I am glad, Dr. Kreps, that you are enjoying the forum. Thank-you, for bringing up a very interesting, and salient, topic for us to discuss here. I moved it to Unpacking Religion, because one of the many problems of religion is it too often tends to Reify its doctrine, philosophy, its progenitors and prophets, etc.
Reification (fallacy)
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. [1][2] In other words, it is the error of treating as a concrete thing something which is not concrete, but merely an idea. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality. Mathematical or simulation models may help understand a system or situation, but they model an abstract and simple mental image, not real life (which will also differ from the model): "the map is not the territory".
Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.
Spiritually speaking I think we have to realize that all our models are only that-models.this is as true of the seven stages of the ego or the seven stages of the soul in Sufism as it is of the four material jhanas and the 4 or 5 immaterial stages of jhana.None of these are precise or sequential in any rigorous manner.I myself have had experiences of cessation without experiencing charismatic phenomena prior to that and my eldest daughter regularly has experiences of ecstasy without any understanding of emptiness or enlightenment.So I think we have to take all classifications and models with a grain of symbolic salt.Hope that is clarifying.Feel free to share this or any part of it with your followers on the forum.Salaams,Ibrahim
Joel Ibrahim Kreps
Yes, I agree that there might be a tendency to reify the 8 stages of deep meditation (samadhi); however, I do not believe that I am erring in that direction when I reduce the the 8 stages of deep meditation down to their salient qualities. However, I do believe that the religious literature of the world most definitely does tend to reify the religious experience in ways that make it impossible for anyone in the future to have the experience.
Since you used the term 'cessation,' then I will start there. What the case histories here show is the 8 stages of deep meditation tend to be relative stages of non-dual experience that is the product of deep meditation. When I present this I do not see how I am erring in reifying the experience of he 8 stages of deep meditation. Instead I am quantifying, an otherwise abstract subjective experience.
I also define the 8 stages of deep meditation in salient qualities, which are in deed common, such as: the first stage is simply an enjoyable experience of meditation that the subject recognizes as a deeper stage than normality; the 2nd stage is cessation of thought; the 3rd stage is equanimity; 4th stage is typified by a profound sense of well-being which feels to the subject as if it would go on forever.; the upper 4 stages of deep meditation are typically out-of-body experiences.
So, since my model takes into account my case histories, then I am going to argue that I am not guilty of reifying the experience of the stages of deep meditation. If so please point out where I am doing so. Otherwise, if we do not define the 8 stages of deep meditation, then we can not determine where one is in deep meditation. If we do not determine where one is in deep meditation, then there is no point in giving anyone guidance through the 8 stages of deep meditation. We could then say that psychiatry errs in the same way, therefore there is no point of offering psychiatric care.
In fact I often find the subjects have reified their experience of deep meditation so much so that when they find out that their experience was just level 1 or 2, they are turned off and go away and launch themselves into a messianic mission. For instance: Eckhart Tolle has made a career out of the 2nd stage of the religious experience; he thinks he is "full-on enlightened;" Rajnish had a single experience of the 3rd stage of the religious experience and made a huge career out of it.
