MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
The characteristics
In the study of the previously mentioned author, and others (1), the nine characteristics below have been consolidated as the phenomenological essence of the mystical experience in general, regardless of the technologies used for its induction:
ONENESS: a sense of cosmic unity, achieved through a positive transcendence of the ego. Although the habitual sense of identity dissolves, consciousness and memory remain; the individual perceives that he belongs to a more comprehensive and vast dimension, a dimension that overflows the fundamental dichotomies, such as subject and object — all is one;
TRANSCENDENCE: the subject feels beyond time and space, beyond the limits of past, present and future; further beyond ordinary three-dimensional space, in a realm of eternal infinity;
ECSTASY: a deeply positive mood, containing the virtues of joy, bliss, peace and love, to an intense degree, often accompanied by laughter and tears;
CONSECRATION: an intuitive feeling, a palpitating response of admiration and awe before the presence of an inspiring reality. The main elements are humility and reverence (the theological terms of habitual religiosity do not necessarily describe the experience);
ILLUMINATION: these are the noetic qualities; feelings of intuitive insight, vivacity and intelligence, which at some level confer upon the experience the force of certainty, a glimpse of absolute reality. This knowledge is not factual but rather an addition, or quantum leap, in psychological, philosophical and religious insight;
PARADOXICALISM: refers to the logical contradictions that appear in the analysis of the experiences. The individual seems to be able to experience the "identity of opposites", something that seems to make sense at the time and also afterward;
INEFFABILITY: the experience felt seems to be, at some more essential and subtle level, above the possibility of verbal expression, indescribable, impossible to be described in full, essentially;
TRANSITORINESS: the climax, splendid, does not endure in all its intensity, but becomes a memory and leaves fruitful, salutary, guiding traces;
TRANSFORMATION: the experience is potentially transformative; positive changes occur in the individual's attitudes, in his behavior and in his relationships, both with himself and in the reflection that this awakens in all other beings, culminating in a more integrated and integrative life, encompassing all aspects in the one.
(1) Drugs and Mysticism. Walter N. Pahnke, The International Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring 1966, pp. 295–313.