On November 3, 2023, Dr. David Yaden and Dr. Michael Ferguson, world experts in the sciences of psychedelics and spirituality, discuss Dr. Yaden's new book, "The Varieties of Spiritual Experience." Inspired by the history, philosophy, and methodology of William James's classic text "The Varieties of Religious Experience," this new volume is a twenty-first-century response to timeless questions about humankind's spiritual nature. "The Varieties of Spiritual Experience" introduces a rich array of original empirical data collected and analyzed by Dr. Yaden and his colleagues, thus enriching the book's treatment of spirituality with a uniquely evidence-based series of perspectives.
Dr. Yaden and Dr. Ferguson have previously debated one another at Oxford University on topics of science and spirituality. Both academics approach questions of human spirituality with scientific rigor and profound respect, but with diverging philosophical interpretation, thus generating productive tension and lively discussion between them. You won't want to miss this exciting event!
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. 21st Century Research, and Perspectives. A conversation with David Yaden and Michael Ferguson. November 3rd, 2022.
CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang. And I have the privilege of serving as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religion here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this evening's event part of the Center's Transcendence and Transformation initiative, or TNT for short, which is now in its second year. TNT is devoted to the study of religious and spiritual traditions and practices, ancient and modern global in reach that aim for the transcendence of our normal states of being, consciousness, and embodiment, and the transformation of individual, community, and society.
TNT affirms the existence of the sacred different levels of reality, seen and unseen, and different modes of access to them. It investigates what might be called metaphysics and mysticism, by which we mean the traditions across time, people, and place that have cultivated practices of transcendence and transformation, and have articulated worldviews to make sense of those practices.
The Center's next event is a poetry reading and talk with Peter Gizzi on Wednesday, November 9th at 12:00 PM. There will also be a Zoom webinar, and we'll put the link to register in the chat function. As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing at the Center and all our programming is to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
So this evening, we are here to celebrate and investigate a book, The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. 21St Century Research and Perspectives coauthored by David Yaden and Andrew Newberg. We have the pleasure of having David with us this evening along with our very own Michael Ferguson, a research associate in the TNT initiative.
I will leave it to Michael to introduce David and say a few words about the book. But it is my pleasure first to introduce Michael. Michael is an instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and the Neurospirituality research director for the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
He is a lecturer on Neurospirituality at Harvard Divinity School, instructs a Cognitive Neuroscience of Meditation semester course at Harvard College, and leads graduate directed readings in mysticism and neuroscience. Michael earned his doctorate in bioengineering from the University of Utah, where he conducted brain imaging research on ecstatic religious experience. He's also trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at Harvard.
Michael is deeply interested in multidisciplinary work spanning science, medicine, and mysticism. And he's ideally suited to serve as a respondent to David's new book. So this is how the evening will unfold. I will soon disappear and Michael will appear and introduce David and briefly the book. Then David will take the stage, as it were, and make his own introductory comments on the book. Whereupon, Michael will return to give a proper response, and the two of them will then enter into conversation. So without further ado, Michael, the floor is yours.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Thank you for that generous introduction, Charlie. It's an honor and a pleasure to introduce to you all tonight the star of our event, William James. William James, as many of our online event participants know, was a giant among 20th century philosophers and psychologists. And we celebrate James's contributions to the study of religion and spirituality in this event tonight.
But lest you think I am either ill mannered or absent minded, allow me to say frankly and directly that William James is the star of our event tonight only because I see in Dr. David Yaden so much of what made William James a great man. Dr. Yaden like James, intuitively grasps the value, the impact, and the urgency in attending closely to a set of human experience that has shaped both individual lives and the trajectories of entire societies, namely the varieties of spiritual experience.
Like James, Dr. Yaden is fiercely committed to a brave scientific methodology that prioritizes empirical observation while simultaneously respecting and even savoring the qualities of religious, spiritual, and mystical events that routinely defy ordinary language and thought. Dr. Yaden has a remarkably illustrious combination of academic training and scientific publishing that justifies identifying him as a leading world expert in the science of spirituality.
He is currently an assistant Professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he leads a multidisciplinary research team to investigate varieties of nonordinary consciousness experiences associated with a wide span of behavioral triggers ranging from personal prayer to clinical psychedelic therapy.
Dr. David Yaden's newly published book, The Varieties Of Spiritual Experience is co-authored by Dr. Andrew Newberg. It speaks critically to a need in the current scientific landscape, which is increasingly apparent from multiple evidence-based perspectives. We can see from medical and clinical points of view that human spirituality has a scientifically significant association with acute and long-term life outcomes.
There is increasing interest within the academy to identify and characterize the nature of human spirituality. And yet finding satisfactory entry points for scientifically engaging with spiritual experience is a notoriously difficult challenge for combinations of reasons that are historical, social, technical, political, and even intrinsic to the topic itself.
Dr. Yaden's book begins by describing for the reader some of the general problems associated with a scientific approach to spiritual experience before moving skillfully and charmingly into a historical introduction of William James himself. I found myself blissfully caught up on numerous occasion by Dr. Yaden's narrative voicing of James's family history, including episodic descriptions of family dinners and salons with guests that represent a veritable who's who of New England intellectual society.
William James figures to the entirety of the text, acting as something of a Vergil to Yaden's Dante and leading us through an ascending series of epiphanies and realizations that were not only informative but legitimately inspiring to me. The book is particularly enriched by the tour de force Dr. Yaden provides-- a previously published scientific studies on spiritual experience and their outcomes.
However, I found myself admiring that the crowning gems of Yaden's Varieties of Spiritual Experience were the voluminous findings from Yaden's and Newberg's own original data, which they collected specifically for this book and report in an impressively accessible manner. Readers will likely be intrigued by the author's findings about spiritual experience triggers. Triggers which the authors derive not from anecdotal or personal reflection alone but from doing the hard work of gathering first-hand data from mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative assessments.
Yaden's Varieties proceeds to describe an evidence-based typology for spiritual experiences, which is sure to be generative of theoretical and practical understanding for expert and non-expert readers alike. Additional highlights from Yaden's Varieties include his lucid digest of the scientific and philosophical problems of consciousness and a titillating series of reports from the front lines of psychedelic science, which Dr. Yaden has been deeply involved in conducting and reporting a dazzling litany of peer-reviewed articles.
