This paper proposes to study mystical experience by contrasting it with “ordinary” experience, i.e., with standard consciousness. It emphasises the construed nature of standard consciousness and the role that the mutual connectedness of mental contents plays in its construction. It then shows that removal of the factors that are responsible for the “making” of standard consciousness accounts for the principal features of mystical experience; these features are, therefore, mainly negative. Understanding mystical experience as the suppression of factors that contribute to the construction of standard consciousness, along with a discussion of the mechanism that makes this possible, permits answers to some frequently asked questions, such as: Why is mystical experience ineffable? What is its epistemic status? Does it have implications for our understanding of mind, consciousness, and self?

This article shows how Brahmanism was a regional tradition, confined to the northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent, that passed through a difficult period—which it barely survived—roughly between the time of Alexander and the beginning of the Common Era. It then reinvented itself, in a different shape. No longer primarily a sacrificial tradition, it became a mainly socio-political ideology that borrowed much (including the belief in rebirth and karmic retribution) from the eastern region in which Buddhism and Jainism had arisen. Its revival went hand in hand with the elaboration of behavioural and theoretical innovations, one of whose purposes was to justify the claimed superiority of Brahmins.

A great number of classical Sanskrit texts, most of them philosophical, refer to the Cārvākas or Lokāyatas (also Laukāyatikas, Lokāyatikas, Bārhaspatyas) who must have constituted a school of thought which has left us almost no literary documents. They once possessed a Sūtra text and several commentaries thereon, for fragments have been preserved in the works of those who criticise them. In modern secondary literature the Cārvākas are usually referred to as “materialists”, which is somewhat unfortunate. It is true that the Sūtra text (sometime called Bārhaspatya Sūtra) accepts as only principles (tattva) the four elements earth, water, fire and air;yet the term “materialism” and its cognates evoke in the modern world associations which are not necessarily appropriate for this ancient school of thought