Documenting and defining emergent phenomenology: theoretical foundations for an extensive research strategy

The paper addresses the widespread yet under-characterized range of experiences associated with meditation, psychedelics, and other modalities—often labeled altered states of consciousness (ASCs)—that can resemble or overlap with psychopathology and frequently arise within or outside religious/spiritual traditions. Despite DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 codes for religious/spiritual problems, clinicians lack detailed, applicable descriptions of these experiences and their triggers. The authors highlight ethical imperatives: to prevent harm (nonmaleficence), promote benefits (beneficence), ensure informed autonomy, and advance justice by equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. They propose an ontologically neutral, terminologically scalable, methodologically rigorous, and pragmatically outcome-focused approach. The aim is to first document and define this domain comprehensively to support future empirical work, clinical training, and possibly a new clinical specialty dedicated to these phenomena.

The authors situate their work within a broad literature spanning psychiatry, psychology, religious studies, and contemplative traditions. They note gaps in mainstream clinical resources (DSM-5-TR, ICD-11, WHO and WPA position statements, major medical textbooks) where phenomenological detail on religious/spiritual experiences is sparse. They review cross-cultural prevalence of ASC-inducing practices and spontaneous occurrences across contexts (e.g., nature, trauma, childbirth), and summarize limitations of current clinical and experimental studies, including reliance on psychometric scales with limited phenomenological precision. They critically discuss existing umbrella terms and typologies—spiritual/religious experiences, spiritual emergence/emergency, spiritually transformative experiences, ASCs, non-ordinary states—and specific experience types (mystical, transpersonal, kundalini, near-death, out-of-body, entity encounters), arguing many are excessively specific, culturally/metaphysically bound, modality-linked, pathologizing, or imprecise. They review influential constructs and scales (William James’ criteria; Stace’s introvertive/extrovertive taxonomy; MEQ; Mysticism Scale) and argue these frameworks exclude challenging experiences (e.g., “dark nights,” “dukkha ñanas”), interactive-relational/entity encounters, and lack differentiating power across developmental stages found in traditional systems. Overall, prior literature supports the need for a broader, phenomenology-first, ontologically agnostic terminology and taxonomy.

To delineate the domain’s scope, the authors conducted an open-ended survey of recent scientific publications reporting first-person phenomenology related to meditation, psychedelics, and other/spontaneous inductions. Initial pools included 38 meditation-related, 37 psychedelic-related, and 21 other/spontaneous publications. Exclusion criteria: lack of new qualitative first-person data, exclusive reliance on pre-existing structured questionnaires without added phenomenology, overly narrow/specific micro-phenomenological topics. This yielded a corpus of 23 (meditation), 22 (psychedelics), and 15 (other) publications. Analytic saturation was used to determine endpoint, resulting in a final set of 50 articles. The authors re-extracted and re-categorized reported phenomena, experiences, after-effects, and impacts across immediate to long-term timescales into a synchronic thematic framework. Analysis was informed by micro-phenomenology and synthesized descriptive/functional frameworks (classical phenomenology, recent qualitative work, biomedical RDoC-like dimensions). Non-phenomenological specifics (demographics, context, intensity, prevalence) not generalizable were excluded. New labels were added when warranted by the data. Supplementary materials list all reviewed publications, methodological notes, and the full inventory taxonomy.

