“Clusters of Individual Experiences Form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences [PNSE] in Adults”, 2013 (; backlinks; similar):
Persistent forms of nondual awareness, enlightenment, mystical experience, and so forth (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) have been reported since antiquity. Though sporadic research has been performed on them, the research reported here represents the initial report from the first larger scale cognitive psychology study of this population.
Method: Assessment of the subjective experience of fifty adult participants reporting persistent non-symbolic experience was undertaken using 6–12 hour semi-structured interviews and evaluated using thematic analysis. Additional assessment was performed using psychometric measures, physiological measurement, and experimentation.
Results: Five core, consistent categories of change were uncovered: sense-of-self, cognition, emotion, perception, and memory. Participants’ reports formed clusters in which the types of change in each of these categories were consistent. Multiple clusters were uncovered that formed a range of possible experiences. The variety of these experiences and their underlying categories may inform the debate between constructivist, common core, and participatory theorists.
…Over the course of a week, his father died followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a major issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth…It was not uncommon for participants to state that they had gained increased bodily awareness upon their transition into PNSE. I arranged and observed private yoga sessions with a series of participants as part of a larger inquiry into their bodily awareness. During these sessions it became clear that participants believed they were far more aware of their body than they actually were…Many participants discussed the thought, just after their transition to PNSE, that they would have to go to work and explain the difference in themselves to co-workers. They went on to describe a puzzled drive home after a full day of work when no one seemed to notice anything different about them. Quite a few chose to never discuss the change that had occurred in them with their families and friends and stated that no one seemed to notice much of a difference.
There was also a progressively decreasing sense of agency. In the final stage, Location 4, he reports: “These participants reported having no sense of agency or any ability to make a decision. It felt as if life was simply unfolding and they were watching the process happen. Severe memory deficits were common in these participants, including the inability to recall scheduled events that were not regular and ongoing.” And yet, almost all of the subjects reported it as a positive experience. The subjects, at whatever point they were in the scale, were often completely certain about the nature of the experience: “PNSE was often accompanied by a tremendous sense of certainty that participants were experiencing a ‘deeper’ or ‘more true’ reality. As time passed, this often increased in strength.” They also tended to be dogmatic about their PNSE being the real thing (whichever location they were at) and descriptions of other people’s different PNSEs as not the real thing. Another way to say “completely certain” is “unable to doubt”.