Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Glenn H. Shepard
11 citations
Abstract The ayahuasca brew (Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis) was introduced very recently among the Matsigenka and Yora (Nahua) indigenous people of southern Peru. The Matsigenka used Banisteriopsis liana previously, however they did not learn to add the potent Psychotria admixture in preparing the brew until the 1950s. Introduction of ayahuasca to the Yora (Nahua) was even more...
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June 18, 2014
Bernd Brabec de Mori
8 citations
Abstract The experience of indigenous people in their confrontation with the growing interest of people from northern countries in drinking ayahuasca has hitherto received little attention. First a brief historical summary is presented in order to show how the use of ayahuasca had already changed its meaning and value among Shipibo-Konibo around the 1960s. Observing that visitors' interests...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, Françoise Barbira Freedman
7 citations
Abstract The introduction provides an overview of the expansion of ayahuasca shamanism, and places it in the context of its interactions with Western therapies and the New Age movement. It also contemplates the role of shamanism as a mediator in contemporary indigenous ethnic relationships. The introduction reviews the existing field of research and offer a comment that gives context and...
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June 18, 2014
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
6 citations
Abstract This chapter looks at ritual spaces of ayahuasca shamanism in western Brazil, organized by indigenous people to be shared purposefully with other indigenous and non-indigenous participants. This usually occurs in the evenings of political and cultural meetings, training courses, and cultural festivals. They allow identifying people with whom to cooperate, exchange substances, and share...
Oxford University Press eBooks
June 18, 2014
Mariana Ciavatta Pantoja, Matthew Meyer
4 citations
Abstract The Kuntanawa are a tribe that belongs to the Pano linguistic branch, who, by the early decades of the twentieth century, were assumed to have been exterminated owing to the expansion of rubber production in the upper reaches of Amazonian tributaries, and in particular in the state of Acre in Brazil. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, descendants of a Kuntanawa woman, who had...
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April 26, 2012
Jonardon Ganeri
This chapter discusses a development that took place in Buddhism in the sixth century, and subsequently had wide repercussions in the Indian discussion of self. Reflexivism (svasaṃvedana) is the thesis that self‐consciousness consists in conscious mental occurrences being reflexively conscious of themselves. Dignāga's defence of reflexivism consists in part in a new “two aspects” theory of...
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April 26, 2012
Jonardon Ganeri
Abstract There are two ways to account for the nature of phenomenologically presented ownership constitutive of the "immersed" self. One sees it as fundamentally a relationship of bodily ownership: the theory of a core self as bodily feeling of presence to oneself is a bodily account of immersion. Other accounts develop an analysis out of a more detailed study of the structure of...
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December 23, 2011
Philip Wexler
1 citation
Modern society has seen a dramatic change toward the sacred. The prevalence and availability of mystical techniques and practices along with specific economic and social conditions have created a base for the revitalization of a spiritualized, mystical consciousness: a veritable mystical society. This chapter examines the effect of such changes on education and pedagogy. The central hypothesis...
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December 23, 2011
Steven Sutcliffe
Abstract The “new age” has been both difficult to specify and tricky to theorize in the standard terms of the academic study of religion. This chapter begins by looking at how elements of the new age stack up with the limited model of a rationalized bureaucratic organization supplied by the “world religions” taxonomy. It further locates the new age in the discursive drift from mysticism to...
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October 28, 2011
Joseph Cheah
This chapter began with the contextualization of the historical circumstances in Burma and the United States that brought about the interactions between these two groups; namely, Burmese Buddhist specialists (monks and lay meditation teachers) and the American vipassana practitioners. It argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what “modern Buddhism” means for various constituents by...
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October 28, 2011
Joseph Cheah
This chapter examines the contemporary adaptation of vipassana meditation by convert Buddhists and sympathizers to the American context. It employs racial formation theory to distinguish between cultural and racial rearticulations of Buddhist ideas, beliefs, and practices. Cultural rearticulation is an ordinary means of taking Asian religious practices and rerepresent them in terms that are...
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October 20, 2011
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
The inner life rendered as exotic space reflects the modern subject’s sense of self, recognizing primal forces within. The aesthetic imagination, mystical-erotic reverie, and the interior experiences of dreams in works by Gottfried Benn, Robert Musil, and Alfred Kubin engage exotic topographical imagery, where writers undermine the Enlightenment model of a rationally unified self and to explore...
