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September 17, 2026 Aleksandar Uskokov
Abstract This chapter focuses on Śaṅkara’s ideas about the inquiry into Brahman through examining the relationship between knowledge, desire, and renunciation. It argues that Śaṅkara reinterprets Vedic injunctions as terminating in cognition rather than action, classifying knowledge of Brahman as prohibitory in kind and thereby independent of ritual performance. The discussion situates the...
September 17, 2026 Aleksandar Uskokov
Abstract The Epilogue argues that Śaṅkara’s enduring significance in Indian intellectual history lies not in his originality as a philosopher or his portrayal as a mystic but in his theology of liberation. While often described as a synthesizer of prior doctrines and cast as a mystic by Western and Indian scholars influenced by Otto and Schleiermacher, Śaṅkara’s project was to repudiate the...
September 17, 2026 John Curtis Gowan
Abstract In addition to his work on gifted children, child development, teacher evaluation, and creativity, John Curtis Gowan was interested in psychic phenomena related to human creativity. He developed a model of mental development extending into extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. In this presentation, The Preconscious and Its Creative Power, given at the...
September 17, 2026 Casey Rae
Abstract Chapter Five charts how psychedelic culture and the early Grateful Dead catalyzed a new American vocabulary for transformation—spiritual, aesthetic, and political—while revealing the tensions embedded in that promise. It opens with Richard Alpert’s 1966 encounter with the Dead at the Fillmore, where Primal Dead’s volatile improvisation, light shows, and collective ecstasy suggested a...
September 17, 2026 Casey Rae
Abstract Chapter Four follows the “turning wheel” of psychedelic awakening as it moved from private epiphany to collective ritual, tracing the converging paths of Ken Kesey’s Pranksters, Timothy Leary’s Millbrook circle, and the embryonic Grateful Dead. It begins with Furthur, the Day-Glo-painted Prankster bus that carried a crew of LSD-fueled experimenters across America in 1964—part road...
ادبیات عرفانی September 17, 2026 Haniye Pakravan, Ehsan Reisi
Ecstatic rituals are regarded as among the oldest religious concepts across diverse cultures. These rituals occupy a central and foundational position within certain spiritual traditions and belief systems, while in other religious or cultural contexts, they are rejected or marginalized. In several intellectual and faith-based traditions, trance is understood as a form of altered consciousness...
International Journal for the Study of New Religions September 16, 2026 WooHyun Jung
Jeffrey J. Kripal’s ten monographs—from Kālī’s Child (1995) to How to Think Impossibly (2024)—have done as much as the work of any single American scholar to put mystical, paranormal, and altered-state experiences back at the center of religious-studies inquiry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2008), in the most theoretically substantive review article devoted to that work, has charged that Kripal’s...
Routledge eBooks September 16, 2026 Kathryn Rickard
This chapter examines Doubt within Releasement Level B of the psychoanalytic model of surrender, describing a disruption in which previously organizing psychic structures no longer hold and no new organization has yet taken their place. Doubt does not appear as ordinary uncertainty but as a shift in how experience is borne, as interpretations, convictions, and orienting frameworks lose their...
Routledge eBooks September 16, 2026 Kathryn Rickard
This chapter examines Contemplation within Releasement Level B of the psychoanalytic model of surrender, describing a shift in the manner in which attention is held rather than the establishment of a reflective or stabilized state. Following the disruptions of Ecstasy and Doubt , what becomes possible is the capacity to remain with unfolding experience without immediately organizing,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) September 16, 2026 Lijo George preprint
This paper attempts to find similar grounds in the poetic mysticism of Bengali polymath nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and the metaxological metaphysics of the contemporary Irish philosopher William Desmond (b. 1951), by casting the philosopher-poet not as an autonomous master of systems, but as a peripatetic pilgrim-poet venturing toward Transcendence. Defying the historical...