Take 17 trained trance practitioners — 13 women, 4 men, average age 49 — and ask each to recall, in close detail, two different states: an ordinary meal, and the deepest self-induced trance they know how to reach. No drug involved in either one. That’s the design behind From the attenuation of self-boundaries to inner peace: how nonordinary states of consciousness modulates self-experience and subjective well-being, published in Neuroscience of Consciousness by Pierre De Oliveira of the Psy-DREPI laboratory at Université Bourgogne Europe, with Hélène Meunier, Audrey Breton, and Michael Dambrun, and covered Oct 14, 2026 by PsyPost. Motor agency — the felt sense of controlling your own movement — collapsed from 83.8 down to 10.4 on a 0-100 scale. Body-boundary distinctness fell from 83.8 to 36.5 while felt oneness with everything around them rose from 28.4 to 75.9. Inner peace jumped from 44.3 to 74.7. The self didn’t just feel different in trance. It felt barely present at all — and that absence is exactly what tracked with feeling better. William James never heard of a 0-100 agency scale, but in 1902 he named the identical shape as two of the four marks of mystical experience: passivity, the will held in abeyance, and a dissolving boundary between self and surroundings. He didn’t just write about it. He gave himself nitrous oxide to study it from the inside.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether a drug-free, self-induced trance state changes self-experience, and whether that change tracks with well-being
Who ran it?	Pierre De Oliveira (Psy-DREPI, Université Bourgogne Europe), Hélène Meunier, Audrey Breton, Michael Dambrun
Where and when?	Neuroscience of Consciousness; covered Oct 14, 2026 by PsyPost
Sample	17 trained auto-induced cognitive trance (AICT) practitioners, 13 women and 4 men, average age 49
Core finding	Motor agency fell from 83.8 to 10.4; body-boundary distinctness fell from 83.8 to 36.5; oneness with surroundings rose from 28.4 to 75.9, comparing an ordinary meal to deep trance
Well-being result	Inner peace rose from 44.3 to 74.7; overall happiness rose from 50.5 to 74.2 during the trance state
What participants said	”The boundaries are no longer there. The boundaries of my body are absent.” “I don’t decide the movements.”
What James already argued	In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), passivity and a dissolved self-boundary are two of four marks of mystical experience, which James studied partly by self-inducing it with nitrous oxide

The Quick Version

A 2026 study of 17 trained trance practitioners found that a drug-free, self-induced state collapsed their sense of being a separate, willing self — and that collapse, not any substance, tracked directly with large jumps in inner peace and happiness. William James named this exact pattern in 1902: passivity and a dissolved self-other boundary, two of the four marks he used to define mystical experience, drawn partly from nitrous oxide sessions he gave himself specifically to study it.

What the Study Actually Found

Most research on self-dissolution reaches for a substance to get there — psilocybin, ketamine, nitrous oxide. De Oliveira and his co-authors picked a stranger starting point: auto-induced cognitive trance, or AICT, a learnable, drug-free practice marked by deep sensory immersion, spontaneous body movement, and vivid mental imagery. No molecule required — just training, roughly four sessions a week, about ten minutes each, going back on average fifteen months.

Seventeen practitioners — mostly highly educated women, several in health professions — were asked to recall two contrasting experiences in detail: an ordinary meal, and their deepest self-induced trance. The contrast wasn’t subtle. Motor agency — the sense “I am the one deciding to move” — dropped from 83.8 during the meal to 10.4 in trance. Sense of authorship over one’s own thoughts and actions fell from 67.4 to 12.1. Future-focused thinking, the ordinary habit of planning what’s next, dropped from 31.5% of reported thoughts to 2.7%. Body-boundary distinctness fell from 83.8 to 36.5, while felt oneness with the surrounding environment rose from 28.4 to 75.9.

None of that, alone, would be surprising — trance states are supposed to feel different. What’s worth sitting with is what happened to well-being alongside the collapse. Inner peace rose from 44.3 to 74.7. Global happiness rose from 50.5 to 74.2, in the same people, across the same comparison. As De Oliveira put it to PsyPost, “For about a decade, our research has focused on the link between states of ‘self-transcendence’ (moments when the feeling of being a separate, self-centered individual fades) and the emergence of positive emotions and well-being.” This is the measured version of that claim: the part of the experience doing the work looks like the self getting quieter, not louder.

