Part I: Interesting Research & Part II: More on Spiritual Experiences – Their Five Characteristics

With my latest book, Spirituality Through a Highly Sensitive Lens: An Objective Look at Meditation Methods and Enlightenment, in mind, my blog posts are now structured in two parts. Part I offers brief reviews of selected recent research, while Part II reflects the more “spiritual” tone of the book. To explore that portion, simply scroll down to Part II in this post.

Part I. Interesting Research. I only found one study worth sharing since my last email, but more are in the pipeline. And the revision of the HSP Scale has finally been published. It will appear in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. So perhaps that counts too as new research. I urge you to read here what I said about it when it first appeared as a “preprint.” 

How Certain Genes May Make Some HSPs More Resilient

Dong, Y., Li, J., Wu, J., & Luo, Y. L. (2026). Highly sensitive persons’ responses to acute and post-earthquake stress: Exploratory insights into genetic moderation. Journal of Affective Disorders, 121382.

In this paper the authors looked at stress in two situations that they saw as previously understudied—experimentally induced stress in a laboratory and stress due to a natural disaster, an earthquake. Plus, they wanted to see how two genes might affect the stress response in HSPs in particular. Study 1 measured psychological (perceived stress) and physiological (salivary cortisol, heart rate) responses to experimentally induced acute stress in 121 male undergraduates. The acute stress is a standardized procedure, in which participants are told to imagine they had been caught shop lifting and to prepare a speech to defend themselves. Then they give it to three people playing the role of store managers. It is recorded and evaluated. After that they have a difficult math task to do (subtract 13 from 1022, then 13 again from that result, etc. and if they made an error they had to start over). Pretty stressful. HSPs had higher cortisol responses than others after doing this, but not higher psychological stress. This may have been because of the number of HSPs in their sample who had the protective genes I will discuss in a moment.  

Study 2 involved 99 undergraduates, measuring perceived stress at baseline and after to an earthquake that the researchers just waited for, that finally occurred 6 months later (level 6.4, with 47 aftershocks). At that time the students were assessed for objective losses (of property, etc.) and the psychological stress from it. Not surprisingly, of course, HSPs had higher post-earthquake stress levels.

Both studies assessed SPS and analyzed their saliva for genetic variants associated with stress resilience: the catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) rs4680, which is related to dopamine, and an oxytocin receptor (OXTR) rs2254298 polymorphisms. (Both dopamine and oxytocin act as both hormones and neurotransmitters, so having more or less of them, what these variants determine, will affect behavior in some ways. If you do not know what they can do, look them up.) In both studies, although all HSPs were more affected by the stressors than those without the trait, the HSPs carrying either the COMT GA/AA genotype or the OXTR GG genotype were less affected by the two stressors in the study than other HSPs.

To me this study highlights the way that SPS is governed by many genes. I often say it is like being dealt a hand of cards—enough of a certain suit, high cards especially, will make you an HSP. But all your genetic cards play a role, and now we know of two more that do.

Bottom Line: Previously differences in an HSP’s response to stress has usually been attributed to things like their childhood environment, but now it seems that certain genes can also make a difference.  I doubt it would be easy to be tested for these genes, but if you seem to handle stress better than other HSPs, your genes may be one reason for it.

Part II. More on Spiritual Experiences—Their Five Characteristics

In my last blog I wrote about spiritual experiences, partly just to be clear that in my book I am not focused on spiritual experiences, events that start and end, living on in memory and perhaps in life-changing attitudes and decisions, but still just events. The focus of my book is on methods of meditation, of course, and on awakening/enlightenment experiences. These experiences are permanent changes in the sense of self and in the brain, involving a much deeper transformation. Still, spiritual experiences that are limited in time but very intense are often the doorway into an interest in or lead to a permanent awakening. And many people, especially HSPs, have had one or more such time-limited spiritual experiences/events and would like to hear more about them. So let’s do it.

Indeed, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people, in the U.S. at least, who report having had “a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of my life.” About 20% completely agreed with that statement in 1962, and more than twice that number did in 2002. (More recent surveys show similar trends but do not ask questions enough like this one to compare.)  I am certain that this increase in spiritual experiences is one expression of the “supernova” I describe in the book, an explosion in the sixties of interest in meditation, near death experiences, psychedelics, and many other “New Age” spiritual subjects, but as with any supernova, it happened far away (decades ago), so the light is only now visible.  Now that it is so visible, numerous books are being written on these subjects. But one in particular stands out for its detailed research on spiritual experiences, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman’s Varieties of Spiritual Experience:  21st Century Research and Perspectives (Oxford Press, 2022). These authors also noticed the explosion—that over the five years of writing their book more information was constantly coming out. But let’s begin with a classic, intense spiritual experience and then look at it as they would.

