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Want to read a map with someone?
Two of the eight dimensions cannot be answered alone. If you want company for those, write and say so. From a person, not a funnel.
Most attempts to sort genuine spiritual experience from something else begin by examining the experience itself — what was seen, how strange it was, how certain the person is. That is the wrong end of the problem, and the research is unusually clear about it.
Both can be true at once. A person can be having a genuine spiritual experience and be unwell. A person can be having one and be entirely well. Neither rules out the other. Everything here follows from refusing to force that choice — which is also why this cannot tell you which one it is.
Hare Krishnas and Druids, given a delusional-ideation inventory, could not be distinguished from psychiatric inpatients on the number of unusual beliefs they held — or on how certain they were of them. They differed on distress and preoccupation. Lukoff prints two accounts of seeing a UFO, one from a hospitalised patient and one from a healthy control, whose content is nearly identical.
It maps six things about how the experience is being held — what it costs, how much room it takes, how far it has reached, how alone you are in it, what it is doing on its own, and what it makes you do. Every axis runs the same direction: further out means more pressure. The result is a shape, and the shape becomes useful once you have more than one.
No score, no threshold, no verdict. It cannot tell anyone they are well — two of its eight dimensions can only be answered by someone else, so every reading ends unfinished on purpose. It is a way of looking, not an assessment, and it is not a substitute for care.
A death, a separation, a job lost, a threshold crossed, a long fast, a sleepless stretch, a substance — or nothing you can point to. An experience with a visible cause is generally easier to metabolise, not more suspect; Lukoff treats identifiable precipitants as a favourable sign. If there is nothing, that is worth knowing too.
Every axis runs the same direction: further out means more pressure. There are no cut-offs — the value is in the shape, not the sum.
Not whether it was frightening — awe and holy dread are not distress. Whether you are suffering, now, in an ongoing way.
Hours in the day. What it has displaced. Whether you can put it down and pick it up again, or whether it is always running underneath.
Sleep, food, work, obligations, the people who depend on you. If everyday functioning is intact, unusual beliefs carry little weight on their own.
Alone, or with one person, or inside a practice, or inside a lineage with elders. Solitude is not a fault. It is a different kind of exposure.
Not what it makes you do — what it is doing on its own. Settling, holding steady, or picking up speed.
Toward people or away from them. Toward obligations or out of them. Whether there is anything to do as a result, or only something to believe.
Not an oversight. These are the dimensions the instrument cannot complete by itself, and naming them is the point.
Can someone who knows you follow you? Not agree — follow. It is a two-way property: how close or far apart two people are depends on what one says and how the other listens. Which is why it needs a reader who is actually trying.
Is thinking holding together? Not whether it is unusual — metaphorical, allusive, difficult speech is not disorganisation. This one is not self-assessable by definition.
Who could answer these two? Not a question for this page — a question for after it.
A single reading shows where things sit. Several readings show a direction of travel — which is what this map exists for, and what a one-off assessment cannot see.
Nothing on this page is stored or sent anywhere. Close the tab and it is gone.
Legibility and coherence remain unanswered, and they cannot be answered from inside. Whoever is closest to you is the only instrument for those two. That is not a gap in the map — it is the map pointing somewhere it cannot go.
If the experience is instructing harm — to you or to anyone else — the mapping stops and someone is brought in now.
This is not a dimension and is not weighed against anything else on the page. Everything above is a description. This is not.
Lukoff, D. (1985) — “The Diagnosis of Mystical Experiences with Psychotic Features,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 17(2). The overlap criteria, the decision flowchart, and the two UFO accounts.
Peters, Day, McKenna & Orbach (1999) — British Journal of Clinical Psychology 38. Religious-movement members could not be distinguished from deluded inpatients on number of unusual beliefs or on conviction. They differed on distress and preoccupation.
Jackson & Fulford (1997) — Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology 4(1). Spiritual and psychotic phenomena are often qualitatively identical; the distinction lies in how they are embedded.
Marzanski & Bratton (2002) — same journal. Neither can be understood without the person’s history and tradition. This is why Company is on the map.
Hardy, A. (1979) — The Spiritual Nature of Man. Over four thousand ordinary accounts: visions in 18%, voices in 7%, contact with the dead in 8%.
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Two of the eight dimensions cannot be answered alone. If you want company for those, write and say so. From a person, not a funnel.