Charles Stang Rejects Roland Griffiths’ Conception of “Mystic Experiencing” Used to Experimentally Scientifically Validate Psilocybin through Psychometric Questionnaires, Particularly the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) Patched by the Challenging Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ)
Contents:
- Intro
- Irony or Self-Contradiction: Matthew “No Buddha Statues” Johnson Pushes the Highly Biased “Mystical Experience” Questionnaire (MEQ)
- The Science of Psychedelic Psychometrics Is Based on as Its Science Foundation an Out of Print 1960 Book of Walter Stace’s Conception of What Mystic Experiencing Is
- Stang’s Statements from Conversation with Griffiths, September 2020
- Stang’s Statements from Conversation with Kripal, October 2020
- The Egodeath Theory is the Opposite of the Stace/ Pahnke/ Griffiths Conception of Mystical Experiencing
- OAV & 11-Factors Conjoins Positive and Negative Effects; MEQ Dissociates and Represses Negative Effects into Woefully Inadequate CEQ
- References
Intro
What package deal, exactly, are we being asked to buy into, when we nod along with Roland Griffiths in 2006 announcing that psychedelic psychometric science has proved that Psilocybin causes so-called “mystical experience”?
Who is defining this alleged thing, “mystical experience”?
Answer: William James 1900, Walter Stace 1960, Walter Pahnke 1962, and Roland Griffiths 2006.
And formally baked into that conception and definition of “mystical experience” is, you must describe it as ineffable, or else you didn’t have a “complete mystical experience”.
Read the MEQ30 questions and the 4 categories – this is what we’re being asked to buy into.
For a copy of the questions and categories, and someone’s dubious definition of a “complete mystical experience”, see Figure 1 in Griffiths 2015:
Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin
Frederick Barrett, Mathew Johnson, Roland Griffiths
2015
Pubmed url: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26442957/ – for PDF, click “FREE Full text PMC” button in upper right.
The 30 questions and 4 categories are shown in Figure 1 on page 15.
When looking at this set of 30 psilocybin effects questions in 4 categories critically, do you really buy into the paradigm that’s being used as if a scientific basis, here?
An intensively 1960-era Christian-brand/couched notion of what the intense mystic altered state is.
Charles Stang says “mystic experiencing” is distorted by Stace/ Pahnke/ Griffiths. I agree.
Charles Stang confronted Griffiths in the first episode of the Harvard video interview series, for failing to match the archive data reports of mystics, and misrepresenting mystic experiencing as solely positive and pleasant.
🦄💨🌈
It was through Stang’s challenging of Griffiths, prompting Griffiths to refer to his Challenging Experiences Questionnaire, that I learned Psychedelics Psychometrics and identified how the key peak ego death experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control is represented or overlooked in psychedelics questionnaires.
— Cybermonk, December 30, 2022/ January 1, 2023
Irony or Self-Contradiction: Matthew “No Buddha Statues” Johnson Pushes the Highly Biased “Mystical Experience” Questionnaire (MEQ)
Update Jan 3, 2022: It doesn’t come across clearly at all from Charles Stang, that Stang criticizes MEQ as biased filtering/creation of a certain conception of “mysticism”.
Stang praises Matthew Johnson’s cautionary article that says ditch the Buddha statue and act neutral when prepping and guiding clinical psilocybin research & therapy – YET who is pushing the biased, lopsided, Christian-particular MEQ?
Matthew Johnson’s name is all over the MEQ articles! Many articles are Griffiths & Johnson re: Mysticism.
From CEQ article’s References:
Barrett FS, Johnson MW and Griffiths RR (2015) Validation of the revised mystical experience questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin. J Psychopharmacol 29: 1182–1190.
Garcia-Romeu A, Griffiths RR and Johnson MW (2015) Psilocybin occasioned mystical experiences in the treatment of tobacco addiction. Curr Drug Abuse Rev 7: 157–164.
Griffiths RR, Johnson MW, Richards WA, et al. (2011) Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose related effects. Psychopharmacology 218: 649–665.
