Why Can’t Mystics Agree on What God Feels Like?
A Warmth That Is Not Hot: Mystics Describe God
In the sixteenth century, some Christian mystics spoke of a stage of prayer called the “prayer of quiet.” Those who reached it reported something remarkable: God felt present not as a thought or a picture in the mind, but as a tangible sensation inside the body. The philosopher Nelson Pike (1928–2010) collected descriptions in which God was felt “in that place within the body where one normally experiences oneself to be.” It was like a gentle heat, but also a kind of hearing and a soft fragrance — all at once. There were no actual sounds or smells, yet the inner feel was rich enough to be compared to seeing, touching, and smelling.
Philosophers call this “what-it’s-like” quality of an experience its phenomenology. When you bite into a lemon, the sourness and the puckering sensation are part of the phenomenology. Mystical experiences, too, have a felt character — but an unusual one. The big question is whether that inner feel can be trusted. Does it point to a real encounter with something beyond the mind? Or is it just a swirl of feelings produced by the brain?
The Vocabulary Problem: Can You Describe a Taste of Honey?
Imagine trying to explain the taste of honey to someone who has never eaten anything sweet. You’d struggle to find the right words. But at least you could both go and taste honey, speak about it, and build a shared language for its flavor. The philosopher William Alston (1921–2009) argued that mystical experiences face a deeper obstacle. We cannot produce an encounter with God simply by setting up the right laboratory conditions. You cannot dial up a divine presence the way you can open a jar of honey.
As a result, we lack a reliable, public vocabulary for describing the qualia — the felt qualities — of mystical perception, which Alston used to mean a direct experience of God’s presence. Some critics take this to mean that mystical experiences are too vague to be good evidence for anything real. But Alston turned the objection on its head. If God is a personal being who freely chooses to be present, then it makes perfect sense that we cannot force a meeting. The absence of a common vocabulary is exactly what you’d expect if the experience is genuine. It does not prove the experience is empty — only that it cannot be summoned like a breeze you can choose to feel by turning your face into the wind.
Spiritual Senses: Hearing Without Ears, Seeing Without Eyes
Despite the difficulty, a tradition running deep in Christian mysticism did develop a vocabulary for the feel of divine encounters. It borrowed from the five ordinary senses. Mystics spoke of spiritual sensations — an inner touch, a taste of divine sweetness, a light seen not with the eyes. Pike mapped three stages of intimacy, each with its own phenomenology: the prayer of quiet, the prayer of union, and rapture. The closer the mystic drew to God, the more the felt qualities shifted.
This common language suggests that mystical experiences are not utterly private. Just as you and a friend can both look at a sunset and agree it is orange, mystics across centuries have converged on similar descriptions — a warmth, a light, a sense of being looked at. The vocabulary is not as precise as that for ordinary sensory experience, but it allows a degree of interpersonal checking. That matters. If the reports can be compared and grouped into patterns, then mystical experience is not a mere jumble of contradictory inner dramas. It may have a structure that points beyond itself.
The Same Core, Different Wrappers? The Lens of Culture
A fierce debate divides thinkers who study mysticism worldwide. Walter Stace (1886–1967) argued that underneath all the different reports lies a single, universal experience. In his view, mystics everywhere touch a state of “undifferentiated unity” — pure consciousness with no thoughts, no shapes, no separate self. Only afterward do they interpret that empty vastness using their own culture’s ideas: a Hindu says it was union with Brahman; a Christian calls it oneness with God. On this picture, the experience is the same, but the stories we tell about it diverge.
Steven Katz (b. 1944) and others pushed back. They insisted that the concepts you bring to an experience shape the experience itself, not just the words you use afterward. A lifetime of hearing about a personal, loving God will sculpt your inner world so that when you reach a mystical state, it feels different from the state of someone raised with impersonal ideas of the ultimate. The philosopher John Hick (1922–2012) gave this idea a Kantian twist. He proposed that all major religions encounter the same ultimate reality — which he called the Real — but each tradition sees it through its own set of thought-lenses. Christians experience the Real as Trinitarian; Hindus experience it as Brahman. The Real itself is beyond all human concepts; we never meet it directly, only clothed in the culture-specific appearances.
Hick’s picture is elegant, but it raises sharp questions. If every religion’s experience is a filtered appearance, why believe it connects to anything beyond culture at all? A skeptic could say religious experience is simply a product of your society, with no transcendent reference. Many believers also find the view unsettling. If the symbols of your faith are just one set of appearances among many, with no better claim to the way things really are, can they still inspire love, trust, and a life of devotion? If you thought the warm presence you felt in prayer was merely a culturally shaped appearance, would you still kneel?
