1. Introduction

Readers of my earlier Undoing essays will remember a strange experience I had in the midst of a life-threatening event. Pondering that moment—and trying to make sense of it led to this realization: most approaches to unusual conscious experiences split into two extremes. On one side, dismissive materialism waves them away because they don’t fit existing frameworks. On the other, uncritical mysticism accepts them too easily, without scrutiny. Both shut down genuine inquiry. What’s missing is a methodological stance rather than a belief system.

In this essay I propose Rational Mysticism as that stance. My focus is personal and practical: what happens when an engineer’s worldview is shattered by a cardiac event, and he turns the same analytic tools he used in engineering toward understanding what happened? The experiences I share are examples of how to apply the method—not evidence for any particular conclusion.

2. The Horizon of the Known and the Unknowable

A Documented Pattern

Human history shows a recurring theme: confident assertions of scientific certainty, later overturned.

In 1933, the great physicist Ernest Rutherford dismissed the idea of extracting useful energy from atoms as “moonshine.” The very next day¹ Leo Szilard conceived the nuclear chain reaction. Within a decade, atomic bombs ended a world war.

For decades, peptic ulcers were blamed on stress and spicy food—until Barry Marshall famously drank a beaker of Helicobacter pylori in 1984, developed gastritis, and helped prove a bacterial cause. A Nobel Prize followed.

Each case reminds us that knowledge advances not only by discovery, but by overturning false certainties.

The Scale Reality Check

If history humbles us, the cosmos dwarfs us. The observable universe extends about 46 billion light-years in every direction^⁠2. Beyond that horizon, we can never see—not because our instruments are inadequate, but because spacetime itself sets the boundary. What lies outside is sealed off, forever beyond our grasp³ .

The Knowledge Paradox

Even inside that bubble, each real advance exposes fresh ignorance. Consider DNA sequencing, which revealed regulatory networks far more intricate than the tidy “gene → trait” story we thought we understood. Or quantum mechanics, which opened whole domains of indeterminacy we hadn’t imagined. Or neuroscience which, despite real progress, still stumbles over the riddle of consciousness—our most intimate experience, still largely mysterious.⁴

Knowledge doesn’t just close the circle; it pushes out the perimeter of the unknown.

The Humility Conclusion

Given the pattern of overturned certainties, the measurable vastness beyond our reach, and the way each advance multiplies new questions, intellectual humility isn’t just a philosophical nicety—it’s empirically warranted. The question isn’t if we’re missing something, but where—and how big the correction will be.
What we know is precious; what we don’t is vastly larger. That’s the humility to preserve.

3. The Shadow of Reductionism

And yet, when confronted with mystery, our culture often chooses to diminish rather than deepen. Science, at its best, enlarges wonder. At its worst, it can flatten mystery into sterile explanations through reductionism: breaking complex wholes into isolated parts.

Take the rainbow. To say it is “just refracted light” is scientifically true — but completely misses the sheer joy of seeing a rainbow form. Misses the thrill of luminous colors arcing suddenly across the sky after a storm, the awe of light breaking through darkness.
Reductionism clarifies, but it also narrows. And all too often strips the wonder from what it seeks to explain.

The deeper danger is that reductionism often oversimplifies complex systems, ignoring the relationships between parts, the surprising properties that often emerge through interaction between components, and wider contexts that are essential for genuine understanding. When we dissect reality into isolated parts, we risk losing sight of the whole that gives those parts meaning. Reductionism is an indispensable tool in the lab; the problem is when it hardens into a worldview and becomes the only lens.

Consider modern medicine. Specialization has brought great advances and, at times, distortions. The tool isn’t the problem; the problem is when the tool becomes the only tool. A cardiologist who ignores nutrition and the digestive system and treats the heart as a stand-alone pump misses the mark. The heart is not an island; it beats in conversation with the lungs, is fueled by the gut, and is influenced by hormones, stress, sleep, and countless subtle interactions. Focus too narrowly on one organ and you lose the thing you’re trying to heal: the person, not just her heart.

The same blindness shows up in how Western medicine often treats alternative traditions—reflexively, and dismissively. That wipes away the lived experience of millions across cultures who report relief within specific domains. Skepticism is warranted; exaggerated claims deserve scrutiny. But outright dismissal without inquiry is not a finding—it’s a posture that often blocks discovery. The rational move is to test claims where plausible mechanisms or consistent outcomes appear, assign domain-specific credibility where evidence holds, and mark the rest as unproven rather than impossible.

