Religions
October 26, 2022
Ugo Dessì
This article focuses on three Zen meditation groups operating in Italy from the perspective of glocalization. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and practitioners’ narratives, it explores the dynamics underlying the making of glocal Zen with reference to the internal structure of individual religious worlds and its reshaping through the creative incorporation of zazen or zazen-like meditation. My...
Religions
October 21, 2022
Hans Henning, Max Henning
6 citations
In a previous article we proposed that spiritual traditions and practices emerged to counterbalance humans inherent “dualism”, or perceived separation from the world around us, by cultivating experiences of “subject-object nonduality” more commonly referred to as “unification with the divine” or “enlightenment”. This implies that religions (social and political institutions ostensibly based in...
Religions
October 21, 2022
Mona Jahangiri
What happens in the brain during meditation? Neuroscientists such as Andrew Newberg, who studies religious experiences on the neural level, may provide an answer. He calls the devolution, which is similar to all mystical experiences in different faiths, self-transcendent experience (STE); in a further instance, he also calls it the feeling of Absolute Unitary Being (AUB). A more detailed...
Religions
October 20, 2022
Mike Sosteric
3 citations
This paper provides an autoethnographic accounting and analysis of my own mystical experiences, called connection experiences in this paper. This account, which is structured around a description of my early experiences, attempts to weave together psychological, sociological, historical, and methodological themes into a coherent contribution that advances our understanding of connection...
Religions
October 18, 2022
Paul Marshall
4 citations
Mystical experiences can bring an overwhelming sense that deeper realities have been contacted or that the everyday world has been apprehended as it truly is. Philosophical study of the experiences has not given much attention to their metaphysical significance, especially to the insights they may offer on fundamental issues such as the nature of reality, self, consciousness, and time. There...
Religions
October 9, 2022
Nathan E. Fisher
13 citations
While the trait of absorption has received a considerable amount of scientific study, states of absorption have been comparatively understudied and even less scholarly or scientific attention has been paid to those that are cultivated within the contemplative traditions of Islam and Judaism. This paper explores canonical descriptions of states of contemplative absorption in Islamic and Jewish...
Religions
September 22, 2022
Xiaoli Jiang
With the Qing armies marching into Beijing through the Shanhai Pass, the Manchu bannermen under the Eight Banners system saw great changes in their everyday lives. However, they continued with the practice of shamanic sacrifices. This paper analyzes the “Sacred Books”, genealogies, and other historical materials about shamanic rituals, to place shamanism in the lives of the bannermen of the...
Religions
September 14, 2022
Leslie Ann King
Christian congregations find themselves caught in a polarized cultural environment which can lead to simplified theological and spiritual constructs. Moreover, congregants are facing spiritual challenges that come from entrenched differences. The Pantañjali yogic system offers an opportunity for Reformed Christian communities to develop yoga practices that integrate breath, movement, and...
Religions
September 11, 2022
Terje Sparby
13 citations
Meditation research tends to be focused on positive effects. Recent studies, however, have uncovered a range of potential negative effects, which may be more prevalent than one would expect. Several different conceptions of “negative effects” exist, and such effects are variously termed “challenging”, “unpleasant”, “adverse”, and “harmful”. Before work on a unifying conception of negative...
Religions
August 25, 2022
Jeff Levin
10 citations
This paper discusses the concept of New Age healing. Its emergence into popular culture in the 1980s can be traced to burgeoning interest in human potential and holistic health in the 1960s and 1970s. These phenomena in turn, were rooted in the appearance of Theosophy, New Thought, and spiritualism in the 19th Century. Rather than a social movement, or even a singular phenomenon, the New Age is...
Religions
August 25, 2022
Renata Cueto de Souza, Charles Scott
5 citations
Our paper addresses the so-called college mental health crisis and the adoption of the strategy of mindfulness-based interventions. We offer a critique of their underlying medical–therapeutic paradigm by engaging the notion of self-transcendence in Viktor Frankl’s Existential Analysis and Buddhism in dialogue. We argue that the current mindfulness movement has decontextualized and appropriated...
Religions
August 25, 2022
Apiradee Wongkitrungrueng, Panitharn Juntongjin
Mindfulness practice and mindful consumption have increasingly attracted the interests of academics and the general public worldwide. Despite the fact that mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhism, little empirical research has studied mindfulness and mindful consumption from the Buddhist principles and from the perspective of active Buddhists who regularly dedicate themselves to...
Religions
August 24, 2022
Masaki Nomura
4 citations
The purpose of this paper is to holistically comprehend the concept of nen 念in the Zen philosophy of Dōgen (道元 1200–1253), which is one of the origins of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, in relation to his principal concepts. This article specifically investigates its usages in his masterpiece, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō 正法眼蔵), according to each step of the threefold wisdom...
