Psychometric brahman, psychedelic science: Walter Stace, transnational Vedanta, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire

ABSTRACT

The longstanding juncture between science and religion in psychedelic research is mediated most notably by the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ). The MEQ is a psychometric survey for assessing mystical experiences, and it relies on the work of philosopher Walter Stace for its typology and philosophy of mysticism. Yet there is an under-investigated influence from Vedantic Hinduism that contributed to Stace’s thinking. In an analysis of Stace’s hermeneutics of mysticism, this article demonstrates how Stace’s typology of mystical experience was created in dialogue with major figures in the field of modern, transnational Vedanta. From there, we investigate how these figures’ approaches to religious experience manifest in Stace’s typology of the mystical experience and are preserved in the MEQ. We conclude by discussing how the enduring use of the MEQ, and scientists’ insistence on its theoretical rigour, embeds Stace’s interpretation of modern Vedantic ideas in the contemporary practice of psychedelic science.

KEYWORDS:

• Mysticism
• Vedanta
• Mystical Experience Questionnaire
• psychedelics
• religious studies
• consciousness
• Hinduism
• psychedelic science

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr Nell Hawley for her generous and expert review and Dr J. Christian Greer for his constant support and whose Harvard seminar germinated this research. We also thank our anonymous peer reviewers, the editorial team at Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and the Special Issue editors, Dr Claudia Gertraud Schwarz and Prof Christine Hauskeller, for their incisive comments and improvements to this article. Finally, we are grateful to the organizers of the Decolonizing the Psychedelic Research Revival panel at the 4S 2022 conference where we first presented this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, Stace cites James Leuba’s The Psychology of Religious Mysticism, where he expounds on the use of drugs to bring about mystical ecstasy. See Leuba (1925, 8–37).

2 The English prose in these translations is assisted by Professor of English Frederick Manchester and the novelist Christopher Isherwood, respectively.

3 The term Neo-Hindu or Neo-Vedantic, popularised by Paul Hacker, is a contested moniker, as it suggests a rift from historic Hinduism (Madaio 2017). When we use the concept here it is to signal the specific form of Vedanta that Stace was drawing from and its relationship to European influence and epistemologies, but it is important to note the complexity of this history and the internal diversity of this movement.

4 Jones, for example, in 2020 considers Stace neither a perennialist nor an essentialist, yet in 2022 (with Gellman) discusses Stace in essentialist terms.

5 Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes further develops a Spinozist understanding of psychedelic experience in his “The White Sun of Substance: Spinozism and the Psychedelic Amor dei Intellectualis” chapter in Psychedelics and Philosophy (Sjöstedt-Hughes 2022).

6 For reference, Stace’s introvertive experience was marked by (1) ‘the Unitary Consciousness’, (2) ‘being nonspatial and nontemporal’, (3) ‘sense of objectivity or reality’, (4) ‘feelings of blessedness, joy, peace, happiness, etc.’, (5) ‘feeling that what is apprehended is holy, sacred, or divine’, (6) ‘paradoxicality, and (7) ‘alleged by mystics to be ineffable’ (Stace 1960a, 111).

7 For example, see the Roland R. Griffiths, PhD Professorship Fund in Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-Being at Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey A. Breau

Jeffrey A. Breau is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, where his research focuses on emergent psychedelic spiritual communities, psychedelic chaplaincy, and Hinduism. He works as a research assistant with the Center for the Study of World Religions’ Psychedelics and Future of Religion series and is a teaching fellow in the Harvard Sociology department. Jeffrey co-organized, along with Paul Gillis-Smith, the first interdisciplinary conference on psychedelic research at Harvard University, and he is a psychedelic chaplain at Brigham & Women’s Faulkner Hospital.

Paul Gillis-Smith

Paul Gillis-Smith is a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School and works as a spiritual care provider for ketamine patients at Brigham & Women’s Faulkner Hospital in Boston, MA. He has presented at the annual meetings for the American Academy of Religion (2022) and the Society for the Social Studies of Science (2019, 2022), and co-organized the first interdisciplinary conference on psychedelic research at Harvard University with Jeffrey Breau.