Even more perilous, reductionism can distort causality itself. It seduces us into if–then–else thinking: if A, then B. If not A, then not B. Such simplifications may work in code or controlled experiments, but they fail in the living world, where causes interweave and effects ripple through hidden networks of relationships.

Real life is not an algorithm. When we force it into binary structures, we don’t just simplify—we falsify.

Blind Dismissal and the Danger of Labels
Reductionism doesn’t just oversimplify; often, it also blinds. Sometimes it blinds us by ignoring evidence outright. Other times it blinds us through the weapon of labels. Both forms are dismissive shortcuts that spare us the hard work of discernment.

Consider the placebo effect. For decades, “just a placebo” was shorthand for “not real.” The label itself became a way to wave away results. And yet placebo responses are among the most reproducible findings in medicine, as neuroscience is now discovering. Expectation, ritual, and context trigger measurable changes in brain chemistry, immune function, and even gene expression. To call them “just placebo” is not explanation; it is gross abdication. The label dismisses reality instead of revealing it.

The same reflex once dogged meditation. For much of the 20th century, it was dismissed in the West as mystical fluff, the province of monks and hippies. Only in recent decades have neuroscience and psychology validated what practitioners already knew: that contemplative practice reshapes the brain, lowers stress, and cultivates resilience. Blind dismissal delayed serious study by several decades.

We have fallen into similar traps, time and again. History is full of such examples across the globe, cutting across eras, cultures, and traditions. In each case, truth is flattened into ideology, inquiry compelled into obedience, and what once was living wisdom becomes brittle dogma. These examples point to a recurring danger: labels and dogma that masquerade as knowledge but function as shields against it. Dismissiveness may feel rational, but it is the mirror-image of credulity. Both shut down inquiry. Both refuse complexity.

Out of the many truths of this world, if a seeker chooses to follow a single truth to the exclusion of all others, that truth curdles into falsehood—and the seeker becomes a fanatic.

4. The Ineffable in Everyday Life

Deeper scrutiny of the cosmos, medicine, and culture—when conducted through a reductionist lens—often falters. It fails most decisively close to home: when it tries to reduce human experiences that defy words. Every life contains moments when explanation thins and language no longer fits.

Think of déjà vu, that uncanny shiver of recognition when none should be possible. Or the sudden breakthrough insight that arrives unbidden—a “mindspark” I’ve written about before—a solution appearing whole, seemingly out of nowhere. Neuroscience can trace outlines of such events, but the lived experience remains something more: irreducibly immediate, more revelation than deduction.

In my own life, the most striking example came on the ride to the ER. A cardiac crisis had gripped me; fear should have been overwhelming. Instead, a strange clarity arrived. Not panic, not resignation, but something beyond either: a calm awareness that asked, Would freaking out help? It wasn’t an idea I reasoned to; it was a stillness that descended—unmistakable, undeniable.

We all carry such stories: a sense of vast belonging under a clear night sky; a moment of piercing beauty in art or music; a quiet presence at a deathbed. These aren’t proofs of the supernatural. They’re data points of lived reality. To ignore them isn’t rationality—it’s denial.

Mystical experience, in this sense, isn’t exotic; it’s woven into ordinary life. The question isn’t whether it occurs, but how to approach it: not with blind belief or blind dismissal, but with sober wonder—and a method for looking. With what I call Rational Mysticism.

On the word “mysticism”

At first blush, Rational Mysticism can sound like an oxymoron. Largely that’s because mysticism is an overloaded term. Some dictionaries include pejorative senses—for example: “belief characterized by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.” That kind of definition invites a lazy dismissal by label: pick a meaning, apply the sticker, mock the thing, move on—no examination required.

In this essay, I use mysticism in its experiential sense: wonder that warrants further investigation; a disciplined, first-person inquiry aimed at more direct contact with the depth of reality. Not occultism. Not anti-reason. Where the word risks misunderstanding, read “contemplative inquiry” or “direct experiential investigation.”

My aim in defining Rational Mysticism precisely is to pin it to a method—critical inquiry, empirical observation, and intellectual honesty—so it can’t be waved away with a label.

Defining Rational Mysticism

What, then, is Rational Mysticism? A precise definition has been missing, so here’s mine:

Rational Mysticism: the disciplined investigation of all conscious experience—ordinary and extraordinary⁵—using critical inquiry, empirical observation, and intellectual honesty, while maintaining both rigorous skepticism and genuine openness to what such inquiry might reveal.

“Mysticism” here doesn’t mean superstition or the exotic. It points to a mode of knowing that seeks more direct acquaintance with reality through disciplined attention. A friend called this “the Enlightenment⁶, rebooted.”
That’s the spirit: the same devotion to clarity, now joined to a refusal to flatten awe—a recognition that mystery has a rightful place in a rational life.