Religions
August 19, 2022
Paul Slama
This article describes the history of modern metaphysics as the history of the immanentization of transcendence. We show this from the concept of the “idea of god”, which is the phenomenon that violently separates subjectivity from transcendence and opens up a tear in it that we call “psycho-theological”: the divine violently leaves a trace in us by its very distance. We describe this...
Religions
July 31, 2022
Olga Louchakova-Schwartz
The first-person perspective, developed by Husserl for the scientific study of consciousness, consists of formal categories which can be used both for the analyses of consciousness as such and its concrete forms. Evidence (Evidenz), the central category in this approach, characterizes consciousness as knowledge. This paper presents the phenomenology of changes in perception and embodiment which...
Religions
July 27, 2022
Michael E. Asbury
3 citations
The transfer of Sufism as a lived tradition to the Euro-American sphere, which first began in the early twentieth century, is a notable modern development that has been the subject of increasing academic interest in recent decades. Yet much of the literature on this topic to date has focused more on what has changed during the process of transfer, rather than on what has remained the same. It...
Religions
July 14, 2022
Richard H. Jones
3 citations
How a positive naturalist understanding of mystical experiences is possible and how these experiences and accompanying practices can be incorporated into a secular mysticism are discussed. Philosophical issues related to such a secular mysticism are also raised: is a truly secular mysticism possible? Are mystical experiences cognitive of transcendent non-natural realities? Can secular mysticism...
Religions
June 24, 2022
Johannes Bronkhorst
15 citations
This paper proposes to study mystical experience by contrasting it with “ordinary” experience, i.e., with standard consciousness. It emphasises the construed nature of standard consciousness and the role that the mutual connectedness of mental contents plays in its construction. It then shows that removal of the factors that are responsible for the “making” of standard consciousness accounts...
Religions
June 23, 2022
John Michael Chase
1 citation
Following insights by Pierre Hadot, I suggest that although explicit discussions of practices of breath control and other psychosomatic techniques of contemplative attention management are conspicuously absent in early Greek thought, there are some signs that analogous practices did exist, perhaps as early as Socrates. The combined evidence of Aristophanes and Plato suggests that Socrates may...
Religions
June 21, 2022
Marc-Henri Deroche, Michael R. Sheehy
5 citations
For Indian Buddhists and their Tibetan successors, the faculty of “mindfulness” (Skt. smṛti, Tib. dran pa) has been interpreted as the foundation of the threefold development of wisdom (study, reflection, cultivation). Such a model was, in Tibet, the hallmark of the gradual approach to awakening, whereas in the simultaneous approach, the state beyond ordinary mindfulness was emphasized. The...
Religions
May 27, 2022
Louis Komjathy
2 citations
Animals teach each other. For humans open to trans-species and inter-species dialogue and interaction, animal-others offer important insights into, invocations of and models for diverse and alternative modes of perceiving, experiencing, relating, and being. They in turn challenge anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness and offer glimpses of and perhaps inspiration for increased awareness...
Religions
May 27, 2022
Brian D. Somers
1 citation
This thesis aims to consider some of the differences between mindfulness as a Buddhist practice and mindfulness-based programs. The primary difference considered is the individualistic perspectives taken by mindfulness-based programs. If modern mindfulness-based techniques are meant as a treatment for depression, and depression is in part caused by isolation then these programs must also...
Religions
May 13, 2022
An-ning Chen, Nicole Porter, Yue-Zhong Tang
This paper examines the spaces where Buddhist spiritual activity—specifically mindfulness practice—takes place, exploring how contemporary urban Buddhist contemplative places may benefit people’s mindful experience. Historical Buddhist contemplative places are examined through a literature review of Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist architecture and landscape. A case study of Kagyu Samye Dzong...
Religions
May 1, 2022
Ron Cole-Turner
22 citations
When the link between psychedelic drugs and mystical states of experience was first discovered in the 1960s, Huston Smith challenged scholars in religion and philosophy to consider the implications. Very few took up his challenge. Beginning in 2006, hundreds of studies have linked psychedelics not just to mystical states of experience but to potential treatments for many mental health...
Religions
April 7, 2022
Brian Macallan
1 citation
Religious experiences and their truth, nature, and influence remain controversial. This is despite their wide cultural expression and significant grounding in research. Personal experiences that are deemed “religious” are often critiqued for being culturally influenced and psychologically misleading, implying that this ought to discredit them. This paper seeks not to argue for the truth or...