*What the encounter is like.* Everyone has felt it. A landscape that opens past where the eye can follow, and what registers is not the view but the reach — the awareness that what lies out there does not end. A mathematical result arriving with the sensation not of triumph but of contact, as if structure was always there and the proof found it. Music resolving into something that feels less like composition than inevitability — as if the sound was always going to land exactly there. The death of someone close, and the absence so total it reveals that the presence had edges you never noticed because you were never outside them. These are not the same experience. They share a structure: in each, the reach has pressed against what exceeds it, and what it meets is not blankness but more — something real that the model cannot hold. The encounter does not require tradition, initiation, or special states. It requires only that the reach be deep enough to notice its own boundary. That capacity is universally met: any reach of sufficient depth meets the boundary whenever conditions bring it to notice. Its activation is not: whether a given person registers the encounter, how often, and in what terms, is conditioned by depth, attention, habituation, and the interpretive vocabulary available for naming it — the same standing-capacity/occurrent-registration split the chapter already relies on for curiosity ([§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>): a standing drive, not a constant activity) and boredom ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>): available whenever a field goes unweighted, not constantly occurring). A reflective, sincere naturalist who reports no such encounter has not thereby shown the capacity absent; the report tracks activation, which the same variables that govern every other occasioned state also govern. Schellenberg's hiddenness argument, read against this distinction, targets a relational, self-disclosing deity who would choose to secure the encounter's activation; it has no equivalent foothold against a non-agential structural feature, since there is no agent whose reticence needs explaining — only an occasioned capacity like any other named in this chapter.

The excess is not a gap to be filled by better thinking. It is the constitutive difference between a finite person and the infinite Nature they are inside of — between a model and the thing it models, where the thing is always larger than any model of it. Awe, reverence, the feeling Schleiermacher called absolute dependence, the *numinous* Otto named — these register a structural fact: the person is inside something they cannot contain. Understanding Nature better does not dissolve the feeling. It makes the excess more precise.

What the traditions called "God" was the excess, personified. Minds that evolved to detect agents in ambiguous signals — because missing a predator cost more than imagining one — show a robust agency-detection bias whenever the excess presses. Whether this bias amounts to a dedicated *hyperactive agency detection device* in the strong modular sense remains contested (van Leeuwen and van Elk 2019); the broader observation that agency-detection runs liberally under uncertainty is well-supported. The architecture that kept the species alive on the savannah delivers its default verdict — someone is there — whenever an unidentifiable pressure registers, and the inheritance of these verdicts across generations supplies the agent-shaped form religious traditions take (Guthrie 1993; Barrett 2000; Atran 2002; Boyer 2001). Grief phenomenology confirms the mechanism from an adjacent direction: the bereaved sense the deceased as present for months or years afterward, because the self-model built across years of contact continues to run after the departed is gone, and the absence registers with the phenomenology of presence (Rees 1971; Datson and Marwit 1997; Field and Filanosky 2010). Inherited across generations and stabilized by ritual and narrative, these verdicts congeal into the personified God the tradition hands down — and a tradition built around ancestors, saints, or a continually-present divine person is the same mechanism run at cultural scale (Boyer 2001; Norenzayan 2013).

None of this debunks the underlying encounter. The pressure is real. The presence is real. What agency detection and grief phenomenology explain is why the encountered excess so reliably takes an agent-shaped form in the tradition's final product. The category error is not *there is something there*, which is accurate. It runs in two directions, and each turns an accurate registration into a false object. The first personifies: the *something* is read as a *someone*, which is what minds built to track someones always do. The second externalizes: the *something* is read as a *somewhere beyond* or a *first cause* standing outside the world — though *beyond*, *above*, and *before* are relations drawn from inside Nature, and applying them to the whole borrows an internal relation and uses it where it cannot reach. The dependence the encounter registers is a part's, not the whole's: a person is genuinely held by what exceeds it, but the totality that holds every person is not one more thing in need of a ground, and the magnitude that impresses is not a cause above the chain but the chain entire. What is real is the excess; both the *someone* and the *somewhere outside* are the model's own structure read onto what the model cannot hold. Every named god was the encounter spoken in the vocabulary the person could carry, felt from inside the one who felt it. Each tradition named the excess in the vocabulary its medium made available. The naming tracked something real; the theological specification of what it tracked was shaped by the cognitive and ecological conditions just described, and is where the divergence between traditions, and between the traditions and the structural account, arises.

The structural encounter is not equivalent to any tradition's theology. What every sustained contemplative tradition points at is the same structural encounter — finite persons pressing against Nature's excess. What each tradition adds — the specific theology, the specific agent, the specific narrative of salvation or liberation or union — is content the structural account does not endorse. The encounter is real; the specific metaphysical object each tradition ascribes to it is not. This is not a concession to religious experience; it is an inversion of the familiar debunking. The skeptic says: religious experience is illusory because its object does not exist. The structural account says: religious experience is veridical at the structural level and misidentified at the theological level. What the traditions encountered exists. What they claimed about it does not.

