Toward a Unified Science of Spiritual Experience
* Article: Hedlund, Nicholas. 2024. “Toward a Unified Science of Spiritual Experience—Visionary Realism and the Ontology of Interiority: Philosophical Commentary on Chatlos’s Framework of Spirituality.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 59 (4): 996–1012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/zygon.19049,
Description
"This article advances an expanded or integrative empiricism—radical, deep, and subtle—that integrates subjective, intersubjective, and objective methodologies to legitimize spiritual experience as a domain of rigorous scientific inquiry. It further explores the nested relationship between a science of interiority, a science of spiritual experience, and the emerging academic field of soul studies. This integrative framework seeks to bridge science, philosophy, and theology, offering transformative responses to the meaning crisis and the larger global metacrisis by fostering a secular spirituality capable of re-enchanting the disenchanted world."
Excerpts
The Neo-Kantian Coupling of Subjectivity and Interiority
Nicholas Hedlund:
"Modern Western thought has largely inherited Immanuel Kant’s strict separation of the knowing subject from the ontological reality of what is known. Kant confined interiority to the realm of mere subjective experience, accessible only via the mind’s transcendental structures, thereby banishing phenomena of mind and spirit from the domain of objective reality. This neo-Kantian legacy treats subjectivity as the epistemic domain of the knower and relegates interiority to it, implicitly denying that consciousness, culture, or spiritual insight could correspond to anything real. Visionary realism directly challenges this assumption, decoupling interiority from subjectivity. Drawing on Bhaskar’s ([1979] 2015) critical realism, visionary realism maintains that interior phenomena possess ontological intransitivity—they exist relatively independently of our awareness of them. Instead of being absolutely unknowable or strictly subjective and non-generalizable, interiority is both an intransitive ontological domain of reality and a transitive epistemic mode of participatory access to it, as knowledge (e.g., science and philosophy) is constellationally contained by being (e.g., social reality). This recursivity in the social domain does not amount to a kind of self-referential paradox in which ontology is reduced to epistemology (what Bhaskar calls “the epistemic fallacy”) but adds a degree of relativity to the notion of ontological intransitivity that necessarily is justified in a process-relational ontology. Once an object or structure has come into being (at t1), whether in the social or natural world, it is both determined and determinate as well as inalterable (at t2)—that is, it is existentially intransitive (Bhaskar 2016, 46–47). Such an entity or structure may be partly causally constituted in a causally interdependent, recursive manner (as in social and human science), and therefore only relatively intransitive in a causal sense, but not an existential one. In short, scientific knowledge (in the transitive dimension) of a social reality is partially constitutive of the social reality it describes such that the transitive and intransitive dimensions remain categorically distinct but not discrete.
In this view, experiences of mind, soul, and spirit are not “nothing but” private constructions; rather, they are real, emergent dimensions of the natural world with their own causal structures that can be studied objectively. This shift opens the possibility of a naturalistic yet non-reductive science of interiority, recognizing that interior phenomena cannot be fully explained away as neural activity or social convention."
Expanded Empiricism: Radical, Deep, and Subtle
To build such an approach, visionary realism advocates for a reimagined empiricism that transcends the narrow confines of the five physical senses. James’s (1912) notion of radical empiricism is a starting point: all aspects of experience, including relations and qualitative nuances, are admissible as data for science. James maintains that the continuity and connections between experiences are as real as the sensations themselves, which pushes us to include the felt sense of meaning—the context and relations of spiritual experiences— in our investigations rather than stripping it away.
Building on James, Wilber (1998) proposes a broad or “deep empiricism” that asserts empiricism must encompass not only the exterior dimensions of reality—accessible through the physical senses—but also interior dimensions, accessible through introspection and systematic contemplative practices. Wilber’s framework is grounded in his epistemological model of the multiple “eyes of knowing” beyond the physical senses, including the sensory-physical (eye of flesh), the conceptual-logical (eye of mind), and the contemplativemystical (eye of spirit). These epistemic modalities, Wilber argues, must be integrated to fully understand phenomena, particularly those involving spiritual experience. Visionary realism integrates Wilber’s insight by insisting that empirical science need not be limited to what can be seen or touched; it can extend to what can be experienced inwardly under disciplined conditions. Other thinkers affirm this widened empiricism. Michael Murphy’s (1992) “synoptic empiricism” complements this perspective by integrating insights from diverse disciplines—including psychology, anthropology, medicine, and mystical literature—to uncover deep patterns in extraordinary human capacities. Similarly, Stephen Phillips’s (2008) characterizes certain Vedantic approaches as “mystic empiricism,” treating mystical experience itself as a valid source of knowledge (provided it is approached with rigor and critical discernment). Both perspectives reinforce the notion that empirical inquiry can embrace data from prayer, meditation, or peak experiences in a methodical way.
