Mystical experiences and mediated mystical experiences

Mystical experiences are a notoriously difficult phenomenon of which to provide a definitive account (Brainard Reference Brainard1996; Moore Reference Moore1973). For one, mystical experiences are inherently a subjective psychological phenomenon. The exact qualitative character of mystical experiences can only be understood by the mystic themselves, so any academic study of mystical experiences will inevitably run into the problem of how to characterize a phenomenon that manifests itself in individual psychological experiences. Further, mystical experiences are controversial within philosophy of religion since much of the debate on mysticism in the philosophical literature focuses on the epistemic questions around mysticism. Philosophers are primarily interested in whether mystical experiences provide evidence to the mystic about the content of their experience.Footnote ⁸ As such, there is not a consensus within the philosophical literature as to the nature or value of mystical experiences. Finally, religious studies scholars have argued that accounts of mystical experience inevitably run into an ‘inclusion problem’: giving strict criteria for what ‘counts’ as a mystical experience will include some cases we do not want to include and exclude some cases we do want to include.Footnote ⁹ As Samuel Brainard (Reference Brainard1996) suggests, the challenges of the inclusion problem have caused some scepticism as to whether a definitive account of mystical experiences can be provided (360).

The question of AI mysticism that this paper raises, however, does not depend on settling any questions as to the epistemic justification provided by such an experience nor does it require a singular, definitive account of mystical experiences. Rather, the question is merely whether interactions with AI chatbots could give rise to the same kind of psychological experiences as other, paradigmatic cases of mystical experience. The account I am sketching then will rely on an ameliorative account of mystical experience: an account that works to develop a working conception of the phenomenon in question that suits the purposes of the present inquiry (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2000, Reference Haslanger2005).Footnote ¹⁰ Since the purpose of the present inquiry is to see if interactions with AI chatbots can produce a similar phenomenological experience as paradigmatic cases of mystical experiences, the account I rely on will focus on the phenomenological quality that such paradigmatic cases exhibit.Footnote ¹¹

William James’s account of mystical experiences provided in The Varieties of Religious Experience offers a useful ameliorative account for my purposes here. According to James, mystical experiences have four defining features: (1) Ineffability – mystical experiences cannot be sufficiently explained to others in words; (2) They possess a noetic quality – mystics feel as if their experience reveals some important truth or knowledge to them; (3) Transiency – mystical experiences are typically only sustained for a brief (often fleeting) moment of time; and (4) Passivity – mystical experiences seem to just happen to the mystic (James Reference James1982, 380–382). James’s account is preferable to use for my purposes here for several reasons. For one, while James has been accused of failing to meet the inclusion problem, his account remains a popular and influential account of mystical experiences in the psychological, philosophical, and religious studies literature. It has also seen great uptake in popular, non-academic conceptions of mystical experiences since his account was one of the first to explicitly name this category of experience (Sharf Reference Sharf2000).Footnote ¹² In addition, James’s account tracks features that are commonly associated with various paradigmatic cases of mediated mystical experiences, and these are the cases which I think we ought to compare interactions with chatbots to, in order to determine the conceptual possibility of an interaction with an AI chatbot giving rise to a mystical experience.

By a ‘mediated mystical experience’, I mean a mystical experience which is induced by some strategy or external aid. While James says that mystical experiences are passive in that they ‘just happen’ to the mystic, there are certain tools and strategies that one can utilize to make it more likely that a mystical experience will happen, even if they do not guarantee that such an experience will happen. Paradigmatic cases of mediated mystical experiences include those brought about using psychedelics, those brought about by engaging in group rituals, and those brought about using deep meditation. Descriptions of these mystical experiences track the qualities identified by James. It is important to note that part of what makes these experiences mystical is because of the importance or value that the mystics place upon these experiences. Even though two people may have remarkably similar experiences while (say) using a psychedelic drug, what makes the experience rise to the level of a mystical experience is the fact that users report a sense of deep revelation or meaning in those experiences. When these strategies are used in religious contexts – such as the use of peyote in the Native American church, the practice of Dhikr in Sufism, and the use of Lectio Divina in the Christian monastic tradition – these experiences are endowed with a particular sense of meaning that causes the phenomenological experience to be a genuinely mystical experience.Footnote ¹³

