The Mystical Experience Questionnaire: Measuring the Most Subjective Human Experience with Scientific Rigor

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The Problem of Measuring God

How do you measure a mystical experience? How do you take the most subjective, most ineffable, most personally transformative event a human being can undergo and reduce it to a number on a questionnaire that can be analyzed with statistics, compared across individuals, and published in a peer-reviewed journal?

This is not a philosophical puzzle. It is a practical problem that has confronted every researcher attempting to study mystical experiences scientifically. And the solution — the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30) and its predecessors — represents one of the most ingenious measurement instruments in the history of psychology. It takes an experience that people routinely describe as “beyond words” and finds the words anyway — 30 precisely worded items that capture, with remarkable fidelity, the core features of what mystics across every tradition and every century have been trying to describe.

Understanding the MEQ30 is essential for understanding modern psychedelic research, contemplative neuroscience, and the scientific study of consciousness. It is the standard measure — the ruler, the thermometer, the blood pressure cuff — by which researchers at Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London, NYU, and dozens of other institutions assess whether a psychedelic session, a meditation practice, or a spontaneous experience constitutes a “complete mystical experience.” And each of its four factors maps to a specific neurological mechanism — a specific pattern of brain activity and neurochemistry that produces a specific facet of the mystical state.

The History: From William James to the MEQ30

William James and the Four Marks

The scientific study of mystical experience begins with William James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher whose 1902 book “The Varieties of Religious Experience” remains the foundational text in the field. James identified four characteristics that distinguish mystical experiences from other states of consciousness:

Ineffability. The experience defies expression — “no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” The mystic insists that the experience must be directly experienced to be understood. It cannot be transferred or communicated through language.

Noetic quality. Despite being ineffable, the experience is experienced as a state of knowledge — “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” The mystic does not merely feel something. They know something. The experience carries a conviction of objective truth.

Transiency. Mystical experiences are typically brief — minutes to hours — though their effects may persist indefinitely. The state cannot be sustained at peak intensity.

Passivity. The experience feels like it happens to the person rather than being produced by the person. Even when the experience is facilitated by voluntary practices (meditation, prayer, psychedelics), the mystical state itself feels received, not achieved. There is a quality of grace — of being given something rather than earning it.

Walter Stace and the Phenomenology of Mysticism

Philosopher Walter Stace, in his 1960 book “Mysticism and Philosophy,” extended James’s analysis by conducting a systematic comparison of mystical experience reports across cultures, traditions, and historical periods. Stace identified two types of mystical experience:

Extrovertive mysticism. Unity is perceived in the external world — all things are seen as one, the multiplicity of objects is experienced as a single underlying reality. The world does not disappear. It is transformed. The mystic sees the same trees, buildings, and people but perceives them as manifestations of a single, unified consciousness.

Introvertive mysticism. Unity is perceived internally — consciousness empties of all content and what remains is pure awareness without an object. This is the “void” of Buddhist meditation, the “pure consciousness event” of Hindu practice, the “dark night” preceding divine union in Christian mysticism.

Stace identified several phenomenological features common to both types: a sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, a deeply felt positive mood, a sense of sacredness, a noetic quality (sense of truth or reality), and paradoxicality (the experience violates ordinary logic).

Ralph Hood and the M-Scale

Psychologist Ralph Hood at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga operationalized Stace’s phenomenological analysis into a psychometric instrument — the Mysticism Scale (M-Scale), first published in 1975. The M-Scale consists of 32 items rated on a 5-point Likert scale, organized into three factors corresponding to Stace’s phenomenological categories: introvertive mysticism, extrovertive mysticism, and interpretation.

Hood’s M-Scale was the first validated instrument for measuring mystical experience and has been used in hundreds of studies across multiple cultures and religious traditions. Cross-cultural research using the M-Scale has confirmed that the phenomenology of mystical experience is remarkably consistent across cultures — Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, secular, and atheist mystics report the same core experiences, differing primarily in the interpretive frameworks they apply afterward.

The MEQ30: The Johns Hopkins Standard

The MEQ30 (Mystical Experience Questionnaire, 30-item version) was developed by Barrett and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Unit and published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2015. It is a refined version of earlier mystical experience questionnaires, validated against the M-Scale and other measures, and optimized for use in psychedelic research contexts.

