Mystical Experiences: About Encountering the Sacred
The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.
-Ken Wilber, Grace and Grit
(If you have Medium membership you can also read this article here.)
Some scholars like Ken Wilber claim that the core of religion lies in direct experience, in what is commonly coined a “mystical experience”.
Firstly, it should be pointed out that there is not one type of mystical experience, but infinitely many. So, there will be no definition of “the mystical experience”, instead I’ll attempt to give you an impression of what it may encompass and why it is so essential for understanding human nature in the context of reality.
Mystical experiences may be described as moments of deep connectedness, insight, or transcendence that go far beyond everyday experience and ordinary consciousness.
While these experiences are often described as ineffable, they are not called mystical because they are mysterious. Surely they are, as they are pointing to the infinite mystery life truly is.
But the term in its origins refers to Mysterion, the Greek word for secret, as in these states, it was said, that the nature of reality was revealed through direct experience.
A traveller peers through the veil looking in the firmament looking at its underyling workings. Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1888)
William James, the father of American psychology (and a pious Christian), wrote in a letter to his friend Ranking:
The mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie in the mystical experience of the individual, taking the world mystical in a very wide sense.
All theologies and all eclecticisms are secondary growths superimposed […]. For this they are also indestructible by intellectual arguments and criticisms.
I attach the mystical or religious consciousness to the possession of an extended subliminal self, with a thin partition through which messages make interruption.
We are thus made convincingly aware of the presence of a sphere of life larger and more powerful than our usual consciousness, with which the latter is nevertheless continuous.
The impressions and impulsions and emotions ad excitements which we thence receive help us to live, they found invincible assurance of a world beyond the sense, they melt our hearts and communicate significance and value to everything that makes us happy. They do this for the individual who has them, and other individuals follow him.
Religion in this way is absolutely indestructible.
- William James[1]
(for references to the sources check the footnotes at the end)
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash.
Technologies Of the Sacred
Mystical Experiences have famously been reported by countless Christian Saints, Buddhist monks, Hindu sages, Jewish Kabbalists, Islamic Sufi mystics, Shamanic practitioners, and many people without confession or belief.
This is no coincidence. The ability to experience the extraordinary, the transcendent, the mystical is something available to every human.
All of the great religions and most Indigenous traditions include what Stan Grof called “‘technologies of the sacred”. In modern terms these could also be called psycho-technologies, techniques to reach altered states of consciousness (holotropic states as Grof calls them). [2]
While some of these experiences may come about spontanously, there are concrete paths that can take you there.
Mystical experiences have been shown to be reliably reproducible through different means such as psychedelics, meditation, breathwork, rhythmic music, and many others.
Ken Wilber claims that while most religions have a codified set of rules, a doctrine, mythical stories, and institutions constituting the outer “exoteric” teachings, most religions also have a hidden “esoteric” core, which contains specific teachings and psycho-technologies to reach higher states of consciousness. These are techniques to directly experience the divine or sacred to learn, grow, and heal. [3]
They are a universal constant of human existence, in which the “reducing valve” (Aldous Huxley)[4]of our ordinary mind opens up so that consciousness can expand and allow the transcendent to infuse the immanent as the limitations of the ordinary mind cease.
The idea behind Huxley’s reducing valve is that our ordinary mind (“mind at large” as he called it) has developed due to evolutionary constraints to show us exactly what we need to survive. This makes perfect sense from the perspective of evolution, but of course, there is much more out there we are just not perceiving.
Out of the electromagnetic spectrum of waves, which covers wavelengths from billionths of millimeters, the range of X-rays, to radio waves meters in length, our optical apparatus only responds to the very small range of 0.4 to 0.7 thousandths of millimeters. Only this very little sector can be received by our eyes and be perceived as light.
-Albert Hoffman[5]
Our “human reality” then is nothing more than an interface we are using to navigate a much vaster and far more complex reality. This is also what some current scientists, including the well-renowned cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, propose (here’s a link to his TED Talk explaining this idea).
