Can Mystical Experience Constitute Knowledge? A Philosopher's Defense (With Caveats)

As a child, I told my mother a plane would crash. The next day it was on every news channel. Last year, driving with my husband, I told him to slow down because I could sense a car crash ahead. About five miles down the road, one happened in front of us. These were not dramatic revelations. They arrived quietly, as information, the way you might suddenly remember you left the oven on. No ceremony. No altered state. Just knowing before there was any conventional way to know.

I want to argue that experiences like these, and their more intense counterparts in formal shamanic practice, can constitute genuine knowledge. Not that every such experience is veridical. Not that mystical or anomalous knowing is immune to error. But that under certain conditions, it provides real access to real information about reality that is not reducible to, or derivable from, ordinary perception and reasoning. And that the philosophical case for dismissing it entirely is far weaker than it is usually presented as being.

This argument makes many philosophers uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable for a long time. I am a researcher who values rigorous thinking and empirical evidence. I did not come to this position easily. I came to it because the evidence, including evidence I have personally verified, kept refusing to fit the standard dismissal.

When anomalous knowledge is often proved, from where does it arrive?

What I Mean by Mystical Experience

I want to use the term broadly because I think the distinction between dramatic and quiet anomalous knowing is less philosophically significant than it first appears. At one end of the spectrum: shamanic journey, meditation states, experiences of unity or ego dissolution, the profound encounters with non-ordinary reality that contemplative traditions across cultures have cultivated deliberately for thousands of years. At the other end: the sudden knowing that arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, the information that comes through at odd times, the quiet certainty before a verifiable event. These look different from the outside. From the inside, and epistemologically, they share the same essential structure: information arrives through a channel that is not sense perception or inference, and it turns out, when checked, to be accurate.

Philosophers have identified a cluster of features that characterise these experiences across their varied forms. They carry a noetic quality, a felt sense of genuine revelation rather than mere feeling. They are often difficult to fully capture in language. They tend to arrive rather than to be constructed. And they frequently involve a dissolution of the usual boundary between self and world, observer and observed. My childhood plane knowing had most of these features, and I was not yet old enough to have a framework for any of them.

The Standard Dismissal and Why It Fails

The most common objection goes like this: we can induce these experiences by stimulating brain regions or ingesting substances, therefore they are merely altered brain states with no epistemic value. They tell us about neurology, not about reality.

This argument is surprisingly weak. It commits what philosophers call the genetic fallacy: assuming that the origin of an experience determines its truth value. If I learn mathematics from a teacher, that does not make mathematics less true. If photons hitting my retina cause my visual experience of a tree, that does not mean the tree is not there. The fact that mystical and anomalous experiences have neural correlates, which they must if they are conscious experiences, tells us nothing about whether they track something real.

The objection also proves far too much. Visual experiences can be induced by stimulating the visual cortex. Would we conclude from this that vision never reflects reality? Of course not. The capacity to artificially induce an experience does not establish that the experience is never veridical. It establishes only that the mechanism can be triggered independently of its usual cause, which is true of every perceptual system we have.

There is a deeper confusion underneath this objection: the conflation of mechanism and content. Understanding how we have an experience is a different question from whether the experience accurately reflects something beyond itself. We understand the neuroscience of visual perception in considerable detail. This has not led us to conclude that vision is an illusion. It has led us to understand the mechanism by which we access visual reality. The same logic applies here.

The Positive Case

We treat perceptual experience as a source of knowledge about the external world despite the fact that it is fallible, theory-laden, and mediated by neural processes. The philosophical question is what makes perception epistemically privileged over anomalous knowing. The standard answer is that perception is public, intersubjectively verifiable, and consistently reports the same external world.

But mystical and anomalous experiences also show consistency, cross-culturally and across centuries. The core phenomenology replicates: unity, noetic quality, the dissolution of subject-object boundaries, the sense of contacting something real rather than generating something fictional. If cross-cultural consistency is evidence that perception tracks something real, it is not obvious why it does not count as evidence here.