The MEQ30 has become the standard instrument in the field. When researchers report that a psychedelic session produced a “complete mystical experience,” they mean that the participant scored above the threshold on the MEQ30. When they report dose-response relationships between psilocybin dose and mystical experience intensity, they are using MEQ30 scores as the dependent variable. When they find that mystical experience intensity predicts therapeutic outcomes in depression, addiction, and existential distress, they are correlating MEQ30 scores with clinical outcome measures.

The Four Factors

The MEQ30 measures four factors, each capturing a distinct dimension of mystical experience. Understanding what each factor means phenomenologically and what it maps to neurologically provides a bridge between the first-person report of the mystic and the third-person data of the neuroscientist.

Factor 1: Mystical (15 items)

This is the core factor — the one that distinguishes a mystical experience from merely an unusual or intense experience. It comprises several sub-dimensions:

Internal unity. Loss of the usual sense of self, dissolution of the boundary between “I” and everything else. The experience of being awareness itself rather than a separate observer.

External unity. Experience of all things as interconnected, as manifestations of a single underlying reality. The multiplicity of the world perceived as a unity.

Transcendence of time and space. The experience of being outside the normal flow of time and the normal constraints of spatial location. Time may stop, reverse, or become irrelevant. Space may become infinite or collapse into a single point.

Sacredness. A sense of awe, reverence, and holiness — the experience of encountering something ultimate, fundamental, and holy.

Noetic quality. Certainty that the experience reveals objective truth about the nature of reality — not merely a subjective state but genuine knowledge.

Deeply felt positive mood. Joy, peace, love, and bliss of extraordinary intensity.

The Neurology of Factor 1

The mystical factor maps to a specific pattern of brain activity that has been well-characterized by neuroimaging research:

Reduced default mode network (DMN) activity. The DMN — comprising the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, and angular gyrus — is the brain network responsible for self-referential processing, autobiographical memory, future planning, and the maintenance of ego identity. Robin Carhart-Harris’s research at Imperial College London, using fMRI during psilocybin administration, demonstrated that the degree of DMN suppression correlates with the intensity of ego dissolution and mystical experience reported on the MEQ30.

Increased global connectivity. Simultaneously with DMN reduction, psilocybin increases connectivity between brain regions that do not normally communicate — sensory cortex connecting with executive regions, visual cortex with auditory cortex, limbic regions with associative regions. This “entropic” brain state, characterized by increased neural diversity and reduced hierarchical organization, produces the phenomenology of unity — the sense that all things are connected — because, within the brain, they temporarily are.

5-HT2A receptor activation. The primary pharmacological mechanism of classical psychedelics is activation of the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, concentrated in layer V pyramidal neurons of the cortex. This activation desynchronizes cortical rhythms, reduces the brain’s normal filtering and prediction processes, and opens the system to unfiltered experience. The mystical factor of the MEQ30 correlates with the degree of 5-HT2A activation, as demonstrated by studies using receptor-blocking drugs (ketanserin) that specifically prevent 5-HT2A activation and correspondingly reduce MEQ30 mystical factor scores.

Reduced activity in the posterior superior parietal lobule (PSPL). Andrew Newberg’s SPECT imaging research on meditators experiencing unity consciousness showed reduced blood flow to the PSPL — the brain region responsible for maintaining the sense of self-other boundary and spatial orientation. When the PSPL quiets, the brain loses its ability to distinguish “self” from “not-self,” producing the experience of unity that is the hallmark of the mystical factor.

Factor 2: Positive Mood (6 items)

This factor captures the emotional quality of the experience — the intensity and quality of positive affect during the mystical state.

Items in this factor assess:

• Experience of pure joy
• Experience of ecstasy
• Feelings of peace and tranquility
• Experience of love (not directed at any particular object, but as a pervasive quality of experience)
• Feelings of tenderness and gentleness
• Experience of awe

The Neurology of Factor 2

The positive mood factor maps to the simultaneous activation of multiple reward and emotional processing circuits:

Nucleus accumbens activation. The brain’s primary reward circuit, driven by dopaminergic input from the ventral tegmental area. Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens produces the sense of meaning, significance, and positive valence. Research by Katrin Preller at the University of Zurich has demonstrated that LSD increases dopaminergic transmission in the ventral striatum, with the degree of increase correlating with the intensity of positive subjective effects.