Griffiths RR, Richards W, Johnson MW, et al. (2008) Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. J Psychopharmacology 22: 621–632.
Johnson MW, Richards W and Griffiths RR (2008) Human hallucinogen research: Guidelines for safety. J Psychopharmacol 22: 603–620.
Contains the usual folk, sub-scientific advice, “surrender, submit, accept your lack of control“.
MacLean KA, Johnson MW and Griffiths RR (2011) Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness. J Psychopharmacol 25: 1453–1461.
Hypocritical of Johnson, a self-contradiction.
Push a 1960 Christian brand of “mystic experiencing” as the “scientific foundation” of the research to prove that Psilocybin produces 1960 Stace and 1962 Walter Pahnke style of Christian mysticism – and then caution session guides to not bring a bunch of religious bias and prompting and filtering and construction causing clients to have a certain particular New Age Buddhism brand of experiencing – but that’s exactly what the MEQ does in spades.
The “science” that Johnson and Griffiths push could hardly be more particularistic, with 1960 Christian “mysticism” brand baked in, thoroughly.
Johnson, how can you use the 1960 Stace foundation of your science, and then caution against Buddha New Age prompting, guiding, shaping, & bias of the clients’ experience?
“Welcome to our 1960 Christian Ineffability Mysticism Clinic, we don’t prompt and filter and pre-program your 1960 Christian Ineffability Brand Mysticism experience that we give you and measure your experience in terms of.”
The Science of Psychedelic Psychometrics Is Based on as Its Science Foundation an Out of Print 1960 Book of Walter Stace’s Conception of What Mystic Experiencing Is
Stace’s book is out of print. That happens all the time, but still this is a good representation of how narrowly biased and particualistic and brand-specific the MEQ is, and the MEQ is presented as the science foundation of all Griffiths’ and Johnson’s research.
Is Johnson secretly criticizing the Stace 1960 “scientific basis” of their MEQ-based science research, when he writes the article about “ditch the New Age Buddha symbolism from your science research clinic”?
I don’t want to make a Progressivism-based “outdated” argument against Stace… but Stace’s conception of mystic experiencing is outdated.
The book Mysticism and Philosophy (Stace 1960) is out of print at the moment.
That status represents the arbitrary culturally specific “scientific basis”, how Stace is inappropriately used as a “scientific basis” for MEQ.
Check instead, a possibly more broad and up to date view, check the Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, which has good articles by Wouter Hanegraaff. 2016, 2019 paperback
url https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Western-Mysticism-Esotericism/dp/0521509831
Blurb:
“Mysticism and esotericism are two intimately related strands of the Western tradition.
“Despite their close connections, however, scholars tend to treat them separately.
“Whereas the study of Western mysticism enjoys a long and established history, Western esotericism is a young field.
“The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism examines both of these traditions together.
“The volume demonstrates that the roots of esotericism almost always lead back to mystical traditions, while the work of mystics was bound up with esoteric or occult preoccupations.
“It also shows why mysticism and esotericism must be examined together if either is to be understood fully.
“Including contributions by leading scholars, this volume features essays on such topics as
- alchemy,
- astrology,
- magic,
- Neoplatonism,
- Kabbalism,
- Renaissance Hermetism,
- Freemasonry,
- Rosicrucianism,
- numerology,
- Christian theosophy,
- spiritualism,
- and much more.
This Handbook serves as both a capstone of contemporary scholarship and a cornerstone of future research.”
Even if we don’t make this book the “scientific foundation” for MEQ, at least this book’s breadth shows the caution that is needed when we employ the term “mystic experiencing”.
What raft of package-deal interpretations are we being asked to agree to by Griffiths and Matthew “No Newage Buddha Symbolism” Johnson, who heavily push as their “scientific foundation” their own dubious house-brand “Mystical Experience” questionnaire?
Our outdated outmoded culturally particularistic scientific basis is out of print:
url https://www.amazon.com/dp/0874774160/
Reviewer Ed wrote:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3QSEA59CR8QPC/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0874774160 –
“In contrast to other philosophers who have written on the topic of religious experience, Stace is a perennialist, searching for a meaningful way to discuss the similarities between documented cases of religious experience.
