But Why Would You Want to Self-Transcend Through Mysticism?

Dan Turello considers Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn’s “Dreaming Reality: How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness.”

By Dan TurelloMarch 26, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Philosophy & Religion

ON A SUNNY WEEKEND morning a few years ago, I lay on my back in the yoga studio of the Eaton Hotel in Downtown Washington, DC. Eventually, as rhythmic music and gentle instructions took me deeper into a realm of mystery, I spent some 45 minutes essentially hyperventilating and, occasionally, holding my breath on either inhales or exhales. Time felt like it was both standing still and moving at unprecedented speed in a kaleidoscope of visions and explosions of colors and possibilities. For several days after, I felt elated. I journaled about the memories that had emerged, gleaned new insights, felt both more grounded and more purposeful, and, stated in generic language, felt damn good for the entire week. My first foray into breathwork had gotten me hooked, and I’ve been a practitioner ever since, often on a weekly basis.

Of late, there are entire industries sprouting up around the expansion of consciousness. These trends towards the democratization of mystical experiences can be attributed to several cultural currents. As yogic practices have blossomed in the West—and the success of brands like Lululemon attest to the exponential creation of followers and market share—so, too, have practices like pranayama and meditation, as well as more esoteric forms of journeying, like holotropic breathwork (which was one of my first points of contact with these traditions). In their original religious context, in the Christian as well as in the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other traditions, mystical practices were often woven in with practices of asceticism. They typically involved long apprenticeships and extended periods of monastic living—which also meant that these spiritual technologies were well guarded. They were kept within narrow confines, reserved for the initiated.

In the West, this all changed rather quickly and dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, decades that saw early experimentation with psychedelics, including LSD. In 1968, the Beatles traveled to Rishikesh, a northern Indian city on the banks of the Ganges, dotted with temples and ashrams. They released their so-called “White Album” later that year. Woodstock happened in 1969. Among the most influential thought leaders during this period was a medical doctor and psychotherapist by the name of Stanislav Grof. Originally from Czechoslovakia, Grof studied in Prague before moving to the United States in 1967 and becoming an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in 1969. During these years, Grof was experimenting with the controlled use of LSD trips, combined with psychotherapy, as a way to access early memories, as far back as pre-birth, and to release traumas that might otherwise never rise to the level of consciousness. LSD research, however, was getting significant negative scrutiny, and research funds became hard to come by.

Around this time, at a party in New York City, Grof met Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Grof had accumulated a wealth of research material by this point and wanted to take some time to write a book, so Murphy invited Grof to be a scholar-in-residence at Esalen. It was 1973, and Grof ended up living at the institute until 1987. At Esalen, he convened scholars from many disciplines, hosted workshops, conducted group therapy, and continued pioneering significant research. This is where the historical narrative intersects with my own: because LSD research was falling out of favor, Grof started experimenting with breathwork as a way to naturally create psychedelic-type experiences within the brain, access memories, and guide participants into their own therapeutic breakthroughs. Much of this history can be found in the 2020 documentary The Way of the Psychonaut, as well as in Grof’s books, among them Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy (co-authored with Christina Grof, 2010) and The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (2019). This is the origin story of the modern holotropic breath movement, which I had a chance to experience on that sunny morning at the Eaton Hotel. (Various religious traditions had developed their own versions of this kind of work centuries previously. Mircea Eliade’s 1951 book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is a good starting point.)

This history might seem like a diversion, but it is essential to understanding the narrative threads that come together in Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn’s new book Dreaming Reality: How Neuroscience and Mysticism Can Unlock the Secrets of Consciousness. Lynn, who died in 2024, had a long and noteworthy academic career, culminating as distinguished professor of psychology at SUNY Binghamton. Miskovic was an assistant professor of psychology at the same institution, though he has since taken some alternative journeys, working as a scientist at Google X for a period and, currently, exploring life as a novice monk at New Skete Monastery in Cambridge, New York.

While Miskovic and Lynn’s book ably explores recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, it is much more ambitious than that. It follows at least three different paths. The first is the scientific one: what do recent studies tell us about the functioning of the brain? Let’s call the second path the “mystical” one. Here, the authors delve into more subjective accounts of mystical experiences in various traditions, including Christian and Buddhist. The third path we might call “philosophical”; it emerges from weaving together the other two strands to ask questions about the nature of the universe and the human experience. This is also where things can get tricky.

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You might not be surprised to hear that the writing at least partially fits into the ecosystem I charted above. Indeed, Stanislav Grof makes an early appearance; in the book’s preface, the authors—in the context of a discussion about the use of psychedelics, as well as other modes of achieving “non-ordinary states of consciousness”—note that they “agree with Stanislav Grof’s characterization of such substances as ‘non-specific amplifiers’ that can amplify both light and shadow in one’s mind.” They further “repudiate the wildly oversimplistic but still popular misconception that non-ordinary or altered states are necessarily ‘higher’ states of consciousness,” adding that, “while it is certainly possible that non-ordinary states of consciousness can have integrative, healing effects, especially with adequate preparation and support, it is also true that they can promote dis-integrative tendencies.”

I kept coming back to this statement as I read the book (and a few others found in the first chapter, “The Matter of the Mind,” and in the coda, “Toward an Optimistic Neurophenomenology of the Future”) because I repeatedly found myself confused about what story the authors were trying to tell, or what fundamental principles they were trying to convince us of. Early on, the authors state that one of their objectives would be to show that,

rather than the commonsense view that the real world impresses itself upon our mind as a brass stamp does on sealing wax, it is actually the other way around: an internal set of processes impresses itself upon what we experience as surrounding us. […] In fact, the stuff from which the waking state is built is precisely the same material out of which hallucinations and dreams are constructed.

