Joe: The M scale or “mysticism scale,” invented by Ralph Hood Jr. professor of psychology at U.Tenn. Chattanooga, is a means of establishing a control mechanism so we know what is and what is not a mystical experience. For example in his book on brain chemistry and religious experience John Hick talked about these researchers that claimed they have manufactured religious experience in the laboratory. Thus it’s just a product of brain chemistry. but they didn’t’ establish how to tell what is and what is not a mystical experience. So researcher said his respondent dreamed she was having sex with Jesus so that’s a mystical experience. Is it? So the M scale is a means of determining.
There are other such scales that were made. The problem is old and Maslow made his own scale to control for other kinds of experience. But Hood’s scale is the most validated. That means it has the most corroboration form other studies. He made other language versions of it and administered it to people around the world in various coteries and got the same answers. So people all over the world in many different faiths are having experiences that they all understand as experiences of God, they are same kinds of experiences. They score the same on the M scale. That’s how they determine they have the same kinds of experiences, because the point is scale designed to reflect certain kinds of experiences.
Remember in the last question I spoke a guy named W.T. Stace? He was philosopher from England. He wrote in the 40s and 50s. He took all of the writings of the great mystics and distilled from those what he thought would be the profile so to speak of mystical experience. That became the basis for Hood’s scale. Hood did his scale to valuate Stace’s theory and so validating it created a means of establishing a control for comparing religious experiences to non religious experiences. He’s assuming that a religious experience conforms to Stace’s theory.
How does he know Stace got it right? That’s the importance of applying it to people around the world. They did it in Sweden, UK, India, Iran, Japan and U.S.A. They have the same kind of break down. People who say they had experiences of God and their lives are made better by it also describe, via the way they answer the questions, the kinds of things that Stace’s theory predicts they would experience.
Now later Hood did another one where he took out the names and the doctrines and had a sort of neutral version. So you are not asking “did you experience Jesus” but “did you experience a supreme being?” He also did one where uses the names appropriate to the tradition, “did you experience Buddha?” The experiences are the same. The names change with reference to the tradition, and the explanations of the meaning changes with reference to the tradition, but the thing experienced (undifferentiated unity, presence of love, whatever) are the same the world over.
The whole body of studies that I use are not all using the M scale. It began in the 70s but didn’t catch on until the 90s. It’s now the standard method of determining a mystical experience in psychology of religion. There have been other scales and they are not far off from the content of the M scale, or from the outcome. But the M scale has the best validation, and has been applied in a more diverse set of countries and so on. It’s hailed as the best. Two other scales that are widely used are by Greely (1974) and another by Alexander and Boyer (1982). In terms of the whole body of research for the 50 year period back to the 60s, there’s general agreement along the same lines. But the M scale really nails it.
A lot of atheists have argued “how do you know they are not lying?” Since this is like a survey you asked questions and rate them on a scale according to their answers. These atheists imagine these peasants in Iran are asked to do this and they going to say “Let’s lie to them, ok we’ll do it in such a way as to validate Stace.” Well, they would never have heard of Stace, they would not know anything about what they are supposed to be validating. Had it not validated Stace one might be able to argue they did lie, but then no one would care. But the 32 items on the test are complex, to get them all exactly the way you must in order to validate, would require a complex understanding of Stace’s theory. I think you would be hard pressed to find even American College students who have heard of Stace. Even philosophy majors might not have heard of him. He’s not exactly a household name. The idea that peasants in Iran, Japan and India will know enough to fraudulently validate the claim is silly. The idea that it happen by coincidence is just out of the question. It’s 32 items. So several hundred peasants in 3 different countries are going to accidentally get 32 items a certain way to validate this guy’s theory? Pretty safe to assume not.
That means we can study mystical experiences scientifically. We can’t study the actual nature of the experience in people’s heads but we can study the effects of having the experience. Now we have a means of saying what is and what is not the experience.