When You Feel One with Everything—Is That Real?
What Is a Mystical Experience?
One evening, twelve-year-old Maya lay on a blanket in her backyard, staring at the stars. Suddenly, the hard border of her own body seemed to soften. She was not just looking at the universe; she was the universe, and everything was one. The feeling was more real and alive than anything she had ever known. But what was that? A glimpse of a hidden reality, or a strange trick of her own brain?
Maya had what philosophers call a mystical experience. The word “mystical” can be tricky, but in philosophy it usually means a powerful event in which a person seems to directly encounter a reality that ordinary senses cannot reach. Often, it involves a sense of oneness — what thinkers call a unitive experience, where the usual split between “me” and “everything else” melts away. Some experiences happen with the eyes open, blending into what you see: that’s extrovertive. Others happen in deep inner stillness, without any sights or sounds: that’s introvertive.
Not all mystical experiences are the same. A Christian nun may describe union with God while still feeling distinct from God (a dualistic experience). A Hindu follower of the 8th-century philosopher Shankara may realize that her deepest self, the atman, is identical with the one eternal reality, Brahman — a fully monistic union. A Zen Buddhist might experience the world without any conceptual labels, directly seeing the “thusness” of things. These accounts all count as mystical, even though the details differ.
Three Strange Features: Noetic, Ineffable, and Paradoxical
Philosophers like William James (1842–1910) noticed that mystical experiences tend to come with three puzzling traits.
The first is noetic quality — a strong, gut-level sense that you have gained genuine knowledge. During the experience, it feels “more real than real.” A mystic may feel certain that all things are connected or that her own self is an illusion. The certainty is so sharp that it can change her whole life.
The second is ineffability. Mystics often insist that you cannot really describe what happened. Any words you try — “light,” “love,” “void” — fall short. Some philosophers think “ineffable” simply means that the experience is very hard to capture, not that absolutely nothing can be said. Others argue that saying “X is ineffable” lands you in a puzzle: you’ve just said something about X! This is usually solved by treating “ineffable” as a second-order label about how our ordinary words fail, not a secret description.
The third trait is paradoxicality. Mystics sometimes say things that sound self-contradictory, like “the soundless sound” or “the empty fullness.” Often this is not meant as nonsense but as a way to shake up ordinary thinking so that you step outside your usual mental boxes. It is like a Zen exercise that keeps denying every fixed idea until only the direct experience remains.
The Common Core: Do All Mystics Share the Same Experience?
If a Christian mystic, a Sufi saint, and a Buddhist arhat all report profound unitive moments, are they describing the same underlying experience, just dressed in different cultural words? That is the question at the heart of a long debate.
Essentialists say yes. The philosopher Walter Stace (1886–1967) argued that there is a universal “common core” to mystical experiences. He believed that across all cultures, people have a basic extrovertive experience — sensing the Oneness through the world — and a deeper introvertive experience of pure, empty consciousness. In Stace’s view, a theist who speaks of “union with God” and a Buddhist who speaks of “emptiness” are really having the same silent inner state; they just interpret it differently afterward.
A stronger version of essentialism focuses on what some call a pure consciousness event (PCE). This would be an experience entirely empty of all thoughts, images, and sensations — just wakeful awareness with no content at all. The American philosopher Robert Forman has argued that such content-free events really happen and are the deepest core of mysticism. He points to reports from medieval Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327/8), who spoke of a “forgetting” of everything, and to ancient Buddhist descriptions of unconditioned awareness.
Culture Constructs: The View That Experience Gets Shaped
The opposite camp is called constructivism. Its central claim: your cultural background does not just add labels after the experience — it actually builds the experience itself from the ground up. The 20th-century philosopher Steven Katz argued that because a Christian mystic grows up with ideas about a personal God, and a Buddhist grows up with ideas about non-self, they cannot have the same raw experience. The concepts you already have shape the very face of what you encounter.
Constructivists also doubt that a PCE is possible. Being human, they argue, means that all consciousness is consciousness of something. If you truly emptied your mind of everything, you would be unconscious, not mystically aware. Moreover, even if a PCE happened, how could you know it? There would be nothing to observe and nothing to remember. When you “come back,” you would only guess that a blank gap occurred — and that could be confused with simply dozing off.
Defenders of PCEs push back: perhaps your brain can enter a “deautomized” state through meditation that eventually strips away cultural conditioning, leaving awareness itself. Neuroscience hints that distinct brain patterns appear during such deep states. And maybe you can know you had a PCE, because immediately after it ends you notice a “before” and an “after” with a transformative shift — a dramatic peace that could not be explained by sleep.
Can We Trust Mystical Experiences?
Even if mystical experiences feel utterly convincing, should we believe that they reveal genuine truths? This is the big epistemological question.
Some philosophers defend mystical experiences by comparing them to sense-perception. The philosopher William Alston (1921–2009) argued that we have many doxastic practices — socially established ways of forming beliefs from certain kinds of input. For example, we believe what our eyes tell us unless something overrides that belief. Alston argued that it is equally rational to form beliefs based on mystical experiences as long as the practice has not been shown to be unreliable. Since no one has proven that all mystical experiences are mistaken, it can be reasonable for a mystic to trust them.
Others push the Argument from Experience: the fact that so many people across eras and cultures independently report similar experiences gives at least some evidence that these experiences are real. When combined with the good fruits in a mystic’s life — increased compassion, courage, and calm — the evidence grows stronger.
But there is a powerful objection: religious diversity. Mystics make conflicting claims. One says the ultimate reality is a personal loving God; another says it is an impersonal void (Brahman or sunyata). They cannot both be literally true. This suggests that many mystics must be misinterpreting their own experiences. If so, the experiences lose much of their authority as a direct source of knowledge. Some thinkers, like John Hick (1922–2012), propose that all traditions are contacting the same indescribable “Real,” but each culture experiences it through a different mask. Others doubt this rescue works.
Neuroscience adds another layer. When a mystic loses her sense of self, brain scans show decreased activity in areas linked to body-boundary and separation. That does not, by itself, show that the experience is just a brain glitch — all experiences, including ordinary seeing, have brain correlates. But it does mean that a natural explanation is available, and this makes purely spiritual claims need more careful support.
Why It Still Matters: Moments of Awe in Your Life
What about Maya, the girl under the stars? She may never join a monastery or study Advaita Vedanta. But more and more young people today explore meditation apps or feel a sudden, overwhelming sense of wonder in nature. This is sometimes called secular mysticism — awe and connectedness pursued without any belief in a supernatural realm. Psychedelic therapy is also being studied, and patients there often report experiences indistinguishable from classical mystical ones.
These modern developments make the old philosophical questions urgent again. If your sense of oneness is purely a brain pattern, can it still make your life richer? Absolutely. But if it sometimes really does put you in touch with a larger reality — whatever that might be — then ignoring that possibility would be like having a telescope and never looking through it because you assume the stars are only in the lens.
The debate is not settled. And that is exactly why it matters: the next time you feel an unexpected opening — a sunset that makes your own boundaries feel thin, or a quiet moment when “you” seem to dissolve — you will face the very question that mystics and philosophers have been wrestling with for thousands of years. Is this a peek at something true, or just a beautiful trick of the mind?
Think about it
- If you had an experience that felt absolutely real but nobody else could verify it, would you still trust what it told you? Why or why not?
- Could two people from very different cultures have the exact same inner experience, or do the words and stories they grow up with always change what they feel?
- In what ways might feelings of awe or oneness be helpful, even if they don’t reveal any hidden truth?
