Mystical experiences across different traditions share core features that support the perennial philosophy, the view that a universal, transcendent reality underlies diverse religious traditions. The article argues that these commonalities are not merely superficial but involve deep structural similarities in the experiences themselves, which have been documented across cultures and historical periods. This suggests that mystical experiences provide empirical evidence for a shared spiritual reality, challenging purely constructivist or culturally relative interpretations of mysticism.
Ellen Gallagher's ongoing series 'Watery Ecstatic' depicts real and imaginary underwater life through drawings, films, reliefs, and paintings. The article argues that this series engages with mysticism, (para)religion, and constructions of blackness, humanness, and animality. Placing the series in conversation with Sigmund Freud and Fred Moten, the author identifies a particular kind of mysticism called blue black mysticism: an experience of sociality that, through the oceanic, refuses categorical distinctions and modes of identification that ground normative and racialized ideations of humanness and subjectivity. This mysticism, by engaging the alterity of the ocean, troubles the racialized, hierarchical boundary between human and nonhuman animals.
Terence McKenna's advocacy for the religious use of hallucinogens shaped a countercultural movement called Psychonauts, who see humanity as undergoing rapid evolutionary change aided by substances and other entities. This American Psychonaut religion evolved in opposition to the Drug War, which treated these sacraments as illegal, thereby catalyzing the movement's anarchist and anticapitalist ideology that idealizes archaic society over modern 'dominator' society. The Drug War also hindered scholarly study of substance use as religious practice.
Joy is not a fixed emotion with an essential property but is always shaped by personal and interpersonal contexts, according to East Asian Yogācāra texts by Xuanzang and Kuiji. These Buddhist thinkers describe two contrasting forms of joy: one experienced in a lifeworld of ignorance and another in a lifeworld of wisdom. Because joy lacks an inherent nature, people can collaboratively recontextualize it to promote inclusion and emancipation. This analysis offers resources for feminist debates on happiness, suggesting that joy can be transformed rather than accepted as given.