Contemplative practice is training in registering the excess. Meditation, prayer, fasting, ritual attention, silence, long walks, exposure to wilderness, extended artistic engagement — these are not arbitrary cultural practices. They are techniques for quieting the self-model enough that Nature's excess becomes registerable. The techniques appear across cultures because the structural need they meet is universal. Neuroscience confirms the mechanism: default-mode network quieting, attention redeployed outward and inward at once. The traditions that developed the practices were doing real engineering on the people who developed them, even when they misdescribed what the engineering was for (Kabat-Zinn 1990; Wallace 2006; Goleman and Davidson 2017).

Reverence, awe, and wonder are structural phenomena. They are what the encounter with excess feels like at different scales and registers. Reverence is the reach toward what exceeds held with acknowledgment that the person is smaller than what it reaches toward. Awe is the same reach registered as overwhelming — the person's ordinary self-model temporarily unable to scale. Wonder is the reach registered as curious, inviting, continuing — the person drawn further into what they cannot model. These are not sentimental leftovers from a pre-scientific age; they are the internal aspect of structurally necessary encounters. Their disappearance from a life or a culture is the disappearance of a structural capacity, not a childish feeling outgrown by maturity (Keltner and Haidt 2003; Monroy and Keltner 2023).

Several positions in theology and philosophy stand in specific relation to the account.

1. *Classical theism (Anselm, Aquinas).* The scholastic tradition defined God through divine simplicity, infinity, omnipresence, and necessary existence (Anselm 1078; Aquinas 1265–1274). The structural account reads these as accurate descriptions of the medium — T, S, and Φ fit each attribute once God is read as the infinite ground a person is inside of rather than the personal agent above nature. What the scholastics were formalizing was structure, expressed in the personal vocabulary their culture supplied. The formalism survives the demythologization.

1. *Process theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne).* Process theology (Whitehead 1929; Hartshorne 1948) rejects the classical God's timelessness and places the divine within the process of actualization, making the referent relational and temporal. This is a partial convergence: the structural account agrees that whatever warrants the vocabulary is inside the process rather than above it. Where the structural account goes further is in declining to keep the personal framing after the metaphysical revision. What is inside the process is the process itself — Nature iterating through its living forms — not a personal being with preferences.

1. *Schleiermacher, Otto, Eliade.* Schleiermacher's (1799; 1821) feeling of absolute dependence, Otto's (1917) numinous, and Eliade's (1957) distinction between sacred and profane describe the structural encounter from inside theology. Each names a real feature: the person's registration of its own finitude against something larger (Schleiermacher), the phenomenology of the encounter with the excess (Otto), and the pattern by which people mark places, times, and objects that register the encounter more strongly (Eliade). The descriptions are accurate at the phenomenological level and detach cleanly from the theological commitments their authors wrapped them in.

1. *Apophatic and mystical traditions.* Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500 CE), Meister Eckhart (c. 1300), the *Cloud of Unknowing* (c. 1375), the Sufi via negativa, and Kabbalistic *Ein Sof* describe the encounter through deliberate negation of the abstracted divine names. The mystical correction is structurally predictable: in every tradition that has matured the abstraction trajectory, an apophatic counter-current emerges — never before the abstraction is mature, never absent once it is (McGinn 1991; Sells 1994). The structural account reads these traditions as performing the right correction in the right register: re-locating the encounter inside the experiencing subject when the official vocabulary has stopped registering it. The structural derivation supplies what the apophatic traditions lacked — an account of why the correction is needed at the depth they intuited.

1. *Non-dual traditions (Buddhist śūnyatā, Advaita Vedanta).* Nagarjuna's (c. 150 CE) emptiness and Shankara's (c. 800 CE) identification of *ātman* with *brahman* point past the personal-agent framing toward a structural claim: a person is not a separate thing from Nature but a local mode of it. The structural account shares the insight that the interval between current and medium is real but not separating. Where it differs is in preserving the interval rather than collapsing it — the [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>) warning that collapsing the interval ends the person rather than uniting it with what it reaches toward. The non-dual traditions were closer to the structural point than the theistic traditions were, and still overcorrected in the direction of dissolution (Stace 1960; Forman 1990). The strongest form of the tradition presses past dissolution-as-practice to a metaphysical claim, and it is owed a hearing at full strength. On the two-truths reading, the world of appearance is real only conventionally (vyavahārika), while what is real without qualification is *nirguna* Brahman, an objectless awareness that hosts no world; the structural conditions would then reach the appearance and never the ground (Deutsch 1969; Forman 1990). The reply is twofold. First, the doctrine's own apparatus is structured through and through: the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth is itself a distinction (S), holding it along the path is a succession of states (T), and superseding each lower truth by a higher one requires something that persists to undergo the supersession (Φ). The non-dualist can grant this and relocate the whole apparatus to the conventional level, leaving the ultimate untouched. Second, the ultimate is still offered as awareness, and awareness carries its own condition. The retreat is pressed at its strongest by the pure-consciousness-event literature: a wakeful episode with no object, no thought, and no felt subject, known only in retrospect (Forman 1990). Grant the episode, and a dilemma follows. Either it retained some minimal over-against, if only the bare difference between the awareness and its own occurring, in which case there is still a distinction, and distinction is Spatiality in the structural sense derived at [§2.4.7](<2.4.7 Distinction Requires Spatiality.md>), not a metric manifold, holding at the very place the ground was meant to be conditionless; or it retained none, in which case nothing is set over against anything and no feature marks the episode as awareness rather than as nothing, so what is called thin objectless awareness is indistinguishable from ∅ ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)) and cannot be the sole reality the doctrine needs, since structure necessarily obtains ([§2.8](<2.8 The Whole Line.md>)). The introspective deepening the traditions actually train does not reach the second horn: awareness turned inward at depth is awareness holding itself as its own object, the reflexive fold the Yogācāra tradition analyzes as *svasaṃvedana*, and a fold is a distinction sustained. One narrow foothold remains: because the episode is reported only in retrospect, memory cannot certify which horn obtained, so the dilemma constrains what the episode could have been without settling it from the inside. That residual is genuine, and it is not enough to carry an objectless ground. *The idealism form of this objectless-awareness gate is raised at [§4.3.5](<4.3.5 Idealism.md>).*

