Caribbean Mysticism: Spiritual Knowledge and the Mystics

Abstract

Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason contends that African people have the ability to acquire spiritual knowledge, and that they believe in a four dimensional worlds, the physical/material, the spiritual, the social and the individual. Henry maintains that the spiritual world is the most important as it influences and controls the other three, and that African philosophical thought is embedded in spirituality, thus all knowledge has a spiritual foundation. If the African ontology of knowledge has a spiritual foundation, how does an objective and subjective rationality interconnect with each other. The purpose of this article is to explore the epistemological justification of spiritual knowledge and the various paradigms shift that account for such knowledge.