<p><strong>Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in certain mushrooms, has gained increasing attention for its potential therapeutic applications in mental health treatment. While clinical research highlights its efficacy in alleviating mental disorders, such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance use disorders, much remains to be known about the role of acute doses of psilocybin...
Relevance. As the psychopathology of religious experience developed in the second half of the 20th – early 21st century, a noticeable trend was the transition to a paradigm that orients psychiatric science toward a differentiated approach to religious-mystical experience. The change of paradigms requires the implementation of philosophical reflection through the prism of interdisciplinary...
Mystical experiences are powerful experiences that may have therapeutic value. Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, has shown potential to induce mystical experiences. However, little research has explored this phenomenon, particularly in treatment-resistant depression. We analyzed clinical data from 60 veterans with treatment-resistant depression receiving a total of 189 ketamine treatments....
Mystical experiences (MEs) are often profound and transformative encounters with a transcendent reality. Reported across many cultures and religions, these experiences are commonly characterized by a sense of unity, transcendence of time and space, positive mood, ineffability, and a noetic quality. Theoretical models have emphasized psychological, neurological, and sociocultural explanations to...
This paper explores the phenomenology of mystical experiences and its philosophical implications. The focus will be on defending Alston’s view that there are perceptual kinds of mystical experiences, a view that has been historically prominent. In Christian mystical tradition the most influential discussions on spiritual senses were led by Origen and respected theologians like Karl Rahner and...
Background: Psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy (PAP) is a promising treatment for various psychiatric disorders. However, the exact biological and psychological mechanisms of action of PAP remain to be determined. Examining predictors of PAP outcomes may help identify necessary processes for positive treatment outcomes. Mystical experiences are considered a key aspect of the subjective effects...
On the basis of the comparative method the differences in the religious experiences of F.M. Dostoevsky and K.N. Leontiev are explored. The author defends the thesis that it was this difference that first of all caused ideological contradictions between these thinkers, in particular, a sharp disagreement on the problem of the attainability of “universal harmony” in the world. It is shown that...
PsyArXivJune 3, 2025Jan Marius Keppel Hesselink
preprint
The rainbow body (Jalü in Tibetan Buddhism) represents a profound spiritual attainment, and it is said that the physical form dissolves into light at the time of death. This paper proposes a novel hypothesis: the visual component of the rainbow body experience, as vividly perceived in personal meditative encounters, can be understood as a complex, dynamic phosphene-movie, a vivid internal...
Mystical religious experiences typically purport to engage with the transcendent and often claim to involve encounters with spiritual entities or a detachment from the material world. Daoism diverges from this paradigm. This paper examines Daoist mystical experiences of bodily transformations and explores their epistemological implications. Specifically, we defend the justificatory power of...
This article argues that Latour’s concepts of actor-networks and modes of existence make room for a different participatory approach to mystical experiences (MEs), as well as religious experience more broadly, that interprets them as participatory events rather than as the inner experiences of an isolated subject. This alternative Latourian approach to MEs neither assumes the a priori presence...