This positions Rational Mysticism as a method for investigating all forms of experience rigorously without prejudging outcomes—neither inflating nor dismissing what careful inquiry might uncover.

What does this mean in practice?
Describe precisely;
Look for patterns;
Test claims against first-person experience and independent observation;
Prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data;
Keep all claims revisable.

It means walking the path with:
1. Discipline:  Not dabbling or indulgence, but a committed way of inquiry and practice.
2. Critical inquiry and honesty: Safeguards against self-deception and comforting illusions.
3. Direct experience: Insight grounded in what is lived and experienced, not in secondhand authority.
4. Skepticism and wonder: Twin lenses that refine and enlarge perception.
5. Avoidance of dogma and denial: the twin traps to be avoided, whether of blind belief or blind dismissal.

Rational Mysticism, in this sense, is not primarily a philosophy but a method. It simply asserts that extraordinary experiences warrant careful inquiry, while refusing to treat them as proof of any particular metaphysical conclusion. For me, this has become a lived experiment.

Faith and Science, Distinct but Compatible

Rational Mysticism is not an eviction notice for religion. It leaves room for religious faith but simply asks us to keep our domains straight.

Faith: trust, fidelity to a way of life, openness to meaning and value.
Science: a method for testing claims about the world—observation, hypothesis, experiment, revision, theory-building.

Confusion arises when either forgets it's lane. When faith dictates facts, it degenerates into dogma; when science claims to settle ultimate questions of meaning and purpose, it overreaches.
Kept distinct and honest, they can coexist—and even enrich each other. The rational mystic can pray and also run the experiment—because each belongs to a different mode of knowing.

An Intellectual Genealogy

Others have walked this path before, each in their own way. William James, more than a century ago, studied mystical states with a psychologist’s eye, cataloging them like a naturalist might collect butterflies. William Kingsland⁷, writing around the same time, spoke openly of “rational mysticism,” seeking a reconciliation of spiritual insight with disciplined reason. J. N. Findlay treated mystical claims not as revelations to be believed or dismissed, but as hypotheses to be tested with philosophy’s tools.

In our time, Sam Harris explores secular spirituality. Ken Wilber sketches integral frameworks. Jeffrey J. Kripal treats extraordinary experience as legitimate data for scholarly inquiry, while John Horgan shuttles between laboratories and monasteries in Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality, listening to scientists and seekers alike.

Philosophers have also noticed the strange harmony between logic and mystery: Joke Schakenraad⁸ traces parallels⁹ between a ninth-century monk, John Scottus Eriugena, and a twentieth-century analytic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein—each using argument to push language to its breaking point until the mystical shimmers through the cracks.

And then there are the critics of arm’s-length analysis. Mark Schroll¹⁰ notes how often mysticism is described from a safe distance, and points out that Thomas Roberts once called such figures “mystical eunuchs.” Harsh, perhaps—but it captures what’s lost when lived experience is excluded. These efforts matter. Still, most treatments remain academic or theoretical, a step removed from the raw edge of life.

So no, Rational Mysticism isn’t new. It appears in different guises across centuries and cultures. What’s been missing is a clear, formal definition. Writers have used the phrase, but rarely pinned it down. That is the small contribution I hope to make. I’m not claiming to be the first to think rationally about mystical experience—only to add a particular perspective. Where James was a psychologist, Harris a polemicist, and Wilber a system-builder, I come as an engineer whose heart literally failed—and who then turned the same analytic tools once used to build complex systems onto the shattering question of what had just happened to him.

The Four Tensions

To walk the path of Rational Mysticism is to find balance inside a set of dynamic tensions. They are not puzzles to solve once and for all, but a continuous balancing act—a tightrope walk. Lean too far either way and you risk falling into distortion.

1. Rational inquiry as an ally to depth
   Some spiritual circles treat reason as the enemy of depth.
   History disagrees: the Buddha warned against untested teachings; the Stoics used logic as inner training; Ibn Rushd¹¹ fused Aristotle with theology. Good analysis doesn’t cheapen the mystical—it tempers it, like a flame burning off dross.
2. Healthy skepticism vs. cynical materialism
   Skepticism = openness with discrimination: willing to be convinced, unwilling to be duped.
   Cynical materialism slams the door before the question is asked. The difference is subtle but decisive. Skepticism sharpens wonder; cynicism extinguishes it.
3. Why most “mysticism” fails (and should)
   Vague intuitions balloon into systems; private visions get universalized. Many claims collapse under scrutiny—and that’s a feature, not a bug. Failure here is quality control. What endures after testing is more likely to be real.
4. The ineffable that can still be examined
   “Beyond words” ≠ “beyond intelligence.”
   On the ride to the ER, the stillness I felt was nameless, yet discriminable: not panic, not resignation—something else. I now glimpse that same stillness in my daily meditation practice.
   Phenomenology’s basic move—describe structures of experience—lets us learn from the unsayable without inflating it or waving it away.

