Mysticism, Consciousness, Death

Abstract
This article examines how mystical experience intersects with core questions about consciousness and death. It argues that conventional frameworks often reduce these experiences too quickly—either dismissing them or forcing them into narrow explanatory boxes. A more careful approach treats them as data about human consciousness, cultural meaning systems, and the limits of dominant scientific narratives. Drawing on the author’s mystical experiences, this paper explores what those experiences imply for theories of consciousness and for the question of death. The argument proceeds from “observable facts” of experience to a challenge: mainstream accounts underestimate the variability and depth of consciousness and often lack the conceptual resources to explain the phenomena reported.

Key Points

• Positions mystical experience as empirical and experiential data relevant to consciousness studies.
• Highlights how cultural frames shape interpretations of death, afterlife, and transcendence.
• Critiques simplistic reductionism while still insisting on careful analysis and conceptual clarity.
• Calls for integrative inquiry across psychology, sociology, and consciousness research.
• Uses first-person experience as structured observational material (with methodological care).
• Challenges narrow materialist framings of consciousness by foregrounding anomalous data.
• Connects mystical experience to the “ultimate question” of death and continuity of consciousness.

• Calls for theory that can actually account for the reported phenomenology.

Key Points

Recommended citation: Sosteric, Mike. (2016). "Mysticism, Consciousness, Death." *Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research*, 7(11), 1099–1118.
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