Mysticism

Mysticism is a practice in many religions and spiritual traditions where people attempt to seek union with what they perceive to be spiritual realities - the One, the absolute, God or the universe - through contemplative and ascetic practices including prayer, meditation, fasting, chanting of mantras, koans, aphorisms, parables and other devotional sayings, retreat, and occasionally use of psychoactive substances.

Those who practice mysticism often become more syncretistic, seeing religious denominations and philosophies as being different approaches to the unified Oneness of being. Religions which are centred on a holy text - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - often use those texts within mystical practice, meditating on passages and verses. Mystic practices often all point to a similar end goal of oneness - the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, union with Christ in Christianity, Irfan in Islam and so on.

Scientific understanding of mysticism

In recent years, scientists have attempted to study the psychological, biological and sociological causes of religious belief and, by extension, mystical, transcendent and religious experiences. An example of this is Pahnke's Good Friday Experiment in 1962, where divinity students in Boston, Massachusetts, were given psilocybin (with a control group being given niacin as a placebo) before going to a service at the Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Those in the live group claimed to have experienced religious experiences. Others have repeated this experiment, and others, to better explore the link between mysticism and psychology, including Michael Persinger's use of magnetic inducement of temporal lobe activity to prompt mystical or transcendent experiences in those who are prone to such experiences.