The current study aims to examine the associations between private religious practices, daily spiritual experiences, and cardiovascular reactivity. A sample of 628 middle-aged participants was drawn from the Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) 2 Biomarker Project. Participants completed a standardized cardiovascular reactivity protocol consisting of baseline, stress, and recovery phases, with systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and heart rate (HR) monitored throughout. Psychometric scales captured levels of private religious practices and daily spiritual experiences. Regression models that adjusted for baseline cardiovascular activity, age, sex, body mass index, smoking status, race, and prescription medication use, showed that private religious practices were associated with lower SBP reactivity. This indicates that those who scored higher in private religious practices were found to have lower levels of SBP responses following an acute stressor. Further, these results remained when daily spiritual experiences were added to the model. There were no associations between daily spiritual experiences and any of the cardiovascular variables. Private religious practices, but not daily spiritual experiences, are related to lower SBP reactivity in this midlife sample. The current findings underscore the importance of considering private religious practices and spiritual experiences as distinct constructs when examining health outcomes.
Mystical dynamics-the notion that mystical oneness may unfold involving ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light-has been discussed anecdotally by psychedelic researchers and therapists but has not yet been empirically examined in controlled settings. This study investigated the occurrence and dose-dependency of mystical dynamics in healthy participants after administration of psychedelics. A total of 816 mystical-dynamics measurements were collected from 386 participants across 15 studies at two sites: University Hospital Basel (Switzerland) and Johns Hopkins University (USA). Participants received low to high doses of four serotonergic psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT. Mystical dynamics was assessed using five corresponding constructs from the Psychedelic Experience Scale (PES100): ego disintegration, distress, renewal, luminous light, and mystical (focusing on mystical oneness, the core of mystical experience). We hypothesized strong intercorrelations of mystical oneness with ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light, and a dose-dependent intensity pattern. Results showed dose-sensitive strong correlations of mystical oneness with luminous light and renewal, and a moderate-to-strong correlation of mystical oneness with ego disintegration. These findings support a broader, dynamic model of mystical experience and offer novel insights relevant to psychedelic-assisted therapy, while acknowledging additional experiential features that may also associate with mystical oneness.
Researchers who seek to understand the mechanisms that give rise to presence experiences are faced with a phenomenon that spans a wide variety of contexts, takes many forms, and is studied in various disciplines. In the absence of a conceptual typology that distinguishes different types of experiences in which physically absent persons or entities seem to be present, researchers have difficulty specifying the extent to which the mechanisms they propose apply to different presence experiences, both within and outside their subfield. Moreover, in seeking to explain presence experiences, researchers across disciplines typically fail to distinguish between detecting a presence and identifying it. We propose a typology of detection processes with three dimensions: mode of detection (direct or indirect), nature of the initial stimulus (unknown or known), and source of the initial stimulus (external or not external). We suggest that people identify presences based on agent characteristics and/or agent context. Based on this typology, we suggest that claims of direct detection involve a variety of mechanisms, while indirect detection typically involves making attributions to relatively ordinary events. Attributional theories, updated based on the proposed typology, can provide a framework for explaining how presences are identified (regardless of how they are detected).
