Mysticism
The experience religion tries to contain
Description
Mysticism is the term Western scholars settled on in the nineteenth century to describe a particular kind of report that recurs across religious traditions. The reports have a recognizable shape. Some practice or condition long meditation, prayer, fasting, illness, sometimes nothing at all produces an experience in which the ordinary boundaries of self and world dissolve, in which the practitioner reports a direct apprehension of something larger, undivided, often described as sacred. The vocabulary varies. Christians call it union with God. Hindus call it the recognition of brahman. Buddhists describe it as awakening. Sufis speak of fana, the annihilation of the self in the divine. The descriptions differ enough that scholars argue about whether they are pointing at the same thing, but the family resemblance is unmistakable.
What complicates the topic is the relationship between this kind of experience and the religious institutions that produce most of the reporters. Mystics within established traditions have always been awkward figures. Their authority comes from direct experience rather than ordained position. Their claims sometimes diverge from approved doctrine. Their followers occasionally start movements that the institution then has to absorb or expel. The history of mysticism inside organized religion is partly a history of negotiation what kinds of mystical claims the tradition will accept, what kinds it will moderate, what kinds it will burn at the stake.
The contemporary moment has added another layer. Western interest in mystical experience has grown as religious affiliation has declined, partly because mysticism's emphasis on direct experience over institutional belonging fits a culture that no longer trusts institutions. Neuroscience has begun studying mystical states with imaging technology. Psychedelic research, after a half-century moratorium, has produced replicated findings that high-dose psilocybin can reliably induce experiences indistinguishable from classical mystical reports. What this means about the nature of the experience is one of the questions the field is currently working through.
The question we're asking: what mysticism is, where its core reports come from, and what to make of the contemporary attempt to study it scientifically.
What we'll see: the major mystical figures, the institutional tension, the neuroscience, and what resists measurement.
Table of contents
01The mystical reports
The corpus of mystical writing across traditions is large enough that a few representative figures have to stand in for the rest. Meister Eckhart, the German Dominican of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, preached a Christian mysticism centered on what he called the birth of the Word in the soul, in which the distinction between the soul and God dissolved into a single act of knowing. Some of his sermons were condemned by the church after his death, partly because the language of identity between the soul and God was hard to square with orthodox theology, but the writings survived and became foundational for later Christian and post-Christian mysticism.
John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, gave the tradition some of its most precise vocabulary. His Dark Night of the Soul describes a process in which the ordinary supports of religious feeling are stripped away, leaving the practitioner in a state of apparent abandonment that turns out to be a deeper purification. His Spiritual Canticle describes the union that follows. The technical care of the writing the distinctions between the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the spirit, between active and passive purifications gives a sense of how seriously the tradition treated its own reports.
02The institutional tension
Established religions have a problem with mystics. The problem is structural rather than personal. An institution that claims authority through ordained office and approved doctrine has to handle people whose authority comes from somewhere it cannot regulate. The Catholic Church developed a substantial machinery for this the canonization process, the office of the inquisitor, the careful distinction between approved and disapproved mysticism and the machinery worked imperfectly. Joan of Arc was burned in 1431 and canonized in 1920. Meister Eckhart was condemned and is now studied in seminaries. Teresa of Avila was investigated repeatedly and is now a Doctor of the Church.
The pattern repeats across traditions. Sufi mystics like al-Hallaj, executed in Baghdad in 922 for declaring I am the Truth, were condemned in their own time and revered later. Jewish mysticism developed inside the rabbinic tradition with periodic tensions and occasional outbreaks Sabbatai Zevi's seventeenth-century messianic movement nearly tore the community apart. Even Buddhism, which has more tolerance for direct experience than the Abrahamic traditions, has had to manage figures whose realizations went outside accepted lines.
03Neuroscience and psychedelics
Until recently, the academic study of mysticism was confined mostly to history, theology, and comparative religion. Over the past two decades that has changed. Andrew Newberg and his collaborators began using brain imaging in the late 1990s to study the neural correlates of meditative and contemplative states, observing characteristic changes in the parietal lobe, the prefrontal cortex, and the default mode network. The findings did not settle whether the experiences were veridical, but they did establish that something measurable was happening, which had not always been granted.
The more substantial shift came from psychedelic research. Studies at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London beginning in the early 2000s found that high doses of psilocybin in supportive settings produced experiences that volunteers, including many who had no prior interest in religion, described in language indistinguishable from the classical mystical reports dissolution of self-other boundaries, sense of unity, encounter with something sacred, profound sense of significance. The Hopkins studies, published from 2006 onward, found that these experiences were rated by participants as among the most personally meaningful events of their lives, comparable in significance to the birth of a first child.
04What resists measurement
Even if the neuroscience continues to develop, there are aspects of the mystical reports that the current methods cannot reach. The first is that mystical experience as reported is a first-person affair. Brain imaging can show what is happening in the parietal lobe; it cannot show what the experience is like from the inside. The hard problem of consciousness, which remains unsolved in any form, sits squarely in the middle of any attempt to reduce the mystical report to its neural correlate. Whether subjective experience can be fully captured by third-person methods is a question philosophy has not settled.
The second is that mystical reports across traditions claim something more than an unusual brain state — they claim contact with what is. The reports are not phenomenological for the mystics. They are ontological. The practitioner who reports union with God is not describing a state of mind. They are describing what they take to be a discovery about the structure of reality. Whether this claim is true is not something a scanner can decide, and the framing in which it could be decided is part of what is being argued about.
05Conclusion
Mysticism is the part of religious life that most clearly survives the loss of religious institutions, partly because it never really belonged to them in the first place. The reports recur across traditions that have nothing else in common, suggesting either that the human nervous system is capable of a particular state that gets variously interpreted, or that the state corresponds to something that does not depend on any particular tradition for its existence. Both readings are still in play, and the contemporary scientific investigation of mystical states has, if anything, made the question more interesting rather than less.