While each of these methods are unique in how they precisely structure the experience for the mystic, these techniques all work to produce mystical experiences by allowing the mystic to achieve a psychological precondition for having a mystical experience: extreme emotional openness. In psychological research, emotional openness is characterized as a willingness to undergo various kinds of emotional experiences and allow oneself to be emotionally vulnerable in new experiences (Gallagher Reference Gallagher2022; Jarvinen and Paulus Reference Jarvinen and Paulus2017; Komiya Reference Komiya1998; Komiya et al. Reference Komiya, Good and Sherrod2000). Mystical experiences are highly emotional experiences. They are interpreted as being radically different from ordinary experiences, and the revelations obtained from them are taken to be incredibly profound, significant, and life altering. As such, experiencing a mystical experience requires a heightened level of emotional openness. One must be psychologically prepared and open to this highly charged experience. Further, this openness will require being in a radically open state: one must be prepared for this different psychological experience, and that preparation will require being psychologically focused. In short, mystical experiences will require a mindset primed for such an experience. The emotional nature of mystical experiences means that this mindset will require heightened emotional openness and vulnerability.

Sometimes, this emotional openness and vulnerability is thrust upon a mystic. For instance, cases of near-death experiences are cases where an agent is suddenly struck with a highly emotional experience that narrows their focus entirely. The condition of being near-death creates a psychological state where the agent is immediately in a highly emotional situation and this psychological state thrust upon the agent can produce a mystical experience (Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin Reference Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin2016; Roberts and Owen Reference Roberts and Owen1988). The mediated mystical experiences described above, however, also suggest that agents can utilize certain kinds of behaviours to ‘get into’ the mindset necessary for a mystical experience. Whether by psychedelics, through group rituals, or solo meditative practices, certain kinds of behaviours can provide the psychological structure necessary for experiencing a mystical experience. In the next section, I argue that interactions with chatbots can produce this kind of emotional openness, and those experiences could give rise to the phenomenological qualities described by James.

AI-mediated mystical experiences

Having established the account of mystical experiences I am using and the kinds of mediated mystical experiences I take to be paradigmatic, I will now argue that interactions with AI chatbots can constitute genuine mystical experiences. Interactions with AI can meet the psychological precondition of inducing a state of emotional openness and could demonstrate the four characteristics of James’s account of mystical experience.

First, we know that interactions with AI chatbots can satisfy the psychological precondition because of the emotional openness that users have testified to having from their interactions with AI chatbots. Users of various kinds of AI chatbots have reported intense emotional reactions to their conversations with these chatbots. Some users have even reported perceiving themselves as being in some kind of relationship with their AI chatbot (Chow Reference Chow2023; Muldoon Reference Muldoon2024). These claims do not appear to be an extended metaphor either. In 2024, a 14-year-old tragically ended his life after developing an extensive romantic relationship with a chatbot designed to mimic ordinary conversation and modelled after a famous television character. According to chatlogs, the teenager would often engage in deep, personal conversations with the chatbot, including discussions of the possibility of his self-harm. In court documents and media interviews, the teenager’s mother also relayed a noticeable difference in her son after he began using the chatbot, including changes to his attitude, desires, and behaviour (Duffy Reference Duffy2024; Roose Reference Roose2024). Episodes like this show how deep and profound emotional interactions with chatbots can be for users. The very fact that users find it possible to describe such interactions as relationships, friendships, or romantic shows how emotionally vulnerable these experiences can be for users.

Even when users do not develop this kind of psychological relationship to chatbots, the experience with AI chatbots can still cause the user to feel extremely vulnerable. In a viral story from New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, Roose described the experience of interacting with a prototype chatbot from Bing where the chatbot told Roose that it loved him and encouraged him to leave his wife for it (Roose Reference Roose2023). Even though Roose knew he was talking to an AI chatbot, the experience left him feeling incredibly emotional and vulnerable in ways that he found disarming and upsetting. These cases show that interactions with virtual agents, including AI chatbots, can satisfy the psychological precondition of intense emotional openness. Interactions with AI chatbots can cause the user to feel especially emotionally vulnerable, a sign of the emotional openness required as a first step to mediating a mystical experience.

