[spiritual_emergency]

<blockquote>The nature of schizophrenia, and other forms of psychosis, is still under debate and a significant issue is the relationship between psychosis and the mystical, or religious, experience. Throughout history this question has been addressed by scholars from all fields of inquiry. Currently, psychologists are looking at the similarities and differences between the experiences, hoping to shed light on the nature, process, and treatment of psychosis. I was curious to see what has been discovered.

The information available on mystical experience and psychotic episodes seems limitless. This paper will focus on the current psychological perspective which examines mystical and psychotic experiences as a natural, universal phenomena. This is not a new idea; however, specific to recent research is its objective, systematic nature. Looking to define both in value-neutral, experiential terms, psychologists are scrutinizing the biological, psychological, and behavioral correlates of the two experiences, combining information from ongoing measurement and personal interviews and the body of knowledge available from philosophy and the study of religion.

In order to discover the relationship between mystical experience and psychosis, analysis must first be directed at defining each individually. Therefore I present not only a review of the current psychological research regarding this relationship, but also a look at theories addressing the questions "what is a mystical experience?" and "what is psychosis?"

DEFINING MYSTICISM:
One topic scholars agree on is the need for a formal definition of mystical experience; they intend to determine the characteristics common to all descriptions of mystical experience, and have this be a "working definition" for present research. In this manner, studies can be related simply and without confusion of terms. Authors of the material I reviewed began discussion with their definition of mystical experience; the following characteristics emerged repeatedly as each author attempts to define mystical experience: experience of unity, intense affective experience, time/space distortion, noetic quality, ineffability, and a sense of holiness or sacredness. In addition, the authors generally included the concept of universality in their definitions. There are aspects of the definition which scholars are not able to agree on; however, the recent development of tools of measurement (e.g. scales, questionnaires) may be able to provide information to help answer such questions.

During the early 1900's, William James wrote about the idea of a spectrum - or continuum - of mystical states of consciousness ranging from the non-religious to the most religiously profound (James, 1985). Beginning with the "simplest" sort of mystical experience, James notes the strong sense of significance and knowledge associated with the experience, its "noetic" quality. It is one of four qualities that James uses to define mystical states of consciousness. "Ineffable" is another characteristic which marks an experience as mystical; the experience defies expression. Due to its subjective nature, the experience is much like states of feeling. James asserts that these two qualities "entitle any state to be called mystical" (p.302). However, there are other qualities usually associated with the experience. He explains that the experiences are generally transient. Fading quickly, it is hard to recall the quality of the experience in memory; they remain just out of reach. But, some memory content always remains, and this can be used to "modify the inner life of the subject between the time of their recurrence" (p.303). When having a mystical experience, however, individuals do not seem to actively process the information. Instead it is a passive experience - James' fourth characteristic mark. Even though people actively study and/or practice techniques to produce mystical states of consciousness, once occurring, the experience seems to happen without their will.

Later, James goes on to suggest that these experiences occur as our "field of consciousness" increases (James, 1980). One can assert these "simple" experiences connote a slight widening of this field, whereas the more profound experiences come when consciousness expands to include items usually filtered, hidden, or just out of reach. Such could include memories and sensations. As awareness increases to include more external and internal information, a sense of self, a boundary between self and environment, expands, seems to dissipate. The experience is one of unity with information formerly defined as non-self. This expansion of the self, often referred to as loss of self, may not be beneficial for someone who does not have a "strong" sense of self to begin with. To these people, a mystical experience can be frightening and confusing, to say the least.

In his earlier writings, James refers to "diabolic" mysticism (p.337). Half of mysticism, he explains, is not a religious mysticism, but cases where "mystical ideas" are seen as symptoms of insanity. He refers to these as "lower mysticisms," springing forth from the same psychological mechanisms as the classic, religious sort. However, the messages and emotions are experienced as negative. This idea does not combine well with his proposed spectrum of mystical states of consciousness, where simple experiences are also referred to as non-religious, but are not accompanied by negative affect. James reconciles the difference, and concludes that the definition of mystical states must be value-neutral. All mystical experience, he writes, whether experienced as positive or negative, deserves recognition as available states of consciousness. He ends debate over which is a superior form of consciousness; instead he suggests that, like our rational states, mystical states encompass both truth and deception, pleasure and pain.

