Mysticism, Connection Experience, and the Utopian Turn

My book Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy: Utopian Edition is concerned with spelling out the economic, psychological, and sociological elements that could provide a realistic and actionable foundation for moving toward utopia — and by utopia I do not mean some pie-in-the-sky fantasy, but a healed, equitable, fully functioning world where every human being has the opportunity to develop and express their full potential. The book includes discussions of accumulation and debt as the twin engines of the System (Sosteric 2016); of money as a technology of extraction rather than exchange; of the psychological damage inflicted by a global order that normalizes competition, precarity, and greed; of the sociological machinery — ideology, media, education, religion — that keeps the whole thing running; and of the concrete economic and political alternatives that could actually get us off this dying path. One of the more important of these discussions, and the one I want to focus on here, is the discussion of mystical experience, or what I call connection experience (Sosteric 2018a).

At this point, some readers may be scratching their heads. Mystical experience? In a discussion of money, the economy, and the transformation of this planet? Can I be serious? Yes, I am. Despite its wholesale neglect and marginalization in academic circles, mystical experience — what I call connection experience (Sosteric 2018a) — is an incredibly important human experience, and it is, I will argue, an indispensable component of any genuine utopian transformation. You cannot get to a healed, equitable, awakened world on policy papers alone. The transformation we are talking about is not merely institutional; it is experiential, psychological, and spiritual. Connection experience is the engine.

A Tradition of Scholarly Interest

Like utopianism, mystical experience has been the subject of serious reflection by great minds, secular and otherwise. William James, the esteemed father of American psychology, regarded mystical experience as the transformative bedrock of religion itself (James 1903, 6). Wayne Proudfoot called religious experience ubiquitous, insisting that religion “has always been an experiential matter,” not merely a set of creedal statements or a collection of rites (Proudfoot 1985). Heriot-Maitland (2008, 302) observed that “the origin of a given tradition can often be traced to an initial transcendent encounter, moment of revelation” — or what I would call a connection to The Fabric. Abraham Maslow, a man interested in ushering in Eupsychia, spent the bulk of his career studying “peak experiences,” his term for connection experience, and concluded they were the root of all “known high religions” — “the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer” (Maslow 2012, 339). William Stace, one of the most significant contributors to the modern study of mysticism, pointed out that Vedantism, a leading philosophy of India, is an intellectualization of a “reality rooted in mysticism,” and called mystical experience “a psychological fact of which there is abundant evidence” (Stace 1960, 30, 14). To deny it, he said, “is ignorance and very stupid.”

And lest anyone still wishes to discount connection experience as irrational fluff, the last two decades of neuroscience have put that dismissal to rest. Andrew Newberg’s neuroimaging of Tibetan Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns in prayer showed that at the peak of connection, activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe — the brain’s orientation area, the region that draws the boundary between self and world — drops dramatically (Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause 2001; Newberg 2006). The felt unity that mystics across all traditions report is not vague poetry; it has a precise, reproducible neurological signature. Roland Griffiths’s team at Johns Hopkins found that a single psilocybin session could occasion mystical experiences that participants rated among the most personally meaningful of their entire lives, with enduring positive changes in mood, outlook, and behavior persisting more than a year later (Griffiths et al. 2006; Griffiths et al. 2008). Related work on long-term meditators shows that connection experience correlates with decreased activity in the default mode network, the brain’s self-referential circuitry associated with rumination and what contemplative traditions call the small self (Brewer et al. 2011). The experience is real, measurable, cross-culturally consistent, and its effects on mental health, well-being, and prosocial orientation are, on balance, profoundly positive.

It Is Ubiquitous

Most people assume connection experience is rare — the province of saints, seers, and robed mystics on mountaintops. The evidence points in exactly the opposite direction. Survey estimates put the proportion of people reporting mystical or transcendent experience somewhere between twenty and fifty percent of the population (Bourque 1969; Bourque and Back 1971; Yamane and Polzer 1994), and some surveys push that figure higher still (Sosteric 2018a). Even these numbers almost certainly undercount. Maslow discovered that the more skillfully he asked the question, the more people reported peak experiences, until he finally fell into the habit of expecting everyone to have them. He coined the term “non-peaker” — not for people who cannot connect, but for people who suppress, deny, or “forget” their connection experiences, whether out of a rigidly rationalistic worldview, ideological commitment, or simple fear (Maslow 2012, 340–41). Most intriguingly, Maslow suggested that Freud himself — the man who built an entire psychology on the premise that religion is infantile delusion — had his own mystical experience and rejected it (Maslow 1962). The father of psychoanalysis was, it seems, a non-peaker in Maslow’s precise sense.