Yaden's writing strikes a vital balance of intellection without condescension, repeatedly bringing clarity and congeniality to matters of great conceptual complexity. Lastly, I'll note that Dr. Yaden, much like William James, teases the reader throughout the book by withholding both his and James's own personal beliefs about an ultimate philosophy of spirituality and maintaining a professional agnosticism that is radically open and admirably humble.
I'll leave it to Dr. Yaden to decide whether he would like to depart from that prolonged tease this evening by revealing to us either his or James's personal beliefs. In summary, The Varieties of Spiritual Experience is an essential book at a critical moment in the history of science. And one which I will and already have recommended to students and colleagues as a must read for anyone who is serious about unifying the analytic and the transcendent dimensions of human experience. With that, I am delighted to welcome Dr. David Yaden to the virtual stage.
DAVID YADEN: Thank you, Michael. That was bar none the best introduction that I have ever received in my life. Thank you for that really from the bottom of my heart. I will attempt to live up to some of that now. I also wanted to thank Charlie, and [? Kharma, ?] and the Center for the Study of World Religions, and TNT, and for all of you listening and delighted to be here.
Harvard is a very special place in the story of William James. I taught physiology there. I started the first psychology lab in North America there and taught philosophy there. So let's start with James and get into his classic book, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
After that-- after establishing some of the foundations, we can move into some of the scientific findings across psychology and neuroscience and psychopharmacology, especially psychedelics. And as Michael alluded to, I'll maintain a kind of agnosticism for as long as I can. But beliefs ultimately, inevitably come back into the picture. And so I'll conclude with William James's professional conclusion as well as his personal conclusion, and I'll give some of my reflections as well.
But before we even get into William James, I think it's worth pausing just a moment to consider where we are now. So when I first began my own interest in researching the varieties of spiritual experience, it started from my own spontaneous altered state of consciousness or spiritual experience-- we'll get into these definitions-- that occurred lying on my dorm room bed as an undergrad. And led me to William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, which helped me to understand and normalize the experience.
This kicked off many, many years of reading in comparative religion, neuroscience, and psychology ultimately. And when I started my PhD work in psychology, I have to say this topic was extremely unusual. It raised a number of eyebrows and was seen as pretty fringe to be frank.
I think that has shifted dramatically. So just today there was yet another publication in the New England Journal of Medicine on psychedelic substances. And psychedelics are now really in front and center in mainstream psychiatric and psychological and even just social discourse.
And at the heart of psychedelic treatments is this very interesting altered state of consciousness that William James actually has much to teach us about. And I think, much to guide us on in terms of his insights of how we ought to study altered states of consciousness in general.
So we've gone from a topic that has even during the course of my career, gone from quite fringe to quite central. And I think there are a number of other reasons probably more important than just the centrality of this topic in the discourse for considering the history and the current state of the art in studying these deeply profound inner experiences.
What I'd like to do is start with the experiential. So I'll just ask everyone to take a nice deep breath in and close your eyes. And as you breathe out, just call to mind a memory of an experience that you've had where there was maybe nothing in particular going on externally.
This is an experience that occurred almost entirely inwardly. And maybe an experience that was intense, unusual, meaningful, maybe difficult, challenging, maybe quite positive. And I think we can bring to mind the kind of experience that one might mean when they refer to a spiritual experience.
So see if you can just find the closest thing for you that seems to you to match that description. Let's remember what caused it, what you were thinking, feeling, visuals or voices, and the insights that came, and how you felt afterwards. And so just bring this memory to mind. And as you do, you can take a nice deep breath in. And as you breathe out, you can open your eyes back to the room. OK.
So I think it's worth connecting inwardly to these memories, which are often extremely profound as I'll mention. I'm not sure if there's a chat function here. If there is, I'll ask you to use it. If there's not, I'll ask you to write it down the answer to this question. So we need to get to some basic definitions before we really dive into James and the varieties and the state of science.
So what is a spiritual experience anyway? Interestingly, the Gallup and the General Social Survey, very large scale polling companies, have for many decades, and really once every few years in the US and the UK, asked people whether they've had a religious or spiritual or mystical type experience. The labels are many and the wording does change, but the affirmative response rate remains relatively stable over time.
And so-- let me see-- a few of these questions are worded like, have you had a religious or mystical experience that changed the direction of your life? Or have you felt close to a spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself? Or maybe simply, have you had what you consider to be a profound spiritual experience?
So the question that I'll pose to you all, the audience, is to guess what percentage of the population in say, the US will agree completely to one of these statements? So just for the sake of simplicity, imagine the question is have you ever had a profound spiritual experience? And imagine there's a scale from 1 to 10 and we're interested in the 10s, the people who say, yes, I completely agree. I definitely had a profound spiritual experience.
So if there is a chat function, I'd ask you to just put in your guess of how many-- what percentage of the population would completely agree to that statement. OK, wonderful. Oh, and I see the chat function does work, which is great. OK, excellent. So I'm seeing a few responses already and actually more are piling in. Actually, I wish I was recording these. Maybe I could write a script at some point to record these and actually compute an average because I wonder if we'd actually get pretty close to the real national average.
But instead of computing an average, I'm just going to take a quick skim and give you the range that I'm seeing. And what I see is 1% as the lower bound. And I'm seeing 85% as the higher bound. Now, that's amazing so thank you all for those who participated. Thank you for throwing in your guesses.
If this was in person, I'd give the winner a book. But anyway, 1% to 85% is the range. Now, this is amazing because this is great. This is a huge amount of uncertainty that we have. And this is a self-selected audience. We're all pretty interested in this topic probably, more or less. Otherwise, why would we be here? So a relatively interested audience. There's this range of 1% to 85%, that's great.
Because psychology often doesn't give us the kinds of answers that we want. There are other sciences that provide these really definitive answers. And we have some assurance on those. Whereas, psychology sometimes it raises more questions than answers, or the answers are somewhat difficult to interpret. But in any case-- in this case, there really is an actual answer.
And the actual answer-- and remember the reason why I ask you to register your guess is because with psychology, as soon as I tell you the answer, what usually happens is confirmation bias. So you think, oh, well, that's completely obvious. I knew that all along. So that's why I'm so appreciative that you threw your guesses out there. So we have the range of 1% to 85%. The answer is in fact about 35%.
So over the decades across at least a couple of countries, with questions that are worded in different ways, the 35% figure is one that's pretty reliable and one that's frequently cited as a kind of basic understanding of prevalence. So that's really interesting, I think.
Now, what's going on here is there's a lot of weight placed on these particular words that are used in this case in what seems to be meant. Oh, and whoever got-- if anyone actually got 35% in particular, do email me because I will send a book if anyone got 35%.
