Introduction

The world’s major religious traditions — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Taoism — have each produced a rich and distinct mystical literature: accounts of direct personal experience of ultimate reality that go beyond ordinary religious practice and doctrinal belief. When these accounts are placed side by side, something remarkable emerges. Mystics separated by centuries, continents, and entirely different religious frameworks describe their experiences in ways that are strikingly, sometimes astonishingly, similar.

And yet the similarities are not the whole story. Beneath the surface convergences lie real and significant differences — in the metaphysical frameworks within which the experiences are interpreted, in the methods used to reach them, in the relationship between the mystic and their religious institution, and in what the experience is ultimately understood to mean. A careful comparison must attend to both.

This article is organized thematically rather than tradition by tradition. It examines the major similarities that appear across traditions, then the significant differences, and finally reflects on what these convergences and divergences together suggest about the nature of mystical experience and its place in human life.

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Part One: The Similarities

We begin with the convergences, because they are the most immediately striking feature of comparative mystical literature and the ones that have most challenged scholars, philosophers, and practitioners to explain.

1. The Dissolution of the Ordinary Self

Perhaps the single most consistent theme across all mystical traditions is the dissolution, transcendence, or transformation of the ordinary ego-self. In every tradition, the mystic reports that the sense of being a separate, bounded individual — with its own desires, fears, preferences, and will — either falls away, is seen through, or is absorbed into something vastly larger. This is described in different terms but with unmistakable consistency.

The soul that is annihilated in God has no will of its own; it wills only what God wills, and this not by effort but by nature, as fire rises upward. — Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (c. 1300)

In Christian mysticism, this is described as the annihilation of the soul’s will in God — most radically in Marguerite Porete’s concept of the annihilated soul, but also in Meister Eckhart’s idea of the soul returning to the divine ground, and in John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul in which all ego-attachment is stripped away.

In Sufism, the parallel concept is fana — the extinction of the ego-self in God. The Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj described his experience of union so completely that he declared Ana’l-Haqq, I am the Truth, a statement that cost him his life but expressed the ultimate dissolution of the boundary between self and divine.

In Hinduism, the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankaracharya holds that the individual self — Atman — is ultimately identical with Brahman, ultimate reality, and that the experience of being a separate self is maya, a kind of appearance or illusion. Liberation — moksha — consists in the direct experiential realization of this identity, in which the separate self is not destroyed but recognized as never having been ultimately real.

In Buddhism, the teaching of anatta — non-self — holds that what we take to be a fixed, permanent self is actually a fluid, constructed process with no unchanging essence. Enlightenment involves the direct insight into this selflessness, an insight that liberates the practitioner from the craving and aversion that arise from mistakenly treating the self as solid and permanent. The Buddhist version differs importantly from the Hindu one — rather than discovering a true divine Self beneath the ego, the Buddha pointed to the absence of any fixed self at all — but both involve the dissolution of the ordinary sense of separate selfhood.

In Taoism, the sage described in the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi has so completely aligned with the natural flow of the Tao that personal ego-assertion has fallen away. The sage acts through wu wei — effortless non-action — not because they have suppressed the self by force but because the self has become transparent to the deeper current of things.

In Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalistic concept of devekut — cleaving to God — and the Hasidic emphasis on self-nullification or bittul ha-yesh describe a similar movement: the dissolution of the separate ego in the presence of the divine.

The consistency of this theme across such different traditions is remarkable. Whatever else divides these traditions, they seem to agree that the ordinary sense of being a separate, self-sufficient ego is in some fundamental way an obstacle to the deepest truth — and that mystical experience involves its transcendence.

2. Paradox and the Limits of Language

The second great convergence is the use of paradox and the acknowledgment that ultimate reality exceeds the capacity of ordinary language to describe it. Mystics across every tradition reach for contradictory formulations when trying to describe what they have experienced, not out of confusion or rhetorical flourish, but because the experience genuinely overflows the categories of ordinary thought.

