Asian Journal of Psychiatry
June 1, 2012
Russell Meares
Experiential evidence suggests that the main features of spiritual experience are euphoria, and a feeling of the expansion and unification of consciousness. A way towards understanding this state and how it might arise comes from a consideration of a state in which these features are lacking. Such a state is borderline personality disorder, central to which is a "painful incoherence" that is...
Journal of Religion and Health
June 1, 2012
Brick Johnstone, Guy Mccormack, Dong Pil Yoon et al.
34 citations
The objective of this article is to determine the convergent/divergent validity of the Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religiousness/Spirituality (BMMRS; Fetzer Institute & National Institute on Aging Working Group 1999) subscales by correlating it with the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) Self-Transcendence subscales (i.e., Mysticism, Transpersonal Identification,...
NeuroQuantology
June 1, 2012
Ümit Sayın
17 citations
Altered states of consciousness induced by hallucinogens (H-ASC) is still a vaguely understood phenomenon. Taken the diverse psychological effects they exert, the main mechanism of action of hallucinogens; LSD, ibogaine, THC, PCP, MDMA, methamphetamine, mescaline, psilocybin and DMT, of which psychological effects are discussed in the article, are not properly understood and explained by the...
HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies
May 21, 2012
Kees Waaijman
This article discussed the use of the Bible in mystical texts by focusing on intertextuality as a literary approach which analyses the intersection of texts. It investigated how mystical texts, as phenotexts, relate to the Bible as archetext: firstly, the intertextual relations affect the surface of the text in a mono-causal way and secondly, they govern the production of meaning reciprocally....
Brain structure & function
April 2012
Kara Kittelberger, Elizabeth E Hur, Saba Sazegar et al.
The proper organization and function of GABAergic interneuron networks is essential for many cognitive processes and abnormalities in these systems have been documented in schizophrenic patients. The memory function of the hippocampus depends on two major patterns of oscillations in the theta and gamma ranges, both requiring the intact functioning of the network of fast-firing interneurons...
Anthem Press eBooks
March 5, 2012
Vijaya Ramaswamy
1 citation
Trances, visions, speaking in many tongues, irrational social behaviour including the discarding of clothes have been widely interpreted by psychoanalysts as a psychopathological condition. However, parapsychologists are increasingly looking at the grey zone that blurs the rigidly held distinctions between psychoses and spirituality. Stanislav Grof, in his remarkable book Beyond the Brain:...
Spiritus
March 1, 2012
Lawrence S. Cunningham
1 citation
Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: An Appreciation Lawrence Cunningham (bio) Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) published her best-known work Mysticism in 1911. It has never gone out of print.1 In fact, Bernard McGinn has judged that it is one of the best-known books on Christian mysticism ever to be published in the English language.2 The year 2011 marked the one hundredth anniversary of its publication;...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
E G Milán, O Iborra, M Hochel et al.
15 citations
In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with...
PLoS One
February 17, 2012
Erich Studerus, Alex Gamma, Michael Kometer et al.
372 citations
Responses to hallucinogenic drugs, such as psilocybin, are believed to be critically dependent on the user's personality, current mood state, drug pre-experiences, expectancies, and social and environmental variables. However, little is known about the order of importance of these variables and their effect sizes in comparison to drug dose. Hence, this study investigated the effects of 24...
2012
Laura A. Cariola
Religious-mystical and psychotic altered states of consciousness (ASC) are assumed to share common phenomenological and psychobiological features, including regressive cognition and changes in body boundary awareness. This study aimed to assess the frequency and strength of associations between primordial thought language and body boundary imagery in the discourses of mystical and...