“He begins with this assumption, which to me seems like an intuitive place to start (as opposed to Katz. See “Language, Epistemology and Mysticism”) so like-minded readers may be drawn to his methods.
“Although this may seem like a very good place to start an inquiry into “mysticism,” upon closer inspection, his method leaves much to be desired.
“First and foremost, Stace makes little distinction between “experience” and “interpretation.”
“From the philosophy of mind, thinkers who wrote a few decades after Stace, such as Levine (see “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”), Nagel (see “What is it Like to be a Bat?”) and Jackson (see “Epiphenomenal Qualia”) have presented powerful cases concerning the vast and potentially unbridgeable gap between experience and its interpretation.
“I won’t reiterate Stace’s position here, but ultimately we have to ask; “What is accomplished by defining the “universal core” of religious experience linguistically when there is such a disparity between experience and the theories we use to explain it?”
“Can this be casually overlooked especially considering the “ineffable” nature of the experience?”
The concept of “ineffability” is the problem, not the solution, and I reject the concept, and I criticize employing this concept. -cm
“I do not fault Stace for not mentioning this due to the era in which he wrote, but this is a critique that needs serious attention.
“Compounding this point is the fact that Stace has had no religious experience of his own making it all the more dubious that he could make that which is by definition beyond human understanding meaningful.”
The Egodeath theory demonstrates that religious experiencing is well within language and understanding. -cm
“Stace also omits non-dual logic systems that seem more apt at addressing self-annihilation and religious experience (i.e., as found in the Diamond Sutra) than does the discourse of either/or logic.”
Self-annihilation doesn’t require non-dual logic (depending on what that term is supposed to mean). -cm
“When discussing an “experience” in the rational [usually ‘rational’ is a misnomer that actually means ordinary-state based -cm] sense where a grammatical subject and predicate are required, what can one seriously take Eckhart to mean when he asks God to rid him of all concepts of God while at the same time striving for his own annihilation? (see Sermon 52)”
I would never ask God to rid me of all concepts of God. That sounds like a dumb, defeatist, anti-STEM, self-defeating idea, and this is why in 1986 I rejected the genre of “Mysticism” as an explanatory paradigm and created instead the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence. -cm
“Also, to profess to have such a position that stands outside of both subject and object is metaphysical speculation.
“To force a grammatical subject and object onto an experience that is calling for neither seems to be akin to forcing a square peg through a round hole.”
“Or, as a wiser man than I once wrote, and I paraphrase, “It is as if Stace has a star-shaped cookie cutter, presses it into the dough of religious experience and then claims that the dough is star-shaped.”
Matthew “No Buddha Statues” Johnson & Roland Griffiths have a certain 1960 “mysticism”-shaped cookie cutter — they press it into the dough of psychedelic experience, and then claim that the dough is “mysticism”-shaped. -cm
“We also need to keep in mind that Stace speaks only incidentally of the body, which is to be expected considering the methodology of analytic philosophy.
“By doing so, he reduces religious experience to language, negating both the body and the unconscious.”
What raft of assumptions, what package deal, are we being asked to accede to, if we approve the concept “the unconscious”? -cm
“It is through the body and in the body that religious experience is cultivated and received.
“Also, the role of concentration on the breath which through prolonged focus in meditation and prayer bridges the conscious and unconscious is not mention in any way.”
Are we being asked here to assert that breathwork causes the exact same effects as Psilocybin? I completely disagree with this set of premises and conceptions. -cm
“I think that for a more full picture of this “universal core,” attention to both the body and the unconscious is needed.
“I would next like to critique Stace’s use of the categories of “extroverted” and “introverted.”
“He seems to use these in a phenomenological sense, roughly correlated to “inner” and “outer,” but he gives little attention to clarification.
“It seems that floating between these two perspectives is a “self,” which when discovered is the end-all of religious experience (much to the chagrin of Buddhism).
“He seems to have some initial insight to make this distinction, but he seems to take this for granted.
