mystical experience in a secular age

and the infrastructure that supports it

In the Spring I took an amazing class at Harvard Divinity School taught by professor Raúl E. Zegarra on the meaning of secularization: Do greater modernization, education, and existential security lead to the decline of religious belief? Or is such a conclusion an ideological construct? How has the separation of church and state developed in different countries and what is their significance for religious faith and practice in our time?

I was particularly fascinated by the downstream impact of secularization on the growing American spiritual-but-not-religious population and how this group expressess similarities to what societies for millennia have characterized as “mystics”. That is, a mystic as one who possesses a direct experience of the divine, without the need for mediation. A personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural.

If individiuals are relying less on churches, priests, and doctrine to help interpret their experience of the divine, what does this imply for the other elements of “religious life” that are deeply supportive in ones becoming: community, place-making, and rituals. And can we retain these “babies in the bathwater” within a backdrop of mystical pluralism?

What follows is a proposal I call a mystical commons: a civic and spiritual typology that outlines the social and physical infrastructure needed to weave kindred spirits together - without losing the immediacy, interiority, and plurality that define contemporary mystical life. It seeks to preserve what institutional religion once offered (ritual, place, community) while adapting these elements to a post-institutional, spiritually diverse landscape. The mystical commons is not a church, nor a retreat, but a new kind of sacred infrastructure: one that honors unmediated experience while supporting the shared interpretation, ethical integration, and communal flourishing that give such experience enduring depth and direction.

DISCLAIMER: it’s a long academic read. If you would like the more straight-forward and concise version of this paper please read The Future will be Mystical.

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Abstract:

This essay explores the enduring significance of mystical experience in a secular age, reframing it not as a purely private or transcendent event but as a potential catalyst for shared meaning-making. Drawing on Friedrich Schleiermacher’s account of immediate feeling and William James’s psychology of religious experience, I examine how classical views have emphasized mysticism’s interior and ineffable nature. Yet, as Wayne Proudfoot and Ann Taves argue, experience is never epistemically “pure”; it is shaped by cultural scripts, interpretive frameworks, and social negotiation. Building on these critiques, Courtney Bender’s ethnographic work illustrates how contemporary spiritual seekers engage in communal meaning-making through informal networks, even in the absence of institutional religious structures. Together, these thinkers suggest that mystical experience gains coherence and durability through interpretive processes situated within broader cultural ecologies. In response, I offer a constructive proposal: the mystical commons. This is a pluralistic, participatory space designed to honor the immediacy of spiritual experience while supporting its interpretation through ritual, dialogue, and ethical service. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of a “network of agape,” the mystical commons aims to create a symbolic and physical infrastructure to support seekers across traditions. It reimagines spiritual life as a shared civic project - one that nurtures interiority without privatization and cultivates pluralism without fragmentation. In doing so, the mystical commons offers a vision of public life in which the sacred can flourish collectively, even amid conditions of fragilized belief and disembedded modernity.

Introduction

Mystical experience has long been regarded as a direct encounter with ultimate reality, an unmediated touch of the divine. A mystic, as interpreted by the late theologian Ernst Troeltsch, was not necessarily someone who received miraculous visions or signs or supernatural experiences. Instead, mysticism signified a personal and subjective form of religion that erred internal rather than external, individual rather than institutional, more experiential rather than scriptural¹. For the mystic, Troeltsch said, membership in church or sect is of no significance, rather it was the free personal experience that mattered the most. ²And perhaps most prophetically, Troeltsch believed that mysticism, with its emphasis on interiority and immediacy, would become “the most rapidly growing [type of spiritual group] in the future.”³

In Western contexts, especially where traditional religious institutions have waned, this emphasis on personal experience has only intensified. As Charles Taylor observes, Western religiosity over recent centuries has seen a steadily increasing emphasis on a religion of personal commitment and devotion, over against forms centered on collective ritual​.⁴ He describes this transformation as the emergence of “the Age of Authenticity,” an era marked by profound changes in the conditions of belief. “Something has happened in the last half-century,” Taylor writes, “which has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies.” At its core, this cultural shift reflects “an individuating revolution” and the rise of “‘expressive’ individualism” not just among elites, but as a widespread and pervasive mass phenomenon.

In the American context, this turn toward experiential and self-authored spirituality has deep historical roots. As the scholar Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, “the American fascination with mountaintop mysticism and seeker spirituality goes much deeper than any generational fixation”.⁵ Prominent American thinkers, writers, and organizers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and W. E. B. Du Bois played a pivotal role in elevating “mysticism” and “spirituality” from cultural obscurity to national prominence. As Schmidt notes, their work often centered on locating the essence of religion within the solitary individual, while also embracing a sympathetic openness to other religious traditions as sources of spiritual nourishment. The result is a distinctly American spiritual milieu that began to take shape in the nineteenth century through currents like Transcendentalism and religious liberalism, prioritizing individual experience and inward devotion as increasingly essential. Today, some argue that the nineteenth-century American fascination with mysticism and spirituality continues through the widespread adoption of the term "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR), which, as cultural commentator Laura Ingraham sharply notes, "has now become the favored way of describing America's metaphysical preoccupations".⁶ By the late 1990s, this orientation had gained sufficient cultural prominence that Gallup formally recognized it, reporting that "thirty-three percent identified as 'spiritual but not religious’⁷, suggesting that the SBNR designation encapsulates contemporary expressions of longstanding American themes of individualized spirituality outside of formalized religion. While the term “spiritual” is undeniably diffuse and may not always capture the depth of authentic mystical experience as Troeltsch conceived it, it nevertheless reflects a broader cultural turn toward individualized forms of mediation, interpretation, and meaning-making that take place outside the bounds of traditional religious institutions.

