This psychometric analysis using the PES100 examined 816 measurements from healthy participants (n=386) across 15 controlled psychedelic studies of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT. It found that mystical oneness was strongly linked to feelings of luminous light and renewal, and moderately to strongly linked to ego disintegration, with these links increasing with dose.
Mystical dynamics—the notion that mystical oneness may unfold involving ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light—has been discussed anecdotally by psychedelic researchers and therapists but has not yet been empirically examined in controlled settings. This study investigated the occurrence and dose-dependency of mystical dynamics in healthy participants after administration of psychedelics. A total of 816 mystical-dynamics measurements were collected from 386 participants across 15 studies at two sites: University Hospital Basel (Switzerland) and Johns Hopkins University (USA). Participants received low to high doses of four serotonergic psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. Mystical dynamics was assessed using five corresponding constructs from the Psychedelic Experience Scale (PES100): ego disintegration, distress, renewal, luminous light, and mystical (focusing on mystical oneness, the core of mystical experience). We hypothesized strong intercorrelations of mystical oneness with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light, and a dose-dependent intensity pattern. Results showed dose-sensitive strong correlations of mystical oneness with luminous light and renewal, and a moderate-to-strong correlation of mystical oneness with ego disintegration. These findings support a broader, dynamic model of mystical experience and offer novel insights relevant to psychedelic-assisted therapy, while acknowledging additional experiential features that may also associate with mystical oneness.
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Aday, J. S., Heifets, B. D., Pratscher, S. D. et al. · Psychopharmacology (2021)
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Becker, A. M., Klaiber, A., Holze, F. et al. · International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology (2022)
Psychedelic research has documented mystical-type experiences fairly well, particularly experiences of oneness, but the authors note that a broader experiential pattern they call mystical dynamics has mostly been described anecdotally. This pattern refers to mystical oneness unfolding alongside experiences of ego disintegration, renewal or rebirth, and luminous light. The paper also situates this idea within long-standing scholarly and clinical descriptions of psychedelic “death-rebirth” experiences, while noting that the core mystical construct used in psychedelic psychometrics has been criticised on conceptual and cultural grounds. Stocker and colleagues set out to test whether mystical oneness is empirically associated with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light in controlled psychedelic studies. They also aimed to examine whether these experiences show dose-dependent changes across low, moderate, and high psychedelic doses, and whether distress is related to these constructs. The study uses the Psychedelic Experience Scale 100 (PES100) in pooled healthy-volunteer data from placebo-controlled and other controlled studies at two research sites. The work is presented as an exploratory psychometric analysis intended to refine how psychedelic experiences are measured, and to assess whether mystical dynamics may be a meaningful structure relevant to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
The researchers conducted a pooled analysis of controlled psychedelic studies in healthy participants. The analysis was not preregistered. Data came from 15 studies carried out at two sites: University Hospital Basel in Switzerland and Johns Hopkins University in the USA. In total, 816 PES measurements from 386 participants were included. The sample had a mean age of 35.5 years, ranged from 22 to 69 years, and included 211 females. Participants received low, moderate, or high doses of serotonergic psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. The authors excluded very low-dose data and data from sessions in which the psychedelics were co-administered with ketanserin, escitalopram, or MDMA. They focused on healthy volunteers rather than clinical populations. Mystical dynamics was assessed using the PES100, also referred to as the States of Consciousness Questionnaire. For this paper, the authors treated six items as indicators of three theoretically defined constructs not previously established as formal subscales: ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. They also analysed the validated PES subscales mystical and distressing experience, with the latter abbreviated to distress. The mystical subscale captures mystical oneness, while distress includes fear, suffering, isolation/loneliness, despair, and feeling trapped or helpless. The analysis proceeded in several steps. First, the authors calculated item statistics and zero-order correlations for the items representing ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. Second, they examined Spearman correlations among mystical, distress, ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal. Third, they estimated a sparse partial-correlation network using the EBICglasso method to examine unique relationships between constructs while controlling for the others. Fourth, they compared relevant correlations using Steiger’s Z-test for dependent, overlapping correlations. Finally, they assessed dose effects for each construct using Kruskal–Wallis tests because normality and variance homogeneity assumptions were violated. Analyses were conducted in JASP and R.
