I’ve written about why I’m a Christian, how I conceive God and wrestled with the dogma of Trinity but not the existential why underneath all three. This subject lives closer to our deepest experiences than to doctrine or data. But those experiences can still be examined with reason, theology, and neuroscience. We don’t spend much time examining why we love our loved ones or why something inspires us at that deepest level rather we express that indirectly: how my wife makes me feel loved or how the Ignatian Principle and Foundation moves me. That’s what I’ll attempt to do here: use reason, theology and neuroscience to examine the contours of the Real beneath my belief and to explain why I find belief credible, inevitable, and intellectually alive.
A religion without mystics is a philosophy.
Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel,” 2013), § 262
To make a long story short, I have found mysticism and spiritual experience sufficient evidence to make belief epistemically valid. Mysticism is not irrational; it is how the human brain, and by extension the human person, apprehends the Real.
Mysticism as Knowing
Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it…lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI.
William James argued that mystical experience is a genuine form of knowing — not emotion or fantasy — marked by insight, authority, and transformative power. For him, these states are empirical data to be judged by their fruits, revealing truths that ordinary consciousness cannot reach.1
I found his argument logically persuasive because he was methodical and scientific in his accounting of these experiences that transcended race, gender, social status, and even culture. If the materialists are right about the epistemic strength of scientific evidence then James is, in fairness, also right by the same lights. So faith as crediting mystics with their genuine perception of a deeper order was utterly Jamesian, utterly reasonable.
The Brain as Reality Generator
What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain.
Newberg M.d., Andrew; Eugene G. D’Aquili; Vince Rause. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (pp. 35-36). (Function). Kindle Edition.
Having satisfied myself with metaphysics, I turned to the neuroscience of belief. Dr. Andy Newberg wrote several books on the subject two of which I found extremely instructive, Why We Believe What We Believe and Why God Won’t Go Away.
Newberg argues that the thalamus is the brain’s reality-generator: it filters and synchronizes sensory input, stabilizing it into a coherent world that feels objectively real. This process—called reification—makes our constructed model of reality seem solid and external. When sensory input into the thalamus diminishes during deep prayer or meditation, the normal self–world boundaries collapse, and the brain reifies a different model: an undifferentiated, unitary state of consciousness. In Newberg’s framework, mystical experience is not a breakdown of reality but the brain’s highest integrative mode of perceiving it.2
In other words, the mystic perceives the world in a way that is “realer than real.” The epistemic upshot couldn’t be clearer. If you reading this post believe what you’re reading is real, then the mystic sees it in a way that’s more real than that. If you are one of those who dismiss mysticism as hallucination then you’d be logically compelled to disbelieve your experience as less real than a hallucination. It’s literally how your brain works.
God in All Things
St. Ignatius believed that we can find God in all things, at every moment, even in the most ordinary times. To do this, we must pay attention to what is happening in and around us and reflect on this experience…God is found in what is real, so we pray from what is real in our lives.
O’Brien, Kevin. The Ignatian Adventure: Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in Daily Life (p. 79). (Function). Kindle Edition.
It’s a familiar Ignatian refrain: God in all things. Here it takes on a universal tenor. A mystic, whether a Carmelite nun engaged in contemplative prayer or a Tibetan monk in deep mediation, has ordered their brains to perceive the God I believe in to be experienced directly. It should be noted that this experience will never show us God but an infinitesimally small sliver of Godself.3
Seeing God in all things is also integrative. I read how mystics try to put the ineffable into words and how remarkably similar it is to the best theology in our spiritual tradition. Dogma as the silent, inexpressible truer faith that lies underneath kerygma the spoken faith in our everyday piety. The Trinity as paradox comes immediately to mind. All of the theological God-talk, in fact.
- God is Nothing, i.e. No-thing.
- God is One.
- The only true thing we can say about God is silence.
- God is all in all.
- We are made in the image and likeness of God.
- God is in our deepest selves.
And on and on and on. It was so clear to me that was the unifying connection between that silent YES in my heart of hearts and the elegant prose and poetry of Ignatian spirituality.
The trick is to remain epistemically vigilant and humble. Because we carry these experiences in daily life and remember them and naturally seek to interpret them. If we aren’t so lucky as to experience them ourselves we have to do the work to discern the accounts of others so we too remain grounded in what is real: God.
The God Who Won’t Go Away
In the end, this is what keeps me a believer.
Not sentiment.
Not inherited doctrine.
Not the feel-good stories I’ve spent years learning how to question.
But the convergence of experience, mind, and discernment — James reminding me that mystical states are a genuine mode of knowing; Newberg showing that the brain is structured to perceive reality at its highest level; and Ignatius teaching me how to test those moments so I don’t mistake comfort for truth.
- William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, identified a consistent pattern across all genuine mystical encounters. He argued that mystical states are not sentimental or escapist but a form of direct knowing—a legitimate mode of human cognition. He called this “the noetic quality,” meaning that these experiences feel and function as revelations: they disclose insight rather than emotion. James held that mystical states are:
Ineffable — they exceed language; they must be experienced to be understood.
Noetic — they convey knowledge, not merely feeling.
Transient — brief, but their impact endures.
Passive — they arrive as gift, not achievement.
James concluded that mystical experience is a valid empirical datum: we must judge it by its fruits, not dismiss it by its strangeness. For him, mysticism is a channel of truth that expands the boundaries of what human beings can know. ↩︎ - Newberg breaks it down to three basic levels of consciousness:
Dream State – The brain generates its own imagery with low coherence, giving rise to a fluid, unstable sense of reality.
Waking Consciousness – Sensory input drives a coherent, structured world with clear boundaries between self and other—useful, but limited.
Unitary State – Boundary-making regions quiet and the brain shifts into its most integrated mode, producing an experience of undivided wholeness. The deepest expression of this is Absolute Unitary Being (AUB), where self and world dissolve into a single field of awareness. ↩︎ - A physical analogy would be perceiving a grain of sand as part of the entire observable universe (1 x 1061). It is an awesome thought; no? ↩︎