Endorphin release. The opioid system contributes the euphoric, blissful quality of the positive mood factor. Research suggests that endogenous opioid release during peak psychedelic experiences may contribute to the distinctive quality of “mystical joy” — which is qualitatively different from ordinary happiness in its intensity, depth, and sense of being given rather than achieved.

Oxytocin release. The love and tenderness components of the positive mood factor map to oxytocinergic activation. MDMA, which produces intense experiences of love and emotional openness, produces its effects partly through massive oxytocin release. Classical psychedelics appear to increase oxytocin levels through serotonergic mechanisms, contributing to the universal love quality of the mystical state.

Anterior insula activation. The anterior insula processes interoceptive emotional signals — the “felt sense” of emotions in the body. Neuroimaging during psychedelic experiences shows increased anterior insular activity corresponding to the intensely embodied quality of mystical positive emotion.

Factor 3: Transcendence of Time and Space (6 items)

This factor specifically assesses the experience of being outside normal spatiotemporal frameworks:

• Loss of usual sense of time
• Experience of timelessness or eternity
• Experience of being beyond space
• Loss of usual sense of where one is
• Experience of existing in a non-physical dimension
• Sense that the experience lasted “forever” or “no time at all”

The Neurology of Factor 3

Disruption of temporal processing circuits. The brain’s sense of time depends on dopaminergic circuits in the basal ganglia, the supplementary motor area, the prefrontal cortex, and the posterior parietal cortex. Psychedelics disrupt normal function in all of these regions, producing the characteristic time distortion of mystical experience. Marc Wittmann at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology in Freiburg has published extensive research on altered time perception during meditation and psychedelic states, demonstrating that subjective time dilation correlates with reduced prefrontal cortex activity and increased thalamic desynchronization.

Posterior parietal disruption. The posterior parietal cortex is critical for spatial processing and the sense of bodily location. Its disruption — by psychedelics, by deep meditation, or by neurological lesions — produces out-of-body experiences, spatial disorientation, and the sense of existing outside normal spatial dimensions.

Thalamic gating disruption. The thalamus normally acts as a gateway, filtering and organizing sensory information before it reaches the cortex. Psychedelics reduce thalamic filtering (as shown by Vollenweider and Preller’s research at the University of Zurich), allowing a flood of unfiltered sensory and cognitive information to reach the cortex simultaneously. This information overload overwhelms the normal temporal sequencing mechanisms, producing the sense that everything is happening at once — eternity rather than succession.

Factor 4: Ineffability (3 items)

The smallest factor, comprising items that assess the degree to which the experience resists verbal description:

• The experience cannot adequately be put into words
• The experience was beyond what words can describe
• Language has fundamental limitations in capturing the experience

The Neurology of Factor 4

Left temporal language center suppression. The brain’s language production systems — Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the left temporal and frontal lobes — show reduced activity during intense psychedelic experiences and deep meditation states. When the language system is suppressed, experience cannot be encoded in words as it occurs — it is processed through non-linguistic channels (visual, somatic, emotional) that do not readily translate into verbal descriptions after the fact.

Right hemisphere shift. Ian Cook’s research at UCLA (originally in the context of 110 Hz sound exposure) demonstrated that specific consciousness-altering stimuli shift brain activity from left-hemisphere (verbal, analytical, sequential) to right-hemisphere (spatial, emotional, holistic) processing. Mystical experiences appear to involve a profound right-hemisphere shift, producing experience that is fundamentally non-linguistic in character. The ineffability is not a failure of vocabulary but a reflection of the neural pathways through which the experience is processed.

Novelty of neural patterns. Ineffability may partly reflect the fact that mystical experiences produce neural activation patterns that the brain has never encountered before. Language is a system for encoding familiar categories of experience. When the brain enters a genuinely novel state — one that does not match any existing category — the language system cannot map the experience to existing words because no existing words correspond to this pattern of activation.

The MEQ30 in Practice: How It Is Used

In Psychedelic Research

The MEQ30 is administered immediately after a psychedelic session (typically within 6 hours). Participants rate each item on a scale from 0 (none, not at all) to 5 (extreme, more than any other time in my life).

A “complete mystical experience” is defined as a score at or above 60% of the maximum possible score on each of the four factors. This threshold was established empirically by comparison with expert ratings and with participants’ own retrospective assessments of whether the experience was “the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experience” of their lives.

