Both Jungian and transpersonal traditions regard meditative and related states as a positive unfolding of an advanced symbolic capacity, with their ostensibly “primitive” features actually being part of an abstractly based reorganization of experience rather than confirming the more traditional psychiatric assumptions of “primitivity” or “regression”. An important feature of long-term...
This study examined the commonalities and the differences between creativity and the schizophrenia spectrum. The variables measured were creativity, schizotypy, absorption, mystical experiences, spatial ability, balance, positive and negative presence, and neuroticism. Three community groups were recruited: 31 artists, 10 people with schizophrenia, and 31 comparisons matched for gender and age...
While Michel Foucault is chiefly known for his historical relativism and his critique of modern institutional power over the individual, his late writings, as further extended by Pierre Hadot, centered on the post-Socratic spiritual practices of the experience of here and now presence or Being in the Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics. For Foucault the positive, expansive self-actualization common...