Over the past 40 years, mindfulness-based therapies (MBTs) have gained a reputation among the biomedical community for their ability to contribute to health, mental capital, and human flourishing. Recently, however, critical mindfulness scholars have questioned the moral import of MBTs, claiming that, in modernizing meditation, they strip Buddhist practices of their ethical and soteriological...
Background: Psychedelic therapy is gaining recognition and the nature of the psychedelic experience itself has been found to mediate subsequent long-term psychological changes. Much emphasis has been placed on the occurrence of mystical-type experiences in determining long-term responses to psychedelics yet here we demonstrate the importance of another component, namely: emotional breakthrough....
New research in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy merits a reexamination of the neurobiology and phenomenology of psychedelic states. First person accounts of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are used to re-conceptualize the ego boundary as a defense mechanism which regulates the significance that objects hold for the self. Therapeutic action is attributed to ego dissolution, which enables...
This article reevaluates the mystical techniques and experiences peculiar to Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah and attempts to offer an alternative approach to their dominant understanding, which largely depends on Moshe Idel’s work. Current scholars of Jewish mysticism have a habit of highlighting the “unique character” of Abulafia’s mystical practices while asserting that they cannot be compared...
Daoist mysticism is a subfield in academic areas of study including comparative mysticism, Chinese religions, and Daoist studies. Methodologies employed in it often adopt and adapt different definitions, categories, and theories formulated in contemporary Western scholarship on the subject of “mysticism” for the purpose of analyzing Daoist thinkers, texts, practices, and traditions throughout...
Spiritual consciousness can come in many forms; it can happen during moments of dance or even in poetic narrations.This article is designed to compare self -expression and spiritual development through Dance and Poetic Mysticism.The question arises, how different theoretical foundation can reach to psychological catharsis.It is supposed that a mystic journey is going to be closed with...
This article turns attention to the mystical theology of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America to demonstrate how Kushner aligns the long theological history of spiritual revelation and textual exegesis with the performative associations of camp, the stylised heightening of otherness, citation, and irony central to contemporary gay culture. Kushner’s play underscores the role of the...
Phenomenological studies suggest the existence of enhanced cognitive states, termed flow or peak experiences, in which specific cognitive processes (e.g., attention, perception) can be dramatically increased for limited durations. Here we review new scientific evidence that shows that specific types of meditation that developed out of certain religious traditions such as Vajrayana (Tantric...
The essay proposes that entheogenic mushrooms and shamanic experiences are encoded in the Khajuraho Temples of India. Erotic sculptures of Khajuraho have statues with limbs depicted in strange positions, separated from the body or with orientations that are anatomically impossible. These represent dismemberment experiences typical of shamanic and mystical initiation, a phenomenon with...
Delving into the unfolding correspondence that fills these lovingly crafted pages affords pleasure and no small dollop of prophecy as they chronicle the great friendship that manifested during the last decade of Aldous Huxley’s life and Humphrey Osmond’s most fertile period of research. Topics run from both men’s fascination with opening the doors of the mind to explore the biochemistry of...