This paper examines the epistemological, ontological and mystical aspects of St. Augustine's thought, showing how his reflection on faith, religious experience and cognition shapes a coherent vision of the human relationship with God. The central theme is the search for the light of truth, which, in Augustine's view, involves both intellectual speculation and profound spiritual experience. The...
This article examines how contemporary ideologies, techno-utopianism, dialectical materialism, mystical nationalism, and identity progressivism, reproduce gnostic structures by eliminating the constitutive tension between immanence and transcendence. The analysis carefully distinguishes between legitimate concerns (environmental conservation, social justice, technological progress) and their...
Oceanic states of consciousness-characterized by ego dissolution, unity, and timelessness-have long occupied a liminal space between psychopathology and transcendence. This paper explores these states through the interdisciplinary lens of existential neuroscience, integrating insights from psychoanalysis, existentialism, affective neuroscience, and psychedelic research. Starting with the...
Family members of ICU patients often experience significant psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and stress, which can affect their well-being and coping ability. Mindfulness meditation has shown promise in alleviating such distress, but its effect on ICU patient families remains underexplored. This quasi-experimental study evaluated the impact of a 14-day mindfulness...
Interest in and use of hallucinogens appears to be growing in the United States, yet less is known about the use of multiple hallucinogens. The aims of this study are to characterize subgroups of lifetime hallucinogen use and to identify sociodemographic correlates of these subgroups. Latent class models were fit using 2021-2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) data on a...
Spiritual and religious experiences (SREs) are common subjective phenomena related to the awareness of transcendence, which transforms one's perception of life, death and suffering. Despite the high prevalence of SREs worldwide, not enough studies have been conducted beyond Europe and North America. To fill this gap, this study investigates the prevalence of SREs in Brazil and their association...
Anomalous experiences are of particular interest to phenomenology. Such experiences include both psychopathological and mystical phenomena. Phenomenological concepts serve as valuable interpretative tools in analysing these cases. In particular, intentionality proves to be a powerful analytic framework, providing promising insights into mystical unions with the divine. In this article, I...
This paper examines recent empirical research on the psychedelic experience and makes sense of the current literature in terms of ontic structural realism, a position in the metaphysics of science which holds that relations are fundamental. This interpretation is maintained by first providing a philosophical framework for the varieties of self-transcendent experiences by implementing a notion...
Abstract Background Among the innovative treatments investigated for depression, psilocybin appears to play an extremely promising role, with several studies showing remission rates up to 70% in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) treated with protocols involving a single or double dose administration [1,2]. Psilocybin is a psychedelic compound belonging to the tryptamine class,...
Abstract This chapter describes the mechanisms behind conscious experiences, emphasizing the Neural Binding and Coherence (NBC) theory. It explores how neural representation, binding, coherence, and competition interact to create conscious phenomena. Using smell, hunger, loneliness, and self-awareness as examples, the chapter illustrates how these mechanisms contribute to component...