448 papers in the library · 806 citations · publishing 2011-2026
Religions August 14, 2023 Cécile Xie 1 citation
Writers anchored in the Christian mystical tradition generally present their spiritual experience as loaded with cognitive content bearing on things divine. The nature of this mystical knowledge, the way they receive it, and its effect on their existence can be fruitfully approached only by elucidating the way their language and discourse make use of metaphors. Accordingly, starting with...
Religions August 10, 2023 Rico Sneller
Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, rationalism’s demise gradually entailed the transcendent God’s demise. In this article, I will draw on the resurfacing of God in the ensuing tradition of the unconscious. Whereas philosophers such as Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann, undermining the alleged rational consciousness, assumed the existence of an impersonal, unconscious, yet collective...
Religions August 8, 2023 Ismail Lala, Reham Alwazzan 7 citations
Abū ‘Alī ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1027) is regarded as the most influential philosopher in Islamic intellectual history. Of his numerous contributions, none has garnered more attention than his ontological proof for the existence of God, known as ‘the Demonstration of the Truthful’ (Burhān al-ṣiddiqīn). In this proof, Ibn Sīnā argues that only one being can be ‘necessarily existent’ (wājib al-wujūd)....
Religions August 8, 2023 June Mcdaniel 2 citations
The burning ground is both a place and a metaphor in the religion of Shaktism or goddess worship in West Bengal, India. As a place, it is where corpses are cremated. As a metaphor, it refers to the human heart, which has been left as a wasteland through sorrow and tragedy. It is when the soul loses its attachment to this world, when the heart is desolate and alone, that the dark goddess Kali...
Religions August 2, 2023 Antoni Gonzalo Carbó 3 citations
The present article traces the symbols of the eye (Greek: κόρη [maiden, concubine, pupil of the eye]; Latin: pūpilla; Hebrew: īshōn bath ʿāyin (‘apple of the eye’ or the ‘pupil of the eye’ [lit. ‘daughter of an eye’], i.e., the feminine divine Presence [Shĕkhīnāh]); Arabic: ʿayn; Persian: chashm) and the black pupil of the eye (Arabic: insān al-ʿayn; Persian: mardum-i chashm) in Sufism, both—in...
Religions July 25, 2023 Dominika Ruszkiewicz
The aim of this article is to situate Chaucer’s The House of Fame in the tradition of exercising the self as practiced by ancient philosophers and theorized by Pierre Hadot. It shows that Chaucer’s poem contains echoes of an ancient exercise referred to as ‘the view from above’, which engages the faculties of the imagination in order to enable an individual to review their life and to situate...
Religions July 24, 2023 Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
This article examines relationships between the absolute being of the universal ego (Ātman-self) according to the Indian religious philosophy of Vedanta (V) and the phenomenological, irreal being of the transcendental ego in Husserl’s phenomenology (P). Both Ātman and the transcendental ego are accessed in the first-person perspective by onto-phenomenological reductions. Such reductions, as...
Religions July 21, 2023 Federico Divino 7 citations
This article investigates the challenge of personal crisis during deep meditation, as observed in an ethnographic inquiry into mindfulness and traditional contemplative practices. The study distinguishes between the “crisis of presence” in contemporary mindfulness practices, and the dissolution of the subject-object distinction in traditional Buddhist meditation. By analyzing Ernesto De...
Religions July 20, 2023 Sophie-Anne Perkins
This article provides an in-depth exploration of the contextual, epistemic, ethical, personal, practical, religious, and socio-cultural factors that sixteen Western practitioners of Vajrayāna Buddhism highlighted as having particularly challenged their ability to learn and engage in deity yoga, including what strategies they may have adopted in attempting to overcome their impact. While these...
Religions July 14, 2023 Gencang Meng 2 citations
This paper, taking the medical practice of Khorchin Mongolian bone-setting as an example, examines the conflict and connection between religious healing and modern (or Western) medicine as well as the transformation of shamanisms in the discourse of nation-state building in China, and argues that the relationship between shamanic healing and modern medicine is not a binary opposition. Khorchin...
Religions July 3, 2023 Zhuo Ni, Yue Guo 1 citation
With the settlement under the mountains, the Chinese Oroqen has started comprehensive interaction with other ethnic groups, and gradually adapted to the wider society. During this process, the shaman culture, which has accompanied the Oroqen’s daily life and social development for a long time, has changed accordingly. Through looking at the changes of shaman culture, the self-adjustment process...
Religions June 29, 2023 M. Winkelman 22 citations
The relationship of wu (巫) to shamanism is problematic, with virtually all mentions of historical and contemporary Chinese wu ritualists translated into English as shaman. Ethnological research is presented to illustrate cross-cultural patterns of shamans and other ritualists, providing an etic framework for empirical assessments of resemblances of Chinese ritualists to shamans. This etic...
