Can religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences reveal truth?

Question

To what extent can we acquire reliable knowledge about the world through religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences?

Does the answer hinge on the context of these experiences?

Does the answer hinge on the specific religious framework these experiences align with?

Furthermore, does the answer depend on whether we directly undergo the experience firsthand or merely hear about it through others' accounts (i.e., secondhand or thirdhand)?

And regarding the point of hearing other people's anecdotes, would it be beneficial to undertake a comprehensive phenomenological and ethnographic analysis of testimonies regarding religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences across diverse cultures and religions throughout the world? This could involve in-depth interviews with individuals worldwide who claim to have encountered phenomena such as:

• Out-of-body experiences (OBEs)
• Near-death experiences (NDEs)
• Demonic possessions and exorcisms
• Paranormal phenomena
• Psychic phenomena
• Spiritual gifts
• Mediumship
• Witchcraft
• Encounters with entities such as demons, angels, deities, aliens, ghosts, etc.
• Ecstatic experiences
• Miracles
• And more.

Would engaging in such research bring us closer to the truth? If so, what might that truth look like?

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Note: In light of @Conifold's concern that the current wording of this question might lead to debates and subjective opinions, I kindly request responses that draw on the insights of respected authors who have contributed relevant literature (such as papers, books, or blog posts) to this topic. Make sure to cite their work and include pertinent quotes if possible.

Answer 1

Short Answer A key point to realize in thinking thru your question, is that all empiricism is first person, and subjective. Science tries to harden its data as much as it can, by trying to cross check the subjectivity, making things as intersubjective as possible. But the closest we can ever get to "objective" is "intersubjective consensus".

Additionally, there are subject areas where one simply cannot go intersubjective, and empiricism is solely subjective. This is the case for almost all informal empiricism -- such as learning how to walk, or developing the technique to consistently throw and catch a boomerang. Many aspects of selfhood and psychology have to be purely subjective as well.

We do not have a settled ontology for the universe. For physicalist worldviews, none of these practices could possibly lead to truth as they presume non-physicalist ontologies. But since basic ontology is in dispute, that is not a valid prohibition.

For those worldviews which postulate a mystic/spiritual realm -- such as interactive spiritual dualism, or consciousness-based idealisms -- direct mystical experiences are in many cases the best, or often the only, way to access significant aspects of our world, and gain understanding of it. So, based on the critical role of first person empiricism in knowledge generation, and the possible case where the only source of knowledge for major aspects of our world would be mystic experiences -- the answer to your question basically has to be a "yes".

However (caveats) the accuracy of mystic communication is not high. The best documented accuracy data I know of is from remote viewing.

Remote viewing passed multiple statistically significant test cases in lab settings. In many cases, the process was to pick four very visually dramatic and distinct locations, and take photos of them. Then send a "target" individual out to one, and have the RVer try to sketch what was around the target. Then a separate judge would evaluate which of the four photos, the sketches was the best match to. If it was the location the target went to, that was a hit, if not a miss. Hits were statistically above the 25% random level, indicating some degree of psi-based knowledge. The CIA then tried a few location based studies, and got occasionally breakthrough levels of knowledge by this method. The hits were good enough to set up a program for 25 years. In the CIA program, multiple RVers gained insights on the same target, and the PM compiled these results into a report.

The RV PM summarized the accuracy rate of these cold location searches at approximately 30%. This was the accuracy rate that 25 years of iterations/variations on method, PLUS the use of as much intersubjectivity as possible, could get to. So -- any given claim or observation had over twice the odds of being wrong as right. Now for a blind set of guesses, they would fall far below 30% accuracy, as there are so many different possibilities that a real site could consist of,. so, just like with the lab data, the field application of RV was helping discover "truth". BUT -- with a very high error noise factor.

For some references on this program, here is a book by the initial scientist who inspired it: Limitless Mind: A Guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness One by its long term program manager: Anomalous Cognition: Remote Viewing Research and Theory and one by its most decorated RVer: The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy

So mysticism needs to be taken with a grain of salt I AM a practicing mystic. But I generally don't trust mystical "knowledge". This is an intrinsic failing of the of the mystical process: the methods to gain insight, and the methods to do narrative speculation, or narrative reinforcement of prior beliefs, use the same mental channels. Insights and speculation are close to impossible to distinguish internally.

