Abstract This paper examines how contemporary Christian contemplative discourse integrates two apparently opposed construals of religious experience: relational intimacy with a divine entity and non-conceptual states of pure awareness. We argue that relational intimacy is conceptualized through warmth, connection, spatial proximity, shared will, and resonance, underpinned by a linked goal...
ABSTRACT The present study examined the relationship between naturalistic psychedelic use and two distinct forms of grandiose narcissism: admiration and rivalry . Using data from an online survey, we compared psychedelic users ( N = 630), non‐users ( N = 100) and individuals planning to use psychedelics in the future ( N = 141) on levels of admiration and rivalry. Additionally, we explored how...
Dissociative psychoactive substances (such as ketamine and PCP) present a challenge to standard models of altered states of consciousness. Unlike classical hallucinogens which enrich or distort conscious content, dissociatives induce a peculiar fragility in the construction of one’s world-model – a breakdown of the high-level coherence that ordinarily binds perception, selfhood, and meaning....
Mindfulness-based interventions have demonstrated benefits for emotional regulation, psychological resilience, and well-being, yet the structural mechanisms through which mindfulness produces sustained transformation remain insufficiently articulated. Existing explanations—attention regulation, body awareness, decentring, emotion regulation, neuroplasticity—are typically presented as parallel...
Serotonergic psychedelics are advancing as psychiatric treatments, yet acute responses vary between individuals and the contribution of sex, a fundamental biological variable, remains largely unexamined. We pooled two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies in healthy volunteers (N = 72; 31 male, 41 female) comparing psilocybin 15 mg, 2C-B 20 mg, and LSD 50 μg. Linear mixed models tested sex...
Anomalous phenomena and associated experiential events have gained increasing scientific attention, yet the developmental organisation of such experiences across an individual’s life has rarely been examined systematically. This study presents a longitudinal analysis of a single experiencer’s encounters spanning nearly five decades, reconstructed from detailed narrative material and analysed...
The beginning of the twenty-first century has been marked by profound transformations in the ways reality, human beings, and society are understood. The rapid development of cognitive science, neuroscience, complexity theory, synergetics, quantum physics, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence has prompted a fundamental reconsideration of many traditional assumptions concerning the...
This study examines the features of religious experience in the Soka Gakkai (SG) compared with William James’s theory. Religious experiences in the SG are not as ‘mystical’ as those James describes. Daisaku Ikeda asserts that everyone should dedicate their full effort to resolving the problems they face. The doctrine of ‘voluntarily assuming the appropriate karma’ (gan-ken-o-go)...
How did religious poets contribute to ideas about religion, tolerance, and spiritual truth in the Mughal Empire? This dissertation examines the poetry of Feyżī (1547–1595), the poet laureate of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Feyżī wrote during a period in which Emperor Akbar promoted a vision of peaceful coexistence among people of different religious backgrounds, known as ṣulḥ-i kull ("universal...
Published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio), this study extends inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS)—originally proposed as a model for olfactory receptor activation—to the mammalian serotonin receptor (5-HT2A) through quantum-chemical modeling. It finds that several serotonin agonists, including LSD and DOI, share a common vibrational peak near 1500 cm⁻¹ whose intensity...