The Philosophy of Mysticism: Perennialism vs Constructivism
Do mystical experiences reveal a shared transcendent reality?
Or, like any other category of contingent experience, are they better understood as products of their cultures?
These questions mark one of the defining controversies in the modern study of religion.
Perennialism asserts that mystics from diverse traditions ultimately encounter the same transcendent reality. As George Harrison put it: “All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn't matter what you call Him just as long as you call.” This is a common refrain in modern spirituality and interfaith relations. Gandhi, Sri Chimnoy, and the Dalai Lama have all expressed perennial sympathies. The Orthodox monk Seraphim Rose, in vogue today for his polemics against modernity, meanwhile claimed that ecumenism and perennial movements were warfronts of a “syncretic world religion” sent by the devil.
Constructivism, by contrast, contends that mystical experiences are contingent phenomena. They are constituted by the conceptual frameworks, cultural contexts, and linguistic systems within which they occur. The idea of a ‘core’ mystical experience is an illusion formed by the selective projection of theorists’ own preferences.
The debate may seem abstract. But it shapes the conclusions we draw about the nature and existence of God, as well as the possibility of religious dialogue. Whether or not we’re all experiencing the ‘same thing’ (or the ‘same God’) shifts the lines of demarcation around wars and conflicts around the world. Transformative experiences have always supplied the libidinal energy and charisma required for the foundation and maintenance of religion. As we’ll see, though, the technical debate itself remains trapped within certain modern assumptions that neither camp adequately interrogates. This article first clarifies the core positions and their historical development, examines the major theoretical arguments and counter-arguments, and then identifies crucial dimensions both frameworks have overlooked.
What is a Mystical Experience, Anyway?
A mystical experience is often described as an altered or heightened state in which the everyday distinctions that structure perception – between self and other, subject and object, inner and outer – are radically diminished or erased. Such experiences may be triggered by meditation, prayer, contemplation, psychoactive drugs, chanting, fasting, sensory deprivation, intense emotion, or sometimes arrive unexpectedly.
Mystical experiences are surprisingly common. A 2009 Pew survey showed that 49% of Americans said they have had a religious or mystical experience; Gallup and other polls have found roughly one-third of respondents consistently reporting such experiences since the 1970s. In the UK, the proportion saying “yes” to having experienced a presence or power different from their everyday self has risen from 36% in 1978 to 48% in 1987. 30-40% of psychedelic research participants report having a “full” mystical-type experience in laboratory studies. 19 of 20 participants administered psilocybin in a mindfulness group retreat had “strong mystical-type experiences”.
Perennialism articulates the view that some species of authentic mystical experiences, regardless of the religious tradition from which they emerge, point toward a single underlying reality or ultimate truth. Perennialists maintain that when a Christian mystic speaks of union with God, a Hindu mystic of realisation of Brahman, a Buddhist of enlightenment (bodhi), and a Sufi of annihilation in the Divine (fana), they are fundamentally describing the same transcendent encounter, merely filtered through different vocabularies and symbolic systems.
The perennialist position rests on several foundational claims. First, it assumes that beneath the doctrinal diversity of world religions lies a common experiential core accessible to mystics of all traditions. Second, it suggests that this universal mystical experience provides insight into metaphysical truth. Third, it posits that properly understood, the world religions represent different paths to the same ultimate reality, which, in toto, is directly contradictory to the claims of those particular religions.
The Basis of Perennialism
The roots of perennialism extend further back than contemporary philosophy. Renaissance thinkers like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Agostino Steuco (1497-1548) developed concepts of philosophia perennis, a universal theology underlying diverse faiths. These Renaissance syntheses drew on Neoplatonism, the Platonic notion of the One or the Good as the ultimate source from which all reality emanates, and the Stoic and early Christian concept of the Logos, a universal principle present throughout nature.
Yet these perennialist impulses also echoed older patterns found in ancient paganism. Rather than strict exclusivism, the Greco-Roman world, and to some extent earlier civilisations, tended to integrate or reinterpret foreign deities and cults as different manifestations of a shared divine reality (“interpretatio graeca”). The emergence of exclusivist monotheisms in late antiquity changed this dynamic, but Christian thinkers from Origen to Nicolas of Cusa attempted to balance universalist metaphysics with commitments to particular revelation. C.S. Lewis – writing in a much later context – argued that ancient myth, philosophy, and ritual contained authentic glimpses of divine reality, preparing the way for Christian fulfilment.
The explicit perennialist framework in academe would crystallise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James codified the ‘mystical experience’ as a naturalistic object of study defined by four characteristics: ineffability (resistance to verbal articulation), noetic quality (the sense of direct knowledge), transiency (temporary duration), and passivity (the sense of being acted upon rather than acting). Crucially, James argued that these phenomenological markers appear consistently across different traditions.
Perennialism reached its cultural apex through Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Huxley brought together mystical texts from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and other traditions to demonstrate a consistent teaching: the existence of a Divine Reality accessible to human consciousness through mystical practice. He introduced the memorable phrase “Highest Common Factor”, the idea that beneath the varying theological superstructures of world religions lay a common encounter with ultimate reality.
