students.
5.3 Method 5.3.1 Design
The study was conducted as a between-groups design with the one independent variable of group at four levels (Student vs. Reichi vs. Buddhist vs Mensa Paranormal) and the two dependent variables of Attitudes to Mysticism and mystical experience. As Hypothesis 5.1 was correlational and efforts were being made to assess the validity of the new scale, correlations between the variable of attitudes to mysticism and that of mystical experience were also assessed.
5.3.2 Participants
An initial pool of ninety-three participants completed questionnaires for Study Two. Forty-one were students who were given questionnaires during lectures at a college in the East Midlands, where they were all enrolled as students in Higher Education. All students were doing at least one module in Psychology as part ol their degree programme and were handed questionnaires during Psychology lectures. I wenty-four ol the participants were members of a Reichi healing group; 12 were members of a local Buddhist group, specifically Nichiren Daishonen Buddhists; and 16 were members of Mensa Paranormal.
Two of these participants had to be eliminated because they had completed only one of the two scales administered for this study, and a further participant was eliminated for not having completed a sufficient proportion of the Attitudes to Mysticism Scale to allow for data collection (one Buddhist and two Reichi healers), leaving an A of 90 for data analysis.
The student sample consisted of 33 females and eight males. 24
respondents aged 19-21, 11 respondents aged 21-30, two respondents aged 31- 40 and four respondents aged over 40 (mean average age = 24.36; standard deviation = 9.14; range = 19.5-56.90). Ten indicated religious affiliation as atheist or as having no religion, seven as agnostic, four as Roman Catholic, six as Anglican, six as adhering to some other Christian denomination, two as Hindu, one as Sikh, one as Islamic, one as the Korean religion Chun Do So Bop and three as personal religion.
The Reichi sample consisted of sixteen females, six males and two respondents who did not record gender; two were aged 21-30, three aged 31-40, four aged 41-50, seven aged 51 -60, three were over 60 and five did not record
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age (mean average age, where given (N= 19) was 48.63; s.d. = 12.65; range = 22-69). Religious affiliations indicated by the Reichi group were Anglican (six respondents), Roman Catholic (three respondents), "Other Christian" (three respondents), Buddhist (two respondents), spiritualist (one respondent), agnostic (two respondents) and multi-faith (five respondents); two respondents did not record religious affiliation.
The Nichiren Daishonen Buddhists consisted of eight females, three males and one respondent who did not record gender; two were aged 31 -40.
seven aged 41-50, two aged 51-60 and one respondent did not record age (mean average age, where given (N= 11) was 46.51, s.d. = 6.24; range = 35-55). The specific form of Buddhism sampled, the Nichiren Daishonen, can, along with Zen. be regarded a particularly pro-mystical form of Buddhism (Chapter Two, this thesis).
The Mensa Paranormal group comprised eight males and eight females, of whom one was aged 21 -30, one aged 31 -40. two aged 41 -50, five aged 51 -60, one aged 61-70, three were over 70 and three did not record age (mean average, where given (N= 13) was 54.69; standard deviation = 14.19; range = 29-78).
All 16 members of the Mensa Paranormal group answered a question asking about their personal religious affiliation, but their replies were often highly idiosyncratic. The responses that Mensa Paranormal participants gave to a question asking them to name their religious affiliation were Anglican (three participants), Roman Catholic (two participants), Quaker (one participant), lapsed Anglican (one participant), Buddhist (one participant), agnostic (one participant), atheist (one participant), animist (one participant), "New Age" (one
participant), Pagan (one participant), Druidic-pantheistic-"The Tao" (one participant), monotheist (one participant) and "God within" (one participant).
Rationale for Sampling of Populations
Buddhism, as explained in Chapter 2 Section 2.3, can be viewed as a religion that supports pro-mystical attitudes. Criterion-related validity of an Attitudes to Mysticism Scale would therefore be supported if Buddhists were found to obtain significantly higher scores on the scale than a student sample.
Reichi healing, a broadly "New Age" approach to healing, is frequently related to New Age preoccupations such as spiritual energy, crystals, chakras and Zen Buddhism (Shuffrey, 1998; Parkes & Parkes, 1998). Zen Buddhism was a major influence on Reichi’s founding father, the Japanese healer Mikao Usui, who spent part of his time in a Zen monastery in Japan (Parkes & Parkes, 1998).
These two groups were expected to obtain significantly higher scores on both the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale and the Attitudes to Mysticism Scale than the sample of students.
Mensa Paranormal, a sub-group within the high-intelligence society Mensa, can be regarded as a group whose members share intellectual interests rather than discussions of personal experiences. Respondents from this
population were therefore expected to obtain significantly higher scores on the Attitudes to Mysticism Scale than students, but not necessarily higher scores on the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale. Presentation of hypotheses in this way emphasises conceptual distinctions between attitudes to mysticism and mystical experience, and helps to clarify how construction of the new scale
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should not be regarded as construction of a redundant scale, but of a scale with potential to make an original contribution to knowledge.
5.3.3 Materials
The two major dependent variables being assessed in this study were:
1) Mystical Experience. This was assessed by the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale (Francis & Louden, 2000a). As informal conversations with participants in Study One had indicated that some respondents had had difficulty with the more obscure questions of the M-Scale, the Francis-Louden Mystical Orientation Scale was chosen in preference to Hood's (1975) M-Scale due to its greater clarity. This is a 21-item scale to assess mystical experience based on Happold (1963), and has been observed to have good internal reliability with a Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of +0.94 (Francis & Louden, 2000a; Bourke, Francis & Robbins, 2004). This scale is presented in Appendix B.
2) Attitudes to Mysticism. This was assessed by the newly constructed Attitudes to Mysticism Scale in its initial, 32-item version. This scale is also presented in Appendix B.
