Why Skeptics and Mystics Need Each Other
What if nobody's wrong?
What if nobody’s wrong?
Let me start with something you’ve probably experienced but never named.
You’re at a dinner party. Someone starts talking about a spiritual experience they had , a moment of overwhelming connection, a sense that something larger was speaking through them. Across the table, someone else shifts uncomfortably. You can feel the room split.
Half the table leans in. The other half is already composing counterarguments.
The Split at the Dinner Table
Here’s the strange part: both sides are absolutely certain the other is missing something obvious.
The mystic thinks the skeptic is trapped in a cage of their own making , so busy measuring the bars they can’t see the open sky. The skeptic thinks the mystic is hallucinating the sky and calling it freedom.
What if they’re both right? Not in a wishy-washy “everyone has their truth” kind of way. In a structurally precise, almost mathematical way. Stay with me.
The Physics of Partial Vision
Here’s an experiment you can run right now. Hold your hand in front of your face. You see it clearly , five fingers, skin, maybe a ring. Now here’s what you’re not seeing.
The electromagnetic radiation bouncing off your hand includes infrared, ultraviolet, wavelengths your eyes were never built to detect. A rattlesnake looking at your hand sees something you literally cannot imagine.
Not because you’re wrong about your hand. Because your biology gives you one real but partial slice of what’s actually there. Your eyes are not lying to you. They’re giving you everything they can. But “everything they can” is not “everything there is.”
This isn’t a metaphor. This is physics. And it turns out, it’s also the key to understanding why the skeptic and the mystic keep talking past each other.
The Paradox of Complementarity
You’ve probably heard the old parable , blind men touching an elephant, each convinced they’ve found a wall, a rope, a tree trunk. It’s usually told as a lesson in humility.
But there’s something deeper going on that the parable itself misses. Each blind man isn’t wrong. The elephant really does feel like a wall if you’re touching its side.
The problem isn’t that anyone’s perception is faulty. The problem is that each person mistakes their genuine contact with reality for the whole of reality.
Niels Bohr , the physicist, not a mystic , ran into exactly this problem with light. Is light a wave or a particle? He realized: it’s not a contradiction. Light shows up as a wave when you measure it one way and as a particle when you measure it another.
Both measurements are real. Both are accurate. Neither is complete. He called this complementarity , the idea that some realities are so rich that no single measurement can capture them.
The Precision of the Flashlight
The scientific method is, at its core, a discipline of controlled observation. You isolate variables. You measure. You repeat. And this works spectacularly well , it gave us antibiotics, satellites, the phone you’re probably reading this on.
But notice what the method requires: you have to choose what to measure. Every experiment is a decision to look at one dimension of reality while deliberately ignoring others. That’s not a flaw. That’s the feature.
Think about it like a flashlight in a dark room. The beam illuminates whatever it’s pointed at with extraordinary clarity. But the clarity comes from the narrowness.
The flashlight doesn’t tell you about the parts of the room it’s not pointed at , not because those parts don’t exist, but because that’s not what flashlights do. The skeptic’s flashlight is real. What it illuminates is genuinely there. The question is whether the flashlight has a setting called “everything.”
The Subconscious Signal
Now here’s something that might surprise the skeptics in the room. Mystical experience, across every tradition that’s ever described it, shares a peculiar structural feature.
The people having these experiences consistently report that they’re encountering something real but that they can’t fully render it into words or concepts. This is usually where the skeptic checks out. “Can’t describe it? Convenient.”
Your subconscious processes roughly 11 million bits of information per second. Your conscious mind handles about 50. That’s not mysticism talking , that’s neuroscience.
Which means the vast majority of what your brain actually knows about reality never makes it into the part of you that thinks in words and builds arguments. So when someone reports an experience that feels profoundly real but resists conscious articulation, one possibility is that their subconscious has made genuine contact with a dimension of reality that their conscious mind simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to render.
Like trying to play a 4K video on a 1990s television. The signal is real. The TV just can’t show you all of it.
A Productive Misunderstanding
The skeptic, with their flashlight, illuminates measurable, repeatable patterns with extraordinary precision. The mystic, with their wider but fuzzier antenna, picks up signals the flashlight was never designed to detect.
What if neither is confused? What if reality is simply richer than any single mode of knowing can capture? This isn’t relativism. Some claims really are wrong. The earth isn’t flat.
But the method that proves those things also has edges. And what lies beyond those edges isn’t necessarily nonsense. It might be signal that requires a different receiver.
I’m suggesting that the argument between skeptics and mystics might be the most productive misunderstanding in human history. Because each side is accurately identifying the other’s blind spot while being unable to see their own.
The skeptic is right that ungrounded claims need discipline. The mystic is right that disciplined measurement has boundaries. And reality might just be generous enough to be accessible from both directions.
The only thing that actually shrinks our understanding? Insisting our flashlight is the sun.
References
Hacking, I. (1983). *Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science*. Cambridge University Press.
Holton, G. (1970). The roots of complementarity. *Daedalus*, 99(4), 1015-1055.
James, W. (1902). *The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature*. Longmans, Green, and Co.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? *The Philosophical Review*, 83(4), 435-450.
Nørretranders, T. (1998). *The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size*. Viking Press.
Sagan, C. (1995). *The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark*. Random House.