers to specific and detailed means for establishing relationships among letters and
words:
The Way … includes [the secret skills] of “gematria” [substitution of letters
based on numerical equivalence], “permuting,” of “transformation of letters,”
of their “division,” their “separation,” their “combination,” their “balancing,”
their “exchange,” and their “substitution.” In addition to all these Ways,

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[there is] “leaping and jumping”—that is, the use of initial letters to form
other words, of the [use of] letters from the middle or the end of words, or by
combining the initial letters to the medial or the final ones. And with all
these Ways [of working the letters], one “leaps and jumps” from one Way to
another Way with the help of a newly-created word or with the help of the
letters which have been mixed together from the beginning, the end, or the
middle of their words.10

To exemplify Abulafia’s linguistic gymnastics I will cite just one example which
additionally introduces a further dimension, namely that of the embodiment of
language and letters:
think in your heart the name of [a] thing, and if it is [composed] of two
letters, such as yam [sea], and you wish to invert it, and the name of the
reversal is yabasah [dry land], the companion of yam with yabasah, and this
is “beginning and end, yah.” But the middle is me-yabes yam; behold, Yah
meyabes yam (God makes dry the sea), for He in truth makes the sea into dry
land. And pronounce in this image whatever you remember, and thus you
will first say heh, in the middle of your head, and draw it within your head as
if you were contemplating and see the center of your brain, and its central
point in your thoughts, and envision the letter heh inscribed above it, which
guards the existence of the points of your brain.11

Whilst all this is highly distinctive, we nevertheless find significant parallels with Ibn
Arabi and Eckhart regarding the goal to which Abulafia directed his techniques, his
path of prophetic Kabbalah, as he called it:
The [place of the] beginning of the real prophecy is the inner intellectual
faculty which is created in the heart … by the 22 sacred letters …, and by the
[Active Intellect], which is divine, religious and prophetic…. [The emanation
resulting from this work of letter combinations will rise from faculty to
faculty until it reaches] the [Active Intellect] and will unite with it after many
hard, strong and mighty exercises, until the particular and personal prophetic
[faculty] will turn universal, permanent, and everlasting like the essence of
its cause, and he and He [i.e., the mystic and God] will become one entity.12

Abulafia understood his ecstatic experiences, as well as the whole psychology of the
linguistic methodology itself, within the broad context of Maimonides’ re-working of
Aristotle. The field of prophetic encounter is the Active Intellect, generally
understood in Islamic and Jewish tradition as the final celestial intelligence emanated
from God. The human intellect is an overflow from the Active Intellect. During the
mystical/prophetic experience the lower, human intellect is united with the Active
Intellect; in classical terms, knowledge, the knower and the known become one.
Similarly for Eckhart, ‘The contemplative state, constituted as it is in Divine
Knowledge, is a realization of “the Knower as subject and the Known as object and
Knowledge itself as the relation.”’13

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For Abulafia, just as for Eckhart, the encounter with the Active Intellect is of
messianic significance. Abulafia explicitly identifies the Active Intellect with the
Messiah,14 a formulation directly comparable to Eckhart’s insistence that, ‘The Father
begets his Son … in the ground of the intellect, and this is the innermost world.’15 As
Idel points out, the motif of the birth of the son is found in diverse mystical traditions
and depicts the spiritual transformation of the mystic himself: ‘the appearance of the
intellective element is seen as a new birth, which transforms the mystic into a son of
the divine.’16 Both Abulafia and Eckhart see the encounter with the son as the
vehicle for experiencing union with the divine being. For Abulafia, as we saw,
realisation of the Active Intellect, elsewhere equated with the birth of the son, leads to
‘he [the mystic] and He [God]’ becoming one entity. For Eckhart, ‘… not only does
He beget me as His Son, but He begets me as Himself, and Himself as me, and me as
His being and His nature.’17