Religions June 27, 2023 Antti Piilola
Ineffability is a long-time partner of the philosophy of religion and mysticism. Through apophatic conceptions of the divine, it can act to guarantee the transcendence of the divine, elevate it to something beyond our conceptions. It has also held the central role in defining if not the nature, then at least the characteristics of mystical experience. Sometimes it is that which affirms the...
Religions June 27, 2023 Matteo di Placido, Stefania Palmisano
In this article, we design a preliminary genealogy of yoga in Italy, showing its positioning within the growing field of “contemporary spiritualities”, their premodern, esoteric and theosophical roots and Catholicism. Our main claim is that yoga and contemporary spiritualities as practiced in XXI-century Italy are neither entirely new nor are they clearly an alternative to more established...
Religions June 19, 2023 Ville Husgafvel, Terhi Utriainen 10 citations
In this article, we apply and assess the concept of transreligiosity in the study of formally educated and licensed psychologists and psychotherapists in Finland who integrate mindfulness practices in their professional toolkit. Our analytical focus complements the discussion on the use of religious and spiritual traditions as therapeutic resources by turning scholarly attention from individual...
Religions June 19, 2023 Aixin Zhang
The religious nature of Joseph Beuys’ works was ignored or intentionally avoided by mainstream criticism since his artistic practice was ridiculed for its potential spirituality. It is argued that Beuys’ works are work meditations on the issues of potential ego in totemic art, which are frequent topics of theological concern. For example, what is the nature of our consciousness after death, and...
Religions May 16, 2023 Minna Sa
The restoration and reconstruction of Daur shamanism is classical and representative of the revival of shamanism in contemporary China. The case study of the Daur shamanic oboo ritual in this paper discusses the connotation and classification of oboo. Through a brief description of the main process of the ceremony, the shaman spirits, and the main contents of the divine songs, this paper...
Religions May 9, 2023 Giulio Osto 1 citation
Pietro Rossano was an important protagonist of interreligious dialogue in the 20th century, serving for more than twenty years in the Vatican office in charge of this field. His experience and writings show how dialogue has many anthropological and theological dimensions and, because we are talking about an event between religious people, dialogue also has a mystical dimension. Rossano was very...
Religions May 6, 2023 Shanshan Ma 4 citations
From the perspective of mysticism, the interpretation of zuowang 坐忘 as the breath-meditation technique with a transcendental goal establishes the religious basis of Zhuangzi’s cultivation. In contrast, most Chinese scholars argue instead that zuowang is primarily the mental state independent of meditative techniques, and that the techniques are devoid of philosophical significance. The pivot of...
Religions April 27, 2023 Roberto Catalano
The present paper offers a presentation and a phenomenological analysis of a rather unusual event in the sphere of interreligious dialogue: a Catholic woman, the protagonist of a mystical experience, shared some of the traits of this experience with people of another culture and religion. The protagonists of this experience include Chiara Lubich and a group of Hindus, some neo-Vedanta scholars...
Religions April 27, 2023 Anja L. Winter, Pehr Granqvist
In this conceptual paper, we suggest that attachment theory is a viable framework for understanding key aspects of embodied religious and spiritual cognition, as seen in religious and spiritual metaphors, rituals, anthropomorphisms, and more. We also discuss embodied cognition as part of mystical experiences and other altered states of consciousness that may occur both within and outside of...
Religions April 16, 2023 Rikard Friberg von Sydow
The mysticism of the 19th and 20th centuries has often been perceived as a reaction towards the new fast, dense, and modern world. But is it not so that it thrives on the same material foundations, globalism, networks, and mass production of text, that built our contemporary global information society? In this article, thoughts found in the writings of the Swedish mystic and translator Baron...
Religions April 5, 2023 Xiaoshuang Liu 4 citations
Shamanic culture, which adheres to the worldview of connecting earth and heaven, has been marginalized in the discourse of the modern material world and separated from mainstream society. However, with the increase in personal problems in civil society and the rise of regional cultural identity since the reform and opening up in China, shamanic practitioners have again become active. Adapting...
Religions April 4, 2023 Feng Qu 4 citations
Social trends and historical contexts have popularized Eliade’s trance model in shamanism studies and have contributed to a famous academic debate. A case study on Manchu shamanism conducted in this article shows that a Manchu shaman functions primarily as a sacrificial specialist rather than a mental state adept. Three types of Manchu shamanism—court shamanism, clan shamanism, and wild...
Religions March 28, 2023 J. Stephenson
The Mahānayaprakāśa of Śitikaṇṭha is an understudied text within Kashmir Śaivism, notable for its rich description of the inner structure of consciousness vis-à-vis the body and the natural world, and esotericization of Left-Handed Tantric Practice. Furthermore, it is also significant in its form; like the Buddhist dohākoṣas it consists of Apabhraṃśa verses with accompanying Sanskrit...