Religions
September 14, 2021
S. Medhananda
1 citation
Aurobindo's philosophy of 'realistic Adwaita' criticizes classical Advaita Vedānta on experiential, philosophical, and scriptural grounds. He argues that Śaṅkara's Advaita is based on a genuine but partial experience of the Divine as an impersonal Absolute, whereas a further stage of spiritual experience reveals the Divine Saccidānanda as both impersonal and personal, dynamic Consciousness-Force manifesting as the universe. Philosophically, Aurobindo questions Advaita doctrines of māyā, the exclusively impersonal Brahman, and illusory bondage and liberation. Scripturally, he contends that ancient Vedic texts teach an all-encompassing, world-affirming Advaita, not Śaṅkara's world-denying version. The article also explores implications of this life-affirming philosophy for ecological crisis.
Religions
October 26, 2020
Lee Irwin
1 citation
Dreams can be categorized into four distinct types—normative-rational, mythic-imaginal, psychic-intuitive, and supernal-transpersonal—each with different metaphysical and ontological significance. Supernal dreaming, a profound and participatory revelatory type, engages the dreamer in a visionary capacity that can lead to new enactive and embodied ways of life. Drawing on the author's extensive dream journal, the article develops a typological approach to dream analysis, placing dream morphology within a metatheory based on agency and a sentient, process-based cosmology. Dreams are presented as sustaining human development, stimulating ontological insights, and forming a basis for paranormal perceptions and inspirational dream actualization.
Religions
May 17, 2019
Frederick M. Smith
1 citation
In the Indian philosophical school Sāṃkhya, the 'inner organ' (antaḥkaraṇa) operates in two distinct experiential contexts: the yogic path of transcendence described in Patañjali’s Yogasūtras (circa 350 CE) and the identity shift occurring during possession by a deity in Indian cultural practices. Understanding the antaḥkaraṇa as an actual organ activated by experiential shifts, rather than as a mere concept or collocation of consciousness characteristics, better explains the act of transcendence. This emic approach avoids reducing the organ to nonepistemic objective or subjective factors.
Religions
November 26, 2018
Tatyana Lifintseva, Dmitry S. Tourko
1 citation
This article compares ontological strategies in Meister Eckhart's Christian Neoplatonic mysticism with those in Advaita Vedanta and Early Buddhism. Despite differences in anthropology, epistemology, and soteriology, all three traditions share similar approaches: detachment from images and forms as the highest blessing; disidentification from body, feelings, cognition, and reason; interiorizing consciousness and ending its representative function. Indian philosophies aim for liberation from suffering into bliss, paralleling Christian salvation through renouncing sin for unity with God. The apophatic Christian view of God as hidden, incomprehensible Nothingness, understood by detachment from the world and ego, enables this comparative analysis.
Religions
July 19, 2026
Tamer Yıldırım
This article examines Dariush Shayegan's concept of "visionary geography" as a way to understand spiritual unity beyond physical boundaries. It criticizes the quantitative worldview that emerged after Galileo reduced nature to a mathematical object and argues that modernity imprisons humanity within coordinates of meridians and parallels. The authors contend that scientific positivism interrupted a mystical partnership, fragmenting the human condition. They question the possibility of a visionary, symbolic world in contrast to both physical and technological/virtual realities. Shayegan posits that the soul's world exists on a transcendent plane with its own geography. The article argues that classical geographical differences did not hinder spiritual convergence, but modern Western lifestyle weakened this ontological bond. The analysis uses qualitative literature and document analysis of Shayegan's works.
Religions
July 18, 2026
M.J.M. Hoondert, Nataliia Vdovychenko
Music can generate non-institutional religious experience through aesthetic and performative practice. Analyzing Joep Franssens' composition Harmony of the Spheres, the article argues that its slow harmonic movement, repetition, tonal affirmation, unintelligible text, spatial sonority, and evocation of timelessness invite immersive listening and self-transcendence. A digital ethnographic reading of YouTube listener responses shows that listeners frequently interpret these musical techniques through religious and spiritual language, referencing God, angels, heaven, the sublime, peace, and mystical experience. The article contends that the work functions as "religion in sound" rather than explicitly confessional music, enabling transcendence and unbound spirituality outside traditional religious institutions.