I use mysticism for helping others, rather than being seduced by the allure of a shortcut to knowledge. Seductive allure, and in particular the special status that "being the true prophet" offers as temptation, is VERY skewing and distorting of one's judgment. The contradictions between the messages of the world's self-declared prophets -- is an effective test case on the validity of the "truth" conclusions their method can deliver.

But apply empiricism to the useful practices, and these can provide knowledge, even if not "revelation-based" knowledge.

If one can cure health and psychological problems of today, by spiritual healing, or past life regressions, these useful practices serve as useful bits of data on how a spiritual realm works. If one can communicate with and interact with lost souls, demons, earth-sprites, and "old gods" like Yahweh, these experiences likewise are data about the spirit realm. I gain my spiritual knowledge from useful practice, not from dogma or revelation.

It is true that part of the source of my conviction of reincarnation, lost souls, spiritual attachments, etc. comes from personally experiencing parts of a past life, doing first person spiritual rescue, and experiencing depossession. But I also know how my own mind can mislead me. Part of my conviction also comes from the utility of regression-based healing, the changed feel of a location for others when its ghosts are rescued, and the psychological benefits of depossession.

Learning by Reading?

Now, one does not have to DO these practices oneself in order to gain this knowledge. Reading about other's experiences is not as personally convincing, but can have the same empirical insight. For example, Joe Fisher's discovery of the dark side of the beings that his channeling circle has taken effectively as their "gods" -- is a useful narrative for anyone thinking at all seriously about interacting with the spirit realm: see this review of Fisher's book The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides. The shamanistic experiences of Carlos Castaneda, while not quite as eye-openingly calling for a rethink of one's prior assumptions, also suggest a spirit realm that is not all rainbows and butterflies. Reading Robert Monroe, Edith Fiore, and William Baldwin will give some more positive examples of what one can discover about the sprit realm -- although the cautionary tales of Fisher and Johannes Greber are also very useful; see my review of Greber's book Communication With the Spirit World of God.

Final takeaway The best method I have found for doing practical mysticism is that of Ben Swett; see his article Prayer as a Form of Two-way Communication.

Answer 2

Can religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences reveal truth?

As @ScottRowe mentioned, any experience has the potential to reveal truth. So technically, the answer is yes.

However, mysticism and spiritualism are at the bottom of the list when it comes to reliability: It's unverifiable hearsay. Math, science, philosopy provide great, reliable tools for acquiring and verifying knowledge and truth. I can't think of any knowledge revealed through mysticism but I'm not an expert on mysticism.

A broken clock reveals the truth about time twice a day but is unreliable the rest of day.

Answer 3

I don't have the full answer to your question but I do have an answer to this:

Furthermore, does the answer depend on whether we directly undergo the experience firsthand or merely hear about it through others' accounts (i.e., secondhand or thirdhand)?

I think it HAS to matter if you had it yourself or not. The world is full of people claiming mystical experiences, and a huge portion of them are mutually exclusive. Joseph Smith's mystical experiences are mutually exclusive with, say, L Ron Hubbard's.

When it comes to religiously specific mystical experiences, at the very least MOST of them have to be "incorrect" in some way - "incorrect" takes a wide range of meanings here, from "the person is lying about or misremembering their experience" to a more benign "they are misinterpreting their experience" to "it was just a dream/hallucination and nothing more".

And when you realise that they have to be mostly incorrect, in one of those types of ways, you then realise that you can't take for granted ANY of them. You cannot make any significant theological conclusions based on the mystical experiences other people report, including people you know and trust.

You should seek your own, AND you should be willing to consider interpretations of that experience that are less obvious (including questioning it entirely).

Answer 4

In medieval times religious revelation was considered the only method to get knowledge of supernatural phenomena. Today the attitude concerning religious revelation and all kinds of paranormal experience has substantially changed.

The century long discussion whether statements obtained from revelation are true or false, shows the necessity to document each case and to check the truth or falseness of the statement. For several fields from your list such controlled examination is already on their way. Applying methods from psychology, sociology and specific scientific diciplines to investigate paranormal phenomena. As a first pointer to the broad field of relevant investigations see parapsychology. Its section “Further reading” lists relevant authors, papers and books for further information.

