Current research on mystical experience in neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary cognitive science has proven that mystical experience has a real and verifiable basis in our biology. Until recently, academic religion scholars tended to side with older schools of science that dismissed mystical consciousness as a merely private experience or as an illusion. Contemplatives had to struggle against strong cultural currents to defend the value of their life-altering experiences and insights. But with the help of recent advances in the biology of meditation, we now know that the recipe for mystical experience has been engraved like a rail upon our brains. It turns out that our brains are genetically coded for transcendence.