Across the six PES items used to represent ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light, all zero-order correlations were significant at p < .001, and item skewness values were acceptable despite right skew. For the main construct-level analyses, all correlations among mystical, distress, ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal were also significant at p < .001. Mystical experience was most strongly associated with renewal (Spearman’s rho = .66) and luminous light (rho = .57), followed by ego disintegration (rho = .45) and distress (rho = .23). Ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal were moderately to strongly intercorrelated, with correlations between .33 and .50. Distress was strongly associated with ego disintegration (rho = .59). The authors’ additional comparison showed that ego disintegration was more strongly related than distress to renewal (Steiger’s Z = 7.16, p < .001), luminous light (Z = 4.67, p < .001), and mystical oneness (Z = 7.45, p < .001). In the partial-correlation network, the simple bivariate association between mystical and distress was no longer present and may have trended negative after controlling for other variables. Ego disintegration remained positively linked with mystical, renewal, luminous light, and distress. The authors interpret this as suggesting that the ego-disintegration component may sit closer to the centre of the broader mystical-dynamics pattern. Dose effects were significant for every construct. For mystical, distress, ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal, Kruskal–Wallis tests all showed p < .001, with small effect sizes (epsilon-squared values from .06 to .09). Pairwise comparisons indicated that low, moderate, and high dose groups differed significantly from one another for each construct. In all cases, the strongest expression occurred at high dose, the weakest at low dose, and moderate doses were intermediate.
Stocker and colleagues argue that the main finding is support for their hypothesis that mystical oneness is closely associated with renewal and luminous light, and moderately to strongly associated with ego disintegration. They also emphasise that mystical-oneness and distress both increased with dose, but that the relationship between mystical and distress disappeared in the partial-correlation network, implying that the simple association may be explained by shared variance with other experiences. By contrast, ego disintegration remained connected to both distress and the mystical/rebirth/light cluster, which the authors suggest may reflect a transitional experience that can be meaningfully integrated into mystical oneness or even facilitate it. The authors relate these results to earlier clinical and phenomenological accounts of psychedelic death-rebirth experiences, including descriptions by Grof, Halifax, and Richards. They present the data as empirical support for those observations and as a synthesis within a broader “mystical dynamics” framework. They also note that the pattern appears more likely at higher psychedelic doses, and they suggest this may matter for preparation, dosing, and integration in psychedelic-assisted therapy. The paper discusses several limitations. First, the study relied on PES100 items that were not originally designed to measure mystical dynamics, so ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light were only approximated. The authors note that their ego-disintegration coverage was incomplete, renewal was represented mainly by “feeling of being reborn”, and luminous light was limited to white and golden light, potentially missing other experiences and colours. Second, some items may capture a wider range of experiences than intended. Third, the study pooled four psychedelics with different pharmacokinetic profiles, so substance-specific differences in mystical dynamics could not be examined directly. They also mention broader conceptual concerns about measuring mystical consciousness psychometrically, and they suggest future work should refine the items and test validity more directly, including via response-process methods. Overall, they present their measure as a useful interim proxy until better tools are developed.
Corresponding PES item "death"70. Profound experience of your own death. "feeling that one is 'going crazy'"85. Fear that you might lose your mind or go insane. "'melting' or 'dissolving'"84. Feeling of disintegration, falling apart.
Corresponding PES item "followed by visions of blinding white … light"67. Visions of brilliant white light. "followed by visions of blinding … golden light"25. Experience of radiant, golden light.
