Hmmm. What do you mean by transformative—and how do you define a mystical experience?
Which of these would you consider to be transformative?
1. A permanently lasting gnosis that sticks with you for the rest of your life.
2. A temporary gnosis that wears off after a certain length of time.
3. An ah-ha moment, or an ommmm moment, that is transformative because it either upset your certainties and/or allowed you to consider/view your world in a surprising new way—but that has no effect on the way you behave or lead your life.
Which of these experiences would you consider to be mystical (all of these have been reported in mystical literature)?
1. A perception or feeling that one's ego merged with the universe (for at least a limited period of time)
2. A perception or feeling of oneness with the universe, but one's ego remains identifiably separate.
3. A vision of the godhead in whatever form you choose to define the godhead. Note: some Sufi mystics have described it as a blinding sun-like light—and Kabbalahist mystics have perceived Ein Sof in a similar way to the Sufis. Christian mystics have seen God on this throne. Merkava mystics perceived God on a chariot with non-human angelic beings attending him.
4. Perception of the Dharmakāya or Saṃbhogakāya bodies/realms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. This would be similar to #1, except one no longer seems to be in the "real" world.
5. Perception of the Bardo state where one's sense of ego is destroyed and one encounters visions that can be extremely disorienting.
6. Perception or Visions of a Hell-like place.
7. The perception/feeling of being dead and that the universe is a lifeless place (frequently encountered on Salvia trips, but these are also nihilistic states that can be accidentally accessed via meditation).
8. A blissful state that one attains through meditation. This may or may not be equivalent to Zen Satori or the Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment.
9. An encounter with angelic or demonic entities—i.e. any powerful entity that is supernatural but that is less than godhead. This includes encounters with meditation deities.
10. Near-death experiences where one sees the tunnel of light.
And there are all sorts of less powerful "supernatural" experiences that could also be transformative...
11. Out-of-body experiences.
12. Realistic visions of one's ancestors such as Ayahuasca can give you.
13. Active dreaming with a companion dreamer.
14. Encountering a ghost or a poltergeist.
15. Accessing memories from past lives.
16. Precognitive experiences.
17. ESP type of experiences with friends and/or family.
18. Experiences involving psychokinesis.
19. The experience of communicating with animals as if they were talking in your head.
20. Encountering the spirits of a place
21. Communication with plants — especially trees or psychotropic plants. Note: Shamans use this skill to identify plants that are poisonous or psychotropic. Some Dianic traditions communicate with the spirits of the trees.
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
I've had four of the first group "mystical" experiences, and five of the second group of "supernatural" experiences. They were all transformative in that they changed how I thought about the world. The "big" mystical experiences didn't transform the way I lead my life, but they have transformed my enjoyment and appreciation of life.
I would say I was transformed, mostly in a bad way, by graduate school. Transformed in a good way by an Outward Bound course. Transformed in a mixed way by some romantic relationships. Transformed in a strange way by reading Wittgenstein as a college freshman. But a fairer way of describing how these things affected me would be to say they had a big impact. I still think about them a lot. They shaped my thinking in some ways. But calling them transformative seems like overstating it. For one thing, they all went on for months or years. I think of transformation as being much more sudden. If something you do for years changes you, it’s not, I dunno, all that surprising that such a big dose of whatever did that. And none of them transformed me radically. Lots of things about me were completely unchanged by them. How does my use of the word compared to yours?
As for sudden changes: cannabis certainly did that. I in fact felt transformed within a few minutes. Told a friend once that I was “a halo of my former self.” It of course that’s a drug experience. Though I’d say my cannabis experiences taken together were quite a powerful change agent. They walked me through the process of loosening up my mind in a certain way, and now, sober, I’m more able and willing to let my thoughts loosen. My one bonafide mystical experience, which I’ve had many times, is the oceanic feeling. But it doesn’t make much sense to talk about it transforming me, because I’ve had it many times over the years. If it’s had any effect at all in me, it’s not that the experience changes me —
It’s more that knowing that way of seeing life is possible just makes a person a little different. You’re
always looking for people and books who know about it too.
My last transformative experience happened after pretty extreme prolonged physical duress after a very symbolic context. Total eclipse of the sun atop 12000 feet of mountain. Physically after that the visual world presented in much greater detail and vibrancy. More beautiful. Cognitively or whatever, you know, "ineffable". But it was definitely all about a more extensive connection. Also on my way to a new phase in my life.
We started off talking about mystical experiences, without the requirement that they be transformative. And what does transformative really mean anyhow? Almost everything changes us a little, and there are plenty of non-mystical experiences that can change us a lot. Fuckin grad school, for example. Certain books. Love affairs. Grave illnesses.
The sole mystical experience I have had is the oceanic feeling. I’ve gotten
zingers of it all my life. I think it’s a different kind of entity than most of the other stuff you mention. A lot of the things in your list are distinct events, with the subject seeing or hearing a certain kind of thing. The oceanic feeling does not involve events or visions , it’s a certain *feeling*. And it really is a distinct feeling, the way deja vu is. If somebody describes it, it’s recognizable. I think, oh yes they’re talking about *that* feeling.
As for whether it’s transformative — eh, I’m not sure. Once you’ve had the feeling of oneness with all things you don’t forget it after the intense zinger fades. Maybe you always have a tiny version of it going on, maybe 1% of what you feel
when an oceanic wave breaks over you. If it’s transformative at all, it’s a transformation in the direction of seeking more of that feeling. It makes you alert for people or books that mention such things. It makes you want to make art that conveys the feeling. But aside from those things — well, you still put your pants on one leg at a time.
I don’t get why he didn’t just claim that mystical experiences are *possible* with a healthy mind. That seems much more reasonable if I might not believe it personally. (Of course, it’s because it’s twitter, and everything you say has to be provocative and witty.)
I’ve never had a mystical experience, and I’m supposed to believe that therefore I am mentally unhealthy? Ridiculous.
Well, the person said their claim was supposed to be controversial. And they also said that if you aren't regularly experiencing mystical awe and wonder, then something isn't right.
I think a lot about the plausibility of the claim depends on how precisely we understand "mystical" and "numinous" and "indescribably beautiful", and what I put as "awe and wonder". I'm not convinced that the question Scott takes from his survey captures the same thing - it seems to be pushing to something more extreme than what makes the claim plausible.
Same here. Not sure I have ever had what counts as a “mystical” experience but consider myself mentally and physically healthy at age 46. I should acknowledge, I have also never tried hallucinogenic drugs, and I’m sure there is some correlation there! More seriously, I will readily admit to having felt awe when contemplating the universe’s mysteries, stories that connect our current condition to those of fhe very distant past, or gaze at beautiful horizon, but I wouldn’t categorize these reactions as mystical - for instance, I didn’t necessarily feel like I was palpaby in the presence of some otherwordly power or force or that I was erased, and I truly don’’t know what people really mean who claim to have such experiences. Anyway, I am also struck that such a strong connection was claimed here. Why do these experiences have to be “universal” and not just “common”.
Yep completely agreed and I wonder what percent of ACX respondents’ mystical experiences were related to psychedelics. Not that I think decreases the significance of such experiences, just that it seems like an important explanatory variable. I would bet (although not super confident) psychedelic usage is higher for ACX readers then general population...?
The claim in the original tweet isn't an original thought --it's a well circulated belief/value judgement in certain new-age circles. And the meaning is intentional-- that if you aren't experiencing these things there's something wrong (or at least suboptimal) (not saying i agree)
As a person who has one foot in the rational materialist camp and the other foot in the mystical camp, I can't say I've ever heard the belief/value expressed that every normal person should have mystical experiences. In fact, some of the new-agey people I've associated with can be insufferably annoying in their sense of specialness that they've had a shared mystical experience (which most ordinary mortals can't experience). I'll grant you that there are an unlimited supply of "spiritual" self-help books out there and an unlimited supply of "teachers" marketing their wares — but the message implicit in such ploys is mystical experiences do not come naturally, and "take advantage of my limited time half-price offer, and I'll show you how you to can unlock all the secrets of the Universe!" (I can be just as cynical about the rational materialist camps, but I see a lot of spiritual scammers out there.)
I'm sure a small percentage of people do accidentally have mystical experiences. But before the advent of widespread psychedelic drugs, most people had to work at it. Traditionally, esoteric teachings and esotericism have always been directed at a limited audience of people who were willing to undertake the discipline. And even then, few attained anything.
Frankly, I doubt if many ordinary healthy people have ever had a mystical experience. Nor would most of them care to have one (if they even gave it a moment's consideration). And because they're not looking for it, they're unlikely to encounter it. "How about those Packers! Have another Bud Light, dude."
Well, that's forgetting that spiritual health is part of actual health. :P
(I'm joking, but the poster also gets to construct their preferred definition of "healthy". Some versions, like my example, are very clearly circular, but would all versions be explicitly circular?
Also, because the tweeter is using lay-speak, how much wiggle room do they get to say "well, I was speaking loosely, I meant for most psychologically normal humans, I wasn't considering people with x, y, z conditions")
But if I speak loosely, I can speak loosely about a set, and mentally exclude certain subsets. It is not expected that a speaker speak with high precision, if the rest of their language shows low precision.
The challenge is that a speaker, speaking about most humans, could reasonably exclude SSC from the population. Even "fully healthy SSC-ers" are likely unusual people. I am not under an illusion that most of the population wants to convert to the Scott Alexander fandom, and is held back by lack of knowledge.
Mystical is very loosely defined. I once had an out of body experience but I would still have said no. In fact even at the time it felt weird not mystical.
So, if you were primed to think that is a mystical experience, I think the odds would lean towards you considering that a mystical experience. However, you are NOT primed, therefore you do not.
The types of "mystical experiences" people claim to experience are based upon their religious beliefs. Buddhists and Christians are noted for having different types of religious experiences.
(This is why I think "instrumentalizing" this original question is just a humongous pain!! I don't think it's right, but giving clear evidence is hard, especially if both experiencing and NOT experiencing mystical experiences has an element of social construction.)
People have reported accidental mystical experiences.
But there are also practices that, if followed seriously, can lead to what some would call mystical experiences. Likewise, psychedelics can be a shortcut to a mystical experience.
And I agree, that in the majority of cases, one would need to desire a mystical experience to experience a mystical experience. If a person doesn't believe they're possible, they won't go to the trouble of trying to obtain one. Intent probably requires belief.
But let's put it this way. If one has the mental fortitude (and the obsessive concentration) to undertake something as strenuous as the Abramelin ritual—which involves eighteen months of intermittent fastings, a series of ritual purifications, various magical operations, a strict diet, and isolation from family and friends—one is very likely to end up encountering some demonic visitations along the way as well as a final communion with one's guardian angel. Whether any of this is real? Well, it is for the people who've experienced this.
Not disputing that, however, if Nolan Eoghan was inclined to think out of body experiences were mystical, he'd be inclined to think his was mystical. Because he's not, it's an anomaly.
Similar types of observations were found in the study, where a sense of energy and empowerment was considered "weird, but not spiritual" to Buddhists in the survey, while feelings of "oneness and harmony" also didn't click well with the Christians.
However, to your point, by saying "this is a spiritual experience" one will prime themselves to have the experience. Either as an implicit training, or a greater atunement ("I'm one with the cosmos" vs "I'm feeling kinda space-y right now")
That's my thought too. Reading the original tweet, I feel like I can sorta stand behind it, because I feel like a well-functioning person *would* regularly experience some sort of awe at the mysteries of existence. But I'm not sure I would have answered "yes" to Scott's question, which seems to be asking for some further significance to the experience.
There’s something to be said for traumatic or difficult experiences bringing about the desire or necessity to “reach deeper” or outside of oneself more aggressively. Of course someone could make the argument that the mind falsely creates the sensation as a defense mechanism. Smarter men than I have debated these subjects forever but personally I feel that God or The Divine chooses to remain arguably nonexistent in order to give free will. But yeah people make bold tweets as some shotgun rejoinder and it feels snappy. Instant axioms of dubious value.
....hm. I wouldn't say I have mystical experiences but I would absolutely say I encounter the strange and the indescribably beautiful regularly (and, uh, surely most people do?). I guess the second is supposed to be an elaboration of the first but the two paragraphs in the tweet definitely read to me as making very different claims.
Among people who care about such experiences enough to debate the definitions, this is fairly mainstream. Depending on who you're reading you can hear that really being present to the beauty of a sunset (instead of just mentally ticking a box that says "yep sunset is beautiful" before going back to playing hearthstone or candy crush on your phone is mystical, contemplative, etc.
No clue, I don't make the rules - I'm just reporting some context of usage otherwise missing from the conversation.
While we're on the topic, though, I find something interesting. It's simultaneously true that the no-true-scotsman claim made by the self-identified 'spiritual' is not very clever, and also that your reference to seconds is itself not especially clever. Such people are making a qualitative point, nothing to do with seconds. I'm sure if you were to debate one he'd conclude you were mentally unhealthy and ignorant of it.
Not a matter of duration but a matter of how you relate to the experience. Thoughts come in chains, one of which could be seeing the sunset -> it’s beautiful-> like the sunset in the Maldives a year ago -> but that was different in subtle ways -> maybe because it was near the equator-> what is the latitude of Male? You get the idea. You can force yourself to go back to perceiving the subset directly rather than this internal chitchat, but they you will have the feeling that you were actively changing the experience by focusing on it more than you normally would. Once again this is unsatisfactory. You could train yourself to perceive things more directly, and then come back to the sunset the next day. Then you manage to somehow being in the moment while watching it but you still realize that there is a back and forth between seeing and being conscious that you are seeing.
So there is the act of seeing the sunset, the immediate impression. Then there is the act of realizing you saw it. Then the act of realizing you realized you saw it. It’s as if you are never really in direct contact with immediate experience. It’s frustrating. In anger you look for something to blame in the mess of thoughts referencing each other. What is it? Is it you in some sense? You look away, then look again at the sunset and try to spot the moment the sight of the sunset triggers the thought that consciously registers that sense impression. This thought feels like you being aware of the sunset but it also feels automatically triggered by the sight of the sunset. Are you an automatic reaction? Is the feeling that the thought of perceiving the sunset being you in that moment to be trusted at all? Can any thought be you? By now I think you get the idea of how this line of inquiry can trigger an experience that some people would call mystical
Did you give the one-question Narcissism test? Although I imagine Narcissists would be likely to over-report mystical experiences.
BTW the effect sizes you’re seeing is small enough that I wonder if the correct answer is really “no effect” (and the chi squared significance is driven by small shifts in other variables.) That’s quite lovely.
The effect size here is actually quite large -- an odds ratio of 1.5 is pretty big -- but it's probably also very attenuated by collider bias and (i.e. the effect size in the general population is probably a lot bigger).
Why do you think the effect size is larger in the general population compared to this subsample?
I would imagine that the effect would get further washed out by all the normal things that I’d cause mystical experiences, e.g., being evangelical, being older, being low-SES etc, but don’t correlate with mental health.
Actually I had some doubts about this chi square test. Scottt compared the 1000 who had made it into the mentally healthy category with the entire sample of 8000. Sure the correct test would be a comparison of the healthy 1000 with the remaining 7000. And we can expect that would strengthen his finding.
Thank you for running an actual test! It's always great to see people actually verifying stuff and doing statistics instead of making shit up.
IIRC, this is actually a well-replicated finding! Higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness (unlike traditional religiosity, where the correlation with mental illness is reversed). I know other studies in more representative samples (e.g. the GSS) have found pretty much the same thing.
I suspect the correlation here is somewhat weaker than the correlation in the general population, because of how nonrepresentative ACT readers are. If you have a nonrepresentative sample that selects on any of these axes (e.g. mental illness or spirituality), you'll usually get an attenuated correlation because you're conditioning on a collider. If mental illness was a prerequisite for signing up to ACT, for example, you'd see no correlation at all, because the rate would be 100% for both groups!
I have to agree with the latter point. ACT readers are nom-representative (and SSC readers were too).
I've noticed a rationalist bias here that is perfectly reasonable for what ACT is trying to do--but can easily turn off mystical but mentally healthy people.
What often isn't considered when people discuss the data linking mental illness with mysticism is that culturally there has been a belief that mystical states are weird -- so being diagnosed with a mental illness due to old editions of DSM that codified these beliefs is one path toward this outcome that is (I think) under-discussed.
Meanwhile Lisa Miller and others are showing imaging data suggesting the brain benefits of deep spiritual experience. So I think there's a disconnect to understand here.
Interesting needle you're trying to thread, here, and it sounds plausible to me. I'd add another element:
In a cohort of people are are mentally unwell, recognize it, and want to get better, mystical experiences are likely effective at improving their mental health.
Perhaps they are destabilizing to the healthy, and mediators of effective treatment for the unhealthy? Which would be a real assbite for the unhealthy who became so partly because of a mystical experience...
Really? — It's well replicated that higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness? Google Scholar isn't turning up much in the way of studies. This sounds like the old chestnut about artistic genius and mental illness. Are you sure you're not making this up? ;-)
No offense, but if one is going to make a claim (especially on a Rationalist discussion group), it seems not only politic but polite to provide some links to back up one's claim. We’re not Twitter, after all! ;-)
Anyway, I made the claim of the null hypothesis for a link between mysticism and mental illness. I used your suggestions to research, and I went on a wild goose chase down an Internet rabbit hole.