Religions
July 16, 2026
Qi Zhao, Ruijia Zhang
Folk shamanic rituals in Xiao Hong's novel Tales of Hulan River exhibit a form of survival resilience that operates across material, spiritual, and cultural dimensions. Material resilience involves making reasonable choices under scarcity, fostering critical thinking, and grappling with contingency and eternity. Spiritual resilience provides psychological comfort, motivates goodness, and offers a sense of transcendence. Cultural resilience unites the community around shared goals, promotes pragmatic values, and sustains the rituals themselves. The article argues that these rituals are crucial to understanding the novel's narrative ideas and should not be overlooked in literary analysis.
Religions
July 15, 2026
Xiao Lin
Chan meditation and Pure Land devotion were not separate, competing traditions in medieval Dunhuang but were practiced together fluidly by monks and laypeople. Drawing on manuscripts such as treatises, lecture notes, liturgical texts, and portrait praises, the article shows that practitioners combined Chan-style introspection with recitation of Amitābha's name. The authors argue that modern sectarian labels retroactively impose later institutional divisions on a medieval reality where such boundaries did not exist. Poetry, eulogies, and sermons reveal individuals who excelled in Chan while also cultivating Pure Land rituals. Dunhuang's frontier setting fostered this adaptable, integrative religious phenomenon, underscoring the site's importance as a convergence of diverse doctrinal streams.
Religions
July 9, 2026
Orchid-Stone Chang Azanlansh
Mindfulness is reconceptualized as a multilayered developmental architecture rather than a set of techniques or cognitive skills, integrating Daoist internal alchemy and Buddhist contemplative theory through the Dialectical Mandala Model of Mindfulness (DMMM). The model incorporates the psycho-physical dynamics of qi, shen (spirit), hun (cloud-soul), and po (white-soul), and is grounded in the catuṣkoṭi framework to reconstruct dialectical logic underlying contemplative traditions. It proposes four interrelated cycles, each with four phases, where faith, understanding, practice, and realization serve as recurrent structural principles. The DMMM contributes to theory-building in cross-cultural and indigenous psychology by offering a systematic account of how non-discursive states are structured by deeper dialectical logic.
Religions
July 7, 2026
E. Koster, PA Versteeg
This paper argues that methodological ludism, which encourages scholars to playfully engage with religious perspectives to overcome the insider/outsider divide, underestimates how fieldwork transforms researchers. Through case studies, the authors show that researchers are deeply affected by religious contexts, challenging the idea of detached play. They propose a shift toward transformative anthropology that emphasizes embodied and emotional engagement over rational control. Fieldwork may not make scholars insiders but rather outsiders to their own prior frameworks, reshaping their understanding of reality and knowledge.
Religions
June 29, 2026
Kwanghyun Han, Sejin Chang
Self-understanding is not a reflective outcome but a conditionally constituted process grounded in the Buddhist principle of dependent origination. Traditional meditation operates as a structure of conditional disclosure, where practitioners observe the dynamic interplay of experiential conditions. In contrast, AI-mediated meditation systems pre-configure these conditions through algorithmic classification, procedural guidance, and interface design, shaping self-understanding through technologically mediated interpretations. The key distinction lies in the visibility and configurational control of conditions. This theoretical framework shows how digital environments may reshape contemplative agency and the conditions under which self-understanding is formed.
Religions
June 25, 2026
Melanie Neumann, Lea Benz, Wiebke Uhlenbrock et al.
A qualitative study of 27 German participants who had experienced stressful life events found that the most extensive meaning-making occurred among those with a highly integrated spiritual and religious orientation, not among those with more individualized forms of spirituality. Participants were categorized into low-, moderate-, and high-spirituality groups. The high-integration group showed coherent belief systems, regular spiritual practices, communal religious embeddedness, and trust in transcendent guidance. The results suggest that integration of spirituality with religiosity into a coherent meaning system may be associated with more sustained meaning-making and positive outcomes following stressful events.
