Mystical dynamics—the notion that mystical oneness may unfold involving ego disintegration, renewal, and luminous light—has been discussed anecdotally by psychedelic researchers and therapists but has not yet been empirically examined in controlled settings. This study investigated the occurrence and dose-dependency of mystical dynamics in healthy participants after administration of...
ABSTRACT To secure the scientific credibility of its theoretical foundations, CSR needs to update its cognitive model. Seminal work in CSR, and much contemporary research, employs a model of cognition that is subject to mounting criticism (i.e., cognitivism). The most significant of these critiques come from 4E cognition. This paper focuses on enactive cognition, arguing that reconstructing CSR...
As a book that seeks to update William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) for a general audience, it has many features to commend. It offers a finely nuanced discussion of James bo...
Fruitful comparison of psychedelic, spiritual, and psychotic experiences requires a degree of phenomenological nuance. Some shared features of these phenomena, such as encounters and communications with supernatural entities, are obfuscated by scientific and clinical terminology. Other supposed distinctions are based on an atemporal view of dynamic experiences. In Section 2 of this...
ABSTRACT The cross-cultural practice of shamanism reflects an innate capacity for altered states of consciousness (ASC’s) that are elicited by stress, deliberately sought in shamanic rituals, and associated with psychopathology. Shamanic sickness, animal transformation, and death-rebirth experiences specifically resemble psychotic experiences. The triggers of shamanic and psychotic experiences...
Possession trance is an altered state of consciousness resulting from spirit possession, belief in an alien entity residing in the self. Though treated as an individual psychopathological condition in Western medicine, cultural anthropology has long tied possession trance, and trance and possession phenomena in general, to marginalization by increasingly complex and inflexible social...
Dreaming is often connected with religious ideas and enjoys distinct epistemic status as a source of trusted information for divinatory practices—oneiromancy. These tendencies suggest the existence of a distinct content affordance relevance for dream divination, hypothesized in the “CARDD theory.” CARDD theory predicts that dreams containing nightmarish and threatening content, omission of...
Interest in experiences that can broadly be considered religious, spiritual, mystical, and self-transcendent is growing – largely due to recent advances in psychedelic research (Yaden et al., 2021)...
ABSTRACT The San trance dance has attracted considerable attention in terms of ethnography and rock art, as well as the human capacity for altered states of consciousness. However, its implications for shamanic ritual and associated states of consciousness remain undeveloped without understanding the brain mechanisms involved. Here I integrate previous models of trance with findings from...
ABSTRACT Objectives: While there are researches on the neural processes of some religious/spiritual practices like mindfulness meditation, no fMRI research on brain functions of mindfulness in Islam is available. Methods: In this study, by using a 3T MRI machine and recruiting 31 (16F) mentally and physically healthy and highly religious individuals, we performed four different tasks during the...
Social Structures and Culture: A Primer on Critical Realism for Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020). 5. Robert Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988). Cf. McNamara on p. 144, on the “dream-like intuition of the ideal commonwealth, but is experienced as uncannily tangible and real in moments of ritual...
As a recent survey of religious artifacts in the British Museum attests (MacGregor, 2018), religions exist in enormous varieties and have been ubiquitous globally and throughout history. This observation has led to the creation of the subdiscipline of psychology focused on religion which, although not as well-established as older subdisciplines such as social, cognitive and developmental...
Ariel Gluklich takes up an important and according to him partly overlooked topic in The Joy of Religion (2020). The book has many qualities, and much of its argument is challenging, original, and thoughtful. It attends to pleasure and joy in an imbalanced fashion, but there is a reason. While the former is usually culturally excoriated, the latter is eulogized, but howdoes that relate to their...
ABSTRACT Empirical cross-cultural research provides a typology of magico-religious practitioners and identifies their relations to social complexity, their selection-function relationships, and reveals their biosocial bases. Different practitioner types and configurations are associated with specific ecological and political dynamics that indicate a cultural evolutionary development. Relations...
We develop a new model of how human agency-detection capacities and other socio-cognitive biases are involved in forming religious beliefs. Crucially, we distinguish general religious beliefs (such as God exists) from personal religious beliefs that directly refer to the agent holding the belief or to her peripersonal time and space (such as God appeared to me last night). On our model, people...
We explored the effects of alcohol on expectancy-driven mystical and quasi-mystical experiences by manipulating participants’ expectations. By using the so-called God Helmet suggestion, participants were led to believe that a placebo brain stimulation could elicit mystical experiences. In this pre-registered field study, we set out to test whether alcohol could increase participants’...
Spiritual retreats are a commonly used intensive program of meditation and prayer, along with other elements, designed to provide participants with opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth. While individual elements of such retreats have been studied, there have been no reports in the literature regarding the neurophysiological effects of these retreats. This preliminary study...
We argue that event is a basic concept that humanists, social scientists, and cognitive psychologists can use to build a consilient research platform for the study of experiences that people deem religious. Grounding the study of experience in event cognition allows us to reframe several classic problems in the study of “religious experience”: (1) the function of culture-specific knowledge in...
Alterations of consciousness are critical factors in the diagnosis of epilepsy and seizure disorders. With this alteration in consciousness, some persons report unusual experiences that have been thought to resemble spontaneous mystical experiences. This study was designed to identify and characterize the mystical experiences associated with seizure activity, through the use of a quantitative...
The nucleus accumbens orchestrates processes related to reward and pleasure, including the addictive consequences of repeated reward (e.g., drug addiction and compulsive gambling) and the accompanying feelings of craving and anhedonia. The neurotransmitters dopamine and endogenous opiates play interactive roles in these processes. They are released by natural rewards (i.e., food, water, sex,...
This study is a critique of three assumptions that have significantly shaped the neuropsychological study of mystical experience: (a) intense positive emotion, especially ecstasy, is the defining feature of mystical experience; (b) abnormal temporolimbic activity, particularly epileptiform activity, is the central mediating factor or cause of mystical experience; and (c) mystical experience...