“I think that much insight can be gained by translating Stace’s use of these terms into the typology of Jung.“
The very heavy obscuring overlay that is Jungianism. If we could remove Jungianism, we could then perceive the domain that’s supposedly being explained by the heavy-handed Jungianism overlay. The Jungianism explanatory overlay is as harmful as helpful. The Egodeath theory is a far superior heavy-handed obscuring explanatory overlay. -cm
“By doing so, I believe that much of Stace’s agenda is exposed.
“For example, I think it is clear that Stace is some form of introverted, intuitive thinker, probably emphasizing the thinking due to his profession and method.”
I’m pro-thinking – but people falsely contrast thinking vs. the intense mystic altered state. They wrongly characterize the latter as “nonrational”, which is a misnomer focusing on the wrong thing.
The mystic state is loose cognitive association from Psilocybin, very much including rationality, occurring in the altered-state eternalism experiential mode. -cm
“His intuition is also evident by his perennialist‘s nature.
“As he is a philosopher, he finds truth in systematization, which I believe explains why Stace strongly favors other mystics who were intellectual enough to systemize their work.
“This bias is all the more evident where in the book Stace ridicules and insults Teresa of Avila for her anti-intellectualism at several points.
“His bias discredits and discounts those who simply have religious insight but do not systematize it, labeling such mystics as secondary in status.
“It is my opinion that Stace has given undue preference to those who happen to think like himself.
“It also is evident that in not further breaking down this typology, he makes a broad generalization between “introverted thinkers” and “extroverted feelers” in a very “either/or” sort of fashion excluding anything in the middle (i.e. an extroverted thinker or introverted feeler).
“In making this generalization, Stace presumes introversion to be categorically superior to extroversion as it often ends with rational analysis.”
Rational analysis in the altered state, is where it’s at. -cm
“I think Stace has undermined his own position by not thinking through the implications of this generalization.
“As an ultimate systematization, or even an initial step in systematizing religious experience, Stace fails, but that is not to say that he is not without merit (as per my 4 stars).
“If one reads him with such concern in mind, his optimism and drive to seek the universal is nothing short of inspiring, especially when compared to Katz (who denies anything meaningful can be said about religious experience).”
I probably strongly disagree with reviewer Ed and Katz and R. Griffiths and Matthew Johnson and Walter Stace. -cm
“I compare both Stace and Katz to watching some politically spun “news” program like Bill O’Rielly or John Stewart [2009].
“Sure, they may be fun, but one must keep in mind that both are catering to a specific bias.“
Bias is ok if it’s correct. -cm
“If you can remain mindful of such a bias, then you have a chance at seeing through to what lies beneath in order to conduct your own study.”
Stang’s Statements from Conversation with Griffiths, September 2020
Charles Stang September 2020 Webinar with Roland Griffiths
Charles Stang:
“about the category of mystical experience. I’m a historian of mysticism.
“the list of qualities of experiences deemed mystical derived from William James [1900] and [Walter] Stace [1960] doesn’t exactly correspond to the archive of mystical literature.
“two sets of experiences that I think seem kind of missing. And I don’t know if they’re in fact missing from these people’s [clinical psychedelics questionnaire] experiences, or whether they’ve been filtered out for any reason.
“profound experiences of divine darkness, which can be harrowing, challenging, compunctive [inducing anxiety?], even fearful. … menacing … overwhelming and overpowering. the idea that the divine might abandon you. abandonment is an enormous concern in mystical archives.
“generally experiences of divine darkness. Where do those come?
“The second general category which I didn’t see is the deeply personal encounter people have with other entities in mystical archives. … experiences of Christ, saints, angels, other mediating figures between you and the source.
“Now, some of you might say, well, those don’t qualify as fully mystical, because they are not experience of the source, the godhead itself.
“But they are often thought of as part of the choreography or the landscape of one’s approach to the godhead.
[landscape = important Stang point = package deal, entire realm of Mythemeland -cm]
“this disparity between the experiences you’ve collected and studied [eg Good Friday Experiment 1962, Griffiths 2006] and the [historical] archive I’m more familiar with.”
Roland Griffiths:
“we haven’t captured that systematically.
