Tag: self-transcendence

Some of the smallest things are the most important. These small, important things and events can escape our notice and study for a long time. They are special precisely because they are small and, paradoxically, everywhere. An incredibly important and heretofore unknown component of the human circulatory system went unnoticed until just the last decade, despite thousands of years of studying human anatomy, because it was wispy, small, and everywhere. Such is the case with the aesthetic chills phenomenon, which few people even think to name or pay attention to, yet which all of us experience. In our search to democratize non-ordinary, mystical, transformative experiences, it may prove to be a key ally—a living biological demonstration of the fact that aesthetics began not in commerce, but in religion and our encounter with the transcendent.

Over the last year, our lab has found that aesthetic chills can not only be reliably evoked, but they also show many of the classical properties of transformative psychedelic experiences. They seem to alleviate depressive symptoms, maybe even reverse maladaptive, deep-seated beliefs, and seem deeply tied to our deepest beliefs and insights. In this study, we sought to examine whether the experience of aesthetic chills could, in fact, bear the characteristics of a tiny, self-transcendent, mystical experience.

To investigate this, we exposed 3,000 people from all over California to a series of songs, videos, and speeches that previous studies had found to consistently cause chills in a majority of people examined. We had them fill out questionnaires that examined their demographic qualities, personality traits, proneness to religious experiences and thinking, and even their political orientation. Then we showed them the video or song and had them fill out another series of questionnaires, assessing their mood, asking them whether they got chills and how intense they were, and importantly, asking if they experienced any of the classical three components of a crucial state known as self-transcendence.

A brief aside on what self-transcendence is: first coined in the 1980s within nursing literature, it was a trait used to describe a state or proclivity that seemed to correlate with and predict long-term health and well-being among people approaching old age. The state was characterized by:

1. Feelings of becoming one with everything, of ego dissolving

2. Feeling connected to one’s deeper self, to the world, and to other people

3. A sense of moral elevation, a motivation to live a nobler or more virtuous life, and a sense of compassion towards others

As it turns out, self-transcendence predicts well-being, resilience to adverse events, and prosocial, empathetic behavior in people of all ages, nationalities, creeds, and orientations. Importantly, having a self-transcendent event—whether it be a major life event, a psychedelic experience, an advanced meditative state, or immersion in nature—has been shown to cause greater well-being, greater resilience, and a greater inclination to help others.

What we found and replicated in independent samples in both California and Texas, as well as in yet another recent replication (in total, some 5,000 people), was an incredibly significant and robust relationship between the experience of chills, its intensity, and self-transcendence. Over and over again, with remarkable consistency, if a person experiences chills and to the extent to which they experience them, they will also report feeling that their ego is dissolved, that they are connected to the world and their deeper selves, and that they feel motivated to live in a kinder, nobler, more virtuous way.

In fact, adding chill-inducing music to a guided meditation increases people’s perception of its self-transcendent qualities and enhances the impact and sense of immersion people report from the meditation. What these findings reveal is that this small but ubiquitous human experience may be a microcosm of the transformative, mystical experiences often considered to be elusive or difficult to achieve for most of the population.

The more we can harness these little experiences and combine them, the more we may be able to bring these central meaning-making experiences—once thought to be the sole domain of psychedelics, religion, or advanced meditation—to that vast mass of people who, in our modern era, are perhaps too skeptical for religion and averse to the psychedelic experience. This could help improve their lives, improve their behavior towards others, and sustain a sense of meaning otherwise all too often taken up by consumerism or demagogues.

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