Such privileging of personal mystical experience carries both promise and tension. On one hand, it affirms the authenticity of the individual’s spiritual life. On the other, it raises critical questions about interpretation, integration, and community. Scholars have argued that mystical experiences do not occur in a vacuum; they carry meaning for the experient and, potentially, for a community of seekers. Others have argued that mystical experience carries a dual nature: it is at once immediate (felt as a direct, unmediated encounter) and interpreted (framed and made intelligible through concepts, narratives, and communities). This paper will explore the interplay between the immediacy and the interpretive framing of mystical experience and its implications for structures that can sustain, legitimize, and deepen such experiences without reverting to rigid institutionalism. First, we examine classical understandings of mystical immediacy in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and William James, for whom individual experience is paramount. Second, we consider the interpretive nature of all experience as argued by Wayne Proudfoot and evidenced in Ann Taves’s work on how extraordinary experiences are shaped into “religious” movements in recent American history. Third, we turn to the contemporary scene: how spiritual “seekers” today construct meaning without the scaffolding of traditional institutions, drawing on Courtney Bender’s ethnography of American spirituality.

Ultimately, I propose that if mystical experience serves as a generative source of faith, it requires interpretive, communal, and ritual frameworks to ensure its continuity, integration, and social relevance. Taking inspiration from Charles Taylor’s notion of “networks of agape,” this paper proposes a constructive vision of a “mystical commons”: a shared space that both honors the immediacy of personal revelation and sustains its integration through pluralistic interpretation, embodied ritual, and ethical service. The mystical commons is not merely a metaphorical container, but a physical place, a reflective programmatic ecosystem, and a civic orientation. In other words, a new form of spiritual infrastructure designed to support seekers across traditions in making meaning together. By rooting mystical experience in community, dialogue, and shared practice, the commons offers a participatory middle way between rigid institutions and isolated individualism. In an age characterized by profound spiritual hunger yet suspicion of religious authority, reimagining how mystical experience and individualized spirituality might flourish within intentional communities becomes not just a theological exercise, but a vital cultural task.

Mystical immediacy in classical perspective: Schleiermacher and James

The modern appreciation of religious experience as something immediate and prior to doctrine owes much to Friedrich Schleiermacher and William James. Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher famously located the essence of religion in a direct intuitive feeling, independent of all rational theory or moral practice. In his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher implored his Enlightenment contemporaries to recognize in religion “a province of its own” – neither a form of metaphysical knowledge nor a system of ethics, but an experience rooted in “intuition and feeling.”⁸ “I entreat you to become familiar with this concept: intuition of the universe,” Schleiermacher writes. “It is the hinge of my whole speech; it is the highest and most universal formula of religion by means of which you may determine its essence and its limits.” True religion, he argues, is an immediate consciousness of the infinite within the finite, a preverbal intuition of the Whole that precedes any theological formulation. In Schleiermacher’s words, “religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite”​. This denotes a kind of direct attentiveness to the cosmos: “It [religion] wishes to intuit the universe, ... longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity”. Such language underscores that, for Schleiermacher, genuine spiritual life begins with an immediate consciousness of the Whole (the infinite, the eternal) manifesting within the self. The individual feels overwhelmed by the universe’s presence, prior to any intellectual mediation. In this move, Schleiermacher thus elevated personal, inward experience to the primary seat of religion, rather than in abstract dogma or institutional authority​. In other words, religion begins with a direct feeling of the Infinite stirring within the human soul, or what Schleiermacher would later call the “feeling of absolute dependence”, and only afterwards do we interpret it or codify it into doctrines. In other words, “real” religion is not a fixed set of doctrines or a unified system, but is a vast and wild realm of individual experiences of the Infinite, each one uniquely unrepeatable. For Schleiermacher, then, the mystical core of faith is immediate: a “living intuition of the universe” that wells up from our pre-conceptual depths, animating all genuine piety.

Nearly a century later, William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, offered a complementary and pragmatic perspective through a psychological and phenomenological lens. James likewise treated personal experience as the heart of religion, more fundamental than institutional dogmas. His oft-quoted definition of religion was “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”⁹ Echoing Schleiermacher's bifurcation between experience and doctrine, James viewed organized churches and creeds as secondary attempts to socialize and intellectualize the original experiences of their founders. “Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition,” James observes, “but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.” This view was supported by James’s study of many firsthand accounts of mystical states, leading him to identify them as a distinct type of religious experience characterized by two primary qualities: ineffability and a noetic quality. Mystical experiences, he found, “defy expression, that no adequate report of [their] contents can be given in words” – hence ineffable – and yet they also seem “to those who experience them to be states of knowledge. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance… and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.” In short, even though the mystic cannot articulate the experience, he or she feels it has delivered some profound insight or truth, and the insight gained is conceived as powerfully real and authoritative, even if it cannot be fully communicated or justified to others. Furthermore, similar to Schleiermacher’s characterization of religion as “taste and intuition with the infinite”, James quotes testimonies of mystics who report “the overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute”, a direct “unity of man with God” in which the sense of a separate self is dissolved​. Such descriptions reinforce the notion that what makes an experience “mystical” is precisely this immediate communion or merging with “the Infinite” or “the Absolute” in a moment. For James, then, the mystical experience stands as religion’s primal source: an unmediated moment of insight whose authority rests not in external validation but in the transformative conviction it leaves within the individual.