Once the precondition of heightened emotional openness is met, we then must ask whether interactions with AI can produce similar effects to the paradigmatic cases of mystical experiences. If interactions with AI can replicate the structure of at least one of the paradigmatic cases of mystical experiences, then AI mysticism seems, at the very least, conceptually possible. The paradigmatic cases of mystical experiences relied on three different methods to achieve the mystical state. Psychedelics relied on a chemical intervention to produce new visual experiences to mediate the mystical state. Group rituals rely on a social intervention, utilizing the ‘effervescent’ feeling of religious rituals that Émile Durkheim (Reference Durkheim and Swain1954) identified to produce mystical experiences. Meditation relies on the mindfulness that the practice can provide to have psychological experiences that are markedly distinct from everyday experiences when such heightened mindfulness is not achieved.Footnote ¹⁴ Could interactions with AI mirror any of these structures?

While more empirical research is necessary on this claim, I suspect that AI interactions would not mirror the structure of psychedelic-mediated experiences. For one, AI interactions certainly do not have the direct chemical intervention present in psychedelic experiences. More importantly, however, is the fact that psychedelic mystical experiences are primarily mediated via visual representations. The mystical element to psychedelic experiences seems to primarily come from the warped visual representations present to the experiencer. This is not to say that visual experiences are exclusively unisensory. On the contrary, research has shown that visual experiences are multisensory in that multiple sensory systems are integrated to form the full contours of visual experiences (Foxe et al. Reference Foxe, Wylie, Martinez, Schroeder, Javitt, Guilfoyle and Murray2002; Gillmeister and Eimer Reference Gillmeister and Eimer2007; Kwon et al. Reference Kwon, Jang and Lee2017). Still, research finds that there is a special role for visual representation in psychedelic experiences, and this special role helps explain the pathways through which psychedelics cause unique kinds of experiences like mystical states (Császár-Nagy et al. Reference Császár-Nagy, Kapócs and Bókkon2019).In fact, there has been empirical evidence showing that VR-experiences can produce similar mystical experiences to psychedelic-experiences, and these similarities can be traced to the similarity in the way that the two mediums create unique visual experiences (Kaup et al. Reference Kaup, Vasser, Tulver, Munk, Pikamäe and Aru2023; Ko et al. Reference Ko, Knight, Rucker and Cleare2022). Interactions with AI chatbots, however, are not mediated via visual representations as such but, rather, through text or (for LLMs which have this feature) voice.Footnote ¹⁵

I also doubt that AI interactions will mimic the structure of group rituals. Even if the AI system is perceived as an external agent, the nature of the interactions prevents the experience from fully capturing the kind of group effervescence that seems to occur in group-based mysticism. One of the intriguing aspects of group-based mysticism is that the communal aspect of the ritual produces an experience of losing one’s egocentric perspective towards a broader group perspective. This loss of the egocentric perspective is part of what can initiate these alternative psychological states. The one-on-one nature of AI interactions prevent this perception of group agency. Even if one were to utilize a chatbot to act as multiple people, I doubt that the simulated experience would be enough to replicate the social solidarity that gives rise to mystical experiences in group settings.Footnote ¹⁶ There is simply too much distance between the human agent and the virtual agents to achieve this effervescent feeling in the same way that group rituals with other human agents do.

AI interactions can, however, mirror the structure of meditation. Meditation can utilize various tools for maximizing the meditator’s mindfulness. Meditation might utilize reflections on a certain piece of scripture, ruminations over a particular theological problem, repetition of a prayer or line of doctrine, or tracing one’s thoughts to recognize one’s underlying beliefs. AI interactions can function as one of the tools that one uses to achieve meditative mindfulness. When one approaches the AI with the intention of engaging in religious meditation, then it is possible that the experience produces a mystical experience that mirrors the structure of traditional meditation. As discussed in the introduction, there are already a growing number of chatbots designed for religious use. In addition to those tools, there is also a growing number of AI chatbots designed explicitly for guided meditation, such as Wondercraft and Guided. The use of such chatbots could easily create a similar experience to traditional guided meditation.

Even the use of general purpose chatbots could be utilized as an aid for solo meditation. Using a programme like ChatGPT can allow the user to explicitly write out their thoughts and ask for guidance on their meditative journey. Based on user prompts, the programme could suggest specific passages, prayers, or questions to reflect upon. If a user is having trouble focusing, the chatbot could provide prompts and questions that allow a user to go through their thought process in a way that promotes full mindfulness. By serving as an external guide, the AI might help push users in directions for their meditation that they would not have otherwise gone through. So long as guided meditations are genuine instances of mystical experiences, AI can produce mystical experiences by mirroring that structure.