--> NHIS turns up nothing on keywords mystical, mysticism. It's a CDC website, so their search interface is pretty shitty.
For keyword "mystical" it insists on searching for "musical". Who knew there were so many studies on music, learning, and health?!
For keyword "mysticism" brings up links to the Microsoft Word instruction manual (I kid you not).
For keyword "mystic" it brings up a bunch of references to perinatal mortality data. That was puzzling to me—but it turns out there's a database called Meropenem Yearly Susceptibility Test Information Collection (MYSTIC) that seems to track antibiotic reactions, etc.
I couldn't find anything about mysticism and mental illness there. But I'll admit I didn't try very hard. Don't get me started on how I hate the way the CDC organizes its data!
--> IPUMS led me to GSS. Other than GSS, I didn’t see any other likely-looking datasets on IPUMs where I might strike mystical-psychosis gold, but there might be some other datasets up there that I'm missing. YMMV.
Using the same keywords, GSS turned up a single reference to a paper I found interesting but wasn't about mysticism and mental illness. Otherwise, there weren't any hits. The paper I was: Levin, Jeffrey S. Age-Differences in Mystical Experience. 1993. It turns out the young’uns in the 1980s were more likely to have mystical experiences than old farts. Their thesis was that it was cultural influences that made late Boomers and GenXers more open to mystical experiences than previous generations. But they didn’t discuss the obvious alternative hypothesis the mind as it ages may become more inflexible and thus less amenable to mystical experiences. The authors missed an opportunity to track generational cohorts across time à la Lewis Terman and his geniuses.
--> OTOH, Google Scholar brings up a bunch of links for the keyword string "mental illness mysticism". I thought I had hit mystical-psychotic gold, but it turned out that there seems to have been a lot of ink spilled during the 1970s and 1980s trying to characterize the differences between mystical states from psychosis. Lots of hand-wringing about how they're distinct and shouldn't be confused.
I did find this paper, though. And this may be where the meme that mystical experiences should be available to all healthy people started…
Mysticism and madness: Different aspects of the same human experience?
"...However, in contrast to much of the previous literature, the intention is not to pathologize mystical experience, but rather to normalize psychotic experience. The paper argues not only that the experience of oneness is entirely genuine and available to all humans, but also that it has an important psychological (and evolutionary) function. Using cognitive terminology, it then attempts to explain the processes determining whether an individual enjoys a fulfilling mystical experience, or suffers a debilitating psychotic breakdown (i.e., how “oneness” is experienced)."
CONCLUSION:
I can't find any data to support a correlation between mysticism and mental illness. I’m sticking to the null hypothesis unless you can dig up some studies (preferably including some negative control groups) to support your thesis.
Sorry if I confused you: the GSS is the General Social Survey. IPUMS is a website that compiles survey data from many different governments. Neither is a paper, so you won’t find them on Google Scholar. The raw data for both surveys is freely available to the public. Loading this data into a spreadsheet or your favorite statistical software (R, Python, or Julia) should let you calculate an answer in a few minutes.
Unless you can come up with some data to support a correlation between mysticism and mental illness, I think I've done more than my bit to prove the null. This is just another old chestnut to be roasted on the open fires of rational inquiry.
I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and have spiritual experiences all the time. It's not unhealthy, it's just different. I wish everyone would be themselves and stop trying to be like me.
Thought the same, until I remembered 20 years ago you'd have expected the percentages to be reversed. "Nobody" had depression or anxiety, and life satisfaction was considered to be pretty good if you had your health and your family.
Hmm...in my memory I'd say the earliest 00s are well correlated with the 90s, weakly correlated with the 80s, and fairly distinct from the (current) early 20s.
Yeah, I wondered about the family history part. I have a family history of heart disease, but I don't think a cardiologist would here that and say, "OK, your heart's unhealthy." I take it he'd do a checkup. So I don't see why having a bipolar uncle should make a person mentally unhealthy,
Yeah, but Scott was trying to get a population that was inarguably mentally healthy. Without those exclusions you could still worry about confounders, because there is definitely a genetic component.
With those exclusions, you also have to wonder about confounders, as having no history of anything is also atypical.
(Mind you, the population bias dwarfs any & all possible concerns like this. The majority of the sample is highly-educated atheists who tend to have some awareness and interest in rationalism.)
Ha! I played a cop in that play back in high school. Fun stuff, but I'm almost certain you can't send someone to Bellevue based on Carey Grant's one liners.
There’s interesting research about the relatives of bipolar people. Those who do not get the actual illness are unusually creative individuals. If you ask them to list as many uses as they can for a brick in 5 mins they come up with more than the average person. And blind ratings of how inventive they are in their work and hobbies are
higher. So having a bipolar uncle isn’t an altogether bad thing.
Same, and frankly I'd be a bit suspicious about the mental health of a person whose whole family is completely clear of depression or anxiety, although the wording on the survey is "clinical depression" and "clinical anxiety disorder". The autism question I think might muck up the results, I'd consider Asperger's to be neutral in terms of mental health, and it's also plausible that autistic people trend heavily one way or another in terms of mystical experiences. Still, I don't think the survey is needed or particularly informative here, schizophrenics, bipolar persons and severe drug addicts would be unlikely to have taken the survey making it impossible to trust a result in the other direction.
Yeah, I agree. I wonder if what some of those people have is a social desirability bias. (Although, holy shit!, you don’t get the feeling that many people who post here have a case of social desirability bias. But Scott’s results were for 8000 people, most of whom must be lurkers. Maybe the lurkers are more invested in presenting as Normal and Nice.)
There is nothing wise about that tweet; clinically nor contemplatively. Scott I think you might agree that current DSM definitions might view a whole variety of classic "mystical experiences" of not-self or "oneness" (two examples), as grandiose, narcissistic, psychotic, delusional etc. I won't elaborate as many have done so in very erudite ways. Suffice it to say, any public claim to the mystic, is immediately suspect. Awakened ones never say so and would never accord exclusivity to awakening. All human minds are capable of experiencing awe, wonder, clarity and compassionate regard. Healthy or not.
Possibly worth noting, I would probably answer the survey question with "No" (it would depend a bit on how I define "completely distinct from ordinary life" on the day I took the survey), but I would say I'm "encountering the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" at least once a month.
I suspect yes. (I don't have a study in hand) However, atheists typically self-select based upon personality traits that don't encourage them to enjoy religion as much (ex: atheists are more disagreeable), and spiritual experiences have elements of social construction.
Almost certainly - once your skepticism and rational thinking is up, you're going to discount many experiences others might think mystical. "That was a weird and interesting experience" after some hallucinogenic intake, rather than "God/Fifth-Dimensional-Aliens spoke to me!"
I wonder if atheists' mystical experiences are as *memorable* to them? When I was trying to decide whether to continue as a Christian or become an atheist, I vetted my religious experiences ruthlessly, and the small handful that couldn't be explained away and that appeared truly mystical, I saved up in my mind like jewels in a chest. If I'd been a contented longtime atheist, might I have said "well the brain sure is weird" and moved on, and decades later answered no on the survey because the moment simply didn't come to mind? Maybe.
Also, studies show that believers have a stronger tendency to see purpose or intention in things (indeed, this is very likely part of why they are believers in the first place). So you would expect atheists to experience fewer mystical items.
I looked at the survey data. Nonreligious are overrepresented, 71.3% are atheist or agnostic, 9.6% atheist but spiritual, 19.0% theist/pantheist/other.
Nonreligious are less likely to have had spiritual experiences. Atheists and agnostics are 12.6% yes and 16.0% maybe/unclear to the spiritual question, "atheist but spiritual” are 39.2% yes and 22.2% maybe, religious are 41.0% yes and 23.0% maybe.
The mental health trend from the post exists in all the subgroups though, e.g. “very mentally healthy” nonreligious have 25.0% yes/unclear spiritual experiences vs 33.3% outside the mentally healthy group, mentally healthy religious have 61.8% yes/unclear vs 69.2% outside group.
My original question was motivated by the following line of thinking: among readers interested in ACX, I think two groups might complicate the findings.
First, many people are here because they are part of the Less Wrong Diaspora. In some ways, these people are an outgrowth of the New Atheist movement that was popular circa 2005 and therefore are more likely to be atheists.
Second, as a psychiatry blog, some other fraction of people is drawn here because they are interested in mental health. My intuition is that people who are very interested in mental health are more likely than average to experience mental health issues. (A generalization, but I assume there is some positive correlation).
So when we survey SSC readers, we may find a positive correlation between atheism and good mental health when none may exist in the general population—a form of Berkson’s Paradox.
If atheists are less likely to have spiritual experiences, then that correlation transfers. We find that spiritual experiences are less likely in the mentally healthy, even if this isn’t true in the general population.
But you have found that the trend holds for the mentally-healthy religious subgroup, which militates against this interpretation.
How much of “mentally healthy” is socially constructed? Isn’t this question dependent on choosing a value system for comparing minds I order to determine which states are “healthy”?
That's also very challenging. The use of a cutoff line is hard, especially since similar subjective states are likely to result in varying numerical results.
Also, the people who have no family history of anything may (in some weird sense) not be representative of the healthy people with some weird background.
Of course, given the limitations of the SSC survey, it's not clear if doing all of those different studies has value.
I think that the tweet (that I don't particularly agree with) is a provocative way of trying to say that mystical experiences are a part of human experience, so it is better to have a capability for them, rather than just to be "healthy" in the mental health sense of "lacking pathology".
Good point. I can see an argument that Genghis Khan had the most mentally healthy state possible, and all of us here (I hope) deviate from that so much that we could not possibly be called healthy.
The problem I have with this is the conflation of the spiritual with the mystical. I'm going to assume that this is due to the current tendency towards materialism in human neurobiology and a disposition towards seeing human consciousness entirely in terms of electro-chemical processes. The mind is real even though it is not physical. Ideas are identifiably responses to physical reality and have consequences in physical reality through the role they play in guiding our actions. This is reflected in our emotions and the role they play in our evaluations of our physical sensations. All of this is to say that you don't need to appeal to the supernatural or the mystical in explaining the spiritual. Human beings are capable of a far wider range of experiences that require no mystical or supernatural explanation than some are willing to give us credit for. If somebody's feeling better than you think they can, look for the reason in that person's own life rather than religion.
Odd, low-key humble brag posing as a "take." Since links have been shown between childhood trauma/adversity and potentially bipolar disorder and higher creativity, seems like it would be more likely to go the other way.
There are a bunch of reasons why the SSC survey wouldn’t reflect the population as a whole, but the one that most jumps out to me is that the respondents are 88% male.
I get that this is a pretty informal analysis and you’re not submitting this to Nature or anything, but I still feel like you should flag this as a huge caveat. As it stands, this feels a bit like Malcolm Gladwell taking an experiment performed on a dozen affluent college students, and interpreting the results as some deep statement about humanity as a whole.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
It does seem that the tweet is asserting that mental health includes having a healthily functioning mystical experience module.
But it also seems that "mystical experience" is being defined as things causing awe and wonderment, which seems like it might encompass a larger circle of experience than "spiritual connectedness/profundity/presence".
The original tweet you posted is a subjective definition of "mentally healthy". That makes sense as a phrase even if the overall claim.feels a bit bogus but kinda true.
But then you try to quantify it to study it. Doesn't make sense to me. This phrase cannot be defined precisely. What's the point in asking someone to rate (say) their happiness? You ask them on a different day they could come up with a 5/10 instead of 7/10. You simply cannot quantify something that you cannot define uniquely.
Have to say this makes me feel a bit better about mine. I don’t talk about it in real life as I didn’t have a great childhood and my mental health history isn’t great.
Didn’t believe in God before it, but then afterward I did. Not some guy who is arbitrarily capricious and lives on a cloud or whatever, but a force behind the universe.
Lots of semantic nitpicking is possible here. I consider my experience as mystical when I'm relaxed and not ruminating (mentally healthy state?). It's light, spacious and beautiful and if I lean into it, blissful. Happened today whine driving for example. I better go have another one now.
Edit:Am I mentally healthy? Depends.. I get anxious and do spend time ruminating until I catch myself. Also, caveat, I need to meditate relatively regularly in order to be able to access these states in my day today life. It gets much harder if I fall off the bandwagon.
That's why I mentioned the semantics. In my opinion, being spacious, as in losing subject-object perspective, forgetting the self and being suffused with joy counts as mystical
Yeah, that’s it in the lightest sense. The lowest level raised form of consciousness is typically referred to as “being in the zone” in contemporary parlance. It’s when you’re so good/professional at something that you lose yourself in it and in the process, perform at a very high level without thinking much about it.
It's different from being in the zone since I know what they feels like too. Also It's a matter of degree. In that sense you could call enlightenment "being in the zone" since it's about losing your sense of self.
It’s poor epistemic practice to use this level of confidence/certainty in your answer. You’re basing your answer on a survey that is highly unrepresentative of the general population and that has had no corrections applied to fix that issue, as far as I can tell.
I've had such experiences only while on drugs. It is tempting to think that the drugs allow you to perceive truths you wouldn't be able to perceive otherwise.
But the evolved nature of brains means that easy, trivial mental improvements are unlikely to exist - evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills (opportunities for easy improvements) sooner or later, until no more exist.
Just from that observation, it's pretty clear that drugs can only break a healthy mind in various perhaps-interesting ways, not make it work better. So any "truths" discovered via mind-altering drugs are unlikely to be true. (Drugs may be able to mitigate problems in unhealthy minds.)
Re any revelatory mystical experiences, see how many result in any verifiably true knowledge afterward. My experience is zero. (Doesn't mean it wasn't fun.)
Easy, trivial mental improvements are totally likely to exist, if you define the improved metric differently from what evolution maximizes, which is survival and reproduction. “Perceiving truths you wouldn’t be able to perceive otherwise” might very well be one such metric. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get drugs that cause these improvements, but evolution doesn’t rule them out.
If the drugs can induce it, you can get there without them. They are helpful for showing you places you can go without any effort on your part, but the basic materials for building that experience are somewhere inside still.
That’s a good sound bite, but citation needed. It’s clearly *not* the case for drugs that address physical medical conditions. For an extreme example consider a poison that kills you, by stopping your heart or disrupting your ability to breathe; you can’t replicate that effect just by thinking hard enough. (And no, I don’t believe yogis can stop their own heart.)
I would not be surprised if there is something like what you said that is true. But it needs refining.
Well, whether an advanced meditative can affect the autonomic nervous system could, I would think, be verified or disproved with empirical inquiry.
This isn't mysticism though which is a product of reason and intuition, or so I've read. Much harder to nail down but I do think 'better' starts with Know Thyself - if you were to ask! : )
You all make good points. I think I was wrong above - the ancestral environment was very different from today's, and our conscious goals can be different from what evolution tuned our brains for.
I concede that cannabis seems to genuinely improve musical perception and creativity, at least in some people (presumably at some cost in other kinds of cognition, but so what - the drug wears off after a while). If so, I suppose that disproves my conclusion above at least in that one case.
I think one way of looking at drugs that might help understand their usefulness is looking at them like temporary buffs and debuffs on your stat. For example, amphetamines could be <single task focus +10, perception of your surroundings -20>. If you're an office worker, your task could be dependant at 90% on single task focus and at 0.1% on perception of your surroundings. Even if amphetamines were technically a total -10, on this specific task it's a +8.98.
The standard counterpoint to the generally valid argument "evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills sooner or later, until no more exist." is that there are many possible improvements that expend extra energy or cause extra activity; from the perspective of hominid evolution something that gets 1% "generic improvement" at the cost of 2% extra calorie expenditure is a horribly bad tradeoff; but from the perspective of modern humans that would be the equivalent of a dropped $100 bill.
I agree with Scott that the tweet is false as stated.
But I also think the tweet is an example of a rhetorically inflated claim for which there might be a more modest and precise version that is both true and significant.
It is a common feature of public discourse, especial on a forum like Twitter, that many people prefer a rhetorically inflated version of a claim, thinking that it "makes the point" more strongly. My view is that such inflated versions are just easier to defeat and then dismiss, as Scott has done, while leaving the underlying issue untouched.
A more modest version of the claim might be "Among the mentally healthy, mystical experiences are not rare."
I replied to another comment above to say this also -- I have encountered the idea in this tweet at least a dozen separate times in new age circles. In my experience it is meant exactly as stated -- that there is something suboptimal/wrong if you aren't have eg. Unbelievable coincidences regularly.
As I said, I agree with Scott and you that the tweet in false as stated. If many New Agers hold this idea as stated, then they're wrong too. Is that idea worth refuting? Maybe.
But this observation doesn't really touch my point.
my intention in replying with that information was to point out that the original claim was stated as such not to make a rhetorically inflated version of a claim but because that specific inflated version is actually what is meant, not to sound better on twitter, but because thats what they believe and its that idea specifically that needs to be refuted. and yes, i think the idea is worth refuting as i have seen it do harm.
I'm not disputing that the person who wrote that tweet really intended exactly what they stated, nor that there are also many other such people who believe such, nor that the claim as stated is worth refuting.
For the purpose of the point I'm making, I'm not focused on what those people intend or believe.
I'm saying that the claim is rhetorically inflated in relation to a *distinct* claim, and that this distinct claim could well be correct.
There’s no basis on which to posit that opinion. I hate when people generalize their own experience. I wonder how mentally healthy a person that feels compelled to relay to the world that they’re mentally healthy as opposed to others can be.