The proportion of participants meeting this threshold varies by dose and context:

• High-dose psilocybin (25-30 mg) with optimal preparation, guidance, and setting: 60-80% of participants meet the threshold for complete mystical experience
• Moderate-dose psilocybin (10-15 mg): 20-40% meet the threshold
• Low-dose psilocybin (1-5 mg, active placebo): less than 5% meet the threshold

The Clinical Significance

The MEQ30 score is not merely a research curiosity. It is clinically predictive. Multiple studies have demonstrated that:

Higher MEQ30 scores predict better therapeutic outcomes. In Griffiths et al.’s landmark 2016 study of psilocybin for cancer-related existential distress (published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology), MEQ30 scores were the strongest predictor of sustained decreases in anxiety and depression at 6-month follow-up. Participants who had complete mystical experiences showed the most enduring clinical improvement.

Higher MEQ30 scores predict sustained personality change. In a 2011 study by MacLean, Johnson, and Griffiths (also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology), participants who scored highest on the MEQ30 showed significant increases in the personality trait of Openness to Experience — a change that persisted at 14-month follow-up. This is remarkable because personality traits are generally considered stable after age 30.

The mystical experience itself appears to be the therapeutic mechanism. When researchers control for drug dose, session duration, and other factors, MEQ30 scores remain the strongest predictor of positive outcomes. The therapeutic benefit is not in the drug. It is in the experience the drug facilitates. And the MEQ30 is the instrument that measures whether that experience occurred.

In Meditation Research

The MEQ30 and related instruments are increasingly used in meditation research to assess whether advanced meditation practices produce experiences comparable to those produced by psychedelics. Research by Matthew Johnson at Johns Hopkins has used the MEQ30 to compare psychedelic-induced and meditation-induced mystical experiences, finding substantial phenomenological overlap — long-term meditators report mystical experiences on the MEQ30 that are qualitatively similar to psilocybin-induced experiences, though typically of lower intensity.

The Profound Implication

The existence and validation of the MEQ30 carries a profound implication: the mystical experience is not merely subjective. It is intersubjectively consistent. The same core features — unity, transcendence, sacredness, noetic quality, positive mood, ineffability — appear across cultures, across centuries, across religious traditions, across induction methods (psychedelics, meditation, spontaneous events), and across individuals. The MEQ30 measures these features with high reliability (Cronbach’s alpha above 0.90) and validity (convergent validity with the M-Scale, discriminant validity from non-mystical drug effects).

This consistency demands explanation. If mystical experiences were merely cultural constructions — learned hallucinations shaped by religious expectations — they would vary dramatically across cultures and traditions. They do not. A Zen Buddhist in Kyoto, a Franciscan nun in Rome, a Quechua shaman in Peru, and a secular software engineer in a Johns Hopkins research laboratory report the same core experiences when the same brain mechanisms are activated.

The most parsimonious explanation is the one that the neuroscience supports: the mystical experience is a capacity of the human nervous system — a specific state of brain activity and neurochemistry that the system is capable of entering through multiple pathways. It is as biological as sleep, as dreaming, as the fight-or-flight response. It is part of the wetware’s operating system — a built-in mode that can be accessed by anyone whose brain can produce the right pattern of neurochemical and electrophysiological activity.

The MEQ30 does not measure God. It measures what happens in the human brain when the conditions are right for the most profound experience the brain can produce. Whether that experience reveals something real about the nature of reality or merely something real about the nature of the brain is a question that science cannot answer and the MEQ30 cannot measure. What it can measure is whether the experience occurred. And that, for both research and clinical practice, is enough.

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This article synthesizes William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902), Walter Stace’s “Mysticism and Philosophy” (1960), Ralph Hood’s development of the M-Scale (1975), Barrett et al.’s MEQ30 validation study (Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2015), Robin Carhart-Harris’s psychedelic neuroimaging research at Imperial College London, Andrew Newberg’s SPECT imaging of mystical states, Franz Vollenweider and Katrin Preller’s thalamic gating research at the University of Zurich, Griffiths et al.’s psilocybin cancer distress study (2016), MacLean, Johnson, and Griffiths’s personality change study (2011), and Marc Wittmann’s temporal processing research.