In summary, for both Schleiermacher and James, the central claim is that religion is grounded in an immediate experiential contact with the divine or infinite, prior to interpretation. Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism and James’s early empirical psychology converged on this point as both challenged predominant paradigms their times: Schleiermacher against Enlightenment rationalism (reducing religion to metaphysics or morals) that ignored religion’s intuitive core, and James against a burgeoning scientific secularism which perhaps dismissed spiritual experiences as superstition or neurosis. By foregrounding the mystical and inward dimensions, they gave intellectual respectability to the idea that the essence of spirituality lies in immediate feeling and insight, accessible in the personal depths of any individual.

And yet, the very idea of isolating “religious experience” as a pure, universal essence was not always conceivable. Moments of ecstasy or vision, could be argued to not just be objective events, but deeply embedded in particular religious cultures. For example, before the eighteenth century, one would not speak of having a generic “mystical experience” at all, only of experiencing God’s grace in specifically Christian (or other traditional) terms.¹⁰ The contemporary religious scholar Wayne Proudfoot, observes, “the possibility of identifying one’s experience as mystical is only as recent as the availability of that term”.¹¹ Schleiermacher and James were also aware, to a degree, that even the most personal experience is never wholly naked. Schleiermacher himself, though an advocate of the primacy of religious intuition, was keenly aware that such intuitions were never expressed in a vacuum. As he writes, “If thousands of you could have the same religious intuitions, each of you as an individual would certainly draw other outlines in order to portray how you viewed them alongside or in succession to one another; that would depend not on each mind but, rather, on an accidental condition, on a triviality.” In the same vein, James admitted that mystics inevitably use “the language of their community” to describe what happened, borrowing images and concepts from their religious upbringing (a Christian will speak of Christ, a Hindu of Brahman, when interpreting a similar feeling of unity).¹² Both thinkers, however, often set aside these differences as less important, emphasizing instead the shared inner essence they saw in all mystics. This move left modern spirituality with an uplifting ideal: the pursuit of direct, unfiltered divine experience. It also left an ongoing theoretical dilemma: is any experience ever free from interpretation? It is in this critical vein that we turn to Wayne Proudfoot, who offered a philosophical critique on the notion of pure religious experience.

Experience as Interpreted: Proudfoot and Taves

If Schleiermacher and James represent the optimistic embrace of mystical immediacy, the work of Wayne Proudfoot serves as a pointed corrective, arguing that experience is never truly pure but is always filtered and formed by interpretive processes. Proudfoot, critiques that “religious experience” can be a self-evident datum independent of any conceptual framework. In his book Religious Experience, Proudfoot contends that when people claim an experience as “religious,” they are not reporting a raw sensation so much as making an interpretive attribution. He writes, “The logic that governs the concepts by which people interpret their experiences in different traditions shapes those experiences.” Any attempt to peel away the “interpretations” and find a core, uninterpreted mystical experience is, in Proudfoot’s view, misguided – “the interpretations are themselves constitutive of the experiences.”¹³​ Importantly, Proudfoot is not a skeptic dismissing mystical experiences as false, as he grants that people have profound experiences. His point is rather that these experiences are never epistemically naked, as they do not come to us with their meaning self-evident. In other words, one can fully acknowledge the authenticity of a person’s experience and still inquire into how that experience was shaped by the person’s religious upbringing, expectations, or situational triggers. Such inquiry doesn’t negate the experience; it situates it. The implication is that the very identification of an encounter as an encounter with God (vs. a psychotic break or burst of joy from dancing) involves one’s pre-established beliefs. If we are to change the pre-existing framework of interpretation, the same feeling might be labeled a mental pathology or simply be left undefined. “A difficulty arises,” he writes, “from the fact that these attitudes and beliefs are typically adopted prior to the experience rather than subsequent to it. The experience is shaped by a complex pattern of concepts, commitments, and expectations which the mystic brings to it. These beliefs and attitudes are formative of, rather than consequent upon, the experience. They define in advance what experiences are possible.” In other words, the very feel of the experience is intertwined with how it is understood. As Proudfoot succinctly puts it, “those in different traditions have different experiences”. In other words, echoing James’ assertion, communion with God for a Jewish mystic is not the same as nirvana for a Buddhist, precisely because each is constituted by a different matrix of belief and practice.​

Proudfoot asserts that what Schleiermacher and James considered a simple, primordial feeling is actually an amalgam of feeling-plus-interpretation. As such, a hermeneutic circularity is introduced where experience and interpretation co-create each other. In doing so, Proudfoot supplements earlier thinkers with more philosophical rigor around language and experience. As such, mystical experiences are not just self-authenticating truths that science or rational inquiry should not probe. Instead, much attention should be paid to the interpretive frameworks themselves and how communities and contexts enable people to have experiences or feelings they identify as “religious”. His critique reveals that religious experience is not passively received but actively constructed and articulated within the linguistic and conceptual traditions we inherit and continually negotiate. Far from diminishing the significance of mystical encounters, his interpretive turn elevates them into the sphere of collective meaning-making. Thus, Proudfoot reframes and shifts the loci of “the spiritual quest”: not as a solitary journey toward unmediated encounter, but as a process embedded in shared symbolic worlds where mystical experiences arise through shared contexts and are interpreted dialogically. This insight is crucial for understanding contemporary spirituality, especially among the growing demographic of spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR) individuals. These seekers, often wary of institutional authority yet deeply engaged in personal spirituality, may rely on implicit or informal interpretive frameworks (cultural scripts, communal narratives, and shared practices) to give meaning and coherence to their mystical experiences.