“it’s not part of the mystical experience questionnaire.
“the mystical experience questionnaire is tending to capture the light side of things.
“And of course there are these very dark experiences.
“And they’re kind of the classic challenging experience that come into play with psychedelics.
“And it may be the experience of the existential vacuum, of the void. “
Jan Irvin exposed T McKenna’s fraud, pretending to use high-dose psilocybin for years after he had stopped due to existential vertigo depression.
Psychedelic transcendent transgression of personal control is more important (central, definitive, peak) of a challenging effect than psychedelic existential void. -cm
“And that can be absolutely terrifying.
“But there’s no question that that comes up [in our psilocybin experiments].
“And we have an entirely different questionnaire, something called the challenging experience questionnaire.”
I don’t believe that the CEQ is a serious, actual, usable questionnaire. There are many very fishy things about it. -cm
“And we try to tap into that.
“We’ve been very interested in that feature.
“But I think psychometrically [per scientific measurement via questionnaires], it falls apart from at least what we’re describing as the classic mystical experience that’s positively balanced.”
APZ/ OAV/ 5D-ASC distinctly measures via psychometrics the positive (Ocean & Visionary) experiences and the negative (Angst/Dread) experiences.
11-Factors version of OAV distinctly measures via psychometrics the “Pleasant Experiences” and the “Unpleasant Experiences”.
How come SOCQ isn’t being used that way, with the MEQ part of it recognized as covering positive, and the non-MEQ part recognized as covering negative mystic effects? How come CEQ is so repressed and far separated from MEQ?
I just realized one thing now that I’m coupling CEQ as intended to be the negative complement of MEQ30:
Why did Griffiths agressively reduce the Initial Item Pool of 64 items down to 24 items? 24/64 = 38%.
Answer: to make CEQ smaller than MEQ30; to have fewer negative psychedelic effects than positive “therefore mystical” effects.
Charles Stang:
“that [lopsidedly positive] allegedly classic mystical experience is actually not in dialogue with the classics of mystical literature”
There, Stang criticizes Griffiths’ conception and characterization: what you are calling “mystical experience” is no such thing, it’s baloney and is not the actual mystical experience that mystics reported per the archive records.
Harvard Page about the Webinar Video, and Transcription
Stang’s Statements from Conversation with Kripal, October 2020
Page’s blurb (not transcription):
“Amid the so-called psychedelic “renaissance” in science, researchers … report that they can occasion “mystical-type experiences” among trial volunteers being treated for … other conditions.
“Many studies correlate the strength of this experience with the therapeutic outcome.
“Other recent studies administer psychedelics to religious professionals without a clear therapeutic aim.
“In this case, an experience that might be assumed to be accessible to religious clergy through non-chemical means is administered within a “secular” biomedical framework.
“what happens when the clinical becomes religious and the religious becomes clinical?
“How are religion, mysticism, and spirituality invoked, studied, and understood within psychedelic clinical contexts?
“What unspoken ontological and theological claims are at work?”
transcript:
Charles Stang:
“The entire clinical container, including the dose, the so-called set and setting– … this entire clinical container is designed to increase the likelihood of a very specific type of experience– a positive, unitive [& ineffable -cm] experience with a conscious and loving source.
“And this is what is labeled the paradigmatic mystical-type experience.
“The research reports that people rate these psychedelically-induced experiences as among the most spiritually significant and personally meaningful in their lives.
“in September [2020 webinar video last month] … I pushed Roland [Griffiths] on some of these points.
“As an historian of religion, and specifically of mystical theology, I fear that there is a flattening of the complicated terrain of mystical experience at work in some of this research– a kind of selection bias for a certain kind of experience– namely, a unitive and positive [and ineffable -cm] one, to the exclusion of other experiences.“
[CEQ doesn’t correct this MEQ shortcoming; CEQ omits 86% of OAV’s “Dread of Ego Dissolution” effects/questions, aka 11-Factors’ “Unpleasant Experiencing” high-level category’s effects/questions -cm]
“And I fear that this selection bias skews the results.
“I don’t know that it skews the results or the research relevant to therapeutic outcomes.