Goethe’s participatory epistemology and Rudolf Steiner’s development of subtle empiricism further enrich visionary realism’s expanded empiricism. Goethe’s scientific method (Bortoft 1996) emphasizes an intuitive and imaginative engagement with phenomena, allowing the observer to resonate with archetypal realities beyond the physical senses. This participatory empiricism broadens the scope of inquiry, recognizing that well-cultivated faculties of intuition and imagination can access dimensions of experience typically excluded from conventional empiricism (Goethe 1988). Steiner, as a key interpreter and developer of Goethe’s scientific work, advanced a resonant vision by identifying additional “organs of perception” or subtle senses that extend beyond the five physical senses. These include imaginative cognition, inspirational cognition, and intuitive cognition, which, once cultivated, enable the perception of spiritual realities through vivid imagery, direct insight, and unmediated understanding (Steiner [1910] 2009, [1923] 2009a, [1923] 2009b). In Steiner’s view, humans have up to fifteen senses, including these finer capacities. Such claims challenge conventional science, but visionary realism takes up the spirit of Steiner’s proposal pragmatically and hypothetically: it suggests that human consciousness may access layers of reality (through symbols, meditative insight, etc.) that standard empiricism overlooks, which is to be more definitively verified or falsified in further philosophical and scientific research. By incorporating disciplined inner observation and intersubjective comparison of those observations, the ambit of empiricism is potentially stretched to include the subtle, the transpersonal, and the sacred.
In sum, visionary realism argues for an integrative empiricism that is radical (accepting all experience as data), deep (probing inner as well as outer realities with mental and spiritual perspectives), synoptic (synthesizing multiple sources of evidence), mystical (open to insights from altered states of consciousness), participatory (engaging the observer’s creative intuition), and subtle (utilizing refined faculties of perception). This transfigured empiricism lays the methodological foundation for a visionary realist science of spiritual experience, affirming the ontological reality of spiritual phenomena and their accessibility through diverse modes of human perception.
This integrative empiricism includes:
• First-person (phenomenological) methods: Phenomenological approaches explore the lived experience of spirituality, capturing the subjective depth and richness of spiritual phenomena. Methods such as mediation, introspection, and autoethnography serve as tools for systematically observing one’s own consciousness. Such methods yield rich qualitative data on spiritual growth, inner conflict, and transformative insight. Rather than being dismissed, disciplined subjective reports become crucial data for understanding spiritual phenomena from the inside.
• Second-person (relational) methods: These dialogical approaches investigate spirituality as it emerges between people. Examples include qualitative interviews and group dialogues and hermeneutic practices about spiritual experiences, studies of communal rituals and collective prayer, and examinations of mentor–mentee relationships on the spiritual path. In these cases, intersubjective verification—finding commonalities and shared meanings across individuals’ experiences—adds rigor. The focus is on how spiritual realities are co-created and validated in relationship.
• Third-person (systematic) methods: These apply often quantitative or formally qualitative techniques to spiritual phenomena. They include neuroscientific studies of meditation (e.g., EEG or FMRI), psychological surveys of mystical experience, cross-cultural comparisons of developmental stages, and other objective analyses. Such methods situate individual spiritual experiences within larger patterns and mechanisms— linking subjective reports to measurable correlates or societal factors. Third-person approaches provide an external, observable anchor to claims about spirituality.
By triangulating and integrating first-, second-, and third-person methodologies, visionary realism provides a pluralistic framework for studying spirituality that honors the complexity and depth of its subject. It resists reductionism, affirming that spiritual experiences are not merely private whims, or psychosocial constructions, but mediated interactions with real (albeit subtle) dimensions of existence. Only through such an integrative methodological pluralism can the study of spirituality remain both scientifically rigorous and true to the phenomena’s depth and nuance.
The Ontological Reality of Spiritual Phenomena
By embracing this expanded empiricism and methodological pluralism, visionary realism allows for a deeper ontology of spiritual reality. No longer reduced to epiphenomena or illusions, spiritual events are seen as emergent properties of nature. In contrast to physicalist paradigms that dismiss spirituality as purely subjective or illusory, visionary realism affirms that spiritual phenomena have ontological reality—they exert real causal influence in individual and collective life. Rooted in the understanding of a methodological circle wherein philosophy and science are syncategorematic and inter-informed, visionary realism contributes an a priori philosophical ontology, laying the intellectual foundations for a new science of interiority, which, when put into an expanded empirical practice, can inform an a posteriori scientific ontology. Together, these produce a consilience in which an integrative ontology of spiritual realities can be progressively developed. This consilience includes both transcendental philosophical methods and empirical scientific ones. Bhaskar’s (2002, [2002] 2012a, [2002] 2012b) meta-reality, for example, develops a secular spiritual ontology rooted in transcendental arguments that conclude to demonstrate a deeper ontological unity or nonduality underlying both natural and social worlds. Meta-reality emphasizes the interconnectedness and co-presence of all dimensions of reality, offering a philosophical foundation for a secular spirituality that avoids the pitfalls of dogmatism while preserving transformative potential. Bhaskar’s ([2002] 2012b) “esoteric sociology of everyday life” illustrates how mutual understanding and ethical action presuppose a non-dual spiritual substrate—a meta-real ontology that undergirds all human interaction. This framework demonstrates that transcendental methods grounded in procedural rationality and methodological transparency can systematically explore the deeper structures of interiority and spirituality. Such methods, when combined with visionary realism’s expanded empiricism, can help bridge the gap between empirical science and philosophical inquiry.
In integrating expanded empiricism with Bhaskar’s meta-reality, visionary realism provides the philosophical infrastructure for a transformative science of spiritual experience. This science holds the potential to re-enchant the disenchanted world, addressing the existential and epistemic crises of modernity by restoring meaning, purpose, and interconnectedness to human existence. By situating spiritual experience within an ontologically robust and epistemologically pluralistic framework, visionary realism opens new horizons for understanding and engaging with the profound dimensions of human interiority."