Proudfoot’s critique thus lays the theoretical groundwork for subsequent empirical studies, notably from Taves and Bender, who analyze new spiritual movements and the “spiritual but not religious” through the lens of shared meaning-making practices. If Proudfoot argues that experiences are never raw these scholars illustrate how this plays out in concrete cases – shifting our focus from the isolated mystic to the interpretive ecosystems in which contemporary spiritual experiences occur. While Taves brings empirical depth to Proudfoot’s theory, showing how revelatory experiences become enduring religious paths through collaborative interpretation; Bender, in turn, explores how contemporary seekers, even in the absence of formal institutions, generate interpretive frameworks through informal communities and cultural scripts. Together, they extend Proudfoot’s insights into lived contexts, revealing how mystical experience continues to be socially mediated, negotiated, and ritualized in the modern landscape.

Taves & Bender: Interpretive Communities in Contemporary Times

Ann Taves, a historian of religion, introduces a significant methodological innovation with what she terms a “building block” approach to religious experience.¹⁴ Rather than treating complex religious phenomena, such as visions, voices, or sensed presences, as inherently religious, Taves conceptualizes them as assemblages of more basic psychological, social, and cultural components. These components, she argues, can be understood across both religious and non-religious contexts and are subsequently interpreted as religious by the individuals who experience them or by the communities around them. As she explains, “If we assume that such experiences are neither inherently pathological nor religious and therefore subject to a range of interpretations, then new questions emerge.¹⁵ In Revelatory Events, she examines three 20th-century instances in which an individual’s private “mystical” experiences gave rise to a new religious movement: the founding of Mormonism by Joseph Smith (based on visions and translations of golden plates), the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous by Bill Wilson and colleagues (sparked by Wilson’s spiritual awakening and “voice” experience), and the reception of A Course in Miracles by Helen Schucman (who heard an inner voice dictating teachings). In each case, Taves meticulously reconstructs how the initial extraordinary experiences were interpreted by both the experiencer and a small circle of others and how those interpretations evolved into a more stabilized religious path. For example, Joseph Smith (Mormonism’s founder) reported a series of unusual visionary experiences that were never self-evident in meaning. From the beginning, his family and early followers participated in a discernment process, collaboratively attributing divine significance to the visions. Over time, the community not only validated the events but actively shaped how they were remembered and interpreted: Smith and his colleagues revised accounts of the visions to reflect evolving theological needs and organizational priorities. As Ann Taves notes, these foundational experiences were “embedded in layers of interpretation,” with narrative retellings and doctrinal elaborations co-arising as the movement stabilized itself.¹⁶ Similarly, Bill Wilson’s 1934 “white light” experience (often cited as the mystical origin of AA) did not come with a self-evident meaning. Initially disoriented by the event, Wilson sought understanding through feedback from Dr. Silkworth and spiritual conversations within the Oxford Group. As Taves notes, a “period of instability and doubt ensued” until collaborative narrative work with early AA members stabilized the experience into a usable spiritual path. The white light was not a complete revelation, but the beginning of a process through which interpretation and practice co-formed over time. In both cases, Taves teaches us that mystical or revelatory experiences do not speak for themselves – rather, people must decide what they mean, and those decisions are often made in conversation with others, eventually solidifying into lasting religious structures.

Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion, approaches the interpretive process at a more grassroots level, focusing on contemporary Americans who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” In her ethnography The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Bender immersed herself in the spiritual subcultures of Cambridge, Massachusetts by attending meditation circles, channeling groups, healing sessions, and informal gatherings where individuals share and discuss their spiritual experiences. Far from finding “spiritual seekers as cultural and theological orphans adrift in fragmented, post-religious worlds.”¹⁷, her research revealed “various networks and internal distinctions within the spiritual networks”¹⁸ that connected people​. They create, in effect, mini-institutions or ad hoc communities - what Bender terms an “emergent network” or “shadow culture” of spirituality​. These networks are “weakly organized” compared to churches, as Bender notes, but they are nonetheless real channels through which ideas and interpretations circulate​. Individuals who might on a survey report “no religious affiliation” were in fact participating in yoga classes at a church, meditation circles at a Theosophical society, lectures at a Spiritualist temple, and reading groups at a metaphysical bookstore​.¹⁹ Bender observed that the people in these circles spent a great deal of time talking about their experiences with one another - interpreting them, comparing them, validating or occasionally critiquing them. In describing one mystics’ discussion group Bender writes, “Their stories were dense with detail and presented occasions for extended, changing, and conflicting interpretations.”²⁰ In these conversations, interpretation is not a solitary act but a social one. Participants frequently drew upon whatever frameworks were at hand - perhaps Jungian psychology to interpret a dream, or Theosophical concepts to explain an energy feeling. Through such dialogue, the group effectively trained its members in how to experience and articulate the mystical. Bender notes that they even “worked together to elicit felicitous circumstances for future experiences”.²¹ For instance, creating a certain ambiance for meditation or encouraging each other to attend particular workshops, thus actively shaping what experiences would likely occur next. As they interpreted their individual experiences, these practitioners were also situating themselves in relation to traditions. Bender observes, “they likewise shaped their relations to the past in ways that refigured the traditions of which they were part.” In other words, by continually re-telling and re-evaluating their experiences, they were selectively drawing on elements of older religious traditions and remixing them into a contemporary spiritual synthesis. In sum, even in a setting where people proudly reject “organized religion” and stress personal experience, we see that an invisible organizing is still happening through stories, books, and informal mentors that provide the interpretive scaffolding. Yet Bender also notes the fragility and ambiguity in this process: interpretations were “extended, changing, and conflicting,” rarely settling into firm doctrine. Without an authoritative institution, the meaning-making remains dynamic and at times contentious. One person’s profound vision might be met with skepticism by another, or reinterpreted over time by the experiencer themselves. In effect, this openness offers advantages such as flexibility and pluralism, but it also carries disadvantages, notably a lack of stability and a shared moral direction.

