Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 2017
Bruno Marchal
After reviewing the basic of theology of Universal Numbers/Machines, as detailed in Marchal (2007), I illustrate how that body of thought might be used to shed some light upon the apparent dichotomy in Eastern/Western spirituality. This paper relies entirely on my previous interdisciplinary work in mathematical logic, computer science and machine's theology, where "theology" is used here in the...
Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
December 1, 2017
Søren Brier
In recent articles in this journal I have discussed why a traditional physicalist and mechanist, as well as an info-computationalist, view of science cannot fulfil the goal of building a transdisciplinary science across Snow's two cultures. There seems to be no path proceeding from mechanistic physicalism to views that encompass phenomenological theories of experiential consciousness and...
November 15, 2017
Evan Thompson
This paper is the text of a keynote lecture for the conference "Buddhism, Mind, and Cognitive Science" at the University of California, Berkeley, April 25, 2014. The main proposition is that the Buddhism-cognitive science encounter needs to be fundamentally reoriented in order to have a chance of becoming a genuine dialogue. At present, the encounter takes its direction from scientific research...
November 15, 2017
Evan Thompson
This paper is a commentary on Dan Arnold's book, Brains, Buddhas, and Believing: The Problem of Intentionality in Classical Buddhist and Cognitive-Scientific Philosophy of Mind, presented at the Toshide Numata Book Prize Symposium, "Taking Buddhist Philosophy of Mind Seriously," University of California, Berkeley, November 15, 2013.
Cerebrum
November 1, 2017
P. Zak
Editor’s Note Buddhism shares with science the task of examining the mind empirically. But Buddhism has pursued, for two millennia, direct investigation of the mind through penetrating introspection. Neuroscience, on the other hand, relies on third-person knowledge in the form of scientific observation. In the book that is the subject of this review, two friends, one a Buddhist monk trained as...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 19, 2017
William Edelglass
The widespread discourse of happiness and meditation is part of a “happiness turn” in contemporary Western Buddhism, in which meditation is presented as a path to happiness. This turn is justified, in part, by empirical research on happiness, which appears to be a straightforward scientific inquiry into the causes and conditions of happiness. The two most widespread methods for measuring...
Oxford Scholarship Online
October 19, 2017
This volume discusses modern transformations of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation and the scientific studies of these practices from the humanistic perspective of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Buddhist Studies. Meditation, particularly “mindfulness” meditation, has garnered enormous attention in recent years as the object of scientific study, to the point of redefining the...
Flashpoints for Asian American Studies
October 3, 2017
Sharon A. Suh
Chapter 15 seriously scrutinizes the relationship of Buddhism, “one of America’s racialized other religious darlings,” to Asian American studies, which has yet to consistently recognize religion as a legitimate site upon which to map race, gender, and sexuality. Suh argues that “the common Buddhist units of measure and authenticity” —for instance, Orientalized monks and Eastern meditation— “are...
Self & Society
October 2, 2017
M. Shipley
1 citation
Heralded as a time of economic prosperity, the post-World War II period in America also experienced extraordinary religious awakenings of born-again evangelicalism, Prosperity Gospels, and an apocalyptic flare rendered palpable by atomic bombs and the Cold War. Postwar Christianity found itself reinforcing neoliberalism, sanctifying standardizations accompanying technological routinization,...
Journal of Religion and Health
October 2017
T Lomas, N Etcoff, William van Gordon et al.
Amidst the burgeoning enthusiasm for mindfulness in the West, there is a concern that the largely secular 'de-contextualized' way in which it is being harnessed is denuding it of its potential to improve health and well-being. As such, efforts are underway to 're-contextualize' mindfulness, explicitly drawing on the wider framework of Buddhist ideas and practices in which it was initially...
Journal of Contemporary Religion
September 2, 2017
Jens Schlieter
19 citations
For about 25 years, mindfulness meditation has attracted growing attention. Developed in the context of a traditional Asian religious tradition, mindfulness meditation originally served soteriological goals. In therapeutic settings, it has been claimed, it has become a secular ‘consciousness technology’. So far, studies have mainly been interested in clinical evidence for salutogenetic effects....
Exchange
September 1, 2017
Joseph S. O’Leary
Abstract: Experiences of ‘presence’ are common in religion. This essay attempts to approach presence along phenomenological lines, arguing that the pluralism of the phenomena and contexts referred to is not an obstacle to a methodologically open dialogue between different experiences. Despite the impersonalism of Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality, personal presences play a considerable...
Вестник Волгоградского государственного университета. Серия 7: Философия. Социология и социальные технологии
September 1, 2017
Zhargal Ayakova
The Buddhist view on personality problem and the nature of human consciousness has a scientific basis as it primarily relates to psychology, state of mind and its transformation during meditation.Speaking about Buddhism as a science of mind the Buddhists primarily imply its psychological aspect based on the current understanding of psychology as a scientific discipline that studies the mental...
Journal of Medical Humanities
September 2017
Jenny Eklöf
Over the past ten to fifteen years, medical interventions, therapeutic approaches and scientific studies involving mindfulness meditation have gained traction in areas such as clinical psychology, psychotherapy, and neuroscience. Simultaneously, mindfulness has had a very strong public appeal. This article examines some of the ways in which the medical and scientific meaning of mindfulness is...
The Yeats Journal of Korea
August 31, 2017
Taeho Han
Yeats as a visionary poet displays the basic Kabalistic creative mind or the instinctual Zen self-reawakening insight; ignorant but wise, barbarian but civilized, beastly but non-intellectually spiritual, rough but pure, which can be compared with the mysterious power of the humming bird who experiences two conflicting states of torpor and freedom. To find his poetic “fornits” (mystic elves) or...
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
August 24, 2017
Young Chin Park, Tom Pyszczynski
Three studies investigated the effects of meditation on responses to reminders of death. Study 1 took a quasi-experimental approach, comparing defensive responses to mortality salience (MS) of South Korean participants with varying levels of experience with Buddhism and meditation. Whereas non-Buddhists without meditation showed the typical increase in worldview defense after mortality salience...
August 18, 2017
Jared R. Lindahl
A qualitative study of Western practitioners of Buddhist meditation investigated unexpected, challenging, difficult, and distressing experiences. This paper reports on a subset of 12 practitioners within Tibetan Vajrayāna lineages who described energy flowing through their body, knots of pain, pressure or tension, and/or concurrent emotional changes. In some cases, somatic changes were...
Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences
August 4, 2017
Anawat Bunnag
9 citations
Abstract The problem of time has been fascinating thinkers since ancient times. Many philosophers (such as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant) and scientists (such as Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein) have tried to conceptualize and analyze time in many ways. There are two main concepts about time recognized as firstly, physical time that is objective and secondly, psychological time that is...
July 12, 2017
Terry V. Lesh
5 citations
Some of the most consistent findings suggest that the counselor&s;s use of accurate empathy is directly related to the positive growth of the client. C. R. Rogers probably comes closest to an ideal description of what empathy means in counseling. Accurate empathy has been difficult to measure with any degree of reliability. In another very comprehensive study of empathy, it was decided that the...
July 12, 2017
Akira Kasamatsu
In this chapter, the authors present the results of their experiments in detail and discuss some of the electrographic characteristics in which the mental state in Zen-sitting will be reflected. In clinical practice, electroencephalogram often becomes a good neufophysiological method to find out the disturbance of consciousness. According to the instructions of Zen meditation, the regulation of...