A distinctive feature of all branches of mysticism, strongly represented in these

mediaeval mystics, is detachment both from ‘I’ and from the objects of sense
perception. In Abulafia’ words,
…you shall die from this world and live in the World to Come, which is the
source of life dispersed amongst the living; and that is the intellect, which is
the source of all wisdom, understanding and knowledge …. And when your
mind comes to cleave to His mind, which gives you knowledge, your mind
must remove from itself the yoke of all the alien ideas, apart from His idea
which connects you and Him, by His honored and awesome Name.18
Using one of Abulafia’s metaphors, the ‘knots’ that bind us to phenomena in the
natural world must be untied and attached instead to the Active Intellect. The
linguistic practice is central to these changes, firstly by deconstructing words
associated with the mundane world and, secondly, by continually connecting letters
back into the Name of God. Abulafia’s technique focused on the letters of various
divine Names, which became instrumental in both the purification of the mystic and
his cleaving to God: ‘In the thoughts of your mind combine and be purified.’19

As I remarked at the beginning of my paper, a psychological understanding of these

forms of mysticism needs to address their intellectual elements. To put the point more
strongly, we seriously misrepresent an Abulafia or an Eckhart if we hold that
experience of mystical states was their primary goal and that their writings merely
constitute attempts to explain these after the event for purposes of communication.
Their quests were fundamentally quests for knowledge, not for experience per se, and
their philosophically-oriented writings are testimony to this quest. They worked to
meet the challenge of specifying the relationship between the human mind/soul and
the mind of God, and attempts to disengage speculative or philosophical aspects of
this work from the experiential are futile. Indeed, the constructivist position—i.e., that
the categories available to us shape the nature of our experiences20—suggests an

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inevitable circularity here. Mystics’ experiences were validating of their categories of

explanation because those experiences had been shaped through the categories in the
first place. My interest is, accordingly, not limited to the form of these mystics’
experiences, but extends to the grand vision of the mind’s relation to God which they
articulated: To what extent might the introduction of psychological terms—perhaps
replacing their more philosophical ones—meet the challenge of understanding that
human-divine relationship which lay at the focus of all their endeavours?

This point has a significant bearing on the whole issue of reductionism in

psychological explanation. The typical neuropsychological theory in this regard
focuses on brain structures which become activated during ‘god experiences’21 of the
kind associated with epileptic seizures, for example. This kind of emphasis on the
primacy of experience exacerbates the problematic confusion between the
pathological and the sublime, and, to my mind, leads inevitably to the resultant
reductionism.

In my earlier figure illustrating the various directions of influence from the Sefer
Yetzirah, I placed Abulafia’s prophetic Kabbalah on the hermeneutic line which
includes also the approach of Freud. The Jewish mystic who enters into the mystery
of language is fundamentally engaged with the primary rabbinic imperative towards
interpretation. This imperative seeks continually to uncover the nuances of meaning in
the Torah—the sacred text—by a complex process of following the ramifications of
its words. ‘Exegesis,’ as Betty Rojtman puts it, citing a famous rabbinic saying,
‘”turns over the text” to bring out all its subtleties, to exploit all its resources.’22
Fishbane observes that, ‘[E]ach letter has (virtual) anagrammatical significance; [and]
each word may encode numerous plays and possibilities ….’23 To cite just one from a
myriad of examples: the word of’nav, meaning ‘fitly’ in the phrase ‘A word fitly
spoken’ (Proverbs 25:11) becomes interpreted as ofanav, meaning ‘its wheel,’ giving
the sense that the word is spoken in relation to its wheel (of meanings). You will note
that I have chosen a pertinent example since ‘the wheel’ refers specifically to this
process of, as it were, revolving the word to extract additional meaning through
associations. Indeed, I will be returning to this particular double meaning later.
Moving forward a few centuries, we may note that all the various forms of rabbinic
exegesis—puns, numerical associations, transpositions, etc.—find their place in the
Freudian arsenal. Handelman has rightly observed that, ‘Freud displaced Rabbinic
hermeneutics from the text of the Holy Writ to the text of the dream,’24 and, we might
add, to all expressions of the human psyche.