The Constructivist Critique
Constructivism, by contrast, emerged as a reaction against this perennialist consensus. In the late 1970s and 1980s, scholars increasingly questioned whether cross-cultural mystical similarities reflected genuine commonality or merely the imposition of Western interpretive categories. The watershed moment came with Steven T. Katz's influential 1978 essay ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’.
Katz's central argument attacked the very possibility of unmediated experience. Echoing the discoveries of Kant, he made the simple claim that all experience – mystical or otherwise – is inescapably mediated by conceptual structures. The mystic does not encounter a “pure” experience and then subsequently interpret it; rather, the mystic's concepts, theological doctrines, and cultural frameworks actively constitute what is experienced.
Katz developed this through meticulous textual analysis. He examined how Christian mystics, shaped by Trinitarian theology and Christ-centred devotion, described encounters with a personal God. In the Bible, we see that Yahweh presents himself to prophets and prayerful figures through angels, corporeal stand-ins, killings, injunctions to wars, and dwellings in heavenly courts. Katz then contrasted these with Buddhist descriptions of enlightenment – experiences characterised by the dissolution of personal identity, the cessation of desire, and the realisation of non-self (anatta). These were not, Katz insisted, the same experience described in different vocabularies. The Christian was trained to seek communion with a personal God; the Buddhist was trained to realise emptiness and non-self. These different teloi, these different ultimate aims, shaped the structure of what was experienced long before interpretive language entered the picture.
Perennialist ideas have made their way into science. The dominant research paradigm uses questionnaires like the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ-30), which operationalises Stace's perennialist framework, measuring unity, transcendence of time/space, ineffability, noetic quality, sacredness, and positive mood. Studies then correlate MEQ scores with therapeutic outcomes in psychedelic research.
But this creates circularity. Researchers use perennialist-derived instruments, find evidence for perennialist categories, then claim to validate perennialism. Here, the MEQ presupposes what it purports to discover: that mystical experiences across contexts share common dimensions. Alternative constructivist measures (like Hood's Mysticism Scale with its “religious interpretation” factor) yield different factor structures, suggesting measurement shapes findings. Moreover, quantifying mysticism through questionnaires treats fluid, ambiguous, context-embedded processes as discrete, measurable, comparable objects. The MEQ asks subjects to rate statements like “Experience of unity with ultimate reality” on Likert scales. But this assumes a number of odd things: that subjects recognise what “ultimate reality” means, or that unity experiences can be put on a scale (as opposed to being discrete categories), or that people entirely remember what they experienced. Each assumption is philosophically contestable, and pales against a reality in which many participants are desperate for their own ‘mystical experiences’ to please researchers or achieve relief from years of distress. Perennialism may seem inclusive. Yet behind its cloth of science and psychological categories, it can create new forms of chauvinism. What we define as the “common core” of mystical or religious experience is fundamentally shaped by the theorist’s own preferences. Why, for example, construct the common core around Indian Vedantic notions of non-duality and bliss (as in much perennialist thought), rather than Christian experiences of union with a personal God, Sufi intoxication, or the Sublime as understood in Western Romanticism?Bill Richards, the Johns Hopkins psychedelic researcher, has received criticism from Jules Evans and Rick Strassman for his dogmatic assertion that mystical experience is a “mountain with many paths leading to its ineffable peak,” with the dialogical encounters characteristic of Judaism and plant shamanism found more in the “foothills”. In 1927, René Guénon, a French theorist who has influenced extremist thinkers like Julius Evola and Steve Bannon, conceived of the perennialist ‘core’ as an explicitly elitist phenomenon, one accessed by a spiritual aristocracy of the “Primordial Tradition”. The “crisis of the modern world,” for Guénon, stems from the loss of sacred hierarchy and the “usurpation” of the sacred by the profane or rational-empirical.
The Pure Consciousness Event
Perennialists have mounted sophisticated defences. The most substantial counter-strategy involved the concept of the Pure Consciousness Event (PCE) – a contentless mystical experience argued to occur across traditions and cultures with striking uniformity.
In works including The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990), Robert K.C. Forman assembled first-person accounts from advanced meditators spanning various traditions. These practitioners reported a state of awareness existing with no intentional content, no thoughts, images, sensations, or sense of self. The experience was characterised by profound silence and an absence of time and space. The epistemological move was clever: if an experience has no conceptual content, it cannot be shaped by the mystic's theological concepts. A Buddhist meditator trained in emptiness and a Christian contemplative trained in union with God might interpret their subsequent non-conceptual state differently – the Buddhist calling it nirvikalpa samādhi, the Christian calling it oneness with the Godhead beyond images.
