Mysticism and beyond Buddhist phenomenology, part II

This paper is an extension of Buddhist phenomenology, Barendregt 1988], hereafter called part I. That paper is a personal account of part of the mental training towards the puriication of consciousness. For the reading of the present paper, however, no acquaintance with part I is required. This paper continues the description of experiences obtained during the practice of intensive vipassana meditation. Moreover, based on these experiences a model is presented for one particular aspect of the human mind: the mechanism of desire, suuering, mysticism and mental purica-tion. The model makes very clear the goal of the meditation training and explains well the phenomena described in the Buddhist literature. Besides that the model is claimed to be useful for the understanding of several psychosomatic phenomena. I dare say that the observed phenomena are valid in general and are of essential value for the eventual theory of the human mind. Acknowledgments. This paper has been written on the basis of several in