So there's been some good qualitative studies digging into these affirmative responses and trying to get a sense for what people really mean when they say yes. And there's a spectrum here. So some people mean things like, well, I have faith. I believe in certain religious views and those are very meaningful to me. And they're emotionally evocative. And this is a certain-- so that's one thing. So this is what we'd call a very belief heavy affirmative response.
Sometimes people respond with intensely altered states of consciousness that it almost like a fever dream, just a state of confusion. And it's not even really felt to be meaningful, which spiritual experience doesn't necessarily need to. But it's more just this kind of state of confusion.
So there's a variety of different responses basically. And people in the colloquial sense of the term are willing to say this is a spiritual experience. And it's important I think to understand what people mean when they use that phrase. But I'm going to offer a little bit of a more precise definition, which is that a spiritual experience for our rough purposes is an intensely altered state of consciousness involving shifts in cognition, affect, and perception in which one feels as if they perceive an unseen reality of some kind.
So there's two major portions of this definition. One is this intensely altered state. So these are these shifts in how you feel and perceive reality in a fundamental way. So our cognitions change, our perception, our feelings. There's this overall gestalt shift.
But then it's paired with this perception of seeming perception of an unseen reality of some kind. This is a phrase that comes from James. And this unseen reality could involve any number of things. It's often a perception of what seems to be essence of existence. This might be a divinity. This could be unity. This could be beauty. This could be entropy.
So there's this idea that one has perceived something about the nature of reality in some way, though, they can doubt this perception is real. I'll say more about that in a second. So what does this mean? This means that if someone were to say, well, I had a fever, and I was really confused about what was going on. I would say, well, that sounds like an intensely altered state of consciousness but maybe doesn't involve this perception of an unseen order.
Whereas another person might say, well, I truly believe in God, and I just feel that belief strongly. One might say, well, OK, so it seems like you have a sense of belief about what an unseen order of reality is, but it doesn't sound like you had an intensely altered state of consciousness. So that really I think the combination of these two things is what constitutes spiritual experience for our purpose.
Why did we use the term spiritual? Why did James use the word religious? James has a whole discussion of this. And he says I'm choosing to use the word religious. Later he talks about mystical experiences. He says you can use whatever label you want. He actually said you could even say experiences that come from the B region of the mind rather than the A region.
He used these terms because people seem to understand what he meant when he used them. That's basically why we also use the word spiritual. We shifted from religious to spiritual for two reasons. One is scholars have said that James had such a broad view of spiritual experience or his topic of these religious or mystical experiences that spiritual is just the contemporary word that fits that broad set best.
So we agreed and we took the lead from these scholars. But we also asked people, we gathered data. And we said, OK, we describe the basic type of experience we're interested in. And we say, what do you call this? And we got a long list of options. And spiritual was the most common and so people seem to use this term most frequently. And so that's why we used it and provided you with a very rough definition there of what's meant by a spiritual type experience.
So another pause to just contemplate where we are. Currently, before we go back to James to talk about James-- I remember that-- we'll get to James. Basically, these experiences can be quite dramatic, and it can induce a pretty substantial shift in terms of wellbeing and meaning. So these experiences appear to often be nontrivial for those who have them. They may only last a few moments. Actually, the average is 20 minutes that this altered state of consciousness lasts. And yet most people report feeling impacted for years or even decades.
So there's something deeply meaningful and important about these experiences which we call spiritual. But just because we're using the term spiritual and just because the definition includes this perception of an unseen reality, that doesn't mean that only people who have religious or spiritual beliefs have these experiences.
So there are actually a number a wide range of interpretations that one can have of these experiences, and those were probably represented by many on this call. When you brought to mind your own experience, you very likely have a very specific interpretation of that experience, or a belief, or an attribution associated with it. But what I think is very interesting is when you look across religions, you don't tend to see the same experiences across religions. But you do see experiences that can be judged to be similar, I think.
But these occur in all religious traditions. These occur in individuals who consider themselves spiritual but not religious who have a belief involving a nonphysical mind of some kind, either that their own mind is separate from their body in some way like a soul, or that there's some larger mind in or beyond the physical universe like a God or all pervading consciousness, these spiritual beliefs tend to be more abstract than religious ones which are more specific.
And agnostics and atheists also have these experiences. Barbara Ehrenreich, who just passed away, wrote a book called Living With a Wild God in which she described her own experiences, which she called spiritual experiences, in which she described as involving the perception of a non-physical mind in the surrounding environment. But she chose to interpret them in a mostly atheistic way.
Sam Harris is someone who has these experiences yet is an outspoken atheist. Bertrand Russell is another, maybe the most well-known atheist of all time, had what he considered to be a mystical experience. He wrote an essay about it called Mysticism and Logic. And he said in his autobiography that the experience no doubt involved delusional elements and yet the feeling tone of it stayed with him throughout the entire rest of his life.
So he felt as if this experience was responsible for some of his pacifism, activism around pacifism, as well as the emotional tone he took with loved ones, which he felt he became a warmer and more loving person. So we've talked a little bit about the overall prevalence of these spiritual experiences. We've talked about how meaningful and positive they can sometimes be, although not always. And sometimes they have in fact, negative outcomes.
We've also talked about a rough definition why we chose the word spiritual. And that people of all beliefs and non-belief systems, as it were, can and do have these experiences. So let's get back to James. So sometimes-- I know that not for this audience and not for this venue-- these William James is, I think, pretty widely known here.
But a lot of times I have this worry, or I get the sense that people think I picked a sort of obscure thinker to focus so much on. And so it's like one of those memes where it's like, why are you obsessed with me. If William James were to make a meme, which is a funny image. But so why care about William James?
It's a fair question. And what I want to say is that William James is not at all really obscure in terms of his impact on contemporary science and scholarship. So Bertrand Russell said William James was the world's most famous academic when he passed away. James was the president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association.
He was trained as a medical doctor. He taught physiology, as I mentioned. And he was a foundational influence on the study of religion to some small extent. He was a very important influence in psychiatry in the definition of a mental disorder, in which one has to look to the outcomes of that mental disorder, if it causes suffering and dysfunction. And this outcome focus comes explicitly from William James. Adolf Meyer, who's the founder of modern psychiatry, explicitly acknowledges James for this.