Tradition	Paradoxical Formulation	Source
Christianity	Knowing everything and knowing nothing; having everything and having nothing	Marguerite Porete
Taoism	The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao	Tao Te Ching, Chapter 1
Buddhism	Form is emptiness; emptiness is form	Heart Sutra
Islam (Sufi)	I am the Truth (Ana’l-Haqq)	Al-Hallaj
Hinduism	Thou art That (Tat tvam asi)	Chandogya Upanishad
Judaism	Ein Sof — the Infinite beyond all names and attributes	Kabbalistic tradition

This convergence on paradox is not accidental. It points to a shared recognition that ordinary language is built for ordinary experience — for describing objects, events, and relationships within the world of everyday perception. When consciousness pushes beyond these limits and encounters something that is simultaneously the ground of all things and beyond all things, simultaneously present everywhere and nowhere in particular, simultaneously the most intimate reality of the self and utterly beyond it, language breaks down. The mystic reaches for paradox not because they are being obscure but because paradox is the most honest available response.

The philosophical term for this approach is apophatic theology, or the via negativa — the way of negation. Rather than saying what God or ultimate reality is, the mystic says what it is not: not this, not that, not describable, not conceivable. This approach is found in the Christian mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, in the Islamic concept of tanzih (divine transcendence beyond all attributes), in the Hindu neti neti (not this, not this) of the Upanishads, in the Buddhist refusal to make positive metaphysical claims about nirvana, in the Kabbalistic Ein Sof, and in the Taoist opening declaration that the Tao cannot be named. The method differs in its cultural expression but the underlying recognition is the same.

3. Love as the Vehicle or Essence of Union

In the theistic traditions particularly — Christianity, Islam, and the bhakti stream of Hinduism — love appears as both the path toward mystical union and the nature of what is encountered at the destination. The mystic is not merely a seeker of philosophical truth but a lover, and the divine is not merely an abstract ultimate reality but a beloved.

Marguerite Porete describes the soul’s journey entirely in the language of love — Love is literally a character in her dialogue, the primary voice of wisdom. The Sufi poet Rumi’s entire body of work is saturated with the imagery of longing, intoxication, and reunion with the divine beloved. The bhakti saints of India — Mirabai, Kabir, Tukaram — wrote poetry of erotic devotion to Krishna or Ram that uses the language of human love as the closest available approximation of the soul’s relationship with God.

Even in traditions not organized around a personal God, something analogous to love appears in the form of compassion. The Mahayana Buddhist Bodhisattva vow — to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, to remain engaged with the suffering world out of boundless compassion — introduces a relational, other-directed dimension that has structural similarities to the love-mysticism of the theistic traditions. The Taoist sage’s effortless care for others without personal agenda also echoes this quality.

What unites these expressions is the insistence that the deepest spiritual reality is not cold, impersonal, or indifferent. Whether understood as a personal God of infinite love or as the boundless compassion of an enlightened mind, the innermost nature of things seems, in the mystic’s encounter with it, to be characterized by something that can only be called, however inadequately, love.

4. Transformation of the Whole Person

Mystical experience, in every tradition, is not understood as merely an interesting or pleasant altered state. It is understood as transformative — as changing fundamentally who the person is, how they perceive reality, and how they act in the world. The transformed mystic is not the same person who began the journey.

In Christianity, this transformation is described as deification — theosis — the gradual participation of the human person in the divine nature. In Islam, the Sufi who has passed through fana into baqa (subsistence in God) acts in the world as a pure instrument of divine will, without personal self-interest. In Hinduism, the liberated sage — the jivanmukta — continues to live in the world but is no longer bound by it, acting without attachment to results. In Buddhism, the enlightened person continues to act compassionately in the world but is no longer driven by craving, aversion, and delusion. In Taoism, the sage’s actions flow naturally and effortlessly, without force or personal agenda.

Across all these descriptions, the transformed person shares certain qualities: an absence of ego-centered striving, a quality of presence and naturalness, an orientation toward others rather than self, and a kind of equanimity in the face of circumstances that would disturb an ordinary person. The transformation is moral and relational as well as spiritual — it changes not just inner states but outer conduct.

5. The Graduated Path

Nearly every mystical tradition describes the spiritual journey as a path with stages — a progressive development through levels of realization, purification, or practice. The number of stages varies, as do their descriptions, but the underlying structure of a graduated journey from ordinary consciousness toward something radically different is almost universal.

