The revival of interest in psychedelics and the death of Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) provide an occasion to reexamine the origins of the psychedelic movement. The text reflects on the historical and philosophical roots of psychedelic research and practice, linking them to spiritual and epistemological questions. It suggests that revisiting these origins can inform contemporary understanding of psychedelics in psychology, medicine, and religious studies.
Dreams frequently contain supernatural agent imagery and are used for ritual and divinatory purposes while awake. Less studied is dream imagery about rituals (DIR). This article surveys and analyzes DIR items and interactions by combining dream and ritual theories with ethnographic fieldwork among Hindus in Nepal. The analysis defines ritual through its obvious aspects and traits, drawing on cognitive and evolutionary accounts of ritualization alongside threat simulation theory and social simulation theory from dream research. The goal is to develop a new strategy for examining imagined ritual traits in dreaming, advancing the methodology and theoretical understanding of religious dream cognition.
Religious practitioners actively cultivate experiences of being overtaken by a divine or transcendent force. Through ethnographic studies of Buddhist meditation retreats and Torah study in a Haredi yeshiva, the paper shows that achieving submission requires deliberate, embodied effort. In Torah study, students alternate between vigorous debate and surrendering to 'divine thinking' within partnerships. In Buddhist meditation, practitioners shift from conscious bodily performance to passive synchronization with 'ultimate reality.' This paradox—exercising agency to reach states that negate it—reveals how religious doctrines become personally felt through practice, making religious experience an accomplished, interactive achievement.
Race has been largely overlooked in the study of Western esotericism, despite a few studies linking esoteric ideas to white supremacy. This article argues that race has operated as a 'hidden presence' shaping both the historical formation of the field and the concept of Western esotericism itself, serving as a subtext for its dominant narrative. The author calls for continued investigation into the entanglements of 'Western' and whiteness, even as scholars move beyond the West.