Corresponding PES item "rebirth"; "subsequent … experiences of being reborn"100. Feeling of being reborn. experience in ways that are philosophically and conceptually more refined, mystical experience as assessed with the MEQ-and as assessed with the MEQ30/40 subscale mystical, which is the only part from the MEQ30/40 used in the current study-continues to function as a valid and informative construct for both clinical and psychometric research in the interim. With the PES100 constructs or subscales ego disintegration, renewal, luminous light, mystical, and distress at hand, we formulated the following main hypothesis on mystical dynamics: a mystical core (oneness) experience is strongly associated with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. Furthermore, since ego disintegration can likely also be a distressing experience, we hypothesized that distress would also be associated with ego disintegration, renewal, luminous light, and mystical. However, given that ego disintegration should be more directly linked to a mystical experience (cf. above), we expect distress to show weaker correlations with renewal, luminous light, and mystical than ego disintegration. Furthermore, a previous LSD dose-range study showed that higher psychedelic doses are associated with more pronounced mystical-oneness as well as distressing experiences. Accordingly, we expected a similar dose-dependent pattern for all our mysticaldynamics constructs (ego disintegration, renewal, luminous light, mystical, as well as distress), with the weakest expression at low doses, the strongest at high doses, and moderate doses falling in between.
The analysis was not preregistered. Overall, 816 PES measurements from 386 healthy participants (mean age = 35.5, ranging from 22 to 69; 211 females) across 15 different studies conducted at two sites-University Hospital Basel (Switzerland; 536 PES measurements from 237 participants) and Johns Hopkins University (USA; 280 PES measurements from 149 participants)-were included in the analysis. We included the use of the PES with the following very high to low psychedelic doses (n refers to PES measurements): high doses (n = 314), moderate doses (n = 401), and low doses (n = 101) (see Table). We did not consider PES data if very low doses (25 µg LSD, 5 and 1 mg psilocybin, 100 mg mescaline) were used, or if the serotonergic psychedelics were coadministered with another drug (ketanserin, escitalopram, or MDMA).
Mystical dynamics was assessed with the Psychedelic Experience Scale 100 (PES100;, also known as the States of Consciousness Questionnaire (SOCQ;. While the PES100 has not been designed to measure mystical dynamics, it includes items that allow for a close approximation of this specific psychedelic experiential complex. Overall, the PES100 consists of two main components: one comprising validated factors and another containing additional psychedelic items that may be useful for further researchor provide valuable insights for clinical interviews. The validated portion of the PES, known as the PES48, includes 48 items. Among them is the 40-item Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ40), which expands upon the MEQ30by incorporating two additional mystical factors: connectedness and paradoxicality. Additionally, the PES48 encompasses two non-mystical factors: visual experience and distressing experience. For the measurement of mystical dynamics, this study used the factors mystical and distressing experience from the PES48, with the latter referred to as "distress" in this article. The remaining 52 items of the PES100 extend beyond the PES48, offering a broader assessment of various psychedelic phenomena. The mystical-dynamics constructs as applied in this paper-ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light (see Tablein the Introduction)-consist of items from this extended section of the PES100.
In a first step, we computed item statistics (M, SD, zero-order correlations, skewness) for the six PES items representing the constructs of ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. As outlined in the Introduction, the selection of these items was theoretically driven; there are no established subscales for them. Given the small number of items per construct, traditional measures of internal consistency, such as Cronbach's alpha, are not meaningful, and the items were therefore treated as theoretically defined indicators. In a second step, we computed statistics (M, SD, zero-order correlations) for mystical, distress, ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal (all sum scores) in order to evaluate our association hypotheses. To gain a more nuanced understanding of how these constructs relate to one another, we additionally employed a network analytic approach. This approach not only identifies unique conditional relationships between constructs but also provides an intuitive visual representation of the overall structure of these interconnections, offering insights beyond traditional correlation analyses. Specifically, we estimated a sparse partial correlation network using the EBICglasso procedure, retaining only the most robust connections. The paths of the network show the unique relationships between the constructs when controlling for all others. In order to assess the additional hypothesis whether the associations between ego disintegration with renewal, luminous light, and mystical are stronger compared to the same three associations with distress, we compared the respective Spearman's rho correlations using Steiger's Z-test for dependent, overlapping correlations, as implemented in the cocor R package. Finally, to examine the effect of dose strength, we run an analysis of variance for each of the five PES constructs. Since normality and variance homogeneity were violated, we used a non-parametric approach employing Kruskal-Wallis test. Descriptive statistics, correlations, network analysis and analysis of variance were performed using JASP. Comparisons between correlations were performed using R (R Core Team, 2024). The R code for this analysis is provided in Supplement 4.