• Produced a fine-grained, functional and descriptive inventory of experiences, effects, after-effects, and impacts associated with diverse induction methods and contexts, synthesizing reports from approximately 30,100 subjects across 50 publications.
• Demonstrated extensive phenomenological overlap across modalities (meditation, psychedelics, other/spontaneous), indicating the domain cannot be adequately partitioned by practice type or context alone.
• Identified broad categories (see examples from Table 1) including: aesthetic/numinous; archetypal/visionary/mythical; arousal-related; behavioral; attentional/clarity/cognitive thinking dimensions; collective; dimensional; emotional; energetic; existential (self, agency, identification, boundaries); sense of reality; expressive; functional; hedonic valence; informational; intuitive; magical; medical; meta-emergent; motivational; motor (involuntary movements); paradigmatic (beliefs/worldviews); perceptual (vision, multimodal); physiological (cardiovascular, respiratory, sensory systems, pain); psychological (affiliation, insights, narratives); semantic; sensate (synesthesia/transmodal); sexual; social; spatial; temporal; vocational; volitional; wakeful. Examples include entity encounters, perception of higher dimensions, energy-like somatic flows, altered self-world boundaries, time dilation, synesthesia, involuntary movements, and life-path/vocational changes.
• Highlighted insufficiency of prevailing psychometric scales (e.g., MEQ) to capture the full range of phenomena, especially challenging or interactive-relational experiences, and the need for more precise, extensive, and less ambiguous instruments and first-person methods.
• Argued for dedicated, ontologically neutral terminology; proposed “Emergent Phenomena, Experiences and Effects” (EPEEs) and “emergent phenomenology” as umbrella terms.
• Suggested development of structured questionnaires based on the inventory and large-scale empirical studies integrating micro-phenomenology and improved instruments.

The findings support treating this experiential range as a coherent domain that transcends specific modalities, warranting specialized terminology and potentially a clinical specialty. The authors argue that existing umbrella terms (ASCs, spiritual/religious/mystical experiences) are constrained by assumptions (metaphysical, cultural, modality-bound), imprecision, or positive-valence bias and fail to accommodate challenging experiences, interactive-relational encounters, functional impacts, and events like cessations. They propose “emergence” and EPEEs as ontologically neutral, scalable, and clinically pragmatic terms resonant with historical uses (e.g., spiritual emergence) yet avoiding prescriptive metaphysics. Advantages include ethical compatibility, cross-cultural etic utility, and potential for adoption in clinical/public health contexts; disadvantages include possible confusion with other disciplines’ “emergence” and resistance from established traditions. They delineate relationships and contrasts with ASCs, spirituality/religion, and mystical experience, showing how those constructs can obscure pre-reflexive phenomenology central to clinical outcomes. The authors emphasize creating more precise taxonomies incorporating sequence/development, context, neurophysiology, micro-phenomenological detail, consequences, and function, acknowledging polyphasic and nonlinear trajectories. They propose building structured questionnaires and micro-phenomenology-based protocols to improve reliability, validity, and replicability, and advocate for integrating scientific, clinical, and spiritual paradigms to guide safe, ethical engagement with emergent practices.

EPEEs constitute a distinct, cross-disciplinary domain of human experience that affects numerous physiological, psychological, social, and functional dimensions. The authors advocate adopting “emergence” and related terms (emergent processes, emergent phenomena) as umbrella terminology to enable global scaling of research and clinical practice, reduce conceptual confusion, and improve outcomes. They propose that this domain’s complexity and clinical relevance merit development of a dedicated specialty, alongside improved descriptive taxonomies and instruments grounded in first-person methods. The paper provides foundational descriptive/definitional work and a comprehensive inventory to catalyze coordinated, high-quality empirical research. Future directions include: developing and validating structured questionnaires derived from the inventory; conducting large-scale micro-phenomenological and mixed-methods studies; mapping developmental sequences and neurophysiological correlates; establishing clinical training and guidelines for managing challenging and beneficial EPEEs; and continuing terminological refinement through global, multidisciplinary dialogue.

• Source literature limitations: many included studies exhibit limited phenomenological/meditative expertise among participants or researchers, crude outcome tools (particularly in clinical trials), uncertain causal attribution, biased interpretations/appraisals, and insufficient attention to nonlinear development.
• Selection approach: open-ended, manual curation rather than a comprehensive database search (e.g., PRISMA); no formal quality assessment of individual studies.
• Scope constraints: excluded publications lacking new qualitative phenomenology or relying solely on pre-existing questionnaires; excluded highly specific micro-phenomenological topics; excluded non-phenomenological details (demographics, intensity, duration, prevalence) not generalizable across the sample.
• Inventory status: first-iteration, synchronic framework; full taxonomy and saturation are preliminary and will require refinement; boundary of what qualifies as EPEEs remains to be operationalized.
• Paper type: non-empirical synthesis; relies on re-analysis of existing qualitative data rather than new primary data collection.