Marguerite Porete describes seven stages culminating in the annihilated soul. The Sufi tradition describes maqamat — spiritual stations — through which the mystic progresses under the guidance of a sheikh. Hindu yoga describes progressive stages of meditation and realization. Buddhist meditation maps the jhanas — eight stages of meditative absorption — as well as the progressive insights of the vipassana path. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life describes ten Sefirot through which the mystic ascends toward the divine. Even the Taoist tradition, which resists systematization most strongly, implicitly describes a progression from ordinary self-assertive consciousness toward the effortless naturalness of the sage.

The existence of these graduated maps serves a practical function: they orient the practitioner, help teachers recognize where a student is in their development, and provide a framework for understanding experiences that might otherwise be disorienting or misinterpreted. They also suggest that mystical attainment, while it may ultimately involve grace or spontaneous insight beyond human engineering, is also cultivable — that there are things one can do, attitudes one can develop, and obstacles one can work through that make the journey more likely to succeed.

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Part Two: The Differences

Having identified the major convergences, we turn to the differences — which are equally real and equally important to understand. A comparative study that only emphasizes similarities risks a kind of spiritual tourism that does justice to none of the traditions it surveys.

1. Theistic versus Non-Theistic Frameworks

The most fundamental difference between the traditions is whether ultimate reality is understood as a personal God or as something more impersonal. This is not a minor theological detail but a difference that shapes the entire character of the mystical experience as it is understood and described within each tradition.

In Christianity, Islam, and theistic Hinduism (the bhakti traditions), mystical experience is always relational — it is an encounter between a human person and a personal divine being who loves, knows, and calls. The language is inherently the language of relationship: the soul and God, the lover and the beloved, the creature and the Creator. Union with God in these traditions does not mean that the distinction between human and divine is entirely abolished — it means that the relationship becomes so intimate that the two wills, while remaining distinct, become perfectly aligned. The mystic loves what God loves, wills what God wills, sees as God sees, while remaining in some sense a distinct person.

In non-theistic Buddhism and philosophical Taoism, the framework is quite different. There is no personal God to encounter, no beloved to long for, no divine will to align with. The goal is rather the direct recognition of the nature of reality — sunyata in Buddhism, the Tao in Taoism — which is not a being but a condition, a way things are, an emptiness that is also the ground of everything. The mystic does not merge with God but wakes up to what has always already been the case. This is a profoundly different metaphysical picture, and it shapes not only how the experience is described but what kind of experience is sought and cultivated.

Advaita Vedanta Hinduism occupies an interesting middle position. Brahman, ultimate reality, is not a personal God in the theistic sense — it is pure, undifferentiated consciousness, beyond all attributes and relationships. Yet the tradition also accommodates devotional theism at a more accessible level, treating the personal God as a manifestation of Brahman that is appropriate for those who have not yet reached the non-dual insight. This layered structure — personal God as a relative truth, non-dual Brahman as ultimate truth — is one of Hinduism’s most characteristic philosophical moves.

2. The True Self versus No-Self

A second major difference, closely related to the theistic/non-theistic divide, concerns the question of what happens to the self in the mystical encounter. Here the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, despite their many superficial similarities, take genuinely different positions.

In Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, the discovery beneath the ego-self is a true Self — Atman — which is identical with Brahman, ultimate reality. Liberation is the recognition that you are, at the deepest level, identical with the infinite. The self is not abolished but revealed in its true nature. There is a self, but it is infinitely larger and deeper than the ego.

In Buddhism, the discovery beneath the ego-self is — no self at all. Anatta means that there is no permanent, unchanging essence to be found anywhere in experience. Liberation is the insight into this emptiness of self, which frees the practitioner from the craving and aversion that arise from falsely reifying a self. This is not nihilism — the Buddhist tradition is careful to distinguish the absence of a fixed self from the claim that nothing exists — but it is a genuinely different metaphysical position from the Hindu discovery of the true Self.

This difference has been one of the most debated topics in the history of Indian philosophy, with Buddhist and Hindu thinkers engaging each other in sophisticated argument over many centuries. It matters not only philosophically but experientially — practitioners in each tradition are, in a sense, looking for different things, or rather, looking in the same direction and arriving at different descriptions of what they find.

