Spirituality as “Self-Worth”

To paraphrase Chatlos (2025), the keys to open awareness of spiritual experience are the integrated experiences of self-worth (self-confidence, self-esteem, self-competence/self-efficacy). The strengthening of a core self-worth and dignity leads to spontaneous opening to the level of the creative forces/creative openings that may include a sense of connectedness, vitality, wholeness, noetics, peace/serenity, and meaning and purpose. A depth of experience is identified and extended into the deepest levels of spiritual or soul experience.

The operationalization of spirituality in terms of “self-worth” merits consideration. But this proposal faces a challenge in that it lacks face validity because it diverges from commonly recognized concepts of spiritual experience and phenomenal experience of personalized entities core to widespread notions about spirituality across cultures and time. Justifying this perspective of spirituality as self-worth in relation to traditional concepts of spirituality and the soul appears problematic.

Chatlos’s conceptualization of spirituality in terms of self-related concepts (confidence, esteem, and competence/efficacy) that can be measured with psychometric instruments is a step in the right direction. This conceptual framework also appears to lack ecological validity in that this is not what spirituality conventionally means. Even if it is valid in a specific WEIRD (“Western educated industrialized rich democratic”; Joseph Henrich 2020) reference group, establishing cross-cultural validity is challenging given divergent cultural concepts of spirituality (and probably in meanings of self-worth elements). This problem is not unique to Chatlos’s theory, as any general theory of the soul and spirituality and their determinants must address how to operationalize them in a cross-culturally valid way.

Chatlos’s (2025) has a “potential answer” for placing the concepts of self-worth and dignity at the core of spirituality—“they are what inherently drive human beings to fulfillment [through] a specific internal experience of wellbeing and happiness.” But empirical evidence for the claim is lacking, and even the (theological?) tradition informing his approach is not presented.

To clarify spirituality, Chatlos proposes several relevant aspects of the self as measurable attitudes—self-confidence, self-esteem, self-competence/self-efficacy. The face validity of aspects of the self as reflecting spirituality and soul concepts is promising and likely to be a very fruitful area of investigation. But the construct validity, whether assessments of elements of self-esteem measure spirituality, and the content validity of specific elements of self-esteem measures remain to be established. Chatlos proposes an explanation for these attitudes as an evolutionary adaptation that provided confidence. While this may be true, it does not establish their equivalence with spirituality. While these raise questions about the validity of the specific proposal, the conception of spirituality as related to the self may be key to interdisciplinary study of spirituality and the soul.

The Self as a Core to Consilience

Commonalities between spirituality and psychology are bridged with the concept of the self, which provides a framework shared by the social and psychological sciences and religious and theological concerns. Concepts of the self are highly varied but represent core aspects of identity formed in the confluence of biological, social, cultural, and personal influences that provide personal references essential for consciousness. Self experiences are core to spiritual and mystical experiences in one’s relations with spiritual others.

The self is not a singular entity or process but involves a multidimensional stratum of auto-reference and identity that spans neural, social, and cultural levels and exhibits well-recognized psychological, neuropsychiatric, and psychosocial profiles. Nonetheless, these diverse models presumably all have some neurological basis. Reviews of fMRI studies on task-based elicitation of self-relevant networks identify neural mechanisms involved in distinctive biologically based forms of the self (i.e., interoceptive, exteroceptive, and mental; Qin, Wang, and Northoff 2020; Wu, Huang, Qin and Wu 2024). This provides a neurological framework for organizing multidisciplinary inquiry into the self. Neurological evidence derived from EEG studies of self forms that are spontaneously manifested in meditation sessions exhibit experiential features corresponding to classic notions: the self, a witnessing observer; me, a representation of emotional agency; and the I, a capacity for reflective agency (Fingelkurts, Fingelkurts, and Kallio-Tamminen 2021). Such neurological evidence provides bridges to classic mystical notions of the self and foundational concepts for an interdisciplinary science of spirituality.