There’s some cultural evidence it’s an inaccurate tweet as well. Has this person never heard of a “dark night of the soul”? Here’s my theory, based on experience:
It comes on most often at the extremities. I’m not talking about a numinous moment or anything; I mean a bonafide experience. Whether you’re really ecstatic or really depressed, you’re vulnerable enough to see beyond out at the distant peripheries of emotion & awareness.
As others have pointed out there may be some validity issues here with either Scott's survey or whatever instrument generated the data that inspired the Tweet above. However, putting that aside, one pretty obvious confounding variable here is whether or not people where high when they had the experience.
I don't think I've ever had anything that approximates a mystical experience, EXCEPT a few times in my younger days when I was dosed on blotter acid. And it's hard to know how that variable (high on, say, LSD, or MDMA, or whatever that drug is that they drink in South America and makes you throw up (William Burroughs called it Yage, I think it goes by another name now), etc) interacts with the 'healthy mind' variable.
Yes since I am the mystical kind, in a way built my life around the sense of mystical encounter, and credit it with my recovery from a difficult time when I was young and for helping me to recover from my mental health problems and be able to hold together marriage and raise children, sample size of one obviously. So how about separating out 'before' problems such as childhood and family history from current level of distress? Do people who have had mystical encounters tend to show improvement on their mental health metrics since that encounter? If anything perhaps people who've had difficult circumstances might be more likely to want or need to seek out the mystical.
Instrumentalizing "mystical experiences happen when the mind is healthy" is by itself challenging. The interpretations of it go on endlessly, given that a mystic in a non-mystical society is unlikely to feel healthy, but allowing social pressure to dictate intrinsic mental markers of wellness would seemingly defeat the point.
Using the SSC dataset is unlikely to help. You have a population that skews high-IQ, high-education, non-religious. In a social setting where religiosity is unpopular, mystical experience would likely be socially undesirable. A healthy person *should* suppress any tendency towards a mystical experience, both in terms of rewriting memory, and in terms of suppressing the tendency going forward.
(Also, I would bet that SSC members self-select to tend to score low on tests like Absorption relative to the base population. A population that focuses on intellectual detachment from their ideas, is very to select against people who hear God whisper from the clouds.)
That being said, I agree with your conclusion. I just don't think we can reliably de-bias the potential intrinsic biases in your sampling. Ironically, I think in order to trust the SSC dataset, we'd need to prove the claim with a different dataset, and thereby negate the value of using the SSC dataset.
How about a survey of happiness based on youthful head injuries? All the skaters I knew that didn’t go too druggy seem pretty well adjusted. My theory is we simply don’t remember all the ways we were aggrieved in Junior High to carry that emotional baggage as adults.
The original tweet feels more prescriptive, (probably based on the writer's personal experience & intuition), than an attempt at an honest observation of the world based on careful analysis. So I feel like their response to you, even if they accepted your poll as validly scientific, would be "Who cares whether people think they are mentally healthy? If they aren't having mystical experiences, then they are not."
If the Dark Night of the Soul is a thing, your "no personal history of anxiety or depression" criterion is going to run into it.
Anyhoo, isn't this originating in Maslow's "peak experiences", and him (I think) writing that it seemed to be a thing happening the most to healthy people?
Not to say I disagree, but I never trust people that self report as mentally healthy. It's very easy to repress yourself, and then outwardly you look mostly fine, inwardly you think you feel fine, but you're not really. I know people that display symptoms of anxiety and depression, but they self report as mentally healthy and get defensive when pressed. A tenuous grasp on a belief.
Unless you have a very special kind of mind, mystical experiences are few and far between. It's not surprising most people haven't had them. I'd be interested in seeing how this stat changes with age; have older people had mystical experiences more than younger people?
The real question is whether the people taking the survey (or those who made it or who try to interpret the results) have any idea what a "mystical" or "religious" experience is, or how it differs from mental illness, or whether they're even using a consistent definition. I would guess the answer, for the most part, is "no", which means the data set is basically meaningless.
I am an atheist, but once when I was in a church in London looking at mural of Joan of Arc, I had this feeling that it somehow made more sense to believe that she (and by extension the other saints, and God) still existed and was aware of me, than to believe that it isn't so. Somehow that it makes more sense to believe that everything is preserved rather than passing away. I wonder whether this is a "spiritual experience". I didn't have an altered state of consciousness or anything. Nor was I filled with conviction, and it didn't feel that disconnected from normal life, even though it was unusual. I felt for a while that it was possible to see things from a different perspective than my usual one.
"Mystical experiences naturally occur" seems like the sort of thing you can only say if you don't think mystical experiences are objectively meaningful, or you're defining them so broadly that they might as well be meaningless. It smacks of therapeutic deism. What is the purpose of these experiences? What do you learn from them? What do they do to you?
We know that drugs, for example, can consistently induce the feeling of meaningfulness or transcendence. I don't think this disproves the existence of something transcendent - any more than artificially inducing a phantom smell of smoke would disprove fire - but it should raise your bar for assuming that any perceived encounter with the numinous is worth anything.
(Cards on the table: I'm a fundie and that's why this stuff raises my hackles.)
It isn't necessarily connected that being religious means experiencing spiritual events or having mystical experiences. It does depend on the strain of religion one is immersed in; the 'signs and wonders' type will select for having (or thinking you are having, or working yourself up to have) mystical experiences frequently:
Whereas Catholicism, in my experience of it, is much more pragmatic: you may not be having visions of the mystic Host at Mass, that doesn't matter. Say your prayers and get on with living a holy life as best you can, as a person living in the world:
That's why Reformers like Martin Luther were, in a sense, spoiled mystics; with the emphasis on adult conversion experiences where you would have a personal sense of the presence of God and be convinced not by cold intellectualism but by going through something like being 'born again', having that moment of enlightenment, as he describes it in his own 'conversion experience': suddenly understanding a phrase that makes it all different, brings him alive, gives him the warmth of love for God:
I'm reminded of a passage in Marcus Aurelius's famous "Medications," in which he says (paraphrasing greatly) "the gods may be good and righteous, but they're important busy folks, and you shouldn't expect them to look in on little ol' you all the time, cheer you up, solve your small problems. You need to work out how to stay reasonably content and get along with people on your own, so let's get to it."
Psychologist here: Big sweeping generalizations like the tweeter’s almost never turn out to be more than a little true. At most you’ll find a weak relationship between the traits at issue. People’s traits aren’t organized into columns, so to speak — with traits in the same column showing high correlations among pairs of them. Traits aren’t even organized into grids, with traits in the same square correlated. In fact, the whole idea of traits is kind of suspect. Everyone realizes this when they take some questionnaire that asks questions like, “Are you bold or timid?” “Well,” you think, “I’m bold in some situations and timid in others,” and that variability of characteristic behavior across situations is the norm. That’s why we all know people who are deeply wise and clever in their work but foolish in love relationships, people with hyperconventional homes and habits who are Burning Mfan fanatics, martial arts monsters who are passionate about growing African violets, etc. In fact, I think it may be that when somebody tends to act a certain way in all situations, that’s a sign of something amiss. Say somebody has high standards for themselves at their work and then when you introduce them to square dancing you see the same high standards kick in — their struggle fiercely to free themselves of typical novice mistakes — you might feel like something’s amiss? It’s just square dancing, for heaven’s sake, relax — right? It’s adaptive to have a different mind set in different situations, and when somebody doesn’t the lack of flexibility comes across as a bit unhealthy. So all this makes me doubt that a certain *kind* of person has mystical experiences. There are probably many paths to having them.
I am definitely subject to the oceanic experience Scott asked about. My teens and 20’s were the peak years for having it, but now in later years it still visits me from time to time. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt. I usually feel a wave of goosebumps when I have it, and often shed tears as well. So I’m trying to figure out why I’m subject to it. I expect some of it is wiring, but a kind of wiring that’s unrelated to mental health of illness — just a wiring for intensity. My father was an artist, and used to shake his head in frustration when he tried to convey how much he loved certain painters’ work — “they’re just . . . they’re just . . .wonderful,” he’d say. I think he was subject to a sort of visual ecstasy. And I was an only child, and used to entertaining myself and walking around thinking my own thoughts, and therefore maybe more likely to stumble into a moment when I looked at the sky and thought “space extends forever in every direction, and here’s this bush right here, and me looking at it all, it doesn’t mean a thing and here we all are.” And that thought sounds sort of bleak, maybe, but in fact was accompanied by a shiver of indescribable delight. Yum.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”
Well.....
I wouldn't think 1/8th of people are extremely mentally healthy any more then I think 1/8 people are professional athlete levels of strength training with ability to run a mile in a few minutes or lift their body weight. Pre-corona helps but, I think it would be rose tainted for people to say that 2020 society was going well.
This may offend someone formally trained in physiology but the perception in 4chan related community's is that autism and schizo is a spectrum and there plenty of reason to expect that a autism biased sample may have less schizo related experience. And "ssc" while probably not as bad a sample as lesswrong and looking at the data its biased towards autism and atheists.
If your in a hard line atheist community where people would react negatively to having a mystical experience it seems likely to me that a) people would downplay it b) feel shame and rate their mental health as 1 less then the max even if they are otherwise doing great
Your spirituality question specifies an "extreme" experience, the tweet is about routine experience. I think (common) meditation would never qualify for the first, but could easy qualify for the 2nd.
etc. etc. I think that take plenty defensible, and think a specific survey for the general public is done before calling it false. (altho Id probably specifically include mediation as a spiritual experience)
I think there's probably some selection bias here.
In the general population, religiosity may be correlated both with better mental health (due to sense of community, sense that God is looking out for you, etc.) and greater tendency towards spiritual experiences (due to greater tendency to attribute things to God), which would explain the tweet.
ACT readers are more likely to want to analyze all of their experiences logically in great detail (I think this is the one underlying theme in this community), regardless of religious affiliation. Conditioned on this, relatively few people will find conclusive evidence of mystical experiences, regardless of their mental health.
I'm going to be a grumpy old misery-guts here, and put forward that the twitterer there has no truck with God (other than some kind of Vague Deity Concept that is all kumbayah and never makes any kinds of demands).
There may indeed be religiosity involved, but it's the secular sort of "yoga, mindfulness, do all this healthy lifestyle stuff, and sprinkle in a little secular wonderment (of the kind encapsulated in the Sagan quote below) and a little trendy spirituality and wrap it all up in the kind of therapy jargon most of the audience for this have absorbed"; hence 'a truly healthy mind would constantly be experiencing a higher level of awareness of the beauty and wonder in the natural world around us'. It's a way of being a toffee-nosed snob but without sounding overtly like one.
Sagan quotes:
""It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."
— "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (Ballantine Books, 1997)
(Note the pooh-poohing of conventional religion here; science, you see, is so much *better* and *higher* than the harp-playing static heaven of popular culture. Sagan, to be fair to him, wasn't an out-and-out enemy of religion, but he still had the same attitude towards it as others of the scientific mindset):
"For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence."
— "Can We Know the Universe?" in M. Gardner (ed.), "The Sacred Beetle and Other Great Essays in Science" (Plume, 1986)
So the tweet fits in well here: the mystical is the sense of the unknown which is, at the same time, knowable by us being thinking beings, and well-adjusted non-neurotic truly healthy minds would experience that as a normal event. We get to eat our cake and have it.
I don't think this is Sagan being (even somewhat) anti-religious as much as his response to spiritual and/or religious people who are anti-science, in terms of thinking science boring and leeching the beauty and wonder out of life. I'm thinking of things like Whitman's poem poo-pooing the Learned Astronomer. C.S. Lewis is also full of this. Many scientists with a gift for creative writing have responded with testimony to the beauty and wonder to be found in a scientific view, Sagan and Isaac Asimov among them.
Anecdatapoint: I would regard myself as fairly mentally healthy, modulo some occasional intrusive thoughts. One time I had a experience that seems possibly in the same category, depending on how we're defining "mystical". I had just gotten back from lunch (cheeseburger and a soda, no alcohol or any other psychoactive substances consumed) and an extremely strong feeling of peace, calm, and contentment suddenly came over me. I probably sat in the parking garage for five minutes just blissed out on it before going inside, and it continued for probably another 20 or 30 minutes. Eventually it mostly subsided, but my mood stayed a bit elevated for the rest of the day.
I'm guessing it was just some chance fluke of biochemistry, but I'd never felt anything like that before or since, and until that point the day had been otherwise unremarkable. I could definitely imagine someone with a more spiritual mindset than I do having a comparable experience and interpreting it in a mystical way.
Seems to me your definition of "mentally healthy" could use some interrogation/explanation. For example, why are no family history or even personal history of depression inclusion/exclusion criteria?
Imagine making this tweet from the perspective of someone who frequently has mystical experiences: if those experiences stopped, you’d feel like you were missing out on something fundamental—something obviously went wrong. You conclude that people who don’t have these experiences probably also have something wrong. Is your generalization ad-hoc or just narrow-minded?
You see the results of the survey. You look at the criteria for “very mentally healthy” and object that it’s too narrow. A person with schizoid personality disorder, or a narcissist, or a psychopath could meet those criteria—something’s missing. Maybe spiritual receptiveness is also missing.
Again, it depends on the definition of "mystical" that whomever is using. From a religious angle, this is why the Church is very dubious about self-described mystics. Someone regularly having mystical experiences may be the real deal, or they could be anything from self-deluded to crazy to faking it for personal benefit.
Scott's approach is not the wrong one. The first barrier to cross is "are you nuts?" (to be blunt), then discernment can happen.
"So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”. "
Well, yeah: this tweet sounds just like one of those "spiritual, not religious, eat pray love, live laugh love, I do yoga and mindfulness, life is such a beautiful gift (when you're well-off, healthy, and have only First World Problems), amn't I so special unlike those vulgar earth-bound moles who don't have numinous experiences every five minutes?"
It does very much depend on your definition of "mystical", but to be frank, it reminds me of the entire wellness, self-help, Chicken Soup for your budgie, industry. Go out on your deck at dawn with your cup of artisan coffee and take a deep breath as you marvel at the beauty around you before you start your day's work as an influencer or whatever.
The world is beautiful and wonderful. but you don't have to make a production out of it, Saskia.
(This is also why I can never make any headway with those mental health therapy-lite self-help books, they're full of crap like this: "if we were truly healthy and grounded and aware of our connection to the cosmos as stardust beings, we'd be having mystic crystal revelations all the time").
I feel like the answers from the survey you used are to a question that is phrased rather significantly differently from what you were inquiring about, _and_ that the tweet phrases it rather differently than the thing I suspect they're actually talking about. So... Not surprised by the result but I don't think anything was learned here.
I'm going to try and express my perspective for you!
It can be both.
You can have it without knowing you've had it. Spiritual experiences are a human endeavor, not a rationalist one. We don't have to think about spirituality to have a spiritual experience. If we don't think then you "don't know", but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I think many people unlearn how to connect and have these experiences as they develop (gg society), and then try to understand it through language and attain it through various modalities of healing. The best language can do is try to communicate the experience, but the words are not the experience. They are signposts that point in that direction. When you arrive like I did... you feel it profoundly, and for me it was so indescribable and fulfilling that I knew i had arrived before the thought expressing that knowledge arrived. So I knew when I had it because I was trying to have it, but thinking and trying is not a requirement to having it.
I suppose it depends on how good you are at describing beauty. Or, more sensibly, that it's not clear whether a mystical exprience is best defined as a quale or as reaction to a quale.
"The whole secret of life lies in the discovery of this Tao which can never be discovered. This does not involve an intellectual quest, but rather a spiritual change of one's whole being."
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
[This book contrasts and compares selected categories of mystics and on this point they agree (to the extent I understand what I'm reading!)]
As a child of the 1960s I have along-term interest in mystical experience. As a musician I have a particular interest in mystical experience induced by music. Here's an experience I had back in the ancient days:
During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.
That was a powerful experience. It "haunted" me for years.
That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memories faded & the ambivalence too. I’m playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.
I think there's a massive difference between encountering something "strange" or "beautiful", and having a mystical experience. For example, I have personally encountered fields of wildflowers that left me almost totally incoherent with their beauty ("they should've sent a poet !"). However, they were not supernatural objects. There was no fairy glamour involved, just biological organisms doing what they do. Other people could see the same flowers. So could bees and other insects. An object does not need to be mystically supernatural in order to be beautiful; in fact, I'd argue that real things are often more beautiful than anything we can imagine.
Half-baked take: effective mysticism improves and maintains your life. Effective mystical experiences lead toward having a healthy mind. Therefore, while not strictly speaking "false", the claim is causally misleading.
Great point. I have more confidence that "effective mystical experiences" support healthier states of mind than the idea that healthier states of mind support the experiences. That being said, I think both are true and I think there is a positive feedback loop.
Personal anecdote: I had no spiritual connection and was stuck in my head. After 18 months of trauma recovery work, I managed to regain my spiritual connection during acupuncture. I believe that my improved mental health helped allow for that to happen. I can't say if I would have regained that connection or not without the other work. Once reconnected.... oh my. The positive feedback loop is real, and the line between "me" and "spirituality" is growing thinner and thinner because we spiritual beings at our core and I am getting ever closer to my own core self.
It does and it doesn't, only you can answer that. I criticized this take in my own top level comment.
I'll also note... this is a community is predominantly composed of people who tend to think first and feel second (if at all). When these kind of half-baked analyses and takes come out, I listen to my intuition and move on. I have read many of Scott's post on mental health and rarely find myself in alignment with him and the way he talks about it. I don't think he gets it, I don't think most people get it. The human experience is not a rationalist endeavor.
