A mystical experience is the one category of human event that every tradition claims and none of them owns. Four mountains. Sinai. The Mount of Beatitudes. A cave called Hira on the Mountain of Light outside Mecca. And a tree in Bodh Gaya that wasn’t a mountain at all — but might as well have been.
Four men. Four moments. Four encounters with something so vast and so completely beyond the ordinary mind’s capacity to contain it that none of them could return to ordinary life as it had been before.
They never met. They lived centuries apart, spoke different languages, and held completely different understandings of what the divine even is. Between them they account for the spiritual lives of roughly five billion people alive on this planet right now.
And a Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof spent fifty years building a map of what they all encountered.
It is the same place on every map.
What This Episode Is Not About
Before anything else — a boundary, and it matters.
This is not about what was built afterward. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The closing of the gate of ijtihad. The conquest narratives. The institutional failures of every tradition examined here get their full and honest treatment in the World’s Mirrors series, episode by episode, tradition by tradition. That conversation is coming and it will not be gentle.
Today the question is narrower and older than any of that.
Did these four men have a direct encounter with the Numinous? Not the doctrines. Not the hierarchies. Not the wars fought in their names centuries after they were gone. The man on the mountain. The man in the garden. The man in the cave. The man under the tree.
What happened to them?
Moses and the Most Inconvenient Mystical Experience in History
Moses is not the obvious contemplative of the four. He is not serene. He is not detached. He kills someone before his calling begins. He stutters. He asks God to please send somebody else.
He is frustrated beyond anything he can articulate when he climbs Sinai — climbing to get away from his people, to think, to find anything at all that will tell him what to do next.
What speaks from the burning bush refuses to give a name that can be used as a handle. Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I am what I am. I am what I will be. The ground of being declining to be turned into a concept.
Rudolf Otto called this the Numinous — the direct encounter with the wholly other, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that is simultaneously terrifying and utterly compelling. An experience that cannot be reduced to psychology or chemistry or theology because it is prior to all three.
Grof documented the same thing across thousands of clinical sessions. At the transpersonal level his subjects — ordinary people, not mystics, not practitioners — encountered something the ordinary mind has no category for. Something vast. Something that left them permanently changed.
The Acacia, the Harmal, and the Ark
There is a thread here worth following carefully, and it needs its framing stated plainly: what follows is a contested interpretation, not established fact, and scholars debate it vigorously.
In 2008 the cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on the phenomenology of ayahuasca, noticed parallels between documented psychedelic experience and the descriptions in Exodus. He identified two plants native to the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev — the acacia tree and the harmal bush — whose combined active compounds would produce an experience chemically analogous to ayahuasca.
He pointed to several episodes in Moses’s life whose phenomenology maps onto documented entheogenic experience. The burning bush that is not consumed. The pillar of fire. And most specifically, Exodus chapter 20 verse 18 — the moment the Ten Commandments are delivered.
The Hebrew text says the Israelites saw the thunder.
Not heard. Saw. The perception of sound as vision — synesthesia — is among the most consistently documented effects of DMT-containing plants.
And one more detail worth sitting with quietly. The Ark of the Covenant, the vessel built to hold the tablets Moses carried down from that mountain, was constructed from acacia wood.
The same tree.
Again — contested. Debated. Not settled. But here is what is not debated: whatever opened the valve on that mountain, what came through it shaped three thousand years of human history, and it maps onto Grof’s cartography with extraordinary precision. The valve opening matters less than what came through it.
Jesus and the Teaching That Was Never About the Soul
Jesus is the most misunderstood of the four — not because his teaching is obscure, but because it is perfectly clear and the institution built around him spent two thousand years making it complicated.
Strip the institution away. Go to the Sermon on the Mount. Go to the Gospel of Thomas, the sayings gospel found in Egypt in 1945 that many scholars believe preserves the earliest layer of the tradition.
The Kingdom of God is within you. Not above you. Not after death. Not mediated through a priest or a sacrament or a doctrinal statement. Within you. Available now, in this moment, to anyone with eyes to see.
That is not a theological claim about salvation. That is a pointing-out instruction.
He taught in a world that already contained the Eleusinian Mysteries — the most important religious institution of the ancient Greek world, attended by Plato, Sophocles and Marcus Aurelius. The intellectual tradition his followers moved through was saturated with the understanding that the territory exists and direct encounter is possible.
What Jesus offered was something that tradition never gave. Not the experience. The technology for accessing it directly — without the ceremony, without the sacrament, without any external vehicle whatsoever.
Mind, Not Soul
Here is the distinction that what is called Christianism missed almost from the beginning.
The institutional church made the soul the primary category — individual, bounded, fallen, in need of rescue. Build the rescue operation. Build the priesthood. Build the hierarchy of salvation.
But Jesus was teaching about the Mind. Not your mind. The Mind. The ground of awareness present in every being simultaneously, in all times and all directions. Not singular. Not bounded. Not fallen. Not in need of rescue.
Where the Mind is, there is the treasure.
That line is from the Gospel of Mary — a private transmission Mary Magdalene received that the male disciples did not, discovered in Egypt in 1896, containing Mind teachings of extraordinary precision.
You cannot sell rescue to someone who knows they were never lost.
Muhammad, and the Terror That Proves It Was Real
In 610 CE a forty-year-old merchant was meditating alone in the Cave of Hira, on the Mountain of Light outside Mecca. He had been going there for years — withdrawn from the noise of the city, preparing the ground through solitude and the sustained cultivation of a quality of attention that makes recognition possible.
Then the angel arrived. Iqra. Read. Recite. The first word of what would become the most recited text in human history.
Muhammad was illiterate. The instruction to read was not literal. It was the valve opening in a man who had spent years preparing himself to receive it.