In philosophy, the view of pragmatism was largely popularized by William James. And I've already mentioned a bit of his influence in psychology. But also he wrote the foundational textbook for the field of psychology, which was read by every psych student for many decades. And so he really had a really extraordinary career himself.
He was also raised in an extraordinary family. it's like a century or so ago version of the Royal Tenenbaums. I mean, this was a family of genius. There was Henry James, who's actually remains more famous than even William James for his novels. Alice James was a famous feminist diarist.
And then their father Henry James senior was also very well known amongst intellectuals at the time. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Faraday, Henry David Thoreau, and Emerson would come over for dinner. In fact, there was even an Emerson room in the James household that Emerson would stay in whenever he visited New York.
So with a childhood like this you can imagine that this topic of spiritual experience wasn't completely alien to him. But James was interested in all of mental life. And that's everything from visual perception, to emotions, to imagination, to language, to even psychic-type phenomena which he investigated. He often found himself in the role of debunker in those investigations.
But this idea of studying these intensely altered states of consciousness, these religious experiences, personal religious experiences, as he called them, or conversions, or mystical experience, this was an obvious final step for him to take, I think. And this was one of the last topics in psychology that he really focused on.
So James himself had a number of experiences. Even though he said, I haven't had a full-blown mystical experience, there was a number of experiences that he described that seemed to come close. He also tried mescaline at one point. It appeared not to be an active dose that the history of psychedelic research would have started much earlier if it had. But he did use nitrous oxide and described it as a revelatory or mystical state. And even though it had a psychoactive-- even though it was a substance that caused the state, he still saw real meaning and value in it.
So he wrote the Varieties towards the end of his life. And the Varieties has ended up being maybe his strongest legacy. It's been in print continuously since he wrote it, which might be a record in psychology. And it's cemented itself into the Western canon. It's a real classic and for a very good reason. And not only is it beautifully written-- I mean, one of our main aims of our book is to get people to go back and read James's Varieties-- But he also does something really important, which is he pays very careful attention to what people are actually saying about these experiences.
So he includes hundreds of personal accounts of these experiences throughout the book-- almost as if he's gathering specimens does he include these personal descriptions. So he cares very much about getting into the actual subjective understanding and subjective feelings that people are bringing into these experiences.
James also does something unusual for the time, which is he says, I'm a psychologist-- this is a new thing to be at that point-- but he says, as a psychologist, I'm not going to be a philosopher or a theologian here. And so I'm going to set aside these larger claims about the metaphysical dimension, or maybe lack thereof of these experiences.
So he says I'm not going to wade into this issue of are these experiences revealing something true about reality or not. I'm going to set that aside to the extent that he can. Remember Michael mentioned this and I mentioned that we'll get to beliefs at the end but James really does set aside beliefs about these experiences as much as possible until the end.
He's really interested instead in looking at what we can understand about these experiences scientifically. And what can we understand about them? Well, we can look at what triggers them. We can look at what happens in the brain and the body during them. We can ask people how they feel during them and maybe divide them into different types. And we can also look at the consequences of these experiences-- how they impact people's actual lives. And this is exactly what James does throughout this book.
So he's sensitive to the subjective and the phenomenology essentially of the investigation. He sets aside what he considers largely unfalsifiable theological questions. And so he adopts this kind of methodological agnosticism and pays attention carefully to what we can study scientifically. And in fact, some of his students were at that time surveying people and providing data about these experiences.
So this is an approach which I find extremely admirable because of its sensitivity to people's actual experience. Because of its scientific rigor of actually looking at the evidence. And because of its philosophical sensible like as a psychologist, as a scientist, setting these questions aside about the ultimate nature of these experiences, I think is refreshing in its humility.
And I'll contrast that approach against-- to much more well known psychologists in the study of spiritual experience. So the first is Freud. So well after James published the Varieties, Freud ended up speculating on these experiences. Romain Rolland, who's a writer and did a lot to bring study of Buddhism and Hinduism into Europe. Hermann Hesse Siddhartha is dedicated to this person. He wrote to Freud saying, well, maybe I agree with your views about religious beliefs but what about these experiences, these oceanic feelings of oneness?
And what Freud said is-- in the intro first chapter of civilization and Its Discontents-- is he says, these experiences sound weird. Essentially these fit so badly in our conception of human psychology, according to him, that they must have a psychoanalytic explanation. And that's to say that he felt that they must be symptomatic of mental illness essentially. He even offered half-baked explanation for what these experiences might be, which is memories of being in one's mother's womb coming to the surface after being repressed.
So this strikes most contemporary psychologists and neuroscientists as very silly and impossible. And Freud really had a very pathologizing perspective towards these experiences. Again, no data. This is just him speculating. And I find that very unfortunate.
So where William James was sensitive and interested in people's subjective experience, Freud was only interested in his own speculations. Where James went out and looked at data, Freud did no such thing. And where James has a balanced view that these experiences often but not always result in positive effects, Freud just assumed that they were completely related to mental illness or psychopathological.
The other very well known psychologists who talked a lot about spiritual experience was Carl Jung. Jung did indeed have these kinds of experiences and did talk to people about them. But he was so enthusiastic about the potential of these experiences that he ultimately brought them into the Center. He called them numinous experiences-- brought them into the center of his whole system of therapy and treated them as a pathway to true mental health.
So this is in some ways the opposite of the Freudian perspective in terms of mental health where Freud thought it was symptom of mental illness-- where Freud thought was a symptom of mental illness, Jung thought it was important for mental health or essential even. These are quite opposite views whereas William James is more mixed and looking to actual data and the outcomes.
But Freud and Jung are similar insofar as they have very, very confident, boldly stated extreme views of these experiences. And they, in my view, wholly lack James's intellectual humility and ability to think in a nuanced and more balanced and evidence-based manner. So over the years, there's been a number of movements in psychology, including psychoanalysis but also behaviorism for a number of years where the methods were such that spiritual experiences were passed over in silence, so to speak.
And it's only the past few decades where a post-cognitive revolution and after some advances in psychometrics that now psychologists can routinely measure spiritual type experiences in very large scales like those Gallup polls, that I mentioned, but also in more carefully controlled studies. So psychology has come a long way in the measurement and understanding of spiritual experiences. And what does the psychological data say?
Well, it's actually vindicating James in a lot of ways, which is that most but certainly not all people tend to benefit at least a little bit from their self-reported spiritual experience and some people benefit tremendously. On the other side of the spectrum, some people have experiences that are related to mental illness. And some people have experiences for which they require psychotherapeutic support in order to integrate.
