In my view, the spontaneity beyond reason that the mystics endorse is best defined in terms of systemic harmony or integration at various levels (neural, biological, social), and the work of Dan Siegel provides useful concepts for outlining how this harmony can be measured. According to Siegel, the mind has nine different parameters pertaining to integration: consciousness, vertical coherence (between the reptilian brain and the cortex), bilateral coherence (between the two lobes), memory (between representational and non-representational memory traces), autobiographical narrative, state (a higher impersonal awareness of the different states of consciousness one typically passes between and an awareness of their ipseity), interpersonal resonance, temporal coherence, transpirational resonance (attention to the outside, missions, quests, the flow of God’s will). What these all share in common is that each, at a different level, involves productive, transformative communication between clearly differentiated elements - whether at the level of cognition, the brain, phenomenal consciousness, or society. The result of a given mind existing at a high level on each of these parameters (this is again Siegel’s formulation) is an optimal mode of functioning involving flexibility, adaptation, coherence, cohesion, energy and stability (FACES), a healthy pattern of development and learning that can be modeled mathematically. There is thus some kind of metaphysical principle at play involving sharply differentiated elements (as opposed to a sort of vague quasi-differentiation) that resound in a circuit which, by its very function of putting them in conversation, sustains their differentiation. This pattern of functioning is simultaneously static and directional: learning, creation and an increase in integration are inevitable if a steady state of integration is maintained. This is practical reason at its finest - and out to be considered thoroughly before any thought is given to the acquisition of scientific knowledge, artistic creation or politics.