Lectures
March 22, 2026
R. Sultana
Hazrat Shah Niaz Ahmad Barelvi (1742–1834) was a distinguished Sufi saint, poet, and scholar of the Indian subcontinent, and the founder of the Niazi Sufi Order. Associated with the Chishti, Qadiri, Nizami, Sabri, and Naqshbandi orders, he played a vital role in preserving and transmitting the spiritual heritage of Sufism during the eighteenth century. His khanqah in Bareilly emerged as a...
Aberystwyth Research portal
March 20, 2026
Faisal Abdul-Wahhab
William Butler Yeats is one of the literary pillars of twentieth century modernism. He was interested in the mystical and mythical elements of the dominant cultures of the world. Accordingly, he interpreted history in a context that broadly negotiated with magic, the occult, theosophy, alchemy, astrology, mythology, mysticism, and religion. He was not attracted to any specific culture, even...
Aberystwyth Research portal
March 20, 2026
David Michael
This thesis embraces the disciplines of philosophy, art history and practical theology. It is concerned with the ways in which artists have endeavoured to express the numinous or point towards the Transcendent through landscape painting. The Transcendent is described as that recognition in mankind of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order...
Religions
March 20, 2026
Youngsun Yang
While Western theology typically locates omniscience in a personal Creator-God, Indian philosophy presents a notable spectrum. This article traces the dialectical arc of omniscience (sarvajñāna) across major Indian philosophical traditions, arguing that what appears as an epistemological question—“who knows everything?”—is ultimately an ontological puzzle about the nature of consciousness...
Exploring Body-Mind Interactions and Their Impact on Well-Being
March 19, 2026
Oriane Chevalier
After fourteen years of wandering across Asia, Alexandra David-Neel became the first Western woman to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa in 1924. To get there, the explorer passed herself off as an old Tibetan beggar, a metamorphosis that was not only physical but also spiritual, marking her identity and enabling her to transcend cultural boundaries. The body certainly affects the mind by...
Frontiers in Psychology
March 19, 2026
Richard W. Maxwell
Meditation research has focused primarily on secular forms of mindfulness meditation rather than spiritual forms of meditation, and rarely on devotion in meditation. This study sought to gain broader understanding of the psychological characteristics (mindfulness, mysticism, self-actualization, positive affect and negative affect) and practice characteristics (minutes per day and years of...
Journal of Religion and Theology
March 18, 2026
Julian Ungar-Sargon
1 citation
This essay reads a deceptively simple folk parable -two unborn twins debating whether life exists beyond the womb -as a compressed theological treatise on the dialectic between divine immanence and transcendence.Drawing upon the Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum, the Shekhinah traditions of Jewish mysticism, the hester panim theology of divine concealment, and the post-Holocaust theological...
JAMA Psychiatry
March 18, 2026
James I. Hudson, Harrison G. Pope
1 citation
Can a guided psychedelic experience with psilocybin successfully treat refractory depression? In other words, setting aside any simple direct biological drug effect, can psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy1 alleviate suffering via what William James would call a mystical experience?2
March 16, 2026
Frances M.M. Comper
“And while my whole heart and all my desires were engrossed in prayer and heavenly things, suddenly, I know not how, I felt within a symphony of song, and I overheard a most delightful heavenly harmony, which remained in my mind. For straightway, while I meditated, my thoughts were turned into melody of song, and for meditation J, as it were, sang songs. And that music voiced itself even in my...
March 16, 2026
Claudio Maddaloni
This section examines the relationship between spirituality and psychiatry, focusing on the distinction between spiritual emergencies (SE) and psychotic crises (PC). Mainstream psychiatry often interprets mystical or non-ordinary states of consciousness as symptoms of mental illness, attributing them to brain chemistry alterations and aiming to restore the patient to a previous “normal” state....