Hi Chris. Thank you so much for the encouraging commentary, honestly, before reading it, I was considering of taking this piece down from Medium. I am a lot of things, but the last thing I want to be is a "Content Writer", which perhaps does send mixed signals since I am, after all, posting on the most generic market-driven and superficial platform in the world. What can I say? I wanted to test the waters.

Now, to the point: You want to draw a line and to separate Institutionalized religion from Mysticism. No problem there, but Foucault is a Nietzschean. And what does that imply? Well, it implies a move beyond not just Christianity, but any type of transcendent reality. Why? Because mysticism (most of the time) implies political impotence. An escape from the particular struggles of every-day life and/or a privileged seclusion. I would suggest keeping an eye out for the "Later Foucault" who many have said, is in fact a "Foucault of Transcendence", but in a hidden form. That being said, I don't think Foucault would abhor all kinds of mysticism. But he would find typical asceticism (self-deprivation) to be a mode of docility. And yes, organized transgression is a sine qua non of corporate governance and we must see through it. Foucault does not have a prescribed method nor a particular framework, as per, being post-modern. So I would say, the power-matrix does not attempt to get rid of the mystical, unless the mystical is of a particularly Christian nature. If we imagine a political mystic, who transcends at the moment of struggle, while dismantling an unjust institution or fighting for the recognition of disadvantaged minority groups, (as opposed to tripping on his couch all day) we could advocate for a mysticism of a Foucaultian kind. The basic premise would be, it does not essentially matter, whether you want to believe in "the beyond" or not, as long as you are ready to (also) engage in a battle to defend it. So that you're mysticism is not institutional in itself (like Husserlian phenomenology). You also mention, that "each mystic reaches their mystical experience via their contemporaneous religion" - I do not think that is true at all. Many have found their path to transcendence precisely as a reaction to or in opposition to the established religion(s). And finally, Foucault himself experimented a lot with drugs and he was always very critical of science as an establishment. I think he and Huxley would have more in common than you think. There's a lot more you touched upon and a lot more I want to say here, but this is already a lot to take in I think, so feel free to ask more questions and I'll be glad to clarify further.