 Because of its variable meanings, a definition of “mystical experience” must be partly stipulative. It is common among philosophers to refer to “mystical experience” in a narrow sense: a purportedly nonsensory or extrovertive unitive experience by a subject of an object granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection. A unitive experience involves the eradication of a sense of multiple discrete entities, and the cognitive significance of the experience is deemed to lie precisely in that phenomenological feature. Examples are experiences of “union with God,” the realization that one is identical to the being shared with God or that one is identical to the Brahman of Advaita Vedanta (i.e., that the self/soul is identical with the one eternal, absolute reality), experiencing a oneness to all of nature, and the Buddhist unconstructed extrovertive experience devoid of a sense of any multiplicity of realities (see Smart 1958, 1978; Wainwright 1981, chap. 1). However, as discussed in Section 2.2.1, few classical mystics refer to their experiences as the union of two realities: there is no literal “merging” or “absorption” of one reality into another resulting in only one entity. Excluded from the narrow definition are, for example, experiences of “contact” with God in which the subject and God remain ontologically distinct, even if there is a lessening of boundaries, or a Jewish Kabbalistic experience of a single supernal sefirah.