I have no formal training in neuropsychology, so I’ll leave it to the neuroscientists to sort out whether the evidence presented is sufficient to the task. The part that doesn’t add up for me, however, is the philosophical narrative, and what it is the authors would like us to do with it. For while the book presents many intriguing studies—for example, on lucid dreaming (see chapter seven, “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of”)—it seems to waffle back and forth between highlighting more modest recent discoveries about the nature of the brain and more grandiose yet speculative claims about the nature of mind, the cosmos, and reality itself.

As the book progresses, the claims about reality become more disconcerting. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the authors—who initially set out to question a strictly materialist philosophy represented with the mainstream of the scientific method—proceed to select still nascent and provisional scientific and medical studies that seem to correlate and give credence to an equally limited selection of practices from nondualistic strands found in both Buddhism and Christian thinking. This is only the beginning of the problem; the bigger leap is that they then extrapolate from these selective, provisional scientific studies, and these equally esoteric contemplative traditions, to make bold, (again) speculative, and thoroughly untestable claims about the nature of reality itself, about “first-order” and “second-order” reality, and so forth.

Let’s look at one example in more detail. “This book’s fundamental premise,” the authors write, “is that what you encounter around you is something akin to a very convincing, fully immersive, virtual-reality simulation.” It’s not this claim that is problematic; on the contrary, it is an interesting starting point for speculation. It is the narrative one weaves around it that must be read discerningly. Consider, as a point of comparison, a different claim in the realm of physics. Today, argues Dean Buonomano in Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (2017), “most physicists and philosophers accept the eternalist stance that all of time is in some sense ‘already’ laid out within the block universe […] that the past, present, and future truly stand on equal footing.” It’s an interesting theory, which seems to be backed by significant evidence. But it’s not a theory that is likely to change the way you act in the world. It doesn’t change legal rulings, nor our existential predicament. Until scientists actually figure out how to travel in time, you probably will not abandon your plans for a vacation to the tropics next year because a cosmologist tells you that, in their theoretical model, everything has already happened.

Many of the strands of Miskovic and Lynn’s investigation come together in chapter 13, “Nonduality and Reality Beyond the Dream,” and in their final reflection, the book’s coda. Again, there is an irony here: in their quest for a unifying field of consciousness, the authors seem to create their own set of arbitrary dichotomies—between “first-order” and “second-order,” as we have already mentioned, but also between “being” and “doing.” In these final chapters, we are reminded that “the non-ordinary dimensions of consciousness […] offer an opportunity to study the foundational dimensions of consciousness.” In the context of their discussion of first-order reality, this takes them to articulate a position that they identify as stemming from Tibetan Vajrayana, on the basis of which they seem to align with the idea that “reality, as it is ordinarily experienced, is actually a second-order reality”; and, furthermore, that “second-order reality is a deeply embedded misinterpretation of self and world, characterized by a splitting of experience into a dualistic perspective that creates a convincing, virtual-reality like simulation.”

I don’t buy this for a minute. I’m with the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. “What is good?” he asks in his poem “In Common”: “Garlic. A leg of lamb on a spit. / Wine with a view of boats rocking in a cove. / A starry sky in August. A rest on a mountain peak.” That is just the first stanza, but you get the point. I certainly understand that in evolutionary history, the “distance senses,” as the authors had previously referred to “vision, hearing, and smell,” emerged at a specific point in time and for specific purposes. (See chapter four, “The 500-Million-Year-Old Virtual-Reality Simulator.”) They claim that these “allowed for biologically useful simulations of the outside world.” But here, too, the scientific narrative is so thoroughly intertwined with speculation that it begs the question of agenda. In the space of just a couple of pages, the authors weave in actual science (“One of the necessary biological conditions for consciousness is an intact ascending reticular activating system”), add caveats such as bland statements about “mystery” (“As for the question of precisely how nature is able to pull off this magic trick of projecting experience beyond its boundaries […] that remains a mystery”), and introduce evocative yet ultimately imprecise analogies involving holograms and projections.

In the end, perhaps my real point of departure with Miskovic and Lynn (with whom, incidentally, I imagine I would quite enjoy a spirited conversation over a pint of beer and some “second-order reality” pretzels) is the fact that when I set out on the beautiful holotropic breathwork journeys, ice-plunging adventures, and meditation practices that have become a treasured part of my day-to-day life, I am not seeking to tap into the secrets of the universe—or even of reality. I am quite content with probing the far reaches of my memory and witnessing the inner workings of my imagination. I am often surprised by what emerges, but those experiences expand and add context and insight to the experiences I have in my waking, ambulating life. They are not a way to transcend them, nor are they a mode of transcending my identity.

Miskovic and Lynn shine in their rendering of recent discoveries about how the brain represents reality, and about the mechanisms driving sight, sounds, sleep, touch, and lucid dreaming. The rest is intriguing, yet best taken with a large grain of salt. My hunch, too, is that, through his monastic practice, Miskovic has already built—and will likely continue to build—a vast and valuable storehouse of personal experience with meditation. As that continues to evolve, I hope to hear a more detailed, first-person account—one that might ground the far more theoretical and impersonal reflections offered in this first book.