The Heythrop Journal
December 20, 2006
Owen Ware
8 citations
This paper explores the ambiguity in Rudolph Otto's discussion of the mysterium tremendum in order to address a broader set of difficulties in The Idea of the Holy (1917). In doing so, I outline two common criticisms of Otto's position. The first attacks Otto for not providing a secure transition from the numinous experience of terror to the holy experience of faith. The second attacks Otto for...
MLN
December 1, 2006
Stephen Vicchio
Reviewed by: On Presence: Variations and Reflections Stephen Vicchio Ralph Harper. On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. x + 132 pages. On Presence first appeared from a small press in 1991 and won the esteemed Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. It is, without doubt, the finest of Ralph Harper's thirteen books. In many ways, it is a conclusion, a...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2006
Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Religionists often presuppose that “mysticism” aims at somehow emptying the mind. In the light of evidence, however, meditation seems rather to consist of ritualized action without an explicit emphasis on subjective experience. Boyer & Lienard's (B&L's) theory of ritualized action as “swamping” working memory thus might help explain the effects of meditation without postulating experiential...
TheScientificWorldJournal
November 16, 2006
Vinod D. Deshmukh
Dhyana-Yoga is a Sanskrit word for the ancient discipline of meditation, as a means to Samadhi or enlightenment. Samadhi is a self-absorptive, adaptive state with realization of one's being in harmony with reality. It is unitive, undifferentiated, reality-consciousness, an essential being, which can only be experienced by spontaneous intuition and self-understanding. Modern neuroscience can...
Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology
November 1, 2006
Michelle R Lofwall, Roland R. Griffiths, Miriam Z Mintzer
57 citations
Ketamine is a noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist. Given the purported role of the NMDA receptor in long-term potentiation, the primary purpose of the present study was to further understand the dose-related effects of ketamine on memory. The study was also designed to provide information about the relative effects of ketamine on memory versus nonmemory effects and to more...
October 18, 2006
Arthur J. Magida
This chapter discusses the experience of Ram Dass at his bar mitzvah. Ram Dass or Richard Alpert is the epicenter of America's spiritual searchings, a teacher, eloquent guide, and agile translator of Eastern thought into American practice. Since the 1960s, he has helped shape Americans' attitudes toward consciousness, faith, drugs, religion, and mysticism, giving them perspective and a...
Journal of Religion & Film
October 1, 2006
Abstract Recognized as a masterpiece of French cinema, Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) dramatizes a young priest's encounters with grace during the months he spends in his first parish in the rural village of Ambricourt. During this time, the priest keeps a journal in which he records both the outer events of his life in Ambricourt and his inner experiences of a transcendent...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
August 17, 2006
Ron Kupers, Arnaud Fumal, Alain Maertens De Noordhout et al.
After loss of a particular sensory channel, the deprived cortex can be activated by inputs from other sensory modalities. It is not known whether activation of the rewired cortex evokes subjective experiences characteristic of that cortex or consistent with the rerouted sensory information. In a previous study, blind subjects were trained to perform visual tasks with a tongue display unit, a...
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
July 1, 2006
Charles Savage
4 citations
The book is a collection of interviews and the distilled wisdom obtained between late 1996 and mid-1998, updated and edited by eminent psychiatrists, Professors Roger Walsh and Charles Grob. The alliteratively poetic title in lower case, in green and blue with a colorful psychedelic logo, contrasts with the ashen photographs of all the participants. The book will evoke nostalgia in anyone who...
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
June 2, 2006
Bruce Greyson
91 citations
Abstract. Some individuals when they come close to death report having experiences that they interpret as spiritual or religious. These so‐called near‐death experiences (NDEs) often include a sense of separation from the physical body and encounters with religious figures and a mystical or divine presence. They share with mystical experiences a sense of cosmic unity or oneness, transcendence of...