3. Grace versus Practice: How is the Experience Reached?

Traditions differ significantly in how they understand the relationship between human effort and what might be called grace — the dimension of the experience that cannot be engineered or earned but must be received or recognized.

In Christianity and Islam, the ultimate mystical experience is understood as a gift of God — something that God grants and that cannot be achieved by human effort alone, however sincere and sustained. The mystic’s practices of prayer, fasting, meditation, and moral purification create the conditions for the divine gift, but they cannot compel it. This places a strong emphasis on humility, receptivity, and the ultimate dependence of the mystic on divine mercy. The Sufi tradition speaks of the mystic as the beloved of God, chosen and drawn by a love that precedes and exceeds human striving.

In Buddhism, the framework is different. The Buddha’s teaching is fundamentally a path — a set of practices that, if followed with sufficient diligence and under proper guidance, lead reliably to liberation. There is no divine grace to be received from a personal God; there is the nature of mind to be recognized, and the practices that make that recognition possible. This gives Buddhist mysticism a more explicitly methodological and democratic character — in principle, any sentient being who follows the path can achieve enlightenment. The Zen tradition complicates this somewhat, insisting that enlightenment cannot be achieved by effort — it must arise spontaneously — but even here, the effortlessness is prepared for by sustained practice.

Hinduism again occupies a complex middle position. The various yoga paths emphasize sustained personal practice — meditation, devotion, selfless action, discrimination between the real and unreal. Yet the tradition also speaks of the guru’s grace as essential, and of moments of sudden recognition that cannot be engineered. The Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism similarly describes the nature of mind as already enlightened — practice is not the means to achieve something absent but the means to recognize what has always already been present.

4. Individual Experience versus Communal Context

Mystical traditions differ in the degree to which the experience is understood as fundamentally individual or fundamentally communal and relational in its significance.

Jewish mysticism is particularly distinctive on this point. While individual mystical attainment is valued, the ultimate goal in Kabbalistic thought is not the individual soul’s liberation but the repair of the cosmos — tikkun olam. The scattered sparks of divine light must be gathered and restored to unity, and this is a communal, even cosmic task in which every Jewish person participates through the proper observance of the commandments. The individual mystic’s experience serves this larger communal and cosmic purpose rather than being an end in itself.

Mahayana Buddhism introduces a similar communal dimension through the Bodhisattva ideal — the vow to achieve enlightenment not for oneself alone but for all sentient beings. The Bodhisattva who has reached the threshold of final liberation chooses to remain engaged with the suffering world out of compassion, postponing personal nirvana in order to help others. This is a profound revision of the earlier Theravada model of individual liberation and gives Mahayana mysticism a strongly other-directed character.

By contrast, the Christian mystical tradition — particularly in its more contemplative expressions such as the Desert Fathers, the Rhineland mystics, and the Spanish Carmelites — tends to describe the soul’s journey as an intensely personal and interior adventure, even when it takes place within a communal religious context. The Sufi tradition similarly emphasizes the individual soul’s relationship with God, guided by a personal teacher, as the heart of the mystical path.

5. Relationship with Institutional Religion

As noted in the companion article to this one, the relationship between mystical experience and institutional religion differs fundamentally across traditions, and this difference deserves emphasis in any comparative study.

In Christianity and Islam, institutional religion is organized around the mediation of a divine revelation — the Incarnation and Scripture in Christianity, the Quran and prophetic tradition in Islam. This mediation is not incidental but structurally central, and the mystic who claims direct access to God potentially threatens it. The historical result has been recurring tension, sometimes persecution, between institutional authorities and individual mystics. Porete was burned at the stake. Al-Hallaj was crucified. Even figures who were eventually canonized or revered — John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart — faced serious institutional opposition during their lives or after their deaths.

In Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, the institutional framework is organized quite differently. In Buddhism, the monastic Sangha exists specifically to support meditative practice — it would contradict its own purpose to discourage the inner transformation it is designed to facilitate. In Hinduism, the guru-disciple relationship is designed to transmit direct experiential knowledge, and the ashram is a container for spiritual practice rather than a guardian of doctrinal boundaries. In Taoism, particularly in its philosophical dimension, institutional authority itself is viewed with suspicion, and the sage who moves freely beyond conventional categories is an ideal rather than a threat.

