Religious Studies
October 1, 1965
Ninian Smart
64 citations
The article examines R. C. Zaehner's classification of mysticism into panenhenic, monistic, and theistic types. It argues that monistic and theistic mysticism likely involve the same kind of experience, differing only in interpretation. Similarly, the Theravādin experience of nirvana, interpreted neither monistically nor theistically, may be substantially identical to those two types. This raises methodological issues about distinguishing experience from interpretation. The fact that mystical experience is substantially similar across cultures does not imply a shared 'perennial philosophy', because mystics' doctrines are shaped by factors beyond the experience itself.
Religious Studies
June 1, 1978
James Kellenberger
10 citations
Scholars of mysticism and psychological researchers have debated whether drugs can induce genuine mystical experiences. R. C. Zaehner, an expert in Eastern and Western mysticism, argued that drug-induced experiences differ from theistic religious mystical experiences. He rejected Aldous Huxley's comparison of his feeling of oneness with a chair to the Beatific Vision, and later critiqued Timothy Leary's claims about LSD. The core disagreement was not whether the experiences were real, but whether they matched the mystical states achieved through spiritual discipline. Psychological researchers like Walter N. Pahnke and R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston pursued this question through laboratory experiments.
Religious Studies
January 30, 2024
Mikel Burley
1 citation
Religions often prioritize ritual activities, including dance, over intellectual matters, a point anticipated by anthropologist R. R. Marett's claim that certain forms of religion are 'not so much thought out as danced out.' This article philosophically examines the Afro-Brazilian tradition of Candomblé as an exemplary case, focusing on dance as a 'gestural language' and a form of 'embodied knowledge.' The author argues that these concepts enrich understanding of religion's dance dimension and broaden conceptions of communication and knowledge in both religious and non-religious contexts.
Religious Studies
July 7, 2026
John Alton Christmann
Helen Yetter-Chappell defends a nontheistic idealism in which physical reality is a phenomenal tapestry held together by unity-of-consciousness relations, without requiring a divine perceiver. This paper argues that her position cannot avoid anti-subjectivism without positing a globally unifying subject-like ground. Two arguments show the pressure: the instability of her preferred Thin Mind view and the lack of an adequate ground for the synchronic pattern of co-consciousness relations. Among the ways to realize a global subject, theistic idealism is superior because alternatives like cosmopsychism, primitive phenomenal field views, neutral monism, and impersonal cosmic subject views leave at least one pressure unresolved. Using Yetter-Chappell's own comparative methodology, theistic idealism has the advantage on criteria of intelligibility, explanation, and perceptual contact.
Religious Studies
May 14, 2026
Ricardo Sousa Silvestre
Jīva Gosvāmī's sixteenth-century Bhedābheda Vedānta can be interpreted as a distinctive form of priority cosmopsychism, termed śakti-based Vedānta cosmopsychism. This metaphysical reconstruction uses contemporary philosophy of mind vocabulary to articulate key aspects of Jīva's thought. The paper examines implications for the causal exclusion problem and the explanatory gap problem, reframed as the individuation problem, and addresses objections including a cosmopsychist formulation of the Vedāntic problem of imperfection.
Religious Studies
December 9, 2025
Daekyung Jung
An embodied cognition approach offers a more robust support for the epistemic reliability of religious experience than a strictly cognitivistic or constructivist framework. The article argues that interpreting religious experience through embodied cognition can resolve the long-standing impasse between religious-experience-based epistemology and constructivism. It proposes an integrative framework that moves beyond their traditional opposition, suggesting compatibility and potential synthesis rather than mere coexistence.
Religious Studies
October 30, 2025
Brant Cole Entrekin
Interactions with AI chatbots like ChatGPT can produce genuine mystical experiences, similar to how guided meditation does. Drawing on William James's framework, the author argues that AI chatbots can serve as mediators for such experiences. The paper raises concerns about using AI technologies in religious contexts, including their role in facilitating mystical experiences.
Religious Studies
September 1, 2024
Mark Wynn
Christina Van Dyke's book A Hidden Wisdom argues for recovering an ideal of philosophy as partly a 'way of life' and for reintegrating that ideal into contemporary philosophical practice. This review explores how such a proposal might be developed.
Religious Studies
May 1, 2024
Karen O'Brien-Kop
Drawing on the Sāṃkhyakārikā, a foundational Hindu philosophical text from the fourth century, this article examines the nature of consciousness as separate and autonomous from material reality, including body and mind. Consciousness is described as immortal, plural, individuated, and contentless, and the goal is existential liberation through being situated in pure, non-objective consciousness. The article explores how to understand this claim—whether as a mundane cognitive state producing affective dissociation or as a post-death state—and considers the motivation for engaging with a system whose freedom may only be realized in a dualist reality or after death.
Religious Studies
December 1, 1994
Melissa Raphael
The article argues that numinous consciousness, which Rudolf Otto described as the immediate, unique essence of religious experience, is actually shaped by conceptual and ideological frameworks. Drawing on constructivist epistemology and feminist religious studies, it demonstrates that androcentric (male-centered) epistemological and value structures make such experiences intelligible and acceptable within patriarchal religious traditions. In contrast, contemporary gynocentric (female-centered) spiritualities, where women treat their psychobiological difference as a necessary medium for religious experience, do not seek to protect the holy from the limitations of immanence.
Religious Studies
December 1, 1992
Leon Schlamm
Rudolf Otto's account of numinous experience and religious language, presented in The Idea of the Holy, rests on the claim that numinous experience is qualitatively unlike any other experience, providing a unique form of religious knowledge inaccessible to ordinary rational understanding. Because it resists literal description, it must be approached indirectly through analogy. At the core of Otto's argument is an epistemological assumption that the parameters of numinous experience extend beyond those of religious language, allowing a straightforward comparison between the two. Much of his work depicts religious experience struggling to free itself from imprisonment by inadequate religious language.