Could you tell the difference?

In attempts to revise a paper on neuroscience and religious experience, which also entails (for me) doing additional research and following leads, I've come across a very interesting study:


Philosopher Huston Smith (1964) devised an exercise in which he asked the following question:

Can you identify which of the following experiences was drug-induced and which was the experience of a famous religious mystic? 

1. 
Suddenly I burst into a vast, new indescribably wonderful universe. Although I am writing this over a year later, the thrill of the surprise and amazement, the awesomeness of the revelation, the engulfment in an overwhelming feeling wave of gratitude and blessed wonderment, are as fresh, and the memory of the experience is as vivid, as if it had happened five minutes ago. And yet to concoct anything by way of description that would hint at the magnitude, the sense of ultimate reality . . . this seems such an impossible task. The knowledge which has infused and affected every aspect of my life came instantaneously and with such complete force of certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its validity. 

2. 
All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire . . . the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. . . . I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any preadventure all things work together for the good of each and alll that the foundation principle of the world . . . is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.






















Out of a sample of sixty-nine students from Princeton University, one-third were able to correctly identify the first as drug-induced.