Means, standard deviations (SDs), skewness and zero-order correlations of the six PES items representing ego disintegration, luminous light, and renewal are summarized in Table. All zero-order correlations (Spearman's rho) were significant (all p's < .001). As a measure of distribution asymmetry, skewness indicates right skew (i.e., most scores cluster on the left tail of the distribution), but all skewness values are in the acceptable range of < 2. Means, SDs and zero-order correlations of mystical experience, distress, ego disintegration, luminous light and renewal are reported in Table. All correlations were significant (all p's < .001). Mystical experience was most strongly associated with renewal (spearman's rho = .66) and luminous light (spearman's rho = .57), followed by ego disintegration (spearman's rho = .45) and distress (spearman's rho = .23). Ego disintegration, luminous light and renewal show moderateto-strong associations with each other (spearman's rhos between .33 and .50). Notably, distress was strongly associated with ego disintegration (spearman's rho = .59). A comparison of the correlations (Table) confirmed our additional hypothesis that ego disintegration is more strongly associated than distress with renewal (Steiger's Z = 7.16, p < .001), luminous light (Steiger's Z = 4.67, p < .001), and mystical (Steiger's Z = 7.45, p < .001). In the partial correlation network estimated using the EBICglasso method (Figure), we observe unique relationships between variables while controlling for the influence of all others. Notably, the previously observed correlation between mystical and distress is no longer present and may even trend negative. This suggests that their association in bivariate analyses may be driven by shared relationships with other factors. Ego disintegration shows positive associations not only with mystical, renewal, and luminous light, but also with distress. This pattern might indicate that ego disintegration reflects the component of distressing experiences that can be meaningfully integrated into or transformed within mystical processes. Scores varied as a function of dose, as shown in Figure. The Kruskal-Wallis test confirmed a significant effect of dose for each construct, mystical: χ 2 (2) = 68.21, p < .001, ε 2 = .08; distress: χ 2 (2) = 52.79, p < .001, ε 2 = .07; ego disintegration: χ 2 (2) = 69.17, p < .001, ε 2 = .09; luminous light: χ 2 (2) = 48.47, p < .001, ε 2 = .06; renewal: χ 2 (2) = 53.57, p < .001, ε 2 = .07. Pairwise comparisons confirmed that for each construct all comparisons (low vs. moderate, low vs. high, moderate vs. high) differ significantly from each other (all ps < .05).