Mystical experiences are often associated with the mentally ill -- for good reason.
But *maybe* the exceptionally healthy can also experience more mystical experiences than healthy normies.
Once upon a time, I followed a mostly raw instinctive eating diet. My dreams were brighter on the diet, and I could achieve certain meditative bliss states with little effort. I suspect that my experience was similar to those who go on long fasts. In both cases the body gets to get rid of troublesome molecular fragments generated by cooking.
But eating mostly raw/unmixed/by instinct had similar downsides as long fasting: weight loss, social isolation, and assorted cravings. So I quit after a time.
Based upon my experience, I believe thati it is possible to be healthier than normal and experience some interesting mystical bliss out states. But it is not easy! The foods on our grocery store shelves were selected more for ease of growing and storage, vs. edibility in a raw natural state. And maybe the foods which sustained humans before we adopted cooking are now extinct. So maybe it is only possible to achieve the states I experienced temporarily -- then the need for Real Food beats out the beauties of Bliss.
I think the issue is as much “mystical experience” as “mentally healthy”.
I consider myself mentally healthy, and consider that I have these sorts of experiences (numinous, indescribably beautiful); I just don’t see any reason to wrap them in woo and call them “mystical”, and I expect I’m not alone in this.
One obvious way to square the circle is that it is perfectly plausible for a guy to be struck numb by and stand in awe before some vast natural wonder, then months later take the survey and answer the question “no” because he thinks of saints and gurus and religious fanatics and so on when he thinks about “spiritual” events.
If you asked child-me, that definetely was a profound and blissful experience, though not distinct from normal life - after all it was and absolutely normal thing to do. Back then I'd classify myself as very mental healthy based on these criterias.
Now I figured out that it wasn't God - just my own brain and that I'm autistic. Putting myself in the God-communicating-stance isn't profound anymore, though it can be somewhat pleasant. Not sure how to count this as evidence in favour or agaist the hypothesis.
I'll try to save something the original claim by making a much less general one: I think people that feel wonder and awe at their place in the universe tend to be more fulfilled and happy people, and vice versa. I don't have data but it feels right when I think about people I know, as well as my own ups and downs.
I think you can be mentally 'healthy' without being fulfilled and happy, in the "nothing explicitly wrong with you" kind of way that Scott's data captures, but it's a "ships in harbour are safe" kind of health that I don't think is in the spirit of the tweet.
I also think wonder and awe are better descriptors for the thing the tweeter is getting at – if I stand on a mountaintop and look out at a view that takes my breath away and take a few minutes to just marvel at it all, I don't _really_ consider myself to have had a mystical experience, but I would have done back when I was religious. The mental state is the same though in either case, so I think the more directly descriptive language is better than talking about "mystical experiences" and bringing in all that baggage.
And yeah maybe this all waters down something obviously false to something vacuously true, but we shouldn't be surprised that it all adds up to reality.
I don't think his claim is true, but I also don't think you chose the right measure. I think, in fact, the measure you chose is probably anti correlated? Specifically, you're largely measuring whether people have had an easy time in life in addition to reporting that they are currently having a good time, but it seems to me that like ~everything else with humans, we get good in domains where we've had some resistance, but not too much. Ie. practice within some zone of proximal development. Life is hard sometimes, and to maintain mental health it's important you have some practice maintaining that health against resistance.
I'm not saying it's necessary to go through a hard time in order to be healthy, but I also think going through a medium-hard time in the past is probably correlated with mental health, not anti correlated.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusion, because I think your analysis is bad and I declare a mistrial.
1) Your defined categories don't align with what the tweet is saying
> Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
You are characterizing a person as healthy or not and this is not equivalent to a healthy state of mind. A person is not their state of mind. It is common for people's minds to occupy healthy and unhealthy states.
I'll also note, I would have to respond as "not healthy" since I have a severe trauma history... but I would describe myself as mentally health as a result of all the work I have done. 1-1 and Group Therapy (Modalities include: CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, Art, Music), somatic experiencing and breath work, acupuncture, PT, long distance running and swimming, meditation and mindfulness, spiritual practices, more time outside, emotional support dog, improving sleep and diet habits... I could go on.
2) Sample Bias
It was a SSC Survey. It is important to note that this community is full of thinkers. I would posit that this community will have less spiritual experiences than a more representative sample of the overall human population, regardless of how they self-assess
3) Inability to evaluate respondent understanding of the survey and self-assessment
i.e. What does a "spiritual experience" and the definition you provided mean to someone else?
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
And here, you share your result while dismissing other interpretations of the tweet as "hokey ad hoc". To me the other errors and complications are understandable, but this conclusion feels callous and close minded to me. It is an interesting idea and I would love to explore it more.
I am mentally healthy modulo some ADHD, and am prone to a lot of mystical experiences (I mean, in the class usually called 'mystical'; I don't endorse supernatural explanations). They're much more common when I push myself to extremes of one sort or another, such that my body is already in an altered state. Like, one of the more dramatic recent ones was after three days backpacking in the desert, I got a persistent hallucination of an angry face in the middle of my field of view. It was soundless but expressive, with lots of glowing tentacles writhing in a network overlaid across my normal vision. It came with a powerful sense of dread, and lasted for hours.
This is pretty typical- physical sustained extremes involving exposure and probably dehydration, absence of normal stimulus like phones or computer screens, and experiences displaying a mix of sensory hallucination and intense affective disruptions with a particular focus on facial and anthropomorphic pareidolia. I and my immediate family are also, as it happens, really prone to visual snow and tinnitus, so this happens in parallel with a brain that seems to have a lot of 'noise' between the perceptive and interpretive layers- and meditation can also be really intense for me, if less 'narrative'. To my knowledge, we don't have a history of schizophrenia or anything though.
So my general feeling as that mystical experiences have less to do with mental health in the traditional sense and more about what your brain does in response to getting whacked real hard- neurological crisis response for the weirdest 1-2% of times. Having spent a fair amount of time in the desert, I'm not at all surprised that so many major world religions seem to originate in them.
Wow, Scott, usually you're very good at steel-manning others' positions—but, just as your "Cheat Sheet For Reading Popular Media Articles About Psychiatry" was an outlier in terms of intellectual rigor, so too does this post come short of the rigor I usually expect from your posts:
Of course, you're perfectly free to define the artificial category of "very mentally healthy" however you want; however, that doesn't mean that others have to accept that definition. First, I question the rigor of relying on what people "say" their history is. What if a person has a "history of autism" purely because their parents interpreted their anti-authoritarian instincts as "mental illness" and fed one-sided, biased information to a psychiatrist? Why do some people's biases of normative behavior constitute a "history" of a lack of "mental health" on another person's part? Why is someone's reporting anxiety and depression considered a lack of "mental health," rather than merely evidence of the inherent tragedy and difficulty of human existence? (I note that, conveniently, you've defined "mental health," or, rather, a lack thereof, in such a way as to promote your own financial interest as a psychiatrist; obviously, if you chose a definition of "mental health" in a way that included more people, that would mean a smaller clientele of the "mentally ill," and that wouldn't be very good for business, now, would it?)
But, more importantly, you so self-assuredly declared that you're right, and that anyone who disagrees with you is using a "hokey ad hoc definition of 'the mind is healthy'"—while completely oblivious to the fact that you yourself just made up just such a definition (calling it by the name "artificial').
I think the “ad how definition” is referring to any definition which includes having spiritual experiences as a prerequisite for being labeled mentally healthy. Those are fair to exclude as they’re directly begging the question. I highly doubt that the rest of the definition changes the result that some “mentally healthy” people have no spiritual experiences - which is, after all, a rather weak claim.
Having just come back to this post after a couple of days, two things strike me:
- the tweet was really calculated to piss people off if they don't consider themselves to have had mystical experiences
- the tweet is in fact so incredibly vague (once you pick it apart you can actually satisfy its parameters by encountering "the strange" regularly--what does that mean? at face value is there anyone who doesn't ever go "wow that's strange"??) that it's not at all useful to try to fact-check it, and yet Scott did.
It seems to me that Scott came up with a really exclusionary definition of mental health, not because he really thinks these things deeply and truly define mental health, but because he wanted to define the parameters so tightly that no-one could question them because the purpose was to disprove the tweet. Because it pissed him off. Which is fair enough--even though I feel like there's something it MAY be trying to get at that might be worth saying (maybe something about being open to experiences you can't understand), it's a stupid and offensive tweet. But like, it's OK to just have a human "this is stupid and offensive and here are my thoughts on why" moment instead of running the numbers sometimes. Especially when it comes to human experience and the mystery of life.
I answered positive to that question. Probably 1975, I was 14, fishing for salmon on the American River in Sacramento. At the upstream end of a small island, an a very strange feeling came over me ; kinda like the feeling after you've been hit in the head or shocked by electricity, that whole universe is buzzing feeling. Dragging my spinner through the water trying to attract a salmon, I snagged on something. Tightened the drag, and pulled, hoping to break free. The buzzing got more intense. The lure broke free, and came back with a piece of someone's shirt. Done with that stuff, I bugged out.
Fast forward to about 1990, I trained as an EMT. Part of the training is a day ride along in an ambulance. Our second call was a 'difficulty breathing' call. Just as we rolled up, that buzzing feeling came over me again. Yes that patient had died.
Later I described this feeling to a cop, who told me he has felt the same thing when coming to the scene of a death.
You might be high-balling this - I can't remember which years I took the survey, but I'd have fallen in the mentally healthy category and have had mystical experiences. However, psychadelics were a factor; it wasn't a random occurrence.
Mostly a reply to various people, but I think the standard definition of "mentally healthy" has to be "wouldn't be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition/disorder." You could certainly argue that some forms of what are called mental illness are *actually healthier* than what psychiatry is aiming for, but it's fair enough to describe that as a hokey definition because it's distinctly non-standard.
Well, you are right in a sense, but it's a limited definition of mental health. Even in psychology there are scales of human well being that are not just "not diagnosed with a psychiatric condition". And there are qualities like high resilience which are signs of mental strength (if you don't want to use the word "health" here) even if not having resilience is not a mental illness.
I interpret the tweet as a rhetorical attack on the popular idea that mystical experience is a sign of mental illness.
I think the idea of the tweet would be better expressed in terms of "mental capability" or "functioning" instead of "health". Like "a mind capable of mystical experience is more capable than one that is not (all other things being equal)".
I think this is like the imagination debate - if you're healthy and prone to mystical experiences, they're obviously normal and normative; if you're not, they're obviously a symptom of something.
1. I don't think that measuring "very mentally healthy"-ness thorugh self-reporting is super reliable.
2. I think that running this particular study in this particular community gives rise to some serious selection bias.
I expect the first effect to be statistically significant but not super strong and I expect the second effect to be so strong that we shouldn't really draw any conclusions from this survey.
Obviously the originator of that comment never read any Russian Literature. It's known, no philosophers come from warm weather. In other words you need some contrasting experiences in life that are certain to have an impact on a 7/10 score of happiness, in order to truly feel the mystical. I'm sure my college self wouldn't agree, and would say, oh no, that contrived experience by the lake was extremely mystical, but life and middle age certainly teaches us something else about what this is all about
Without knowing who made the tweet I would just think it was a bit of wu wu hyperbole. I know people that talk in a these terms and I always smile and shrug and say “Good for you!”
What an upsettingly offensive tweet to read with my morning coffee. I hate being reminded these people exist; it's exactly why I stay off Twitter. It seems intended to position the author as all-knowing and to provoke the next question: Tell me, your holiness, was my experience truly mystical up to your standards? Or am I sick and how should I get well?
Here's a controversial mental health take of my own: The assertion that other people must be mentally unhealthy if they don't have "mystical" experiences (a linguistic construct denoting, by design, an undefinable and unverifiable state but, it's implied, one which only the author's godlike judgment can easily discern, validate or reject) is the type of assertion that only a truly predatory narcissist could make. It's also an example of how social media has become a primary vector for mental illness, with cunningly injected appeals to FOMO and pseudo-scientific argle-bargle as its handmaidens.
"Mystical experiences" have throughout history been associated with madness. The tendency to elevate some unverifiable and subjective internal experience to "health" and thence to holiness has operated like a parasitic infection hopping from one human host to another for millennia; it survives because its victims, stripped of reason, gain power as a self-reinforcing collective. All religion boils down to this. But the average madman muttering on a street corner who believes his madness is the highest truth had not, until recently, infinite ink, paper and the means of distribution by which to infect millions of other potentially unstable people with his worldview. It only ever took one really slick psycho to start a cult, but now technology seems to have bred millions of them. The ancient parasite is out-competing itself, evolving and trying new tactics before our very eyes.
I'm so glad Scott ran an actual fact check. There couldn't be a better rebuttal.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
Reminder that you're basing this on your audience, in which there could be a vast number of uncorrelated precursors. It might better be thought of "This tweet is false for the type of individual who would complete my 2020 SSC survey." You then have to ask if the average participate in your survey is representative of society's population as a whole.
You showed that lack of mental health is a factor in having mystical experiences. You did not show that being mentally healthy makes it implausible someone would have a mythical experience. Neither did you show that it is implausible for someone who lacks mental health to not have mystical experiences. So both the mentally healthy and mentally unhealthy may or may not have mystical experiences, but the relationship between mental health and mystical experiences is statistically significant.
Mysticism is the belief that knowledge can be obtained without effort, i.e. through prayer, revelation, instinct, LSD, meditation, etc. Thus, while I'm sure that a mentally healthy person could have a mystical experience, it seems to me that too many such experiences would eventually threaten your mental health through bad epistemology.
Hmmm. What do you mean by transformative—and how do you define a mystical experience?
Which of these would you consider to be transformative?
1. A permanently lasting gnosis that sticks with you for the rest of your life.
2. A temporary gnosis that wears off after a certain length of time.
3. An ah-ha moment, or an ommmm moment, that is transformative because it either upset your certainties and/or allowed you to consider/view your world in a surprising new way—but that has no effect on the way you behave or lead your life.
Which of these experiences would you consider to be mystical (all of these have been reported in mystical literature)?
1. A perception or feeling that one's ego merged with the universe (for at least a limited period of time)
2. A perception or feeling of oneness with the universe, but one's ego remains identifiably separate.
3. A vision of the godhead in whatever form you choose to define the godhead. Note: some Sufi mystics have described it as a blinding sun-like light—and Kabbalahist mystics have perceived Ein Sof in a similar way to the Sufis. Christian mystics have seen God on this throne. Merkava mystics perceived God on a chariot with non-human angelic beings attending him.
4. Perception of the Dharmakāya or Saṃbhogakāya bodies/realms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. This would be similar to #1, except one no longer seems to be in the "real" world.
5. Perception of the Bardo state where one's sense of ego is destroyed and one encounters visions that can be extremely disorienting.
6. Perception or Visions of a Hell-like place.
7. The perception/feeling of being dead and that the universe is a lifeless place (frequently encountered on Salvia trips, but these are also nihilistic states that can be accidentally accessed via meditation).
8. A blissful state that one attains through meditation. This may or may not be equivalent to Zen Satori or the Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment.
9. An encounter with angelic or demonic entities—i.e. any powerful entity that is supernatural but that is less than godhead. This includes encounters with meditation deities.
10. Near-death experiences where one sees the tunnel of light.
And there are all sorts of less powerful "supernatural" experiences that could also be transformative...
11. Out-of-body experiences.
12. Realistic visions of one's ancestors such as Ayahuasca can give you.
13. Active dreaming with a companion dreamer.
14. Encountering a ghost or a poltergeist.
15. Accessing memories from past lives.
16. Precognitive experiences.
17. ESP type of experiences with friends and/or family.
18. Experiences involving psychokinesis.
19. The experience of communicating with animals as if they were talking in your head.
20. Encountering the spirits of a place
21. Communication with plants — especially trees or psychotropic plants. Note: Shamans use this skill to identify plants that are poisonous or psychotropic. Some Dianic traditions communicate with the spirits of the trees.
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
I've had four of the first group "mystical" experiences, and five of the second group of "supernatural" experiences. They were all transformative in that they changed how I thought about the world. The "big" mystical experiences didn't transform the way I lead my life, but they have transformed my enjoyment and appreciation of life.
I would say I was transformed, mostly in a bad way, by graduate school. Transformed in a good way by an Outward Bound course. Transformed in a mixed way by some romantic relationships. Transformed in a strange way by reading Wittgenstein as a college freshman. But a fairer way of describing how these things affected me would be to say they had a big impact. I still think about them a lot. They shaped my thinking in some ways. But calling them transformative seems like overstating it. For one thing, they all went on for months or years. I think of transformation as being much more sudden. If something you do for years changes you, it’s not, I dunno, all that surprising that such a big dose of whatever did that. And none of them transformed me radically. Lots of things about me were completely unchanged by them. How does my use of the word compared to yours?
As for sudden changes: cannabis certainly did that. I in fact felt transformed within a few minutes. Told a friend once that I was “a halo of my former self.” It of course that’s a drug experience. Though I’d say my cannabis experiences taken together were quite a powerful change agent. They walked me through the process of loosening up my mind in a certain way, and now, sober, I’m more able and willing to let my thoughts loosen. My one bonafide mystical experience, which I’ve had many times, is the oceanic feeling. But it doesn’t make much sense to talk about it transforming me, because I’ve had it many times over the years. If it’s had any effect at all in me, it’s not that the experience changes me —
It’s more that knowing that way of seeing life is possible just makes a person a little different. You’re
always looking for people and books who know about it too.