Nor is it only the religious or the uneducated who connect. Contrary to what dogmatists like Richard Dawkins would have you believe (Dawkins 2006), the limited sociological research on the phenomenon finds that those with more education are equally, if not more, likely to have profound mystical experiences (Bourque 1969; Bourque and Back 1971). The educated simply conceptualize it differently, using secular, psychologically neutral vocabularies: flow, self-actualization, transcendence (Maslow 1971), “pure consciousness events” (Forman 1986), or, as Albert Einstein put it, “cosmic religious feeling” (Einstein 1930). Ken Wilber assembled a collection of the mystical writings of the world’s great physicists and claimed that every one of them was a dyed-in-the-wool mystic (Wilber 2001). Gnosis, Samadhi, Fana, Satori, the Clear Light, being born again, flow, peak experience — the same underlying connection event pours through dozens of vocabularies, religious and secular, and researchers counting only one vocabulary will always undercount the whole. Add centuries of deliberate obfuscation of mystical knowledge by elites who had political reasons to keep it hidden (Versluis 2007), and the surprise is not that we underestimate the ubiquity of connection experience; the surprise is that we see it at all. In my own work, I have argued that we should simply accept what the evidence indicates: everybody has connection experiences (Sosteric 2018a).

The Power to Transform: Quantum Change

Here is where the argument becomes directly relevant to utopian transformation. Connection experience is not merely pleasant or meaningful — it is transformative, sometimes instantaneously and permanently so. William Miller and Janet C’de Baca documented the phenomenon in Quantum Change: people who, in a single vivid epiphany or mystical moment, undergo sudden, dramatic, and enduring transformation — quitting addictions overnight, reorienting their values, changing the entire trajectory of their lives (Miller and C’de Baca 2001; Miller 2004). These are not slow therapeutic gains; they are phase transitions (White 2004). The person who walks into the experience is not the person who walks out. William James knew this a century ago; his accounts of conversion describe precisely this rapid, radical reordering of the self (Hastings 2010).

This is precisely why connection experience matters for any serious program of social change. The transformations we need — the end of accumulation, exploitation, and the normalization of a System that chews up human potential — require not just new institutions but new people, or rather, people newly aligned. Connection experience realigns. It dissolves the small self, erodes the ego-defenses that make greed and domination appear natural, and orients individuals toward compassion, equality, and service. A population that connects is a population that becomes very difficult to rule.

The Turn to the Left

Which brings me to the fourth point, and to my article “Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion” (Sosteric 2022). Connection experience does not simply change people; it changes them in a particular direction. It produces what I call a turn to the left — a progressive, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian reorientation. The paradigmatic case is Bartolomé de las Casas, a brutal Spanish colonizer who burned slaves alive to promote the colonial agenda. After encountering a passage from the Christian Bible during a Sunday service, like a logic switch, he flipped. One day he was burning and mutilating the natives of Hispaniola; the next he was campaigning to end their exploitation (Sosteric 2018b). That is a quantum change with a political valence, and that valence is progressive.

When I finally overcame my own sociological squeamishness and actually read the New Testament for myself, I found the same pattern at the very origin of Christianity (Sosteric 2022). Jesus was not the gentle shepherd of sheeple the priests fed me in spoonfuls as a child. He was an anti-elite, anti-authoritarian revolutionary: he healed on the Sabbath in open defiance of authority, called the priests and lawmakers hypocrites and vipers to their faces, told the rich man to sell everything and give to the poor, and announced, quoting Isaiah, that he had come to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and liberation for the oppressed. His apostles carried the same message — shared property, redistribution aimed explicitly at equality, “neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male and female.” Even Engels (1894) recognized that early Christianity resembled the modern working-class movement, though he missed that its socialism was practiced in real time, not deferred to heaven. The elites of the day recognized the threat, assassinated Jesus for it, and then — this is the crucial move — built a Church, headed by elites like Emperor Constantine, not to spread his message but to contain it. The “Jesus died for your sins” dogma is what I call the Caiaphas Lie: a propaganda operation designed to convert a revolutionary execution into a passion play the masses would passively watch (Sosteric 2022).

Religion, on this view, is not simply the opium of the people (Marx 1978). It is a containment strategy — an institution developed to sanitize, co-opt, and defuse an otherwise revolutionary human spirituality (Jantzen 1995; Bruneau 1998). What is being contained, at root, is connection experience and the progressive activation it breeds. The Church fathers handpicked the canon and destroyed the rest (Starr 2013, 179); they kept the Bible out of common hands for over a thousand years; they forced mystics, especially women mystics, into monasteries, edited their teachings, and threatened them with the Inquisition (Bruneau 1998) — because authentic connection breeds people who turn left, who reject hierarchy, who redistribute, who see through the System.

Conclusion

So let us put the pieces together. Connection experience has a long pedigree of serious scholarly attention, from James to Stace to Maslow. It is neurologically real, and it is ubiquitous — everybody has connection experiences. It is a documented engine of sudden, durable personal transformation, as the quantum change literature demonstrates. And its political signature, from Jesus to Las Casas, is a turn to the left: egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, revolutionary. That is why elites have spent millennia suppressing, obfuscating, and containing it, and it is why any serious program of utopian transformation must reclaim it. You want to change the world? Then we need to talk about connection.

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