We can strengthen this position by pointing to empirical neuroscience. Researchers studying advanced meditators have found decreased activation in the brain's orientation-processing areas and default mode network and increased gamma-wave coherence. These neurological signatures appeared across meditators of different traditions, suggesting a common neurophysiological basis. In Waking Up (2011), Sam Harris claims that mystical experiences are often rooted in a psychological discovery about consciousness itself. He claims that rigorous introspection shows the “self”, as a sort of homunculus ‘observing’ the world, to be a clear psychological illusion. Meditative practices like vipassana allow one to directly observe the arising of thoughts without finding a unified inner observer. In Harris’ schema, this discovery marks the essential engine of psychological transformation, and we see many mystics finding out the same thing, albeit with the accretion of other doctrinal claims that are largely irrelevant for Harris. While different cultures may shape the way in which people make that discovery about their own psychological natures, we may only ‘deconstruct’ for so long, because we are dealing with natural facts about the mind itself.
Constructivists remained unconvinced. Steven Katz and others responded that even if neurological patterns are similar, this does not establish that the experience is the same. The brain state is one thing. What it is experienced as (if anything) is another. A Buddhist who interprets the PCE as the realisation of emptiness still experiences it through the lens of Buddhist metaphysics. A Christian who interprets it as union with God experiences it through Christianity. And if the PCE truly is contentless, how can it be reported or known to be an experience rather than mere unconsciousness?
What if Both Are Wrong?
By the 1990s and 2000s, the debate had reached a productive impasse. Neither side could definitively refute the other without begging its basic assumptions.
For one, perennialism tacitly adopts a foundationalist epistemology – the view that mystical experience provides incorrigible foundational knowledge upon which universal truth claims can be built. But subjective certainty alone does not constitute knowledge. A belief born from a compelling internal state only counts as knowledge if that state represents a reliable mechanism for accessing truth. Perennialists cannot establish this reliability without circularity: they cite mystical experiences as evidence for perennial truths, yet the evidential status of those experiences is precisely what requires justification.
Constructivism, by contrast, embraces coherentist or contextualist epistemology – knowledge emerges from relationships between beliefs within particular cultural-linguistic systems. This faces its own problem: if all experience is culturally mediated, on what basis can constructivists make any universal claim that “all mystical experiences are culturally constructed”? This appears to be a claim that transcends particular cultural contexts, creating a performative contradiction. Extreme constructivism risks a slide into epistemological relativism, where no cross-cultural truth claims about mysticism would be possible at all. Indeed, constructivism itself can be examined as a constructed phenomenon, being an academic movement embedded in postmodernism's scepticism toward grand narratives, born from the 1960s-80s feminist, postcolonial, and cultural turns.
Beyond Mere ‘Experience’
Both frameworks treat “mysticism” itself as a natural, transhistorical category. Yet “mysticism” as a distinct, privatised category came about with the Protestant Reformation's emphasis on inner religion: a trend later consummated by Enlightenment secularisation, which displaced religion to the subjective-emotional remainder of rationality, and an Orientalism that assimilated Asian traditions into European categories. Simply, Medieval Christianity had no “mystics”, but contemplatives and theologians practising theoria (contemplation) within institutional monastic life.
William James' psychology of religion took this further. It made “religious experience” primary and treated it as psychologically isolable. Perennialism emerged in the Renaissance amid religious violence, offering reconciliation through universal spiritual cores. It matured within liberalism's need to manage diversity and empire, making difference negotiable and tradeable. It reached its market apotheosis in capitalism, where the “universal mystical experience” became a commodity. Capitalism, Marx argued, turns all distinct qualities into exchange-value, erasing differences to make things marketable. This abstraction applies to spirituality when diverse mystical traditions, each with unique metaphysics, are commodified into purchasable products, like retreats or apps.Plus, scholars have since recognised that both frameworks focused narrowly on cognitive and phenomenological dimensions. Instead, mystical experiences are profoundly emotional.
Teresa of Ávila describes ecstatic rapture as “delectably wounded”. Many Christians have reported the entry of spontaneous grace at their moments of greatest despair. “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”, St. Paul wrote. “Bringing someone to recognise their true condition is to lead them towards suicide”, Jacques Ellul wrote in his posthumous work, Freedom, Love and Power (2017). “Doing so may be done only in the context of the good news: be humble, because as of this moment, you will participate in the work of God in the kingdom of heaven.” Ellul was influenced in this respect by Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, who wrote that true faith is found in a “despairing of self” and “a comforted despair.” In Confessions, St. Augustine’s moment of conversion comes after a disturbing episode in which he beats himself repeatedly over the head, “distressed not only in mind but in appearance.” Ultimate reality is often felt as a malevolent and terrifying force. Rudolf Otto called it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the “tremendous and fascinating mystery”. Cosmic dread saturates Lovecraft’s works, which deal in the primal organs of fear and terror of the unknown. There is the mysticism of pure emptiness – Buddhist śūnyatā as a destabilising void – and the contemplation of death's horizon, where “dying before you die” walks a razor's edge with actual suicidality.
It seems that mystical experience is neither a ‘pure’ encounter nor entirely constructed. The ambition of the perennialists and constructivists at their best is convergent: to de-fang and de-escalate the absurd dogmatic warring between different religions, and try to achieve a common peace, one enriched by mutual experiences of sublimity within the world. The risk, however, is the one spelled out by some of the Old Testament prophets. Beware we say “Peace, when there is no peace”, and say there is common cause when there is no such thing.