Bringing together the insights of Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender, a picture emerges of contemporary mystical experience as vibrant but deeply interpretive. Immediate in its felt intensity, yet inseparable from the cultural, communal, and conceptual frameworks that shape it. Schleiermacher and James celebrated the primacy of religious feeling, but even they acknowledged that the mystic must draw on the “language of their community” to name what occurred. Proudfoot nuances this claim, showing that mystical experiences are shaped in advance by beliefs, concepts, and expectations that render certain experiences possible and intelligible. Taves and Bender extend this insight by documenting how contemporary seekers, even outside traditional institutions, generate interpretive cultures through storytelling, ritual practice, and informal networks of syncretic meaning.

A Proposition: A Mystical Commons

The preceding thinkers - Troeltsch, Schleiermacher, James, Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender - paint a textured picture of mystical experience as both profoundly immediate and inevitably interpretive. While Troeltsch and James emphasized the solitary and inward dimensions of the mystical, Taves and Bender have shown that such experiences become spiritually generative only when they are stabilized within a community of interpretation. What emerges is a paradox at the heart of modern spiritual life: mystical experiences are often born in solitude, but they only endure and mature when held communally.

In prior generations, institutional religion offered the primary containers for this process. Churches, fellowships, and sects provided more than doctrine; they offered shared symbols, collective rituals, interpretive frameworks, and memory structures that anchored the ephemeral in communal life. But today, as Courtney Bender documents, many seekers operate within fluid and decentralized spiritual networks marked by fragility, high turnover, and resistance to formalization. These emergent networks reflect a deep hunger for authenticity and transcendence, but they often lack the stability and shared language necessary for long-term spiritual integration.

This shift reflects what Charles Taylor has called the “great disembedding” or a cultural transformation in which individuals become unmoored from the cosmic and social sacred that once embedded belief within a broader metaphysical framework. In its place, individuals now navigate optional relationships to the divine on their own terms.²² Taylor names this moment both a gain and a loss: a liberation into expressive individualism, but also a fragmentation of the shared symbolic worlds that once held spiritual life in common. The resulting condition, as he puts it, is one of “fragile belief.”²³

What this moment demands is not a return to rigid orthodoxy or institutional revivalism, but the imaginative articulation of new forms of spiritual infrastructure. These must be spaces capable of holding mystical experience without domesticating it—places that can honor immediacy while enabling interpretation, embodiment, and ethical action. Drawing inspiration from Taylor’s notion of a “network of agape,” spaces not organized by rigid orthodoxy, but by love, trust, and the shared task of mutual discernment, I propose the idea of a “mystical commons”: a participatory, pluralistic space in which seekers can share, hold, and deepen their experiences of the sacred in community.

The mystical commons is not merely a metaphor but a civic and spiritual design proposal: a new typology of sacred space that combines the contemplative intensity of the monastery with the dialogical openness of the agora. It serves as a container where mystical experience can be ritualized, interpreted, and lived, both individually but relationally. Imbued within a context of trust which makes ripe the conditions by which love and fellowship can naturally arise. In a disembedded age, it offers a holding structure for spiritual depth, co-constructed by those who gather to listen, discern, and dwell together in the presence of mystery. While the mystical commons is envisioned primarily for the growing spiritual-but-not-religious population in the United States, its pluralistic design invites participation from seekers across traditions. As patterns of religious affiliation shift and global interconnection accelerates, the need for spaces that can sustain shared spiritual life without rigid boundaries is likely to become increasingly relevant across diverse cultural contexts.

Physical Place

First, a mystical commons begins as a physical place as an embodied environment that invites people to return regularly and form an ongoing community. This means creating physical and ritual environments that help personal experiences “stick” and gain depth. As Proudfoot observes, myths and rituals are not superfluous; they “serve as an interpretation of the experience of a community,” dramatizing meaning in tangible form. Likewise, William James notes that mystical states are often fleeting “brief duration” peaks that fade if left unintegrated. While digital apps, online forums, sporadic circles across numerous spaces, and private gatherings can supplement spiritual life, they cannot replace the relationship formation which supports integration through consistent face-to-face encounters in a dedicated space. Anthropologist Courtney Bender affirms this through her fieldwork in Cambridge, observing that what we call “the spiritual” is not disembodied or unstructured, but rather rooted in relationships with built environments and adjacent institutions. She writes, “many [spiritual leaders] do so in religious settings and not only in the Theosophical Society and the Swedenborgian Chapel, but also in the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, which… opened its doors to the local neo-pagan group; the Friends Meetinghouse, which hosted shamans; and the Congregational Church, which hosted ecstatic drumming and dancing groups.”²⁴ These insights suggest that even the most decentralized spiritual movements continue to seek sacred containers where rituals unfold, where legitimacy is granted, and where meaning is held across time.

