A common theme noted among near-death experiencers (NDErs) is the affirmation of increased spirituality after their near-death experiences (NDEs). This study focused on the question of whether the Human Spirituality Scale (HSS), a commonly used spirituality measure, would exhibit a ceiling effect among NDErs. Thirty-seven participants from eight countries participated in the online study. HSS...
Unitive, mystical, or transcendent experiences; subjective perceptions of connection with God or the divine; spiritual rebirth - for biomedicine these concepts are regarded as wholly subjective, perhaps products of delusion, and thus intractable from a research standpoint. As even sociologists of religion focus their psychometric efforts elsewhere, there is little extant scholarship on...
This article examines the boundaries between madness and mysticism by presenting a narrative analysis of a medieval first-hand account of madness. TheBook of Margery Kempedetails one woman’s spiritual visions and voices, and her struggle for a sense of belonging amongst different medieval communities. Part of its fame is that it is considered by some to be an early first-hand account of...
The greatest contemporary challenge in the arena of cognitive neuroscience concerns the relation between consciousness and the brain. Over recent years the focus of work in this area has switched from the analysis of diverse spatial regions of the brain to that of the timing of neural events. It appears that two conditions are necessary in order for neural events to become correlated with...
Schopenhauer on Sense Perception and Aesthetic Cognition Bart Vandenabeele (bio) Introduction In Schopenhauer’s view, the whole organic and inorganic world is ultimately governed by an insatiable, blind will. Life as a whole is purposeless: there is no ultimate goal or meaning, for the metaphysical will is only interested in manifesting itself in (or as) a myriad of phenomena, which we call the...
It has been suggested that perception and action can be understood as evolving in temporal epochs or sequential processing units. Successive events are fused into units forming a unitary experience or "psychological present." Studies have identified several temporal integration levels on different time scales which are fundamental for our understanding of behavior and subjective experience. In...
This article considers various comparisons that can be made between Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and the Zen Buddhist tradition. It first summarizes how D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966) used the comparison between Eckhart and Zen to explain Zen to the West, and how Kyoto School member Ueda Shizuteru (1926-) interprets Eckhart's notion of the birth of God in the soul as an initial stage in a process that...
AIMS: This study was designed to evaluate the changes in EEG power spectra and EEG coherence in a ketamine model of psychosis in rats. Analyses of behavioral measurements--locomotion and sensorimotor gating--and the pharmacokinetics of ketamine and norketamine were also conducted. METHODS: Ketamine and norketamine levels in rat sera and brains were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass...
This study focuses on measuring the spirituality of alcohol and marijuana users, using the new and exclusively Czech measuring tool, the Prague Spiritual Questionnaire (PSQ). The data from 155 respondents shows that users of both marijuana and alcohol scored significantly higher in the mysticism dimension of spirituality than those who only drank alcohol. People who mentioned that the specified...
Psychedelics can enable a broad and paradoxical spectrum of linguistic phenomena from the unspeakability of mystical experience to the eloquence of the songs of the shaman or curandera. Interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion with ancestors and spirits, are relatively common. Sentient visual languages are encountered, their...