Psychology of Religion and Spirituality
July 27, 2015
David B. Yaden, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, H. Andrew Schwartz et al.
68 citations
Mystical experiences are often described as “ineffable,” or beyond language. However, people readily speak about their mystical experiences if asked about them. How do people describe what is supposedly indescribable? In this study, we used quantitative linguistic analyses to interpret the writings of 777 participants (45.5% female, 51.0% male) who recounted their most significant spiritual or...
July 1, 2015
Yaroslav Komarovski
This book connects the Tibetan Buddhist polemics over realization of ultimate reality with contemporary debates regarding mystical experience. It argues that realization of ultimate reality as understood by Tibetan thinkers on the one hand in significant ways resembles the category of unmediated mystical experience, and on the other challenges and suggests rethinking the very meaning of that...
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
June 21, 2015
David Bradshaw
Most characterizations of mystical experience emphasize its private, esoteric, and non-sensory nature. Such an understanding is far removed from the original meaning of the term mystikos. For the ancient Greeks, the ‘mystical’ was that which led participants into the awareness of a higher reality, as in the initiatory rites of the ancient mystery cults. This usage was taken over by the early...
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion
June 21, 2015
Tatiana Malevich
3 citations
The paper highlights the key perspectives on mysticism typical for Soviet and Post-Soviet religious studies. Recognizing the vagueness of the ‘mystical’, Soviet scholars interpreted it as a belief in ‘communication’ with ‘supernatural powers’. Furthermore, ‘mysticism’ was thought of as a multicomponent entity composed of (1) mystical experiences, (2) mystical beliefs, and (3) ‘mysticism’ as a...
April 15, 2015
Chapter Three. The Stream of Mystical Consciousness: The Character of Mystical Experience and the Way that it is Shaped as Literature in “The Guest Who Came In” was published in The Revealed and Hidden Writings of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav on page 90.
March 1, 2015
R. E. Sears
This study aimed to create and test a dream‐specific version of Hood's Mysticism (M) Scale for the purpose of studying dreaming mystical experience. Factor analysis of the Spiritual Dreams Scale (SDS), based on data collected from 289 adults affiliated with an American evangelical Christian school, clearly resulted in three factors in accordance with prior studies of the M Scale. However, the...
Journal of Psychopharmacology
February 9, 2015
Tomislav Majić, Timo T Schmidt, Jürgen Gallinat
267 citations
Interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances has recently resumed. During an early phase of human psychedelic research, their therapeutic application in different pathologies had been suggested, and the first evidence for efficacy was provided. The range of recent clinical applications of psychedelics spans from cluster headaches and obsessive-compulsive disorder to addiction...
Current Drug Abuse Reviews
January 9, 2015
Albert Garcia‐romeu, Roland R. Griffiths, Matthew W. Johnson
480 citations
Psilocybin-occasioned mystical experiences have been linked to persisting effects in healthy volunteers including positive changes in behavior, attitudes, and values, and increases in the personality domain of openness. In an open-label pilot-study of psilocybin-facilitated smoking addiction treatment, 15 smokers received 2 or 3 doses of psilocybin in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy...
2015
Karen Kuhn, A. Mickiewicz
Johanna Brandt (1876-1964) was a South African propagandist, spy, writer and prophet. She played a big role in both Afrikaner nationalism and the Anglo-Boer War. Brandt wrote several books including: The Petticoat Commando (1913) and The Grape Cure (1927). Her religious views in her books: The Millennium - A Prophetic Message to the Native Tribes of South Africa (1918) and The Paraclete or...
2015
S. Vörös
SAYING THE UNSAYABLE: MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE The article considers whether, and to what extent, mystical experience, which is supposed to be transrational (non–dualist) and therefore ineffable, can be conveyed in language. The article consists of two parts. First, drawing on the Wittgensteinian distinction between “pointing” and “saying”, it is suggested that language not only speaks,...
Linguistics