How to Change Your Mind

the work of William James, W. T. Stace, and Walter Pahnke.) “Looking
back on the entirety of your session, please rate the degree to which at
any time . . . you experienced the following phenomena” using a six-point
scale. (From zero, for “none at all,” to five, for extreme: “more than any
other time in my life.”)
Some items were easy to rate: “Loss of your usual sense of time.”
Check; five. “Experience of amazement.” Uh-huh. Another five. “Sense
that the experience cannot be described adequately in words.” Yup. Five
again. “Gain of insightful knowledge experienced at an intuitive level.”
Hmmm. I guess the platitude about being would qualify. Maybe a three?
But I was unsure what to do with this one: “Feeling that you experienced
eternity or infinity.” The language implies something more positive than
what I felt when time vanished and terror took hold; NA, I decided. The
“experience of the fusion of your personal self into a larger whole” also
seemed like an overly nice way to put the sensation of becoming one with
a nuclear blast. It seemed less fusion than fission, but okay. I gave it a
four.
And what to do with this one? “Certainty of encounter with ultimate
reality (in the sense of being able to ‘know’ and ‘see’ what is really real at
some point in your experience).” I might have emerged from the
experience with certain convictions (the one about being and doing, say),
but these hardly seemed like encounters with “ultimate reality,” whatever
that is. Similarly, a few other items made me want to throw up my hands:
“Feeling that you experienced something profoundly sacred and holy”
(No) or “Experience of the insight ‘all is One’” (Yes, but not in a good way;
in the midst of that all-consuming mind storm, there was nothing I
missed more than differentiation and multiplicity). Struggling to assign
ratings to a handful of such items, I felt the survey pulling me in the
direction of a conclusion that was not at all consistent with what I felt.
But when I tallied my score, I was surprised: I had scored a sixty-one,
one point over the threshold for a “complete” mystical experience. I had
squeaked through. So that was a mystical experience? It didn’t feel at all
like what I expected a mystical experience to be. I concluded that the
MEQ was a poor net for capturing my encounter with the toad. The result
was psychological bycatch, I decided, and should probably be tossed out.
Yet I wonder if my dissatisfaction with the survey had something to do
with the intrinsic nature—the sheer intensity and bizarre shape—of the