Journal of Humanistic Psychology
December 18, 2014
Yochai Ataria
24 citations
This article examines the similarity between the mystical experience and the traumatic experience, the latter involving a fundamental threat to life or bodily integrity. Despite the necessary caution and reservations, there are many similarities between these two kinds of experience. Indeed, the resemblance is not restricted to a phenomenological description but is far more deeply rooted: a...
Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
September 4, 2014
Marc Malmdorf Andersen, Uffe Schjoedt, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo et al.
73 citations
We review previous attempts to study mystical experience and point to problems inherent to certain methodologies. Focusing on studies that use controlled environments we advocate taking an experimental approach to mysticism. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we report findings from a new study that probes the potential for eliciting mystical experiences in the laboratory. We find...
Religion, Brain & Behavior
April 8, 2014
Bruce Greyson, Donna K. Broshek, Lori L. Derr et al.
45 citations
Alterations of consciousness are critical factors in the diagnosis of epilepsy and seizure disorders. With this alteration in consciousness, some persons report unusual experiences that have been thought to resemble spontaneous mystical experiences. This study was designed to identify and characterize the mystical experiences associated with seizure activity, through the use of a quantitative...
March 1, 2014
Jason N. Blum
Recent evidence in neuroscience and psychology militates against the dominant theory of consciousness that has typically been used in explaining mystical experience—a neo-Kantian model that emphasizes concepts and language as the necessary foundations of consciousness. Findings in neuroanatomy, psychology, and evolutionary biology indi-cate that emotion is more fundamental to consciousness than...
Journal of Aesthetic Education
March 1, 2014
Gregory Aisemberg
Abstract In this paper, I explore how John Dewey, through an application of his antiessentialist empirical naturalism, deconstructs the essentialist phenomenology of stasis as the dialectical development of preconceived notions constructed without any reference to aesthetic-mystical experience as it is lived. I endeavor to show that the only empirically justified phenomenological...
Mental Health, Religion & Culture
February 1, 2014
Current research on mystical experience is offering community mental health professionals the opportunity to re-consider the role of love within clinical care. In psychological literature the historical conflation of love and sexuality is fraught with ethical concerns about professional impropriety, and the abuse of power. But the intimacy, intensity and beauty to be found within the...
January 31, 2014
T her e seem to be two ways to discover the nature of religious experience. One way is to appropriate the historical formulation of one religion, denomination, or school of religious thought. Another way is to start from mystical experience or Sufism. Such is the case with Sufism, the generally accepted name for Islamic mysticism. To approach its partial meaning we have to ask ourselves first,...
2014
Leslie J. Francis, M. Robbins
This study addressed two research questions among three samples of 14- to 18-year-old adolescents: 203 Muslims, 477 Christians, and 378 religiously unaffiliated young people in England and Wales. The first question examined the comparative extent to which the religiously unaffiliated reported mystical experience. The second question examined the association between mystical experience and...
Warwick Research Archive Portal
November 1, 2013
Leslie J. Francis
Since the pioneering work of William James at the dawn of the twentieth century, psychologists have been interested in the study of mysticism, with the consequence that mysticism is now the aspect of religious experience most adequately and most comprehensively discussed within the psychology of religion. The aims of this paper are threefold. First, attention is given to the detailed...
International Journal for the Psychology of Religion
October 1, 2013
Bruce Greyson
45 citations
AbstractNear-death experiences, altered states during a brush with death, may include mystical features like a sense of sacredness and divine union, timelessness/spacelessness, positive mood, noetic quality, and ineffability. We quantified mystical elements in near-death experience by comparing responses on the Mysticism Scale of 292 near-death experiencers and 34 persons who had come close to...