Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The authors, both anthropologists who study alternative states of consciousness (ASC), explore the psychodynamics of mystical experience (ME). An affect that is a key factor for and integral to the phenomenology of ME is what they term “mystical love.” In many respects, ME refers to ASC that is diametrically opposite to everyday ego‐centered, materialist consciousness. In this article we examine several questions, including: (1) Why do humans experience ME, (2) why does there seems to be a need to alter consciousness away from ordinary waking states, (3) what is the relationship between mystical love and other affective states such as anger, greed, and anxiety, and (3) what are the necessary conditions for ME‐type, transpersonal experiences? We demonstrate that ritual practices are recurrently used across cultures to incubate and evoke intense feelings of non‐romantic love, empathy, and compassion. Some of these practices include ritual drivers such as ingesting psychotropic substances (entheogens and empathogens), daily activities that devalue ego centeredness and promote love, empathy and selfless service, meditation upon loving kindness, and compassion. All of these practices are preparations for entering ME, the results of which are interpreted within people's cycle of meaning.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".