So James's nuanced perspective has been really vindicated in the data, whereas Freud's wholly negative and Jung's wholly enthusiastic assessments have not held up nearly so well. James couldn't have imagined the advances in neuroimaging that have occurred over the past few decades. So our Michael Ferguson does brilliant work in this. My coauthor Andy Newberg, who's a radiologist, has done pioneering work in this area, the neuroscience of spiritual experiences over the years-- what Michael now calls Neurospirituality.
But also, as I mentioned in the beginning, psychopharmacology has come a long way. So during my doctoral work, I did many of these survey studies, retrospective survey studies asking people to report about their spiritual experiences. But I also tried to do some controlled studies where I would induce a spiritual experience in the lab. And these basically all failed entirely. So I tried noninvasive brain stimulation. It didn't really work. Virtual reality or inspiring stimuli like videos, meditation. None of these things reliably induced anything close to the kind of intensely altered state of consciousness that I was interested in.
These investigations did provide some findings of interest. For example, the whole middle of the book, the new book, the Varieties of Spiritual Experience is divided into different types of experience, which we derive from a data-driven approach called factor analysis. So we find that we can distinguish between types of experience, for example, numinous or God experiences where people feel the presence of God around them. Unity experiences-- deep feelings of connectedness. Revelatory experiences where you receive voices, or visions, or epiphanies.
Synchronicity experiences where seemingly coincidental events feel like as if they have a deeper personal meaning. Aesthetic experiences-- this is the experience that all of us have had feeling goose bumps, and thoughts stop, and jaw drop from art or nature. And the paranormal experiences-- so non-physical entities of some kind, which are actually extremely common and was of surprise to us because we didn't go looking for people to report these experiences. But especially in the context of grief, are fairly normative.
And speaking of which, we want to normalize these experiences. I mentioned the prevalence at the beginning. And despite this prevalence, 40% of people still don't mention having one of these experiences to even their close friends and family. 40% of people apparently have never told another soul about their spiritual experience, regardless of which type it is, because of this concern, which I think is somewhat of a holdover from Freud that they'll be considered to have a mental illness.
So let me wrap up here with just getting back to this issue of inducing these experiences in controlled laboratory settings. So as Michael mentioned, I now work in a psychedelic Center at Johns Hopkins. And these psychedelic experiences that we induce often for therapeutic purposes or to examine their impact on wellbeing, they're somewhat of a similar dynamic to the overall picture of these spiritual experiences that James discussed and that the psychology research finds, which is that they're positively transformative for some. That they benefit many a bit. They have no effect for some. And for a few, they're actually adverse. So there's a similar breakdown.
But what's so interesting I think about the psychedelic research is that according to a lot of self-report measures, the naturally occurring-- quote unquote "naturally" occurring spiritual experiences from things like prayer, or meditation, or solitude in nature, seem subjectively quite similar to many of the psychedelic experiences that we're able to induce.
And again, I think this is one of the most interesting findings in all of psychology from the past two decades. But very reliably in these psychedelic studies, 2/3 of the sample who receive the psychedelic like, for example, psilocybin report that the experience was one of the most meaningful of their entire lives. And many of these people are benefiting from these experiences in a persisting way.
So when we look at the context of global mental health pandemic and the lack of innovation in psychiatric treatments for mood disorders in the past 30 or more years, there's good reason to be excited about the psychedelic research with the massive caveat that much more research needs to be done in order to really understand the efficacy, the risks, and the benefits there.
But I think regardless of the overall impact for therapeutic reasons and for wellbeing reasons, what we have with psychedelics is a laboratory probe to help us understand these often profoundly meaningful and deeply interesting spiritual experiences. And so I think William James would have been absolutely delighted to see that the research on this topic has continued. And that we've advanced in our psychological, neurological, and pharmacological tools to study these experiences.
But we still need input from scholars, which is absolutely essential. And I think it's important that we not forget our past, and that we look to William James for some of these foundational insights in how we approach and study and seek to understand not only psychedelic experiences but spiritual experience in general. So I'll pause there and let Michael come back into the mix so we can start chatting about some of these topics.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Bravo. David, this is just such a joy to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for sharing your reflections here. I'd like to maybe start with a little bit of personal reflection from you before moving on to a couple of technical discussion points. Then lastly go into a bit of a theoretical conversation before opening it up to Q&A from the virtual audience.
On the personal side of things, you mentioned that you had your own what you could categorize as spiritual experience at a formative period. And I'm wondering if to the degree that you feel comfortable elaborating a little bit more about the set and setting, if you will, for that experience and how it impacted you?
DAVID YADEN: Yeah, so this experience came on entirely spontaneously. No substances involved whatsoever.
[LAUGHTER]
MICHAEL FERGUSON: It wasn't my question. But [INAUDIBLE].
DAVID YADEN: No, I know. Just setting the stage. It was though during what I would consider a transitional period of life, which is in fact, a trigger that we identify that people frequently endorse as encouraging these experiences to occur. So this was, as I said, undergrad lying on my dorm room bed contemplating myself, my future. Feeling some adolescent angst, I think, and some confusion about what the future really held for me and anxiety, I think about that.
I remember having the feeling, or even thinking to myself at some point this phrase, come what may. It's like OK, I've thought enough about this, I'm anxious enough but it was kind of surrender to my future. At which point I experienced a heat in my chest. This heat grew. It initially I thought it was indigestion or something very physical. Eventually this heat came over my whole body at which point a voice in my mind said, this is love.
At that point, I went into my mind, or I became unaware of my body or my surroundings and saw 360 degree boundless horizon stretching out in every direction. And this intricate fabric, which I felt totally part of-- indistinguishable from. And after what was probably just a few minutes but felt like days, weeks, months, I opened my eyes. This heat or feeling of love had reached the boiling point as if I couldn't take any more.
Open my eyes. My body is laughing and crying at the same time. Very unusual emotional release for me. And everything seemed new. The future seemed open. I felt an outpouring of love, the classic thing. I wanted to call friends and family and just tell them I love you. And I did do that in fact.
But most of all, I was wondering what the fuck just happened to me. What was that? And that kicked off a rather obsessive decade of reading and seeking to understand. And thankfully, one of the early books I happened upon was William James's Varieties of Religious Experience because it for me normalized my experience.
