Across the broad span of wisdom traditions, one encounter is of key significance: some direct access or contact with the ground of being.
Even in this secular age, dominated as we are by the materialistic, reductionist paradigm of western science, these transcendent experiences still occur, even amongst members of the scientific community.
Most neuroscientists are convinced that minds live in skull confinement — after all, their metaphysical gospel (cloaked in brain scans) insists that minds are “nothing but” what brains do. Some occasionally let their minds stroll within the body, acknowledging the importance of heart and gut, while maintaining the brain as organ king. A few conservative radicals go further and claim that minds can also protract into the world, much like the blind’s cane or everyone’s phone. Such an “extended mind” is seriously meant but often so rather metaphorically as a heterodox way to lessen the duality by spreading “mind” like butter in the bread of “matter”. I wonder if that’s sufficient, or even necessary. We are still struggling with Descartes’ forced divorce between “res cogitans” and “res extensa”; extended stuff can’t think and thinking stuff can’t enjoy extension.