The mind schooled in rabbinic ways is, then, a mind acutely sensitised to the
multiplicity of meaning beneath the surface of immediate sense. This critical
observation forms the foundation of the psychological model which I shall elaborate.
It is important to realise that such rabbinic training underlies the approaches
developed by mystics such as Abulafia. The mystics transcend the rabbinic

6
sensitisation towards multiple meanings by entering more actively into those
processes of the mind which are responsible for the multiplicity of meaning in the first
place

At this juncture I need to introduce some relevant concepts deriving from cognitive
neuroscience. It has been demonstrated through experiments in subliminal
perception25 and linguistics26 that multiplicity of meaning is a hallmark of
preconscious processing. Nuances and ambiguities of meaning in sensory input are
explored prior to the arising of an image in consciousness. In a mundane sense, then,
becoming ‘conscious’ seems to be synonymous with a process entailing the inhibition
of diverse meanings. A stimulus word such as palm, for example, when processed
subliminally (i.e., preconsciously) sensitised subjects in experiments to both meanings
of the word, namely a tree and part of the hand. This was not the case when it was
consciously processed. A similar state of affairs pertains with motor control: it
appears that multiple possibilities for the movements of muscles are initially activated
prior to a narrowing down to the final singular movement, of which the subject is
conscious.27 The picture of the mind which emerges from these and many similar
studies is of a preconscious realm characterised by multiplicity of meaning and intent,
preceding the entry into consciousness of unitary concepts. The formal parallel
between this state of affairs and the view of Torah as conveyed in rabbinic and
mystical literature is indeed remarkable.

A second concept deriving from cognitive neuroscience concerns the role played in
consciousness by a representation of self, or ‘I’. There are good reasons for arguing
that the processing stage at which unitary meaning arises can occur in the absence of
consciousness. This statement might be thought to contradict what I have just stated,
to the effect that it is unitary material which enters into consciousness. There is no
contradiction, however, when we realise that becoming conscious, in the everyday
sense of being conscious of some object of perception, for example, entails a further
stage. This further stage I have characterised as interpretative, meaning that what I
finally become conscious of is my interpretation of the entire situation in which a
given object as a unitary entity may be a part.28 As Wittgenstein noted in relation to
vision, for example, “seeing is seeing as.” Central to this stage is the establishing of
connections with the representation of self, ‘I’. In other words, if the object in my
focus of vision happens to be a pen, for example, what I am conscious of is not a
simple shape, but a pen (a unitary meaning) with which ‘I’ have a relationship. The
phenomenology of the situation is not ‘there is a shape’, nor ‘there is a pen’ but ‘I see
a pen.’

This last argument, concerning the role of ‘I’, is supported by the various pathological
conditions—blindsight, amnesia, the neglect syndrome, amongst others—as well as
non-pathological ones, in which relatively accurate performance in the absence of
consciousness may readily be demonstrated. The most parsimonious formulation of

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such conditions is one which allows for the phase of unitary meaning to have been
sustained in the absence of connections being forged with ‘I’. As Kihlstrom states,
‘When a link is made between the mental representation of self and the mental
representation of some object or event, then the percept, memory or thought enters
into consciousness; when this link fails to be made, it does not.’29

I have incorporated these key observations from cognitive neuroscience into a model
of perception (figure 2), described more fully elsewhere.30 A central assumption of the
model is that processes of memory and thought are necessarily engaged by perceptual
activity. ‘Seeing as’ implies a relation to one’s previous experience with the given
sensory activity (memory), and the processes whereby stored images are accessed and
explored for their relevance are of the nature of thought. A further assumption is that
‘I’ is not a continuous entity; it is constructed in the present moment from the ‘I’-tags
activated by the current array of representations. These ‘I’-tags may best be thought of
as ‘memories’ of the ‘I’ that had been constructed during previous experiences with
given objects or situations. In other words, ‘I’-tags are representations of self which
are associated in storage with the representations of other objects and events, etc. The
model essentially proposes stages in perception as follows.
1. Features in the sensory array are coded by sensory neuronal systems (giving rise
to the ‘neuronal input model’).
2. Stored representations become activated by dint of associations to the input
model; competing, multiple, representations become inhibited as the
representation achieving the closest match to the input model is selected.
3. The representation selected, together with its ‘I’-tag (and of course a whole range
of other such representations plus ‘I’-tags, since there will always be a complex
array of ongoing input activity in any moment) feed in to the processing of the
Interpreter system. This system (or ‘module’) has been proposed by Gazzaniga
as continually monitoring the outputs of other brain systems and constructing an
interpretation which enables all the outputs to fit into a coherent ‘story’.31 I have
argued that this narrative generated by the interpreter is focused in a construction
of the unified sense of ‘I’. The unified ‘I’ might be thought of as a kind of ‘gloss’
on the multiple strands of ‘I-ness’ depicted by the activated ‘I’-tags. It is
functionally significant but carries no substantive reality. The narrative—
including the unified ‘I’ and the selected representations—amounts to the stream
of consciousness of which we are aware. At a simple and mundane level, the
narrative is consciousness. In a nutshell, it is not that “I think”, as Descartes had
it, but that thinking is, and that thinking—in its mundane sense—eventuates in
‘I’.32

