Features of the Mystic Experience

"...it is necessary to explain five principal features of the mystic experience: (1) intense realness, (2) unusual sensations, (3) unity, (4) ineffability, and (5) trans-sensate phenomena. (...) It is assumed by those who have had a mystic experience, whether induced by years of meditation or by a single dose of LSD, that the truthfulness of the experience is attested to by its sense of realness. The criticism of skeptics is often met with the statement, "You have to experience it yourself and then you will understand." This means that if one has the actual experience he will be convinced by its intense feeling of reality. "I know it was real because it was more real than my talking to you now." But "realness" is not evidence. Indeed, there are many clinical examples of variability in the intensity of the feeling of realness that is not correlated with corresponding variability in the reality. A dream may be so "real" as to carry conviction into the waking state, although its content may be bizarre beyond correspondence to this world or to any other. Psychosis is often preceded or accompanied by a sense that the world is less real than normally, sometimes that it is more real, or has a different reality. The phenomenon of depersonalization demonstrates the potential for an alteration in the sense of the realness of one's own person, although one's evidential self undergoes no change whatsoever. However, in the case of depersonalization, or of de-realization, the distinction between what is external and what is internal is still clear. What changes is the quality of realness attached to those object representations. Thus it appears that (1) the feeling of realness represents a function distinct from that of reality judgment, although they usually operate in synchrony; (2) the feeling of realness is not inherent in sensations, per se; and (3) realness can be considered a quantity function capable of displacement and, therefore, of intensification, reduction, and transfer affecting all varieties of ideational and sensorial contents..."

See the whole paper "Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience" by Arthur J. Deikman. More useful articles to be found at the website.