Together these tensions are a compass. They keep the rational mystic out of the swamp of unexamined faith and the desert of unexamined doubt.
Balance—not certainty, not credulity—is the essence of the path.

Knowing and Unknowing

Rational Mysticism isn’t about solving the mystery once and for all; it’s about living with the four tensions—between what can be known and what refuses knowing, what can be directly touched yet remains beyond the reach of language and logic. Reason, at its sharpest, brings us right to the edge of its own limits—the place where language falters, where logic runs out of road.

John Scottus Eriugena called this the ineffability of God. Wittgenstein called it the point where we must “pass over in silence.” In my life it arrived as a wordless stillness—and still does: unmistakable, undeniable, beyond analysis. What unites such moments is not certainty, but an honest recognition of limit.

To live as a rational mystic is to let knowing and unknowing travel together. Knowledge illuminates mystery; mystery deepens knowledge.
Rationality without humility curdles into arrogance; mysticism without rigor drifts into fantasy.
Held together, they form a way of seeing that neither denies what is known nor refuses what is unknown.

Perhaps the greatest unlearning is this: unknowing is not reason’s failure but its fulfillment. Reason walks us to the threshold; wonder takes us across.

5. Toward a Practice

If Rational Mysticism is a stance, it’s also a way of living—a practice. Ideas matter, but without embodiment they’re mere abstraction. The Rational Mystic's task isn’t only to think differently; it’s to live differently, bringing reason and wonder together in the lab of daily life.

That practice—what the Indian contemplative traditions call sādhanā—has its own rhythms. It begins by clearing away the false: seductive teachings that don’t withstand scrutiny, labels that masquerade as knowledge, the reflex to dismiss what doesn’t fit. It continues with disciplines of attention—meditation, reflection, self-inquiry—undertaken not with blind faith but with intelligent discrimination. It extends to testing experience empirically, treating life itself as experiment.

And it requires the hardest discipline of all: the courage to abide in unknowing, resisting the urge to fill gaps with comforting stories.

In short: use rationality to clear away the junk, then use the same clarity to recognize what is genuine in direct experience. Reason doesn’t vanish at the threshold of the mystical; it becomes a finer instrument.

These are the contours of what I call The Way of the Rational Mystic: The Sādhanā. In a follow-up essay, I’ll offer a field guide: how to begin, likely stages, common pitfalls on both the rational and mystical sides, and how to walk the razor’s edge between knowing and not-knowing.

Your turn

I’ve sketched a method; now I’m curious about your side of the street.

• A moment you couldn’t quite explain. What happened, and what made it feel different from the everyday?
• First-pass phenomenology. If you pause the interpretations, what exactly was there—sensations, emotions, shifts in time/space, changes in agency?
• Competing explanations. What’s the best ordinary account? After taking it seriously, what (if anything) still doesn’t fit?
• Replication. Have you noticed milder, repeatable versions (in meditation, music, sport, nature)? What conditions seem to matter?
• A tiny experiment. What’s one safe, honest way to test a hunch—without self-deception?
• Red flags. Where might you be over-interpreting—or dismissing too fast?

If you’re willing, share your reflections—publicly in the comments or privately at undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me. I'd love to hear from you!

The goal isn’t to prove anything. It’s to practice careful attention, intellectual honesty, and genuine wonder—together.

Footnotes:

¹ Ernest Rutherford, in a public speech  claimed that seeking practical energy from atomic transformations was “talking moonshine,” dismissing the idea as unrealistic.  The speech was summarized in the Times and Szilard read it and was provoked by Rutherford's skepticism.  Later that day, the 12th of September 1933,  while walking near Southampton Row, in London, Szilard, had a Mindspark - a flash of insight about the possibility of a neutron striking a nucleus and a self-sustaining chain reaction resulting.

² This boundary exists because space itself has been expanding since the Big Bang. While the universe's age is approximately 13.8 billion years, the galaxies whose ancient light reaches us today have since moved much farther away due to cosmic expansion, now calculated to be roughly 46 billion light years distant.

³ At least until we learn to bend space-time...