This structural difference has profound consequences for how mysticism has developed within each tradition. In Christianity and Islam, mystical writing has had to negotiate carefully with orthodoxy, often couching radical insights in cautious theological language. In Buddhism and Hinduism, the most radical mystical formulations — the Buddha’s paradoxical silences on metaphysical questions, Shankara’s uncompromising non-dualism — could be expressed with relatively less institutional constraint.

6. Methods of Contemplative Practice

The practical methods through which mystics in different traditions seek or cultivate the mystical experience differ considerably, reflecting both the different metaphysical frameworks of the traditions and their different understandings of human nature and the spiritual path.

Tradition	Primary Method	Key Concept
Christianity	Contemplative prayer, lectio divina, ascetic practice	Union with God through love
Islam (Sufi)	Dhikr (remembrance of God), sama (spiritual music/movement), guidance of sheikh	Fana — extinction of self in God
Hinduism	Yoga (jnana, bhakti, raja, karma), mantra, guru transmission	Moksha — liberation; realization of Atman as Brahman
Buddhism	Meditation (samatha/vipassana), mindfulness, koan practice (Zen)	Nirvana; direct insight into anatta and sunyata
Judaism	Prayer, Torah study, contemplation of divine names, ethical action	Devekut — cleaving to God; tikkun olam
Taoism	Wu wei, inner alchemy (neidan), qigong, simple naturalness	Alignment with the Tao; effortless action

Several of these methods deserve particular comment. The Buddhist emphasis on systematic meditation practice — with its detailed maps of meditative states and its emphasis on repeatable, teachable techniques — gives it a somewhat different character from traditions where contemplative practice is less systematized. Buddhism has been described as the most methodologically explicit of the world’s mystical traditions, and this explicitness has made it particularly attractive to the modern scientific study of contemplative experience.

The Sufi practice of dhikr — the rhythmic repetition of divine names or phrases — and sama — the use of music, poetry, and sometimes movement to induce states of spiritual opening — represent a distinctive approach that engages the whole person, including the body and the emotions, in the contemplative process. The whirling practice associated with the Mevlevi order founded by Rumi’s disciples is perhaps the most visually distinctive expression of this embodied contemplative method.

The Jewish emphasis on Torah study as a contemplative practice — finding in the text not just information but a living encounter with the divine mind — represents a uniquely text-centered approach to mystical experience that reflects Judaism’s deep orientation toward sacred language and interpretation.

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Part Three: What Do the Similarities and Differences Mean?

The Perennial Philosophy and Its Critics

The striking similarities across mystical traditions have led some scholars and philosophers to propose what Aldous Huxley famously called the Perennial Philosophy — the idea that beneath the surface differences of all the world’s religious traditions lies a single universal mystical truth. On this view, Porete, Rumi, Shankara, the Buddha, Laozi, and the Kabbalists were all describing the same fundamental reality from different cultural starting points. The differences are real but secondary; the convergences point to something essential and universal about human consciousness and its relationship to ultimate reality.

This view has deep appeal and has been enormously influential, particularly in the modern spiritual landscape where many people draw freely from multiple traditions. But it has also attracted serious criticism. The philosopher Steven Katz and others have argued that mystical experiences are not raw, unmediated encounters with a universal reality but are always shaped by the conceptual frameworks, practices, and expectations of the tradition within which they occur. A Christian mystic expecting union with a personal God of love, a Buddhist practitioner expecting the recognition of non-self, and a Hindu sage expecting the identity of Atman and Brahman are, in this view, not all having the same experience described in different language but genuinely different experiences shaped by different training and expectation.

This debate — known in the academic study of mysticism as the constructivist versus perennialist controversy — remains unresolved and may in principle be unresolvable. It touches on deep questions about the relationship between language, thought, and experience that extend far beyond the study of religion.

What the Differences Teach Us

Even if one leans toward the perennialist view, the differences between traditions are important and instructive. They show that the same basic territory of human experience can be mapped in genuinely different ways, and that the map one uses shapes what one finds and how one is changed by finding it.

