Religions
September 18, 2025
Ron Cole-Turner
1 citation
Psychedelic drugs show promise in treating a wide range of mental health conditions. These drugs are beneficial in part because they disrupt prior ideas and patterns of behavior and because they increase neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. It is important therefore to consider the causal impact of the social context not just during but also following psychedelic experiences. Modern cultural or...
Religions
September 9, 2025
Fides del Castillo, Gregory S. Ching, Clarence Darro del Castillo et al.
1 citation
Near-death experiences (NDEs) encompass transformative existential experiences that lead to religious change. Although most previous research focused primarily on Western contexts, there remains less understanding of individuals’ interpretations of NDEs in pluralistic societies such as the Philippines. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examined the relationship between NDEs and...
Religions
August 30, 2025
Chen Lu
Jñānakīrti (Tib. Ye shes grags pa), an eminent monk of the late Indian Buddhist period, composed the Tattvāvātara (De kho na nyid la ’jug pa, Realizing Reality), of which only a Tibetan translation exists in the Tibetan Tripiṭaka-Tanjur. The treatise is considered an exposition of the Mahāmudrā teachings, with the chapter entitled “Practices of the Secret Mantra Approach” (gSang sngags kyi...
Religions
August 28, 2025
Noreen Herzfeld
The discipline of spirituality can be described as the study of human experience of encounter with the transcendent and our lived response to that encounter. There are commonalities to our experience of transcendence that cross the divides of culture and language, commonalities which are often obscured when we theologize about our experience. If we examine the concept of jinn, both among...
Religions
August 27, 2025
Jinjing Zhu
This paper examines the four-stage process of mystical experience in the Huzi and Lady Yu allegories of the Zhuangzi. It begins with a lifeless stage enabled by the mystic’s purgation of the world and the self. It is followed by a revitalization stage in which Oneness is experienced not only as the introvertive experience of the self but also as the extrovertive truth of reality. It is then...
Religions
August 26, 2025
Richard Viladesau
Both feeling and thought operate largely through a process of associations. Some of these are learned; some seem to be transcultural. In Western art it has long been assumed that certain arrangement of sounds, shapes, and colors evoke particular emotions and ideas. Rudolph Otto applies this idea also to the experience of the “Holy,” the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” This is a unique...
Religions
August 25, 2025
Miao Deng, Cuiqin Li
Judging a person’s appearance as beautiful or ugly is not a factual description but an aesthetic act. Kant believed that the human figure is the ideal of beauty, and at the same time, beauty can positively symbolize morality. However, regarding the correlation between aesthetics and morality, the Chapter “De Chong Fu 德充符” in the Zhuangzi offers us a strikingly insightful perspective that is...
Religions
August 20, 2025
Márk Losoncz
1 citation
Drawing upon a meticulous delineation of pure consciousness’s fundamental and necessary features—including unstructuredness, maximal simplicity, selflessness, awareness as such, zero-perspective, and the absence of specific phenomenal qualities—this article asserts that a full-fledged experience of pure consciousness is attainable within the psychedelic state. Critically, this psychedelic...
Religions
August 12, 2025
Anne Böckler
Psychology as an empirical science has targeted human cognition for more than a century. Typically, the focus of these investigations was on isolated mental processes, which were studied in individual participants in confined laboratory settings. The present commentary aims to show how a relatively recent paradigm shift, the (renewed) conception of humans as fundamentally social, can shape our...
Religions
August 11, 2025
Malik J. M. Walker
As Zen Buddhism continues into its second century in the United States, the practices and philosophies transmitted have gone through major, though necessary transformations. At present, the vast majority of Zen temples and centers are “convert” communities that have over time adjusted language, ritual, and tradition to suit pastoral and theological needs. This article lays out a blueprint for a...
Religions
August 9, 2025
Richard S. Ascough
4 citations
John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross posits that early Christianity derived from fertility cults involving psychedelic mushroom use. Though widely discredited by scholars when it was first published, the theory persists in popular culture and entheogenic discourse. This article evaluates the scholarly reception, methodological flaws, and enduring cultural impact of Allegro’s thesis,...
Religions
July 29, 2025
Dennis F. Kinlaw
1 citation
This article explores the often-overlooked question of how literary reading might give rise to experiences that readers themselves identify as spiritual. Framed by William James’s account of “mystical susceptibility” and recent psychological models of spirituality as altered states of consciousness involving shifts in perception, affect, and cognition, the essay asks how engagement with...
