Continuities of Consciousness, Life-Worlds, and Numinous Experience: Cognitive-Phenomenological Foundations for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 DOI: 10.24972/ijts.2023.42.2.1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Key points | Proposes that the numinous is a semantic amplification of a primary transspecies consciousness, implying ethical responsibility for the environment. |
Abstract
Numinous experience—as the felt sense of the sacred—evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world—as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and concept the numinous would be the semantic amplification of the more concrete organism-surround nonduality of non symbolic organisms—as reflected in a primary consciousness shared across Uexkuell’s sentient animal umwelten and Gibson’s “envelopes of flow.” H usserl’s phenomenology of passive synthesis and James on pure experience can be understood as intuiting the implicit forms underlying such a primary transspecies consciousness, as both differentiated into these concrete lifeworlds, to the level of the inferably sentient protozoa, and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. The latter, with its original social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, becomes similarly responsible in the contemporary context of a human caused global climate crisis for the care and conservation of that Spirit it both develops as such and accurately intuits as a universal is-like shared with all sentient beings.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on shamanism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond | 2014 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Cognitive Neuroscience, Shamanism and the Rock Art of Native California | 1998 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From Culture to Experience: Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press | 2020 | Historical analysis | |
| Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing–Being in the World: One Anthropologist's Journey of Discovery and Transformation | 2010 | Reflective essay or personal narrative |
Citations in the library
Cites 16
- On a confusion about a function of consciousness Behavioral and Brain Sciences June 1, 1995
- REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics Pharmacological Reviews June 20, 2019
- Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology December 1, 2011
- Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism Oxford University Press eBooks May 29, 2008
- The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe Human Brain Mapping May 7, 2019
and 11 more in the library