1. *Freud, Durkheim, and projection accounts.* Freud (1927) argued religion is projection of the infantile father-relation; Durkheim (1912) argued religion is society worshipping itself. Both are partially right. Agency detection and grief phenomenology supply a cognitive basis for projection; ecological shaping (Sapolsky 2017) supplies a social basis for the variation across cultures. What both miss is the underlying encounter the projection and the social structure are shaping into their specific forms. The excess is real before any projection reaches it, and a person registers the excess whether or not their society has supplied an interpretation.

1. *Nietzsche and the new atheists.* Nietzsche (1882; 1883–1885) announced the death of God and asked what remained. Dawkins (2006), Dennett (2006), Harris (2004), and Hitchens (2007) pressed the case against the classical God on empirical and moral grounds. The structural account agrees with the debunking of the classical personal agent while preserving the encounter the classical agent was a personification of. What dies is the personification. What survives is the infinite medium a person is always already inside of, which cannot die because it is not an object. The question Nietzsche asked about what remains has an answer: structure remains, and with it, the encounter.

1. *Hick's pluralism.* Hick's (1989) pluralism converts cleanly from Kantian to structural footing once the veil drops. He argued that the world's major religious traditions are equally valid responses to the same ultimate reality — the Real — cognized differently through culturally-conditioned conceptual schemes that produce *personae* (Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, the Trinity) and *impersonae* (Brahman, Tao, Nirvāṇa, *śūnyatā*), which are not the Real itself but the Real as humanly experienced. The structural account converges on the pluralist thesis and sharpens it. The Real is the medium — T, S, and Φ — and the reason the traditions arrive at different *personae* and *impersonae* is not Kantian noumenal opacity but the ecological and cognitive shaping described above: agency detection delivers the agent-shaped forms, and environment selects which features get amplified into the infinite. Hick kept the Kantian veil between the Real and its appearances. The structural account lets the veil drop. What the traditions encounter is not the Real behind a screen but the medium itself, encountered from inside a person whose architecture shapes what it registers into the forms the tradition supplies.

1. *James and perennialism.* James's (1902) varieties of religious experience, Huxley's (1945) perennial philosophy, and the mystical-monism thesis (Stace 1960; Forman 1990) all point at a common core underneath tradition-specific surface. The structural account supplies what the perennialists lacked: a non-theological derivation of why the core should be common. The common core is not the shared content of distinct divine revelations; it is the shared structural encounter that distinct cultural inheritances dress differently.

Spirituality read as the structural encounter — finite persons pressing against Nature's excess and registering what exceeds them — composes with every serious religious and post-religious position by relocating rather than dismissing each. Classical theism's attributes describe the medium once *God* names the infinite ground a person is inside of; process theology gets the inside-the-process right while keeping a personal framing the structural account drops; Schleiermacher, Otto, and Eliade name phenomenology accurate at its level; the apophatic counter-current is the structural correction the matured abstraction always needs; non-dual traditions reach the structural point and overcorrect into dissolution; projection accounts identify a real cognitive mechanism while missing the underlying encounter; Nietzsche and the new atheists rightly bury the personified agent while leaving the encounter the agent was a personification of; Hick's pluralism converts cleanly to structural footing once the Kantian veil drops; and perennialism's common core is structurally derivable.

A last projection points forward rather than back. Beside the excess personified into a *someone* and externalized into a *beyond*, the tradition projected an *outcome*, the blessed final state: security without threat, life without suffering, care without limit, union without division, set after the world and above it. That registers something real in the wrong place: the drive's own asymptote, the limit the reach already moves toward whenever it acts to secure and widen the life it has. Subtract the supernatural venue and the personal dispenser, and what the heaven-image pictured turns out to be not a final state to be reached but a living standing to be held: the widest field of live possibility a shared structure keeps open under necessities met, achieved and maintained from within rather than awaited from beyond. The inversion's last turn is political, and Chapter 9 takes up what mortal, mutually-exposed, language-bearing, art-making, spiritually-reaching subjects do when they live and build together.


---

← [8.14.4 What is Confirmed](<8.14.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.15 Synthesis](<8.15 Synthesis.md>) →
