Ceremonial magic and technology have been flirting since the dawn of the new millennium. ‘Technowitches’ like Patricia Telesco and Sirona Knight promoted the wide range of domestic appliances such as mobile phones and microwaves that can act as magical media (Telesco/Knight 2002). Neopagan authors have encouraged city-dwellers to form a psychic bond with electrical and mechanical objects,...
In his technophilosophical investigation Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, David J. Chalmers discusses the historical skepticism about the human capacity to recognize material reality.Already in the centuries before our era, Chinese, Indian, and Greek thinkers independently raised whether humans could distinguish between what was real and what was an illusion.Chalmers...
Loving KindnessThe meditation of loving kindness is a technique in which we focus on a quality, namely that of compassion, rather than on an object or an action.There are many different variations.For example, we can inwardly speak positive affirmations, in which we wish for security, safety, contentment, health, etc. for ourselves and others.In class we have used an example from the book...
a meeting was held in which the Dalai Lama and several monks spent a week engaging in extensive dialogue with Western scientists.These dialogues are recorded in the book: Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama written by Daniel Goleman -who is also the author of the book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, and also brought...
In contemporary religious landscapes, entanglements between the field of religion and the field of psychology and psychiatry are manifold.In this paper, the psychological school of "Transpersonal Psychology" (TP) and specifically the work of the psychiatrist and LSD researcher Stanislav Grof is introduced in order to illuminate the interferences between psychological or therapeutic discourses...