How Cheryl Came to Firing God

One interesting feature of this supernova is that many people have experiences that are not at all in keeping with their prior views on spirituality. The experiences happen, but often without the person having any context or knowledge that would explain the experience and prepare for the next one. A good example of a life-changing experience that came from out of nowhere is the one that happened to Cheryl Abram, described in a “Buddha at the Gas Pump” podcast and in her book, Firing God.

Cheryl was raised in a very literal God-fearing religion that taught her that her only hope for avoiding Hell was to be saved by Jesus, to be saved from her wretched guilty sinfulness inherited from Adam and Eve. In this tradition, if you showed the slightest self-respect or autonomy, you would be passed over by Jesus as a sinner. Before her experience she was definitely not someone who would dare to fire God.

Cheryl was already in a bit of hell, however. This is classic–often these sudden experiences come during times of stress or crisis. She was in the middle of a divorce, raising four children alone, and having to work at a job she hated. It is true that she was starting to see that her religion was not helping her. But that was a terrifying thought, given that it was all she had. It was her identity. Further, Cheryl was not someone primed for an extraordinary spiritual experience. She knew nothing about mystics or altered states–just our common state of sin.

But one morning–she remembered it was in May–when she sat down in front of her computer at work, her heart began to pound violently. She broke out into a cold sweat, and although she was in good health and had never had anything like this happen before (or since), she was sure she was dying. She was terrified, more for her children, who would be left without her, than for herself. But she finally surrendered to whatever was happening, and at that moment the terror was replaced by something else. “I have absolutely no words for it. It was so beautiful, and freeing.” Things around her, like her computer, made no sense to her. “What is that?” But what was happening was more like pure knowing. “And the thing that made it so amazing was that whatever I was knowing, I was knowing for everyone.” Even for her ex-husband, whom she thought she hated. “Happy is not even the word.” 

The experience only lasted about a minute, but she has no memory of the rest of the day. After work she started searching on the internet for subjects such as “Already in eternity.” But as spiritual teachers’ websites came up, what she read made no sense to her at all. But her own experience had “made all the sense in the world.” Since then, she has been gradually taking it in and letting it change her. In the process she “fired God” in the sense of rejecting her old religious views of God. She does not tell others to do that, but suggests questioning a bit more than she had, to see what is working for them, what may not be.

As part of her searching, Chery found her way to the Buddha at the Gas Pump podcast, and hence we have her story on video. This remarkable website is the creation of Rick Archer, who has now interviewed over 750 “ordinary” spiritually awakening people. (He is cautious about the finality of the words “awakened” or “enlightened.”) The website’s name alludes to just how common awakening has become–you may be pumping gas beside someone who is enlightened. There is a quote on the home page by Eckart Tolle, attesting to what others have observed as well: “A huge number of people are going through the process of awakening. Some in the early stages, some in later stages, and it is wonderful to see.” I think Rick thought Cheryl’s experiences qualified her for an interview, so sometimes the line between awakening and having had a spiritual experience can be very blurred, depending on how one’s life unfolds after the event.  So back to spiritual experiences.

The Five Characteristics of Spiritual Experiences

For the book I mentioned above, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman used an online survey that provided data on 700 persons who had had some kind of profound spiritual or transformational experience. Newberg and Waldman summarized the descriptions from their survey as having five elements. 

The first element, a sense of oneness or unity with everything, leaving the ego or self feeling small or non-existent, having merged with something larger. Here people differed on what they had merged with, but usually it was oneness with God, the universe, or just everything. 

Second, the experience had an intensity that made it life-changing. The third element there is a new sense of clarity about everything, a fundamentally new understanding–Cheryl had the sense that she now knew everything, not the details but some vast reality (much like the description in India’s Vedanta philosophy of  “Brahman consciousness,” meaning that one is a “knower of the Ultimate Reality”). Newberg and Waldman emphasize that an equally important feature was how difficult people said it was to put this knowledge into words. But that deep sense of knowing added to the sense that the experience was totally real, not like a dream. In fact, it seemed more real than the rest of life.

The fourth element was a sense of surrender or loss of control–Cheryl’s surrendering to what seemed like death brought the breakthrough. Finally, fifth, a sense that one’s beliefs or life purpose had suddenly and permanently changed. While Cheryl felt in some sense that she now understood everything, and that this gave her life an entirely new basis, she also immediately started to seek an understanding that would put her experience into a larger context. 

Reading about these five characteristics, and Cheryl’s experience, leaves me with the feeling that the boundary between “real” permanent awakening and transient but life-changing spiritual experiences is a bit softer, fuzzier than one might conclude from the research and theory about enlightenment. This seems right, given how we humans are all unique. So, for example, I do not know if Cheryl later saw herself as being enlightened. I do not think so. But she certainly saw herself as changed forever.