“I do know that it skews the understanding of what mysticism is, and the full depth and diversity in the archive of mystical experiences.”
Webinar: Medicalizing Mysticism: Religion in Contemporary Psychedelic Trials
Harvard’s page about the webinar, including transcription:
https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2020/11/03/video-medicalizing-mysticism-religion-contemporary-psychedelic-trials
My page title:
Psychedelics and the Future of Religion/ Transcendence and Transformation Initiative (Stang, Harvard)
Section heading in that page:
Video 2: Medicalizing Mysticism: Religion in Contemporary Psychedelic Trials
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/psychedelics-and-the-future-of-religion-transcendence-and-transformation-initiative-stang-harvard/#Video-2
The Egodeath Theory is the Opposite of the Stace/ Pahnke/ Griffiths Conception of Mystical Experiencing
I disagree with Griffiths’ theological claims, to such an extent that I countered this Mysticism theory/ explanatory framework in 1985 by creating the Egodeath theory; the Cybernetic theory of Ego Transcendence:
- Griffiths Believes in ineffability – you don’t have a “complete mystical experience”, according to Griffiths’ science assessment, unless you agree about ineffability.
I don’t agree that ineffability is a helpful, useful, meaningful, valuable explanatory construct; “ineffability” is exactly the kind of wooly-headed mystical thinking that early modern science (like the Egodeath theory in 1987) sought to replace.
- Griffiths assumes no mystics ever used psilocybin. But per the Entheogen Mytheme theory portion of the Egodeath theory, all mystics’ experiencing was through Psilocybin. Psilocybin is the Eucharist.
- Christian mysticism. Like the word ‘faith’, ‘mysticism’ is exclusively a Christian word.
- Griffiths’ conception of mysticism is exclusively positive. But religious mythology describes negative experiencing, from Psilocybin.
I reject the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30 specifically), and its categories, and its questions, and its assessment of whether a person had a “complete mystical experience”.
1/4 of the questions of are about ineffability. If you didn’t report that you experienced ineffability, then Griffiths says you didn’t have a complete mystic experience.
That’s according to Griffiths’ interpretation of Walter Stace’s 1960 interpretation of Christian-based, Christian-flavored mystic experiencing.
During December 31, 2022 into January 1, 2023, I read Griffiths’ 2015 article on validating the MEQ:
Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin
Frederick Barrett, Mathew Johnson, Roland Griffiths
2015
Pubmed url: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26442957/ – for PDF, click “FREE Full text PMC” button in upper right.
The 30 questions and 4 categories are shown in Figure 1 on page 15.
Griffiths 2015 presents the 30 MEQ questions in 4 categories.
Previously there were 43 MEQ questions in 7 categories, per Walter Pahnke around 1969 after the April 1962 Good Friday Experiment at Harvard under Leary & Alpert, based on Walter Stace’s 1960 book Mysticism and Philosophy.
Version 1 of MEQ is MEQ43, which has 7 categories of effects questions.
Version 2 of MEQ is MEQ30, which has 4 categories of effects questions. Four of the MEQ43 categories were combined into a single “Mystic experiencing” category. The other 3 of the 7 are retained as distinct categories.
Griffiths attempted to cover the incompleteness of MEQ by pointing to his CEQ – but my analysis determined that the CEQ is bunk:
CEQ deletes the experience of threat of loss of control, and replaces that by gathering and highlighting the Grief questions.
CEQ is supposed to cover a wider set of challenging psychedelics effects than OAV’s DED dimension, but actually, CEQ entirely deletes all of the Control challenges effects questions (definitively distinctive of the psychedelics state), and creates a new, heavily promoted Grief category of the questions instead, in their place.
Griffiths’ CEQ deletes 18 of 21 (86%) of Dittrich’s “Dread of Ego Dissolution” (DED) effects questions, while pretending and posturing and selling itself as adding a superset of OAV’s coverage of challenging aspects of psychedelics effects.