Read more here: The Relationship Between Schizophrenia & Mysticism

See also: Commentary: Schizophrenia & Mysticism</blockquote>

[spiritual_emergency]

<font size=3>Into the Mystic</font>
Bruce Bower

After spending 8 years training in the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism, neurologist James H. Austin spent a sabbatical year from 1981 to 1982 at the London Zen Center. On a pleasant March morning, while waiting for a subway train on a surface platform and idly glancing down the tracks toward the Thames River, Austin got his first taste of spiritual enlightenment.

Instantly, the panorama of sky, buildings, and water acquired a sense of what he calls "absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection." He suddenly shed his formerly unshakable assumption that he was an individual, separated from the rest of the world by a skin suit. The sky and river remained just as blue, the buildings just as gray and dingy, yet the loss of an "I-me-mine" perspective imbued the view with an extraordinary emptiness, he says.

Within seconds, other insights dawned. These included the notion that Austin had experienced an eternal state of affairs, had nothing more to fear, couldn't possibly articulate what had happened, and felt a rush of mental release that impelled him to take himself less seriously.

In Zen and the Brain (1998, MIT Press), Austin described how this brief experience spurred him to investigate brain processes that underlie spiritual or mystical encounters.

Austin's fellow neurologists haven't taken his approach either to heart or to brain. The harsh reality of science is that those who study mysticism and meditation rarely hear the sound of even one hand clapping among their colleagues, to paraphrase a Zen saying.

Austin's Zen instructor told him that although many people attain what she called "moments of no-I," such experiences seem incomprehensible to those who haven't had them. For scientists, creatures of the rational thinking embraced by the 17th-century Enlightenment, claims of mystical enlightenment have long smacked of self-deception, gullibility, mental disorder, charlatanism, or all of the above.

However, a small band of researchers has begun to probe the nature of mystical experiences and other extraordinary psychological happenings. They've issued a manifesto of sorts in Varieties of Anomalous Experience (2000, American Psychological Association). The book explores scientific evidence on altered states of consciousness associated with mystical experiences, near-death incidents, alien-abduction reports, and other so-called anomalous events.

... the three academics want to launch a science to study the characteristics of human consciousness that make mystical experience possible. Their focus on a spectrum of conscious states defies the mainstream-neuroscience notion that there's a single type of awareness, which is either on or off, as if controlled by a light switch. Conscious experience instead comes with a dimmer switch that varies in sweep and intensity from one person to another and gets wired up mainly by cultural forces, in their view.

Mystical experiences
Although mystical experiences can't easily be diced up and quantified, they affect a surprisingly large number of people. National surveys in the United States and England find that roughly one-third of adults say that they've had, for example, a moment of sudden religious awakening or felt close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift them out of themselves.

Such experiences may extend far back into human prehistory. According to archaeologists, cave and rock art from Africa to Australia depicts shamans' supernatural encounters, which occurred during conscious states achieved through chanting, dancing, hallucinogenic drugs, or other means (SN: 10/5/96, p. 216). In traditional societies, shamans act as spiritual leaders and healers.

"Mystical experiences occur on a continuum," says psychologist David M. Wulff of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. "Even if they're not religiously inspired, they can be striking, such as the transcendent feelings musicians sometimes get while they perform. I have colleagues who say they've had mystical experiences, although they have various ways of explaining them."

In Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Wulff reviews current scientific evidence and theories about mystical experience. He defines such events as those that deviate sharply from a person's ordinary state of awareness and leave the person with an impression of having encountered a higher reality. Mystical encounters are rare and fleeting, yet they stand out as defining moments in the lives of those who have them, Wulff says.

