Robert K. C. Forman (born 1947) is an American scholar of religion and a prominent figure in the study of mysticism and consciousness. He is the founding executive director of the Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change and a former professor at the City University of New York. He is best known for his defense of the "perennialist" position in mystical studies and his extensive critique of constructivism.
Forman was raised in Baltimore. He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University.
His academic career includes a professorship in the Department of Religion at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has also held faculty or lecturing positions at Vassar College, the City College of New York, the New School for Social Research, and Union Theological Seminary.
Forman was awarded an honorary doctorate from Lund University in Sweden in 2010 for his contributions to the study of consciousness mysticism. He served as a founding co-editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and was a founding member of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion.
Forman is a primary critic of the "constructivist" or "contextualist" school of mysticism, a position championed by scholars such as Steven T. Katz and Robert Gimello. The constructivist framework posits that mystical experiences are fundamentally mediated and shaped by a subject's linguistic, cultural, and religious background. In his 1990 work, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Forman challenged this paradigm by arguing for the existence of unmediated experience.
Forman's critique rests on several philosophical observations. He argues that constructivism often commits the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc by assuming cultural differences must be the cause of experiential differences. To illustrate the distinction between description and experience, he employs the "North Star" and "Pole Star" analogy, asserting that varying linguistic labels do not inherently necessitate different underlying realities. He further identifies the "Pure Consciousness Event" (PCE) as a state where the subject lacks active conceptual thought or language, which he suggests precludes the possibility of cultural mediation. His later research expanded these concepts to include the "Dualistic Mystical State" (DMS), characterized by a sustained "inner quiet" maintained during external activity.
Lola Williamson has criticized Forman's description of transcendence as "a state of wakeful though contentless existence," noting that experiences reported by meditation practitioners often contain variations and specific content. Yaroslav Komarovski (2015) has argued that the PCE concept has limited applicability in Tibetan Buddhism, where the realization of emptiness involves specific techniques and conditioning processes that differ from Forman's model. Azadeh Vatanpour (2020) has also assessed the PCE and DMS within the context of Sufism, noting that "realization" (taḥqëq) involves distinct ontological frameworks.