Construction of the Attitudes to Mysticism Scale
The initial version of the "Attitudes to Mysticism" scale consisted of 32 items. These items were devised by the researcher, and were used to assess each of eight content categories, with four items in each category. This was done to ensure that the new scale was measuring an adequate range of attitudes
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and opinions that could be deemed “pro-mystical”. These eight themes, and the sources which inspired them, are displayed in Table 5.1.
Igfalc.?.l_C-atcgories of Items in the Initial Version of the Attitudes to Mysticism Scale
ITEM CATEGORY SOURCE AND BACKGROUND
1. Items assessing whether religious experience is valued over religious ritual
Glock and Stark (1965); Smart (1989)
2. Interest in mystical literature Keller (1978) 3. Items assessing whether religious
experience is valued over intellectual dimension of religion
Clock and Stark (1965)
4. Valuing mysticism as opposed to
Lutheran theology of solafidianism Various 5. Perceptions of mysticism as non-
pathological experiences Various
6. Valuing perennialism in mysticism Forman (1998); Huxley (1946) 7. Valuing mysticism over social
dimensions of religion Smart (1989)
8. Valuing mystical experience over
doctrinal dimensions of religion Glock and Stark (1965); Smart (1989)
The first category of items included four items assessing whether respondents valued the experiential dimension of religion more highly than the ritual. These were:
Item 1. If I were to think of a prototypical religious person, I would think of a mystic or some one who reports religious experiences, rather than some one who attends religious services regularly.
Item 20. The practices of the mystic are a more true path to God than regular attendances at religious services.
Item 26. To have had a religious or mystical experience indicates more commitment to one's faith than whether one goes to one's place of worship regularly.
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Item 32. If I were a religious person, I would see regular attendance at a church, mosque, synagogue or other place ot worship as being more central to my faith than whether I had ever had a "mystical" or "religious" experience. (Negatively loaded).
1 he second item category assessed respondents' attitudes to mystical literature. The central place given to discussion of mystical literature in the volume of essays edited by Katz (1978), discussed in detail in Keller's (1978) chapter, provided a foundation for supposing this to be an important and worthwhile category. Furthermore, as one may read mystical literature and feel drawn towards or moved by it without feeling that one has had oneself had a mystical experience, inclusion of this category further clarified how this scale was a measure of attitudes to mysticism and not of self-reported mystical experience. The scale could therefore be seen to be serving a different function to scales such as Hood's (1975) M-Scale. The four items in this category were:
Item 2. Some of the most moving literature ever written has been the work of world's great mystics.
Item 12. I find that people who write about their so-called mystical experiences contradict themselves - they claim to have received revelations, but to me, their experiences hardly reveal anything at all. (Negatively loaded).
Item 17. 1 get excited when I read accounts of mystical, religious or spiritual experiences.
Item 24. I would get rather annoyed if I had to read mystical literature, as most of it would be quite incomprehensible to me. (Negatively loaded).
Item 12 above was based upon a quote by Luther. Luther disliked the Biblical text of "The Revelation of St. John the Divine", holding that a
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revelation should be revealing, not couched in the rather esoteric language in which the final book of the Biblical canon is written.
1 he third item category was based upon Glock and Stark's (1965) inclusion of an intellectual dimension of religiosity in their scheme. Items in this category were designed to assess whether respondents valued the intellectual dimension of religion more highly than the experiential. Items in this category were:
Item 3. Possession of a great deal of factual knowledge about one's faith (e.g.
about its history, literature or ritual) is really a very poor shadow of the great insights that can be obtained during mystical experience.
Item 9. If one wants to know about one's faith, one should apply lots of
academic study to its history, texts and theology, rather than engage in practices that may or may not bring about mystical experiences. (Negatively loaded).
Item 13. Theologians are more important figures in the world religions than are mystics. (Negatively loaded).
Item 21. One can learn at least as much about God from those who report religious or mystical experiences as one can from theologians.
Inspiration for the fourth category came from the observation that different religions, and indeed, different denominations within the same religion, have taken different attitudes towards mysticism due to different doctrinal foundations relating to the power of the individual's efforts to obtain Divine grace. More specifically, items in this category had been designed to assess similarity between respondent's beliefs and Luther's doctrine of
solafidianism, which today continues to be espoused by some forms of Christian fundamentalist Protestantism. This doctrine teaches that we are justified by faith
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in God alone and that, therefore, our own self-initiated attempts at the spiritual quest are to be proscribed - thus, clashing head-on with the implications of certain mystical teachings that a self-initiated, on-going quest can help one to bear spiritual fruit. The former position was taken to be one that would offer doctrinal foundations for being suspicious of mystics; the latter position one likely to lead to more sympathetic attitudes towards mysticism. Items in this category were included to assess the extent to which respondents leaned towards the former or latter viewpoint. The tour items in this category were:
Item 4. Our sins are justified through faith, that is, through belief that God alone can save us from our sins - we are not likely to get very far by constant reliance on our own efforts at the spiritual quest. (Negatively loaded).
Item 6. God alone is the fountainhead of all religious revelations, so mystics deceive themselves to think that they can obtain union with God by their own efforts. (Negatively loaded).
Item 8. The mystical quest for union with the Divine is one which - partly thanks to the mystic’s own efforts - is often likely to prove extremely fruitful.
Item 11. The mystical viewpoint that life is like a ladder, and that by appropriate spiritual journey, one may ascend this ladder to reach the realms of God, is one which deserves a lot of respect.
The fifth item category was based upon the conservative premise that another reason why some respondents may have negative attitudes towards mysticism may be less to do with lay theology than with lay psychology, specifically, the possibility that mysticism may be perceived as psycho-pathology by some people. The four items in this category were designed to