S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 2 3 Diego Pérez Lasserre Diego Pérez Lasserre, PhD. is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at the Law and Social Sciences School, Universidad San Sebastián, Valdivia, Chile. His latest works deal with the hermeneutic reaches of mystical traditions. He is available at diego.perezl@uss.cl. The perceived world is the result of the projection of human consciousness, and therefore akin to a Rorschach card. – Hawkins 2009 that the manner, in which mysticism portrays human understanding, enriches what has already been said about this topic by the hermeneutical tradition. Now, due to the fat that there have been many individuals that have been considered as mystics throughout history, we believe to be prudent to focus our attention in one of them. The candidate, whose we have chosen for this endeavor, is the contemporary American mystic David R. Hawkins. The roadmap we will follow for justifying what has just been said is the following: We will start by reviewing the way philosophical hermeneutics have thematized human understanding. Afterwards, we will argue that David R. Hawkins portrayed human understanding in a manner that is quite similar to that done by philosophical hermeneutics, but at the same time justify that his line of thought enriches philosophical hermeneutics in at least two manners: the reinsertion of the concept of truth to the philosophical discussion, and the provision of concrete mechanisms for accessing it. Finally, we will draw some conclusions. 1 Introduction We seem to be in an era in which relativism occupies a privileged place in the epistemological discussion. By this we mean that the idea that each person has their own truth is established, so there seem to be no common ground among different individuals who are part of what we call humanity. Our argument, as it will be shown in the pages that follow, is that this is a consequence of the hermeneutization of reality (at least to some extent). That is, of the popularization of the idea that the fact that different people interpret reality from diverse conceptual perspectives has as a corollary that every individual “creates” its own reality according to his or her worldview. In this scenario, the idea that there is an objective reality about which something true or not true (that conforms or not to said reality) can be said, has disappeared. It is in this context that this paper seeks to argue that some individuals classically designated as mystics make a philosophically interesting and daring proposal. On the one hand, they recognize that human understanding is projective and hermeneutic (interpretative). On the other, they argue that this does not mean that reality is inherently subjective, that is, subject (and dependent) to the concepts that the agent that understands the world throws onto it via projection. Also, the mystics add a dimension to the problem of human understanding that seems have been forgotten in the hermeneutical discussion: The possibility of letting go the conceptual projections that the human mind consciously or unconsciously throws onto what it is being perceived, and therefore of perceiving the world as it is (instead of how it appears to the human mind). In synthesis, our hypothesis is
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