This essay first draws upon the work of William James and others to propose a nonphysicalistic understanding of the relationship between the brain and consciousness in order to articulate a philosophical perspective that can understand entheogenic visionary/mystical experiences as something other than hallucinations. It then focuses on the Santo Daime tradition, a religious movement that began...
Entheogens or psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin are associated with mystical states of experience. Drug laws currently limit research, but important new work is under way at major biomedical research facilities showing that entheogens reliably occasion mystical experiences and thereby allow research into brain states during these experiences. Are...
This article seeks to explore the mystical approaches to suffering characteristic of both Buddhism and Christianity. Through the analysis of the meanings, the two traditions in question ascribe to suffering as a ‘component’ of mystical experience; it challenges the somewhat oversimplified understanding of the dichotomy ’sage-the-robot versus saint-the-sufferer’. Thus it contributes to the...
This article revisits a debate about the nature and function of anubhava or intuition in Advaita Vedānta. In their presentation of Indian thought to the West, neo-Vedāntins such as Vivekananda and Radhakrishnan emphasized intuitive experience as a unique means to brahmajñāna , or Brahman-realization. In so doing, they distanced themselves from the tradition’s emphasis on the role of scripture...
Meant to be an authoritative guide for psychiatrists and others interested in understanding and applying ketamine psychedelic psychotherapy (KPP), this paper focuses on its pharmacology, phenomenology, and clinical applications. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic widely used by physicians and veterinarians in the United States. In addition to its anesthetic and dissociative properties,...
Historically social work has shared a tenuous relationship with religion and spirituality. In an effort to hold onto its scientific roots, which began with the quest for professionalisation, it became suspicious of knowledge and experience that could not be fully quantified or rationally derived. It began to “distrust the language of higher transcendence, mystical connection, intuitive grasp”...
The similarity between psychotic symptoms and aspects of mystical experiences is well known. It has long been recognized that there are similarities between mystical and spiritual and psychotic experiences. The content of an experience alone usually does not determine whether an individual is psychotic. The Russian composer Scriabin (1872-1915) was among the most famous artists of his time....
For centuries, mystically inclined practitioners from various religious traditions have articulated anomalous and mystical experiences. One common aspect of these experiences is the feeling of the loss of the sense of self, referred to as “self‐loss.” The occurrence of “self‐loss” can be understood as the feeling of losing the subject/object distinction in one's phenomenal experience. In this...
Psychoactive plants have been consumed by many cultures, cults and groups during religious rituals and ceremonies for centuries and they have been influential on the eruption of the many images, secret and religious symbols, esoteric geometrical shapes, archetypes, religious figures, philosophy of religions since the dawn of Homo sapiens. Some of the psychoactive plants used for religious...
This paper examines the madness of Gerard de Nerval, the nineteenth-century French writer. It looks at his account of mental disturbance, how he responded to the psychiatric profession and how he reacted to being diagnosed as insane. It considers his autobiographical novella of madness, Aurelia, which he began at the suggestion of his alienist, Dr Emile Blanche, and while he was still an asylum...