Journal of Islam in Asia
December 30, 2019
Homam Altabaa, Adham Hamawiya
Literature has been a medium to express and explore the depths of human life and Truth. This is accurate of Islamic literature that has been produced across the globe over hundreds of years. This paper seeks to highlight key mystical aspects of classical Islamic literature and their relevance to world literature and culture. Mysticism is essentially understood in this context as a set of...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion
December 23, 2019
William Thompson-Uberuaga
Should Christian theology be interested in mysticism? A strong current within contemporary theology believes it should be, linking up with an older tradition holding that the mystical dimension has always formed the deepest current in the flowing river of Christianity and its theologies and doctrines, even if some have failed to recognize that. This article explores this modern current, its...
Kultura-Społeczeństwo-Edukacja
December 1, 2019
A. Wysocki
Abstract The Path of Insight is a spiritual path of Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The fundamental part consists of three elements, such like: preliminary practices, the tranquility meditation and the penetrating insight meditation. However, counted three parts one ought to perceive as aspects of one process aiming to realize of the soteriology purpose. The achievement of the nondual state has its...
Academia Open
November 28, 2019
Haydarova Hanifa Burkhanovna
This article analyzes the problem of self-education and the problem of spirituality, which is one of the central issues of mysticism and philosophy. It also provides an overview of the lustful views of a number of prominent figures of mysticism.
November 26, 2019
Alan Page Fiske
What are often called ‘mystical’ experiences of union with divinity or with nature, as well as experiences on MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) on sometimes other hallucinogenic drugs, typically consist of exceptionally strong kama muta motes. The communal sharing motives that ecstatic motes generate are so strong that they often transform identity and social relations. The phenomenology of mystical...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion
November 22, 2019
W. Parsons
The definition and meaning of mysticism have been the subject of debate for decades within academia. While in a colloquial sense its referent may be readily apparent, there is no one existing definition of the term that adequately captures the multiple, diverse phenomena that have been termed “mystical.” Genealogical studies reveal its origin in the Greek mystery religions (muo; mystikos),...
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
November 13, 2019
Michael Frishkopf
. This essay explores the universal nature of aesthetic, creative, and mystical experience, tracing some essential interrelations among the three. Enlarging upon the work of anthropologist Jacques Maquet, I speculate that “sensory fixedness” is both necessary and sufficient to achieve aesthetic experience, and that the unification of mind engendered by sensory fixedness is the essential source of...
Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies
November 13, 2019
S. Joseph
Since its publication in 1975, A Course in Miracles (ACIM) has continued to grow in popularity as a major feature of New Age spirituality. While the text of the Course is not a direct imitation of any particular form of ancient Gnosticism, A Course in Miracles represents an example of the emergence, reception, and popularity of gnosticizing trajectories of thought in the New Age movement. As a...
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
October 20, 2019
Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal
ABSTRACT The role of the image in the third part of Practice in Christianity suggests that Kierkegaard was inspired by Meister Eckhart’s and Johann Tauler’s account of detachment (Entbildung). I argue that Kierkegaard was not only indirectly influenced by Tauler through the works of the Pietistic writers, but also directly inspired by Tauler’s sermons. Particularly striking are similarities to...
Buddhist Path, Buddhist Teachings: Studies in Memory of L.S. Cousins
October 8, 2019
Rupert Gethin
1 citation
Over the last fifty years the study of mysticism has been shaped by the debate between ‘perennialists’, who claim that mystical experiences are the same across different cultures, and ‘constructivists’, who claim that mystical experiences are shaped by, and hence specific to, particular religious traditions. The constructivist view is associated with the ‘discursive turn’ that has dominated the...
Journal for Semitics
October 1, 2019
A. Evans
A striking characteristic of Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice is the lack of clarity as to when the participants are human and when angelic. Scholarly opinion has been divided on the question. Fletcher-Louis, for instance, argued for an “angelomorphic” theology in Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. Scholars regard this text as an example of mysticism at Qumran, but the root of the term “mystic” (to...
Stance: an International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
September 25, 2019
John Cooney
With the growth of epistemology, an important debate in philosophy of religion has arisen: can mystical encounters—purported feelings of intense unity with the divine—serve as epistemic warrants? In this paper, I examine two of the most prominent and promising standards by which to determine the veridicality of such encounters—those of William Alston and Richard Swinburne—and demonstrate their...
The Music Road
August 29, 2019
Reinhard Strohm
For many Persian poets, Sufis in particular, the ethereal modes through which music communicates with its listeners embodied the somatic ‘taste’ (ẕauq) of the suprasomatic divine realities. Through a dialectic of revelation and concealment—or in the Qur’anic terms often employed by the Sufis, ẓāhir and bạ̄tin, exoteric and esoteric—proper musical experience (samāᶜ) becomes both a means of...
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion
June 25, 2019
Judson B. Murray
Daoist mysticism is a subfield in academic areas of study including comparative mysticism, Chinese religions, and Daoist studies. Methodologies employed in it often adopt and adapt different definitions, categories, and theories formulated in contemporary Western scholarship on the subject of “mysticism” for the purpose of analyzing Daoist thinkers, texts, practices, and traditions throughout...
Ramus
June 1, 2019
Ella Haselswerdt
2 citations
In the medical practice of Asclepian dream incubation, dreams offered a conduit through which the divine power of the healing god could be visited upon an ailing suppliant. This practice was enough of a part of everyday life in fifth-century Athens that it achieved the dubious honor of an extended parody in Aristophanes’ Plutus . An extensive inscriptional record suggests that it continued to...
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
May 29, 2019
Meena Maillart-Garg, Michael Winkelman
21 citations
The essay proposes that entheogenic mushrooms and shamanic experiences are encoded in the Khajuraho Temples of India. Erotic sculptures of Khajuraho have statues with limbs depicted in strange positions, separated from the body or with orientations that are anatomically impossible. These represent dismemberment experiences typical of shamanic and mystical initiation, a phenomenon with...
Religions
May 16, 2019
Juliana Dresvina
The article traces potential visual sources of Julian of Norwich’s (1343–after 1416) Revelations or Showings, suggesting that many of them come from familiar everyday devotional objects such as Psalters, Books of Hours, or rosary beads. It attempts to approach Julian’s text from the perspective of neuromedievalism, combining more familiar textual analysis with some recent findings in clinical...
History of psychology
May 1, 2019
Simon Kemp
During the later Middle Ages, a number of religiously oriented people behaved in ways that we would consider unusual, yet it was unusual for them to be regarded as mentally disordered. This article reviews late medieval thinking and practice with regard to mental disorder and also with regard to the discernment of spirits, that is, how it could be decided whether an experience or impulse to do...
Mind Cure
March 28, 2019
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
This chapter explores the far-reaching influences in American religion and medicine of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic, and Franz Anton Mesmer, who developed Mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. Swedenborg’s theology filtered into homeopathy and the religious movements of Shakerism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, modernist Buddhism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and...
Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis
January 16, 2019
Carl-Martin Edsman
An evident experience of God's presence is the basis for all religion. Mysticism is considered to be piety in so far as primary importance is attached to inner religious experience, to religion as occurring in the soul. Mysticism is pure religious introversion. The special religious experience of mysticism, its epistemology and its ascetic ethics or technique, occur with startling likeness in...