Participants’ own language matched the numbers closely. “I don’t decide the movements,” one said, describing involuntary gestures during deep trance. Another: “The boundaries are no longer there. The boundaries of my body are absent.” A third described trance as a state where there was no longer a separate “I” running the show at all — just, in their words, the emotion itself, with no one left over to have it.

What Did James Mean by the Marks of Mystical Experience?

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), proposed four marks that identify a genuine mystical state: ineffability (it resists being put into words), noetic quality (it feels like knowledge, not just feeling), transiency (it rarely lasts more than an hour), and passivity (the sense that one’s own will has gone into abeyance, as if held by something else).

James spent two full lectures — the mysticism chapters of Varieties — working through testimony from people who’d had experiences they couldn’t categorize any other way: nuns, poets, ordinary correspondents who wrote to him describing a sudden collapse of the wall between themselves and everything else. One told him: “I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all.” James’s own phrase for the broader pattern was “the overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute.” That’s the self-boundary mark. The passivity mark is narrower and, for this study, the sharper match: James wrote that once a mystical state sets in, “the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” Not calm. Not relaxed. Held. Not deciding.

James didn’t take this entirely on other people’s word. In the 1870s and 80s, inspired by a self-published pamphlet from the amateur philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, he started giving himself nitrous oxide to see what it did to the structure of his own consciousness, writing up the sessions in a 1898 Psychological Review article, “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide,” scribbling fragments mid-intoxication — “Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!” He folded the exercise into Varieties four years later as evidence for a conclusion he thought mattered more than any single trip: that ordinary waking consciousness is “but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” He wasn’t claiming the insights were literally true. He was claiming the state was real and worth taking seriously as data — close to the exact posture De Oliveira’s team takes toward a trance practitioner’s self-report, a century and a quarter later.

Why Would Losing Your Sense of Self Bring Peace?

1. Agency has a maintenance cost. Feeling like the author of your own movements and thoughts means constantly monitoring, deciding, and owning the outcome. That monitoring doesn’t run for free. Switching it off, even temporarily, removes a job the mind was doing continuously without being asked to.
2. A fixed boundary is also a fixed target. Body-boundary distinctness didn’t just drop in this study — it dropped specifically alongside a rise in oneness with the surroundings. A self sharply walled off from everything else is also a self that everything else can threaten. Loosen the wall, and there’s less exposed surface for anxiety to land on.
3. Future-focused thought is often where distress lives. Planning, worrying, rehearsing all require a stable “I” projecting itself forward in time. That category of thought collapsed from 31.5% down to 2.7% in trance, alongside more peace in the present moment.
4. James’s passivity and this study’s “motor agency” may be the same variable wearing two names. A psychologist measures reduced sense of agency on a scale. A mystic calls it the will in abeyance and writes a letter about it. Neither set out to test the other’s vocabulary — but the number and the mark are describing strikingly similar territory.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

This isn’t “a nineteenth-century psychologist of religion predicted a 2026 trance study.” James’s narrower claim was that two things reliably travel together in genuine mystical states: the will going quiet, and the wall between self and surroundings coming down — a pairing he thought was diagnostic, a way to tell a real mystical experience from an ordinary strong feeling. De Oliveira’s team wasn’t testing James. They were testing whether a drug-free trance technique changes self-experience and whether that change relates to well-being. But the two variables that moved together hardest in their data — collapsed agency and collapsed body-boundary — are the exact pairing James picked out of hundreds of testimonies as the signature of the thing he was trying to define.

It connects to Plotinus’s account of henosis, the idea that a temporary collapse of ordered, discursive thought — not a permanent change to the ordinary reasoning mind — produced his most lasting insight. Both describe a self that steps back from running the show and returns afterward unchanged, having briefly touched something else. It also sits close to Empedocles’s account of Love as the force that fuses separate things into one — there, self-other overlap between romantic partners; here, self-world overlap inside a single trained nervous system. Same direction: the boundary softens, and something good follows.