8
 6. becomes new
'I’-tag re. pen

Memory ‘I’ see

a pen
ink
Neuronal
Input Model pen 'I'-tag
Interpreter

pencil
Other current inputs
+ ‘I’-tags

1. feature analysis 2. neuronal 3. search through 4. matching - neuronal 5. incorporation into

in V1 etc. oscillation memory equilibration ‘I’-narrative

{
accessibility
Dimensions of
consciousness Intentionality 1 intentionality 2

phenomenality

Figure 2. ‘I’-tag theory: Dimensions of consciousness

Now, the central question of interest in the present context concerns the effects of
mystical practice. My argument, in brief, is that the mystic shifts the focus of activity
in the preconscious direction, as illustrated in figure 3.33 And, logically according to
the model, there are two means for this to happen: augmenting the activity in the
“wheel” of associations and/or attenuating the construction of ‘I’, roughly
corresponding to kataphatic and apophatic mysticism respectively.

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 Lancaster: New Lamps for Old

Increase awareness of ‘preconscious’

processes
shift leading edge of consciousness

Memory ‘I’

Words of
scripture
Interpreter
Name of
God

Augment associative Attenuate interpreter

process function
transform / permute etc. detachment from ‘I’

Altered state Reality orientation

Figure 3. ‘I’-tag theory: Proposed effects of mystical practice

It will be evident from what has been described so far that the “wheel” of association
is central to Hebrew language mysticism. The pun I introduced earlier was taken from
the twelfth-century Sefer haBahir:
We learnt, ‘It is the honour of God to conceal a word’ (Proverbs 25:2). What
is a “word”? As it is said, ‘The head of your word is truth’ (Psalm 119:160);
and ‘The honour of kings is to probe a word’ (Proverbs 25:2). What is a
“word”? As is written, ‘[Apples of gold in settings of silver is] A word fitly
[Hebrew of’nav] spoken’ (Proverbs 25:11). Do not read ‘fitly’ [of’nav] but
‘its wheel’ [ofanav]”34
The author depicts a two-way process in which God conceals truth in His words and
the mystic (a “king” in the extract) probes to find the truth by exploring the “wheel”
of the words.

There is, however, considerably more to this “wheel” than the kinds of psychological
associations implied by my discussion so far might suggest. As I mentioned above,
whilst the rabbinic method might sensitise the mind to multiple meanings, the
techniques of Hebrew language mysticism actively propel the mystic into this realm
where meaning is in a state of flux. More critically, for the mystics the “wheel”
transcends words in the sense of conventional or semantic meaning. The allusion in
the Bahir would seem to relate fundamentally to the wheel portrayed in the Sefer
Yetzirah as cited earlier: ‘…. He placed [the letters] in a wheel like a wall with 231
gates. The wheel revolves back and forth….’ Here the “wheel” represents the very

10
heart of the divine creative process. Psychologically, the mystic seems to enter a
realm where processes of dissolution and recreation of meaning occur. Finally, let us
note that Abulafia equates the wheel of the letters with the Active Intellect,35 and, as
we have seen, union with this sphere was the essential goal of the whole practice.

In analysing Abulafia’s method we may readily discern features likely to engender an

altered state of consciousness, generally understood as a lowering of reality
orientation and loosening of ego control. Such features include fasting, isolation,
repetitive body movements and breath control. In themselves these may be expected
to bring normally preconscious processes to the fore, thereby opening the psyche to
fundamental change and reconstruction. But the distinctive, and psychologically most
interesting dimension concerns language. Language has been implicated as a key
determinant of self, of our construction of reality, and of consciousness.36 Words are
necessary not only to describe our repertoire of concepts but to maintain them. To the
extent that Abulafia deconstructed language, atomising words into their prime matter,
I conjecture that the mundane schematisation of self and reality was also
deconstructed.

