Are mystical experiences formed by the mystic's cultural background and concepts, as "constructivists" maintain, or do mystics sometimes transcend language, belief, and culturally conditioned expectations? Do mystical experiences differ throughout the various religious traditions, as "pluralists" contend, or are they somehow ecumenical? The contributors to this collection scrutinize a common mystical experience, the "pure consciousness event"--the experience of being awake but devoid of intentional content--in order to answer these questions. Through the use of historical Hindu, Buddhist,...

This book is the sequel to Robert Forman's well-received collection, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford, 1990). The essays in the earlier volume argued that some mystical experiences do not seem to be formed or shaped by the language system--a thesis that stands in sharp contradistinction to deconstruction in general and to the "constructivist" school of mysticism in particular, which holds that all mysticism is the product of a cultural and linguistic process. In The Innate Capacity, Forman and his colleagues put forward a hypothesis about the formative causes of...