Mystical experience characteristics

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly lucid thought" aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood. 

It seems to me that the eventual outcome will be the construction of psychedelic parks. In general, these will feature a large center for therapeutic, creative, and other uses, supervised by medical men and guides, and a psychedelic chapel for religious and mystical experience. The most likely setting will probably be a park of artificial environments. The dimensions of the park need not be very great, since space counts for little in the experience. A point of some importance, however, is the matter of diversity, for one of the major characteristics of these experiences, after all, is flux. 

Unity, the most important characteristic of the mystical experience, is divided into internal and external types, which are different ways of experiencing an undifferentiated unity. The major difference is that the internal type finds unity... 

His thesis focused on nine traits listed by Dr. W.T. Stace, Professor Emeritus at Princeton. These characteristics, Stace felt, were the fundamentals of mystical experience—"universal and not restricted to any particular religion or culture . 

The experiment soon came to be known as "The Miracle of Marsh Chapel. In the following six months, extensive data were collected. These included tape recordings, group discussions, follow-up interviews and a 147-item questionnaire used to quantify these characteristics of mystical phenomena ... 

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