The validity of shamanism is generally denied in the politically dominant health system in Chile although for many people, such as the Mapuche, it is part of their belief system. This chapter describes a case study of the sufferings—and attempts to seek help—of a Mapuche woman under social pressures in a society undergoing cultural changes. The author, an anthropologist who works in the health...
Some speak of “higher consciousness.” Or higher human possibility. Here are three areas and information from professionals who explored them. It is up to us to decide about validity. Interesting that qualities of everyday creative living may assist on such paths. Evolution has manifested a series of major emergences over time. Might there be other emergences forthcoming, even during our...
This chapter explores the processes that mediate the relationship between sociocultural experiences and bodily responses, in the context of religious devotion. Using ethnographic and psychophysiological data from a study of spirit possession (Brazilian Candomblé), I offer a close examination of interactions among enactments of roles and meanings, and bodily states of mediums. In doing so, I...
“The Way to Comfort” is devoted to the musical pathways along the journey that soothe and comfort the companion. Hanser presents specific techniques, including breath work, facial massage, progressive muscle relaxation, drummassage, imagery, meditation, mantra, listening, toning, and singing. Hanser provides a list of songs of comfort, and speaks of the properties of the lullaby that...
In 1954, at the age of 55, Henri Michaux was a well-published writer and a seasoned traveller. As a young man in the 1930s and 1940s, the Belgian poet and painter had voyaged across East Asia, Central and South America, which resulted in a large portion of his oeuvre: well-known accounts, both real and imaginary, of his trips abroad, fictional ethnographies, and numerous volumes of poetry....
The extended mind hypothesis by its very title assures us that it does not restrict itself to conventional or limited notions of the mind, but incorporates into its focus the subject and the world. For this reason, it is worth considering how EM might interact with theories concerned with the nature of the mind that have more commonly been employed in literary readings. This second chapter is...
I’m an analytic metaphysician who thinks analytic metaphysicians don’t think enough about consciousness. By ‘consciousness’ I mean the property of being a thing such that there’s something that it’s like to be that thing. There’s something that it’s like for a rabbit to be cold or to be kicked or to have a knife stuck in it. There’s nothing that it’s like (or so we ordinarily suppose) for a...
In this chapter, I discuss body disturbances in mild psychosis related to symptom stabilisation in schizophrenia. First, I outline how contemporary psychiatric nosology has moved away from the notion of mild psychosis. Here I show how clinicians have veered away from using the idea of mild psychosis through the focus on symptom severity coupled with the introduction of borderline personality...
The philosopher Andy Clark has explored the relationship between cognition and environment through an extended meditation upon the predicament of the mole cricket. These creatures attract their mates through song, but their minute size renders them incapable of producing sounds loud enough to travel. However, they solve this problem environmentally: by creating underground burrows that greatly...
Many philosophers of mind and mainstream neuroscientists remain committed to the broadly Cartesian notion that there is a ‘thing’ inside us which allows us to think and feel and is responsible for the wide range of conscious states we experience. While Descartes identifies this ‘thing’ as a non-material substance that exists independently of the body, most contemporary theorists maintain that...
We have seen that while Sartre holds that consciousness is always pre-reflectively aware of its ontological nothingness, it alienates itself if it chooses to adopt the fundamental project of bad faith. It may appear, therefore, that the alienation of consciousness only ever emanates from, and is grounded in, consciousness’s own activity.
Spatial environments constitute a key component of our cognitive ecologies, helping to configure the form of religious worship, directing the attention of worshipers and providing physical shape to the construction and transmission of religious forms. This chapter applies Extended Mind theory to aspects of early modern English religion within the context of the parish church in order to deepen...
This book has explored the connection between emotion, cognition, and the essentially embodied nature of consciousness. Its central aim has been to bring together important work being done in philosophy of mind, philosophy of emotion, and philosophical psychology so as to move toward a new theoretical framework in which all of our conscious experience and cognition can be understood as...
If there is a sense in which the entire universe exists within the energetic composition of every human body, then there is a sense in which Lhe subtle energies of our embodiment, impaci ihe entire universe. This is a centra] aspect of the agenda of transpersonal psychology; although more aptly, we will refer to them in the plural, as psychologies, since they are a diverse grouping of...
The internet, and especially, participatory communication technologies, such as forums, social networks and wikis, are often credited with turning ordinary people into armies of content creators and changing the way information is produced and consumed (Gillin, 2009; Grossman, 2006; McConnell and Huba, 2007). In the realm of electronic health information and consumer health informatics, these...
Most neurophysiologists work on some highly specialised area of brain research and are not particularly interested in the philosophical issue, as they see it, of the relationship between brain and consciousness. For it does not make any practical difference to them whether consciousness is identical with, or caused by, or only correlated with brain activity. But those who do concern themselves...
In the opening of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud makes reference to a ‘peculiar feeling’ which many have identified as the true source of religious sentiments. It is a feeling that one might call ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic”’ (PFL 12, 251). Freud suggests that the ‘oneness with the universe’ which constitutes the...
The biological (causal) and computational theories of consciousness have the common outcome of reducing mind to a set of input/output relations. In the biological model, the emphasis is on the causal links between perception and its external occasions — the objects of perception — and active peripherals such as muscles and glands. In the computer model, the emphasis is on computational...
In the wake of the collapse of Communism, religious and ethnic revivalism have emerged as major elements of social change in the former Soviet Union, playing themselves out on national, regional and community levels. This chapter focuses on community, and examines the dialectic between (i) religious values and (ii) the construction of a ‘moral community’, which is in turn a basis for ethnic...
Animism is the belief that human beings have souls, or, by extension, the belief that animals, plants or even rocks have souls; that is, that they are subjects of feeling or consciousness, or display intelligence, in ways that ensouled human beings do. This extended view is sometimes called animatism or panpsychism, in order to distinguish it from the more restricted view, though in common...
The language and the symbolism of nothingness, of non-being and of the void inevitably call to mind Asian traditions of religious thought and experience. Indeed, any attempt by the West to go it alone in formulating an adequate account of nothingness would be the height of provincialism. 1 On the contrary, the enterprise of thinking through the concept of nothingness in the context of Western...
I shall be tiresome and borrow the familiar (but useful) device of making a couple of preliminary remarks before launching into my topic proper. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Dennett is an excellent communicator of complex ideas, and his book of some 500 pages provides a useful conspectus of the current state of cognitive science, including a number of areas of controversy. Many highly specialized disciplines are involved and Dennett rightly makes it a virtue that he has tried, ‘with unabashed eclecticism’, to build a coherent theory, looking across the whole field....
There are several important logical differences between the kinds of general argument we examined in the last chapter and the kinds of specific evidence for a life after death to which we must now turn. We shall shortly be focusing on: (1) near-death experiences; (2) apparitional experiences; (3) communications via mediums; and (4) putative reincarnation cases. Evidence of these empirical kinds...
This book 1 contains eleven of Professor Broad’s articles and lectures. All of them have been published before; but several of them were not easily accessible, and one, the lecture on ‘War Thoughts in Peace Time’, has long been out of print. The book is divided into three sections, (I) Psychical Research, (II) Religion, and (III) Politics. It would not be relevant here to comment on Section...