In a letter written in 1927, the French writer Romain Rolland asked Sigmund Freud to analyse the ‘oceanic feeling,’ a religious feeling of oneness with the entire universe. I will argue that Rolland’s intentions in introducing the oceanic feeling to Freud were much more complex, multifaceted, and critical than most scholars have acknowledged. To this end, I will examine Rolland’s views on...
Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist...
In recent decades, embodiment has become an influential concept in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Embodiment denotes the study of the reciprocal (causal) relationships between mind and body, with the mind not only affecting the body but also vice versa. Embodied cognition comes to the fore in sensorimotor coupling, predictive coding, and nonverbal behavior. Additionally, the embodiment...
Spirituality plays a prominent role in the lives of most palliative patients whether or not they formally adhere to a specific religion and belief. As a result, the palliative care team is frequently called upon to support families who are experiencing their "dark night of the soul" and struggling to make sense of their lives during a healthcare crisis. While conventional religious practices...
This article argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how ‘brainwashing’ was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science and media,...
June 30, 2017Mohamed Safiullah Munsoor, C. Z. Sa'ari
Contemplative practices form the cornerstone of Islam and infiltrate every facet of life. These can be categorized into seven main types of practices, ranging from stillness through generative, ritual, activist, relational and creative to movement. Yet these practices are not very well known as compared to Buddhist meditation, Hindu yogic systems or Christian monastic practices. The ‘tree of...
Excerpt: What I intend to do in this paper is offer a non-exhaustive perspective on the original core aspirations, as I experienced them, behind introducing mindfulness as a practice and as a way of being into the mainstream world, initially through medicine and health care in the form of MBSR, and then—as the meme and practice took root and interest spread with increasing evidence of its...
Introduction. The complex multifaceted essence of human as a biological, psychological, social being has attracted the attention of researchers and has caused hot debates during centuries. Still now, human being, her/his nature requires a broader understanding in the context of the synthesis of long-standing philosophical, psychological, religious traditions and contemporary sciences. Purpose....
Workshops featuring or promising elements of Tantra have been on the rise in Europe and North America since the 1970s. This study attempts to define the elusive and eclectic term Tantra and explores the effects that Tantra workshops have on the peaceability, resilience and serenity of its attendees. Due to the accessibility of data, the Austria-based Institut Namasté was used as an example....
The “rationalizing interpretation” view of psychological discourse, associated with Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, has been widely influential as a reconstruction of our practices of ascribing attitudes to others, and as an account of the meaning of psychological terms. This perspective has lent support to a wider assumption in philosophy of mind, that we should think of our ordinary use...