International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
February 20, 2024
Harry T. Hunt
Numinous experience—as the felt sense of the sacred—evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world—as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and...
August 5, 2022
Harry T. Hunt
4 citations
Extending this series of papers on a futural spirituality, and considering the numinous as an inherent human capacity for an awe that confers a sense of all-inclusive meaning, communality, and humility, the question arises whether, in the face of a secularization of traditional world religions, globalization of a techno/capitalist economy of perpetual commodification of planet and person, and a...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
September 1, 2019
Harry T. Hunt
2 citations
The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
September 1, 2018
Harry T. Hunt
1 citation
Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
September 1, 2018
Harry T. Hunt
This is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as...
The Journal of analytical psychology
February 1, 2012
Harry T. Hunt
A needed rapprochement between Jung and the contemporary human sciences may rest less on the much debated relevance of a biologistic collective unconscious than on a re-inscribing of an archetypal imagination, as the phenomenological and empirical core of Jungian psychology. The most promising approaches in this regard in terms of theory and research in psychology come from combining the...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
2010
Harry T. Hunt
9 citations
Although transpersonal psychologies of self realization emphasize individual development, earlier shamanic traditions also showed a central societal aspect and group based consciousness. Indeed, many have understood the transpersonal movement as developing towards an abstract globalized neo-shamanism. That altered states of consciousness, whether as integrative realizations of the numinous or...
Review of General Psychology
September 1, 2007
Harry T. Hunt
47 citations
Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the “dark night of the soul” in classical mysticism, with its painful “metapathological” loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
2003
Harry T. Hunt
3 citations
Early Gnosticism is identified as a form of Weber’s inner-worldly mysticism that, following the critique of Plotinus, entailed spiritual metapathologies of inflated grandiosity, despair, and/or social withdrawal. These vulnerabilities re-emerge in the naturalistic psychologies of spirituality begun by Emerson, Nietzsche, Jung, and Maslow and more implicitly within contemporary personality and...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2000
Harry T. Hunt
11 citations
The five authors vary in the degree to which the recent neuroscience of the REM state leads them towards multiple dimensions and forms of dreaming consciousness (Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms) or toward all-explanatory single factor models (Vertes & Eastman, Revonsuo). The view of the REM state as a prolongation of the orientation response to novelty fits best with the former pluralisms but not...
Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne
May 1, 1996
Allan T. Morrison, Harry T. Hunt
9 citations
AbstractThis study tests the hypothesis that questionnaire self - report measures of altered state experience are, by their very nature, affected by demand features (Orne, 1970), while interview self - report measures of experience are more resistant to these vulnerabilities. It was specifically hypothesized that an interview measure would distinguish the experiences of actual meditators...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1985
Harry T. Hunt
Various apparent drawbacks and extensions are considered of a previously developed cognitive approach to mystical and altered-state experience as directly exteriorizing the normally masked processes of semantics or “felt meaning.” The humanly criterial “turning around on the schemata” as the basis for recombinatory symbolic operations would be based on the cross-modal or synaesthetic embodiment...
Psychophysiology
July 1, 1984
Paul D. Tyson, Robert D. Ogilvie, Harry T. Hunt
59 citations
ABSTRACT Alpha activity during REM sleep without signs of awakening can discriminate between the blind classification of prelucid, lucid, and nonlucid dreams. Ten good dream recallers were aroused after relatively high or low amplitude REM alpha. The spectral and temporal characteristics of EEG alpha within each REM period were associated with lucidity and other content dimensions. Each type of...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1984
Harry T. Hunt
Traditional approaches to the psychology of religious-mystical and altered-state experience have divided between more psychoanalytic and psychiatric views that associate such experience with “schizophrenia,” “regression,” and “primitivity” and the more intuitive Jungian and transpersonal-humanistic assertions of a “higher” path of development (“self-actualization”). By considering the full...
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1982
Robert D. Ogilvie, Harry T. Hunt, Paul D. Tyson et al.
61 citations
10 good dream recallers spent 2 nights in the sleep lab during which they were awakened 4 times per night from REM sleep, twice during their highest alpha activity in REM, and twice during low REM alpha. 5 were given alpha feedback training prior to sleep onset. Arousals from high alpha REM sleep yielded significantly higher lucidity ratings. Alpha feedback had no effect upon lucidity or REM...
Archives of General Psychiatry
July 1, 1976
Harry T. Hunt
43 citations
The term "psychedelic" applied to "altered states of consciousness" would imply that such subjective anomalies are direct expressions of normal psychological functioning. The anomaly in such experience would depend in the first instance on sensitization to qualities of immediate subjective state. Such sensitization should in itself be considered nonadaptive, cutting off the "intentionality" of...