Deconstruction is just the first stage here. Schematic structuring of reality, both
worldly and bodily, is to be broken down in order to be reconstructed at a more
transpersonal level. This, reconstructive phase is brought about by means of the
central role occupied by letters of the Name. The state of psychic flux is filled by the
mystic’s deep sense of the divine as embodied in these letters. Again, the ‘wheel’
imagery is pronounced, suggesting the active engagement of the preconscious sphere:
And begin by combining this Name …, at the beginning alone, and examine
all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel returning
around, front and back, like a scroll…..37
As we saw earlier, the “knots” binding one to things of this world—an apposite
metaphor for contemporary psychology’s notion of a schematic structuring of
reality—are to be unbound from the mundane sphere and subsequently rebound to the
Active Intellect. Returning to my model, whilst the mundane mind is characterised by
‘I’-tags binding all schematic structures into the representation of self, the ‘prophetic
mind’—as Abulafia would put it—links them instead to the mystic’s representation of
God. The memory system becomes, as it were, ‘re-formatted’ in relation to a higher-
order indexing system; ‘I’-tags become substituted by (for want of a better term) God-
tags. Just as mundane ‘I’-tags are given currency by one’s own name, so the mystic’s
intense contemplative working with the various divine Names is hypothesised as
eventuating in this shift in the operational scale of the intellect.

It is not my purpose here to evaluate such a shift. Clearly, the question whether it may
be for ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is dependent on many factors. Thus, for example, one may
envisage fundamentalist, exclusivist, even megalomaniacal, tendencies of the mind as
arising with shifts of the kind under discussion. On the other hand, I can also conjure

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up scenarios in which the limiting, and even internally divisive, tendencies of a

memory index based on ‘I’ becomes transcended, opening up broader vistas of
purpose and meaning. Indeed, the indexing dimension of the model developed here
may have significant implications for contemporary psychological issues such as
creativity and the therapeutic growth of personality. My primary interest, however lies
with the means, not the ends. I claim merely that the model has value to the extent
that it explains mystical practices and their effects in psychological and operational
terms.

In closing this paper I wish to return to my opening comments concerning the

eclipsing of gnostic states in the study of mysticism. Daniels, amongst others, has
drawn attention to the problematic prioritising of one mystical goal over another in
Wilber’s ‘spectrum’ model.38 In addition, we should consider the role and value of
psychological explanation in this context. Wilber draws on Eckhart in elucidating his
causal level in the spectrum of consciousness. For Wilber, Eckhart’s writings testify
that, ‘the Soul and God are both transcended in the prior identity of Godhead, or pure
formless awareness, pure consciousness as such, the pure Self as pure Spirit.’39 But
what, we may ask, exactly is added here to Eckhart’s own potent language? Are the
terms ‘pure consciousness’ or ‘pure formless awareness’ capable of definition in
operational terms? I think not; and yet Eckhart himself engages in considerable
elaboration of his understanding of the Godhead. In fact, it is epistemologically
unclear as to how we might distinguish between different claims about pure
consciousness. Merkur writes emphatically that, ‘There is no such thing as “pure
consciousness”’;40 Sullivan describes pure consciousness as a basically valueless state
experienced when information processing functions are shut down due to physical
trauma;41 and, of course, others such as Forman42 and Wilber extol its virtues.

I am not denying the value in metaphysical speculation. But, if our discipline is

legitimately Transpersonal Psychology, then, so it seems to me, we cast adrift from
the constructs of explanation shared with fellow psychologists at our peril.

The model I have presented is focused on the role of preconscious processing. The
multiplicity of meaning, fluidity of structure, and potential openness to change which
I ascribe to these processes, is central to the entire model. The mechanism of such
processing, if, indeed this is even the appropriate word, is not specified. There are
surely neural features involved, and I could certainly elaborate on physiological lines
of evidence for aspects of the processing taking place. I could equally well point to
the multiplicity of potential prior to collapse of the wave function as
understood in quantum physics, suggesting, with Hameroff and Penrose,43 that
it is this factor which accounts for the nature of preconsciousness. These are
complex matters which we are nowhere near solving, representing—as they
do—the essentially ‘hard’ questions of consciousness. How, indeed might

12
processes of a neural or even quantum nature be identified with ‘meaning’? The
model merely attempts to explain operationally those changes of state which may be
induced by following an Abulafian type of mystical practice, and to do so in terms
which have explanatory value within our contemporary understanding of mind. And
this, in a nutshell, is the role which I ascribe to a psychology of mysticism.

