Three suicidal adolescents suffering from schizophrenic reactions developed the ability to conjure up a mystical consciousness. Directly experiencing this "oceanic" state (or just its memory) provided the patients with a reliably soothing safeguard against their overwhelming loneliness and possible suicide. Recognition by the psychiatrist of the mystical state as a transitional phenomenon...
Maslow has presented two differing views related to the effects of peak experiences. He first stated that they inevitably had lasting effects but later maintained that peaks may produce no positive benefits beyond the transitory effects of pleasure during the experience itself. From a sample of 83 peaks submitted by 78 college students, 55% of the protocols seemed to record no lasting effects,...
This Spring I received a long distance telephone call from Dean Samuel Miller, who invited me to give this year's Ingersoll Lecture on human immortality. Three days later, Dean Miller was dead. When I heard the sad news, I, as many of you no doubt, began to think about the way he had influenced me, especially during my theological training here at Harvard Divinity School. One of my most vivid...
Summary Professor R. C. Zaehner's distinction between panenhenic, monistic and theistic mysticism will be examined. It will be argued that there is no necessary reason to suppose that the latter two types involve different sorts of experience: the difference lies rather in the way the experience is interpreted. Likewise it will be argued that the Theravādin experience of nirvana, which is...
Whitman's “Song of Myself” has long been considered a loosely organized, perhaps even chaotic poem which is held together, if at all, by his own robust personality. He himself may have contributed to this concept of the poem. Untitled when it appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, it was called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in the 1856 edition; “Walt Whitman” in the...
First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather...
The study examined whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can non-pharmacologically induce psychedelic-like altered states and what predicts their intensity. Fifty-seven adults who had used classic psychedelic within the previous six months completed neutraland psychedelic VR conditions in randomized order. Relative to neutral VR, psychedelic VR elicited higher mystical-type experience...
This work is an exploration into the world of mysticism and mystical experiences. Many of our religious traditions encounter the subject of mystical experiences, but are there certain underlying features that string them together? Using texts by authors who have had mystical experiences or describe them, this work is an investigation as to whether such experiences have similar elements.
Using a validated and quantitative measure of mystical experience called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30), we assessed whether and to what extent participants report mystical experiences during orgasmic meditation (OM), and to what extent that experience is correlated between the partners. In the first half of this study, we asked participants to complete the MEQ30 with a single...
Psychedelics, contemplative practice, and fasting are physiologically unrelated interventions that nevertheless converge, across cultures and centuries, on a common experiential endpoint: the mystical state. Here I propose that this convergence reflects shared disruption of a single computational architecture, the precision-weighted predictive hierarchy, through three mechanistically distinct...