I thought OK, people are having this. People have had this. Many people have had this experience and in fact, many benefited from it. And so part of my whole mission with all of this with this book is to pass that on, to pay it forward, and to help normalize these experiences for people who are having them and maybe confused by them.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Well, that's beautiful. I'm really curious as well, David, the degree to which your research has shaped or infused into your own ongoing relationship with spiritual experience, or your own attribution of narrative to past spiritual experience?
DAVID YADEN: Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say at the point of having my experience I was right beforehand-- moments beforehand I was an atheist. I had been raised religious, but I was an atheist at that point. After my experience I became really a believer in supernaturalism and was very interested in religious traditions and spiritual traditions. And that lasted for a little while.
I would say my diving into philosophy, though, brought me back. And brought me because I was thinking well, seeing is believing. I just I saw this different dimension to reality. It seemed as if this really was something beyond the physical world. And what I think philosophy taught me is to be more self-critical and more humble about what conclusions I can draw from my own experience.
And so I started to be more skeptical of myself. And so that brought me to a place of agnosticism. And so in terms of questions about the nature of consciousness, for example, I consider myself an agnostic technically.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: And it's really interesting to me that if you read particularly mystical theological literature, there is a way in which agnosticism has a particular orthodoxy to it. There's a sense within more mystical expressions of traditional religious faith systems that the totality of being and the source of existence is so far beyond what a finite human mind can comprehend and conceptually articulate. That type of openness, that type of humility that typifies the agnostic posture you're describing is in a way an orthodox posture to assume as opposed to some kind of subversive posture to assume.
DAVID YADEN: That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I'd like to talk more about that and learn more. I did want to get to William James's conclusion on this point because I actually forgot to end on this. And then you teased it. I'll take--
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Can we-- can I be so bold as to pump the brakes just a little bit on that.
DAVID YADEN: Yeah, sure.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: We'll keep people with suspense here before we get to the big reveal because I actually want to ask some questions about that. But if I may, I want to again, unpack a little bit of a technical set of questions first. One of them is about the typology that you present in the book. Because you have this very elegant, parsimonious categorization of God experiences, unit of experiences, and ghost type experiences.
And I want to just make sure I'm understanding correctly that this typology you came to from evidence-based approaches. And the reason why I just want to make sure that I'm reading that correctly is because it was striking to me how cleanly your proposed typology aligns with categorizations that are explicitly from theological sources.
DAVID YADEN: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Well, in the third part of the book we say that our typology doesn't work ultimately. It fails. But that's interesting to know that it matches with theological understanding. I didn't know that. I mean, basically, the structure of this is we asked people have you had a spiritual experience? If so, describe it in writing. And then answer these 200 different questions about the experience. And then we applied factor analysis, which essentially allows us to cluster different kinds of responses.
So the answer as having to do with God clustered with those having to do with divinity and this feeling of presence around one. And those other clusters were like feelings of connectedness, unity, self-transcendence. And others were seeing a non-physical entity like a ghost. So these different clusters emerged, and that's how we create that typology, which is kind of like a guidebook for different sorts of spiritual experiences in the second part of the book.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: So tell me about why you're saying that it failed. Because I mean, that sounds explanatory, that sounds clean. Why are you saying that it failed?
DAVID YADEN: Well, the thing that I really worried about is that a lot of this whole typology rests really on what seems to have been perceived during the experience. So it's really a typology of different kinds of unseen realities that people seem to perceive during these experiences.
The categories are not mutually exclusive, which is somewhat of another issue. People can have multiple of these categories all at once. But the part that mostly bothers me is that they all involve seeing a certain-- or perceiving a certain kind of thing during this experience. And what I'd really like for a good typology is for it to involve very abstract underlying dimensions that are more psychologically and even neurologically basic.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: OK.
DAVID YADEN: Yeah, so--
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Is this where you're driving toward when-- because you talk about dimensions of spiritual experience and dimensions of mind perception, unity, altered sense of time, emotional balance, overall arousal of [? noetic ?] quality, is that closer to what it is that you're talking about?
DAVID YADEN: Exactly. That would be ideal, I think. Because what would be great is if these dimensions were somewhat universal across traditions. And what you could see is different traditions maybe having higher or lower levels of these various dimensions. Whereas as we have it now if there's a certain religion that involves some kind of entity that we don't describe particularly well, then we just won't pick up on that experience.
So I think our typology is too parochial. And what I'd really love is to have these deeper underlying dimensions. But basically, I just failed to deliver on that. I thought I could come up with something, but we list this as a future direction for the field to hopefully gain some traction on.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Very interesting. And I'm curious to you, what would that look like? What would it look like to arrive at the carving of nature at its joints where it looked like, OK, now we have five discrete brain circuits. And those are independent vectors. And those map onto our different dimensions of spiritual experience. Like how will you know when you come to the right answer?
DAVID YADEN: It's a great question. It probably won't involve brain circuits because I'll leave that to people like you who understand how to do that work much better than I do. I mean, that would be interesting, wouldn't [? it, ?] if we had a brain-based typology. But I don't know enough to say there. There's this movement in mental health research to move from particular diagnoses, particular disorders from the research domain criteria or RDoC.
And so seeing these more underlying dimensions like so, for example, negative mood that shows up in depression, anxiety disorders, compulsive disorders, psychotic disorders. So it's not a distinctive feature. It's rather this continuous distribution that can occur to more or less of an extent across these, as we call them now, our diagnoses.
And so rather than talking about things like depression and anxiety, which is more so what we have as currently the middle section of the book, our typology, it'd be great to move towards these underlying dimensions like mood for example. I don't know if this is possible. Again, I failed to deliver on this. And the problem is you get so abstract so quickly.
And when you ask someone, did you feel the presence of God around you? People get that. Even if they're an atheist, they understand what you mean by that. And they may interpret it as a projection of their brain, but they still get what you mean. Whereas when you start to talk in these very abstract ways like, did you perceive nondiffuse, nonphysical mind in your immediate surroundings? People are like, what are you talking about? I mean, if you're an academic, you kind of think, yeah, sure, that makes sense. But if you're most of us, we think that doesn't really sound like something that makes sense. It sounds like a bunch of jargon. So that's the concern. It's a tradeoff really.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: It occurs to me that so often, whether it's a psychological approach, a neuroscientific approach, that the questions about spiritual experience are often framed in some formulation of why is it that people have these types of experiences? And there is a baked in set of assumptions here that that's abnormal, or exceptional, or breakthrough. And I'm curious what your thoughts would be about flipping the paradigm and asking almost the exact inverse of the question of, why is it that some people do not have spiritual experiences? What would be gained? What would be lost? What would be the risk, the benefits of flipping the paradigm for the question?
