Abstract This article examines the genealogy of the concept of “transconscious,” a key notion in the work of Mircea Eliade. It argues that the “transconscious” is the inheritor of a long psychological tradition in the study of religion, namely that of the religious faculty. The first section looks at the religious faculty in the work of Max Müller and some of his German post-Kantian precursors,...
Tom Stoppard’s ‘science dramas’ have been mostly associated with Hapgood (1988), where Spy games were interwoven with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Arcadia (1993), one of the most famous play, united mathematics, landscape design, literary history, and Chaos theory. But there are also philosophy plays, such as Jumpers (1972) and Professional Foul (1977), among Stoppard’s works. The...
The mind-brain problem is to bridge relations between in higher-level mental events and in lower-level neural events. To address this, some mathematical models have been proposed to explain how the brain can represent the discriminative structure of qualia, but they remain unresolved due to a lack of validation methods. To understand the qualia discrimination mechanism, we need to ask how the...
The pandemic has plunged us into a liminal situation and led us into an unknown situation. In this article, I propose an apophatic approach to cultivating spirituality in response to this prevailing uncertainty. Within the Christian spiritual tradition, two major approaches exist, i.e. the cataphatic (via affirmation) and the apophatic (via negation). While religious education often leans...
This article analyses the “subject” as a cybernetic process driven by animation’s urge towards a “transcendental ideal:” an absolute of “survival,” “consciousness” and “freedom” that completes and transcends our spatiotemporally limited, causally compatible experience of “vitality,” “awareness” and “agency.” The dual nature of subjective awareness made of awareness of a subject (“self”) and...
expected the microdosing to change how they felt on measures of 18 affective states: angry, anxious, calm, cognitive functioning, craving, creative, connected, energy, focused, guilty, happy, meditative, motivated, open, sad, self-efficacy, stressed, and well. They were asked at the final visit to report whether microdosing actually did result in change in these states. Data on adverse events...
Trance is an altered state of consciousness characterized by alterations in cognition. In general, trance states induce mental silence (i.e., cognitive thought reduction), and mental silence can induce trance states. Conversely, mind-wandering is the mind's propensity to stray its attention away from the task at hand and toward content irrelevant to the current moment, and its main component is...
Mental health and wellbeing are increasingly threatened in the current post-pandemic times, with stress, especially in students, reaching preoccupying levels. In addition, while many educational programs are unidimensional (i.e., lacking integration between physical, emotional and cognitive elements), there are ways to promote physical, social and mental health in children and adolescents. In...
The healthy conscious brain is thought to operate near a critical state, reflecting optimal information processing and high susceptibility to external stimuli. Conversely, deviations from the critical state are hypothesized to give rise to altered states of consciousness (ASC). Measures of criticality could therefore be an effective way of establishing the conscious state of an individual....
I participated in Psychedemia 2012 as an attendee and Psychedemia 2022 as a speaker.The first was a formative experience: I was twenty-three years old and had never been to a scholarly meeting before that weekend.Six months later, a classmate would tell me that the main point of conferences was to inflate scholars' egos.We were in our first year of grad school, and I was beginning to realize...