Synthesis:Multidimensional Framework

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Individual Level

Subjectivity

This covers all relevant domains of experiencing, which constitute the manifest world or the field of consciousness for a given individual from their own perceptual perspective. As is the case overall with this framework, not all domains will be of equal relevance. Note that from a phenomenological perspective, this is the "first-person view", while from a medical perspective, this corresponds to symptoms.

Aesthetics

The domain of aesthetic experiences is fundamental to human life and intersects deeply with EPEEs and related behavioral and sociocultural aspects. Experiences involving more or less central aesthetic aspects, a sense of beauty, of awe, of sublimity, etc., are very common. Culturally-speaking, most spiritual and mystical traditions exhibit elaborate aesthetics, which often draw on elements and themes of the sociocultural and natural environments. Many of the most valued aesthetic productions of a given culture are related with contemplative, psychedelic, mystical, etc., experiences often linked with religion and spirituality, including sacred arts in all forms of expressions – to stick with well-known european examples, music (think J.S. Bach), sculpture (think Bernini's Transverberation of Saint Teresa of Jesus), painting (Piero Della Francesca's Polyptych of Misericordia), poetry (Dante's Divine comedy), architecture (the pyramids, the cathedrals), etc. Remember Dostoyevsky: "Beauty will save the world".

Mystical and religious rituals and practices (liturgies, sadhanas, etc.) usually involve the synergistic integration of internal and external forms and activities belonging to and impacting many different complementary domains of the present framework, often blending all artistic modes of expression into aesthetically coherent wholes that also involve cognitive, attentional, imaginative, ethical, mythical, cultural, and other domains and factors which, when viewed at different scales of time and space, can have profound historical and even civilizational import (Gruau, 1999; Jousse, 2008), and are thus hard to reduce to the notion of "set and settings" sometimes employed in e.g. psychedelic studies to describe the proximal conditions in which a substance is ingested.

This experiential domain often involves complex emotions, cognitive and arousal changes, depth of meaning, paradigmatic and/or axiological components, and an overall sense of pleasure or appreciation disconnected from the direct hedonic tone of individual aspects of the experience — e.g. an aesthetic experience may involve painful or unpleasant specifics and yet be overall deeply valued and appraised as overall "pleasant" or beneficial (Sandilands, 2019; Schaeffer, 2015). The relationship between pleasure, values and aesthetic experiences is complicated: many religious or spiritual traditions are rather "puritanical" in the sense that they do not inherently value pleasure, or only certain kinds of pleasures (e.g. the pleasure born from "seclusion from the hindrances" in early buddhism). Yet many traditional religious figures seem to have fond deep meaning, beatuy and personal significance — thus perhaps a sense of pleasure derived from an overall appreciation as well — in experiences which by all means seem extremely unpleasant. One may think of transverberation experiences described by Terésa of Àvila, and its sculpted counterpart.

Aesthetic experiences also involve a degree of immersion into the sensate qualities of a given phenomenon or work of art, for themselves, i.e. without an instrumental goal, and a defamiliarization, i.e. they often involve the voluntary or involuntary suspension of pre-conceived judgments and perceptive habits, of what Husserl called the "natural attitude" which quickly categorizes and reifies surroundings and objects into a familiar world. After all, classical phenomenology associated with Husserl, starts with the gesture of épochè, which means "suspending" the belief in the intrinsic existence of the largely socioculturally conditioned "natural" objects and entities of perception around us, and instead returning "to things themselves", i.e., phenomena as they appear. This can also be "imposed" by something "striking", whether captivating beauty, or  the surprise of something threatening in the environment, drawing the attention of the subject out of the default roaming mode of attention, out of ruminations, projections, and familiarity, into a raw and intensified world of experience often infused with a sense of novelty.

The intensification of aesthetic experiences can sometimes be accompanied by varying levels of unease or fear, and the defamiliarization criterion may in part explain why. Famously, enlightenment philosopher Kant saw experiences of the "sublime" as one degree above aesthetic experiences, differing from it by the fact that they supposedly come with a sense of fear. It seems common sense that more radical defamiliarization should lead from a sense of novelty to a sense of mystery. Considerations on the relationship between attention, arousal, and fear found in the arousal/vigilance section below, can inform these observations. This is why we also include in this domain experiences linked with a sense of devotion- or fear-inspiring holiness, mystery, divinity, sanctity, sacredness, etc., all of which may be viewed as the "numinous", a term used by Rudolf Otto and later by the likes of Carl Jung to refer to these types of feelings — be it mysterium augustum (majestic) or mysterium tremendum (awe-inspiring). "The most beautiful emotion we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. [...]  It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion" Albert Einstein.

Interestingly, the english words "whole", "holy", and "health" have shared etymological histories, while the french equivalents to healthy ("sain") and saint ("saint") have latin words "sanus" and "sanctus" which are also cognate.