Of course, there is considerable room for further speculation. I am inclined to think,

for example, that the preconscious “wheel” of associations is closest to the divine
spark within, for in its incessant pouring forth of the possibilities of meaning beneath
the surface of consciousness it is truly a fount of creation. I speculate that this wheel
represents the locus of encounter between mechanism and meaning. Such a
formulation gives me a handle on the idea of the Active Intellect, a term otherwise
lost to me in the haze of a distant philosophy. The mystic harnesses the preconscious
“wheel,” subjecting it to the discipline of spiritual practice, and detaching it from the
normally automatic linkage to ‘I’ and the mundane world. He or she may ultimately
fuse in awareness with the stillness at its heart, the inner sanctum of ‘unknowing
knowledge’ to which Eckhart refers.44

But, on the threshold of the divine, we draw a line between the psychologist and the
metaphysician. This, I stress, is not a trivial point, for the crossing of this line tends to
make of psychology the great leveller, squeezing distinctive elements of any mystical
system into a uniform—supposedly fundamental—set of psycho-spiritual axioms. We
should be wary of the denuding of the thought of Eckhart and these other mediaeval
mystics which is characteristic of much transpersonal speculation. The religious and
intellectual dimensions are too often abandoned, as if they merely detract from the
more profound issue of emptiness. I cannot but think that the real profundity, the
genuine advice to the seeker, is eclipsed as a result. Eckhart writes that, ‘Intellect the
seeker must recede into Intellect which does not seek.’45 It is Intellect that is the real
focus, and our account with Eckhart, as with Abulafia, is incomplete until we can
conceptualise in our own language his grasp of Intellect—and this should include, but
not be limited by, the language of psychology. And, as Corbin noted, Ibn Arabi’s
work is similarly bowdlerised, when we compromise his emphasis on Imagination. It
is these terms, imagination and intellect, which contribute the essential scaffolding of
mediaeval mysticism; and they are firmly enmeshed with the religious constructs of
the respective faiths. A treatment of mysticism which ignores them is not, in the final
analysis, dealing with their authors’ real paths of wisdom.

1
H. Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, transl. R. Manheim (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 233. First published in French 1958.
2
E. R. Wolfson, Throufh a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 60.
3
231 = the number of two letter permutations in a 22 letter alphabet.
4
For English version, see Sefer Yetzirah, ed. A. Kaplan (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1990)
paragraphs 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5.
5
I have discussed psychological aspects of the golem ritual in B. L. Lancaster, “The golem as a

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 Lancaster: New Lamps for Old