What Bender’s ethnography makes plain is that people do not simply want to meet - they want to gather in spaces that resonate, architecturally and atmospherically, with a sense of the sacred. The desire for spiritual depth is matched by a longing for environments that feel holy, set apart, or gently consecrated. Not just any neutral or utilitarian space, but ones that carry the aesthetic and symbolic weight of sanctity, even if reframed for pluralist use. While the mystical commons would not be housed in an existing church per se, it would learn from the architecture of sacred presence that churches and religious buildings have long cultivated. It would be a new typology of physical place that stands as its own and signals reverence, beauty, and continuity, without the exclusivity or theological fixity that often accompanies traditional religious spaces. In this spirit, the design of the mystical commons would signal sacredness not through enforced doctrine or exclusion, but through aesthetic intentionality and an ethic of presence. In practical terms, this might mean a beautiful, calming environment with symbols from multiple traditions or ones that are universally resonant and open to subjective interpretation (such as nature motifs or archetypal shapes). There might be quiet alcoves, a larger hall for shared presence (meditation, prayer, or contemplation), a wisdom hall for salons and lectures from pluralistic traditions, intimate rooms for interpretive circles, pathways for circumambulation, or altars void of any one God. The key is continuity and embodiment: a place that becomes spiritually resonant through repeated presence. Such a place anchors spiritual practice in the rhythms of real life and encourages an experiential knowledge that mystical insight and interpretation is not just a heady flash but something that takes root and ripens in community and place.

An Embodied Value of Pluralism

Culturally, the mystical commons embodies a commitment to pluralism, inclusivity, and individual freedom.Not only as mere liberal tolerance, but as a ritualized practice of engaging difference. As Cohen notes in The Symbolic Construction of Community, “the sharing of the symbol is not necessarily the sharing of the meaning”; thus, community can be sustained not by uniform belief, but by a collective agreement to “incorporate and enclose difference” through a common ideal.²⁵ While traditional religious communities often cohere through shared dogmas, rituals, or theological claims, the mystical commons coheres through pluralism itself as a shared symbolic commitment and ideal. Rather than enforcing doctrinal unity, the commons affirms that ultimate reality may be approached from many directions, and that each person’s sincere experience holds interpretive weight. People of different backgrounds, beliefs, and cosmologies could thus co-inhabit the commons without having to water down their truths or collapse their distinct experiences into a single consensus. As Bender observes in her studies of the spiritual scene in Cambridge, many participants identify as “a yogi, and an artist, and a singer and a writer, and a mystic” all at once, refusing fixed labels and inhabiting a fluid spiritual identity.²⁶ In this environment, pluralism is not simply tolerated but ritually practiced: theological difference is welcomed and made fruitful through, for example, interspiritual meditations, multi-tradition festivals, scriptural reasoning dialogues, and collaborative discernment circles.

This kind of pluralistic communion reflects a long standing pattern observed in mystically-oriented individuals. As Ernst Troeltsch observed in Public Religions in the Modern World, “those ‘born-again’ souls who have ‘experienced’ individually the redeeming power of the ‘new light’ have always tended to feel closest fellowship with kindred spirits in other denominations than with ‘old lights’ in their own.”²⁷ What unites these individuals, he writes, is not institutional allegiance but “a parallelism of spontaneous religious personalities, whose only bond of union is their common Divine origin, their common spirit of love, and their union in God, which is the free and invisible work of the Divine Spirit.”²⁸ The mystical commons echoes this vision: a space where people gather not because they agree on theological propositions, but because they are kindred spirits each drawn by the gravity of lived experience, and each committed to interpreting the sacred with humility and openness. Schleiermacher likewise critiques rigid ecclesiastical institutions and instead offers a vision of the church as a fluid, open spiritual fellowship, one rooted in shared intuition rather than dogma or hierarchy. He distinguishes sharply between the institutional church and the living communion of those who genuinely possess religion, insisting that “the external society of religion will be brought closer to the universal freedom and the majestic unity of the true church only by becoming a flowing mass where there are no outlines.”²⁹ For Schleiermacher, the “church” is healthiest when it fosters uncoerced participation, spiritual individuality, and mutual edification. Taken together, these thinkers point to a form of spiritual community that is not defined by what members must believe, but by how they relate: through shared longing, intuitive resonance, and a common commitment to exploring the divine as it discloses itself in different lives. The mystical commons echoes this ideal: it is not a church in the conventional sense, but a spiritual commons where kindred seekers gather, not to be shaped by creed, but to deepen through presence, conversation, and the lived immediacy of spiritual encounter.

Ultimately these forms may support what Bender calls “religious and secular freethinkers, progressives, and experimenters,” creating an ecosystem where novel religious expressions are not only allowed but honored as meaningful contributions to the common quest.⁵ This creates the conditions by which a mystical commons can function not as a rigid sect but as a living “ecology of spiritual exploration”, bound together by mutual respect, dialogical practice, and a shared commitment to experiential depth. Critically, this exposure to multiple symbolic repertoires before mystical experience occurs also becomes spiritually generative. Echoing Proudfoot: “the experience is shaped by a complex pattern of concepts, commitments, and expectations which the mystic brings to it”; these beliefs are not added afterward, but are “formative of, rather than consequent upon, the experience.”³⁰ In other words, the conceptual and cultural frameworks available to a seeker in advance help determine not only how an experience is interpreted, but even what can be experienced at all. The more a seeker is immersed in a range of spiritual languages and metaphors, the more capacious their imagination or modes of experience becomes. The more likely that a future insight will find resonance, interpretation, and ethical application. The mystical commons, in this sense, does not merely accommodate plurality, rather, it seeds the conditions for spiritual experience to take root, expand, and be understood across traditions.