There seems to be some relationship between aesthetic experiences and emergent development trajectories (e.g., certain stages of meditation/ phases of mystical itineraries seem associated with particular kinds or higher likeliness of going through aesthetic experiences etc.) but this relationship is not straightforward (Sandilands, 2019).

The aesthetic domain may entail a larger meaning. In its more general, etymological sense, aesthetics can refer to the laws of sensibility itself as opposed to the sphere of rationality: the ancients thus divided lived experience into aesthesis and noesis (see the "Transcendental Esthetics" section in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant, 2007). In the context of aesthesis as sensibility, Kant declared "time" and "space" to be the transcendental, a priori forms of sensibility, i.e., he considered that all experience had temporal and spatial extension as a pre-condition.

Aesthetics thus relates with metaphysics and the domain of beliefs and paradigms, both in terms of people's lived experiences in this realm and in existing theoretical literature. Speaking of transcendentals, through many centuries in Western medieval philosophy, which drew on Greek thought, the tetrad of the Good, the One, the True, and the Beautiful, has been considered as "transcendentals" or "properties of being". The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "The manifold perfections of creatures — their truth, their goodness, their beauty all reflect the infinite perfection of God" (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 1997, para. 41). In a Confessions paragraph where he recounts "being drawn to God", Augustine speaks of the experience as an ancient and fresh beauty ("pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova").

Hegel's work on aesthetics gave such epistemological importance to the experience of beauty and the relationship between ideas and artistic production, that some later authors argued he participated in the arising of a king of "religion of art" throughout the romantic period and beyond (Schaeffer, 2015).

Regardless of metaphysical debates, all of this speaks volume as to the enduring importance of aesthetic experience and beauty for humans. Examples of EPEEs linked with various psychedelics, meditation practices, or spontaneous related to this domain include:

A few examples of aesthetic experiences and phenomena as reported in recent research literature:

Increased Appreciation for music (Subjective Effect Index, [A]), Intense sense of Gracefulness (N,N-DMT, [11]), Experiencing a (sometimes “overwhelming”) sense of Holiness (Meditation [various], [l]), Mild to extreme experiences of beauty or the sublime, either specific (such as perceiving "beautiful colors" [N,N-DMT, [11]), or not (Jhāna meditation, [t]; N,N-DMT, [11]; Ibogaine, [6]: Sense of Beauty (Jhāna meditation, [t]; Ibogaine, [6]; N,N-DMT, [11], Light (Ibogaine, [6], Extreme/intense (N,N-DMT, [11]), extreme Experience of the Sublime (N,N-DMT, [11]), Sense of Novelty — “Novelty enhancement (Subjective Effect Index, [A]) feeling of increased fascination, awe, and appreciation attributed to specific parts or the entirety of one's external environment”; Seeing the world as new (Subjective Effect Index, [A]), Intense sense of Purity (N,N-DMT, [11]), Sublimation, i.e. Finding beauty in a previously difficult experience (e.g. re-experiencing a past trauma "with a sense of the beauty of it") (Buddhist meditation NOS, [e]), Transfigured perception of "the world" or "life", e.g. Perceiving "life" as "a golden world" (Spontaneous NOS, [δ]) or Perceiving the visual world as a "Magical landscape" infused with "the experience of location and non-location" (Meditation NOS, [b]).

References

Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.). (1997). https://www.scborromeo2.org/catechism-of-the-catholic-church.

Daly, H. (2016). Shadowy Beauty: The Art of Hypnopompic Inquiry [Dissertation, California Institute of Integral Studies]. https://www.proquest.com/openview/87359d5dd856200d0b7e55adf186cc8d/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Dufrenne, M. (2011). Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique [Phenomenology of the aesthetic experience]. (2. éd). Paris: Presses Univ. de France.

Eliade, M. (1985). Symbolism, the sacred, and the arts (D. Apostopolos-Cappadona, Ed.). New York: Continuum.

Eliade, M. (1987). The sacred and the profane: the nature of religion (W. R. Trask, Trans.). Harcourt, Brace.

Gruau, M. (1999). L’Homme rituel. Anthropologie du rituel catholique français [The ritual Man. Anthropology of the french catholic ritual]. Paris: Métailé.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1998). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T.M. Knox. Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press.

Jousse, M. (2008). L’anthropologie du geste [Anthropology of the Gesture.]. Gallimard.

Kant, I. (2007). "Transcendental aesthetics" in Critique of pure reason (M. Weigelt, Ed.; F. M. Müller, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.

Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy: an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Saint Augustine. (2008). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schaeffer, J.-M. (2015). L’expérience esthétique [The aesthetic experience]. Paris: Editions Gallimard.

Sandilands, O. (2019). Comparative Phenomenology of Aesthetic and Meditative Experiences. [Unpublished Master’s Thesis]. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Vallet, O. (1991). Le sain et le saint [The healthy and the holy]. Mots, 26(1), 107–108. https://doi.org/10.3406/mots.1991.1598

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