Dittrich’s 21 “Dread of Ego Dissolution” effects questions defined in the OAV and 5D-ASC questionnaire are the same items as Studerus’ 21 “Unpleasant Experiences” effects questions in the 11-Factors questionnaire (Studerus 2010 Figure S1 or S2, and find “pleasant”).
As Charles Stang, Historian of Mysticism rebutted Roland Griffiths in the Harvard Divinity School video after Griffiths presented his slides narrative, all this conception of ‘mystic’ rests on a solid wobbly “scientific” basis of Walter Stace 1960.
Stace misconceives mystic experience as all peace and light, per outsiders’ & beginners’ medium-dose, positive-only experience, so all this “Science” rests on a misconceived basis.
OAV & 11-Factors Conjoins Positive and Negative Effects; MEQ Dissociates and Represses Negative Effects into Woefully Inadequate CEQ
Dittrich’s OAV severs positive effects into Oceanic and Visionary dimensions, and separates negative effects into the Angst/Dread dimension.
Studerus’ 11-Factors’ high-level categories split apart those same dimensions as Unpleasant Experiences (identical to OAV’s Angst/Dread dimension) and Pleasant Experiences (identical to the combination of OAV’s Oceanic + Visionary dimensions).
Griffiths puts all focus on a self-contained instrument, MEQ.
Then, as if to patch that blatant mismatch with actual experiences, as an afterthought, they later create a dissociated, separate instrument, CEQ — which proceeds to nevertheless omit 86% (18 of 21) of the OAV’s Angst/Dread effects items.
Griffiths’ would-be patch (CEQ) has gigantic, dragon-sized hole in it: the Control-challenges questions and category are completely omitted and deleted and suppressed and disowned, repressed and denied to exist.
Exhibit A: OAV Dread Question 54: “I was afraid to lose my self-control.”
In Griffiths’ eagerness to shrink the negative effects of Psilocybin, when constructing the Initial Item Pool which consists of all challenging effects items from SOCQ, HRS, and OAV, when adding the negative effects from OAV, Griffiths adds only 11-Factors’ 13 ANX & ICC effects items, instead of adding all 21 of OAV’s Angst/”Dread of Ego Dissolution” effects items.
Or, identically, all 21 of 11-Factors’ high-level, “Unpleasant Experiences” effects items, which is an official category within the 11-Factors scale, that’s discussed by Studerus 2010 in two spots.
That’s starting with only 13 of 21, 62% of the OAV’s negative effects, or (identically) 11-Factors’ negative effects.
Then Griffiths recklessly, willy-nilly removes all of the Control-challenging effects from the Initial Item Pool, the CEQ ending up with only 3 out of the 21 negative effects (14%, deleting 86%) that are in OAV’s or 5D-ASC’s Dread, or 11-Factors’ Unpleasant dimension.
References
url https://www.amazon.com/Mysticism-Philosophy-W-T-Stace/dp/0874774160
Validation of the revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire in experimental sessions with psilocybin
Frederick Barrett, Mathew “No Buddha Statues” Johnson, Roland Griffiths
2015
Pubmed url: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26442957/ – for PDF, click “FREE Full text PMC” button in upper right.
The 30 questions and 4 categories are shown in Figure 1 on page 15.
Search: https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Validation+of+the+revised+Mystical+Experience+Questionnaire%22
SOCQ – “States of Consciousness Questionnaire”
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/socq-states-of-consciousness-questionnaire/
Lacks a section presenting the questions and categories of the MEQ30 or earlier MEQ43. With so many variants and subsets of the psychedelics psychometrics questionnaires, I need to create particular, narrowly focused pages, such as a page dedicated to the MEQ43, and another page for the later MEQ30.
Psychedelics and the Future of Religion/ Transcendence and Transformation Initiative (Stang, Harvard)
Section heading in that page:
Video 1 (Sep 2020): Psilocybin and Mystical Experience: Implications for Healthy Psychological Functioning, Spirituality, and Religion (Roland Griffiths, Charles Stang)
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/psychedelics-and-the-future-of-religion-transcendence-and-transformation-initiative-stang-harvard/#Video-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pahnke
— Cybermonk January 1, 2023
The Egodeath theory 