The main finding of the present study was that mystical core (oneness) experience shows strong associations with renewal and luminous light, and a moderate-to-strong association with ego disintegration, confirming our primary hypothesis. We also observed a dose-dependent increase in both mystical-oneness and distressing experiences, with the weakest expression at low doses and the strongest at high doses, and moderate doses falling in between, consistent with previous findings of dose-dependency of the acute response to psychedelics. We furthermore observed this dose-relation in the mystical-dynamics constructs of ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. Notably, when examining partial correlations, the association between mystical and distress (fear, suffering, isolation/loneliness, despair, feeling trapped/helpless) disappeared and trended negative, suggesting that their relationship in bivariate analyses may be confounded by shared variance with other constructs. Ego disintegration, in contrast, remained positively associated with both mystical and distress, as well as with renewal and luminous light. This pattern may indicate that ego disintegration captures a specific domain of potentially distressing experiences that is meaningfully integrated into-or might even facilitate-the experience of mystical oneness. This is essentially what Stanislavas well as William Richards (2015, p. 60) have described in their accounts of psychedelic death-rebirth experiences (cf. Introduction). Our findings thus provide empirical support for these clinically grounded observations and synthesize them into the framework of mystical dynamics. Mystical oneness experience may, at times, be accompanied by an experience of ego disintegration or fear thereof, furthermore accompanied by luminous light, a liberating sense of rebirth, and the mystical oneness experience itself. This mystical-dynamics phenomenon appears to occur with some regularity, especially at high doses, and may have relevance for all stages of psychedelic-assisted therapy: preparation, dosing, and integration. represent regularized partial correlations estimated using the EBICglasso method. Because partial correlations control for all other variables in the network, they are typically smaller than the corresponding zero-order (bivariate) correlations. The EBICglasso procedure applies a regularization penalty that shrinks small edge weights toward zero, promoting sparsity and specificity. As a result, absent edges do not necessarily indicate truly zero associations, but rather reflect edge weights that were too small to retain under the chosen penalty parameter. Let us also insert here that while dose strength clearly seems to modulate the intensity and likelihood of the occurrence of mystical dynamics, other factors likely play a crucial role as well. Participant expectations, therapeutic support, and the broader set and setting may not only help individuals manage challenging transitional experiences, but could also influence whether mystical dynamics occurs at all. Strong therapeutic alliances and careful preparation may increase the likelihood that such transitional experiences are encountered with trust rather than resistance, potentially facilitating smoother progressions toward renewal, luminous light and mystical oneness. Future research should further investigate these set-and-setting moderators of mystical dynamics. In accordance with this, during preparation, participants should be informed about the potential for challenging experiences-including ego disintegration-and how to best navigate them should they arise during the session. As Sanford Unger told a patient during preparation for a high-dose LSD session: Therapist: There may be moments when you feel as if your own boundaries are dissolving, as if somehow you are merging into the universe. Patient: Is it like dying? Therapist: This is not like dying, but you may feel, in fact, that "My God, I'm dying" … if you feel this way, die Peg; you are not dying. As a matter of fact, if you feel that you are dying, also know, you'll feel reborn.Figure PES scores as a function of dose strength. Note. For better comparison, means are expressed as percentages of their maximum rather than their absolute sum scores. Thus, during the dosing session, both participants and therapists can be aware of the possible emergence of ego-disintegration experiences-recognizing that a common guiding principle is "the challenge … to trust unconditionally and to simply allow death to occur," or to choose "with the supportive presence of one's guide to let it happen and 'go crazy,'" as such destruction experiences can "rapidly give way to a sense of being 'at home' deep within one's mind". Unger and colleagues cite a report from a long-term patient with multiple psychiatric diagnoses, including, e.g., personality disorder, anxiety, and depression. The patient described her experience during a high-dose LSD session conducted as part of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. Her account exemplifies an acute psychedelic ego disintegration-renewal experience: I was drifting with the music and I had the sense that I was dying. I was at my funeral. I could smell all of the flowers. I cried, but I didn't want to escape from the feeling. I somehow knew that I had to die in order to be born again. The music was stopped and the eyeshades and earphones removed. The colors in the room were vibrating and alive. I talked with the doctor and asked him if I had died. I was still crying. I lay back down and the shades and earphones