transpersonal image: 1. a marker of cultural change,” Transpersonal Psychology Review, 1 (3), 5-11,
1997, and “The golem as a transpersonal image: 2. psychological features in the mediaeval golem
ritual,” Transpersonal Psychology Review, 1 (4), 23-30, 1997.
6
For a discussion of the relation between Jewish mysticism and artificial intelligence, see M. P.
Marcus, “Computer science, the informational, and Jewish mysticism,” Technology in Society, 21,
363-371, 1999. For the influence of Jewish hermeneutics on psychology, see D. Bakan, Sigmund
Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1958); S. Handelman, The
Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1985); P. F. Langman, “White culture, Jewish culture, and
the origins of psychotherapy,” Psychotherapy, 34, 207-218; M. Ostow, “Judaism and psychoanalysis,”
in M. Ostow, ed., Judaism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Ktav, 1982), pp. 3-41.
7
Cited in M. Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (State University of New York
Press, 1988), p. 39.
8
Cited in M. Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia (State University of
New York Press, 1989), p. 108.
9
Ibid., p. xi.
10
Cited in D. R. Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism vol. 2: The Philosophic-Mystical
Tradition and the Hasidic Tradition (New York: Ktav, 1982), p. 42.
11
Cited in Idel, Mystical Experience, p. 36.
12
Cited in M. Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 6.
13
C. F. Kelley, Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge (Yale University Press, 1977) p. 212.
14
M. Idel, Messianic Mystics (Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 58-100.
15
Cited in Kelley, p. 239.
16
Idel, Mystical Experience, p. 197.
17
Cited in Kelley, p. 129.
18
Cited in Idel, Mystical Experience, p. 132.
19
Cited in Idel, Mystical Experience, p. 19.
20
See especially S. T. Katz, Mysticism and Religious Traditions. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983).
21
This term is used by M. A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. (New York:
Praeger, 1987). For more recent discussions from a similar perspective, see E. d’Aquili & A. B.
Newberg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1999) and V. S. Ramachandran & S. Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the
Architecture of the Mind (London: Fourth Estate, 1998).
22
B. Rojtman, Balck Fire on White Fire: An Essay on Jewish Hermeneutics, from Midrash to
Kabbalah (University of California Press), p. 5.
23
M. Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology, (Harvard
University Press, 1998), p. 12.
24
S. Handelman, “Interpretation as devotion: Freud’s relation to rabbinic hermeneutics,”
Psychoanalytic Review, 68, 201-218, 1981, p. 202.
25
A. J. Marcel, “Conscious and unconscious recognition of polysemous words: Locating the
selective effects of prior verbal context,” in R. S. Nickerson, ed., Attention and Performance VIII
(Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1980), pp. 435-457.
26
M. Velmans, Understanding Consciousness (Routledge, 2000), pp. 208-209.
27
S. A. Spence & C. D. Frith, “Towards a functional anatomy of volition,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies, 6, 11-29, 1999, p. 19.
28
B. L. Lancaster, Mind, Brain and Human Potential: the Quest for an Understanding of Self
(Shaftesbury, Dorset & Rockport, Massachusetts: Element, 1991).
29
J. F. Kihlstom, “The psychological unconscious and the self,” In Experimental and Theoretical
Studies of Consciousness, Ciba Foundation Symposium no. 174. (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1993), p.
152.
30
B. L. Lancaster, “Self or no-self? Converging perspectives from neuropsychology and
mysticism,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 28, 509-528, 1993. B. L. Lancaster, “On the
stages of perception: towards a synthesis of cognitive neuroscience and the Buddhist Abhidhamma
tradition,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, 122-42, 1997.
31
M. S. Gazzaniga, The Social Brain (New York: Basic Books, 1985); M. S. Gazzaniga, “Brain
modularity: Towards a philosophy of conscious experience,” In A. J. Marcel & E. Bisiach, eds.,
Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 218-238.

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 32
My use of the word, mundane, is intended to indicate that other, non-mundane (e.g., mystical)
states of consciousness may not be centred on ‘I’ in the way described here. See below.
33
A detailed exposition of this argument is in B. L. Lancaster, “On the Relationship Between
Cognitive Models and Spiritual Maps: Evidence from Language Mysticism,” Journal of Consciousness
Studies, in press.
34
For English version, see A. Kaplan, The Bahir (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1979), para. 50.
35
M. Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, pp. 38-41.
36
J. Bruner, “A narrative model of self-construction,” in J. G. Snodgrass & R. L. Thompson, eds.,
The Self across Psychology: Self-Recognition, Self-Awareness, and the Self Concept (New York: The
New York Academy of Sciences, Annals vol. 818, 1997), pp. 145-161; E. T.Rolls, “Brain mechanisms
of vision, memory, and consciousness,” in M. Ito, Y. Miyashita & E. T. Rolls, eds., Cognition,
Computation, and Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 81-120.
37
Cited in Ibid., p. 21.
38
M. Daniels, “The shadow in transpersonal psychology,” Transpersonal Psychology Review, 4
(3), 29-43, 2000.
39
K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), p.
301.
40
D. Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions (State University of
New York Press, 1993), p. 23.
41
P. R. Sullivan, “Contentless consciousness and information-processing theories of mind,”
Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, 2, 51-59, 1995.
42
See, for example, R. K. C. Forman., ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and
Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); R. K. C. Forman, “What does mysticism have
to teach us about consciousness?” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5, 185-201.
43
Hameroff, S. R. & Penrose, R. (1996). Conscious events as orchestrated space-t-me selections.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, 36-53.
44
Kelley, p. 234.
45
Cited in Kelley, p. 236.

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