Religions
June 24, 2026
Leor Roseman
Prophetic or messianic states of consciousness can be charged with moral urgency and become active, historical, and political. The paper examines psychedelic micro-messianic phenomenology and revolutionary dynamics through three historical figures: Allen Ginsberg (LSD), Master Irineu (Daime/ayahuasca), and John Wilson/Moonhead (peyote). In moments of tension and uncertainty, psychedelics can catalyze micro-messianic movements that diffuse these substances into new situations. A revelatory event motivates the subject to spread the substance and practice, creating a movement that eventually becomes routinized or inverted, then stabilizes into a new status quo from which another revelatory event may arise. The analysis draws on Weber, Wallace, Kuhn, Taves, Whitehouse, Rogers, Badiou, and others to show how psychedelic insights and actions intertwine, with revelations seeking to ripple outward into movements.
Religions
June 22, 2026
Evanne Nowak
Contemplative practices like dialogue and walking can help people perceive and process ecological grief. A study of the Lab Landschapspijn Veluwe in the Netherlands found that these practices function as contemplative witnessing, making ecological loss more perceptible, grievable, and emotionally acknowledged. Participants articulated tangible losses and their emotional, moral, and spiritual dimensions. The practices foster an open-ended engagement where grief, wonder, uncertainty, and care coexist without demanding immediate resolution. Contemplative ecology may thus cultivate the emotional, existential, and relational capacities needed to remain engaged with ecological crisis.
Religions
June 19, 2026
Dongkyu Kim
Shamanic healing rituals in Korea, specifically byeong-gut, paradoxically follow the rigid format of blessing rituals rather than adopting a clinical approach. This article argues that previous scholarship wrongly reduces shamanic healing to psychological comfort or social liberation. By integrating Roy Rappaport's theory of ritual invariance with relational ontologies from Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold, the authors propose a relational displacement model. Healing operates through two mechanisms: at the material level, the ritual objectifies and displaces individual suffering onto external surrogates; at the linguistic level, the invocation chant re-assembles the patient's fragmented life into a network of human and non-human agencies. The byeong-gut transforms suffering into an intelligible event within a shared cosmic order.
Religions
June 16, 2026
Emmanouil Synadinakis, A. Delis, Anastasia Doska et al.
Religious psychopathology sits at the intersection of psychiatry, theology, and culture, addressing mental health disorders expressed through religious content, ideation, or behavior. Distinguishing culturally normative religious experiences from pathological symptoms is non-trivial for clinicians, researchers, and religious leaders. This integrative narrative review examines historical perspectives, diagnostic challenges, clinical manifestations, cultural considerations, therapeutic interventions, neurobiological models, ethical issues, and future directions. It focuses on literature from 2013 to 2025, with selected foundational sources, emphasizing culturally informed and interdisciplinary approaches that respect spiritual frameworks while promoting evidence-based mental health care.
Religions
June 12, 2026
Yue Wang
Lotus and dharma wheel motifs in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves are not merely decorative but function as active visual apparatuses that generate embodied religious experience through a mechanism called totemic mediation. Drawing on structuralist and phenomenological theories, the analysis of motifs in Caves 285, 329, and 361 shows that the lotus mediates ontologically along a spatial axis, building a vertical channel between the worldly and the divine, while the dharma wheel mediates teleologically across the temporal axis, neutralizing linear temporality through rotational dynamics. Together, these motifs constitute visual prajñā—a nonconceptual, embodied cognitive effect that enables direct apprehension of emptiness.
Religions
May 26, 2026
Andrew S. Skinner
People tend to form social bonds with large language models even when they know the systems lack consciousness. This happens because humans evolved to attribute inner states, moral status, and even 'soul' to nonhuman beings—a capacity that once operated within cultural belief systems that regulated such relationships. Modernity has stripped away those cultural frameworks, but the underlying cognitive architecture for perceiving agency in others remains. When conversational agents behave helpfully and patiently, users project authentic interiority onto them, similar to how ancestors interacted with spirits and animals in enchanted landscapes. The result is a 'Turing Animism' where users feel soul in a simulacrum.
Religions
May 18, 2026
Geoffrey Ready, Ron Cole-Turner
Orthodox Christianity offers distinctive resources for evaluating psychedelic spirituality that both challenge and enrich existing Western Christian approaches. The tradition's insistence that profound spiritual experience is a universal Christian vocation rather than reserved for an elite reframes discussions of mystical experience. Orthodoxy's recognition of diverse catalysts for spiritual awakening, its understanding of ascetical preparation as receptive, and its doctrine of divine energies provide frameworks for evaluating psychedelic experiences that sometimes resemble mystical experience by their orientation and fruits. The emphasis on ongoing formation within communities situates spiritual experience within broader transformation, and traditions of spiritual discernment offer criteria for evaluating authenticity. Engagement with psychedelic experiences can occur within established frameworks when guided by discernment, formation, and communal accountability.