were put in place. Again, I drifted with the music. Suddenly my body seemed to grow very warm. I felt with every sense of my being that I was in Hell. My body grew warmer and warmer, then suddenly burst into fire. I was afraid; then the doctor took my hand. I lay there and let my body burn up. The fire seemed to cleanse me. Then all sensation seemed to fade and I asked to sit up.During integration, if it is not clear whether only ego disintegration and no renewal has taken place during the dosing session-or if the renewal process is still fragmentary-the renewal part could be further addressed in therapy. We are not aware of any clinical reports of ego-disintegration experiences during a classic-psychedelic experience that did not also involve a renewal process, but such experiences have, for instance, been reported during dissociative (ketamine) experiences. Here is an illustration, drawn from a report of a 43-year-old man with a two-year history of treatment-resistant depression, describing his experience during an S-(+)-ketamine rapid infusion, including additional reporting from the treating psychiatrist: There was a devil and he removed my heart with his own hands; it was terrible." One week after the infusion, he persistently re-experienced recurrent dissociative thoughts and nightmares. Three weeks after the infusion, he was in remission from both depression and dissociation, but still hesitant to mention the … experience. At that time, he asked his psychiatrist: "to get out of limbo, I should go to hell?"Clearly-despite achieving remission from depression after this experience-there is no explicitly identifiable renewal process here, but only one of ego disintegration. Cases like this demonstrate how crucial it is in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to be prepared for nonordinary-consciousness ego-disintegration experiences, whether psychedelically or otherwise induced-also in the integration phase if the experience was not resolved during the nonordinary state of consciousness. In general, visions of ego disintegration (often a bodily disintegration) followed by a sense of renewal have been described-often as single case reports-across a variety of nonordinary states of consciousness. One finds such examples in shamanic initiation, advanced meditation (e.g.,, lucid dreaming, or in a dream series of a terminally ill girl. In these cases, the experience generally appears to indicate the initiation or possibility of a deep psychological renewal process for the better. Furthermore, our findings of the close association between a mystical experience and a luminous light-two experiential components that, in addition to renewal, can also be associated with an egodisintegration experience)-support scholars who have viewed experiencing this light and mystical experience as often deeply interconnected. The sinologist and meditation expert Eduard Erkes, for instance, described this interconnection in advanced meditative states as follows: Finally, the primordial ground, the Tao, appears as the unification of all colors, an indescribable white light, as it also recurs in the visions of the occidental mystics and … indicates that the goal of the immersion, the inner union with the world-ground, has been reached.; own translation from German) Similarly, Jonathan Dinsmore's recent scholarly work on luminous light in nonordinary states of consciousness considers the experience of such light to be (often enough) so intrinsically interwoven with mystical experience that he termed this phenomenon the "mystical luminosity experience" (2024, p. 1). The profound possible impact of experiencing such an extraordinary light is well illustrated by a self-report from the psychedelic research pioneer (and psychiatrist with theological training) Walter Pahnke, who described encountering it during his first LSD session (with his own underlining and capitalization): The most impressive and intense part of this experience was the WHITE LIGHT of absolute purity and cleanness … The associated feelings were those of absolute AWE, REVERENCE, AND SACREDNESS. Just before this experience I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the Self stripped bare of all pretense and falseness. It was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity-something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of supreme importance-absolutely self-validating and something worth staking your life on and putting your trust in.As luminous light and the mystical subscale (which includes items reflecting a sense of sacredness), correlated highly in our investigation, we now have evidence now that the "indescribable white light, as it … recurs in the visions of the … mystics"), also appears in modern-day psychedelic trials. One could argue that the overall spirit of our investigation reflects what has recently been termed mystical exceptionalism-that is, the tendency to treat mystical experience as a privileged explanatory lens when investigating nonordinary states of consciousness (NSCs). Importantly, however, our engagement with mystical experience is not intended to defend its ontological primacy, nor to suggest that it exhausts or normatively outranks other forms of nonordinary experience. Rather, our focus on mystical oneness reflects a specific analytical choice: to examine whether certain experiential features repeatedly described in clinical and therapeutic contexts as relating to mystical oneness-namely ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light (e.g.,)-show particularly strong empirical associations with