This s tudy examines the incidence of reports of psychic phenomena and associated beliefs both before and after the near -dea th experience (NDE). The near -dea th exper iencers in terv iewed repor ted no more psychic phenomena before the NDE than the genera l populat ion. There was a stat ist ica l ly s ignif icant increase following the NDE in the incidence of 14 of 15 i tems examined. The...
This article reviews the role of psychedelic drugs as potential tools for psychiatric research and practice. The decline in the utilization of these substances is linked to social reactions, which led to psychedelics being scheduled as controlled substances and consequently unavailable for human research. Three different paradigms for the use of psychedelics in psychiatry are reviewed: the...
Like the teaching stories of many other religions-the parables of Jesus, Zen koans, Hasidic tales-the stories of the Sufis, or Islamic mystics, offer important insights into the nature of religious experience and emotional well-being. This paper discusses the comments of selected Sufi tales on the basic structure of situations, non-rational or lateral problem-solving techniques, the process of...
At the end of this volume, it is time to assess the cumulative implications of the assembled evidence. What has been learned about flow in the 10 or so years since the model was first presented? The main conclusions, derived from a variety of different studies, seem rather robust. In the first place, it is clear that the flow experience is recognized as a phenomenological reality by people of...
To compare the subjective experience of different forms of altered states of consciousness, computerized content analysis was applied to 66 autobiographical accounts of schizophrenia, hallucinogenic drug states, or mystical ecstasy and to 28 autobiographical control accounts of important personal experiences. The patterns of lexical choice used by the four groups were significantly different in...
Comparatively stronger attention was given by Maslow (3) to his notion of the peak experience than to his concept of the nadir experience (defined as the most important negative happening in one's life). This tendency still is dominant in humanistic literature (5). One method of determining the apppropriateness of this almost exclusive emphasis on peaks to the exclusion of nadirs could be to...
Psychedelics are unique from other drugs in that the experiences they make available often demand an ethic of living. Ethics of a spiritual, therapeutic, or exploratory quality develop spontaneously because of the transcendental nature of the experience. Contemporary psychedelic drug taking went through a cycle which peaked in 1972 and declined about 1979. A slow resurgence of interest is...
A case history is presented of a 70 year old man treated with psychedelic psychotherapy for depression, anxiety, and pain associated with terminal cancer. Interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of treatment following a single 90 mg dose of dipropyltryptamine (DPT) are described. Comparisons are made between transpersonal, mystical, and religious elements in psychedelic drug experiences and...
One hundred and fifteen subjects completed Hood's M scale, a measure of reported mystical experience, and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, which measures introversion/extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism, and a lie score. No significant correlations were found between mysticism and the scales of the EPQ, nor could mysticism be predicted by multiple regression, either by the EPQ scales...
The Experience Questionnaire, a research instrument measuring experiential data, was derived from literature on peak performance and peak experience, with constructs extended to comprise negative extremes of performance and feeling. The efficacy of the Experience Questionnaire is tested by addressing accessibility and salience of experiential data and independence of construct events. Data on...