Is mystical perception (aka yogipratyakṣa) a kind of perception? Can we go without it, if we want to ground religious beliefs?

After a long discussion on sense perception as being the only possible type of direct perception and after having thus ruled out the possibility of mystical perception, Veṅkaṭanātha adds some verses, which are far from being just “summary verses”, since they make a completely different point:

anuṣṭhātṛdaśāpannapuruṣāpekṣayā tv idam |

satsamprayogajanyatvam; aiśādhyakṣādi susthitam ||

This fact that [perception] needs to be born out of a contact with something existing regard [only] a person who has attained the level of “performer” (anuṣṭhātṛ) [of worldly activities] (i.e., it pertains to normal people only); God’s [super-sensuous] perception and His other [super-human means of knowledge]  are [instead] well established || 28 || (Seśvaramīmāṃsā ad Mīmāṃsāsūtra 1.1.4)

Thus, Veṅkaṭanātha agrees with the Pūrva Mīmāṃsā’s empiricism as for the general refusal of mystical perception. After all, accepting it would make any claim of self-defined “mystics” epistemologically valid. However, Veṅkaṭanātha needs to accept a special case of yogipratyakṣa, i.e., the intellectual intuition of God, who must be able to have a direct access to reality without the mediation of the senses. Without it, it would be impossible to explain God’s omniscient.

Now an open question: The meaning of the verse is clear, but have you ever heard of anuṣṭhātṛdaśāpanna as indicating “normal people”?

On Veṅkaṭanātha, see here. On Veṅkaṭanātha’s Seśvaramīmāṃsā see this short introduction on my previous blog. In this post on my previous blog you can find a basic bibliography about Pūrva Mīmāṃsā. This post in my previous blog is a provocative introduction to Pūrva Mīmāṃsā philosophy. On mystical experience, I really enjoyed this blogpost by Helen De Cruz.