mystical oneness under psychedelic conditions. From the perspective of mystical exceptionalism, one might object that the features we examine might just as well correlate with other nonordinary phenomena beyond mystical unity. Cavallarin, drawing on both psychedelic and non-psychedelic literatures, indeed highlights a broad range of experiences that may be phenomenologically adjacent to or intertwined with mystical experience, including for instance eroticism, entity encounters, afterlife contact, geometric visions, out-of-body experiences, encounters with religious figures, and extrasensory phenomena. Notably, items corresponding to these themes just listed are also contained within the PES100. In an additional analysis, we therefore explicitly examined whether these experiences (via the corresponding PES items; see Tablein Supplement 3) show comparable associations with mystical oneness, ego disintegration, renewal, luminous light, and distress. The results indicate a differentiated pattern. Of the experiences highlighted bythat also matched a PES item, only out-of-body experiences showed a strong correlation with mystical oneness, whereas entity encounters and extrasensory experiences showed moderate-tostrong associations. In contrast, luminous light and renewal exhibited consistently strong associations with mystical oneness, while ego disintegration showed a moderate-to-strong association of comparable magnitude to entities and extrasensory phenomena (Table; Tablein Supplement 3). In this sense, our findings do not deny the phenomenological continuity emphasized by, but suggest that certain experiential features-particularly renewal and luminous light-occupy a more central position within the specific configuration we describe as mystical dynamics. Considering the strong correlations with mystical oneness observed when including the additional analyses of Supplement 3-namely, renewal, luminous light, and out-of-body experience-it is noteworthy that out-of-body experience is already known to correlate with mystical oneness from another psychometric instrument. For instance, in the recently revised Five/Three-Dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Scale (5D-ASC, 3D-ASCr), the subscale disembodiment (which includes out-of-body experiences) is part of the same higher-order dimension (positive effects, previously termed oceanic boundlessness) as the subscale experience of unity (which includes mystical oneness). In contrast, to our knowledge correlations of renewal and luminous light with mystical oneness have not been demonstrated empirically before, and these strong correlations therefore present novel empirical findings. Turning to the moderate-to-strong correlations with mystical oneness observed when also including the additional analyses in Supplement 3-namely, ego disintegration, entity encounters, and extrasensory-the moderate-to-strong (rather than strong) association between ego disintegration and mystical oneness may reflect the notion that mystical oneness does not necessarily entail a complete loss of personal being. This is for instance also discussed in, and is conceptually worked out with particular clarity in the work of Bede Griffiths (e.g.,. Furthermore, following long-standing distinctions in the scholarly literature, our analyses maintain an analytical differentiation between mystical and visionary experience (e.g.,. Mystical experience is here defined by the transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy, whereas visionary experience-though often experientially adjacent and fluidly interconnected-retains this distinction to some degree. Richards describes this distinction as follows: In scholarly discussions in the psychology of religion, visions or visionary experiences tend to be distinguished from experiences of mystical consciousness, even though they often may seem to occur simultaneously or one may flow into the other. This may seem to be a pedantic attempt to separate two incredibly profound and meaningful types of human experiences, but the distinction can enhance clarity of thought on this terrain at the frontiers of language … mystical consciousness by definition includes unitive consciousness … In it the "subject-object dichotomy" … the experience of feeling separate from what one is perceiving … is transcended or overcome. Visionary experiences … typically occur with the subject-object framework still intact: I am here, looking-even awesomely beholding-something there. I may see it, approach it, tremble before it, and relate to it with love or fear, but I do not fully "enter into it" or "become one with it." Such visionary experiences are often reported just prior to or just after experiences of unitive-mystical consciousness, but there are many instances when they stand on their own as the culmination of a particular journey into alternative realms of awareness.This long-standing differentiation between mystical and visionary experience, which we also adopt in the present paper, is intended as a conceptual distinction rather than an ontological claim about discrete experiential kinds. Within this framework, experiences such as entity encounters are not treated as constitutive elements of mystical dynamics, even though they may occur in close experiential proximity to mystical states, because they imply the experiencer as subject and the entity as object. This interpretation is also consistent with the moderate-to strong (and not strong) association we observed between mystical oneness and visionary entities (Supplement 3). Moreover, it may also help to offer