Mystical experiences seem to speak very well to that idea as they enable us to go beyond ordinary perception, including space, time, and the self, and to become aware of the complexity and connectedness of all things.
Insight, bliss, and revelation are commonly associated with these experiences.
The Origins of Mysticism in the West And the Perennialist Idea
The mystical experiences, in all their varieties, seem to constitute an experiential core, a foundation of direct revelation, that enabled most if not all religious traditions.
This claim, sounding a little out there for some, can quite easily be verified on an empirical basis taking a closer look at the mystical core of the great world religions.
The Sufi Dervishes developed a technique of whirling, the Hindu Yogis used Soma in ancient times and then went on to use Asanas, breathing practices, and meditation, Buddhist practitioners used meditation and sacred plants, Shamans worked with Sweat Lodges, plants, drumming, and other means.
There are even some reasonable arguments to show that the Christian eucharist in the first centuries A.D. was a psychedelic sacrament until the church authorities reclaimed their monopoly as the dealers of the divine. [6]
Mysticism tends to be rather counter-cultural and does not lend itself well to power structures. It’s obvious why the church did not like the idea of everyone having access to that.
The early eucharist may have been a direct continuation of the mystery religions that existed in and around the Mediterranean from very early on (at least the 4th millennium B.C.) until they were stomped out by the Christian rule of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D.
In many of these, a revelatory direct experience of reality as part of an initiation played a central role. The most famous one was Eleusis which I have explored in other articles already.
(Here’s my series of articles on this incredibly important Athenian institution.)
What many may not know is that apart from the many mentions of mystical states in writings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, the Kabbalah, and Christianity there is a whole literature of Neoplatonist philosophers of the first centuries A.D., including the most well-known among them, Plotinus, who reported what he called “oneing” (henôsis), experiences that would later be coined as “unio mystica” in light of the Christian mysticism that followed from this tradition. [7]
As it is described it was an incredibly powerful non-dual, apophatic experience beyond any subject-object duality, a mystical union with “the one”, or the ground of all being. Many of the Neoplatonists (like Proclus and Plotinus) took this experience to be the highest goal of all philosophical endeavors.
This is especially fascinating because they are accepted as serious philosophers in modern terms who saw themselves as continuing the lineage and school of Plato. If they were actually in line with the original Platonic teaching and ideas is much less clear and another topic altogether.
The understanding of mysticism as we know it today only developed in later times during the Middle Ages.
Important in this context was the perennialist idea or tradition (of which Aldous Huxley was a famous proponent), which essentially claimed all mystics experienced the same Ultimate Truth clothed in different ways.
The Idea is that the mystical experience truly enables insight and access to levels of reality beyond the ordinary that are universally accessible.
The Faustian search, the eternal quest: Which binds the world, and guides its course? We may never know… But is there a chance to get a glimpse behind the curtain?
In further episodes, I’ll explore the perennial tradition (and the rivaling constructivist approach) in much more detail.
But for now, let’s return to modernity!
The Goodfriday Experiment at Harvard and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire
During the first wave of psychedelic exploration in the 60s, the famous Goodfriday experiment, a double-blind study in which psilocybin mushrooms were given to theology students — those were wild days indeed — took place at Harvard Divinity School. [8]
(Check out the footnotes for links and information)
Consequently the “Mystical Experience Questionaire” (MEQ) was developed to compare and evaluate these experiences. It is still used in some variations to this day to evaluate the participants’ experiences in clinical therapy and studies regarding psychedelic therapy. [9]
A study at Johns Hopkins found that 14 months after the treatment the score at the MEQ Was the single most indicative variable of how successful a session of psychedelic therapy was. [10]
Among many other astonishing results, it has also been shown in multiple studies that a single dose of psilocybin led to a significant decrease in existential distress in terminally ill cancer patients. [11]
The central indicators of the mystical experience questionnaire are:
Unity (Connectedness), Sacredness (Sense of the Sacred), Positive Mood, Transcendence of Time and Space, Ineffability, Noetic Quality (Sense of Gaining Insight), Paradoxicality, Feeling of Reality (Reality of the Experience).