Chatlos’s proposal to identify the progression of these experiences of self-worth and dignity as occurring as a consequence of cognitive development might be fruitful, and ought to begin with stages proposed by psychologist Jean Piaget. Using Piaget’s framework of cognitive development to assess the nature of self changes in spiritual development provides a broad scientific framework for an integrative science of mysticism that establishes firm epistemological bases and interdisciplinary bridges. It is through epistemology that we can come to appreciate the relation of the self to the nature of mystical knowing and the relationship of both self and knowing to biological structures and processes (Winkelman 2024).

What Is the Soul?

The FOS identifies the soul with reference to experiences of creative forces/creative openings of moral-truth, open-hearted love, and indomitable faith that indicate the functional soul experience. Just what is the evidential basis or theological rationale for making such attributions regarding the nature of the soul is not presented, nor are they consistent with the experience of the soul reported across cultures. Traditional concepts of the soul emphasize a person’s immaterial essence that can experientially separate from the body and even survive physical death. The divergence between the FOS and traditional concepts illustrates that there is still a phenomenon to delimit and validity concerns. What is a soul and how do we define it, or even further, operationalize such experiences? What is being denoted and how can it be reliably assessed across cultures?

Ede Frecska, Levente Moro, and Hank Wesselman (2011) propose conceptions of the soul found cross-culturally that reveal a tripartite model of physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions, suggesting they are derived from psychobiological structures. While the tripartite model seems to imply strictly metaphysical aspects to some soul components, it may be that all three of these aspects have a grounding in physiological systems (e.g., the immune system or specific nervous systems). A biological basis for soul concepts is clearly reflected in universally distributed out-of-body experiences like astral projection and the shamanic soul flight. Thomas Metzinger (2009) proposes that the out-of-body experience manifests separated elements of the protoself in the disintegration of the normal unity of the visual field and self-identity from the physical body. This persistence of cognitive functions with suspension of the corporeal functions produces an experience of a soul-like entity (see also Winkelman 2019). These body-self dissociation experiences reveal the tripartite structure in the underlying functional brain architecture—a mental self-identity, a disembodied mimetic self, and a dissociated physical body. Studies of people who can induce these experiences voluntarily (Blanke and Metzinger 2009) illustrate how soul experiences can result from interference with brain systems (temporo-parietal junction; see Winkelman 2010 for review) and provide a model for the interdisciplinary study of spirituality.

So Is Consilience Possible?

What might be aspired to is a common framework regarding the nature of the human capacities for knowing, leading us instead to questions regarding epistemology. Philosophy may contribute to scientific understanding of supernatural experiences through epistemological issues regarding valid evidence, the significance of experience, and the nature of human knowledge of reality.

Philosophy’s contributions to frameworks to integrate knowledge regarding spirituality may be fruitful through a framework of neutral monism, the perspective that reality involves something underlying both matter and mind. A scientific justification for neutral monism is based in recognition of what the neurosciences tell us about human perception and knowledge: what we perceive of physical reality is not reality itself but an acquired model shaped by habituation, learning, and socialization and, most significantly, limited by the human sensory and cognitive systems that are oblivious to most information of the universe. Consequently, a scientifically defensible epistemological framework is an idealist orientation that recognizes the symbolic mental representation of all experience, independent of its source, combined with a provisory materialist metaphysics that recognizes the obviously incomplete data of our senses.

Evolution and Spirituality

Evolutionary perspectives are key to naturalizing spirituality, as the universality of spiritual beliefs reflects direct or indirect (by-products or exaptations) evolutionary adaptations. Chatlos proposes the survival value of spiritual beliefs is expressed through the resultant effects on self-worth in bolstering self-confidence, enhancing initiative and increasing self-esteem and self-competence, enhancing capacities for more competent action and decisions, as well as stimulating compassion for and protection of others. But Chatlos also proposes spiritual experience is a by-product of what was needed for survival, not what made survival possible. Where by-products are subsequently used for new applications that enhance survival, these exaptations are also adaptations. The question of the survival value of spiritual experience must be contextualized not only in the framework of belief, but more importantly, in terms of how spiritual values affect behavior, social groups, and emotional wellbeing. While most evolutionary theories consider spiritual experiences to be by-products, a growing body of empirical research on how supernatural beliefs manage various social problems, (free-riding, moral systems, constant vigilance, and supervision of norm violations) suggests that they subsequently constituted at least cultural, if not biological, adaptations. The potential survival value of spiritual experiences engages a broad range of processes because of the multifactorial nature of their effects.

