Yale University Press eBooks
November 15, 2022
John Michael Carey
30 citations
This chapter argues that first-hand accounts of mystical experiences are rare nowadays. It follows the events that led up to Francis Spufford's first mystical experience back in 1997. The chapter examines how Spufford became aware of something else, a ‘whisper of presence’, the sense of being watched but absolutely safe, and it brought with it the conviction that the universe is sustained by ‘a...
Yale University Press eBooks
October 27, 2020
Russell Crandall
This chapter focuses on psychedelics as another emerging front in the war over the war on drugs in the mid 2010s, with most psychedelic substances, such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, being Schedule I listed since 1970. It explains how the scheduling imposed significant barriers to scientific research on hallucinogenic substances and their effects, through stringent security requirements,...
Yale University Press eBooks
January 7, 2020
Giovanni B. Bazzana
6 citations
The earliest Christian writings are filled with stories of spirit possession and exorcism, which were crucial for the activity of the historical Jesus and for the practice of his earliest followers. Possession, besides being a harmful event that should be exorcized, can also have a positive role in many cultures. Often it helps individuals and groups to reflect on and reshape their identity, to...
Yale University Press eBooks
April 24, 2018
Jason Tougaw
The introduction examines contemporary debates in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind, demonstrating the conceptual impasses inevitable when writers adopt extreme rhetorical positions about the so-called “cerebral subject”—for example, “you are your brain” or “you are not your brain.” Literary works, literary criticism, and the neurohumanities respond to such debates by eschewing reductive...
Yale University Press eBooks
May 17, 2011
Moshé Idel
This chapter describes how some modern scholars have focused their attention on theosophical-theurgical Kabbalah, a preeminently Spanish type of Kabbalah, and how they have pointed out the “casuistical” nature of Kabbalah as a whole. Part of this evaluation has to do with the marginalization of Abulafia's Kabbalah in the scholarship after the mid-1950s, despite Gershom Scholem's...