Transcendent experience or the transcendence of experience? An analysis of transcendent realization in Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart
Kent Academic Repository January 1, 2021 Reza Shah‐kazemi
Transcendent realization—the highest form of spiritual attainment—consists in realizing identity with the Absolute, an identity that transcends the individual and all possible experience defined in relation to the individual. This conclusion emerges from analyzing the teachings of three mystics: Shankara (Hindu), Ibn Arabi (Islamic), and Meister Eckhart (Christian). The analysis uses intentionality as a central methodological principle, situated within the phenomenological method and the debate between contextualist and pure consciousness schools of comparative mysticism. The thesis critiques recent scholarly approaches for reductively failing to account for the nature and implications of transcendence in mystical experience. The realization itself is incommunicable intrinsically but can be described extrinsically as the realization of 'Being-Consciousness-Bliss'.