ABSTRACT Intense aesthetic experiences are among the most complex responses arising from the interaction of mind, brain, and context. Observations from fMRI suggest that when viewers feel highly moved by artworks, the underlying neural states differ from those accompanying less intense responses, particularly through recruitment of the DMN. Using electroencephalography and Bayesian...
It is clear that when we love, we feel happy, and when we hate, we feel miserable. Many wise Sufi poets and thinkers believed that living a good life means being happy, and the best way to achieve this happiness is through love, faith, and kindness. They thought that the highest form of life is a life filled with love and spiritual devotion. Love, profoundly simple yet infinitely complex, has...
Abstract The Other Condition is a type of experience. It is a way of experiencing the world that is very different from the way we normally experience the world. And a much more valuable one. This Other Condition is what we find ourselves in when we have aesthetic experiences, but also when we have a mystical experience or if we are in what he calls the “ardour of love” (Musil 1925/1990, p....
Abstract This chapter examines the debate surrounding the common core thesis of mystical experience by situating contemporary empirical psychology within the longer intellectual history of psychology, philosophy, and theology. It traces how William James and Walter Stace defend the distinction between experience and interpretation, establishing a foundation for a cross-cultural,...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during sleep involve a transient disruption of bodily self-consciousness, in which the self or center of awareness is experienced as displaced from the physical body. Although OBEs have been reported in neurological, psychiatric, and dissociative contexts, they also occur in non-clinical populations, raising the question of whether their altered-self phenomenology...
Background: Despite the rapid growth of psychedelic research, limited attention has been given to how psychedelics are used, experienced and integrated within highly conservative religious communities, and in Jewish contexts more broadly. This study addresses this gap by examining ayahuasca use among the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, a highly religious, conservative, and collectivist...
The concept of wali majdzub constitutes one of the most controversial themes in the Islamic mystical tradition due to its association with spiritual experiences considered to transcend rational consciousness and, at times, appear inconsistent with the outward norms of Islamic law (shari‘a). Some Sufi scholars regard the wali majdzub as a chosen servant of God who receives direct spiritual...
There are empirical studies on both the cognitive and performative outcomes of learning via VR and the affective aspects of the use of VR in learning. Studies on affective outcomes in relation to the learning object, such as the attitude towards it or the atmospheric effect of a visited environment on the students, are still pending. This desideratum of educational research is addressed in this...
Sleep remains a complex and only partially understood neurophysiological process, with current theories often fragmented across electrophysiological, metabolic, and phenomenological domains. In this paper, we propose an advanced and integrative framework that conceptualizes rapid eye movement (REM) sleep as a state in which the brain constructs a provisional dummy model of the external world....
The human desire to survive death is not new. Religious traditions, philosophical systems, memorial practices, and popular culture have long offered ways of imagining continuity beyond biological life, whether through heaven, reincarnation, ancestral presence, symbolic immortality, or cultural remembrance (Bhargava; Cave; Iglesias et al.; Lifton; Nairn; Nairn and Matthews). What is changing,...