Why the Increase in Global Reports of Mystical Experiences?

A friend of mine ate a chicken sandwich in a restaurant, walked into the parking lot, and had a mystical experience.

How does something so extraordinary happen in such an ordinary setting? What does his experience have in common with people who have spent decades meditating, taken psychedelics, survived encounters with death, or participated in experimental virtual reality? I have become fascinated by worldwide reports of mystical experiences across cultures and centuries, through remarkably different pathways.

Reports of mystical experiences are becoming more numerous and more systematically documented, partly because of advances in medical resuscitation and renewed research into psychedelics. More people now survive close encounters with death and can describe their experiences, which strongly resemble previously reported mystical experiences. At the same time, researchers are studying psilocybin and other psychedelics as potential treatments for depression, anxiety, addiction, and other psychiatric conditions. These developments are bringing experiences once studied primarily within religious and spiritual traditions into increasingly systematic scientific investigation.

What Is a Mystical Experience?

Imagine standing beneath a tree and suddenly experiencing yourself, the tree, the ground, and the surrounding landscape as parts of one living reality. The boundaries separating you from the world seem to disappear (Stace, 1960). Intense love expands into what feels like the Universe or God. People describe profound peace, joy, gratitude, awe, and sacredness. Time may expand into an endless present. William James (1902) added Ineffability, difficulty putting these experiences into words and noetic quality, the sense of directly knowing something profound.

5 Pathways to Mystical Experience

1. Spontaneous Experiences

Mystical experiences may arrive without invitation or preparation. People report them while listening to music, walking in nature, grieving, giving birth, making love, or recovering from illness. The experience may last only moments and may remain memorable for decades.

2. Meditation and Spiritual Practice

For thousands of years, people have sought unity and transcendence through meditation, prayer, chanting, fasting, silence, and ritual. Buddhist monks, Christian contemplatives, Hindu yogis, and Sufi mystics have developed practices that encourage profound changes in awareness. Their traditions provide centuries of descriptions of similar experiences, interpreted in different ways.

3. Psychedelic Experiences

Psychoactive plants and fungi have long been used in spiritual ceremonies. Ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and mescaline-containing cacti can dramatically alter perception, emotion, and the sense of self.

Modern research has brought these experiences into medical settings. Griffiths et al. (2016) studied psilocybin-assisted treatment among people with life-threatening cancer, finding substantial reductions in depression and anxiety. Participants sometimes described experiences of extraordinary significance, including changes in their sense of identity and connection to the world.

4. Near-Death Experiences

People who have come close to dying sometimes describe radiant light, deceased relatives, profound peace, life reviews, and extraordinary love. Some report entering a reality more real than everyday existence. Modern resuscitation technologies have increased opportunities to collect accounts from survivors of life-threatening emergencies (Greyson, 2021; van Lommel, 2010; Parnia, 2024).

5. Virtual Reality

A new pathway is emerging through immersive virtual reality. Unlike traditional virtual reality, which represents people as solid, separate figures, researcher David Glowacki and colleagues created a shared virtual environment in which participants appear as diffuse, pulsing forms of light. As these forms interact, participants can experience a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness, as though the boundaries separating them from others have disappeared. Research using the Mystical Experience Questionnaire found that participants' scores were comparable to those reported after moderate-to-high doses of psychedelics (Glowacki et al., 2020, 2022). (Glowacki et al., 2020, 2022).

Mystical Experiences as Global Meaningful Coincidences

Consider the range of circumstances in which these experiences occur. Someone spends years meditating in a monastery. Another receives psilocybin during cancer treatment. Someone survives cardiac arrest. A group enters a specially designed virtual world. Across different people, cultures, centuries, and methods, the recurrent reports of mystical experiences through five pathways ask what these recurrent reports suggest about humanity's future. I wonder whether these experiences reveal possibilities within us that ordinary awareness seldom brings into view. When one meaningful coincidence occurs in an individual's life, the person may ask what it means for their present and future. When similar experiences recur across humanity, we can ask those questions on a much larger scale.

What Might This Mean for Humanity's Future?

Imagine increasing numbers of people directly experiencing the love and interconnectedness mystics have described for centuries. Such experiences could influence their relationships with one another, their communities, and the natural world. Our societies emphasize national, religious, political, economic, and personal differences. Yet mystical experiences offer glimpses of profound unity.

What if more people experienced that unity themselves? Could it influence how we educate children, resolve conflicts, organize communities, or care for the Earth? The possibility becomes especially intriguing as new pathways allow people who might never have sought a mystical experience to encounter one.

Meaningful coincidences are suggestions, not demands. They do not tell us what to do or guarantee a particular future. They invite curiosity about possibilities that might otherwise escape our attention. The global recurrence of mystical experiences may be one such invitation, suggesting that an extraordinary individual experience can also be part of a larger pattern unfolding across humanity.

The increasing reports of mystical experiences may be showing us what humanity could become.

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