Feelings That Reveal: Emotions as a Window to the Divine
So far we have asked whether mystical experiences have a describable feel. But what if the feeling itself is the way God is made known? The theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) argued that the divine shows up first and foremost as a peculiar emotional response. He called it the numinous — a blend of overwhelming awe, shivering fascination, and a dread unlike any ordinary fear. This feeling, Otto thought, directly presents a reality beyond the self. You don’t infer that God exists from the shudder; the shudder is the experience of encountering the holy.
This view challenges a common model of emotions, which says an emotion has two parts: a thought (like “that dog might bite”) and a feeling that follows (like tightness in the chest). On that model, a religious emotion would be just a felt reaction to a belief about God, not a genuine perception of God. But many philosophers now suggest that emotions themselves can be a form of seeing. When you feel fear while looking at a snarling dog, the dog becomes more vivid, more attention-grabbing; the fear is part of what makes the danger real to you. In a similar way, the feeling of awe in a vast cathedral or under a star-strewn sky might be a way of registering a presence — not a separate thing added to a thought, but the very lens through which that presence becomes visible.
Such emotional shifts can recolor the whole world. William James (1842–1910) collected reports from converts who said that after a religious change, “Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe…” This isn’t just a change in opinion; it’s a change in the felt texture of ordinary life. Philosophers today speak of existential feelings — background moods, like the grogginess of jet lag, that tint everything you see. A deep spiritual transformation may alter that background, making the world appear new, bright, and meaningful in ways that feel impossible to put into words.
Holy Places and Everyday Life: Finding the Sacred in Stone and Sky
Religious experience isn’t always a direct inward meeting with God. Often it begins with a place. The scholar Thomas Barrie observed that sacred sites around the world are arranged to prepare the visitor: a long path, a series of thresholds, a climb that demands effort. These physical challenges tune your attention and create a mood of serious, focused respect. By the time you reach the sanctuary, your body already expects something important.
Some Christian thinkers have been wary of this idea. If a building feels holy just because it is grand and beautiful, are we confusing architecture for God? Harold Turner distinguished two models. In the Domus Dei idea, a church is a house of God — a magnificent space meant to lift the mind toward heaven. In the Domus Ecclesiae idea, it is simply a meeting place for a community of love. Yet even a plain community hall, Turner noticed, can take on a sacred feel over time because of the lives lived inside it. A young Quaker once admitted that although he didn’t believe a meeting house was especially holy, he still couldn’t bring himself to smoke inside it while cleaning. The history of the place had soaked into his experience.
Nature, too, can speak of the sacred. The philosopher Erazim Kohák argued that walking through a snowy forest at night can make you feel the sheer fact that things exist at all — a sense of contingency and gift. That feeling, he thought, is the lived root of what theologians call divine presence. The world, when experienced deeply, appears not as a dead machine but as a realm full of care — “a sphere of mineness,” as though it had been set in order by someone. On this view, the everyday world itself can become an image of the divine character once we learn to see it with the right kind of attention.
Why It Matters: Your Own Sense of Wonder
These debates are not just about ancient mystics in cloisters. Consider a moment when you felt overwhelmingly small and yet deeply at home — watching the ocean at sunset, standing inside an immense cathedral, or simply lying on your back in the grass and feeling the vastness of the sky. Was that feeling a mere quirk of your brain? Or was it a genuine brush with something that transcends the ordinary world?
If experiences of the sacred are entirely shaped by culture, then every religion’s version is, in a sense, equally valid — and equally distant from the Real itself. That makes it hard to say any one tradition is “truer” than another, but it also raises the worry that religious experience is nothing but a cultural echo. If, on the other hand, some experiences carry a feel that is harder to explain away — a sense of meeting not just beauty, but a presence — then the phenomenology of such moments might matter profoundly. It would mean that how you attend to the world, and what you learn to feel, can open or close a window onto whatever is most real. Figuring out which picture is right isn’t just a puzzle for professors. It’s a question that sits at the heart of living an awakened life.
Think about it
- If you’ve ever felt a sense of awe staring at the stars, does that feeling tell you something true about the universe, or is it just your brain reacting?
- Could one religion’s way of seeing the sacred be clearer than another’s, even if the experiences feel deeply real to everyone inside them?
- Can a feeling ever count as evidence for something invisible? Why or why not?
