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As Silas understands, the high-five is a euphoric, unitive act, “a gesture we feel in our souls,” as he puts it.

There are very many similar accounts in the modern literature, with similar features described again and again, and a few basic “categories” into which many of the experiences fall, such as contentless pure consciousness, theistic union or encounter, and content-rich unitive experiences of multiplicity, including cosmic consciousness.

More profound is what Richards calls “unitive consciousness” – a mystical state of unity described by visionaries of all religions in which subject and object merge, somewhere beyond space and time.

Richards writes that roughly 75% of volunteers for his studies have reported experiencing unitive consciousness.

Well, in the book, I make the distinction between archetypal or visionary experiences, and then what we call the unitive/mystical consciousness.