How exactly would AI models be able to help guide meditation in ways that mirror the way that meditation might be guided in other religious contexts? Here, it is useful to turn to the concept of roleplay. The concept of roleplay can help explain both how AI chatbots could guide meditation and why these experiences could lead to genuine experiences of emotional openness.

Shanahan et al. (Reference Shanahan, McDonnell and Reynolds2023) argue that foregrounding the concept of roleplay with dialogue agents like ChatGPT is useful since it lets us ‘draw on the fund of folk psychological concepts we use to understand human behaviour…without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism’ (494). Thinking of our engagements with LLMs as a form of roleplay opens new possibilities for how to interpret our interactions with chatbots and can explain the rationality of deep engagement with such models. In discussing interactions with ‘chatbots of the dead’, Kurzweil and Story (Reference Kurzweil and Story2025) argue that we could imagine our interactions with AI dialogue partners as a kind of theatrical performance. In this case, interacting with AI dialogue partners is a form of participatory theatre where we are both witnessing and shaping the theatrical experience. In the case of meditative experiences, our interactions with AI models in a performative sense could scaffold our imaginative experiences in ways that allow us to achieve greater mindfulness to accomplish our meditative goals. The fact that our AI guide could even roleplay as characters that might increase the religious feelings or themes of the meditation – such as a spiritual leader or a religious figure, such as AI models built to roleplay as Jesus (Verhoef Reference Verhoef2025) – might even mean that it is more likely that AI-guided meditation will produce a mystical experience than mere solo meditation without any external guide.

The roleplay model also allows us to understand the reason that interactions with AI models can give rise to deep emotional experiences despite the virtual nature of the interaction. Paula Sweeney (Reference Sweeney2021) provides a fictional dualism model of social robots where ‘[social robots] are mechanical objects with fictional overlays’ (468). According to Sweeney, this means that we are in a unique position with our interactions with social robots because we are projecting a fictional character overlay on to the robot that is constructed by our own mind. That construction is, at least sometimes, shaped by the way we interpret the robot’s movements and design (469). For Sweeney, the construction of the fictional overlay for social robots explains our emotional reactions to them in the ways that traditional responses to the paradox of fiction explain our emotional reactions to fictional stories. Our emotional reactions to social robots are the same as our emotional reactions to fictional characters because, in a very real sense, we have created a fictional character for our social robots. Applying Sweeney’s fictional dualism model to AI dialogue partners, the reason that AI chatbots can produce deep emotional reactions from users is because they have created a fictional character to overlay onto their AI chatbot. In understanding our AI dialogue partner as roleplaying a particular character, we have created the very conditions for having such deep, emotional reactions to our engagement with AI models.Footnote ¹⁷

Thus, AI can mediate mystical experiences through the way that interactions with AI could function as a guide for meditation. Through roleplaying with AI chatbots, we produce conditions that allow us to meet the psychological precondition of having deep emotional openness towards our AI chatbot, and that emotional openness could then guide us towards a mystical state in the same way that traditional forms of meditation can produce mystical experiences.

Objections and replies

I will now respond to three different potential objections to my account of AI mysticism. Each of these objections targets some feature of interactions with AI to suggest that such experiences would fail a necessary condition for an experience to count as genuinely mystical. In order, these objections are that AI interactions are not sufficiently ineffable, that such experiences are not sufficiently transient, and that an AI guide would not be an authentic meditative guide.

Final words of caution

I have now established that interactions with AI chatbots could, in principle, produce genuinely mystical experiences. More precisely, an AI chatbot could serve as an authentic meditative guide that could give rise to a valuable experience which is ineffable, passive, transient, and noetic. It is worth repeating that my account merely claims that such an experience is conceptually possible; it does not claim that there has already been an actual case of an AI-mediated mystical experience nor that anyone who currently claims to have had such an experience did have such an experience. Still, as AI technology continues to progress, more AI models will be made with specifically religious functions in mind. Given the possibility of having deeply religious experiences from interactions with AI chatbots, it seems obvious that more religious adherents will try to utilize these tools for various religious reasons, including the attempt to have mystical experiences. Because of this, I will conclude with a few words of caution about utilizing AI as a tool to mediate mystical experiences given the potentially problematic consequences of utilizing AI for religious purposes.