Importantly, this model does not negate the value of traditional religious institutions. For many, churches, synagogues, temples, or mosques remain vital spaces to deepen within a single lineage. In fact, the mystical commons may function as a threshold space, surfacing multiple traditions in a way that helps individuals discern which path they may want to root more firmly in. At the same time, for others, formal affiliation with a particular tradition may feel constraining. Entering a church may imply that one’s personal experiences must be interpreted exclusively through that tradition’s metaphysical and moral filters. For such individuals, a more fluid and dialogical matrix for meaning-making, in which diverse frameworks are held in proximity but not in hierarchy, offers a more honest and expansive spiritual home. The rise of this need is evident in the broader social trend: for the first time in U.S. history, church membership fell below 50% in 2020, according to Gallup, signaling not necessarily a rejection of spirituality but a shift in the institutions people trust to steward it.³¹

Programming: Practices, Facilitation, and Ritual

As aforementioned, rather than a fixed program, the mystical commons cultivates an “ecology of spiritual exploration”. Its activities would emerge organically from the evolving needs and inspirations of the community, more like a garden than a curriculum. Participants would collectively curate rituals and dialogues that speak to them: periods of silent meditation, interfaith prayer, spiritual text book clubs, dream interpretation circles, journaling workshops, or storytelling evenings. Interpretive discussions would likely follow any profound individual experience: for example, after someone shares a mystical insight or vision, the group might engage in communal discernment by listening and reflecting together on what the experience might signify. Such interpretive circles allow multiple perspectives (psychological, theological, symbolic) to be offered. In this collective reflection, personal experiences are neither automatically validated as universal truth nor dismissed as delusion; rather, they are lovingly tested and refined in the crucible of shared inquiry and mirroring. As such integrating personal insights into communal dialogue guards against the spiritual narcissism or solipsism that sometimes plagues purely individualist paths. It fosters a form of mutual responsibility, in which individual revelations are not isolated events but become occasions for shared discernment, ethical reflection, and the slow formation of communal wisdom. Crucially, akin to the “informal mentors” that Bender notes in Cambridge spiritual circles, those who guide these kinds of activities would be facilitators and “garden-tenders”, not gurus. Rather than authoritative prophets or priests interpreting truths, facilitators focus on holding space, tending the container, protecting the process, and infusing it with loving presence. For example, a facilitator might simply open the gathering with a poem, ensure that everyone has a chance to speak in a circle, or maintain an atmosphere of respect. This approach guards against hierarchy while still providing structure. It acknowledges, in line with Schleiermacher, that genuine spiritual community thrives through freedom and mutual exchange, not through “proselytizing” or coercion. In the mystical commons, everyone is both a student and a potential teacher as wisdom is shared horizontally.

In addition to these kinds of interpretative practices, ritual is a foundational modality of the mystical commons. Far from being a vestige of archaic religiosity, ritual constitutes a primary technology of human meaning-making. As Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the sacred does not necessarily originate in metaphysical content but in the collective effervescence generated when individuals gather and act in synchrony. Sacredness, in this view, is not a property of doctrines or deities, but an emergent quality of coordinated presence: “The sacred is the effect of a momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting collective.” These moments act as liminal spaces where inner experience is externalized, reshaped, and received in a shared field of attention by turning feeling into form, and form into meaning. In the context of a mystical commons, we can thus reposition ritual not as the remnant of fading religious traditions, but as a generative force in communal life capable of shaping shared attention, anchoring spiritual experience, and cultivating new forms of collective sanctity. Within the mystical commons, such ritual technologies can be intentionally repurposed: not to restore the structures of the past, but to open symbolic containers for presence, transformation, and meaning in a pluralistic world. Such rituals might include communal meditation, rites of passage, grief circles, seasonal observances, or silent processions. Each of these experiences would be intentionally crafted not around theological consensus but symbolic resonance. Indeed, what binds these acts is not shared dogma but the mutual willingness to enter into symbolic space together: to make solitude porous to solidarity, and contemplation receptive to communion. As Hans Joas underscores in The Power of the Sacred: rituals “create a controlled environment that temporarily suspends the mechanisms of everyday life,” enabling participants to inhabit ideal states not merely as ideas but as lived experiences. In the context of a mystical commons, these states may not revolve around doctrinal certainties but around ethical and existential qualities like reverence, presence, gratitude, or collective mourning. Their sacrality lies not in orthodoxy but in their capacity to convene difference into a shared moment of transcendence. In this sense, ritual performs a double movement: affirming spiritual autonomy while inviting individuals into freely chosen, embodied togetherness. It does not restore religion-as-institution but reimagines sacred practice as a civic and spiritual commons where meaning arises not from divine decree but from the intersubjective space between humans, in acts of shared attention and reverent presence.

Orientation Towards Service

To ensure that the mystical commons does not devolve into a purely individualistic or therapeutic enterprise, it must also cultivate a structural and cultural orientation toward service through translating inner transformation into outer contribution. As William James argued, the true test of mystical insight lies not in its affective intensity alone but in its moral and social fruits. James characterized the mystic as one who, having touched a deeper order, returns not with passive repose but with an energized “moral fighting shape” that carries readiness to act, to serve, and to create.³² This principle shaped a lineage of liberal religious thinkers who saw mysticism as inseparable from ethical passion. The Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, who followed in James’s footsteps to became one of the most prolific American writers on mysticism, saw mystics not as passive contemplatives but as “tremendous transmitters of energy”³³, exemplified by his own lifelong dedication to international relief work. Likewise, the Swedenborgian tradition, which was highly influential in the development of American spiritual liberalism³⁴, taught that spiritual growth entails becoming “divinely useful,” and that true love of the divine is revealed through actions that embody care, charity, and attentiveness to others in daily life.³⁵

In this spirit, the mystical commons must imagine programming not only as a means for deepening inner experience but also as a framework for discerning and embodying one’s actions in the world. Ritual and interpretive circles should not simply provide spaces for self-exploration but should also be oriented toward attunement with life’s inherent meaning and directionality. Meaning, in this context, is not manufactured but disclosed - uncovered through contemplative presence and enacted through service. Accordingly, cultural attitudes within the commons might center on the belief that mystical experience carries an implicit call: to become a transmitter of one’s unique gifts for the benefit of others. Programming might include vocational discernment workshops that explore the intersection between personal insight and social needs; service-oriented rituals that ritually bind contemplation to action; or seasonal festivals where participants collectively offer projects or intentions for the benefit of their community. These public-facing dimensions would embody what Hans Joas identifies as the creative and reconstructive force of the sacred in collective life. He writes that a society cannot remake itself without ideals, and that rituals, as containers for those ideals, help constitute a society’s vision of itself.³⁶

