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...
This paper puts forward a mystical reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave by comparing it with some allegories from Sufi literature, Islamic mystical tradition. The paper argues that the determining parts of the allegory, such as escaping the cave as the world of shadows; seeing the sun/truth and becoming a philosopher; and the necessity of returning to the cave, have significant similarities...
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...
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...
In this paper, I explore the implications of Max Scheler’s concept of the movement of love, and I show that this movement, for him, constitutes not only the core of human nature but also the metaphysical presupposition upon which the nature of the object of religious experience could be understood. I argue that Scheler’s unique way of blending intellectual knowledge of essences and spiritual...
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...
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...
In this Special Issue of Religions, we have tried to bring together new research that can shed light on epistemological problems faced by accounts of religious experiences together with empirical research about its nature and qualities [...]
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Divinisation rituals establishing oneness between practitioners and divinities are common across Tantric traditions. While scholars largely argue that divinisation occurs through meditative practices, implying a clear demarcation between contemplative samayācāra rituals and body-focused kaulācāra rituals, I suggest that samayācāra divinisation rituals entail fundamental corporeal elements;...
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...
ReligionsJuly 27, 2022Michael E. Asbury3 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...
Aaron Rizzieri’s Pragmatic Encroachment, Religious Belief, andPractice (2013) is the fullest religious appropriation of a relatively new epistemological concept: pragmatic encroachment. To achieve this goal, Rizzieri rightly sees (1) how justification takes place within an encompassing pragmatic context and (2) how justification of religious belief establishes within a wider context less than...
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...
This work sought to address the question of where religious violence is located in our constitution of experience, so as to show how transcendental phenomenology can help us begin to better understand religious violence. The paper begins with an outline of four distinct levels of phenomenological analysis provided by transcendental phenomenology. It then relates those four levels to religious...
The field of mystical and meditative research lacks a basic typology delineating the varied genres and characteristics of the mystical experience and of the meditative practices that may be correlated to those. Such a state hinders the comparative study of mysticism and meditation through different philosophical, religious and spiritual traditions, or along the chronological development in a...
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...
ReligionsJune 23, 2022John Michael Chase1 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...
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...
This paper explores how certain Buddhist-inspired principles such as impermanence of self and compassion for all (metta) and the practice of mindfulness can contribute to challenging ways in which young men adopt troublesome aspects of systemic patriarchy. It (1) briefly examines the problem of systemic patriarchy in its most dominant forms, neoliberal hegemonic masculinity and right-wing...
Although a convergence between theology and mystical literature can be observed in recent years, it is not always very clear what the relationship between the two is. That there has been a gap between the two, for several centuries, is obvious. A passage in Teresa of Avila’s work is a sign of this, as are the difficulties the Jesuit Balthasar Alvarez encountered during his lifetime. However,...