One Hypothesis for Religious and Mystical Experiences

One of my sharper memories was walking around Changi Airport with Amelia, a good friend from high school, after pulling an all-nighter (pretty difficult to replicate those midnight conversations). You know, we walked around this grand place – the great indoor waterfall that forms the central dome of Changi airport is still breathtaking in its size – and the walls are filled with an opulent, unnecessary amount of green, and I felt fine. But then, as we walked to terminal 3, we saw this dark hotel lobby, directly linked to the terminal, and I was overwhelmed by this sincerely strange experience where I kept repeating, again and again, "doesn't this feel strange?" In particular, I remember they were playing some charm-like, electronic, synth-style music, and there was this sofa, and it just felt special. Like I'd never had that feeling before, but I think I must've convinced Amelia too that, indeed, there was something special. And I thought it felt weird, and hallucinatory, and might've reflected, even back then, that this is what being on a substance would've been like. And then, after about an hour of this, and what a fantastic and novel experience (I delight in it perhaps the same way the baby who goes down a slide does for the first time, oh how the information value feels so good, just rarer now in my slightly older youth), I snapped out of it. And that was that.

The most similar I've felt to this ended up ~replicating the conditions of such a time – very little sleep the night before, a cozy, warm, new place (the meditation room at Lighthaven at 4am if you're interested in replicating, can recommend).

I was at an "Unconference" in DC recently, and I attended an event about religious and mystical experiences, and someone, Michael, told a story. He too, visited this grand church-like thing in Paris, this time a cathedral with singing nuns, and then he went to an outdoor restaurant with musicians playing the most beautiful music, and he became overwhelmed with tears, and a vision of these people climbing a mountain. He, like me, was a teetotaler, never done any drugs, and, like me, was sleep deprived, after the jet lag of flying. Unlike me, he now wants to build an underground cathedral.

We discussed how there are definitely similarities between the scenarios, and that it may be too hard to replicate. Contrast our experiences, say, with the pilgrimage of a ~wealthy peasant to the local church, let alone (also I had a zone out while writing this sentence where my brain went from church, to italy, to tortellini, exceedingly quickly. Milan, a story for another time) one that has spent days of their otherwise repetitive existence, and then you are struck by something as beautiful as a cathedral. Along with the angelic experiences and similar, it is almost as if that the churches have evolved mimetically and structurally to give the humans around you a chance to experience the divine. And, I think the conclusion we came to, is that it does. That is, mimetically evolve, rather than, perhaps, in fact give you an experience of the divine.

Our conversation then moved onto whether this was a particularly unique phenomenon in the modern world, where our exposure to the many higher-dimensional elements of grandeur have been taken away from us by our imaginations (is there a single "famous monument/architecture" that you'd wish you could see a photo of / had a book, and thus have only heard of it and would have a giant sense of awe if you'd seen it), into this one-dimensional screen. Perhaps the accurate thing to draw is never think about the novel experience that you're going to fly.

Anyway, so that's my predictive model for how these kind of phenomenological extremities happen. Not being religious, nor primed to believe that perhaps God set me up for this moment, and created the world in order for me to have this, is perhaps the limiting factor in a lot of people not having this every morning. It does suggest, though, that before you have a chance to experience something divine or magical, do not go in with any expectation of what it is going to be like beforehand.