A claim can be true or false, independently from how it originated. The question is “How to check whether the claim is right?” One has to question and to classify each report separately by a well-defined list of predefined criteria: The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

“Would engaging in such research bring us closer to the truth?” – Of course, that’s the method of scientific investigation.

Answer 5

The Catholic church has made it it's business to follow up on and track all reports of mystical experiences throughout the world, in at least the last 1500 years. They have traditionally been well connected to common folk and have for a long time been the most significant authority to reach out to for any such reports.

The Catholic Church as a business has also tried out various venues of turning profit from their cultural heritage which is a book with reports of mystical experiences. So they would know how to make more profit from discovering more miracles.

Yet the Catholic Church has not been able to find anything worth changing either scripture or science, despite for the longest time being as much a sponsor of scientists and philosophers as other economical powers of the medieval world.

I don't think the Catholic Church is an entity without self interests that could be relied on for science and philosophy, but even this huge organization which traced thousands of reports of mystical experiences has not declared deviations from the Bible, indicating that the time of plentyful wonders was in the past, and reports of other occult experiences in the last 1500 years were not reliable.

If you do not want to trust the majority of academia today, nor governments, not even the Catholic Church, but rather try to follow up on YouTube videos, then that is not a rational path.

Would engaging in such research bring us closer to the truth? If so, what might that truth look like?

The immediate and obvious path to a lot of truth is via a secular education. There is so much hard applicable truth to be found in the technologies, social sciences and arts that as a human you would die of old age before having learned and mastered it all.

The only known hard truth that has been found in the last 3000 years from investigating mystical reports is that even otherwise sane humans can be extremely gullible, believing in falsehoods from tricks, cons, illusions and delusions. Just learning all the known applicable ways in which humans can be manipulated and tricked can fill one year or learning in psychology.

This is not 100% proof that every single report of a mystical experience was a trick, a con, and illusion or a delusion, but proof that at least most of them were, and that for the rest it's not rationally worth bothering following up, if at the same time there is soooooooo much truth to be learned effectively and in applicable ways from a secular education in technology or social sciences (And there is good money and respect from peers in society in it as well).

Answer 6

(Answering from a Christian perspective. Please note: I am not here arguing for the correctness of this perspective, I am simply presenting it.)

In the 1st Century

The authors of the New Testament wrestled with this question somewhat, and found the answer to be both yes and no - mystical experiences can reveal truth, but they can also lead people into falsehood. Caution is required.

The New Testament uses miracle stories as evidence that the claims of Christianity are true. For example, in the conclusion of his Gospel, the Apostle John¹ writes

Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30-31, ESV)

In defending the legitimacy of his beliefs, the Apostle Paul frequently recounted his own mystical experience on the road to Damascus (see Acts 22 and Acts 26). There are many other examples in the New Testament, but these will suffice to prove the point: Christians in the first century did believe that miracles and mystical experiences can and do point towards the truth.

However the early Christians did not believe that mystical experiences necessarily bring you closer to the truth. This is because not all spiritual forces are honest, as Jesus called the Devil "a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44). For this reason, 1st century Christians repeatedly warn against naively believing any spiritual experience:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. (1st John 4:1-3)

Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. (Galatians 1:8)

Not everyone who speaks in the spirit is a prophet, but only if he exhibits the Lord's ways. By his conduct, therefore, will the false prophet and the prophet be recognized. (Didache² 11.8)

The message from these three different early Christian authors is fairly clear: You must be on your guard against misleading mystical experiences. The doctrinal and moral foundations of the Christian faith are so certain that mystical experiences mustn't shake you from believing them. Similarly, the first Christians warned against the possibility of miracles being worked by evil powers for the purpose of deception (note that the signs and wonders are presumed to be genuinely miraculous here):

For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect. (Mark 13:22)

And then the deceiver of the world will appear as a son of God and will perform signs and wonders. (Didache 16.4)

Thus, while Jesus and his disciples did use miracles as evidence for the truth of their teachings, they did not claim that miracles necessarily point towards the truth.