My last transformative experience happened after pretty extreme prolonged physical duress after a very symbolic context. Total eclipse of the sun atop 12000 feet of mountain. Physically after that the visual world presented in much greater detail and vibrancy. More beautiful. Cognitively or whatever, you know, "ineffable". But it was definitely all about a more extensive connection. Also on my way to a new phase in my life.
We started off talking about mystical experiences, without the requirement that they be transformative. And what does transformative really mean anyhow? Almost everything changes us a little, and there are plenty of non-mystical experiences that can change us a lot. Fuckin grad school, for example. Certain books. Love affairs. Grave illnesses.
The sole mystical experience I have had is the oceanic feeling. I’ve gotten
zingers of it all my life. I think it’s a different kind of entity than most of the other stuff you mention. A lot of the things in your list are distinct events, with the subject seeing or hearing a certain kind of thing. The oceanic feeling does not involve events or visions , it’s a certain *feeling*. And it really is a distinct feeling, the way deja vu is. If somebody describes it, it’s recognizable. I think, oh yes they’re talking about *that* feeling.
As for whether it’s transformative — eh, I’m not sure. Once you’ve had the feeling of oneness with all things you don’t forget it after the intense zinger fades. Maybe you always have a tiny version of it going on, maybe 1% of what you feel
when an oceanic wave breaks over you. If it’s transformative at all, it’s a transformation in the direction of seeking more of that feeling. It makes you alert for people or books that mention such things. It makes you want to make art that conveys the feeling. But aside from those things — well, you still put your pants on one leg at a time.
I don’t get why he didn’t just claim that mystical experiences are *possible* with a healthy mind. That seems much more reasonable if I might not believe it personally. (Of course, it’s because it’s twitter, and everything you say has to be provocative and witty.)
I’ve never had a mystical experience, and I’m supposed to believe that therefore I am mentally unhealthy? Ridiculous.
Well, the person said their claim was supposed to be controversial. And they also said that if you aren't regularly experiencing mystical awe and wonder, then something isn't right.
I think a lot about the plausibility of the claim depends on how precisely we understand "mystical" and "numinous" and "indescribably beautiful", and what I put as "awe and wonder". I'm not convinced that the question Scott takes from his survey captures the same thing - it seems to be pushing to something more extreme than what makes the claim plausible.
Same here. Not sure I have ever had what counts as a “mystical” experience but consider myself mentally and physically healthy at age 46. I should acknowledge, I have also never tried hallucinogenic drugs, and I’m sure there is some correlation there! More seriously, I will readily admit to having felt awe when contemplating the universe’s mysteries, stories that connect our current condition to those of fhe very distant past, or gaze at beautiful horizon, but I wouldn’t categorize these reactions as mystical - for instance, I didn’t necessarily feel like I was palpaby in the presence of some otherwordly power or force or that I was erased, and I truly don’’t know what people really mean who claim to have such experiences. Anyway, I am also struck that such a strong connection was claimed here. Why do these experiences have to be “universal” and not just “common”.
Yep completely agreed and I wonder what percent of ACX respondents’ mystical experiences were related to psychedelics. Not that I think decreases the significance of such experiences, just that it seems like an important explanatory variable. I would bet (although not super confident) psychedelic usage is higher for ACX readers then general population...?
The claim in the original tweet isn't an original thought --it's a well circulated belief/value judgement in certain new-age circles. And the meaning is intentional-- that if you aren't experiencing these things there's something wrong (or at least suboptimal) (not saying i agree)
As a person who has one foot in the rational materialist camp and the other foot in the mystical camp, I can't say I've ever heard the belief/value expressed that every normal person should have mystical experiences. In fact, some of the new-agey people I've associated with can be insufferably annoying in their sense of specialness that they've had a shared mystical experience (which most ordinary mortals can't experience). I'll grant you that there are an unlimited supply of "spiritual" self-help books out there and an unlimited supply of "teachers" marketing their wares — but the message implicit in such ploys is mystical experiences do not come naturally, and "take advantage of my limited time half-price offer, and I'll show you how you to can unlock all the secrets of the Universe!" (I can be just as cynical about the rational materialist camps, but I see a lot of spiritual scammers out there.)
I'm sure a small percentage of people do accidentally have mystical experiences. But before the advent of widespread psychedelic drugs, most people had to work at it. Traditionally, esoteric teachings and esotericism have always been directed at a limited audience of people who were willing to undertake the discipline. And even then, few attained anything.
Frankly, I doubt if many ordinary healthy people have ever had a mystical experience. Nor would most of them care to have one (if they even gave it a moment's consideration). And because they're not looking for it, they're unlikely to encounter it. "How about those Packers! Have another Bud Light, dude."
Valuable information. Thank you for this insight. I will undoubtedly recall this later in life, perhaps tomorrow.
Headline, "Do All Healthy People Have Mystical Experiences?" does not match topic content, "mentally healthy." Right?
Showing that any subset of "healthy" do not all have mystical experiences should be sufficient for marking off the general case that they all do.
Well, that's forgetting that spiritual health is part of actual health. :P
(I'm joking, but the poster also gets to construct their preferred definition of "healthy". Some versions, like my example, are very clearly circular, but would all versions be explicitly circular?
Also, because the tweeter is using lay-speak, how much wiggle room do they get to say "well, I was speaking loosely, I meant for most psychologically normal humans, I wasn't considering people with x, y, z conditions")
On the contrary, fully healthy people are a subset of mentally healthy people.
Agree, they are.
But if I speak loosely, I can speak loosely about a set, and mentally exclude certain subsets. It is not expected that a speaker speak with high precision, if the rest of their language shows low precision.
The challenge is that a speaker, speaking about most humans, could reasonably exclude SSC from the population. Even "fully healthy SSC-ers" are likely unusual people. I am not under an illusion that most of the population wants to convert to the Scott Alexander fandom, and is held back by lack of knowledge.
Mystical is very loosely defined. I once had an out of body experience but I would still have said no. In fact even at the time it felt weird not mystical.
There's an aspect of social construction within mystical experiences.
See The Cultural Kindling of Religious Experiences by TM Luhrmann: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/677881
So, if you were primed to think that is a mystical experience, I think the odds would lean towards you considering that a mystical experience. However, you are NOT primed, therefore you do not.
The types of "mystical experiences" people claim to experience are based upon their religious beliefs. Buddhists and Christians are noted for having different types of religious experiences.
(This is why I think "instrumentalizing" this original question is just a humongous pain!! I don't think it's right, but giving clear evidence is hard, especially if both experiencing and NOT experiencing mystical experiences has an element of social construction.)
People have reported accidental mystical experiences.
But there are also practices that, if followed seriously, can lead to what some would call mystical experiences. Likewise, psychedelics can be a shortcut to a mystical experience.
And I agree, that in the majority of cases, one would need to desire a mystical experience to experience a mystical experience. If a person doesn't believe they're possible, they won't go to the trouble of trying to obtain one. Intent probably requires belief.
But let's put it this way. If one has the mental fortitude (and the obsessive concentration) to undertake something as strenuous as the Abramelin ritual—which involves eighteen months of intermittent fastings, a series of ritual purifications, various magical operations, a strict diet, and isolation from family and friends—one is very likely to end up encountering some demonic visitations along the way as well as a final communion with one's guardian angel. Whether any of this is real? Well, it is for the people who've experienced this.
Not disputing that, however, if Nolan Eoghan was inclined to think out of body experiences were mystical, he'd be inclined to think his was mystical. Because he's not, it's an anomaly.
Similar types of observations were found in the study, where a sense of energy and empowerment was considered "weird, but not spiritual" to Buddhists in the survey, while feelings of "oneness and harmony" also didn't click well with the Christians.
However, to your point, by saying "this is a spiritual experience" one will prime themselves to have the experience. Either as an implicit training, or a greater atunement ("I'm one with the cosmos" vs "I'm feeling kinda space-y right now")
That's my thought too. Reading the original tweet, I feel like I can sorta stand behind it, because I feel like a well-functioning person *would* regularly experience some sort of awe at the mysteries of existence. But I'm not sure I would have answered "yes" to Scott's question, which seems to be asking for some further significance to the experience.
There’s something to be said for traumatic or difficult experiences bringing about the desire or necessity to “reach deeper” or outside of oneself more aggressively. Of course someone could make the argument that the mind falsely creates the sensation as a defense mechanism. Smarter men than I have debated these subjects forever but personally I feel that God or The Divine chooses to remain arguably nonexistent in order to give free will. But yeah people make bold tweets as some shotgun rejoinder and it feels snappy. Instant axioms of dubious value.
....hm. I wouldn't say I have mystical experiences but I would absolutely say I encounter the strange and the indescribably beautiful regularly (and, uh, surely most people do?). I guess the second is supposed to be an elaboration of the first but the two paragraphs in the tweet definitely read to me as making very different claims.
Yeah, this stuck out to me too. I don't see how those qualify as mystical.
Among people who care about such experiences enough to debate the definitions, this is fairly mainstream. Depending on who you're reading you can hear that really being present to the beauty of a sunset (instead of just mentally ticking a box that says "yep sunset is beautiful" before going back to playing hearthstone or candy crush on your phone is mystical, contemplative, etc.
That seems incredibly stupid. How many seconds do I need to appreciate the sunset for it to be mystical? 90, 300, 600?
No clue, I don't make the rules - I'm just reporting some context of usage otherwise missing from the conversation.
While we're on the topic, though, I find something interesting. It's simultaneously true that the no-true-scotsman claim made by the self-identified 'spiritual' is not very clever, and also that your reference to seconds is itself not especially clever. Such people are making a qualitative point, nothing to do with seconds. I'm sure if you were to debate one he'd conclude you were mentally unhealthy and ignorant of it.
Not a matter of duration but a matter of how you relate to the experience. Thoughts come in chains, one of which could be seeing the sunset -> it’s beautiful-> like the sunset in the Maldives a year ago -> but that was different in subtle ways -> maybe because it was near the equator-> what is the latitude of Male? You get the idea. You can force yourself to go back to perceiving the subset directly rather than this internal chitchat, but they you will have the feeling that you were actively changing the experience by focusing on it more than you normally would. Once again this is unsatisfactory. You could train yourself to perceive things more directly, and then come back to the sunset the next day. Then you manage to somehow being in the moment while watching it but you still realize that there is a back and forth between seeing and being conscious that you are seeing.
So there is the act of seeing the sunset, the immediate impression. Then there is the act of realizing you saw it. Then the act of realizing you realized you saw it. It’s as if you are never really in direct contact with immediate experience. It’s frustrating. In anger you look for something to blame in the mess of thoughts referencing each other. What is it? Is it you in some sense? You look away, then look again at the sunset and try to spot the moment the sight of the sunset triggers the thought that consciously registers that sense impression. This thought feels like you being aware of the sunset but it also feels automatically triggered by the sight of the sunset. Are you an automatic reaction? Is the feeling that the thought of perceiving the sunset being you in that moment to be trusted at all? Can any thought be you? By now I think you get the idea of how this line of inquiry can trigger an experience that some people would call mystical
One gets the feeling the tweeter is trying to walk the headline claim back a little, so that almost any epiphany counts.
Even “Goddam! Now I remember where I left my hairbrush!”
Interesting! I only have car key gnomes in my house, I did not know there was another species that specialized in hairbrushes.
Did you give the one-question Narcissism test? Although I imagine Narcissists would be likely to over-report mystical experiences.
BTW the effect sizes you’re seeing is small enough that I wonder if the correct answer is really “no effect” (and the chi squared significance is driven by small shifts in other variables.) That’s quite lovely.
> one-question Narcissism test
I love the fact that "one-question Narcissism test" became an euphemism for asking people whether they are narcissistic
The effect size here is actually quite large -- an odds ratio of 1.5 is pretty big -- but it's probably also very attenuated by collider bias and (i.e. the effect size in the general population is probably a lot bigger).
Why do you think the effect size is larger in the general population compared to this subsample?
I would imagine that the effect would get further washed out by all the normal things that I’d cause mystical experiences, e.g., being evangelical, being older, being low-SES etc, but don’t correlate with mental health.
Actually I had some doubts about this chi square test. Scottt compared the 1000 who had made it into the mentally healthy category with the entire sample of 8000. Sure the correct test would be a comparison of the healthy 1000 with the remaining 7000. And we can expect that would strengthen his finding.
Thank you for running an actual test! It's always great to see people actually verifying stuff and doing statistics instead of making shit up.
IIRC, this is actually a well-replicated finding! Higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness (unlike traditional religiosity, where the correlation with mental illness is reversed). I know other studies in more representative samples (e.g. the GSS) have found pretty much the same thing.
I suspect the correlation here is somewhat weaker than the correlation in the general population, because of how nonrepresentative ACT readers are. If you have a nonrepresentative sample that selects on any of these axes (e.g. mental illness or spirituality), you'll usually get an attenuated correlation because you're conditioning on a collider. If mental illness was a prerequisite for signing up to ACT, for example, you'd see no correlation at all, because the rate would be 100% for both groups!
I have to agree with the latter point. ACT readers are nom-representative (and SSC readers were too).
I've noticed a rationalist bias here that is perfectly reasonable for what ACT is trying to do--but can easily turn off mystical but mentally healthy people.
What often isn't considered when people discuss the data linking mental illness with mysticism is that culturally there has been a belief that mystical states are weird -- so being diagnosed with a mental illness due to old editions of DSM that codified these beliefs is one path toward this outcome that is (I think) under-discussed.
Meanwhile Lisa Miller and others are showing imaging data suggesting the brain benefits of deep spiritual experience. So I think there's a disconnect to understand here.
Interesting needle you're trying to thread, here, and it sounds plausible to me. I'd add another element:
In a cohort of people are are mentally unwell, recognize it, and want to get better, mystical experiences are likely effective at improving their mental health.
Perhaps they are destabilizing to the healthy, and mediators of effective treatment for the unhealthy? Which would be a real assbite for the unhealthy who became so partly because of a mystical experience...
That is an intriguing idea -- state-dependent outcomes. More subtle and probably more likely than a general rule. Would be good to investigate!
Really? — It's well replicated that higher levels of spirituality and mysticism are usually associated with higher rates of mental illness? Google Scholar isn't turning up much in the way of studies. This sounds like the old chestnut about artistic genius and mental illness. Are you sure you're not making this up? ;-)
Hmm; either the GSS or the NHIS (data can be found on IPUMS) should have the data to confirm this.
No offense, but if one is going to make a claim (especially on a Rationalist discussion group), it seems not only politic but polite to provide some links to back up one's claim. We’re not Twitter, after all! ;-)
Anyway, I made the claim of the null hypothesis for a link between mysticism and mental illness. I used your suggestions to research, and I went on a wild goose chase down an Internet rabbit hole.
--> NHIS turns up nothing on keywords mystical, mysticism. It's a CDC website, so their search interface is pretty shitty.
For keyword "mystical" it insists on searching for "musical". Who knew there were so many studies on music, learning, and health?!
For keyword "mysticism" brings up links to the Microsoft Word instruction manual (I kid you not).
For keyword "mystic" it brings up a bunch of references to perinatal mortality data. That was puzzling to me—but it turns out there's a database called Meropenem Yearly Susceptibility Test Information Collection (MYSTIC) that seems to track antibiotic reactions, etc.
I couldn't find anything about mysticism and mental illness there. But I'll admit I didn't try very hard. Don't get me started on how I hate the way the CDC organizes its data!
--> IPUMS led me to GSS. Other than GSS, I didn’t see any other likely-looking datasets on IPUMs where I might strike mystical-psychosis gold, but there might be some other datasets up there that I'm missing. YMMV.
Using the same keywords, GSS turned up a single reference to a paper I found interesting but wasn't about mysticism and mental illness. Otherwise, there weren't any hits. The paper I was: Levin, Jeffrey S. Age-Differences in Mystical Experience. 1993. It turns out the young’uns in the 1980s were more likely to have mystical experiences than old farts. Their thesis was that it was cultural influences that made late Boomers and GenXers more open to mystical experiences than previous generations. But they didn’t discuss the obvious alternative hypothesis the mind as it ages may become more inflexible and thus less amenable to mystical experiences. The authors missed an opportunity to track generational cohorts across time à la Lewis Terman and his geniuses.
--> OTOH, Google Scholar brings up a bunch of links for the keyword string "mental illness mysticism". I thought I had hit mystical-psychotic gold, but it turned out that there seems to have been a lot of ink spilled during the 1970s and 1980s trying to characterize the differences between mystical states from psychosis. Lots of hand-wringing about how they're distinct and shouldn't be confused.
I did find this paper, though. And this may be where the meme that mystical experiences should be available to all healthy people started…
Mysticism and madness: Different aspects of the same human experience?
Charles P. Heriot-Maitland
Pages 301-325 | Published online: 22 Feb 2008
Download citation https://doi.org/10.1080/13674670701287680
From the Abstract:
"...However, in contrast to much of the previous literature, the intention is not to pathologize mystical experience, but rather to normalize psychotic experience. The paper argues not only that the experience of oneness is entirely genuine and available to all humans, but also that it has an important psychological (and evolutionary) function. Using cognitive terminology, it then attempts to explain the processes determining whether an individual enjoys a fulfilling mystical experience, or suffers a debilitating psychotic breakdown (i.e., how “oneness” is experienced)."