What can we learn from all that?
Mystical experiences seem ubiquitous among all cultures and religions while also revealing something about the core of reality and our being.
They may have even been the starting point of religion when it wasn’t about dogma, power, and politics yet.
“All religion starts in Mysticism and ends in politics” as Richard Rohr said.
After having some of these experiences it may seem that our ordinary consciousness really is nothing but a simulation, a five-sense construct through which we navigate, often clueless of the infinite complexity of the cosmos.
But truth beyond the duality of the mind and the categories of time and space may be accessible after all.
For the adventurer and psychonaut, it may then be reasonable to explore the unreasonable and seek out some of these peak experiences, as Abraham Maslow called them.
(Maslow, the founder of humanistic psychology did some in-depth research on these experiences, just before adding self-transcendence to the top of the final version of the hierarchy of needs.
Interestingly, this is not taught or even mentioned in most introductory psychology classes, instead the model he himself saw as outdated is still the commonly used version.)
This can be done using some of the many psychotechnologies (like meditation, breathing, and plant medicine) proven through the ages; some may be more direct and some may require years of preparation and training.
(Never engage in these powerful practises reckless or unprepared though! Reverence and respect are always key.)
Having some of these peak experiences may offer us a glimpse of who we truly are beyond our conditioning and everyday perception.
It may also offer us deep insight, healing, and inspiration leading to a transformation of the self and a remembrance of our true being.
It is important to remember though that these states and experiences should not become a self-serving purpose or be mere sensation-seeking.
But we don’t have to go to extreme measures or states of consciousness to infuse our ordinary life with something extraordinary.
Bringing more connectedness, wonder, and a sense for the mystery of life into the every day is possible at every turn of existence.
Seeing more of the sacred in the profane, and recognizing the divine in nature and each other, may go a long way towards making the every day a better time and place.
Direct experience of the sacred may help, but after all, it’s the integration of these experiences into the day-to-day that matters most.
And to learn from the wisdom of the sages and mystics, we don’t have to go as far as they did.
Aren’t we all stardust? Don’t we all come from the same source? Photo by Tom Gainor on Unsplash.
As the priest and Jungian analyst, Pittman McGehee put it:
“The mystic is someone who wants or expects to experience the transcendent in his ordinary life.
The mantra of the mystic is:
I want to experience the extraordinary in the ordinary, the miraculous in the mundane, and the sacred camouflaged in the profane.”
I think we can all profit from a little more of that mystical dust sprinkled into the everyday.
[1] Henry James (ed) Letters of William James, v. 2, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, p149–150.
[2] Stan and Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork, 2010, p53
[3] c.f. Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow, Introduction, 2017.
[4] Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large
[5] Albert Hoffman, Chapter 4: The Message of the Eleusinian Mysteries for Today’s World, in: Persephone’s Quest. Entheogens and the Future of Religion, 1986.
[6]Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, see especially Chapter 8.
Also check out this Youtube Video of Brian for a very short intro related to the topic of mysticism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTkRIpR4gAc
[7]Plotin, Enneads V.3.14 & EnneadsIV.9.5.
[8] Check out this brief Youtube Video on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrSs9d9Dne0 or for a long version go and look for the 2015 documentary Psychedelic Mysticism: The Good Friday Experiment & Beyond.
[9] Barrett et al. (2018): Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin.
DOI: doi/10.1177/0269881115609019
[10] Griffiths et al. (2008): Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later.
DOI: doi/10.1177/0269881108094300
[11] Blinderman (2016): Psycho-existential distress in cancer patients: A return to “entheogens”
DOI: doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675761
Algin-Liebes et al. (2020): Long-term follow-up of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for psychiatric and existential distress in patients with life-threatening cancer
DOI: doi.org/10.1177/0269881119897615