Later History

Even into the present day, Christian attitudes towards mystical experiences have generally stayed close to what their intellectual predecessors thought in the first century: Mystical experiences can be useful evidences, but they must be subject to scrutiny and they cannot overrule the truths already revealed. For this reason, subsequent generations of Christians rejected the claims of new revelation made by Mani, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and many others who claimed to have been told by God or by angels things contrary to what was taught by the New Testament. This rejection is not founded on a belief that those people were faking their spiritual experiences, but rather on the belief that their teachings contradicted the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles.

There is, of course, a lot of variation in how strictly Christians will investigate spiritual experiences, either to discern whether the experience actually happened or to discern whether the claims based on the experience are true. Some people are much more credulous than others! When debates of any kind arise among Christians, it is not at all unusual for them to use claims of mystical experiences as evidence to support their side. However, the arguments do not usually hinge on such claims. Instead, they are viewed as confirmation of an otherwise compelling argument. For example, in the famous debate between Martin Luther and Ulirch Zwingli in 1528, both Luther and Zwingli claimed to have had visions that confirmed their own view was correct, but in the actual discussion between the two theologians, neither brought up their own mystical experiences, instead appealling to the Bible, Christian tradition, and logic to support their respective opinions.³

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Footnotes:

1. There is considerable dispute about the authorship of this book. Whether it was written by John the Apostle or by some other ancient Christian author is not relevant to the point I am making.

2. This is one of the oldest Christian books not included in the Bible. It may not date to the 1st century but it is very close if not. The author's identity is completely lost to history. I am using the translation by Michael Holmes.

3. See Hermann Sasse, This is My Body. In pages 225-272 reconstructs the debate from notes of those present; I don't recall the page numbers but Sasse also mentions in the same book that both of them believed their opinion had been confirmed by their own mystical experiences.

Answer 7

Even truth itself is subjective in many cases. One might consider something a conspiracy theory and believe that makes it inherently false, despite the incredible number of conspiracies that have later been confirmed as having been valid. It has been said: If you put 3 strange men in a room with limited resources 2 of the men will always conspire against the third. Even mystical experiences that would seem to be mutually exclusive are not necessarily so.

Enough people have reported experiences such as seeing a loved one while temporarily deceased, seeing a light as they pass away, that society widely accepts the notion that it is true that the person perceived what they claim. Enough people have been told it's not their time yet and returned from a flatline, that there is more evidence confirming the phenomenon is possible compared to the complete lack of evidence that it is not possible. Therefore it is a empirically factual statement to say that sometimes deceased people encounter a loved one, despite your lack of having experienced it yourself. Science and observation are not as reliable a system as they are given credit for. Ultimately scientific understanding doesn't carry any guarantee of truth. If I were to tell you there are a thousand voices in the room with you where you are alone. Some are dead some are alive but they are there regardless of your inability to hear them. You might then say I was wrong because there Is literally nothing but dead silence in the room. But you would be wrong because the voices don't follow the radio around hoping to be heard. They are there regardless of your ability to perceive them.

One could claim that the Higgs field is the mechanism by which God Wills the universe to exist, and that His belief that it does what it does is what causes it to do what we think it does. Or with radiation coming from a black hole. It doesn't come from the black hole it comes from what is displaced by the black holes attraction. Otherwise black holes would cumulatively increase the cumulative negative pressure of space. Resulting in a vacuum that would instantly affect everything in the universe.

Answer 8

Your question is ridiculously vague. You ask about whether research would bring us closer to 'the truth'. The truth about what, exactly? Clearly, research could generate factual information. You can, for instance, gather information about the numbers of people who have had each type of experience, about their ages, religious beliefs, cultural background, training, ethnicity, about the duration and timing of the experience, about the impressions gained by witnesses, about the existence of any physical evidence, etc etc etc etc. So yes, the research could reveal no end of factual truths in those areas. (As an aside, you could probably save yourself a lot of time by analysing research already done by others over the decades.)

However, if by 'the truth' of possession, say, you want to know whether people are 'really' possessed by devils, you need to do more than just hold interviews with people who have been possessed. You need, to begin with, a testable hypothesis about what a devil is and how and why it causes the effects we call possession.

