Yale Divinity School and Yale School of Medicine recently hosted a searching interdisciplinary conversation on levitation, mystical experience, and the nature of consciousness, bringing together historian of religion Professor Carlos Eire and psychiatrist-neuroscientist Dr. Christopher Pittenger.
Under the title “Between Heaven and Brain: The Neuroscience and History of Extraordinary Bodily Experiences,” the evening explored how to take seriously centuries of testimony about phenomena such as levitation and bilocation without either credulous acceptance or reflexive dismissal.
Wild facts and social facts
Drawing on his book They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Eire introduced the audience to early modern mystics whose lives were surrounded by detailed reports of levitation, bilocation, and other extraordinary bodily events, including St. Teresa of Ávila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Sor María de Ágreda, and the 20th century French nun Yvonne Aimée de Jésus. He described Inquisition-era beatification and canonization processes that gathered sworn testimony from hundreds of witnesses, many of whom believed that lying under oath could imperil their eternal souls.
These accounts, Eire argued, are what William James called “wild facts”, events that do not fit comfortably into existing explanatory frameworks yet are reported with remarkable consistency and moral seriousness. He contrasted such wild facts with “social facts”, the taken for granted assumptions that govern what a culture considers possible, such as the modern conviction that levitation and bilocation simply cannot occur. A recurring question in his work, he noted, is whether and how a “matrix of belief” might help make the impossible possible, or at least thinkable and narratable, in particular times and places.
The brain, experience, and what counts as explanation
Responding from the vantage point of contemporary neuroscience, Pittenger began by acknowledging that it is easy, from a “committed scientific reductionist” stance, to offer glib explanations for mystical phenomena, attributing them to seizures, temporal lobe disturbances, dissociative states, or mass misperception. Such moves, he suggested, may be technically plausible but often fail to engage the existential and spiritual weight of the experiences themselves.
Pittenger described himself as a “non reductive monist”, affirming that every subjective experience, even the most ineffable, is accompanied by complex brain processes without being exhausted or nullified by them. Using examples of pain, fear, and love, he argued that mapping neural correlates does not “explain away” those experiences any more than knowing which fibers carry pain signals makes the pain unreal. In the same way, identifying brain activity during spiritual ecstasies shows correlation, not reduction; the experiences remain real in the first person sense even when they can be studied in the third person.
Truth, testimony, and the limits of science
One of the most provocative threads of the evening concerned the meaning of truth in relation to shared and individual experience. Pittenger questioned the assumption that truth must always be a zero sum, single frame concept in which only one description of reality can be valid, proposing instead that there may be domains where multiple, non identical accounts are “true” within their own frames of reference. This opens conceptual room, he suggested, for experiences that may not show up on a videotape yet remain experientially real to those who live and witness them.
The discussion also probed the reliability of testimony, from cloistered nuns to modern scientists. Audience members raised the concern that if we discount clusters of historical eyewitness accounts as socially conditioned misremembering, we must also attend to the ways contemporary scientific observation is vulnerable to similar biases. Pittenger responded by emphasizing that science is not a static list of facts but a social process deliberately designed to mitigate such distortions through replication, antagonistic peer review, statistics, and methodological skepticism. The “proof” that these safeguards matter, he noted, is the tangible world of airplanes and electricity that works reliably within science’s proper domain, even as that domain does not encompass all of human experience.
Expectation, culture, and constructed reality
Both speakers converged on the importance of expectation and culture in shaping what people see, feel, and report. Eire raised the puzzle of why reports of levitation and similar phenomena seem more common in certain eras than today, asking whether a “relaxation of the impossibility” of such events within a believing community might increase their occurrence or at least their recognition. Pittenger, drawing on psychiatry and cognitive science, described how individuals and societies continually construct reality from incomplete information, leaning heavily on prior concepts and shared narratives.
He suggested that subtle social cues, authority structures, and communal expectations can profoundly condition experience, in ways that are not trivial or merely deceptive but speak to the deep intersubjective nature of human perception. Charismatic figures, especially in religious contexts, may shape the inner and outer experiences of those around them through channels that are not yet well understood scientifically but need not be labeled “supernatural” to be taken seriously.
Consciousness, eternity, and ongoing questions
In the final portion of the evening, the conversation widened to questions of consciousness, death, and eternity. For Eire, consciousness is an awareness of the self situated in an environment that constantly needs to be interpreted, framed by the philosophical puzzle that we find it nearly impossible to imagine our own non existence. Eternity, he suggested from a theological perspective, can be thought of as “a now that never ends”, challenging our linear conceptions of time.
Pittenger distinguished between the relatively tractable scientific task of modeling a self that monitors itself over time and the far more mysterious problem of qualitative subjectivity, what it feels like to be a self. He expressed skepticism that current scientific accounts have come close to resolving this “hard problem”, while resisting the conclusion that it is forever beyond naturalistic explanation.
The evening closed with reflections on professional risk and intellectual courage. Eire noted the intense resistance his work has sometimes provoked within the historical guild, including critiques that pathologize his interest in “impossible” phenomena or reduce it to cultural stereotypes. Pittenger shared that, as a scientist, he speaks only cautiously in public about metaphysical implications, but finds it essential to question unexamined assumptions of reductive materialism in order to make honest sense of spiritual life and subjective depth.
As participants lingered over wine, cheese, and dessert, the central questions remained deliberately unresolved: How should we weigh centuries of testimony about events that seem to defy the laws of physics? What can neuroscience say, and not say, about mystical ecstasy and the experience of God? And where might history, theology, and brain science together illuminate not only the limits of the possible, but also the richness of what it means to be conscious, believing human beings?
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