Thus, rather than positioning mysticism as an escape from the world, the mystical commons invites a return to the world with renewed vision and responsibility. Through its pluralistic, symbolic, and participatory frameworks, the commons offers not only contemplative depth but ethical formation - a setting in which spiritual autonomy and social solidarity are held together. In doing so, it affirms that mystical experience is not the endpoint of the spiritual path but a generative moment that demands enactment. True insight, in this view, is inseparable from ethical expression; it culminates not in private enlightenment but in the cultivation of lives that are attuned to mystery and devoted to service.

Conclusion

Mystical experience, long cherished as the heart of religious life, is today both more accessible and more fragile. As seekers reach toward the ineffable in a secular age, the theological challenge is not only to affirm the reality of such experiences, but to offer interpretive and communal forms that nurture them without domesticating their wildness. This essay has traced the contours of that challenge - from Schleiermacher and James’s celebration of immediacy, to Proudfoot, Taves, and Bender’s insistence on interpretation, to the contemporary quest for meaning outside traditional institutions. What emerges is a clear insight: that mystical experience is neither reducible to pure immediacy nor to cultural construction, but lives in the generative tension between the two. Its power lies in its capacity to rupture the ordinary, and its promise in the slow work of communal discernment.

The mystical commons, as proposed here, seeks to hold that tension as a sacred task. It is not a blueprint for a new orthodoxy, but a possibility for a new typology of spiritual infrastructure: embodied, pluralistic, dialogical, and attuned to service. It is a container for the sacred that holds difference without collapsing it, that invites personal insight into communal dialogue, and that reclaims ritual not as a performance of conformity but as a shared act of attention and reverence. As such, it recognizes that no single framework can contain the full truth of the mystical, and thus it turns toward pluralism not as a dilution of faith, but as an expansion of its horizon. Within it, individual insight is honored within shared practice, and spiritual autonomy is deepened through presence with others. Such a space reimagines what sacred community can be in a post-institutional age: instead of a system of control, a commons of care; rather than a return to dogma, a turn toward discerning together what the sacred asks of us now. Most importantly, it affirms that mysticism is not a private escape, but a call to re-enter the world with clearer eyes, an open heart, and a commitment to serve others in tandem with the unfolding undulations of our insights and gifts.

In this vision, mystical experience is not merely a personal high or private revelation, but as a seed. And like all seeds, it needs soil. Physical and social infrastructure like the mystical commons offers that ground: a place where insight can be rooted, interpreted, ritualized, and made to flower in one’s life. What we need now is not another church, nor a vague escape from institutions altogether, but something in between: a holding structure for mystery, made by many hands, creeds, and co-existing truths. We need, in short, a new ecology of the sacred, where the divine is not only glimpsed through numerous lenses, but cultivated together in community

Thus, the future of theology may not lie primarily in sermons, creeds, or texts, but in spatial and communal imagination. In envisioning something like a mystical commons, theology takes on the creative and constructive work of reimagining spiritual infrastructure both physically and programmatically. This move is not a turn away from tradition, but a rediscovery of theology’s deeper vocation: to hold open the conditions in which wonder, transcendence, and spiritual transformation can meaningfully thrive. Theology, in short, becomes an art of communal design - creating the spaces, structures, and conditions by which the infinite might once again speak clearly, compellingly, and collectively.

Ultimately, the deeper provocation of a mystical commons is not a final answer, but a shared question: How might we live, and what institutions might we create together, if the sacred were not distant or confined within orthodoxy, but alive right here - between us, among us, arising through us?

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” —Leonard Cohen

1. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, vol. II, trans. Olive Wyon (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 731.

2. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 761.

3. Garrett E. Paul, “Why Troeltsch? Why Today? Theology for the 21st Century,” The Christian Century, June 30–July 7, 1993, 676–681, reprinted at Religion Online, https://www.religion-online.org/article/why-troeltsch-why-today-theology-for-the-21st-century/

4. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 532.

5. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 2.

6. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, xiv.

7. Jeffrey M. Jones, "In U.S., 47% Identify as Religious, 33% as Spiritual," Gallup, September 22, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/511133/identify-religious-spiritual.aspx.

8. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, 22.

9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 31.

10. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 184–185.

11. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 185.

12. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 410.

13. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 123-124.

14. Ann Taves, Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths, 28.

15. Ann Taves, Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths, xi–xii.

16. Ann Taves, Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths, 57.

17. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 3.

18. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 4.

19. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 33-34.

20. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 2-5.

21. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 2-6.

22. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 156-157.

23. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 533-535.

24. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 23.

25. Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community, 13–14.

26. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, 4-5.

27. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 999.

28. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 744.

29. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 90.

30. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 121.

31. Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” Gallup News, March 29, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx.

32. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 210–211.

33. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 56.

34. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 46.“Whether for Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, or Henry James Sr., no one surpassed Swedenborg as the archetype of mysticism’s new possibilities in mid-nineteenth-century America. He exemplified the potential for spiritual perception in everyday life and the renewed accessibility of angels”

35. Swedenborg Foundation, “Use: The Heart of Swedenborg’s Spirituality,” accessed April 8, 2025, https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/explore/use/.

36. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, 65.