CONCLUSION:
I can't find any data to support a correlation between mysticism and mental illness. I’m sticking to the null hypothesis unless you can dig up some studies (preferably including some negative control groups) to support your thesis.
Sorry if I confused you: the GSS is the General Social Survey. IPUMS is a website that compiles survey data from many different governments. Neither is a paper, so you won’t find them on Google Scholar. The raw data for both surveys is freely available to the public. Loading this data into a spreadsheet or your favorite statistical software (R, Python, or Julia) should let you calculate an answer in a few minutes.
If you have access to the data, share it with us. Personally, I have no wish to teach myself R, Python or Julia.
But to your point, searching the datasets on https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/vfilter for any of the keywords: mystical, mysticism, or mystic turns up nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zed.
Unless you can come up with some data to support a correlation between mysticism and mental illness, I think I've done more than my bit to prove the null. This is just another old chestnut to be roasted on the open fires of rational inquiry.
I have Schizoaffective Bipolar Disorder and have spiritual experiences all the time. It's not unhealthy, it's just different. I wish everyone would be themselves and stop trying to be like me.
I'm surprised that as much as 1/8 of people match your rather stringent definition of healthy.
Thought the same, until I remembered 20 years ago you'd have expected the percentages to be reversed. "Nobody" had depression or anxiety, and life satisfaction was considered to be pretty good if you had your health and your family.
Twenty years ago? You mean in 2002? I think the world is more the same than different in this respect, compared to 20 years ago.
It might be that, like me, Radu anchors "a couple decades back" on 1980. :|
Exactly what I was thinking.
:)) Partly that, partly living in a corner of the world that's 10 years behind.
Hmm...in my memory I'd say the earliest 00s are well correlated with the 90s, weakly correlated with the 80s, and fairly distinct from the (current) early 20s.
There is no healthy person, only an insufficiently diagnosed one.
Yeah, I wondered about the family history part. I have a family history of heart disease, but I don't think a cardiologist would here that and say, "OK, your heart's unhealthy." I take it he'd do a checkup. So I don't see why having a bipolar uncle should make a person mentally unhealthy,
Yeah, but Scott was trying to get a population that was inarguably mentally healthy. Without those exclusions you could still worry about confounders, because there is definitely a genetic component.
With those exclusions, you also have to wonder about confounders, as having no history of anything is also atypical.
(Mind you, the population bias dwarfs any & all possible concerns like this. The majority of the sample is highly-educated atheists who tend to have some awareness and interest in rationalism.)
"So I don't see why having a bipolar uncle should make a person mentally unhealthy"
To quote "Arsenic and Old Lace", "Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops!" 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGyfOMCRBn0
Ha! I played a cop in that play back in high school. Fun stuff, but I'm almost certain you can't send someone to Bellevue based on Carey Grant's one liners.
There’s interesting research about the relatives of bipolar people. Those who do not get the actual illness are unusually creative individuals. If you ask them to list as many uses as they can for a brick in 5 mins they come up with more than the average person. And blind ratings of how inventive they are in their work and hobbies are
higher. So having a bipolar uncle isn’t an altogether bad thing.
Same, and frankly I'd be a bit suspicious about the mental health of a person whose whole family is completely clear of depression or anxiety, although the wording on the survey is "clinical depression" and "clinical anxiety disorder". The autism question I think might muck up the results, I'd consider Asperger's to be neutral in terms of mental health, and it's also plausible that autistic people trend heavily one way or another in terms of mystical experiences. Still, I don't think the survey is needed or particularly informative here, schizophrenics, bipolar persons and severe drug addicts would be unlikely to have taken the survey making it impossible to trust a result in the other direction.
Yeah, I agree. I wonder if what some of those people have is a social desirability bias. (Although, holy shit!, you don’t get the feeling that many people who post here have a case of social desirability bias. But Scott’s results were for 8000 people, most of whom must be lurkers. Maybe the lurkers are more invested in presenting as Normal and Nice.)
I guess I need to see a shrink, then. For that matter, it seems that most other cats aren't too healthy, either.
There is nothing wise about that tweet; clinically nor contemplatively. Scott I think you might agree that current DSM definitions might view a whole variety of classic "mystical experiences" of not-self or "oneness" (two examples), as grandiose, narcissistic, psychotic, delusional etc. I won't elaborate as many have done so in very erudite ways. Suffice it to say, any public claim to the mystic, is immediately suspect. Awakened ones never say so and would never accord exclusivity to awakening. All human minds are capable of experiencing awe, wonder, clarity and compassionate regard. Healthy or not.
Possibly worth noting, I would probably answer the survey question with "No" (it would depend a bit on how I define "completely distinct from ordinary life" on the day I took the survey), but I would say I'm "encountering the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" at least once a month.
Yeah, it seems like something that happens frequently enough must be considered part of “normal life”.
That said, I can’t say that this happens to me nearly that much. But then I don’t quite qualify as “very mentally healthy” by Scott’s definition.
Yes, I think there's a possible motte and bailey on the term "mystical" going on here.
Are atheists less likely to have spiritual experiences? Are atheists vastly overrepresented in the annual survey?
I am probably one of 1000 who qualified, and I think I answered "unclear." If I were more religious, I would have probably answered "yes."
I suspect yes. (I don't have a study in hand) However, atheists typically self-select based upon personality traits that don't encourage them to enjoy religion as much (ex: atheists are more disagreeable), and spiritual experiences have elements of social construction.
Almost certainly - once your skepticism and rational thinking is up, you're going to discount many experiences others might think mystical. "That was a weird and interesting experience" after some hallucinogenic intake, rather than "God/Fifth-Dimensional-Aliens spoke to me!"
But Scott's survey question has a caveat about "Regardless of whether or not you believe it indicated anything meaningful..."
Can it really still be considered "mystical", in that case? That makes no sense to me.
I wonder if atheists' mystical experiences are as *memorable* to them? When I was trying to decide whether to continue as a Christian or become an atheist, I vetted my religious experiences ruthlessly, and the small handful that couldn't be explained away and that appeared truly mystical, I saved up in my mind like jewels in a chest. If I'd been a contented longtime atheist, might I have said "well the brain sure is weird" and moved on, and decades later answered no on the survey because the moment simply didn't come to mind? Maybe.
Also, studies show that believers have a stronger tendency to see purpose or intention in things (indeed, this is very likely part of why they are believers in the first place). So you would expect atheists to experience fewer mystical items.
I looked at the survey data. Nonreligious are overrepresented, 71.3% are atheist or agnostic, 9.6% atheist but spiritual, 19.0% theist/pantheist/other.
Nonreligious are less likely to have had spiritual experiences. Atheists and agnostics are 12.6% yes and 16.0% maybe/unclear to the spiritual question, "atheist but spiritual” are 39.2% yes and 22.2% maybe, religious are 41.0% yes and 23.0% maybe.
The mental health trend from the post exists in all the subgroups though, e.g. “very mentally healthy” nonreligious have 25.0% yes/unclear spiritual experiences vs 33.3% outside the mentally healthy group, mentally healthy religious have 61.8% yes/unclear vs 69.2% outside group.
Thanks so much for looking into it!
My original question was motivated by the following line of thinking: among readers interested in ACX, I think two groups might complicate the findings.
First, many people are here because they are part of the Less Wrong Diaspora. In some ways, these people are an outgrowth of the New Atheist movement that was popular circa 2005 and therefore are more likely to be atheists.
Second, as a psychiatry blog, some other fraction of people is drawn here because they are interested in mental health. My intuition is that people who are very interested in mental health are more likely than average to experience mental health issues. (A generalization, but I assume there is some positive correlation).
So when we survey SSC readers, we may find a positive correlation between atheism and good mental health when none may exist in the general population—a form of Berkson’s Paradox.
If atheists are less likely to have spiritual experiences, then that correlation transfers. We find that spiritual experiences are less likely in the mentally healthy, even if this isn’t true in the general population.
But you have found that the trend holds for the mentally-healthy religious subgroup, which militates against this interpretation.
How much of “mentally healthy” is socially constructed? Isn’t this question dependent on choosing a value system for comparing minds I order to determine which states are “healthy”?
That's also very challenging. The use of a cutoff line is hard, especially since similar subjective states are likely to result in varying numerical results.
Also, the people who have no family history of anything may (in some weird sense) not be representative of the healthy people with some weird background.
Of course, given the limitations of the SSC survey, it's not clear if doing all of those different studies has value.
I think that the tweet (that I don't particularly agree with) is a provocative way of trying to say that mystical experiences are a part of human experience, so it is better to have a capability for them, rather than just to be "healthy" in the mental health sense of "lacking pathology".
Good point. I can see an argument that Genghis Khan had the most mentally healthy state possible, and all of us here (I hope) deviate from that so much that we could not possibly be called healthy.
The problem I have with this is the conflation of the spiritual with the mystical. I'm going to assume that this is due to the current tendency towards materialism in human neurobiology and a disposition towards seeing human consciousness entirely in terms of electro-chemical processes. The mind is real even though it is not physical. Ideas are identifiably responses to physical reality and have consequences in physical reality through the role they play in guiding our actions. This is reflected in our emotions and the role they play in our evaluations of our physical sensations. All of this is to say that you don't need to appeal to the supernatural or the mystical in explaining the spiritual. Human beings are capable of a far wider range of experiences that require no mystical or supernatural explanation than some are willing to give us credit for. If somebody's feeling better than you think they can, look for the reason in that person's own life rather than religion.
Odd, low-key humble brag posing as a "take." Since links have been shown between childhood trauma/adversity and potentially bipolar disorder and higher creativity, seems like it would be more likely to go the other way.
There are a bunch of reasons why the SSC survey wouldn’t reflect the population as a whole, but the one that most jumps out to me is that the respondents are 88% male.
I get that this is a pretty informal analysis and you’re not submitting this to Nature or anything, but I still feel like you should flag this as a huge caveat. As it stands, this feels a bit like Malcolm Gladwell taking an experiment performed on a dozen affluent college students, and interpreting the results as some deep statement about humanity as a whole.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
It does seem that the tweet is asserting that mental health includes having a healthily functioning mystical experience module.
But it also seems that "mystical experience" is being defined as things causing awe and wonderment, which seems like it might encompass a larger circle of experience than "spiritual connectedness/profundity/presence".
The original tweet you posted is a subjective definition of "mentally healthy". That makes sense as a phrase even if the overall claim.feels a bit bogus but kinda true.
But then you try to quantify it to study it. Doesn't make sense to me. This phrase cannot be defined precisely. What's the point in asking someone to rate (say) their happiness? You ask them on a different day they could come up with a 5/10 instead of 7/10. You simply cannot quantify something that you cannot define uniquely.
Not every question can be studied scientifically.
Happiness is subjective, which is what is being measured. These are common psychological type questions.
Right. I object to studying psychology using science.
I’m not sure happiness is the same as mental health. In fact, I think a lot of people who put happiness first end up mentally unhealthy.
Have to say this makes me feel a bit better about mine. I don’t talk about it in real life as I didn’t have a great childhood and my mental health history isn’t great.
Didn’t believe in God before it, but then afterward I did. Not some guy who is arbitrarily capricious and lives on a cloud or whatever, but a force behind the universe.
Lots of semantic nitpicking is possible here. I consider my experience as mystical when I'm relaxed and not ruminating (mentally healthy state?). It's light, spacious and beautiful and if I lean into it, blissful. Happened today whine driving for example. I better go have another one now.
Edit:Am I mentally healthy? Depends.. I get anxious and do spend time ruminating until I catch myself. Also, caveat, I need to meditate relatively regularly in order to be able to access these states in my day today life. It gets much harder if I fall off the bandwagon.
Very. But why is that mystical?
That's why I mentioned the semantics. In my opinion, being spacious, as in losing subject-object perspective, forgetting the self and being suffused with joy counts as mystical
Yeah, that’s it in the lightest sense. The lowest level raised form of consciousness is typically referred to as “being in the zone” in contemporary parlance. It’s when you’re so good/professional at something that you lose yourself in it and in the process, perform at a very high level without thinking much about it.
It's different from being in the zone since I know what they feels like too. Also It's a matter of degree. In that sense you could call enlightenment "being in the zone" since it's about losing your sense of self.
It’s poor epistemic practice to use this level of confidence/certainty in your answer. You’re basing your answer on a survey that is highly unrepresentative of the general population and that has had no corrections applied to fix that issue, as far as I can tell.
You are being nitpicky, so I will also be nitpicky - technically you only need one counterexample to prove a universal statement to be wrong.
That isn't a nitpick!!!!!!!!
Also, semantically, overly universal statements are not expected to be interpreted in a strictly logical manner!
Simpson's paradox, though (which is not really a paradox).
Lots of people suggested possible confounders, but I suppose it's nice to know this hypothesis doesn't seem to apply to Astral Codex Ten readership
I've had such experiences only while on drugs. It is tempting to think that the drugs allow you to perceive truths you wouldn't be able to perceive otherwise.
But the evolved nature of brains means that easy, trivial mental improvements are unlikely to exist - evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills (opportunities for easy improvements) sooner or later, until no more exist.
Just from that observation, it's pretty clear that drugs can only break a healthy mind in various perhaps-interesting ways, not make it work better. So any "truths" discovered via mind-altering drugs are unlikely to be true. (Drugs may be able to mitigate problems in unhealthy minds.)
Re any revelatory mystical experiences, see how many result in any verifiably true knowledge afterward. My experience is zero. (Doesn't mean it wasn't fun.)
n=1
Easy, trivial mental improvements are totally likely to exist, if you define the improved metric differently from what evolution maximizes, which is survival and reproduction. “Perceiving truths you wouldn’t be able to perceive otherwise” might very well be one such metric. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get drugs that cause these improvements, but evolution doesn’t rule them out.
If the drugs can induce it, you can get there without them. They are helpful for showing you places you can go without any effort on your part, but the basic materials for building that experience are somewhere inside still.
That’s a good sound bite, but citation needed. It’s clearly *not* the case for drugs that address physical medical conditions. For an extreme example consider a poison that kills you, by stopping your heart or disrupting your ability to breathe; you can’t replicate that effect just by thinking hard enough. (And no, I don’t believe yogis can stop their own heart.)
I would not be surprised if there is something like what you said that is true. But it needs refining.
Actually, I read a mindfulness book that cautioned about that. It takes some real effort but...
Yes, EVEN MEDITATION can be dangerous!
I'll look for the passage if you are interested.
Heh. I still don’t believe it.
Well, whether an advanced meditative can affect the autonomic nervous system could, I would think, be verified or disproved with empirical inquiry.
This isn't mysticism though which is a product of reason and intuition, or so I've read. Much harder to nail down but I do think 'better' starts with Know Thyself - if you were to ask! : )
It is interesting though, how some very accomplished people say LSD had an important influence in their discoveries.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/amazing-drug-discoveries
You all make good points. I think I was wrong above - the ancestral environment was very different from today's, and our conscious goals can be different from what evolution tuned our brains for.
I concede that cannabis seems to genuinely improve musical perception and creativity, at least in some people (presumably at some cost in other kinds of cognition, but so what - the drug wears off after a while). If so, I suppose that disproves my conclusion above at least in that one case.
I've never tried LSD. I'd very much like to.
I think one way of looking at drugs that might help understand their usefulness is looking at them like temporary buffs and debuffs on your stat. For example, amphetamines could be <single task focus +10, perception of your surroundings -20>. If you're an office worker, your task could be dependant at 90% on single task focus and at 0.1% on perception of your surroundings. Even if amphetamines were technically a total -10, on this specific task it's a +8.98.
The standard counterpoint to the generally valid argument "evolution picks up such dropped $100 bills sooner or later, until no more exist." is that there are many possible improvements that expend extra energy or cause extra activity; from the perspective of hominid evolution something that gets 1% "generic improvement" at the cost of 2% extra calorie expenditure is a horribly bad tradeoff; but from the perspective of modern humans that would be the equivalent of a dropped $100 bill.
I agree with Scott that the tweet is false as stated.
But I also think the tweet is an example of a rhetorically inflated claim for which there might be a more modest and precise version that is both true and significant.
It is a common feature of public discourse, especial on a forum like Twitter, that many people prefer a rhetorically inflated version of a claim, thinking that it "makes the point" more strongly. My view is that such inflated versions are just easier to defeat and then dismiss, as Scott has done, while leaving the underlying issue untouched.
A more modest version of the claim might be "Among the mentally healthy, mystical experiences are not rare."
I replied to another comment above to say this also -- I have encountered the idea in this tweet at least a dozen separate times in new age circles. In my experience it is meant exactly as stated -- that there is something suboptimal/wrong if you aren't have eg. Unbelievable coincidences regularly.
Not saying I agree. I'm glad to see pushback on a claim that (unintentionally I believe) creates a scorecard for people to be judged/judge themselves
As I said, I agree with Scott and you that the tweet in false as stated. If many New Agers hold this idea as stated, then they're wrong too. Is that idea worth refuting? Maybe.
But this observation doesn't really touch my point.
my intention in replying with that information was to point out that the original claim was stated as such not to make a rhetorically inflated version of a claim but because that specific inflated version is actually what is meant, not to sound better on twitter, but because thats what they believe and its that idea specifically that needs to be refuted. and yes, i think the idea is worth refuting as i have seen it do harm.
