Some years back, I read in the New York Times magazine an article on “Mysticism in America,” which said that two-fifths of the population of the United States has had a genuine mystic transcendent experience, which means they saw through the veil. As I recall, though I can no longer find the article, in sampling that two-fifths of the population, 8

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I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I managed, barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “trust” and “surrender.” These words became my mantra, but they seemed utterly pathetic, w

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In an editorial accompanying Griffiths’s paper, the University of Chicago psychiatrist and drug abuse expert Harriet de Wit tried to address this tension, pointing out that the quest for experiences that “free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment” is an abiding element of our hu

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