The sheer variety of these sorts of experience to me point to a deeper kind of agency than our conscious minds can access. It's hard to point to, it's hard to n

The sheer variety of these sorts of experience to me point to a deeper kind of agency than our conscious minds can access. It's hard to point to, it's hard to nail down, but in my mind, you can put agency on a continuum from bacteria all the way to God. Tolkien is phenomenal at describing divine agency. Eru Iluvatar only occasionally imposes his will on the world, but mostly just lets it run. Where he imposes his will, it's actively needed in order to further his plan. Fantasy is a fantastic vehicle for exploring non-human, non-physically-based intelligent agency. I'm not entirely sure why I went on this tangent, but I'll leave it in instead of deleting it. Okay now I feel like I have a handle on it. Why we do things and what happens to us makes a kind of sense that transcends the mundane. Imagining that it's God is a perfect metaphor to describe the transcendence. When you describe going down to the base levels of sensation, the reason your particular mysticism dives in that direction has a reason, and that reason will be explainable by pure chance, but it will also be explainable by some deeper element of your life or psyche or whatever. Mysticism wants to dive in and create more reasons and more questions, while materialism wants to stop the process and state that there's nothing further to examine. If I had to choose between materialism and psychosis, I'd pick psychosis. Luckily I don't have to embrace psychosis to throw away materialism.