Neoshamanic ayahuasca drinkers in Australia experience trance as a radical reconfiguration of the senses and body, which enables them to reshape cultural ideals and everyday ethical practices. The ethnographic research shows that during trance, participants' sense of self shifts between dividual and individual modes of personhood, where the 'I' is constituted by human and nonhuman persons. These experiences of healing and wisdom are embedded in a critical cosmology that is overdetermined by Western individualism, revealing how relational personhood operates within capitalist society.
Mystical experience, which William James called ineffable, can be understood through the lens of art and aesthetics. Focusing on Western Christian mysticism, the author argues that positive (cataphatic) mystical experience resembles an artistic or aesthetic experience in its phenomenology and psychology. The imagination plays a crucial role in realizing the presence of God, which is represented pictorially in the mystical imagination like a painting on the canvas of the soul. Using Kant's philosophy, the author contends that the consciousness of divinity is an aesthetic realization, and that mystics can and do articulate this experience through language and figures of speech, making their claims of ineffability problematic.