Numen
1995
Robert H. Sharf
395 citations
Abstract The category “experience” has played a cardinal role in modern studies of buddhism. Few scholars seem to question the notion that Buddhist monastic practice, particularly meditation, is intended first and foremost to inculcate specific religious or “mystical” experiences in the minds of practitioners. Accordingly, a wide variety of Buddhist technical terms pertaining to the “stages on...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1994
William P. Alston
4 citations
The central thesis of the book is that experiential awareness of God-the of God, as I call it-can provide epistemic justification for certain kinds of beliefs about God. I call such beliefs 'M-beliefs' ('M' for manifestation), beliefs to the effect that God is doing something vis-a-vis the subject-strengthening, guiding, communicating a message, etc-or to the effect that God has some...
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
December 1, 1994
William P. Alston
3 citations
Both Gale and Pappas argue that I fail to justify the claim that mystical experience is perceptual. Hence, in Gale's terms, my project derailed before it leaves the station. However, the two criticisms are rather different. Gale's is the more radical, since he seeks to show that mystical experience is not even a candidate for being a source of justification for beliefs about any objective...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1994
Thomas Natsoulas
8 citations
Quite naturally, Imagination, Cognition and Personality is the literal context of the present series of articles, which aims to examine what is known and knowledgeably held about the nature and character of the referents of William James's concept of the stream of consciousness. The sixth and seventh installments focus on selected relevant interpretations and facts from Imagination, Cognition...
Cambridge University Press eBooks
September 29, 1994
Barry Windeatt
1 citation
(Chapters 44, 45, 46) ‘This hevenly boke more precyous than golde’ is the description of The Scale of Perfection in Wynkyn de Worde's edition of 1494, the first printed text of English mystical writing and published at the behest of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. The title seems ill-suited, in that imagery of a ladder (Latin: scald) is not the unifying concept, and other titles in...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
J. L. Schellenberg
William Alston's Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) is a most significant contribution to the philosophy of religion. The product of 50 years' reflection on its topic (xi), this work provides a very thorough explication and defence of what Alston calls the ‘mystical perceptual practice’ (MP) – the practice of forming beliefs...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
L. Philip Barnes
13 citations
In a recent study entitled ‘Numinous Experience and Religious Language’, Dr Leon Schlamm has endorsed Rudolf Otto's well known and much discussed account of the relationship of religious experience to religious language, and then used this position to criticize some highly influential voices in the continuing debate on the precise nature of mystical experience. The aim of this paper, in...
Religious Studies
June 1, 1994
James W. Forgie
3 citations
In his long-awaited Mystic Union, Nelson Pike offers a phenomenology of mysticism. His account is based on the reports and descriptions of third parties, not on his own, first-person experience. So he calls his enterprise ‘phenomenography’, an attempt to describe the experiential content of conscious states by way of reports of them. Pike finds in the Christian mystical tradition three...
International Journal of Neuroscience
May 1994
Shirley Telles, R Nagarathna, Hr Nagendra et al.
Middle latency auditory evoked potentials were recorded in 18 male volunteers with ages between 25 and 45 years, 9 of whom had more than 10 years of experience in "Om" meditation (senior subjects), whereas the other 9 had no meditation experience (naive subjects). Both groups were studied in two types of sessions. (1) Before, during, and after 20 minutes of mentally repeating "one" (control...
Ceskoslovenska psychiatrie
April 1, 1994
S Grof
In this lecture, the new insights and strategies that transpersonal psychology offers will be discussed in relation to the global crisis. Western academic psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy are ethnocentric; they tend to see their point of view as being superior to the perspectives of all the other cultural groups. They are also pragmacentric in that they take into considerations only...