The esoteric/mystical stuff always turned out to be little more than woo. So all the more reason to do "research" in a rigorous way. Individual research ends up little more than making up things. It cannot really be called "research" at all.

The "spiritual experience" is in fact rather common. Nothing esoteric about it, only the wacky explanations of it are. There is a lot of mainstream research about it that "individual researchers" just ignore.