It is widely held that mystical experiences have certain common qualities, such as ineffability and a sense of connection to a greater being, that point to a perennial philosophy underpinning otherwise diverse religious traditions. Philosopher Steven T. Katz argues that this is too simplistic: a closer look at accounts of mystical experience indicates that they are shaped by their cultural and religious context, as well as the conditions that govern what and how we are able to think.

From the late nineteenth century until the 1980s, the most common, widely accepted interpretation of mystical experience was that the ultimate experience was the same across all ¬religious traditions. William James characterized the mystical experience as transient; as ineffable, or defying expression; as noetic, or imparting a form of knowledge or insight; and as passive, in the sense that the experiencer perceives an absence of his own will, and may also perceive the presence of another, greater will.  James also characterized such experience as creating a feeling of love and bliss.

What gives rise to the different schools of mystical teachings is the fact that the ultimate experience is ineffable, beyond language, and so when the individuals who have had this experience want to describe it and share it with others, they are forced to employ the existing language and metaphysical ideas they knew from their own religious communities, resulting in diverse mystical traditions. This view was endorsed by a long and distinguished line of scholars that includes James, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, Ninian Smart, and more recently, William Wainwright. And it was shared by all those many advocates of the interpretation of mysticism as an undifferentiated philosophia perennis. Here, one thinks of scholars as different as Frithjof Schuon, Sayyed Hossein Nasr, Robert Forman, and most famously, Aldous Huxley.

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