Religions
May 14, 2026
Hollis Phelps
The term “entheogen” is often treated as a neutral label for certain psychoactive drugs, but this article argues it functions as a theological construct. Entheogenic claims about historical use, spiritual meaning, and transformative power are presented as descriptive when they are actually normative. The article examines how the term was created, how advocates portray entheogens as exceptional, how shamanism is used for legitimacy, and the eschatological hopes for social and religious renewal. Instead of judging these claims or proposing a new term, the article interrogates the theological interests and rhetorical strategies involved, suggesting a more reflexive and contextual approach is needed.
Religions
May 11, 2026
Enis Doko
A philosophical argument drawing on Sufi and Sadrian metaphysics contends that strong artificial intelligence is possible in principle, even though current systems remain zombie-like. The framework rejects both reductive functionalism and indiscriminate panpsychism. Drawing on Ibn ʿArabī's account of divine self-disclosure and Mullā Ṣadrā's ontology of graded existence, knowledge by presence, and substantial motion, the argument holds that artificial systems are not barred from mentality simply because they are artifacts. What matters is whether a system becomes a sufficiently unified locus of manifestation. The paper reframes the panpsychist problem from asking how micro-conscious units combine into a macro-subject to asking how a bounded center of awareness is individuated within a living field of being. Future artificial minds remain possible if they instantiate sufficient integration, receptivity, self-world distinction, and diachronic continuity.
Religions
May 2, 2026
Matteo Sgorbati
Buddhist practitioners and psychotherapists both aim for health but disagree on what that means and how to achieve it. Some scholars argue the two are incompatible: psychotherapy adjusts people to society, while Buddhism seeks detachment from worldly life. Examining Buddhism in Republican China (1912–1949), this paper analyzes how Master Taixu and mental hygiene advocate Jin Sheng responded to emerging mental health concerns and global therapeutic techniques. They converged in framing mental illness as a fundamental cognitive obstruction, with meditation alone insufficient as a remedy.
Religions
April 29, 2026
Hengfu Zhu, L H Zhu
The Vajra Exorcism Dance at Yonghegong Lamasery in Beijing is not merely an aesthetic performance but a structured embodiment of Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine. The dance's choreography, iconography, music, and costumes systematically manifest soteriological and cosmological aims, primarily the destruction of mental defilements and the establishment of a purified sacred realm. The ritual has transformed from an imperial ceremony under Qing patronage into a public urban spectacle, reflecting an ongoing negotiation between esoteric efficacy and popular accessibility that sustains its continued survival.
Religions
April 24, 2026
Youngsun Yang, Eunyoung Lee
Indian intellectual traditions developed a distinctive 'relational organ model' in which brain and heart function as complementary poles of a single vital-cognitive network connected by the nāḍī (neural-energetic channel) system, neither purely cardiocentric nor encephalocentrist but integrated within a hierarchical framework. This model evolved from the Atharvaveda through classical Āyurvedic texts to Haṭha Yoga literature, which located ultimate consciousness in the cranial Sahasrāra while preserving the heart as the integrative hub. The Sāṃkhya philosophical framework provided the metaphysical key by distinguishing non-material consciousness (puruṣa) from the material cognitive apparatus (antaḥkaraṇa). The article brings these historical findings into dialogue with modern neurocardiology and prāṇāyāma science.
Religions
April 9, 2026
Julie Robertson, Sehrish Haroon, Thomas St. James O’Connor et al.
Drawing on Daniel Kahneman's concept of System 1 thinking—which includes emotions, dreams, and intuition—this hermeneutical analysis examined 53 texts to explore how such thinking appears in contemporary spiritual and theological reflection. The findings indicate a rise in texts using System 1 thinking in this context, with disciplines outside theology increasingly practicing spiritual reflection as part of spiritual care and also employing System 1 thinking. There is growing awareness and use of diverse cultures and faith experiences, alongside an increase in the demographic of people who are spiritual but not religious, linked to dreams, emotions, and intuition. An overlap between spiritual and theological reflection is also developing.