what's the difference between "mystical experience" and psychosis, other than emotional valence? Srs question btw
I don't think it's just a matter of emotional valence though. You could, if you wanted to, decide to label the mystical experience a variety of psychosis but that doesn't like a helpful classification.
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It's not apparent to me how "noetic quality" is different from having a delusional belief, except for the term "delusion" being impolite. And ineffability ("struggling to find words") is not uncommon in psychosis as well. Same with passivity, really. Oneness seems like an
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interesting distinguishing feature to consider, perhaps? Point being, as far as I can tell there are quite a few overlaps between transient psychotic episode (which is a thing) and whatever is referred to as "mystical experience"
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I agree. there's overlap. the original psychiatric model for LSD induced mystical experiences was labeled "psychoto-mimetic" and that wasn't obviously incorrect at the time (and is maybe only subtly incorrect). I do think they're different things though.
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I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that the difference goes deeper than "psychosis feels bad and has bad outcomes as registered by Trusted Third Party, ME feels good and has good outcomes as registered by Trusted Third Party", but I'm not quite sure what it would be.
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this source characterizes psychosis of having these qualities and I can see how you could produce a mapping from those to the qualities of ME. 1. delusions 2. hallucinations 3. disorganized speech 4. disorganized or catatonic behavior http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/516/Psychosis.html …
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but you don't get symmetry really. noetic experiences and delusions might look like a mapping but the way a person behaves afterwards and integrates the experience is vastly different in practice. a noetic experience tends to produce a belief similar to "empirically validated"
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whereas a delusion tends to be quite groundless. the mystic will often say "I can't rationallly account for this in the same I can't rationally account for the feeling of solidity of the table" but they accept the reality of it as a ground truth.
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delusions are rarely like that, right? tend towards extravagance and the characteristic "disorganized" features of psychosis. so I think that's more than just emotional valence but a qualitative difference of the phenomenon as experienced by the person.
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what I think of when you use the word psychosis though falls short of most of the qualities of the mystical experience. it's not ineffable, it often produces huge amount of verbiage, ranting, paranoid conspiracy, etc. it's not transient, it can be very persistent. etc.
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there is literally a separate ICD for transient psychotic episode(s) tho, and claims of experience being "too large" for words / struggling to find words is very common. "verbiage" can be neither here nor there in this regards, depending on whether it is more like
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unstructured speech or more like struggling to find proper terminology to describe the experience (or both!)
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