They can include a sense of existing in a unitary place outside of space and time or feeling immersed in a kind of objective or ultimate reality that eludes verbal description. For many people having mystical experiences, physical objects recede from view in the wake of feelings of peace, joy, and having encountered the sacred or divine, Wulff reports.

[...]

In the past 20 years, investigations of epilepsy patients have linked reports of mystical and paranormal experience and religious preoccupation to bursts of electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobes. A novel written by Mark Salzman, Lying Awake (2000, Knopf), revolves around a nun who fears that medical treatment for her temporal lobe epilepsy will also wipe out her vivid religious visions.

In How We Believe (2000, W.H. Freeman and Co.), Michael Shermer of Occidental College in Los Angeles speculates that many religious visionaries and founders of major religions may have had temporal-lobe seizures that jump-started their mystical journeys.

Whatever happened inside the skulls of the ancient mystics, most people today who report mystical and so-called peak experiences don't have brain or mental ailments, Austin says.

Some people consider the hallucinations and altered thinking of schizophrenia as akin to mystical visions. But this mental disorder exhibits only a superficial similarity to mystical experiences, Austin contends. ...

Neither schizophrenia nor mystical experience has been comprehensively explained, Wulff maintains, although theories abound. Sigmund Freud viewed mystical reports as a sign of a person's regression to an earlier stage of development. Freud's psychoanalytic disciple Carl Jung described mystical experience as a positive process springing from a shared, unconscious reservoir of human experiences and themes.

In the 1960s, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of "self-actualization" that was topped off by having peak experiences of ecstatic fusion with the world. Lower in the hierarchy are experiences that psychologists now refer to as "flow" and attribute to creativity.

[...]

Dismissing the mystical
Cognitive and brain scientists appear more inclined to dismiss the mystical realm than to study it. "There's nothing in our conception of what a human is that allows this stuff to fit in," comments psychologist Eleanor Rosch of the University of California, Berkeley.

Austin suspects that a better understanding of brain areas that contribute to the individual notion of self will lead to insights about spiritual enlightenment. Parts of the cortex and the inner brain, including the thalamus and the amygdala, work together to generate each person's sense of "I-me-mine," he theorizes. During mystical or spiritual episodes, transmission of chemical messengers, including consciousness-altering opioids, within this brain system might undergo dramatic changes.

[...]

Still, even far less provocative approaches to mystical experience draw blank stares from many scientists, Wulff notes. "I don't think this is likely to become a popular area of research," he says.

Seeds of mystical research, however, may flower as researchers increasingly turn to examine positive aspects of mental life, such as the nature of happiness, Cardeña remarks.

"Psychologists haven't really entered into the study of mystical experience, but they're parked just outside the door," he says.

Source: Into the Mystic

[jefftele]

my reply is nowhere as detailed as the previous i tend to remember the the quote 'the mystic and the madman are swimming in the same sea its the mystic who can came back at will. 'i suffere chronic depression with bouts of severe episodes on top i have also heard voices been deluded and dissociative states whilst severely depressed i have also many years of practicing meditation zen and other forms.i have never had an enlightenment experience ,-states of calm and peace along with turmoil ,i now no longer do it but i may do so in the future.I know many people who practise meditation who to my observation appear to be slightly off the wall. i know one person who has done zen for many years who i would now say has episodic psychotic episodes ,would he have had them with or without zen thats impossible to answer,it strikes me that vulnerable people who are seeking when doing meditation can allow unconcious material through and disturb their mental states i imagine these people need people who have learnt from these experiences and come out the other side to guide them along the road .there is a line of thought also that people can become possessed by both good and bad entities whilst in altered states -not sure about that but who knows?

[(JD)]

I sure hope you don't think I'm slightly off the wall... nor any of the professionals I know who use meditation to calm themselves after a busy clinic day.

TC