Abstract: Grant Morrison is one of the most prolific and well-known superhero comic writers of all time. He wrote his magnum opus, The Invisibles, as a 59-issue comic book series that was published under DC comics’ Vertigo label from 1994 to 2000. At the end of the narrative humanity supposedly enters into a 5th dimensional space called the ‘Supercontext’, which Morrison has at one point...
Mysticism and schizophrenia are different categories of human existence and experience. Nonetheless, they exhibit important phenomenological affinities, which, however, remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we explore structural analogies between key features of mysticism and major clinical-phenomenological aspects of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders-i.e. attitudes, the nature of...
We consider a collection of distributed units that interact with one another through the sending of messages. Each message carries a positive ($+1$) or negative ($-1$) tag and causes the receiving unit to send out messages as a function of the tags it has received and a threshold. This simple model abstracts some of the essential characteristics of several systems used in the field of...
All human experiences, including mystical and religious ones, are the result of brain functional activity. Thanks to the study of cases of ecstatic epilepsy with structural (MRI) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET, SPECT) and neurophysiological technologies (recording and stimulation with intracranial electrodes), we now have a better knowledge of certain mental states which involve...
Religious experience can be a tool for the constitution of social subjects, the construction of symbolic meanings and values, as well as for shaping the subjectivity and corporality of the faithful. An ethnographic account and analysis of the Sufi ritual, the darb al-shish, as it was performed in the zawiya (Sufi lodge) of shaykh Mahmud in Afrin, Syria, shows how religious experience allows the...
The partial awareness hypothesis is a theoretical proposal that recently provided a reconciling solution to graded and dichotomous accounts of consciousness. It suggests that we can become conscious of distinct properties of an object independently, ranging from low-level features to complex forms of representation. We investigated this hypothesis using classic visual word masking adapted to a...
Abstrak : Ibn Taymiyyah, meski dikenal sebagai tokoh panutan radikalis salafi yang anti pembaharuan dan alergi tasawuf, ternyata merupakan inspirator kaum modernis dan juga seorang sufi. Bagaimana mungkin seorang yang anti tasawuf juga adalah seorang aktivis tasawuf ? Bagaimana posisi Ibn Taymiyyah seharusnya dipetakan? Bagaimana pula sikapnya yang terlihat kontradiktif ini dapat dijelasakan?...
The search for the basis of religious experience among neurological processes in the brain has resulted in a widespread debate within, as well as outside the academic world. The aim of this paper is to analyze to what extent a neuro-psychological theory could explain the phenomenon of religious experience. To clarify what the neuro-psychological studies of the present paper mean by the concept...
Abstract : In general, this article intends to answer a fundamental question, whether a mystical experience can or cannot be expressed through language. If the answer is positive, what kind of language can ‘formulate’ an inner space of human experience to penetrate into the heart of the most real reality? What kind of consciousness can “bring” the light of God to the ‘empirical’ world? h en how...
In this article, I will examine St. Edith Stein’s theory of religious language. Stein, who was both a professional philosopher and a mystic, and deeply rooted both in the tradition of negative theology and early phenomenology, held a peculiar version of univocity with regard to religious language. On the one hand, our concepts have something objectively in common with the thing they signify. On...