This article explores how the understanding of human perception and specifically its ability to grasp the numinous has developed in the West since seventeen-seventy, and how it has increasingly related to the experiential Vedantic tradition of India. Beginning with the thought of David Hume, the first person in modern times to insist on the exclusive primacy of experience as a basis for valid perception and knowledge, I touch on the thought and discoveries of savants who built on that presupposition. I conceive of four historical groups in the West, each of which contains: A primary theoretician. A savant who applied the theory to practical situations. A savant who worked on an interface with other disciplines. A mystic who added new dimensions to the whole discussion. The overall findings of each of these four groups are then compared with the discoveries and teachings of a contemporary sage in the Vedanta tradition. In the West these figures are distinguished by their qualifications in Western science, including psychology and philosophy. In India, the selected figures are recognized as masters of experiential religion and its traditional framework of explanation extant in India. My thesis is that what Western savants arrived at as a group is mirrored and complemented in the more holistic thinking of the great Indian spiritual figures who were their contemporaries. I show how India has contributed to the Wests ongoing development in the world of spiritual perception and experience, particularly in more recent history.