Why Science Needs to Take Seriously the Mystical Experience

It's time to Create Bridges Between Earth and Heaven

What I always find somewhat annoying is how easily we conflate lived, first-person knowledge—that is, a direct, subjective perception of spiritual experience—with religious or philosophical speculation. We often fail to distinguish between religion and spirituality. While science deals with hard facts rather than beliefs, God is often framed not as an experience but as a matter of belief, or so the saying goes (even among the religious-minded). A third possibility is rarely considered: Between the material facts of science and religious beliefs or theological speculations lies the whole experiential dimension of mystical tradition.

Let me clarify this distinction.

There is a difference between an experience and a belief. You don’t say that the sensation of heat or cold is a philosophical speculation, right? Nor do we consider feelings such as love, anger, joy, grief, rage, or compassion to be ‘speculations’ or ‘theories.’ If you smash your finger with a hammer, you won’t tell people that the pain you feel is an ‘assumption’ or a ‘philosophical hypothesis,’ right? That awful pain is a concrete, undeniable experience, and nobody can convince you that it is merely an ‘intellectual fantasy.’

And yet, this is precisely the reasoning we often apply to mystical experiences. We feel compelled to rationalize everything, downplaying these first-person, subjective experiences as ‘illusions’ or ‘fantasies’ of the mind.

But is the subjective mystical account really nothing more than self-delusionary religious or philosophical speculation?

This simplistic and sometimes dismissive intellectual attitude toward spiritual knowledge has historical and cultural roots. After the Age of Enlightenment, also called the ‘Age of Reason’, the 18th-century period that ignited the scientific revolution, it became widely accepted that religious thinking should be separated from rational, analytic, and empirical sciences. Religion is based on faith or theological speculation, while science investigates reality through experimental, evidence-based methods. This separation freed society not only from religious dogma but also allowed intellectual and practical development in directions previously deemed inadmissible. More broadly, it enabled the growth of political, philosophical, and scientific autonomy from religious authority, setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Isolating religion from other human activities delivered a great service to humanity: material and political progress that promoted, at least in principle, fraternity, equality, and freedom. While these ideals remain only partially realized, some progress has undeniably been made since the eras of religious obscurantism, witch hunts, and irrational superstitions. This distinction became one of the pillars of modern secularism, upon which principles of democracy and human rights were built.

That said, the question remains: To what extent is first-person spiritual insight, or mystical experience, merely a ‘religious speculation’? One thing is the mystical experience, or subjective realization, another is the interpretation or philosophical speculation that may follow from it.

To keep this reasoning secular, consider a straightforward, non-mystical example: Berkeley’s idealism. Berkeley developed his philosophical theory from his sensory experience of heat and cold. He maintained that these sensory experiences are subjective constructs, rather than objective qualities of the external world. One may agree or disagree with this philosophical model, but one cannot deny that Berkeley had the concrete sensory experience of heat or cold. There is a clear distinction between first-person experience, sensation, or feeling, and the theory, hypothesis, or intellectual model of reality that one may construct based on it.

A more subtle example comes from spiritual insights claimed by mystics across cultures and ages, namely that the nature of reality is pure consciousness. From Plotinus or Meister Eckhart to the Indian Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist teachings of ‘emptiness,’ despite cultural and conceptual differences, a common thread emerges. These mystics claim that ultimately there is a single, indivisible reality underlying all multiplicity and diversity. Even our sense of subjectivity—the individual “I” with which we strongly identify—is, according to these teachings, an illusion created within universal consciousness through a sort of ‘exclusive concentration in itself.’

This might sound unusual. My sense of ‘self’ does not at all feel like a projection of a ‘higher Self.’ My personality feels entirely like an isolated individual, separate from all others. In fact, we are fully entitled to believe that what these mystics describe could be nothing more than a hallucination. So be it.

But the point I want to make is not to convince anyone of the truth or accuracy of these claims, but rather to emphasize that they are not merely metaphysical speculations dictated by a religious belief system. Even though mystical experiences, by their very nature, must be expressed in words to be communicated, and even though these accounts may be shaped by historical and cultural contexts, this does not mean the experience itself is an abstract fantasy. The experience of the subject identifying as a ‘super-subject’ is as real as Berkeley’s experience of heat or cold. It is not an intellectual ‘model’ of the universe; rather, it is the experiential account of mystics who report themselves as a ‘selection’ of a universal Soul.

The theory or model of reality derived from these experiences may not align with our current worldview or dominant paradigm. But the claim itself is not a product of speculative reasoning; it is the report of a lived experience. One might downplay it as a hallucination, but even a hallucination is not a theory, it remains a genuine, lived experience.

This brings to mind the question: “Did God speak to you in a dream, or did you have a dream in which God spoke to you?” Can we know? From a scientific, purely rational perspective, we cannot. Yet nobody would call the dream itself a ‘theory’ or a ‘metaphysical speculation.’ It is an experience occurring in a particular state of consciousness. And it is not a ‘model’ either, in the sense of an intellectual hypothesis; it is a non-inferential report of a lived experience, just as one might report being conscious, sentient, seeing a color, feeling an emotion, or perceiving a burning sensation.

Of course, one might insist that mystical experiences are nothing more than ‘dreams’ or illusions. But then we might also ask: how much less deceptive are our ordinary experiences in the waking state, with all their sensory and subjective perceptions of reality? When I look at a chair, do I see the chair as it truly is? I have already addressed this question in a previous essay.

Once again, the point I want to make is that it is time to take the first-person accounts of at least some spiritual figures more seriously, even from a scientific perspective, without dismissing them as mere fantasies or outdated superstitious religious speculations. Taking these accounts seriously does not mean believing in them blindly; it means being open to them and exploring whether, and to what extent, they might offer insights into reality that a purely third-person, empirical approach cannot.

For example, from the accounts of various spiritual masters, one might infer that consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon of the brain, but that the brain functions as a ‘channel’ or ‘interface’ bridging the material universe with universal consciousness. Or that consciousness, mind, life, and matter are distinct, contrary to the scientific assumption that everything can ultimately be reduced to matter. One could even consider that evolution might have a teleological aspect, driven, behind the veil of appearances, by a ‘spirit in matter’ (a very different conception from the creationist view). Mystical accounts also suggest that there is no true separation, that ‘all is one,’ a notion reminiscent of non-local realism in quantum mechanics. Finally, these perspectives imply that divine action is always present in physical phenomena, contrary to the strictly mechanistic and deterministic assumptions often made in science.

In these mystical accounts, one encounters an entire spiritual, dynamic dimension of reality that does not necessarily contradict science but may, in fact, complement it. We need not believe in it or subscribe to any religious doctrine to take it seriously. Nor is it strictly necessary to prove such claims experimentally in order to consider their potential relevance. One might then ask: What could scientists possibly gain from this, if their practical, empirical, and experimental approach to reality remains unchanged in the laboratory, observatory, or in the development of testable theories?

My answer is simply this: let us take mystical experience seriously and see where and how far it leads us. What we perceive and discover about the world depends to a great extent on our often unexamined assumptions, presuppositions, and paradigms. At times, recognizing what lies directly before us requires not new instruments or theories, but a shift in perspective. If we are willing to question, or at least relax, some of our underlying assumptions about reality, an entirely new and previously unnoticed dimension of the world may reveal itself.