The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality
January 23, 2024
Stephan A. Schwartz
Abstract This chapter presents an anthropological assessment of religions and spiritual practices stripped of their sectarian dogmas. It discusses them not on the basis of faith but as systems of empirical observational science developed over generations for the purpose of allowing followers the opportunity to open to nonlocal consciousness. The chapter describes how religions begin as the...
Anthropology of Consciousness
September 1, 2021
Stephan A. Schwartz
12 citations
AbstractThe founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness (SAC) can only be understood within the cultural context of its heritage. This paper is an historical narrative tracing the intellectual lineage of the SAC. The immediate causes were a series of symposia in 1974, including several on the challenge to anthropology represented by Carlos Castaneda, who attacked the way a...
Explore
2019
Stephan A. Schwartz
8 citations
This paper discusses the ancient anthropological linkage of water and wine with sacred rituals after these substances have been the focus of nonlocal perturbation. The paper reports the changes produced can be both physical, as well as a subjective aesthetic reaction arising when individuals have a sensorial interaction with such treated substances. In making this argument the paper presents...
Explore
2010
Stephan A. Schwartz
Two hundred years of reductive materialism has failed to explain the extraordinary experiences we know as moments of genius, religious epiphany, and psychic insight. This paper proposes that these three experiences are in essence the same experience, differentiated only by intention and context. It reaches this conclusion based on well-conducted experimental research across the continuum of...
Explore
July 2005
Stephan A. Schwartz
This paper describes the development of the blind protocol, and its place in this history of consciousness research. It was first devised by Croesus, King of the Lydians (BCE 560-547) and reported by Herodotus ( approximately BCE 484 - approximately 424), and was created to protect against fraud in assessing an Anomalous Perception (AP) event; a Remote Viewing (RV) experiment little different...
Anthropology of Consciousness
2005
Mark A. Schroll, Stephan A. Schwartz
16 citations
This essay (written by Mark in dialogue with Stephan and including supporting commentary by Stanley Krippner and others1) is not a comprehensive survey of psi and anthropology, nor does it contain a thorough overview of Castaneda's work. Rather, it seeks to explore two primary questions. First, whatever became of the interest in psi and anthropology that led to the founding of the Society for...