William James made an argument worth taking seriously: that we should evaluate beliefs partly by their practical consequences. Mystical experiences produce verifiable effects. They reduce fear of death, increase compassion and altruistic behaviour, generate lasting changes in values and perception that persist years and decades after the experience itself.

If these states were merely pleasant delusions, it is not clear why they would reliably produce this quality of durable transformation. The NDE literature I have written about elsewhere documents the same thing: whatever is being contacted in these states, it operates at a depth that random neural noise does not reach.

And then there is the simply empirical point. When I told my mother the plane would crash, it crashed. When I told my husband to slow down, the crash happened five miles ahead of us, exactly as I had sensed it would. I have decades of experiences of this kind, many of them witnessed by others, many of them verified against independently observable facts. A philosophical framework that must classify all of this as coincidence or self-deception is not being appropriately humble about the limits of its own explanatory reach. It is protecting a prior commitment by refusing to engage the evidence.

The Caveats, Which Are Real

None of this means mystical or anomalous experience is infallible or beyond scrutiny. Several caveats matter genuinely.

The most important is the distinction between the experience and its interpretation. The raw phenomenology, what actually arrived, tends to be more reliable than the framework built around it. A Christian mystic and a Buddhist practitioner may be accessing the same underlying reality and interpreting it through incompatible conceptual lenses. The experience carries epistemic weight. The theology built on top of it carries considerably less. I am more confident that I knew about the plane than I am about the precise mechanism by which I knew.

Not all anomalous experiences are equally credible. Experiences that are consistent across multiple occasions, that cohere with the reports of other practitioners, that produce lasting positive transformation, and that can be partially verified against external facts carry more weight than one-off altered states with no observable consequences. Discernment matters. The capacity to evaluate which experiences warrant confidence and which do not is itself a skill that develops through practice and honest self-examination.

Error correction is also harder than it is for ordinary perception. I cannot always reproduce an anomalous knowing on demand. I cannot share the experience directly with another person for comparison. This is a genuine limitation. It does not make mystical knowledge impossible, but it makes the standards of care required higher, not lower.

What This Knowledge Is and Is Not

My considered position is that mystical and anomalous experience can provide genuine knowledge under the right conditions: when it is phenomenologically specific rather than vague, when it is consistent across multiple occasions, when it coheres with the experiences of others in a tradition, and when it can be at least partially verified. The interpretation should always be held more lightly than the experience itself, and humility about what cannot yet be explained is not a weakness but a requirement.

What this kind of knowing can reach includes: the nature of consciousness, the relationship between observer and observed, the interconnectedness of events across time, and, in cases like the ones I described, specific empirical information about events that have not yet occurred. What it is not well suited to provide is systematic metaphysical certainty, technical knowledge, or detailed facts about distant situations where no relational connection exists.

The experience is more reliable than the interpretation. The phenomenology is more certain than the metaphysics. The transformation is more evident than the theoretical framework explaining it.

The position I am defending sits between two unhelpful extremes. It is not the dismissive view that mystical experience is merely subjective noise with no epistemic value. It is also not the credulous view that every anomalous experience reveals ultimate truth. It is the more difficult, more honest position that certain experiences, approached with rigour and humility, constitute genuine knowledge about dimensions of reality that ordinary perception and reasoning do not reach.

I practice shamanism. I have anomalous experiences. Some of them have been empirically verified in ways that cannot be easily explained. I do not claim certainty about the mechanism by which a child knows a plane will crash before it does. I do claim that dismissing such experiences without engaging the evidence is not the scientific or philosophical position it presents itself as being. It is a prior commitment dressed as rigour.

The windows are imperfect. They require interpretation. They need careful evaluation. But they are windows nonetheless, and what comes through them is often, verifiably, true.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind, relational ontology, and anomalous experience. She can be reached at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

Have you had an experience that gave you information you could not have had through ordinary means, and that turned out to be accurate? I would genuinely like to hear it.