DAVID YADEN: That's really interesting. It reminds me of work done by David Sloan Wilson in Darwin's Cathedral and Jonathan Haidt, which is this evolutionary argument that focuses on groups. And it basically says groups that had more people who had these experiences, which they describe as these all-for-one one-for-all moments, which is definitely a big outcome of all of these spiritual experiences. People often feel this outpouring of altruism.
Like in my example, when I said I want to call all my friends and family and say I love them and I'd do anything for them, you can imagine how groups that had more people having these experiences would be more cooperative overall and thus more successful. And so yeah, you can imagine this view almost like an evolutionary fitness type view of there are some people who have these advantageous experiences-- for most of them, at least they're advantageous-- not always.
And that these are helpful for the furtherance of human survival. And that the real question is why isn't everyone having these experiences? That's very interesting. I like that I like that flip. I don't have anything else to say other than that.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: OK, fair enough.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
MICHAEL FERGUSON: I'll say to that speaking of just flips, at first when you said that you were going to identify two psychologists who you would like to critique for their approaches, I thought you were going to talk about contemporary psychologists. I was like, oh, it's about to get real. But OK, Freud and--
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID YADEN: Well, I always feel a little bad critiquing Jung because I love reading Jung, And it's just I disagree with-- I think he lacks the humility and evidence groundedness of James. But there's a lot to learn from Freud and Jung. But I think they both got a lot of the approach to spiritual experience quite wrong.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: So that does segue into my final question for you here. And this is a theoretical question that sets the stage for the big reveal of James's personal beliefs.
So you discuss in the book the way in which James is extrapolating metaphysical evidence from pragmatic data. And it's caricatured by I think critics who are uncharitable as James merely saying, if it makes you happy, then it must be true. And so I'm wondering if first you can articulate with a little bit more of a sophisticated set of criteria what it is that James is actually saying about the relationships between pragmatic observation and metaphysical extrapolation? And then share with us what is it exactly that James himself espoused as his personal beliefs?
DAVID YADEN: Yeah. OK, great. So the big reveal. So just to rephrase the question, I would say something like, what does James say about the issue of are these experiences real in the metaphyseal sense? Are they showing us something about the metaphysical nature of reality is a spiritual experience providing evidence of spiritual dimension to reality?
So he provides two conclusions. The first is what he calls his professional conclusion. His professional conclusion is he says something like, in all said sincerity we must admit to the fact that none of these experiences, all of these hundreds of experiences we've discussed about provide an iota of evidence for the infinitiest belief, is what he calls it. But this is like a supernatural belief.
So he basically says if we're-- and I know Michael you and I disagree with this, so we can talk about it. But he basically says, if we're going to be scientists about it, we simply can't prove or disprove the supernatural realms existence or nonexistence. So he really doubles down on this methodological agnosticism that he's really maintained throughout the whole book. So that's his professional conclusion.
I find that incredibly admirable in its humility. There's a lot of power in the phrase I don't know especially when it comes from an expert. But then he gives his personal conclusion. This is quite different and really surprising to me and most readers. It comes right at the end of the book. And he basically-- just this comes from his philosophy of pragmatism.
And he says there's this concept of overbeliefs. And an overbelief is James says, if you really don't know something and if you have no way of knowing it, then you have the right to choose what you believe on the basis of its benefits to you and to others. And so he says that he can't know whether these experiences point to some other-- more this other supernatural or spiritual dimension. But he says that believing that they do makes him more sane and true. And essentially help him to deal with life.
And so on that basis, he himself makes the leap of faith, which apparently is James's phrase that he coined. It's not Kierkegaard. He makes the leap of faith, and he chooses on the basis of this idea of this concept of overbeliefs to believe that these experiences point to another spiritual realm of existence.
And he even goes further. He says some people have this view of God. There's the refined supernaturalists. And then there's who believe in this notion of the ultimate, or like deists who believe in Spinoza's God, like God is just nature. And then there's the [? Kresser ?] naturalist, I think he says. And he says I'm in the latter category. So he chooses to believe in a more interventionist God on the basis of the benefits of that belief to his life.
And so this was controversial. I mean, James-- Bertrand Russell said everything is good about the Varieties except the conclusion. So Bertrand Russell really didn't like James's view, but I find it very bold and interesting that James put that at the end of the book.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Beautiful. Wonderful summary, again just a fantastic contribution here to this multidisciplinary discourse between science and spirituality, David. With that, I think that Charlie is going to rejoin us here to help curate some questions from the virtual audience.
DAVID YADEN: Thank you, Michael.
CHARLES STANG: Well, I've really been enjoying just listening to you two talk. We have a couple of questions in the Q&A function. And also somebody dropped-- people have been dropping comments into the chat function. So I'm actually going to start with one in the chat function from Kim Frumkin that's not visible to everyone else. So I'm going to read it out loud. David, here's what it says.
In the context of psychedelics generating spiritual experiences. How would you respond to Swami Akhilananda who said, "Some thinkers conclude that a kind of mystical state can be produced by nitrous oxide and other drugs, but the effect of the [INAUDIBLE] produced proves that it's not a mystical experience because there's no change in personality. So the no change in the personality is somehow the thing that disqualifies it as a mystical experience, or I suppose, a change of personality would qualify it as mystical. And that comes from the Swami's article, Mysticism and Altruism from 1948.
DAVID YADEN: Interesting. So I tried to do-- to drive by definitional work pretty quickly in this talk. But ultimately, these topics require a substantial amount of definitional work. And so here's a reason why right in this question. I think this person has a definition of mystical experience that includes-- that isn't based on the self-reported subjective features of the state but is rather inclusive of certain outcomes associated with the state.
So it sounds like for this person that in order to have a mystical experience, it needs to fulfill certain subjective criteria as well as outcome criteria. So in other words, for it to be called mystical, it has to have good effects. I think that there are problems with including the outcome in the definition itself. Because then what do you call an experience that has a lot of the shared subjective features of the state itself but results in a very different outcome?
So say one person has a feeling of absolute connectedness, and unity, and benefits from it tremendously, and it ends up making them more altruistic. But what do you call a state that is similarly described, is a unit of collective experience but results in a negative outcome-- a feeling of fear and confusion that requires therapeutic assistance? Would that state itself be something totally different or is it the case that the same state can have different outcomes depending on one's framework for understanding it, and processing it, and integrating it?
