Toward the Enlightened Self: How Mindfulness and Psychedelics Relate to Self-Transcendence and Connectedness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective. Spirituality and religiosity have long been associated with experiences that transcend ordinary self-awareness, often described as mystical union or nondual awareness. This study examines the concept of the “enlightened self” as a transcendent ideal, focusing on the role of mindfulness practice and psychedelic experiences in fostering self-transcendence, nondual awareness, and ecological connectedness.Method. A total of 1,164 participants (668 men, 433 women, and 63 other) were recruited internationally, primarily from the United States (n = 502), Canada (n = 67), the United Kingdom (n= 59), and Poland (n = 50). They completed validated self-report measures of mindfulness traits, contemplative practice frequency and duration, lifetime psychedelic use and intensity, ego dissolution, self-transcendence, nondual awareness, and ecological awareness. Analyses included correlational, regression, and mediation models.Results. Mindfulness practice and psychedelic experiences were positively associated with self-transcendence and nondual awareness. Ego dissolution emerged as a significant mediator linking both practices with nondual awareness. Ecological awareness was also positively associated with self-transcendent orientation.Conclusions. Findings suggest that mindfulness and psychedelics may contribute to experiences of self-transcendence and ecological connectedness. These phenomena remain complex to define and study, underscoring the need for multimethod approaches to capture their depth and diversity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".