Why Science Needs to Take Seriously the Mystical Experience

What I always find somewhat annoying is how we conflate so easily the lived first-person knowledge, a subjective direct perception of the spiritual experience, with religious or philosophical speculation. We often fail to make the distinction between religion and spirituality. While science is about hard facts, not beliefs, God isn’t an experience but a matter of belief, so the saying goes (often also among religious minded.) A third option is rarely considered: Between the material facts of science and religious beliefs or theological speculations, there is also the whole experiential dimension of the mystical tradition.

Let me clarify the distinction.

There is a difference between an experience and a belief. You don’t say that the sensation of heat and cold is a philosophical speculation. Right? We don’t consider the feeling of love and anger, joy and grief, rage or compassion, etc. a ‘speculation’ or a ‘theory.’ Right? If you smash your finger with a hammer you won’t tell people that the feeling you perceive is an ‘assumption’ or a ‘philosophical hypothesis’. Right? That awful pain is a damned real experience, and nobody will be able to convince you that it is only an ‘intellectual fantasy.’

And yet, this is the kind of reasoning that we apply to mystical experiences. We feel compelled to mentalize everything by sweeping this first-person subjective experience under the carpet as an ’illusion’ or ‘fantasy’ of the mind. But is the subjective mystical account only a self-delusionary religious philosophical speculation?

This simplistic and almost derogatory intellectual attitude toward spiritual knowledge has its historical and cultural roots. After the Age of Enlightenment, also called the ‘age of reason’–that is, the period in the 18^th century that ignited the scientific revolution–it has become a common understanding that we should separate religious thinking from the rational, analytic, and empirical sciences. Religion is based on faith, or theological speculation, while science investigates reality with experimental and evidence-based practices. This separation between religion and science freed society not only from religious dogma but also allowed it to flourish in directions that were previously considered inadmissible. More generally, it allowed us to develop a political, philosophical, and, especially, scientific autonomy from religious thinking that ignited a further transformation leading to the industrial revolution. Isolating religion from other human practical and intellectual activities has delivered a great service to humanity: A material and even political progress that preached fraternity, equality, and freedom. The latter aspect remains until nowadays largely wishful thinking but, undoubtedly, after the ages of religious obscurantism, witch-hunts, and irrational superstitions, some progress has been made and this became one of the pillars of modern secularism upon which principles of democracy and human rights were built.

However, this being said, the question is, how far was and is the first-person spiritual insight and the mystical experience a ‘religious speculation’? One thing is the mystical ‘experience’ or a ‘subjective realization’ (name it...), and another thing is the interpretation and eventually the philosophical speculation that follows from it.

To keep my reasoning still secular, an easy philosophical, still non-mystical, example could be Berkeley's idealism and which he developed from his experience of heat and cold. Berkeley's maintained that the sensory experience of heat and cold is a subjective construct, rather than an objective quality of the external world. One might agree or disagree with this philosophical theory of idealism–that is, the philosophical construct based on that experience–but one cannot deny Berkely of having had the very concrete sensory experience of heat or cold. There is a very clear-cut distinction between a first-person experience, sensation, or feeling, and the theory, hypothesis, or philosophical conjecture and the intellectual model of reality following from it.

Now, let me make a somewhat less easy example based on a spiritual insight that several mystics throughout all ages and cultures claim to have had, namely that the nature of reality is pure consciousness. From Plotinus or Meister Eckhart to the Indian Advaita-Vedanta or the Buddhist teachings of ‘emptiness,’ despite cultural and conceptual nuances, there is a common thread. These mystics claim that, ultimately, there is only one indivisible reality underlying all the multiplicity and diversity of the universe. Even our sense of subjectivity, this individual we call “I” and so strongly identify with, is an illusion created in this universal consciousness by a sort of ‘exclusive concentration’ in itself.

This might sound weird. My ‘self’ doesn’t have at all the sensation to be the projection of a ‘higher Self.’ My personality feels pretty much like an isolated individual separated from all others. In fact, we are entitled to believe that what these mystics are talking about can’t be other than a hallucination. So, be it.

But the point I’m trying to make here is not that of convincing you of the truthfulness and accuracy of this claim but rather that it is not just metaphysical intellectual speculation dictated by a religious belief system. Even though the account of the mystical experience that goes beyond words must necessarily be rendered with words to be communicated and may be colored by the cultural and historical context, this doesn’t imply that the experience is a theological pipedream. The experience of the subject identifying as a ‘super-subject’ is as real as Berkely's experience of heat and cold. It is not an intellectual 'model' of the universe, rather it is the experiential account of several mystics that report themselves being an individual soul as a 'selection' of a universal Soul. The theory, or model of reality deriving from it may not fit into our worldview and dominant paradigm but this claim is not derived from a speculative logical inference, it is the account of a lived experience. You might also downplay it as a ‘hallucination’ but also a hallucination isn’t a theory, it remains a lived experience.

That might remind us of the question: “Did God speak to you in a dream, or did you have a dream that God spoke to you?” Can we know? From a scientific and purely rational perspective, we can’t. But nobody would call the dream itself a ‘theory’ or a ‘metaphysical speculation’. It is an experience occurring in a certain state of consciousness  And it is not a 'model' either, in the sense that it is not an intellectual hypothesis, but is a non-inferential report of a lived experience, like claiming to be conscious, sentient, seeing a color, having feelings, having a burning sensation, etc.

Of course, we might insist by saying that mystical experiences are only a 'dream' or an illusion. But then we might also question how far our ordinary experiences in the normal conscious waking state with all its sensory subjective perceptions of reality are supposed to be less deceptive? When I look at a chair, do I see the chair as it is? I have already answered this question in a previous essay.

But, again, the point I’m trying to make here is that it is time to take the first-person accounts of at least some spiritual figures more seriously, also from the scientific perspective, and without branding them as mere fantasies or superstitious religious speculations. Taking it seriously doesn’t mean believing in it blindly but at least being open to it and testing whether and how far they might eventually give us some insight into reality, and that a purely third-person perspective empirical science can’t.

For example, from the account of several spiritual masters, one can infer that consciousness is not a brain epiphenomenon but rather that the brain is a ‘channel’ or an ‘interface’ that bridges the material universe with this universal consciousness. Or that there is a distinction between consciousness, mind, life, and matter, contrary to what science assumes (almost dogmatically) to be the case, namely that everything must be reducible to the workings of matter. Or that evolution is a teleological process driven behind the veil of appearances by a spirit in matter (a very different conception of evolution that creationists believe in.) Or that there is no real separation and that ‘all is one’, something reminiscent of a non-local realism of quantum mechanics. Or that divine action is always present in all physical phenomena as well, contrary to the mechanistic and strictly deterministic assumption of science.

In these mystical accounts there is a whole spiritual dynamical universe that does not contradict science but, on the contrary, complements it. We don’t need to believe in anything or embrace any religious faith to appreciate it. It isn’t even necessary to prove experimentally that these things are true or false. You might then ask what could scientists possibly gain from that, if their approach to reality doesn’t change pragmatically, experimentally, or empirically in their daily practice in a laboratory, observatory, or in developing testable theories?

My only answer is: Let us only take the mystical experience seriously and see where and how far it leads us. What we see and discover about the world depends very much on our more or less unaware assumptions, presuppositions, and paradigms. Sometimes to see what is in front of our noses we need a change of viewpoint rather than new means or theories. If we change, or at least relax some of our assumptions about reality an entirely new and previously invisible universe might disclose itself in front of us.