Most current theories of spirituality and religion exemplify the cognitive science approaches, which neglect the evolved capacities for community and empathy that existed much earlier in our evolutionary history. If spirituality is equated with community, then the effects of community on human survival are without parallel, with sociality being our most important survival strategy. Spiritual beliefs enhance social groups and moderate numerous psychological conditions and physiological responses by giving meaning, assurance, and calming influences that can shift the dynamics of stress and immunological systems, with direct implications for wellbeing, reproduction, and survival.

A Phenomenological Psychology of Spirituality

What must psychology do to engage this scientific inquiry into spirituality and soul studies? Many spiritual phenomena are already addressed within the methodological and conceptual frameworks for the study of anomalous phenomena (Cardeña, Lynn, and Krippner 2014) and phenomenological psychology. The emphasis of phenomenological psychology on verbal or written descriptions of experience through first-person introspection is a necessary step in creating an empirical science of spiritual and soul experiences. Such studies need to take seriously the admonitions of the phenomenological approach to provide descriptions of experiences and avoid speculation about their causes or ontology. Only with analysis of such data to extract their core features and patterns will we have a phenomenon to study, a set of experiences that can be further examined through the tools of the neurosciences.

I call for a study of psychedelic entities through an “entitiology,” a multidisciplinary research program to determine the range of phenomenal qualities of spirit engagements and the patterns of features and relationships they manifest (Winkelman 2018). A clearly delimited phenomenology of spiritual entities and experiences has yet to be instantiated, or differentiated, and a recognition is needed of distinct types of spirit experiences with different origins and functions.

Just what phenomena constitute the principal forms of spiritual experience remains to be determined at a phenomenological level, and even more so at a biological level. Out-of-body experiences, unity experiences with a sense of merger with something larger, and possession experiences of evil dominating entities are distinct spiritual experiences. The experiential and self-dynamics are so contrastive as to demand consideration as distinct types of spirituality. A developed science of spirituality must be a multidisciplinary endeavor informed by existing methods and theories of diverse human sciences with the help of philosophy. For a scientific study of spirituality and the soul, we first need to delimit a phenomenon of study, beginning with a rigorous study of the phenomenology of an agreed upon class of experiences. This is a challenge even if we do not go beyond the WEIRD cultures. Only if we have a clearly delimited and reliably produced or accessed phenomenon (or phenomena) can we examine how its appearance relates to measurable neurological functions, other personal experiences, aspects of personality, or even external forces such as electromagnetic and quantum fields.

The study of spirituality, spiritual experiences, soul awakenings, and similar anomalous religious experiences should be situated within the psychology of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, and transpersonal psychology and anthropology. These scientific disciplines have already begun the study of these phenomena and the organization of data to produce valid scales, empirical analyses of the patterns and relationships to diverse demographics, and even studies of the relationships of specific forms of experience to personality and brain function.

A Biopsychosocial-Spiritual Model?

Chatlos proposes that incorporating spirituality within medical science requires an expansion of the biopsychosocial model to incorporate spirituality. The biopsychosocial model has significant contributions as a bridging model for studying spirituality. Its significance is not just causal interactions across the three domains but the novel paradigmatic framework of supervenience, the top-down effects of our intentions upon physiological processes. This is a core element of an alternative to the materialist paradigm in which the material is subjected to the influences of more subtle forms of human capabilities, where social conditions affect physiological responses (i.e., group behavior activating the individual’s endogenous opioid system) or where psychological states (e.g., mediation) can affect a wide range of physiological parameters. Chatlos’s notion that the specific regions of the brain associated with spiritual experience can only be affected through physical methods or physical interventions (e.g., EEG neurofeedback, electroconvulsive therapy) misses the point that many meditators use conscious intentions to control physical brain functions without external feedback.

