This qualitative study explored the meaning and description of profound sexual and spiritual connection among practising Christians. Investigations of the conditions and events that led to these peak encounters as well as the aftereffects of such experiences were also conducted. It was purposed that this research would enhance understanding of sexual and spiritual connection, inform theories of...
This paper summarizes the results of Integral Self Therapy in the treatment of a group of 30 patients with mild anxiety and depression, and explains the steps involved in this novel psychotherapeutic method. Integral Self Therapy (IST) is best defined as a transpersonal, nondual, psychotherapeutic method. It is a form of transpersonal psychotherapy since practitioners of IST incorporate a...
This chapter addresses the “Hard Problem” of consciousness in the context of robot emotions. The Hard Problem, as defined by Chalmers, refers to the task of explaining the relation between conscious experience and the physical processes associated with it. For example, a robot can act afraid, but could it feel fear? Using protophenomenal analysis, which reduces conscious experience to its...
SUMMARY This paper addresses three issues. In the first part the relation between consciousness and time is being discussed as it developed in the history of philosophy and theology. This covers Plato, Plotinus and St. Augustine. It continues in the second part to describe that time is being perceived in the mystical consciousness as eternity which means in this context timelessness. Examples...
The American philosopher Ken Wilber has taken on a sizeable challenge by trying to unsnarl the modern world-knot and its secular worldview. In the course of his almost forty years of predominantly solitary study (he has worked outside academia for the best part of his career) and writing, Wilber has produced a body of work that spans from consciousness studies to sociology and anthropology, to...
Shamanic phenomena have always been part of the human consciousness and modern Western shamans (neo-shamans) are seeking to (re)-claim what some would see as their (lost) heritage. The literature on neo-shamans focuses primarily on core shamanism or re-constructed shamanisms as practised in parts of Britain, the United States, and Northern or Western Europe. This chapter, an annotated...
In this article, I argue that a class of religious behaviors exists that is induced, for prepared organisms, by specific stimuli that are experienced according to a response-independent schedule. Like other schedule-induced behaviors, the members of this class serve as minimal units out of which functional behavior may arise. In this way, there exist two classes of religious behavior:...
A report is offered of the psychoanalysis of an emotionally constricted, religiously devout ko'hen, a member of the Jewish priestly class, undertaken with the author, himself a religiously committed Jew. While the analysand brought a great deal of material to his hours and was deeply committed to the analysis, the sessions were emotionally vapid, obsessively repetitious and ruminative. For more...
Book Reviews / Pneuma 31 (2009) 105-160 133 Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 328 pp. $44.95 cloth. Th e phenomenological philosopher Anthony Steinbock has written an incredibly rich book about the phenomenology of mystical experience in the Abrahamic traditions, a book that will certainly be...
Neurobiologists and cognitive scientists are engaged in new efforts to establish the brain basis of consciousness. Progress in brain imaging and in quantitative EEG recording in humans and in unit recording in animals have all contributed to this progress. But progress has been limited by the relative poverty of the paradigms used in these studies, many of which do not take subjective...