“Dark Nights of the Soul”: Phenomenology and Neurocognition of Spiritual Suffering in Mysticism and Psychosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the “dark night of the soul” in classical mysticism, with its painful “metapathological” loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilder's early understanding of instabilities in the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganized hallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of body image/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abilities, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative transformations of consciousness. “Dark night” suffering can be seen as a semantic satiation leading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previous enhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared by clinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".