Self-Transcendent Experience

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Self-Transcendent Experience

A Self-Transcendent Experience (STE) is a transient mental state of decreased self-salience and increased feelings of connectedness — a temporary fading of the boundaries of the bodily sense of self accompanied by a felt sense of unity with other people, one's surroundings, or existence as a whole. Self-Transcendent Experience is a syncretic term for the LP Connection Experience Type Unity Experience.

Concept Map

Key Terms

Connection

• Connected Consciousness
• Connection Algorithm
• Connection Axes
• Connection Blockage
• Connection Coach
• Connection Enhancements
• Connection Experience
• Connection Framework
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• Connection Obstacle
• Connection Outcome
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• Initiation
• Inner Connection
• No-Violence Rule
• Outer Connection
• Reconnection

Connection Experience

• The Flow

Connection Experience Types >

• Activation Experience
• Aesthetic Experience
• Birth Experience
• Clearing Experience
• Completion Experience
• Death Experience
• Deep Flow
• Diminutive Experience
• Dream Experience
• Flow Experience
• Forced Connection
• Healing Experience
• Nadir Experience
• Peak Experience
• Plateau Experience
• Push Experience
• Rebirth Experience
• Restorative Experience
• Union Experience
• Unity Experience
• Zenith Experience

Unity Experience >

Syncretic Terms

Unity Experience >

• Self-Transcendent Experience
• Unity Consciousness

Notes

Self-Transcendent Experience (STE) is a term proposed by psychologists David Yaden, Jonathan Haidt, Ralph Hood Jr., David Vago, and Andrew Newberg in an integrative review published in the Review of General Psychology. The title deliberately echoes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the article opens with James's observation that "we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace."

The authors favour the designation "self-transcendent experience" because it "captures a spectrum of intensities in addition to remaining neutral regarding secular or spiritual connotations."

Typology

Two Components

Yaden et al. decompose the STE into two broad, complementary subcomponents:

• an annihilational component, which refers to "the dissolution of the bodily sense of self accompanied by reduced self-boundaries and self-salience"; and
• a relational component, which refers to "the sense of connectedness, even to the point of oneness, with something beyond the self, usually with other people and aspects of one's environment or surrounding context."

The authors suggest the two components may vary with a degree of independence from one another. Notably, they propose that depersonalization/derealization experiences (DSM-5) may involve the annihilational aspect of self-loss without the relational aspect — i.e. self-loss with alienation rather than connection.

The Unitary Continuum

STEs are proposed to lie along a spectrum of intensity — called the unitary continuum (Newberg & d'Aquili) — "that ranges from the routine (e.g., losing yourself in music or a book), to the intense and potentially transformative (e.g., feeling connected to everything and everyone)." Milder states like mindfulness and awe sit at the low end; peak and mystical experiences sit at the high end, "insofar as they are felt to be more salient, visceral, and memorable." The degree of unity is commonly measured with Aron's Inclusion of Other in Self Scale (overlapping "Self"/"Other" circles).

The Varieties

The review identifies five common psychological constructs as "varieties of self-transcendent experience." To be included, each construct had to (1) be cited at least 1,000 times, (2) describe a mental state, (3) have a self-transcendent aspect explicitly described in theoretical writing, and (4) be measured by a scale containing items about reduced self-salience and/or increased connectedness. The five varieties:

• Mindfulness — moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness; its self-transcendent aspect appears as "decentering" (reduced identification with thoughts and emotions) and, in advanced practitioners, nondual awareness "in which the self-other distinction is dissolved." Formalized in the S-ART framework (self-awareness, self-regulation, self-transcendence).
• Flow — focused absorption in a challenging task, in which "the self is said to fade away while merging with the activity one is engaged in." Csikszentmihalyi: "one item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self."
• Self-Transcendent Positive Emotions — elevation, compassion, admiration, gratitude, love, and awe (also called "moral" or "other-praising" emotions). Shown to increase social connectedness and altruistic behaviour. Awe has a particularly intense self-transcendent quality, producing the "small self" ("I feel small or insignificant," "I feel the presence of something greater than myself") and even altering time perception.
• Peak Experiences — Maslow's term for transformative experiences reported by self-actualized individuals, typically including "a feeling of merging with the universe." The unity component is described as more primary than positive affect. Maslow: "These same people, the strongest egos ever described and the most definitely individual, were also precisely the ones who could be most easily ego-less, self-transcending."
• Mystical Experiences — the most intense variety, in which "the sense of self can fall away entirely, creating a distinction-less sense of unity with one's surroundings." James's four marks: transiency, ineffability, passivity, and a noetic quality. Measured by Hood's M-Scale and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ).

Alternate Labels

The article notes research on the same phenomena proceeding "under a number of different labels" — a clear case of Nomenclature Confusion — including: hypoegoic states, transpersonal experiences, unitary experiences, quantum change, religious experiences, spiritual experiences, sacred moments, epiphanic experiences, ecstatic experiences, anomalous experiences, nondual awareness, near-death experiences, mystical experiences, and the closest to a catch-all term, "religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences" (RSME).

What STEs Are Not

STEs are phenomenological states, not beliefs, values, traits, or orientations. Excluded: self-transcendence as a moral value (Schwartz), an other-prioritizing orientation (Frankl), a personality factor (Piedmont), a developmental process (gerotranscendence; Tornstam), and the trait-like TCI self-transcendence subscale — these may be predisposing factors or outcomes, but are not experiences. Also excluded are perceptual errors about bodily boundaries (e.g. phantom limbs) and the practices that induce STEs: "meditation, prayer, yoga, music, dancing, ingesting psychoactive substances, and many more."