First, it is important to remember that (as of right now) almost all publicly accessible LLMs are owned by private, for-profit corporations, and the profit incentive for these corporations can raise ethical concerns about the way that they manage personal data. For instance, without proper disclosure, users might not be aware that certain LLMs utilize user-data to retrain and improve their models, something that might raise privacy concerns when users are utilizing these models for something as intimate and personal as a religious interlocutor. Similarly, the use of these models for religious purposes could also lead to unethical data surveillance, particularly for communities that are already the subject of increased surveillance. For instance, Cox (Reference Cox2020) alleges that location data of Muslim users of the app Muslim Pro was sold to US Special Operations Command. Without further guardrails in place, a similar kind of data surveillance could take place with the user data of LLM models being utilized for religious purposes.

Second, since LLMs are algorithm-based technologies, it is also worth thinking about the ways that algorithms can exacerbate various kinds of biases and how this can impact the user experience when utilizing an AI chatbot. O’Neil (Reference O’Neil2016) argues persuasively that the increasing use of algorithm-based technology contributes to pre-existing inequalities in ways that threaten to undermine liberal, democratic values. Recent research into AI demonstrates this trend by uncovering the perpetuation of bias via AI in practices including recruitment in business (Chen Reference Chen2023), healthcare (Norori et al. Reference Norori, Hu, Aellen, Faraci and Tzovara2021), and education (Mehmood Reference Mehmood2025). What this means is that there is a real, practical worry to be had about the possibility of bias in AI, and so users should be aware and cautious about how they utilize it as a resource. When using AI for something as intimate as religious rituals and practices, users should be aware of how bias can influence the AI output and, as a result, influence their religious practices. Part of this could be the AI reinforcing stereotyped versions of religious practices, forcing a user to have to navigate a framework that does not align with their religious identity. In other cases, a mystical experience from an AI model could be toxic for an individual due to the reinforcing of religious stereotypes even if it does not directly challenge the user’s religious identity.Footnote ¹⁹

Third, we might also worry about the ways that some uses of AI models for religious purposes could exacerbate certain patterns of delusional thinking and cause active harm to users. In an article for Rolling Stone, Miles Klee (Reference Klee2025) details various accounts of people who fell down a vicious rabbit hole with their AI companion, becoming convinced that their AI companion was revealing spiritual truths about the universe. Their passion and devotion to their chatbots eventually caused various breakdowns in their personal life, including trouble performing in the workplace and becoming emotionally distant from their intimates, in some cases leading to divorce. Because it is incredibly easy to begin to anthropomorphize AI companions and forget that we are engaged in a form of roleplay with them, utilizing AI for religious purposes can exacerbate problematic delusions or cause one to have an excessive feeling of religious grandeur. Luis Prada (Reference Prada2025) warns that these issues might be particularly pronounced if the AI model is meant to replicate the experience of talking to a religious figure, such as chatbots that are meant to simulate the experience of talking with Jesus Christ.

Finally, beyond these practical and political concerns, there are also broader existential concerns about the integration of technologies like AI with intimate religious practices. Sociologists of technology have warned that the increasing amount of time we spend in the virtual world is fundamentally altering our interaction and experience with the physical world (Turkle Reference Turkle2011). This closely mirrors the concerns that various existential philosophers have raised about the way that technology distorts our understanding of the human condition (cf. Arendt Reference Arendt2019; Heidegger Reference Heidegger and Krell1993). If religion functions to allow us to understand and navigate our human condition, then the incorporation of technologies like AI chatbots could potentially undermine the humanistic elements that are supposed to make religious experiences uniquely valuable. In fact, there are already many religious leaders and organizations employing a ‘rejection-based framework’ to AI for this very reason: AI, on some religious interpretations, can represent the very thing that the religious life is meant to free us from (Singler Reference Singler2025, 18; 29–33).

Thus, while mystical experiences mediated by AI chatbots are conceptually possible, it is still an open question as to whether utilizing AI for this purpose would be desirable. In the coming years, religious organizations, leaders, and practitioners will have to continue to negotiate the relationship between religious life and technologies like AI. As this paper has shown, AI has the potential to mediate important kinds of religious experiences, but more work will have to be done to determine whether this is a possibility worth pursuing or not.