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October 13, 2011
Murray Smith
23 citations
Abstract This chapter advances a definition of empathy as *other‐focussed personal imagining,* a definition which at once distinguishes empathy from various lower‐level phenomena such as affective mimicry and emotional contagion, and specifies the relationship between such processes and fully‐fledged empathy. This account of empathy is then contextualized and developed further in relation to...
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September 29, 2011
Alf Gabrielsson
3 citations
In accounts of strong experiences with music, the experience is sometimes described with words such as ‘magical’, ‘mysterious’, ‘supernatural’, or ‘extraterrestrial’. The narrator feels as if he/she is put in a trance or ecstasy, there may be a feeling of totally merging with something bigger and of glimpsing other worlds or existences. These are examples of transcendental experiences (from the...
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September 29, 2011
Udo Thiel
This chapter turns to Locke's account of personal identity itself, taking up the discussion of the fundamental notions that are relevant in this account from the previous chapter. Contrary to what some commentators hold, Locke distinguishes between consciousness and memory, and he ascribes to both an essential role in the constitution of personal identity. Linked to the notion of consciousness...
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September 29, 2011
Alf Gabrielsson
Religion and music have always been closely associated. Regardless of which religion, music is an important part of rites and cult activities, sometimes even dance. This chapter presents accounts of strong experiences with music in connection with religious experiences. The narrators' attitudes to Christianity vary. Some of them are explicit religious believers, others haven't taken a stance;...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
This chapter describes the main introductory meditation classes offered at Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti Centre in detail. It breaks the classes down into their various elements—rites of entry, opening prayers, meditation practice, talks or lectures, and so on—and discusses each as formalized or experiential means of learning that are ritualized to one degree or another. Comparisons are...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
This chapter focuses on the specific ritual practices that meditation students learned and performed. Learning through devotional practices like chanting, prostrations and offerings is discussed, as is the example of one participant who decided to take on an offering rite without insisting on prior cognitive understanding. His experience of discovery through doing is a rare but illuminating...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 2, 2011
Patricia Q. Campbell
Beginning with interview excerpts demonstrating the different ways in which respondents described their learning experiences, this chapter sets out a framework for understanding various types of learning. It briefly summarizes the learning domains of Bloom's taxonomy, showing how these domains and the learning tasks involved in each relate to learning in meditation classes. Respondents...
Oxford University Press eBooks
September 1, 2011
Robert Audi
In this chapter the character of religious experience is explored. Perceptual and non-perceptual kinds are distinguished, and both are shown to have possible confirmatory value for religious commitment. The chapter also explores how practical considerations may support a religious commitment that is not otherwise irrational. It concludes with a discussion of the extent to which religious...
Oxford University Press eBooks
July 28, 2011
Andy McGuiness, Katie Overy
32 citations
This chapter considers the neural basis of musical experience alongside theories of the embodied nature of consciousness. Drawing on previous theoretical work on the role of the human mirror neuron system in emotional responses to music, it proposes that the nature of the musical listening experience is of a shared subjectivity between individual listeners and performers, underpinned by innate...
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July 28, 2011
Bennett Hogg
25 citations
This chapter explores the connection between the idea of consciousness understood as enactive cognition and the perceptions within philosophy that ‘knowledge depends on being in a world that is inseparable from our bodies, our language, and our social history — in short, from our embodiment’. Various avatars of these three factors of our knowledge — body, language, and history — reappear over...
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July 28, 2011
Tia DeNora
10 citations
This chapter examines the role in music in consciousness formation understood pragmatically. This pragmatic perspective focuses on consciousness as a form of creative work. It suggests that, in common with all creative work, it is a ‘systematic function’: it emerges from collaborative social and material-cultural settings. To develop this theme and set it in its proper context, the chapter...
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July 28, 2011
David Clarke, Tara Kini
7 citations
While the seemingly new Western discipline of consciousness studies wrestles with its problems of definition and methodology, it is salutary to note that consciousness has been a near continuous concern — in both theory and practice — in Eastern cultures for much of their history. This chapter argues that Indian classical music both emanates from and is able to instil deep states of...
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July 28, 2011
Jörg Fachner
7 citations
This chapter discusses the psychedelic effects of drugs (mainly cannabis) on the perception and performance of music, and in particular how such drugs influence time perception in the process of performance. It focuses both on scientific studies and on anecdotal evidence provided by musicians and observers of musicians using drugs. Most of the material relates to developments in the American...