Comparison to the LP Concept Connection Experience

While "self-transcendent experience" is a step forward from older, religion-bound labels, the LP concept of Connection Experience is a more descriptive and more accurate marker for the same phenomenon — and it captures more of the "varieties" than the STE marker does.

• The centre of gravity is connection, not self-loss. STE defines the experience privatively, by what happens to the self (decreased self-salience, "annihilation"), with connectedness tacked on as a second component. Yet the salient feature of these experiences is positive and additive: a felt Connection to something beyond the boundaries of the Bodily Ego — nature, other people, the cosmos, God. Yaden et al.'s own decomposition betrays the problem: the "annihilational component" can occur entirely without connection (as in depersonalization, which they are then forced to exclude from the category), which means self-loss is not the essence of the experience at all. Connection Experience names the phenomenon by what it actually is, not by what happens to the ego while it occurs.
• It captures more of the varieties. STE's two-component definition only fits unity-type experiences — which is precisely why, on the LP map, STE syncretizes to Unity Experience, a single Connection Experience Type. The LP framework recognizes over twenty Connection Experience Types — Activation Experience, Aesthetic Experience, Clearing Experience, Completion Experience, Healing Experience, Rebirth Experience, Restorative Experience, Dream Experience, and others — many of which involve no diminishment of self-salience at all and therefore fall outside the STE marker. "Self-transcendence" names a subset of the phenomenon; "connection" names the class.
• It handles valence without pathologizing. STE is constructed around positive instances and shunts negative or difficult instances into the DSM (depersonalization/derealization disorder, "religious and spiritual problems"). The LP framework recognizes that the same class of experience can arrive as a Zenith Experience or a Nadir Experience, depending largely on the preparation of the individual and how the insight/expansion is received — keeping positive and negative instances in one category, where they phenomenologically belong.
• It is multidimensional. Where STE offers a single "unitary continuum" of intensity, the LP analyzes Connection Experience along five Connection Axes, distinguishes experience types from Connection Outcomes, and provides a measure of both intensity and quality (the Q-Scale).
• It is ontologically accurate. From the LP perspective, nothing is "transcended" or lost in these experiences: the Bodily Ego relaxes its grip (neurologically, a release of Default Mode Network control) and allows a stronger flow of Consciousness into the Physical Unit. "Connection Experience" describes this directly; "self-transcendent experience" describes it from the standpoint of the ego that was momentarily quieted — a marker of the observer's position, not of the event.

Tidbits

• Prevalence: STEs are common — "around one third of people in samples from multiple cultures report intense experiences of unity with other people and their surroundings."
• Freud vs. James: Freud speculated that "oceanic feelings of oneness" were neurotic regressions to the womb and a symptom of psychopathology. The authors conclude that "a qualified consensus has emerged that, on the whole, Freud was wrong and James was right regarding the positive psychological potential" of these experiences — STEs are "more often associated with positive outcomes such as well-being and prosocial behavior," and intense STEs "are sometimes counted among life's most meaningful moments."
• Psilocybin studies: In the Johns Hopkins replication of Pahnke's "Good Friday Experiment," about two thirds of participants administered psilocybin met the criteria for a mystical experience, and about two thirds rated the experience among the top five most meaningful moments of their entire lives — "alongside events like childbirth and marriage." Beneficial effects (positive attitudes, altruism, meaning in life, life satisfaction) persisted at least 18 months.
• Neurology: SPECT scans of advanced meditators and praying nuns showed decreased activity in the superior parietal lobe — a region that models bodily boundaries and self/non-self distinctions — during peak feelings of unity. Conversely, patients with lesions to parietal regions and the right angular gyrus showed increased self-transcendence. The relational component is linked to oxytocin and vasopressin, vagal tone, and social-cognitive networks (theory of mind, mentalization).
• Hood's "Ego Quality": the M-Scale factor describing "the experience of a loss of sense of self while consciousness is nonetheless maintained. The loss of self is commonly experienced as an absorption into something greater than the mere empirical ego."
• Healing potential: the authors link STEs to post-traumatic growth and "postecstatic growth," and suggest STEs confer benefits by providing "a temporary reprieve from the sense of one's self" — when the self temporarily disappears, so too may the fears and anxieties tied to it (excessive self-focus is implicated in depression, anxiety, shame, and guilt).
• "A friendlier universe": James observed that one outcome of mystical experiences can be "the feeling of being at home in the universe," and the authors suggest STEs may answer Einstein's question — is the universe a friendly place? — with a temporary but emphatic "yes!"
• Evolution: Haidt's "Hive Hypothesis" proposes that STEs — once present, perhaps as neurological accidents — conferred advantages on groups that harnessed them through ritual and worship: the "all for one, one for all" quality of STEs may have fostered group cohesion and coordinated action (building on Durkheim's conclusion that such experiences form "an important core of tribal life").
• Agency: reduced self-salience does not undermine agency; agency is "the belief in one's capacity for action," and the relationship may be one of reciprocal reinforcement — "a virtuous cycle" in which STEs enhance agentic behaviour and agency enhances the capacity for STEs.
• Nonmonotonicity: as with most psychological constructs, "there can be too much of a good thing"; the authors call for practical wisdom and evidence-based facilitation, noting that "the relative lack of settings for the facilitation of STEs in contemporary secular society is historically anomalous."

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References