PEARL
2011
Diana Slattery
1 citation
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...
Science
December 16, 2010
Salvia divinorum may be this generation's answer to magic mushrooms. A hallucinogenic member of the mint family, it has been used for centuries by Mexican shamans for spiritual purposes. Within the past decade it's become popular as a legal high—at least where its use hasn't been outlawed. Now researchers at Johns Hopkins University have conducted the first human laboratory study on the plant,...
PLoS One
December 2, 2010
Gantt P. Galloway, Jennifer D. Siegrist, Lynn C. Robertson et al.
22 citations
BACKGROUND: The mechanisms of drug-induced visions are poorly understood. Very few serotonergic hallucinogens have been studied in humans in decades, despite widespread use of these drugs and potential relevance of their mechanisms to hallucinations occurring in psychiatric and neurological disorders. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We investigated the mechanisms of hallucinogen-induced visions...
Arizona quarterly/The Arizona quarterly
December 1, 2010
Ayon Maharaj
3 citations
Why Poetry Matters:The Transpersonal Force of Lyric Experience in Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos Ayon Maharaj (bio) pandars to authoritypets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,obscuring the texts with philology, hiding them under their persons,the air without refuge of silence . . . Ezra Pound, Canto 14 Recent critics in modernist studies have been eager to expose the often unsavory...
Substance Use & Misuse
December 2010
John Stirling, Lauren McCoy
52 ketamine users were "opportunistically" recruited to take part in a survey of the psychological effects of the drug, in Manchester, United Kingdom in 2008. Twenty-seven ketamine-naïve respondents were also recruited for comparison in respect of "other" recreational drug use and level of schizotypy. Ketamine users attributed a wide range of appetitive, aversive, after-effect, and dissociative...
Anthropology & Humanism
December 1, 2010
Bonnie Glass‐coffin
49 citations
SUMMARYFrom over 20 years of working with shamans and their apprentices in northern Peru and the United States, this article describes my own journey from scientist and skeptic to humanist and adept. It tells of the fundamental shift in consciousness I experienced as a result of a specific instance in which the veil between the seen and unseen worlds temporarily lifted, allowing me to engage...
Anthropology & Humanism
November 21, 2010
Bruce Greyson
66 citations
SUMMARY The ubiquitous belief that, after death, our consciousness might persist in some discarnate form is fueled in part by phenomena like near‐death experiences (NDEs) and deathbed visions, mystical experiences reported on the threshold of death. Some NDEs, called “Peak in Darien” experiences, include visions of deceased people who are not known at the time to be dead. Cases of this kind...
NeuroQuantology
November 11, 2010
D. Comings
4 citations
Spirituality is defined as a sense of being connected with something greater than oneself. That something can be a supernatural entity, nature, a social group or a family. Different studies show that a wide range of factors that influence temporal lobe function can produce hallucinations, paranormal, spiritual, mystical, and religious experiences. These factors include the electrical...
St Andrews Research Repository
November 3, 2010
Carmen Angela Cvetković
The present thesis examines the way in which two twelfth century authors, the Cistercian monks, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) and William of St. Thierry (c. 1080-1148), used Augustine (354-430) in the articulation of their mystical thought. The approach to this subject takes into account the fact that in the works of all these medieval authors the “mystical” element is inescapably entangled...
Substance Use & Misuse
November 1, 2010
Paolo Nencini, Kathleen A Grant
The recent interest in the psychopharmacological underpinnings of religious experiences has led to both the laboratory characterizations of drug-induced mystical events and psychobiological models of religious experiences rooted in evolution and fitness. Our examination of this literature suggests that these theories may be congruent only within more modern religious and cultural settings and...