Religions
September 14, 2017
John Bartkowski, Gabriel Acevedo, Harriet Van Loggerenberg
Frequent communal prayer is linked to more anxiety-related symptoms, while attending worship services is linked to fewer such symptoms among American adults. Attending services together with communal prayer appears to reduce anxiety. Meditation, measured as a yes-or-no practice, shows no connection to anxiety in the same sample. These findings come from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey and suggest that collective religious activities have selective effects on mental health, with worship attendance offering benefits but communal prayer alone associated with greater anxiety.
Religions
November 30, 2016
Sthaneshwar Timalsina
Applying cognitive theories of schema, metonymy, metaphor, and conceptual blending shows that salient cognitive categories enable a deeper analysis of Tantric language. Tantras employ symbolic language in mantric speech and visual maṇḍalas, and texts link deciphering meaning with mystical experience. The essay examines distinctive varieties of Tantric language, arguing that select cognitive tools facilitate coherent reading of these expressions. Mystical language broadly uses images and metaphors, so deciphering Tantric language provides a framework for reading other mystical expressions across cultures.
Religions
August 16, 2016
Richard Payne
The concept of "ritual syntax" is given a fuller theoretical basis by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual. Five conceptual distinctions are necessary to avoid overly strong interpretations of the analogy between ritual and language: production versus analysis, syntax versus semantics, ritual versus the mental, cognition versus the mental, and syntax versus language. Ritual is best conceptualized in terms of multiple scalar characteristics with degrees of ritualization. Two Buddhist practices, insight meditation and homa, are introduced as instances for cognitive study. Syntax involves hierarchical organization of elements, not just ordering. While syntax allows movement, ritual tends toward invariance, which seems contradictory, but rituals are often modeled on ordinary activities, producing a "semantic" motivation for invariance.
Religions
August 8, 2016
Brendan Ozawa-de Silva
Contemplative science will be best served by incorporating a wider range of practices beyond mindfulness, including analytical styles of meditation, and by addressing ethics as a framework for understanding both the traditions behind these practices and their modern applications. The Tibetan Buddhist Lojong tradition and its secularized derivatives, now studied in contemplative science, serve as a case study illustrating the importance of these two perspectives for the field's future.
Religions
July 1, 2016
Loriliai Biernacki
An 11th-century Indian philosopher, Abhinavagupta, and a current neuroscientific theory, Integrated Information Theory 3.0, both link subjective experience with causality to address the mind-body problem. Abhinavagupta's concepts of knowledge and action connect subjectivity and objectivity, while Tononi's theory proposes that information is both causal and intrinsic. This shared approach is mostly absent in Western Cartesian models and other Indian philosophies. Abhinavagupta's framework can help illuminate Tononi's mathematical model of consciousness.
Religions
July 10, 2015
Martina Roesner
Contemporary philosophy of religion tends to treat religious doctrines and organized religion's social impact as worthy of analysis while dismissing cultic practices—prayer, religious service, ascetic rituals—as irrational and incomprehensible. This paper traces the historical roots of that devaluation to Kant's philosophy of religion, which created a sharp dichotomy between humans as moral subjects and as natural, sensible beings. The authors argue that Habermas's paradoxical views on religion stem from this Kantian dilemma. They then offer a phenomenological alternative: religious practice should be understood not as primitive or irrational but as a proto-ethical schematism that integrates pure practical reason into the rhythmic structure of living, embodied consciousness.
Religions
January 27, 2015
Ernest Kurtz, William L. White
Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) is adapting to a broader cultural shift in how spirituality is understood, now encompassing both traditional religious and secular spiritual frameworks. The paper argues that a distinct wing of recovery spirituality is emerging within A.A., grounded in experiences of transcendence (horizontal and vertical) and connection (mutuality). It identifies six facets of spirituality—Release, Gratitude, Humility, Tolerance, Forgiveness, and a Sense of Being-at-home—that are shared across religious, spiritual, and secular recovery pathways. The growing diversity within A.A., from "Christianizers" to "Seculizers," reflects the organization's response to the wider diversification of religious experience and the increasing secularization of spirituality in the surrounding culture.
Religions
August 13, 2014
Loriliai Biernacki
A comparison of the 11th-century Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta's views on consciousness with those of contemporary philosophers reveals possibilities for a materialist paradigm that prioritizes subjectivity over objectivity. Abhinavagupta's nondual Śaivite system provides a framework connecting the material with the phenomenal, which may be useful for cognitive science and philosophy of mind.
Religions
September 10, 2013
Chögyal Namkhai Norbu
This short text describes the essence of Dzogchen teaching, or total perfection. It explains that establishing the correct view requires direct understanding through experience of the primordial state of pure presence, beyond intellectual construction. Meditation involves practicing to recognize one's own true nature, the non-dual condition of the calm state and its natural energy. Behavior means integrating meditation into all daily activities, continuing in the state of pure presence in every circumstance, which constitutes total realization.
Religions
November 22, 2011
Dwight Judy
Since the first Journal of Transpersonal Psychology appeared in 1969, transpersonal psychology has grown into a field of theory and practice that has opened Western psychology to the study of inner subjective awareness and spiritual experience. The Wilber-Combs Lattice, a recent contribution, provides a typology that accounts for developmental processes across the human lifespan and different qualities of spiritual experience.