It belongs next to Iris Murdoch’s argument that unselfing — turning attention outward, away from the compulsively self-referential mind — loosens anxious rumination. Murdoch’s version is gentler: looking hard at a bird instead of your own anxious thoughts. AICT is unselfing with the attention-shift removed and the self-structure itself allowed to go slack. It’s also worth reading against the other 2026 study covered here on James, on interoceptive awareness and disgust — that one found political belief shaped by a bodily signal nobody noticed. This one finds well-being shaped by a self-structure participants noticed collapsing in real time.

The Gap James Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison gets more interesting than a clean match.

James assumed access to mystical states required rare natural disposition, years of contemplative discipline, or — in his own case — a chemical shortcut he was somewhat uneasy about. The practitioners in this study needed none of those routes. AICT is trained, not innate, and the sample had been practicing an average of fifteen months — a fraction of the “lifetime of disciplined ascent” that older contemplative traditions, Plotinus’s included, assumed was the price of entry. That’s a real gap. It cuts against the assumption, James’s included, that the depth of a mystical state should track the depth of spiritual preparation behind it, and suggests passivity and boundary-dissolution might be a trainable skill sitting dormant in ordinary nervous systems rather than a rare state reserved for the exceptionally disciplined. Whether a fifteen-month-trained trance and a four-decades-trained contemplative’s union with the Absolute are the same kind of event is a question this study doesn’t settle and probably can’t.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

Seventeen People Is a Pilot, Not a Population

The researchers said this themselves: “These results should nonetheless be read cautiously. This was a pilot study with a small sample, which tends to overestimate the size of effects.” Seventeen practitioners, recruited because they already practice AICT, isn’t a sample you can generalize from to trance practice broadly, let alone to people with no training at all.

This Was Recalled Experience, Not a Live Trance Under Observation

Participants described two states from memory rather than being measured continuously while entering trance in the lab. Recalled self-report is real data, but memory has its own distortions.

Correlational, Not Causal

The study shows self-boundary collapse and well-being gains moved together in the same people and the same comparison. It doesn’t establish that the collapse caused the peace, rather than both arising from something else about deep trance — or about the kind of person drawn to train in it for fifteen months.

Not Everyone Should Go Looking for This

Deliberately dissolving your sense of agency and bodily boundary isn’t risk-free for everyone. This sample was trained, voluntary practitioners with no reported adverse effects, not a general population. Research on meditation’s adverse effects has found that states involving depersonalization and loosened self-boundaries can tip into dissociation or panic in a meaningful minority of practitioners, especially those going deep without guidance. A controlled trance session and an uncontrolled slide into dissociation aren’t the same event, even when the numbers look similar on paper.

What Actually Follows From This

1. The self you’re managing all day is more optional than it feels. Motor agency, authorship, and body-boundary read as fixed facts about who you are — until a trained person turns each one down almost to zero and reports feeling more at peace, not less.
2. Peace might be downstream of quiet, not control. If letting go of planning, deciding, and boundary-maintenance tracks with inner peace this consistently, the usual advice to “take more control” of a hard moment may be aimed the wrong way some of the time.
3. James’s question is still live: is it the self doing the experiencing, or the experience itself, that matters? A trance practitioner losing track of their body’s edges and a philosopher losing track of his own will under nitrous oxide report the same shape, 124 years apart. Neither claims the revelation was objectively true. Both claim the state was real, and worth more than the ordinary, boundary-intact alternative.

James never tried auto-induced cognitive trance, and De Oliveira’s team never set out to test a century-old taxonomy. But put a 0-100 agency scale next to a letter from a nineteenth-century mystic describing a will held in abeyance, and they’re pointing at the same collapse — one measured in a lab in Dijon in 2026, one gathered from correspondence and a bottle of laughing gas in Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a century before anyone thought to put a number on it.

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This post discusses a 2026 pilot study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness (De Oliveira, Meunier, Breton & Dambrun, DOI: 10.1093/nc/niag022) and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). The study’s findings come from a small sample of 17 trained auto-induced cognitive trance practitioners recalling past experiences, not a controlled experiment on a general population, and the researchers themselves caution that pilot studies of this size tend to overestimate effect sizes.