an explanation for the final moderate-to-strong association observed with mystical oneness-namely, that with extrasensory experiences (Supplement 3)-given that in psychedelic experiences extrasensory phenomena (e.g., "telepathic" experiences) are, to our knowledge, most often described as forms of perceived, languageless communication with entities. On a final note, we would like to stress that with our focus on mystical experience in this paper, we are in no way intending to claim that this kind of NSC is somehow superior to other kinds of NSCs. Rather, this focus reflects an analytical choice. In this respect, we share views that, for instance, psychedelically induced autobiographical experiences remain under-represented in psychedelic psychometrics. This paper offers a key strength alongside two important limitations that merit consideration. Its strength lies in providing support for the idea that mystical dynamics can occur during a psychedelic experience-specifically, that mystical experience can be closely intertwined with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous-light experiences, as long proposed by scholars and mystics, but, to our knowledge, not previously demonstrated in controlled trials. A conceptual limitation of our study is that we had to rely on PES100 items not primarily designed to measure mystical dynamics, which presents some conceptual disadvantages in assessing ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light. For ego disintegration we lacked a fully generic item such as "Experienced the disintegration or fragmentation of the self." Instead our PES100 construct only included more specific experiences (death, fear of insanity, feeling of falling apart), which may have excluded other forms of self-disruption, such as the feeling "that one is about to explode into countless fragments". While the item "Feeling of disintegration, falling apart" (PES item 84) partially covers this domain, it does not fully capture the sudden, explosive, and overwhelmingly fragmentary quality some participants may experience. Similarly, renewal was assessed only with the item "Feeling of being reborn," which may have excluded other renewal experiences. Likewise, by inquiring about luminous light only in terms of white and golden colors, we may have missed other color variations of this experience. Jonathan Dinsmore, who has extensively researched light with mystical qualities in nonordinary states of consciousness, including psychedelics, informally notes-based on his general familiarity with the literature, experience reports, and qualitative material-that the most commonly reported colors seem to be, in order: "1. white, 2. golden (often combined with white), 3. blue, 4. multicolored (seemingly prismatic)." 2 Furthermore, some of the items that we used might capture a wider range of experiences than we have intended.were for instance unable to produce consistent interpretations of mystical items relating to unity (akin to items 35 and 77 in the mystical subscale we used; see Supplement 2) and animated life (akin to item 74 in the mystical subscale we used; Supplement 2) across participants in the United States and India. However, participants of Taves et al. were Amazon Mechanical Turk workers being asked about nonordinary lived experiences in general, and it is not clear whether the same ambiguities would persist if only participants were included who retrospectively reported on psychedelic experience. Nevertheless, it might be worthwhile in future studies to test the item validity of the items of our mysticaldynamics construct (Supplement 2) with the qualitative Response Process Evaluation (RPE) method ofto assess whether future item refinement would be warranted. In terms of limitations, it is also important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of substances included in the study. Although all four substances (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT) primarily act via the serotonin 5-hydroxytryptamine-2A (HT 2A ) receptor and share core phenomenological effects, they differ for instance in pharmacokinetics and acute effect duration. It remains possible that mystical dynamics unfold differently depending on the specific substance, a question future studies could address by comparing substance-specific trajectories directly. Despite the lack of a more general items, in addition to the specific items from the PES100 to characterize ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light, our strong correlational results suggest that the measurement of mystical dynamics-as approximated with the constructs of the PES100can serve as a useful proxy until future psychometric tools refine this construct further. A mysticaldynamics scoring key can be found in Supplement 2, and the entire PES100 is freely available (for English and German) as a supplement in. Already, this paper has placed mystical experience within a broader dynamical framework than has previously been considered in psychedelic psychometrics. As such, it provides also valuable insights for all stages of psychedelicassisted therapy-preparation, dosing, and integration. Notes 1. Please note that we adopt here a phenomenological description of a specific psychedelic-experiential complex as outlined by Grof and Halifax, without endorsing their theoretical interpretations of such phenomena-particularly without endorsing their integration of such descriptions into the framework of perinatal matrices. 2. J. Dinsmore, personal communication, November 6, 2024.
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