The difference between the Hindu discovery of the true Self and the Buddhist discovery of no-self is not merely a verbal dispute about the same experience. It orients the practitioner toward different objects of attention, generates different insights, and produces different forms of liberation. The difference between the theistic mystic’s experience of being loved by a personal God and the non-theistic practitioner’s recognition of empty awareness is not a trivial difference in packaging. Each opens a different dimension of human possibility.

Similarly, the difference between traditions where the institution supports mystical practice and traditions where it tends to oppose it has not been merely a sociological accident. It has shaped which kinds of mystical experience got cultivated and transmitted, which got suppressed or driven underground, and how mystical wisdom was integrated — or failed to be integrated — into the broader religious community.

Convergence at the Limits

Perhaps the most interesting observation that emerges from careful comparative study is that the traditions seem to converge most closely at their extremes — at the points where the mystic has traveled furthest from ordinary consciousness and ordinary language. The more carefully a mystic tries to describe the deepest levels of their experience, the more their language resembles the language of mystics from entirely different traditions.

At the surface level, the differences are obvious: different gods, different scriptures, different rituals, different communities, different cosmologies. But at the point where language breaks down, where paradox is the only honest response, where the mystic can only say what the experience is not rather than what it is — at this point, something very similar seems to be being pointed at across all the traditions. Whether this convergence at the limits reflects a genuine universal reality, or a universal human cognitive response to the limits of conceptual thought, or something else entirely, remains one of the most fascinating and genuinely open questions in the study of human consciousness and spiritual experience.

The Practical Significance

For the contemporary reader, the comparative study of mystical traditions offers something beyond academic interest. It suggests, first, that the mystical dimension of human experience is not the peculiarity of one culture or one era but a recurring feature of human consciousness across history and geography. This gives a certain weight and credibility to the claims of individual mystics that might be harder to extend to any single tradition considered in isolation.

Second, it suggests that there are multiple valid paths toward the transformation of consciousness that mystics describe — that no single tradition has a monopoly on the methods or the destination. This is a liberating insight, though it comes with a caveat: the traditions consistently emphasize that genuine progress requires sustained commitment to a particular path, under proper guidance, within a supportive community. The spiritual tourist who samples everything shallowly may find the convergences intellectually interesting without ever penetrating to the depths where the traditions are most alive.

Third, and perhaps most profoundly, the comparative study of mysticism reminds us that the questions at the heart of these traditions — What is the nature of the self? What is the nature of ultimate reality? How should a human being live? — are not questions that any civilization or era has answered finally and definitively. They remain, as they have always been, the questions that matter most and that press most urgently on anyone willing to take them seriously.

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Conclusion

The mystical traditions of the world’s major religions present a remarkable and in some ways paradoxical picture. On one hand, they are diverse in their metaphysical frameworks, their methods, their institutional relationships, and their cultural expressions. Christianity’s personal God of love, Buddhism’s empty awareness, Hinduism’s non-dual Brahman, Taoism’s nameless Tao, Judaism’s Ein Sof beyond all attributes, Islam’s Allah of infinite mercy — these are not obviously the same thing, and to treat them as simply identical would be to do violence to the integrity of each tradition.

On the other hand, when we attend carefully to what the mystics of these traditions actually describe — the dissolution of the ordinary ego-self, the paradoxes that arise when language reaches its limits, the transformative quality of the experience, the centrality of something like love or compassion, the graduated path of development — the similarities are too deep and too consistent to be dismissed as coincidence or superficial resemblance.

The most honest response to this picture is probably not to choose between emphasizing the similarities and emphasizing the differences, but to hold both in tension — to take seriously the possibility that these traditions are circling around something real that none of them has fully captured, while also taking seriously the possibility that the genuine differences between their frameworks reflect genuine differences in what is found and how the finding changes a human life.

What all the traditions agree on, at the end, is perhaps this: that reality is vastly deeper and richer than ordinary experience suggests, that the ordinary sense of being a separate and self-sufficient ego obscures something important, and that the journey inward — however it is undertaken and whatever it ultimately reveals — is among the most significant things a human being can do. In a world that often seems to be moving in the opposite direction, toward distraction, superficiality, and the relentless assertion of ego, the mystics of every tradition offer a quietly radical alternative — and one that human beings have found compelling, in every culture and every age, for as long as we have records of what human beings have sought.

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