This article provides the characteristics of “dhyāna” term found in Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. Here mentions of dhyāna in the text of Patañjali are studied. The article shows that the notion of dhyāna in Yoga Sūtras has for the first time been given a philosophical underpinning in which the cognitive element of the term plays the key role. Despite a long history of study of Yoga Sūtras the...
This thesis is concerned with three fundamental questions. First, why does North American higher education minimally engage with the existential dimensions of its students (their interests and inquiries regarding the formation of their personal narratives of meaning, moral directions, and a sense of stable identity)? Second, what are the potential psychological and social consequences of such...
I applaud Singh's proposition to use evolutionary psychology to explain the recurrence of shamanistic beliefs. Here, I suggest that evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., life history theory) also can explain the variability of the distribution of shamanism. When resources are abundant, individuals become more patient and more open minded to the point that science becomes cognitively attractive and may...
The article deals with the theory of levels of religiosity proposed by one of the classics of the phenomenology of religion F. Heiler. In his works he offered a system of levels of religiosity structured from primitive to higher - mystical and prophetic - types. The article presents Heiler’s theory and summarizes the main features of the two higher types of religiosity, showing their...
Image-paradigms are non-pictorial mental images of the sacred. They are engendered in the viewer’s imagination by means of organized ensembles of iconic, symbolic and typological elements of sacred spaces and emerge from a manifold of interrelating associations. In this paper I elucidate this complex notion by studying the example of one image-paradigm of fundamental importance, namely, the...
This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to...
Emotion regulation involves a coherent relationship with the self, specifically effective communication between body, mind, and feelings. Effective emotion regulation involves the ability to accurately detect and evaluate cues related to physiological reactions to stressful events, accompanied by appropriate regulation strategies that temper and influence the emotional response. There is...
From Descartes and Cartesian mind-body dualism in the 17th century though to 21st-century concerns about artificial intelligence programming, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness presents a compelling history and up-to-date overview of this burgeoning subject area. Acknowledging that many of the original concepts of consciousness studies are found in writings of past...
Dynamic and static body postures are a defining characteristic of mind-body practices such as Tai Chi and Qigong (TCQ). A growing body of evidence supports the hypothesis that TCQ may be beneficial for psychological health, including management and prevention of depression and anxiety. Although a variety of causal factors have been identified as potential mediators of such health benefits,...
According to Thomas Metzinger, many human cognitive processes in the waking state are spontaneous and are deprived of the experience of epistemic agency. He considers mind wandering as a paradigm example of our recurring loss of epistemic agency. I will enrich this view by extending the scope of the concept of epistemic agency to include cases of depressive rumination and creative cognition,...