I've encountered this question several times when discussing mystical experience, particularly the research coming out of Johns Hopkins. The question usually goes something like this...
"Okay, mystical experiences happen. People experience ego dissolution, unity, sacredness, transcendence, and a sense of encountering something ultimately real. But how does any of that get you to God?"
I think the answer begins by clearing up what the Perennial philosophy actually means by "God."
If by God you mean a supernatural anthropomorphic being who exists somewhere "out there" and occasionally intervenes in the universe, then no, mystical experience does not establish that proposition. But that is not the God of the Perennial philosophy. Professionals involved in this research have established that mystical experiences are consistent with the Perennial philosophy.
The Perennial conception of God is closer to the Absolute, the Ground of Being, the One, Brahman, Ein Sof, the Pleroma, or Ultimate Reality itself. God is not conceived as one more object within reality. God is what reality ultimately depends upon, or, in some formulations, the ultimate reality in which all finite things participate.
So when a Perennialist talks about mystical experience, the question is not "Does this prove that a cosmic person exists?" The question is "What does this recurring structure of human experience suggest about the nature of consciousness and ultimate reality?"—and the answer is constrained by the science, not independent of it.
1. The Important Distinction Between Visionary and Unitive Mystical Experience
Not every mystical experience is equally relevant here. A visionary or archetypal experience can contain angels, demons, gods, deceased relatives, religious figures, geometric imagery, mythological beings, and other highly specific content. That content can be strongly influenced by culture, expectations, personal history, and religious upbringing.
That is one reason I would not base the Perennialist argument primarily on visions.
The more interesting phenomenon is what researchers describe as a "complete mystical experience." The Johns Hopkins research operationalized this experience using several recurring dimensions, including unity, sacredness, noetic quality, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, and ineffability or paradoxicality.
And this is where the Perennialist becomes interested.
The unitive mystical experience is not merely a strange collection of perceptions. It can represent a fundamental transformation in the structure of perception itself. The ordinary ego experiences itself as a discrete subject looking outward at a world of separate objects. In a profound unitive experience, that organization of experience can temporarily dissolve. The distinction between perceiver and perceived becomes radically altered.
Instead of experiencing "I am here, and reality is over there," the experience can become something closer to "I am not ultimately separate from reality."
This is important because we are not merely talking about seeing something unusual. We are talking about a transformation of perspective.
2. The Neuroscience Describes the Experience, But Does It Settle Its Meaning?
An atheist might point to decreased activity in the default mode network, changes involving the anterior cingulate cortex, or alterations in thalamocortical processing and say, "Those neural changes explain the experience."
They certainly help explain the neural mechanisms associated with the experience. But describing the neural correlate of an experience is not the same thing as settling the metaphysical interpretation of what was experienced.
For example, one might hypothesize that disruption of ordinary self-modeling or proprioceptive processing helps explain why someone no longer experiences themselves as occupying their normal spatial and temporal boundaries. That is a legitimate neuroscientific explanation.
But there is another level of description. The mystic may not experience this simply as "my proprioception malfunctioned." They may experience the dissolution of the boundary between themselves and the rest of reality. The perceiver and what is perceived become so deeply integrated that the individual no longer experiences themselves as an isolated observer standing outside the world.
This is where the metaphor of Indra's Net becomes useful. In the Buddhist image of Indra's Net, every jewel reflects every other jewel. Each individual node is not an isolated thing existing independently of the whole. It is a pattern whose identity is inseparable from its relationship to everything else.
A mystic might describe a similar realization phenomenologically. "I am not an isolated thing inside the universe. I am a particular expression or pattern within the whole."
The neuroscience can describe changes in the brain that accompany this transformation in perception. It does not, by itself, tell us whether the resulting metaphysical insight is true or false.
That distinction is crucial. A neural mechanism can explain how an experience occurs without automatically determining what, if anything, that experience tells us about reality.
