What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps.
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.