Why do people find conspiracy theories attractive, convincing, or useful? In this article, I analyze conspirituality-that is, the relationships between New Age spirituality and conspiracy theories-in Italy during the COVID-19 lockdown. After distinguishing between conspiracy-believing and belief in conspiracies, I claim that conspiracy-believing could be understood as an aesthetic (sensory and...
One surprising and yet relatively unknown aspect of contemporary Korean Buddhism is the significant influence of American and European Buddhism. Between 1989 and 2009, South Koreans witnessed well-educated “blue-eyed” monastic residents via the Korean media, and the emergence of new bestsellers by authors like Thich Nhat Hahn and Jack Kornfield, written initially for Western audiences but since...
Contemporary neuropsychology reveals that the parietal lobe contains neurons that are specifically attuned to the act of grasping and this act may be fundamental to the establishment of the phenomenal boundaries between subject and object. Furthermore, alterations to this process, such as the hypoactivation of this region during meditation or the hyperactivation associated with schizophrenia,...
This paper argues that whitewater paddling constitutes religious experience, that non-western terms often best describe this experience and that these two facts are related and have much to tell us about the nature of religious experience. That many paddlers articulate their experiences using Asian and/or indigenous religious terms suggests that this language is a form of opposition to existing...
Although the forces of Eros and Magic have long been linked in western esoteric traditions, it is really not until the nineteenth century that we see the emergence of a large and sophisticated body of literature on the art of sexual magic. This article examines the rise of sexual magic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, placing it in the context of the larger discourse...