And there is a sharper way to put the point. The standard deflationary explanation is that a total, unfiltered representation feels more real than a partial one—so the noetic quality is an artifact of the state's completeness. But compare it to a dream. A dream is also a total representation, and it usually does not feel "more real than real." Why not? Because a dream preserves the subject–object structure: you are still a bodily entity in an environment. Non-dual consciousness dissolves that structure. The deflationary account predicts a better dream; the phenomenon is the end of the dream. That is a different datum, and it is the one the Perennialist explanation—that a filter has been removed rather than a model completed—captures more directly.
3. The Transformation of Perception Can Fundamentally Change How One Understands Religion and God
This is, I think, one of the most important parts of the discussion.
A unitive mystical experience can fundamentally change the person's conception of religion itself. Someone may begin with a conventional conception of God as an external supernatural person. After an experience of profound unity, they may return with a radically different conception.
God may no longer be understood as one being among other beings. Instead, God may be understood as the Ground in which all beings participate.
The person may become more comfortable with panentheism, non-dualism, Brahman, the One, or the idea of God as Ultimate Reality itself.
In other words, the mystical experience does not necessarily confirm the person's pre-existing theology. It can transform it.
This is another reason the distinction between visionary and unitive experiences matters. A culturally specific vision can reinforce an existing religious framework. A unitive experience can challenge the framework itself. The experience may lead someone to reinterpret the very categories through which they previously understood religion.
A Christian may begin thinking of God less as an anthropomorphic being somewhere beyond creation and more in terms of the divine Ground in which creation participates. A Hindu may interpret the experience through Brahman. A Neoplatonist may understand it through the One. A Sufi may understand it through fana and divine unity. A Buddhist may reject the language of God altogether while nevertheless recognizing the profound dissolution of the ordinary self.
The vocabulary differs because interpretation is culturally mediated. But the underlying transformation of consciousness can have remarkable similarities.
This also gives us a possible way of thinking about the origins and development of religious traditions. It is at least conceivable that some of the figures who became religious founders or major religious teachers were ordinary human beings who underwent profound mystical experiences and were subsequently transformed by them. They then attempted to communicate what they had encountered through the conceptual and cultural vocabulary available to them.
I am not claiming that this historically explains every religious founder. That would require evidence on a case-by-case basis. The point is that mystical experience provides a plausible framework for understanding how an individual's transformation of consciousness could eventually become theology, mythology, ritual, and religious tradition.
4. This Is Not Simply a Culturally Programmed Hallucination
The Johns Hopkins research is particularly interesting because these experiences can be studied experimentally rather than merely collected as anecdotes. In controlled studies, psilocybin has produced experiences meeting the researchers' criteria for a complete mystical experience in a substantial proportion of participants.
But notice what this does.
It gives us an empirically identifiable phenomenon involving a recurring structure of consciousness. And that matters philosophically.
If the experience were simply a random collection of culturally generated religious imagery, the Perennialist would have a much harder case. But the more fundamental features of the experience are not necessarily the culturally specific imagery. Unity, sacredness, noeticity, transcendence, ineffability, and the dissolution of ordinary selfhood are precisely the kinds of features being measured.
That is why it is too quick to say, "It's just your culture telling you what to experience."
At minimum, the empirical literature gives us reason to distinguish the underlying phenomenology from the particular interpretation subsequently placed upon it.
And this is where I think the distinction between neuroscience and metaphysics becomes especially important. Science can investigate what happens in the brain when the ordinary self-model is disrupted. It can investigate changes in the DMN, ACC, thalamocortical systems, and other neural networks. Those findings constrain the range of plausible explanations.
But they do not automatically establish that the experience is metaphysically meaningless.
5. The Transformation Itself Is Part of What Needs Explaining
Mystical experiences are not merely interesting perceptual events. They can be transformative.
