تحلیل کارکرد "ذهن" در صورت‌بندی "تجربه‌های عرفانی" روزبهان

The scholars who study mystical experience are often divided into two main groups. The first group is advocates of “essentialism.” The advocates of essentialism believe that mystical experience is self-determining and mind-independent; therefore they think all mystical experiences share the same essence and features that are universal and trans-cultural. The second group has a constructivist approach. For them, there is a fundamental relationship between mind of the mystic and hisher mystical experiences. They believe that former experiences and backgrounds form the mystical experience and therefore the mystical experience is an individual phenomenon affected by the mind, language, and traditions of the mystic. This article defends the constructivist approach by providing various evidences from the mystical experiences of Ruzbihan that is reported in his spiritual autobiography, Kashf al-Asrar. To do this, as one of the most important component of Rouzbahan’s cognitive world, we analyze his tendency toward concrete, tangible, and embodied phenomena. The result of this research demonstrates that, as constructivists scholars have said, Ruzbihan’s belief that “the human body is the manifestation of God” led him to attribute anthropomorphic features to God and angels in his mystical experiences and visionary dreams