In the sake of brevity, I will quickly go down the list as best as I can, so forgive my reiteration of what you wrote... But first, I want to state, or restate, that an experience is ephemeral and is not what I am talking about. A person may call an out of body experience mystical, but it still involves the sense of self. What I am talking about is when the self is gone and all there is is the observation of what is devoid of thought, memory, movement, ideas, feelings, intellectualizing, etc.

Yes, the mystical experience is potentially misleading, but this must be placed into context of what we mean by mystical experience, as previously discussed.

To your statement, "When you’re having the sense that you’re the divine subject of all experience..." my immediate response is that there is no "you" in the divine, there is only the divine, though I don't like that word.

You said, "While you’re in it, it feels true and profound..." I would say, again, that there is no "you" that is in it. How something feels is not what's important; in fact, it is unimportant, because it's not at all about feeling or assessing, but rather observing what "is."

You wrote: "When you’re having the sense that you’re the divine subject of all experience, you won’t feel the need for philosophical doubts, or you won’t fear such doubts since the answers come in a way that seems to precede logic, intuition, and ordinary perception." There are no answers, only some indescribable "seeing" or observing. There are no answers, only seeing what is.

You wrote: " It’s easy to understand how a peak state of consciousness scrambles normal brain functioning, reducing inhibitions or combining modules that are normally held apart." Yes, I agree, but this has nothing to do with the ineffable, but rather with the world of phenomena, thought, the self, and so on.

You wrote: "There are altered states of synesthesia in which sounds have visual appearances, and sights have sounds or smells. Should those experiences be taken at face value and as revealing the true nature of the world? Or should we apply science to understand what’s happening in the brain?" These examples have to do with conscious experience, not the ineffable. Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, thoughts, etc., are within consciousness as the movement that emanates out of the capacity or void of which I speak. It is this capacity that becomes one's identity instead of the identity that claims possession of feelings, thoughts, etc.

You wrote: "Those metaphors become stretched because the initial presumption that first-order experience suffices for understanding demotes knowledge and sensation. What you’re left with is the structure of consciousness, the essence of qualia, and you’re slapping labels onto it that apply, rather, to the more advanced products of cognition." Yes, again I agree, but this is the problem with thought and language, as I indicated. There is no good way to explain what is unexplainable. Language is a failure, and labels are language. Anything that is described involves cognition, doesn't it?

You wrote: "Qualia, by themselves, entail an ultimate haver of mental contents." Yes, I completely agree. Someone experiences the qualia, which is why using qualia as an analogy is just a poor metaphor or example.

And lastly, you wrote: "That unity appears when you forget about the plurality, and you train yourself to shut down certain mental processes. In that altered state things will seem unified. But that seeming isn’t yet a kind of understanding, knowledge, or perception. That’s the leap I’d dispute, at any rate." I would say that there is no forgetting, no trying (effort), no concentration, no analysis, and no interpretation involved, UNTIL one is trying to explain what cannot be explained. Also, this is not an altered state that I speak of; it is the true state, which means that it is the state that exists when all else is removed — thought, memory, understanding, discussing, intellectualizing, analyzing, thinking, and so on.

If you were to remove everything that is not the endless, limitless, boundless, definable, explainable, verifiable, objectivized stateless state then what would yet exist? For some there is the recognition that what yet remains is something that pre-exists time, movement, consciousness, feelings, qualia, and all the rest. But, again, language is a failure, because even the words exist, pre-exist, state, etc., are only metaphors for what cannot be explained.

The bottom line is that we learn to question things, and people like you are quite adept and finding deeper meaning and nuances to make better sense of our world and experience. This is how my mind was formed as well. Oddly, though, this is perhaps the greatest obstacle to finding, or uncovering, the fundamental "state" that is at the bottom of everything and out of which everything that exists, even in potential, emanates. It is this stateless state that I speak of, so you can perhaps see that I am not referring at all to an experience or a thing.

Much of the confusion lies in what we consider mystical. There is the mystical that has to do with all sorts of perceptions, experiences, and feelings; and then there is the mystical that has to do with nothing at all but a capacity for phenomena, forms, expressions, thought, etc. When the mind is emptied of everything then all that is left is a capacity that is not a "thing" or an experience.