This book connects the Tibetan Buddhist polemics over realization of ultimate reality with contemporary debates regarding mystical experience. It argues that realization of ultimate reality as understood by Tibetan thinkers on the one hand in significant ways resembles the category of unmediated mystical experience, and on the other challenges and suggests rethinking the very meaning of that...
arXiv Preprint ArchiveJune 25, 2015Alejandro Gangui, Gabriela Siracusano, Juan R. Rey-Marquez
preprint
"The Lord made me a very great favor in an imaginary vision" wrote Maria de Agreda in the seventeenth century, "His Majesty put me at the foot of a beautiful Ladder, and showed me I had to climb it." These words refer to the spiritual ascent, present in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and crystallized in the visions of prophets and Catholic saints. Genesis (18: 10-22) narrates that Jacob, going...
This article derives from a paper presented at the Philosophy of Religion and Mysticism Conference hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, May 22-24, 2014. That paper introduced theories and methods drawn from the ‘cognitive science of religion’ (CSR) and suggested future avenues of research connecting CSR and scholarship on mysticism. Towards these same ends, the present article...
The paper highlights the key perspectives on mysticism typical for Soviet and Post-Soviet religious studies. Recognizing the vagueness of the ‘mystical’, Soviet scholars interpreted it as a belief in ‘communication’ with ‘supernatural powers’. Furthermore, ‘mysticism’ was thought of as a multicomponent entity composed of (1) mystical experiences, (2) mystical beliefs, and (3) ‘mysticism’ as a...
The bipolar affective structures of brain emotional processes – namely negative and positive affects – provide ideal ways to make scientific progress on the “hard problem” of primal consciousness: wherever in subcortical brain regions one applies highly localized electrical deep brain stimulation, and obtains coherent emotional behaviors, animals treat these brain arousals as ‘rewards’ and...
The philosophy of mind employs plenty of metaphysical concepts such as “(mental) property”, “state”, “event”, “identity”, “causation”, or “supervenience”. However, it has no fully fledged metaphysical theory, let alone a generally accepted one. This flaw slows down the progress of the field in that the same old problems keep being discussed over and over without much hope of resolution....
Philosophers of mind have been arguing for decades about the nature of phenomenal consciousness and the relation between brain and mind. More recently, neuroscientists and philosophers of science have entered the discussion. Which neural activities in the brain constitute phenomenal consciousness, and how could science distinguish the neural correlates of consciousness from its neural...
In this article I set out in concise form the physicalist account of the mental I develop in Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Pereboom, 2011). I first set out a response to the knowledge and conceivability arguments against physicalism, one that features the open possibility that introspection represents phenomenal states as having qualitative features they actually lack. I then...
Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull Access‘All You Need is Love,’ Says 1960s Guru Ram DassAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:12 Jun 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.6b15AbstractA search for deeper truths along the life course occupied the psychologist who became Ram Dass.At APA’s 2015 annual meeting in...
Background. The aim of this study was to investigate the nature of the relationships between healers and their clients in Germany. Methods. An interdisciplinary research team performed semistructured interviews with healers and clients and participatory observation of healing sessions. All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using content analysis. Results. Fifteen...