I'm not disputing that the person who wrote that tweet really intended exactly what they stated, nor that there are also many other such people who believe such, nor that the claim as stated is worth refuting.
For the purpose of the point I'm making, I'm not focused on what those people intend or believe.
I'm saying that the claim is rhetorically inflated in relation to a *distinct* claim, and that this distinct claim could well be correct.
There’s no basis on which to posit that opinion. I hate when people generalize their own experience. I wonder how mentally healthy a person that feels compelled to relay to the world that they’re mentally healthy as opposed to others can be.
There’s some cultural evidence it’s an inaccurate tweet as well. Has this person never heard of a “dark night of the soul”? Here’s my theory, based on experience:
It comes on most often at the extremities. I’m not talking about a numinous moment or anything; I mean a bonafide experience. Whether you’re really ecstatic or really depressed, you’re vulnerable enough to see beyond out at the distant peripheries of emotion & awareness.
As others have pointed out there may be some validity issues here with either Scott's survey or whatever instrument generated the data that inspired the Tweet above. However, putting that aside, one pretty obvious confounding variable here is whether or not people where high when they had the experience.
I don't think I've ever had anything that approximates a mystical experience, EXCEPT a few times in my younger days when I was dosed on blotter acid. And it's hard to know how that variable (high on, say, LSD, or MDMA, or whatever that drug is that they drink in South America and makes you throw up (William Burroughs called it Yage, I think it goes by another name now), etc) interacts with the 'healthy mind' variable.
Yes since I am the mystical kind, in a way built my life around the sense of mystical encounter, and credit it with my recovery from a difficult time when I was young and for helping me to recover from my mental health problems and be able to hold together marriage and raise children, sample size of one obviously. So how about separating out 'before' problems such as childhood and family history from current level of distress? Do people who have had mystical encounters tend to show improvement on their mental health metrics since that encounter? If anything perhaps people who've had difficult circumstances might be more likely to want or need to seek out the mystical.
Instrumentalizing "mystical experiences happen when the mind is healthy" is by itself challenging. The interpretations of it go on endlessly, given that a mystic in a non-mystical society is unlikely to feel healthy, but allowing social pressure to dictate intrinsic mental markers of wellness would seemingly defeat the point.
Using the SSC dataset is unlikely to help. You have a population that skews high-IQ, high-education, non-religious. In a social setting where religiosity is unpopular, mystical experience would likely be socially undesirable. A healthy person *should* suppress any tendency towards a mystical experience, both in terms of rewriting memory, and in terms of suppressing the tendency going forward.
(Also, I would bet that SSC members self-select to tend to score low on tests like Absorption relative to the base population. A population that focuses on intellectual detachment from their ideas, is very to select against people who hear God whisper from the clouds.)
That being said, I agree with your conclusion. I just don't think we can reliably de-bias the potential intrinsic biases in your sampling. Ironically, I think in order to trust the SSC dataset, we'd need to prove the claim with a different dataset, and thereby negate the value of using the SSC dataset.
How about a survey of happiness based on youthful head injuries? All the skaters I knew that didn’t go too druggy seem pretty well adjusted. My theory is we simply don’t remember all the ways we were aggrieved in Junior High to carry that emotional baggage as adults.
The original tweet feels more prescriptive, (probably based on the writer's personal experience & intuition), than an attempt at an honest observation of the world based on careful analysis. So I feel like their response to you, even if they accepted your poll as validly scientific, would be "Who cares whether people think they are mentally healthy? If they aren't having mystical experiences, then they are not."
If the Dark Night of the Soul is a thing, your "no personal history of anxiety or depression" criterion is going to run into it.
Anyhoo, isn't this originating in Maslow's "peak experiences", and him (I think) writing that it seemed to be a thing happening the most to healthy people?
Not to say I disagree, but I never trust people that self report as mentally healthy. It's very easy to repress yourself, and then outwardly you look mostly fine, inwardly you think you feel fine, but you're not really. I know people that display symptoms of anxiety and depression, but they self report as mentally healthy and get defensive when pressed. A tenuous grasp on a belief.
Unless you have a very special kind of mind, mystical experiences are few and far between. It's not surprising most people haven't had them. I'd be interested in seeing how this stat changes with age; have older people had mystical experiences more than younger people?
The real question is whether the people taking the survey (or those who made it or who try to interpret the results) have any idea what a "mystical" or "religious" experience is, or how it differs from mental illness, or whether they're even using a consistent definition. I would guess the answer, for the most part, is "no", which means the data set is basically meaningless.
I am an atheist, but once when I was in a church in London looking at mural of Joan of Arc, I had this feeling that it somehow made more sense to believe that she (and by extension the other saints, and God) still existed and was aware of me, than to believe that it isn't so. Somehow that it makes more sense to believe that everything is preserved rather than passing away. I wonder whether this is a "spiritual experience". I didn't have an altered state of consciousness or anything. Nor was I filled with conviction, and it didn't feel that disconnected from normal life, even though it was unusual. I felt for a while that it was possible to see things from a different perspective than my usual one.
"Mystical experiences naturally occur" seems like the sort of thing you can only say if you don't think mystical experiences are objectively meaningful, or you're defining them so broadly that they might as well be meaningless. It smacks of therapeutic deism. What is the purpose of these experiences? What do you learn from them? What do they do to you?
We know that drugs, for example, can consistently induce the feeling of meaningfulness or transcendence. I don't think this disproves the existence of something transcendent - any more than artificially inducing a phantom smell of smoke would disprove fire - but it should raise your bar for assuming that any perceived encounter with the numinous is worth anything.
(Cards on the table: I'm a fundie and that's why this stuff raises my hackles.)
It isn't necessarily connected that being religious means experiencing spiritual events or having mystical experiences. It does depend on the strain of religion one is immersed in; the 'signs and wonders' type will select for having (or thinking you are having, or working yourself up to have) mystical experiences frequently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signs_and_wonders
Whereas Catholicism, in my experience of it, is much more pragmatic: you may not be having visions of the mystic Host at Mass, that doesn't matter. Say your prayers and get on with living a holy life as best you can, as a person living in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_of_Saint_Gregory
And indeed the types who do have 'mystic visions' are regarded with great dubiety, as this person found at random:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK5pD7Lqjqs
That's why Reformers like Martin Luther were, in a sense, spoiled mystics; with the emphasis on adult conversion experiences where you would have a personal sense of the presence of God and be convinced not by cold intellectualism but by going through something like being 'born again', having that moment of enlightenment, as he describes it in his own 'conversion experience': suddenly understanding a phrase that makes it all different, brings him alive, gives him the warmth of love for God:
https://theaquilareport.com/story-martin-luthers-conversion/
I'm reminded of a passage in Marcus Aurelius's famous "Medications," in which he says (paraphrasing greatly) "the gods may be good and righteous, but they're important busy folks, and you shouldn't expect them to look in on little ol' you all the time, cheer you up, solve your small problems. You need to work out how to stay reasonably content and get along with people on your own, so let's get to it."
Psychologist here: Big sweeping generalizations like the tweeter’s almost never turn out to be more than a little true. At most you’ll find a weak relationship between the traits at issue. People’s traits aren’t organized into columns, so to speak — with traits in the same column showing high correlations among pairs of them. Traits aren’t even organized into grids, with traits in the same square correlated. In fact, the whole idea of traits is kind of suspect. Everyone realizes this when they take some questionnaire that asks questions like, “Are you bold or timid?” “Well,” you think, “I’m bold in some situations and timid in others,” and that variability of characteristic behavior across situations is the norm. That’s why we all know people who are deeply wise and clever in their work but foolish in love relationships, people with hyperconventional homes and habits who are Burning Mfan fanatics, martial arts monsters who are passionate about growing African violets, etc. In fact, I think it may be that when somebody tends to act a certain way in all situations, that’s a sign of something amiss. Say somebody has high standards for themselves at their work and then when you introduce them to square dancing you see the same high standards kick in — their struggle fiercely to free themselves of typical novice mistakes — you might feel like something’s amiss? It’s just square dancing, for heaven’s sake, relax — right? It’s adaptive to have a different mind set in different situations, and when somebody doesn’t the lack of flexibility comes across as a bit unhealthy. So all this makes me doubt that a certain *kind* of person has mystical experiences. There are probably many paths to having them.
I am definitely subject to the oceanic experience Scott asked about. My teens and 20’s were the peak years for having it, but now in later years it still visits me from time to time. It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt. I usually feel a wave of goosebumps when I have it, and often shed tears as well. So I’m trying to figure out why I’m subject to it. I expect some of it is wiring, but a kind of wiring that’s unrelated to mental health of illness — just a wiring for intensity. My father was an artist, and used to shake his head in frustration when he tried to convey how much he loved certain painters’ work — “they’re just . . . they’re just . . .wonderful,” he’d say. I think he was subject to a sort of visual ecstasy. And I was an only child, and used to entertaining myself and walking around thinking my own thoughts, and therefore maybe more likely to stumble into a moment when I looked at the sky and thought “space extends forever in every direction, and here’s this bush right here, and me looking at it all, it doesn’t mean a thing and here we all are.” And that thought sounds sort of bleak, maybe, but in fact was accompanied by a shiver of indescribable delight. Yum.
I love this.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”
Well.....
I wouldn't think 1/8th of people are extremely mentally healthy any more then I think 1/8 people are professional athlete levels of strength training with ability to run a mile in a few minutes or lift their body weight. Pre-corona helps but, I think it would be rose tainted for people to say that 2020 society was going well.
This may offend someone formally trained in physiology but the perception in 4chan related community's is that autism and schizo is a spectrum and there plenty of reason to expect that a autism biased sample may have less schizo related experience. And "ssc" while probably not as bad a sample as lesswrong and looking at the data its biased towards autism and atheists.
If your in a hard line atheist community where people would react negatively to having a mystical experience it seems likely to me that a) people would downplay it b) feel shame and rate their mental health as 1 less then the max even if they are otherwise doing great
Your spirituality question specifies an "extreme" experience, the tweet is about routine experience. I think (common) meditation would never qualify for the first, but could easy qualify for the 2nd.
etc. etc. I think that take plenty defensible, and think a specific survey for the general public is done before calling it false. (altho Id probably specifically include mediation as a spiritual experience)
You just defined 'mystical experience' differently from what the tweet is trying to convey. There's no discrepancy here.
I think there's probably some selection bias here.
In the general population, religiosity may be correlated both with better mental health (due to sense of community, sense that God is looking out for you, etc.) and greater tendency towards spiritual experiences (due to greater tendency to attribute things to God), which would explain the tweet.
ACT readers are more likely to want to analyze all of their experiences logically in great detail (I think this is the one underlying theme in this community), regardless of religious affiliation. Conditioned on this, relatively few people will find conclusive evidence of mystical experiences, regardless of their mental health.
I'm going to be a grumpy old misery-guts here, and put forward that the twitterer there has no truck with God (other than some kind of Vague Deity Concept that is all kumbayah and never makes any kinds of demands).
There may indeed be religiosity involved, but it's the secular sort of "yoga, mindfulness, do all this healthy lifestyle stuff, and sprinkle in a little secular wonderment (of the kind encapsulated in the Sagan quote below) and a little trendy spirituality and wrap it all up in the kind of therapy jargon most of the audience for this have absorbed"; hence 'a truly healthy mind would constantly be experiencing a higher level of awareness of the beauty and wonder in the natural world around us'. It's a way of being a toffee-nosed snob but without sounding overtly like one.
Sagan quotes:
""It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."
— "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" (Ballantine Books, 1997)
(Note the pooh-poohing of conventional religion here; science, you see, is so much *better* and *higher* than the harp-playing static heaven of popular culture. Sagan, to be fair to him, wasn't an out-and-out enemy of religion, but he still had the same attitude towards it as others of the scientific mindset):
"For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence."
— "Can We Know the Universe?" in M. Gardner (ed.), "The Sacred Beetle and Other Great Essays in Science" (Plume, 1986)
So the tweet fits in well here: the mystical is the sense of the unknown which is, at the same time, knowable by us being thinking beings, and well-adjusted non-neurotic truly healthy minds would experience that as a normal event. We get to eat our cake and have it.
I don't think this is Sagan being (even somewhat) anti-religious as much as his response to spiritual and/or religious people who are anti-science, in terms of thinking science boring and leeching the beauty and wonder out of life. I'm thinking of things like Whitman's poem poo-pooing the Learned Astronomer. C.S. Lewis is also full of this. Many scientists with a gift for creative writing have responded with testimony to the beauty and wonder to be found in a scientific view, Sagan and Isaac Asimov among them.
Anecdatapoint: I would regard myself as fairly mentally healthy, modulo some occasional intrusive thoughts. One time I had a experience that seems possibly in the same category, depending on how we're defining "mystical". I had just gotten back from lunch (cheeseburger and a soda, no alcohol or any other psychoactive substances consumed) and an extremely strong feeling of peace, calm, and contentment suddenly came over me. I probably sat in the parking garage for five minutes just blissed out on it before going inside, and it continued for probably another 20 or 30 minutes. Eventually it mostly subsided, but my mood stayed a bit elevated for the rest of the day.
I'm guessing it was just some chance fluke of biochemistry, but I'd never felt anything like that before or since, and until that point the day had been otherwise unremarkable. I could definitely imagine someone with a more spiritual mindset than I do having a comparable experience and interpreting it in a mystical way.
Seems to me your definition of "mentally healthy" could use some interrogation/explanation. For example, why are no family history or even personal history of depression inclusion/exclusion criteria?
Why do you count autism as excluding someone from being mentally healthy
Imagine making this tweet from the perspective of someone who frequently has mystical experiences: if those experiences stopped, you’d feel like you were missing out on something fundamental—something obviously went wrong. You conclude that people who don’t have these experiences probably also have something wrong. Is your generalization ad-hoc or just narrow-minded?
You see the results of the survey. You look at the criteria for “very mentally healthy” and object that it’s too narrow. A person with schizoid personality disorder, or a narcissist, or a psychopath could meet those criteria—something’s missing. Maybe spiritual receptiveness is also missing.
~~~~~~(end imagination)
Again, it depends on the definition of "mystical" that whomever is using. From a religious angle, this is why the Church is very dubious about self-described mystics. Someone regularly having mystical experiences may be the real deal, or they could be anything from self-deluded to crazy to faking it for personal benefit.
Scott's approach is not the wrong one. The first barrier to cross is "are you nuts?" (to be blunt), then discernment can happen.
I agree with Scott, who knows about 100x more than me about this subject and is twice as thoughtful.
I guess I’m trying to explore here whether there’s a sort of (very loose) comparison to be made with the “neurodiversity movement.”
You have group A who think they function fine, and another group, B, who claim group A is missing out on something very important.
A<B and you get a movement to lobby for A.
A>B and society just chugs along with some B posting hot takes on Twitter.
Self described mystics can be very dubious about the church, too.
If you are in a buddhist monastery, there is a reasonable chance that the Abbot has had more and better Satoris..but who are theologians to judge?
"So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”. "
Well, yeah: this tweet sounds just like one of those "spiritual, not religious, eat pray love, live laugh love, I do yoga and mindfulness, life is such a beautiful gift (when you're well-off, healthy, and have only First World Problems), amn't I so special unlike those vulgar earth-bound moles who don't have numinous experiences every five minutes?"
It does very much depend on your definition of "mystical", but to be frank, it reminds me of the entire wellness, self-help, Chicken Soup for your budgie, industry. Go out on your deck at dawn with your cup of artisan coffee and take a deep breath as you marvel at the beauty around you before you start your day's work as an influencer or whatever.
The world is beautiful and wonderful. but you don't have to make a production out of it, Saskia.
(This is also why I can never make any headway with those mental health therapy-lite self-help books, they're full of crap like this: "if we were truly healthy and grounded and aware of our connection to the cosmos as stardust beings, we'd be having mystic crystal revelations all the time").
I feel like the answers from the survey you used are to a question that is phrased rather significantly differently from what you were inquiring about, _and_ that the tweet phrases it rather differently than the thing I suspect they're actually talking about. So... Not surprised by the result but I don't think anything was learned here.
The assumption built into the original tweet reminds me of the famous exchange from Life of Brian:
"You are all individuals!"
"I'm not."
Without a definition, I can't know if I've had such an experience or not.
Is it a "you'll know when you've had it" kind of thing?
I'm going to try and express my perspective for you!
It can be both.
You can have it without knowing you've had it. Spiritual experiences are a human endeavor, not a rationalist one. We don't have to think about spirituality to have a spiritual experience. If we don't think then you "don't know", but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I think many people unlearn how to connect and have these experiences as they develop (gg society), and then try to understand it through language and attain it through various modalities of healing. The best language can do is try to communicate the experience, but the words are not the experience. They are signposts that point in that direction. When you arrive like I did... you feel it profoundly, and for me it was so indescribable and fulfilling that I knew i had arrived before the thought expressing that knowledge arrived. So I knew when I had it because I was trying to have it, but thinking and trying is not a requirement to having it.
"Good mental health" and "mystical experiences" sound oxymoronic. Get real and get checked.
I suppose it depends on how good you are at describing beauty. Or, more sensibly, that it's not clear whether a mystical exprience is best defined as a quale or as reaction to a quale.
I stopped reading at: "For this analysis..."
"The whole secret of life lies in the discovery of this Tao which can never be discovered. This does not involve an intellectual quest, but rather a spiritual change of one's whole being."