Religions
July 25, 2025
Henry Albery
This paper considers the practice of immeasurable joy (muditā) as presented in the so-called Yogalehrbuch, a seventh century Sanskrit “yoga manual” from Qïzïl, on the northern rim of the Tarim Basin. It demonstrates that the author of the text, whose purpose is to describe the journey of a yogin on the path to the awakening of a Bodhisattva, relied on some version of the *Vibhāṣā, the...
Religions
July 22, 2025
Mateo Sánchez Petrement
1 citation
This essay argues for the reciprocal benefits of joining the new theories of matter emerging out of critical posthumanism and the psychedelic drugs currently experiencing a so-called “renaissance” in global north societies. While the former’s twin emphasis on relationality and embodiment is perfectly suited to capture and ground the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of...
Religions
July 21, 2025
Géraldine Mossière
This paper discusses the role of energy and movement in facilitating experiences of well-being from an anthropological perspective that considers energy as a situated form of knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork among Core Energetics (CE) and 5Rhythms (5R) groups, I examine how the circulation of energy is achieved through bodily movements and dances, attention to the senses, somatic...
Religions
July 14, 2025
Ercan Kaçmaz
Why have thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Zhuang Zi, across different cultures, sought something beyond the self? Whether through God, nature, or abstract ideals, the longing for transcendence has been a recurring theme across philosophical and religious traditions. This impulse reflects what Aldous Huxley termed the “perennial philosophy”—the idea that all spiritual traditions share a...
Religions
July 11, 2025
Hang Sun, Eunyoung Kim
4 citations
This study aimed to investigate the practical effects of symbolic imagery on shamanic religious rituals, emotional modulation, belief deepening, and alterations in the state of consciousness. Thirty participants were recruited and randomly assigned to either a control group or an experimental group for comparative investigation. The results indicated that participants in the experimental group...
Religions
June 24, 2025
Klara Hedling, Benedikt Paul Göcke
This paper explores striking philosophical parallels between Karl Christian Friedrich Krause’s 19th-century articulation of panentheism and the much earlier non-dual Śaiva philosophy of the Pratyabhijñā school in Kashmir. While Krause is widely credited with coining the term panentheism, models of divine immanence and transcendence akin to panentheism are already present in the Pratyabhijñā...
Religions
June 23, 2025
Aloisia Moser
correction
In the original publication [...]
Religions
June 19, 2025
Mei Yang, X. F. Li
This study investigates how human will is articulated, negotiated, and reimagined within the discourses about Shamanism of Northeast China, with a particular focus on user-generated content from the Douyin platform (Chinese TikTok). Drawing on the data collected from comments between 2020 and 2024, this research employs a triangulated methodology integrating Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)...
Religions
June 13, 2025
Sabine Grunwald
1 citation
This paper aims to juxtapose bodhisattvas, awakened beings recognized in various Buddhist traditions and contemporary philosophies, as viewed through different lenses: as personified symbols, idealistic visions, mystical manifestations, naturalized sentient beings, and integral visions. Specific attention is given to the contrasting bodhisattva motivations and ideals articulated in Theravāda...
Religions
June 8, 2025
Nicolae Turcan
3 citations
This article offers a theo-phenomenological investigation of the body, exploring the dialogue between contemporary phenomenology—especially its theological turn—and Eastern Orthodox spirituality as found in the Philokalia. Building on the phenomenological distinction between body and flesh and drawing on Orthodox theology’s understanding of the body–soul unity, the article analyzes the...
Religions
June 5, 2025
Rotem Meidan, Ofra Mayseless
Spirituality has gained increasing legitimacy in psychotherapy; however, certain spiritual experiences, such as past life memories, remain marginalized in clinical settings. These experiences often arise outside therapy and may hold deep existential meaning for individuals, yet patients frequently hesitate to disclose them in conventional psychotherapy for fear of being pathologized. This...
Religions
June 5, 2025
Shan Gao
Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Zhuangzi lived in eras of profound social transformation. They both reconstruct virtue to respond to the meaning crisis in this social transformation. However, for the reason that their metaphysical foundations of virtue differ, there is a significant difference between them. Emerson’s concept of virtue promotes aesthetic appreciation of nature. Emerson regards...
Religions
May 30, 2025
Xiaoshuang Liu
2 citations
Since China’s accession to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004, private shamanism, centered around the sacred belief of “connecting heaven and earth”, has for the first time been incorporated into the national heritage management system with legal legitimacy, becoming regulated public heritage on the condition of avoiding religious attributes....