So I tend to choose definitions that are more state based so that we can look at the outcomes, the whole spectrum of outcomes, good, bad, ugly, positively transformational, et cetera. And there's another dimension of that question, which is interesting. And it has to do with the nitrous oxide or drugs causing-- so James was very, very clear on this. He said what we should really care about-- we shouldn't care so much about the origins in judging the value of a state. We should judge the value of it. Now, not definition now but judging the value based on the outcomes.
And so he said we wouldn't deny how moving and beautiful a Beethoven symphony is just because we know that the composer was depressed during its composition. And in the same way, someone may have-- like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus-- could have a very transformative experience from something that we know also has-- this was a seizure.
I think it's widely acknowledged that Saint Paul's vision on the road to Damascus was both a seizure and a dramatically transformative spiritual experience. And I think James would say it doesn't matter that this was a seizure. What matters is that this was a dramatically transformative experience for that individual.
And so the first chapter of James's Varieties of Religious Experiences is called neurology and religion. And it goes really, really deep into this. And goes through a number of really well known saints who had pretty obvious mental disorders. And he says to deny the value of these experiences based on some of the features of their origins is nonsensical. And so when he would look at something like nitrous oxide, he would say, well, that might be the proximate cause of the state but really we need to look to the impact of the experience to judge its value.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Yeah I hear-- actually David, just a little bit of a contradiction of the two sequences there. And I don't think that was your intention. So we can just briefly tease those out because I hear you in the first sequence saying that we should not factor in the outcomes of transformation to the qualification of an experience as authentic or not. And then secondarily, here talking about James and his focus on the fruits of an experience. And so I wonder if you can just speak a little bit to that?
DAVID YADEN: Yeah. So in the first case how we define an experience need not be inclusive of outcomes. And the second point is when we think about the value of an experience, we might look to outcomes rather than origins.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Great, thanks.
CHARLES STANG: David, I want to ask you a question of my own based on something you just said. So one of the things that has always struck me since I found myself rather surprisingly now in this conversations around psychedelics and religion, that intersection, is maybe I shouldn't be surprised but there's a pretty widespread resistance among some folks about thinking about psychedelics as inducing mystical experience, especially I think people from Christian circles. And it's always struck me as somewhat odd.
And I want to pose this actually to both of you, Michael as well. The Christian archive has plenty of ample evidence of experiences induced by all kinds of practices, prayer, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, just to name some of the classic-- singing of Psalms, these are some that are close to my own heart with Egyptian monasticism.
It always strikes me as strange why should we think that depriving oneself of something like food would induce a-- could induce a legitimate spiritual experience but if we ingest something that is somehow illegitimate? And I've wondered whether the worry about ingesting something is troublesome precisely because of the Eucharist?
There's a sense in which only one thing that you can ingest should transform you. You can do all kinds of other bodily exercises, but if you're going to put something in your-- if you're going to eat or drink something that would transform you, it should be the Eucharist. And so anything that might do that is kind of rendered illegitimate by virtue of its stepping into the space of the Eucharist. I'm wondering if you find that even remotely compelling as an explanation for Christian worries about psychedelics?
MICHAEL FERGUSON: David, do you want me to go or do you want to go first?
DAVID YADEN: Mine will be really brief, and I suspect you have a better answer, Michael. So I'll say in a few words. Yeah, what I would say is interesting, is this historical background of people being outraged by these practices themselves as well, which is strange for us, I think, to consider. But these practices like fasting and extensive prayer were themselves viewed with suspicion at various times. And really I guess spontaneous being the only true form of spiritual experience.
Whereas if you're chasing it with one of these practices, that's inauthentic. I think we've moved on a little bit from that, but psychedelics appear to be the brunt of that attitude currently. I suspect once people get used to it, that attitude won't last. But again, I think Michael probably has a much better response for this one.
MICHAEL FERGUSON: A longer. I don't know if better but a longer response. I think that there's at least two dimensions in which we can test that hypothesis, Charlie. One is to look within Christendom and to correlate the degree to which a particular faith tradition has a high veneration for the Eucharist. And then to see if there is an association with an increased or decreased anxiety surrounding psychedelics.
Because with this working hypothesis you would predict that the higher that the reverence is given to the Eucharist sacramentally, that the higher the anxiety around psychedelics would be for some kind of authenticity of mystical experience induction. And then a second dimension of analysis would be to look across different traditions, Islamic traditions, Jewish traditions, et cetera to see if there is comparable anxiety, or if there is really something uniquely elevated about Christian anxiety.
But if we were to run that experiment, my wager is that perhaps there would be some correlation there. But that there would be perhaps a larger explanatory value to the anxieties about intoxicated states generally. I think that already with spiritual rapture there is such a patently intoxicating effect about it. That this delicate dance between ecstatic transformation versus delusion is so difficult to really finely walk and to discern. And so my speculation is that it's more generally an anxiety about any type of intoxicant that would compromise the ability for discernment.
CHARLES STANG: And by intoxicant, Michael, do you mean specifically intoxicant, or anything that might-- a catalyst for an altered state?
MICHAEL FERGUSON: Yep, so a catalyst for an altered state.
CHARLES STANG: Mh, OK. Yeah. Because of course, so many of these practices-- and I think David's right. There's the worries about these practices across the board, whether you're ingesting something or not. There are practices like sleep deprivation we know obviously induces altered states. We all know it when we get too tired. But if you have a cultivated practice of sleep deprivation, I think that can reliably bring on altered states.
Are people as anxious about that as a technique for inducing altered states as they are about techniques that involve of ingesting something, and if so why? And I'm not sure I know the answer to that. But I love the way you think. Because I think-- I just put this out as a hypothesis. And you're like, here's how we would-- here's how we would structure an experiment to answer that question, which is why you're a scientist and I'm not.
Well, we have come to our time. It's after 7:00. And I want to thank-- I want to thank especially David and Michael for leading us through a really wonderful, wide ranging conversation. I want to thank you David and Andrew, in his absence, for writing this book.
I have many more questions, but we simply don't have time to pursue them now. And I want to thank the audience for staying with us-- in fact, growing at a particular time. The audience surged late in the game. I don't know what explains that. And for some of the questions that are in the Q&A, which as I said before, we will pass on to David and Michael. So-- excuse me.
Please again be on the lookout for our next set of events. Sign up for our newsletter. And in the meantime, once again, David, Michael, thank you so very much and good evening.
DAVID YADEN: Thank you, Charlie. And thanks all.
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