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
[This book contrasts and compares selected categories of mystics and on this point they agree (to the extent I understand what I'm reading!)]
As a child of the 1960s I have along-term interest in mystical experience. As a musician I have a particular interest in mystical experience induced by music. Here's an experience I had back in the ancient days:
During the early 1970s I’d played for two years with a rock band called “St. Matthew Passion” – a 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet, trombone. On “She’s Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.
On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn’t make it. We started and got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good. And I got scared, tensed up, and it was over. After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it—“that was nice”—enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been.
That was a powerful experience. It "haunted" me for years.
That’s the only time I’ve ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but fearing it. But the memories faded & the ambivalence too. I’m playing better than I ever did. What I can now do on a routine basis exceeds what I did back then.
I've been keeping a document where I collect accounts of altered states of musical consciousness: https://www.academia.edu/16881645/Emotion_and_Magic_in_Musical_Performance_Version_10
This is interesting as well, though not necessarily about mystical experience in music: https://www.academia.edu/11767211/The_Magic_of_the_Bell_How_Networks_of_Social_Actors_Create_Cultural_Beings
I think there's a massive difference between encountering something "strange" or "beautiful", and having a mystical experience. For example, I have personally encountered fields of wildflowers that left me almost totally incoherent with their beauty ("they should've sent a poet !"). However, they were not supernatural objects. There was no fairy glamour involved, just biological organisms doing what they do. Other people could see the same flowers. So could bees and other insects. An object does not need to be mystically supernatural in order to be beautiful; in fact, I'd argue that real things are often more beautiful than anything we can imagine.
>An object does not need to be mystically supernatural in order to be beautiful;
Mystical is not an object state.
It is a deeply felt perception.
Half-baked take: effective mysticism improves and maintains your life. Effective mystical experiences lead toward having a healthy mind. Therefore, while not strictly speaking "false", the claim is causally misleading.
Great point. I have more confidence that "effective mystical experiences" support healthier states of mind than the idea that healthier states of mind support the experiences. That being said, I think both are true and I think there is a positive feedback loop.
Personal anecdote: I had no spiritual connection and was stuck in my head. After 18 months of trauma recovery work, I managed to regain my spiritual connection during acupuncture. I believe that my improved mental health helped allow for that to happen. I can't say if I would have regained that connection or not without the other work. Once reconnected.... oh my. The positive feedback loop is real, and the line between "me" and "spirituality" is growing thinner and thinner because we spiritual beings at our core and I am getting ever closer to my own core self.
Why does a mental illness generations back in my family history count against my decades of personally flawless mental health?
It does and it doesn't, only you can answer that. I criticized this take in my own top level comment.
I'll also note... this is a community is predominantly composed of people who tend to think first and feel second (if at all). When these kind of half-baked analyses and takes come out, I listen to my intuition and move on. I have read many of Scott's post on mental health and rarely find myself in alignment with him and the way he talks about it. I don't think he gets it, I don't think most people get it. The human experience is not a rationalist endeavor.
Mystical experiences are often associated with the mentally ill -- for good reason.
But *maybe* the exceptionally healthy can also experience more mystical experiences than healthy normies.
Once upon a time, I followed a mostly raw instinctive eating diet. My dreams were brighter on the diet, and I could achieve certain meditative bliss states with little effort. I suspect that my experience was similar to those who go on long fasts. In both cases the body gets to get rid of troublesome molecular fragments generated by cooking.
But eating mostly raw/unmixed/by instinct had similar downsides as long fasting: weight loss, social isolation, and assorted cravings. So I quit after a time.
Based upon my experience, I believe thati it is possible to be healthier than normal and experience some interesting mystical bliss out states. But it is not easy! The foods on our grocery store shelves were selected more for ease of growing and storage, vs. edibility in a raw natural state. And maybe the foods which sustained humans before we adopted cooking are now extinct. So maybe it is only possible to achieve the states I experienced temporarily -- then the need for Real Food beats out the beauties of Bliss.
The Science isn't settled.
I think the issue is as much “mystical experience” as “mentally healthy”.
I consider myself mentally healthy, and consider that I have these sorts of experiences (numinous, indescribably beautiful); I just don’t see any reason to wrap them in woo and call them “mystical”, and I expect I’m not alone in this.
One obvious way to square the circle is that it is perfectly plausible for a guy to be struck numb by and stand in awe before some vast natural wonder, then months later take the survey and answer the question “no” because he thinks of saints and gurus and religious fanatics and so on when he thinks about “spiritual” events.
I predict that the rates of reported musical experiences will increase on this year's survey now that Scott has been blogging about jhanas.
Been talking to God since early childhood.
If you asked child-me, that definetely was a profound and blissful experience, though not distinct from normal life - after all it was and absolutely normal thing to do. Back then I'd classify myself as very mental healthy based on these criterias.
Now I figured out that it wasn't God - just my own brain and that I'm autistic. Putting myself in the God-communicating-stance isn't profound anymore, though it can be somewhat pleasant. Not sure how to count this as evidence in favour or agaist the hypothesis.
I'll try to save something the original claim by making a much less general one: I think people that feel wonder and awe at their place in the universe tend to be more fulfilled and happy people, and vice versa. I don't have data but it feels right when I think about people I know, as well as my own ups and downs.
I think you can be mentally 'healthy' without being fulfilled and happy, in the "nothing explicitly wrong with you" kind of way that Scott's data captures, but it's a "ships in harbour are safe" kind of health that I don't think is in the spirit of the tweet.
I also think wonder and awe are better descriptors for the thing the tweeter is getting at – if I stand on a mountaintop and look out at a view that takes my breath away and take a few minutes to just marvel at it all, I don't _really_ consider myself to have had a mystical experience, but I would have done back when I was religious. The mental state is the same though in either case, so I think the more directly descriptive language is better than talking about "mystical experiences" and bringing in all that baggage.
And yeah maybe this all waters down something obviously false to something vacuously true, but we shouldn't be surprised that it all adds up to reality.
I don't think his claim is true, but I also don't think you chose the right measure. I think, in fact, the measure you chose is probably anti correlated? Specifically, you're largely measuring whether people have had an easy time in life in addition to reporting that they are currently having a good time, but it seems to me that like ~everything else with humans, we get good in domains where we've had some resistance, but not too much. Ie. practice within some zone of proximal development. Life is hard sometimes, and to maintain mental health it's important you have some practice maintaining that health against resistance.
I'm not saying it's necessary to go through a hard time in order to be healthy, but I also think going through a medium-hard time in the past is probably correlated with mental health, not anti correlated.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusion, because I think your analysis is bad and I declare a mistrial.
1) Your defined categories don't align with what the tweet is saying
> Someone qualified as very mentally healthy if they said they had no personal or family history of depression, anxiety, or autism, rated their average mood and life satisfaction as 7/10 or higher, and rated their childhood at least 7/10 on a scale from very bad to very good. Of about 8000 respondents, only about 1000 qualified as “very mentally healthy”.
You are characterizing a person as healthy or not and this is not equivalent to a healthy state of mind. A person is not their state of mind. It is common for people's minds to occupy healthy and unhealthy states.
I'll also note, I would have to respond as "not healthy" since I have a severe trauma history... but I would describe myself as mentally health as a result of all the work I have done. 1-1 and Group Therapy (Modalities include: CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, Art, Music), somatic experiencing and breath work, acupuncture, PT, long distance running and swimming, meditation and mindfulness, spiritual practices, more time outside, emotional support dog, improving sleep and diet habits... I could go on.
2) Sample Bias
It was a SSC Survey. It is important to note that this community is full of thinkers. I would posit that this community will have less spiritual experiences than a more representative sample of the overall human population, regardless of how they self-assess
3) Inability to evaluate respondent understanding of the survey and self-assessment
i.e. What does a "spiritual experience" and the definition you provided mean to someone else?
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
And here, you share your result while dismissing other interpretations of the tweet as "hokey ad hoc". To me the other errors and complications are understandable, but this conclusion feels callous and close minded to me. It is an interesting idea and I would love to explore it more.
I am mentally healthy modulo some ADHD, and am prone to a lot of mystical experiences (I mean, in the class usually called 'mystical'; I don't endorse supernatural explanations). They're much more common when I push myself to extremes of one sort or another, such that my body is already in an altered state. Like, one of the more dramatic recent ones was after three days backpacking in the desert, I got a persistent hallucination of an angry face in the middle of my field of view. It was soundless but expressive, with lots of glowing tentacles writhing in a network overlaid across my normal vision. It came with a powerful sense of dread, and lasted for hours.
This is pretty typical- physical sustained extremes involving exposure and probably dehydration, absence of normal stimulus like phones or computer screens, and experiences displaying a mix of sensory hallucination and intense affective disruptions with a particular focus on facial and anthropomorphic pareidolia. I and my immediate family are also, as it happens, really prone to visual snow and tinnitus, so this happens in parallel with a brain that seems to have a lot of 'noise' between the perceptive and interpretive layers- and meditation can also be really intense for me, if less 'narrative'. To my knowledge, we don't have a history of schizophrenia or anything though.
So my general feeling as that mystical experiences have less to do with mental health in the traditional sense and more about what your brain does in response to getting whacked real hard- neurological crisis response for the weirdest 1-2% of times. Having spent a fair amount of time in the desert, I'm not at all surprised that so many major world religions seem to originate in them.
Wow, Scott, usually you're very good at steel-manning others' positions—but, just as your "Cheat Sheet For Reading Popular Media Articles About Psychiatry" was an outlier in terms of intellectual rigor, so too does this post come short of the rigor I usually expect from your posts:
Of course, you're perfectly free to define the artificial category of "very mentally healthy" however you want; however, that doesn't mean that others have to accept that definition. First, I question the rigor of relying on what people "say" their history is. What if a person has a "history of autism" purely because their parents interpreted their anti-authoritarian instincts as "mental illness" and fed one-sided, biased information to a psychiatrist? Why do some people's biases of normative behavior constitute a "history" of a lack of "mental health" on another person's part? Why is someone's reporting anxiety and depression considered a lack of "mental health," rather than merely evidence of the inherent tragedy and difficulty of human existence? (I note that, conveniently, you've defined "mental health," or, rather, a lack thereof, in such a way as to promote your own financial interest as a psychiatrist; obviously, if you chose a definition of "mental health" in a way that included more people, that would mean a smaller clientele of the "mentally ill," and that wouldn't be very good for business, now, would it?)
But, more importantly, you so self-assuredly declared that you're right, and that anyone who disagrees with you is using a "hokey ad hoc definition of 'the mind is healthy'"—while completely oblivious to the fact that you yourself just made up just such a definition (calling it by the name "artificial').
0/10 for this post
I think the “ad how definition” is referring to any definition which includes having spiritual experiences as a prerequisite for being labeled mentally healthy. Those are fair to exclude as they’re directly begging the question. I highly doubt that the rest of the definition changes the result that some “mentally healthy” people have no spiritual experiences - which is, after all, a rather weak claim.
Having just come back to this post after a couple of days, two things strike me:
- the tweet was really calculated to piss people off if they don't consider themselves to have had mystical experiences
- the tweet is in fact so incredibly vague (once you pick it apart you can actually satisfy its parameters by encountering "the strange" regularly--what does that mean? at face value is there anyone who doesn't ever go "wow that's strange"??) that it's not at all useful to try to fact-check it, and yet Scott did.
It seems to me that Scott came up with a really exclusionary definition of mental health, not because he really thinks these things deeply and truly define mental health, but because he wanted to define the parameters so tightly that no-one could question them because the purpose was to disprove the tweet. Because it pissed him off. Which is fair enough--even though I feel like there's something it MAY be trying to get at that might be worth saying (maybe something about being open to experiences you can't understand), it's a stupid and offensive tweet. But like, it's OK to just have a human "this is stupid and offensive and here are my thoughts on why" moment instead of running the numbers sometimes. Especially when it comes to human experience and the mystery of life.
I answered positive to that question. Probably 1975, I was 14, fishing for salmon on the American River in Sacramento. At the upstream end of a small island, an a very strange feeling came over me ; kinda like the feeling after you've been hit in the head or shocked by electricity, that whole universe is buzzing feeling. Dragging my spinner through the water trying to attract a salmon, I snagged on something. Tightened the drag, and pulled, hoping to break free. The buzzing got more intense. The lure broke free, and came back with a piece of someone's shirt. Done with that stuff, I bugged out.
Fast forward to about 1990, I trained as an EMT. Part of the training is a day ride along in an ambulance. Our second call was a 'difficulty breathing' call. Just as we rolled up, that buzzing feeling came over me again. Yes that patient had died.
Later I described this feeling to a cop, who told me he has felt the same thing when coming to the scene of a death.
Definitely not. It’s sort of an absurd claim, and I suspect the correlation to the extent there is one is actually strongly with unhealth.
I really fail to see how "the strange, the numinous, the indescribably beautiful" is synonymous with "mystical"
Seems like the tweeter is conflating profound with mystical.
You might be high-balling this - I can't remember which years I took the survey, but I'd have fallen in the mentally healthy category and have had mystical experiences. However, psychadelics were a factor; it wasn't a random occurrence.
Mostly a reply to various people, but I think the standard definition of "mentally healthy" has to be "wouldn't be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition/disorder." You could certainly argue that some forms of what are called mental illness are *actually healthier* than what psychiatry is aiming for, but it's fair enough to describe that as a hokey definition because it's distinctly non-standard.
Well, you are right in a sense, but it's a limited definition of mental health. Even in psychology there are scales of human well being that are not just "not diagnosed with a psychiatric condition". And there are qualities like high resilience which are signs of mental strength (if you don't want to use the word "health" here) even if not having resilience is not a mental illness.
I interpret the tweet as a rhetorical attack on the popular idea that mystical experience is a sign of mental illness.
I think the idea of the tweet would be better expressed in terms of "mental capability" or "functioning" instead of "health". Like "a mind capable of mystical experience is more capable than one that is not (all other things being equal)".
I think this is like the imagination debate - if you're healthy and prone to mystical experiences, they're obviously normal and normative; if you're not, they're obviously a symptom of something.
I see at least two major confounders here.
1. I don't think that measuring "very mentally healthy"-ness thorugh self-reporting is super reliable.
2. I think that running this particular study in this particular community gives rise to some serious selection bias.
I expect the first effect to be statistically significant but not super strong and I expect the second effect to be so strong that we shouldn't really draw any conclusions from this survey.
Third (and causal) variable: intelligence
Obviously the originator of that comment never read any Russian Literature. It's known, no philosophers come from warm weather. In other words you need some contrasting experiences in life that are certain to have an impact on a 7/10 score of happiness, in order to truly feel the mystical. I'm sure my college self wouldn't agree, and would say, oh no, that contrived experience by the lake was extremely mystical, but life and middle age certainly teaches us something else about what this is all about
Very wholesome interpretation of the results there
Without knowing who made the tweet I would just think it was a bit of wu wu hyperbole. I know people that talk in a these terms and I always smile and shrug and say “Good for you!”
What an upsettingly offensive tweet to read with my morning coffee. I hate being reminded these people exist; it's exactly why I stay off Twitter. It seems intended to position the author as all-knowing and to provoke the next question: Tell me, your holiness, was my experience truly mystical up to your standards? Or am I sick and how should I get well?
Here's a controversial mental health take of my own: The assertion that other people must be mentally unhealthy if they don't have "mystical" experiences (a linguistic construct denoting, by design, an undefinable and unverifiable state but, it's implied, one which only the author's godlike judgment can easily discern, validate or reject) is the type of assertion that only a truly predatory narcissist could make. It's also an example of how social media has become a primary vector for mental illness, with cunningly injected appeals to FOMO and pseudo-scientific argle-bargle as its handmaidens.
"Mystical experiences" have throughout history been associated with madness. The tendency to elevate some unverifiable and subjective internal experience to "health" and thence to holiness has operated like a parasitic infection hopping from one human host to another for millennia; it survives because its victims, stripped of reason, gain power as a self-reinforcing collective. All religion boils down to this. But the average madman muttering on a street corner who believes his madness is the highest truth had not, until recently, infinite ink, paper and the means of distribution by which to infect millions of other potentially unstable people with his worldview. It only ever took one really slick psycho to start a cult, but now technology seems to have bred millions of them. The ancient parasite is out-competing itself, evolving and trying new tactics before our very eyes.
I'm so glad Scott ran an actual fact check. There couldn't be a better rebuttal.
> So this tweet is false, unless you’re using some kind of hokey ad hoc definition of “the mind is healthy”.
Reminder that you're basing this on your audience, in which there could be a vast number of uncorrelated precursors. It might better be thought of "This tweet is false for the type of individual who would complete my 2020 SSC survey." You then have to ask if the average participate in your survey is representative of society's population as a whole.
You showed that lack of mental health is a factor in having mystical experiences. You did not show that being mentally healthy makes it implausible someone would have a mythical experience. Neither did you show that it is implausible for someone who lacks mental health to not have mystical experiences. So both the mentally healthy and mentally unhealthy may or may not have mystical experiences, but the relationship between mental health and mystical experiences is statistically significant.
Mysticism is the belief that knowledge can be obtained without effort, i.e. through prayer, revelation, instinct, LSD, meditation, etc. Thus, while I'm sure that a mentally healthy person could have a mystical experience, it seems to me that too many such experiences would eventually threaten your mental health through bad epistemology.