Mystical Experience vs Religion

The one key difference between them

First I’m going to describe an example of a mystical experience. Then I’ll describe how it’s transformed into a religion. It’s comparable to the process in which sunlight is converted into electricity via photovoltaic panels, in a way that is slightly sad and yet quite human.

Let’s say you’ve ingested a full dose of lysergic acid in the morning, or maybe you didn’t — that part doesn’t really matter. But you’re in one of those moods. You go walking alone through a forest on a perfectly warm day. You come to a nice-looking rock alongside a stream, and you lie down.

You close your eyes and let the sensations of the forest wrap around you, in a literal sense. The sounds of the birds and running water and rustling leaves, the gentle blowing of the breeze on your skin, the heat of the dappled sun. It creates the sensation that what is outside of your body is continuous with what is inside. From this humble starting point, a radically different way of experiencing existence begins to blossom.

This is at odds with how we ordinarily perceive the universe. Most of the time we operate under the assumption that our skin is a barrier between “I” and “not I.” This is what gives rise to the ego and the illusion of duality. In neurological parlance, this is the enterprise of the default mode…