Measuring the Reflective Self and Experiential Self in Self-Transcendent Experiences

Abstract

This chapter proposes that self-transcendent experiences can be usefully understood through the distinction between the reflective and experiential self, originally articulated by William James and developed in contemporary philosophy and neuroscience. The reflective self involves conscious, narrative self-referential processing, while the experiential self refers to affective salience processing and meta-awareness which typically follows bodily consciousness. Drawing on evidence from psychedelics, meditation, and awe research, it is suggested that self-transcendence involves a decrease of the reflective self-state (ego dissolution) and a corresponding increase in experiential self-state (immersion), supported by affective salience processing and associated with meta-awareness, leading to feelings of connectedness. In doing so, the framework reconciles the paradox of feeling “smaller yet larger” in self-transcendent experiences. This dual-self framework offers a pragmatic model for researching the phenomenology of self-transcendence in PRSM experiences, encouraging a building-block approach by delineating the processes which together form the complex phenomenon of self-transcendence and which can be measured individually through psychological scales, acknowledging and accommodating that the extents of these processes can vary across different types of PRSM experiences and cultural contexts.