As for your subsidiary question about whether the insights you might gain depend on whether or not you experience the various phenomena first hand, I would say that if you were to have first hand experience of witchcraft, possession, NDEs, OBEs, encounters with aliens, and all the rest, you would be a very unusual researcher indeed.

Answer 9

Many "truths" revealed in the religious, mystical or spiritual realm have been proven to be untrue, and some have proven to be true. The famous untruth of the world being flat being one.

I think you have to experience something firsthand to know whether it is the truth or not, regardless of context or religious framework. A wise sage can expound many truths he claims he realized, people can share their encountered phenomena, but you will always stay in the shadow of doubt, unless you have some form of personal experience or realizations yourself. Also because of the following point.

"Would engaging in such research bring us closer to the truth?"

Honestly would love to have research on this field but it's pretty much impossible to do research into the phenomena you've described. Many of them are personal experiences (out of the body experience for example). How do we ascertain if the person is truly having an out of body experience? We don't have tools to document or verify the fact.

All in all, in my opinion, personal experience in this field is your best friend.

Answer 10

All knowledge is implicit in the brain and body of the person who possesses such knowledge. We do not find explicit logic, similar to computer code, in the brain and body of a person either while alive or when performing an autopsy. Speaking about true knowledge just means some person holds knowledge that is evaluated in the local body-mind as true or untrue in the context of implicit knowledge. Objective truth is a topic of discussion among two or more subjects where each subject has to evaluate truth-values in the mystical or personal implicit knowledge context.

Answer 11

As the other answers already imply, it simply depends on how you measure truth, so to speak. A common method in modern times is to apply logical reasoning and refer to observable facts, but it is by no means to only way; just look to conspiracy theories as an example, where 'The Truth' is decided a priori, and perceived reality takes second place. The point here being adherents genuinely believe this to be true.

Even in maths there isn't actually absolute truth; we choose our axioms as the ground truth, but that is a free choice each of us makes, and we could have chosen the opposite. The only things that we can declare to be universally true with some justification, are statements of the form 'If [axiom, axiom, ...] then [consequence, ...]' - that is, if we are convinced of the validity of boolean calculus; I am, but that is my choice.

The answer then, as others have already said, is yes, truth can be revealed through religious experiences; not only can you randomly stumble over something that is universally accepted as truth by rational criteria, but you can simply decree that something is true. However, whether this then stands up to reality is another matter.

Answer 12

It seems as I'm too late as an answer is already accepted, but let me respond to

To what extent can we acquire reliable knowledge about the world through religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences?

Hales wrote a short book addressing this question, Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. From the description:

His claim is that philosophical propositions are relatively true—true in some perspectives and false in others. Hales defends this argument first by examining rational intuition as the method by which philosophers come to have the beliefs they do. Analytic rationalism, he claims, has a foundational reliance on rational intuition as a method of acquiring basic beliefs. He then argues that there are other methods that people use to gain beliefs about philosophical topics that are strikingly analogous to rational intuition and examines two of these: Christian revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. Hales argues that rational intuition is not epistemically superior to either of these alternative methods.

The book covers in depth the system of western empiricism / the scientific method ("rational intuition" he calls it). He clearly lays out how this is a foundation for philosophical beliefs. Well, one possible foundation for philosophical beliefs. He goes on to consider some religious experiences/practices that also claim to be a foundation for philosophical beliefs.

To be clear, Hales is not saying the scientific method is wrong, or that alternative methods of acquiring beliefs are superior to the scientific method. Instead he makes clear that the reasons for preferring one over the other are really quite difficult to justify, and the book is his argument that you cannot prefer one over the other (at least as long as there are no contradictions).

He kind of glosses over some important epistemology ideas like coherentism, and I have other minor criticisms, but the book is worth reading in regard to the above question.

Answer 13

Can religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences reveal truth?

Reveal truth(s) about oneself? Yes, of course.

Reveal truth(s) about mathematics? Yes two!: Sometimes when looking for a theorem/proof, one experiences trance-like, altered states of consciousness, and conversely, such states, arrived at by other means, can be conducive to creativity

To what extent can we acquire reliable knowledge about the world through religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences?

"the world" as in "the material world"? Can one reliably know that there's a bright blue sky outside after days inside an underground bunker with no communication of any sort?