I don't know. It may not be an "it", i.e a thing, an object, despite the implication of the language I'm using. Within my own tradition I tend to think of mystical experiences as experiences of the Divine. I am fond of Panikkar's
cosmotheandric intuition if you are interested in understanding more of how I conceive of that. But the fairest answer is "I don't know".
Yet you've agreed that belief is itself an experience, correct?
Let's try to parse this carefully. I do not think that a belief is an experience. I think we have an experience of believing our beliefs, in the sense that our awareness is reflective. We believe, knowing that we believe. That "knowing" is an experience of belief, but the content of a given belief is not itself an experience. First there is experience, then there is memory, interpretation, belief. Coincidental with interpretation and belief is the experience of believing, a separate experience from the original one.
You're now insisting that there are three sorts of experiences?
1.) Mystical experiences.
2.) Experiences themselves.
3.) Experiences of the senses.
And if there is no distinction to be made between Experiences Themselves and Experiences Of The Senses ... why did you apparently just try to make one?
I have not been attempting to propose an exhaustive taxonomy, but I'll make a few comments. With regard to "mystical" experiences, it's a description, not an ontological category. More like if I broke down experiences as "happy", "sad", "fearful", or etc.
"Experience in itself" is not a category related to the others you list at all, but is a phrase that is intended to distinguish between
experiencing, the actual happening, a verb form, and beliefs about experiences, which are distinct. "Experiences themselves" are not a type of experience, it's a way of referring to an experience prior to memory, interpretation, and belief.
In referring to the senses, I'm referring to traditional distinctions made between human faculties of understanding, which is also not a category of experience, but of faculty. For example you would distinguish between the senses and the rational intellect, presumably. Via your physical senses, you have experiences. Your reasoning mind interprets those experiences and also "knows" things based on logical inferences drawn from them. In this way, your rational intellect "knows" what it knows (by inference) and also what the senses "know" (the data of experience). The knowledge of the senses is not reflective, but the knowledge of the rational intellect is. This non-reflectivity is what I meant by "ecstatic". Through the intellect, you also "know" logical truths, a priori. Like mathematics. Note that even this conceptualization is not intended to be some absolutely objective description. It's just intended to draw useful distinctions, and these distinctions have long been used in philosophy.
So I was comparing mystical experience to sensual experience in general by saying that they are both ecstatic, i.e prior to interpretation, but in so saying not making them entirely separate categories, or part of some set. Sensual experience can be mystical, i.e in the example of looking at the stars.
When you say "ultimate reality" aren't you really implying that there is a "hidden reality?" Why isn't reality ultimate enough? Because it fails to support claims of the fantastic?
Yes, I am implying that reality is partly hidden from empirical and rational knowledge. The experience of the hidden is mystical experience. I am not particularly interested in this as a means to support claims of the supernatural. Now, as I said, I am a theist of a sort, and a Christian, so there are such elements in my worldview, but at least insofar as I've been talking about mysticism, I've been trying to do so in a very general way. There can be such a thing as a mystical experience even of a reality with no supreme being in the Abrahamic sense. Consider various forms of Buddhism.
Indeed. The word "spiritual" is similarly bereft of any meaning.
Many words are polysemic without being meaningless.
I still fail to see why any appeal to "the mystical" is required, when a simple acknowledgment that the human experience is slippery and subjective is sufficient.
An appeal isn't required. This gets back to the insistence all along that "the mystical" isn't a belief. The goal is not to assert a proposition and gain your assent through a process of reasoning. The goal is to point to the experience and suggest that it is possible and that the demonstration of its possibility is in the having of the experience. In many traditions, the proper method is a purification and initiation of one's own life and consciousness, and this is so precisely because the experience is subjective.
