Do psychedelics really produce a mystical experience?
Currently, in the field of psychedelic research, the most popular psychometrically validated instrument is the “Five Dimensions of Altered States of Consciousness Questionnaire” (5D-ASC), closely followed by Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30). The latter is used to analyse the general phenomenon of a mystical experience, what the underlying neural mechanisms of it are, and whether it can predict therapeutic efficacy. But how come so many people describe psychedelic experiences as mystical? Or maybe the question is, who started to use this terminology and why?
What is a mystical experience?
In research we commonly refer to a mystical experience as a transient multi-dimensional state as defined by British philosopher Walter Terence Stace in 1960. These include the experience of profound unity with all that exists, a felt sense of sacredness, a sense of the experience of truth and reality at a fundamental level (also called the noetic quality), deeply felt positive mood, transcendence of time and space (or transiency), and difficulty explaining the experience in words (or ineffability).
His book titled “Mysticism and philosophy” (1960) is the one that most researchers cite today as the origin of the MEQ. It showcases his vast interest for different world religions, metaphysics, and philosophies, as well as ethics and logic. His goal was to find the core characteristics between them such that one could reliably define what a universal mystical experience entails.
Three years after the publication of his book Walter Norman Pahnke, an American minister, physician, and psychiatrist, got inspired by this work. He took it as the basis to develop the first version of the MEQ during his PhD thesis called “Drugs and Mysticism” at Harvard University. Pahnke used it during what is now called the "Good Friday Experiment": an experiment where ten theology students were given 30 mg of psilocybin (which is a high dose) and another ten were given the active placebo Niacin (vitamin B3) in a religious setting (a friday service) to see whether psilocybin could help to produce a genuine religious experience in its participants. The result was clear: nine out of ten students on psilocybin reported a religious experience (unsurprising maybe for theology students). Three to four students even reached what he called a “complete” mystical experience (characterised by at least 60%-70% in the questionnaire), which none of the placebo group students did.
For a long follow up of this experiment, click here.
The validation of the MEQ30
Since research on psychedelics had to stop for around 40 years due to political reasons, a newer version of the MEQ emerged in 2006 revised by Roland R. Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. In his paper, he investigated whether the same 30 mg of psilocybin (per 70 kg of bodyweight) induced a mystical experience in healthy participants with no prior psychedelic experiences. However, given Griffith’s personal interest in meditation, he also added another inclusion criteria that all participants should hold a regular practice in religious or spiritual activities (such as mediation, prayer, or a religious choir). The outcome was very positive: 61% of the participants fulfilled Pahnke’s criteria for having the “complete” mystical experience, which was even higher than in the Good Friday Experiment.
Today it is often being considered as the starting point of the exponential growth of research into this unified psychedelic-induced mystical experience. Many other research groups also started to experiment with clinical populations, such as people with various types of addictions or depression. Most of these studies found indeed that the “complete mystical experience” could reliably predict treatment success (for more details, see this meta-analysis).
However, knowing now the MEQ30’s origin history, I asked myself:
If this questionnaire was validated on people who already had an ongoing spiritual interest and practice, then this questionnaire’s language must be adapted to them. However, people from clinical trials surely are not all spiritually active so perhaps they wouldn’t entirely understand the mystical terminology?
Furthermore, what would be the outcome for people who have no spiritual practice in their daily life? Would then the occurrence of the mystical experience be less present? As a consequence, would there be less association between the mystical experience and the improvement of mental health symptoms?
So I checked out the 30 items of this questionnaire.
MEQ30 items
Picture taken from this paper
We can see that the definition of the “mystical experience” is reduced from the previously mentioned six dimensions to four. The first one is called mystical and mostly includes feelings like “all is one”, “ultimate reality”, “eternity”, “freedom”, “fusion”, and “reverence”. The second dimension positive mood describes “amazement”, “tranquillity”, “ecstasy”, “joy”, and “awesomeness”. The third dimension space/time consists predominantly of the “loss of a sense of space and time”. And the last dimension ineffability encompasses the feeling that “you actually cannot describe your state in words”.
Looking closely at each item, I am beginning to understand how the authors tried to use universally understandable language, especially in the dimensions 2, 3, and 4. However it does seem that these dimensions are not necessarily describing something “mystical”, but are rather just byproducts of it. It seems to me that these dimensions could stand on their own in most of what people would describe as a pleasurable experience on psychedelics (for example the ones used called “good drug effects” on a visual analogue scale).
On the other hand, the first dimension describes what I (being a white European woman of my time) would associate to some sort of spiritual practice that is known to me, such as the typical “spiritual awakening” that is taught as a christian concept or described in the teachings of famous mystics like Erkhart Tolle. To judge the actual universality of this concept, I would want to conduct research questioning a sufficient number of people from different backgrounds on how much they can understand and relate to it. However I do not see this kind of research being done anywhere right now.
Additionally, from the field work of anthropologist David Dupuis on the socialisation of hallucinations I can derive that the individual experiences on psychedelic drugs can vary drastically between cultures. It comes to no surprise that people who meditate or go to the church regularly and are exposed to spiritual concepts are more prone to experience such things also on psychedelics and will attribute these positively.
So what does the MEQ30 really measure? To me it seems that it accurately measures whether a person who is already interested in spirituality will be positively affected by spiritual concepts during psychedelic trips. Now, it is true that spiritual practices have had a positive impact on us humans providing us with comfort, a sense of meaning, understanding and hope, but on the other side they also lead to devastating consequences ranging from outgroup biases to genocide. Some people warn about how our globalised, capitalised, and mediatised society is driving us more and more into a spiritual crisis or meaning crisis, to which spiritual practices offer an alternative and often healing. A first review on the therapeutic efficacy of the mystical experience on psychedelics shows these good outcomes as well.
Buddhist practice teaches us that everything is transient (which I do find very comforting), so I am curious to find out how this field will evolve in future. In the name of Rick Doblin’s “political science”, I see the good intentions behind this way of research. And as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote:
“Gesetzt, dass nichts Anderes als real "gegeben" ist als unsere Welt der Begierden und Leidenschaften, dass wir zur keine anderen "Realität" hinab oder hinauf können als gerade zur Realität unserer Triebe - denn Denken ist nur ein Verhalten dieser Triebe zu einander.”
(engl.: “Assuming that nothing else is "given" as real than our world of desires and passions, that we cannot go down or up to any other "reality" than just to the reality of our drives - because thinking is only a behaviour of these drives to each other.”)