But preparation does not make the encounter gentle. It makes it survivable.
He did not float down from that mountain in serene enlightenment. He came down shaking. Terrified. Convinced something had touched him and that he might be losing his mind. He ran to his wife Khadija and said only: cover me, cover me. And she wrapped him in a cloak and held him until the trembling stopped.
This detail is not incidental. The Quran preserves it — two of its chapters open by addressing him as al-Muzzammil and al-Muddaththir. The wrapped one. The cloaked one. The revelation names him by the moment of his fear.
Because the Numinous, when the valve opens all the way, is not a comfort. Moses shielded his eyes and feared for his life. Paul was struck blind for three days. Anthony trembled in the desert. And Muhammad shook under a cloak while the woman who loved him held him together.
The terror is not a flaw in the experience. It is evidence that something real arrived — something too large for the nervous system that received it.
And notice who held the container. It was Khadija who steadied him, Khadija who reassured him, Khadija who brought him to her cousin Waraqa — a man who knew the old scriptures — and it was Waraqa who confirmed that the same presence which had come to Moses had now come to him.
The experience needed a witness. It needed someone to wrap the cloak and someone to name what had happened. Even the founder of a world religion did not walk through that door alone.
The Buddha Almost Didn’t Teach
The Buddha is different from the other three — not because his experience was different. The territory he accessed under the Bodhi tree is the same territory Moses accessed on Sinai, the same Kingdom Jesus described as within, the same presence Muhammad received in the cave, the same place Grof documented across fifty years.
He is different because of what almost didn’t happen next.
After the recognition — after forty-nine days and the complete dissolution of the ordinary self into the nature of Mind — the Buddha did not want to teach. The tradition tells us he felt the territory was too subtle. Too far from ordinary experience. Too easily misunderstood. He sat with it and concluded that the words would simply slide off.
Then something shifted. He looked out at the world and saw beings like lotuses in a pond. Some deep in the mud. Some with their heads already above the surface. Some nearly in full bloom.
Out of compassion for those nearly at the surface, he agreed to teach. And then spent forty-five years doing exactly one thing: teaching other people how to do what he had done. Not what he had seen. How he had seen it.
What Each One Gave
Moses gave the law — what to do. Jesus gave the heart — how to be. Muhammad gave the surrender — how to orient. The Buddha gave the technology — how to recognise.
The Four Noble Truths. The Eightfold Path. The Six Paramitas. The Six Yogas. The Mahamudra pointing-out instruction. A complete, testable, repeatable methodology for opening the valve — not through divine grace, not through a mountain, not through revelation, but through the systematic cultivation of the quality of attention that makes recognition possible.
Not for one afternoon. Not in one session. Permanently. As the ground of how you meet every moment of every day.
The others pointed at the moon. The Buddha almost didn’t show us how to see. And then — out of compassion — he did. And kept showing us for forty-five years.
The Same Territory
So — were they pointing at the same thing?
From where I stand, and this is a dharma practitioner speaking rather than a scientist or a theologian: yes.
The Numinous is not a Christian experience or a Jewish experience or an Islamic experience or even a Buddhist experience. It is what is always already there when the reducing valve opens and the ordinary mind’s careful management of what gets through is suspended.
Moses found it through the burning bush. The Eleusinian initiates found it through the sacred cup. Jesus found it and spent three years teaching everyone else how to reach it directly. Muhammad found it through years of preparation and surrender. The Buddha found it under a tree and spent forty-five years building the most precise navigation technology for the same territory ever produced. This is the heart of what gets called perennial philosophy — not that all religions are the same, but that they keep describing the same country.
Grof found all of them waiting for him at the end of fifty years of research.
The territory is not new. The mountain was always there. The cave was always there. The tree was always there.
Different shoes for the climbing.
What Comes Next — The Pharmacy of Mind
Every figure in this episode prepared the ground. Every one of them opened the valve. And every one of them needed a container to survive what came through — Moses had the mountain and the law, Muhammad had Khadija and the cloak, the Buddha built the container himself and called it the path.
But we have been asking only half the question.
We asked how they prepared the mind. Next season asks something more dangerous. What if preparation was not the only key? What if, alongside the fasting and the solitude and the years in the cave, there was also — in temple after temple, tradition after tradition — a substance?
We begin where the physician stopped writing. With a gap in the greatest medical text of the ancient world, a gap that was not an accident. With women carrying crocus flowers across an island that would be buried before it could tell us what they were for.
The mind is a pharmacy. The question the next season asks is: who held the keys, what was on the shelves, and why is so much of it missing?
Until then — look at the nearest thing to you. Really look. Not at your idea of it.
The Numinous was always there.
Further Reading:
Rudolf Otto — The Idea of the Holy. The origin of the term Numinous and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The foundational text for treating mystical experience as a category prior to psychology and theology.
Stanislav Grof — The Holotropic Mind and Realms of the Human Unconscious. Fifty years of transpersonal cartography. The map on which all four figures appeared.
Benny Shanon — ‘Biblical Entheogens: A Speculative Hypothesis’, Time and Mind, 2008. The contested hypothesis discussed in the Moses section. Presented in the episode as interpretation, not fact. Shanon’s own title contains the word speculative.
The Gospel of Thomas. Discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, 1945. Widely held to preserve the earliest layer of the sayings tradition.
The Gospel of Mary. Coptic manuscript acquired in Cairo, 1896. The private transmission Mary Magdalene received.
Erwin Schrödinger — What Is Life? and My View of the World. Referenced across the series for the one-mind conclusion.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Mysticism.
Lotsawa House — Tibetan master translations.
Quantum Awareness — The Six Yogas of Naropa.
Quantum Awareness — The Six Paramitas.
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