These top-down functions enable spiritual beliefs, attitudes, and relations to impose or elicit physiological responses in ways that can have significant effects on physiological processes that promote health and wellbeing. Perhaps, as Chatlos proposes, we accommodate spirituality within the biopsychosocial model, not as a new fundamental aspect but as an additional dimension that emerges from interaction between aspects. Is spirituality how the social or psychological realms engage the physical body? Is spirituality how meaning or self-significance engages physiological responses?

The proposal to include spiritual or numinous experience as an independent personality factor shows that subjective spiritual experiences are not ephemeral delusions but applications of spiritual beliefs in medicine require a shift in paradigm to recognize the power of symbols and their capacities to elicit physiological responses. Supernatural beliefs in souls independent of the body reflect the human proclivity to find hidden symbolic meanings and understand them in personal terms as caused by unseen actors (Deacon and Cashman 2009). Spiritual beliefs also reflect our meta-representational capacities, with the integration of innate cognitive operators exemplified in the humanlike personification of spirits, producing emergent possibilities from unconscious cognition. Symbolic information represented in communication from spirit others permits possibilities that exceed innate capacities. Spiritual experiences, such as awe and self-transcendence, are uniquely human emotions produced through symbolic processes that expand possibilities by integrating incompatible or even contradictory emotional properties outside of normal biological experience.

The Roles of Psychedelics in Applied Spirituality

How can we engage this endeavor of applied spirituality with what are ephemeral and generally infrequent, often idiosyncratic, experiences? If we are to have a scientific study of spiritual experiences and the soul, we need to have people who can produce these experiences more or less on demand, and under observable conditions. An example are meditative experiences studied in laboratories with persons adept at inducing such transformations of consciousness to determine the unique profiles of the brain dynamics under specific conditions of meditative intent, even finding contrastive brain systems engaged by distinctive forms of meditation (e.g., loving kindness versus focused attention). The brain activity during such experiences is informative (even enlightening?), and studying people or processes that can reliably produce spiritual experiences should be a central approach to studying spiritual phenomena with neurophenomenological methodologies. The study of mystical experiences in the context of psychology, in particular their use as outcome measures in the current waves of psychedelic clinical research, illustrates that what at first might appear as ephemeral concepts can be operationalized in ways that have construct validity, and even cross-cultural applicability, as illustrated in the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (Barrett, Johnson, and Griffiths 2015).

The clinically established evidence for the ability of psychedelics to objectively, and relatively reliably, produce mystical experiences (in the context of specific clinical set and settings) may suggest an avenue for the transdisciplinary study of spirituality, specifically mystical experiences. This is due to the ability of these substances to produce such experiences of interest that have been notoriously difficult to achieve for most, even the most adept. If we accept the legitimacy of the psychedelic-induced entheogenic experience as a valid spiritual (mystical) experience, the physiological dynamics of the psychedelic-induced state then become relevant to answering questions about the origins and nature of spiritual experiences. Since altered states of consciousness are typically, almost universally, associated with spiritual experiences, their psychobiological dynamics are also relevant to explaining how our biological structures are related to our spirituality. The answers from psychedelic brain dynamics and studies of altered states of consciousness point to a common shift in the overall brain dynamic in which the normal top-down brain control (repression) of lower-level systems is disabled or suspended, allowing the lower brain system to project into and express in the frontal brain systems (Winkelman 2017). From a brain systems perspective, spiritual experiences are manifestations of our ancient brain systems, exemplified in the activation of innate cognitive operational systems that were adaptations of the ancient hominin brain for enhanced sociality.

This is illustrated in Chatlos’s suggestion that the FOS be contextualized in reference to the brain’s two main brain processing systems. He situates spirituality in reference to the theory of the “dual process of cognition,” which proposes that the major differences in modes of thought are based in two distinct functional systems—“a fast, automatic, emotional, not logical, and unconscious system and a slower, logical, conscious system” (Chatlos 2025). Chatlos notes the similarity of these two systems to Freud’s concept of conscious versus unconscious processing and the widely recognized hemispheric differences. An application of this right-brain versus left-brain paradigm is significantly expanded in Iain McGilchrist’s (2019) book and requires further attention in the context of the FOS.