The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Lloyd W Pflueger
3 citations
Abstract I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance-this for lack of a better wordI have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
R L Franklin
3 citations
Abstract The classic approach to mysticism emphasizes its unity. It points to striking parallels in the language used by mystics from different cultures who were unknown to each other and concludes that they describe the same experience. Hence, it presents mysticism as involving a state of consciousness found in virtually all religions, recog-nizably the same in each, and acknowledged by those...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
James Robertson Price
Abstract DURING THE PAST fifty years, philosophers of mysticism have been actively intrigued by the meaning and epistemological status of quotations such as this one by John Ruusbroec, the fourteenth-century mystic from Flanders. An intense and fruitful debate has emerged, one marked by three discernible and on going philosophic moments. By briefly sketching this debate, I will clarify my own...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
John Dourley
Abstract JUNG’ s UNDERSTANDING OF the nature and dynamic of the psyche is intrinsically religious in that the encompassing process of psychic maturation it seeks to describe has as its foundational telos, or intentionality, a movement toward a state of consciousness that can, and perhaps must, be described as mystical. “Mystical consciousness,” in this context, is taken to mean the conscious...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Anthony N Perovich
Abstract “SHUT YOUR EYES, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.” Plotinus, understood in the context provided by the spiritually charged atmosphere of Neoplatonism and of his own writings, here endorses the idea that an innate capacity for mystical union is possessed by all of us. (He sounds as well the frequently accompanying note in mystical writers...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Diane Jonte-Pace
Abstract NEARLY A CENTURY after William James initiated the psychological study of mysticism with the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience, Robert Forman has returned to James’s project by issuing a call for a psychologia perennis. This “perennial psychology” would investigate mystical or nonordinary states of consciousness and the transformative processes that produce them....
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
G William Barnard
Abstract SEVERAL DECADES AGO, Western philosophers of religion frequently claimed that mystical experiences were the result of direct contact with an undefined, but usually vaguely Christian, Ultimate Reality. In recent years, however, a significant philosophical shift has taken place. In most contemporary philosophical discussions of mysticism, it is now almost axiomatic that mystical...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Robert K C Forman
Abstract It is commonly observed that many, if not most, seminal religious leaders have undergone some form of mystical experiences. Less commonly known is how surprisingly widespread such experiences are; summarizing several large-scale studies, David Hay, in Religious Experience Today, concludes that nearly half-43 percent of all Americans and 48 percent of all British people-have had one or...