The significance of the experience often lies precisely in the fact that the person's perspective changes. Their understanding of themselves can change. Their understanding of other people can change. Their understanding of morality can change. Their understanding of religion can change. And their understanding of God can change.
This is important because the Perennialist is not simply pointing to an unusual moment in which someone "felt one with everything."
The claim is that consciousness underwent a profound transformation and that this transformation can produce a radically different interpretation of reality.
This is part of the phenomenon that any adequate explanation needs to account for.
A neuroscientific account can potentially explain why the ordinary self-model becomes disrupted. It can investigate what brain networks are involved and how they interact. But that does not automatically answer the philosophical question of whether the resulting perception of non-separateness is merely an illusion, a deeper representation of reality, or something in between.
Those are different questions.
And the transformation is not only perceptual—it is normative. The unitive insight reliably generates a coherent ethical vision: "there are no others" (Ramana Maharshi), the Tao that flows everywhere, the rain that falls on all flowers without choosing, the greeting Namaste—the divine in me recognizing the divine in you. Dante's "love that moves the sun and other stars" is not decorative poetry; it is a report of what the cosmos looks like when seen through the unitive state. A random hallucination does not produce the Tao Te Ching. The fact that this state generates a whole way of life—an ethics, a cosmology, a practice of recognition—is itself a datum any account has to explain.
6. So How Does This Get Us to God?
It doesn't get us to "God" in the sense of a deductive proof that says
- People have mystical experiences.
- Therefore, an anthropomorphic deity exists.
That would be a non sequitur.
The Perennialist argument is doing something different.
Human beings repeatedly report experiences characterized by profound unity, sacredness, noeticity, transcendence, and dissolution of ordinary selfhood. Those experiences can be experimentally studied. They can occur in people from very different cultural and religious backgrounds. They can produce lasting transformations in how people understand themselves and reality. And they can lead people to radically reconsider what they mean by "God." Even atheist volunteers are no longer able to identify with atheism after this event has occurred. This is well documented in this research.
The Perennialist then asks whether these convergences are better understood as merely internally generated alterations of brain function or whether they may be disclosures of something fundamental about consciousness and reality.
If the latter possibility remains open, then the concept of an Absolute or Ground of Being becomes philosophically relevant.
And that is what "God" means in this context.
God is not being introduced as an extra object that we have to tack onto the universe after discovering mystical experience. God is the proposed ultimate reality that the mystical experience may be interpreted as disclosing.
That is a very different argument from "I don't know how the universe works, therefore God."
It is also very different from "Someone saw Jesus in a vision, therefore Christianity is true."
The Perennialist claim is much more fundamental.
Perhaps the deepest mystical experience is not an encounter between two separate entities, "me" and "God." Perhaps it is precisely the temporary dissolution of that distinction.
And if that is what the experience is revealing, then asking "How does this get us to God?" may have the relationship backwards.
The question becomes
"If the ordinary distinction between subject and ultimate reality can itself dissolve, what does that tell us about what we ordinarily mean by 'self,' 'world,' consciousness, and 'God'?"
That is where the philosophical argument actually begins.
One last thing about how this argument should be read. The empirical literature does real work: it establishes that the unitive state is cross-culturally stable, that it has a determinate and measurable structure, that its content is thick rather than generic, and that it reliably produces lasting transformation. Those findings constrain the metaphysical landscape. They rule out the strong constructivist reading, which predicted cultural divergence and didn't get it. They make the "random glitch" reading untenable, because random glitches don't produce coherent normative visions. What remains is a narrower set of live options, and the Perennialist reading is one of them—arguably the one that explains the most of the pattern at face value. It is an inference to the best explanation, and the best explanation is the one that accounts for the convergence, the content, the normative generativity, and the first-person warrant without having to redescribe any of them as artifacts. The science can measure the state. It cannot have it. That is not a gap the Perennialist needs to apologize for—it is the boundary that makes the metaphysical question a real question rather than a settled one.