⁴ The riddle of consciousness is a broad term referring to the deep mystery of how consciousness exists at all, why there is such a thing as subjective experience, or how consciousness relates to the physical world and itself.  
In contemporary philosophy, the hard problem of consciousness—a term popularized by David Chalmers—specifically refers to the challenge of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, or qualia: the felt sense of ‘what it is like’ to be conscious.

⁵ I use the term extraordinary to explicitly refer to altered states of consciousness and mystical or transcendent experience.

⁶ "The Enlightenment" here refers not to spiritual enlightenment but to the intellectual and philosophical movement that began in the late 1600s and emphasized reason, science, and empirical inquiry as tools for understanding the world and improving society, challenging the authority of monarchies and the church

⁷ William Kingsland was a British author, theosophist, and philosophical writer active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He sought to place mystical experience and modern mysticism on a rational, scientific footing and to reconcile spiritual and material understandings of existence.

⁸ Joke Schakenraad is an accomplished Dutch philosopher, theologian, and academic writer, with expertise in medieval Christian mysticism, philosophy, and theology.

⁹ Joke Schakenraad, "The Rational Mysticism of John Scottus Eriugena and Ludwig Wittgenstein," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Eriugenian Studies in honor of E. Jeauneau, ed. W. Otten and M. I. Allen, Instrumenta Patristica et Mediaevalia 68 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 637-655.

¹⁰ Mark A. Schroll, review of Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality, by John Horgan, Anthropology of Consciousness 14, no. 2 (July 2003)

¹¹ Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroës, was a prominent Islamic philosopher born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1126. He was a defender of philosophy against theologians and is known for integrating Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thought, including commentaries on Aristotle's works. His writings significantly influenced Jewish and Christian thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas. [Source: Encyclopedia Britannica]

Further Reading:

Thanks to the comment by David on Medium, I decided to add this section, for those interested in reading the works I reference, as well as closely related, adjacent material that might be of interest.

Works Referenced:

1. William James — The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature 
Classic empirical-phenomenological catalog of “mystical” states and their traits.

2. John Horgan — Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality
A journalist’s tour of labs, monasteries, and arguments at the science–spirit border.

3. Sam Harris — Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
Secular case for contemplative practice; good on methods vs. metaphysics.

4. Ken Wilber — A Brief History of Everything, also, 
Ken Wilber — The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction
Ambitious integrative frameworks (agree or not, they’re clear stakes in the ground).

5. J. N. Findlay — The Discipline of the Cave / Ascent to the Absolute
Philosophical probes of “the absolute” with analytic rigor.

6. William Kingsland — Rational Mysticism
Early use of the term; attempts a reconciliation of science and mysticism.

7. Joke Schakenraad — see footnote #9
On how logic and language can be pushed to (and past) their limits.

Adjacent Works on Contemplative Science & Neuroscience:

1. Evan Thompson & Stephen Batchelor — Waking, Dreaming, Being
Phenomenology meets neuroscience across waking, dreaming, and meditation.

2. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch — The Embodied Mind
Foundational for enactive cognition; argues for disciplined first-person methods.

3. Judson Brewer — The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love — Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits
Mechanisms of attention, habit, and reward in meditation and addiction.

4. Andrew Newberg — Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality
What scans can and can’t say about spiritual practices.

Works on philosophy of experience & method

1. Ann Taves — Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things
   A careful, non-mystifying way to study “special experiences” across traditions.
2. Steven T. Katz (ed.) — Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis
   On how culture/concepts shape experience—essential pushback to naïve universalism. One of the critiques of this work is that the academics here are all “experts” on mysticism, without direct experience of the states of consciousness studied — folks that Thomas Roberts once categorized as “mystical eunuchs”.
3. Robert K. C. Forman — Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness
   Counters “all the way down” constructivism; argues some experiences are unconstructed, direct encounters with Consciouness itself.
4. William P. Alston —Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience
   Epistemology of religious experience; when (if ever) it can count as justified belief.

On placebo, expectation & context

1. Fabrizio Benedetti — Placebo Effects: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease
   The go-to scientific treatment of how meaning/expectation modulate physiology.

Cautionary & critical perspectives

1. Jeffrey J. Kripal — The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge
   Scholars and scientists who had anomalous experiences—and what changed.
2. T. M. Luhrmann — When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
   A deep dive into American Evangelism. Covers how practice trains perception; superb on social/psychological scaffolding.
3. David Chalmers (ed.) — Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings
   Broad tour of consciousness, perception, self-knowledge, the self, and artificial intelligence.

With quiet thanks to Andrei Anghel on Unsplash for the photograph