A Claim That Has Gotten Mystics Killed, and One Neuroscience Now Studies

Claiming direct, unmediated experience of the divine has historically been dangerous as often as it has been honoured. The Sufi mystic al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 after reportedly declaring ana al-Haqq, I am the Truth, a statement authorities read as a blasphemous claim to divine identity rather than as the language of mystical union it was intended to be, and centuries later the German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart had a series of his propositions condemned by papal authority in 1329, shortly after his death, on the grounds that they could be read as denying a real distinction between God and the soul. Both cases illustrate the same structural tension noted elsewhere in this entry, an institution built on doctrine reacting against a claim of experience that bypasses doctrine to reach the divine directly.

In the past few decades the mystical experience itself, rather than the doctrinal dispute it provokes, has become an object of direct scientific study, with researchers in a field sometimes called neurotheology using brain imaging to examine what is happening neurologically during meditative or contemplative states reported as mystical, work that has documented measurable changes in brain activity during such states without thereby settling, or attempting to settle, the separate theological question of whether the experience constitutes genuine contact with a real divine reality.