Research over the past several decades suggests that meaningful psychedelic experiences can engender long-term effects on subjective wellbeing. However, less research has investigated the psychological mechanisms through which these effects may emerge. In the present study, participants (N = 201) completed an online survey that retrospectively measured the acute effects of a meaningful...
The subject of the research is the approach of analytical psychology to understanding the content and meaning of mystical experience represented by religious and esoteric traditions. The purpose of the presented article is to reveal the content, directions and results of the conceptualization of religious-mystical experience within the framework of the psychological theory of religion...
Anton Boisen was a seminal figure in the psychology of religion and pastoral psychology, but scholars have remained skeptical about his theoretical contributions and have perpetuated the stigma surrounding his psychiatric diagnosis and incarceration. I argue that Boisen was a prophet, ahead of his time, and that the academy has been slow to hear his salient critiques of the psychiatric system,...
This study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-assisted therapy in patients who experienced anxiety with or without association with a life-threatening illness. The study is an investigator-initiated 2-center trial that used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2-period, random-order, crossover design with 2 sessions with either oral LSD (200 μg) or...
Psychoanalysis used to hold a critical, reductive approach towards religion. Lately, however, one can find two other approaches: adaptive and transformative. An “adaptive” psychoanalytic approach to spirituality, described in this chapter, refers to the spiritual experience as any kind of human experience, which psychoanalysis can improve and intensify. Psychoanalysis, in this sense, is not...
The Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, as reflected in ethnohistoric documents underwriting the beliefs and practices of contemporary neo-kabbalists, practitioners of shamanic Judaism, Jewitchery, and other para-Judaic spiritualities (including Hermetic Qabalah and Christian Cabala) illustrate a cosmological theory of “kabbalistic perspectivism” analogous to the Amazonian perspectivism...
Objectives Contemplative practice can occasion powerful psychological experiences. Yet few empirical studies have investigated whether their occurrence is associated with intensive meditation-based interventions. Here, we assess the prevalence of profound, meaningful, and mystical experiences in experienced meditators during a month-long insight meditation retreat compared to a control group of...
This article used a descriptive-analytical method to investigate the introvertive and extrovertive mystical experiences of Baha Walad and Laozi, based on the views of Walter Stace. Both types of gnostic experience are found in Baha Walad’s experiences, referred to metaphorically as “taste”. In extrovertive gnostic experience, God is hidden in the instinct and the reality of hidden senses and...
Abstract This chapter offers a constructive feminist reading of mystical theological texts by an influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century (Balthasar) and the lay contemplative woman who was central to much of his work (Speyr). It embraces feminist critiques of their gender essentialism and certain problematic aspects of their relationship, while proposing a feminist...
Abstract This chapter contrasts two postmodern philosophical approaches to the mysticism of ordinary life: one based on a phenomenological account of the inner experience of the flesh (Henry), the other informed by psychoanalytic, historiographic, and cultural-studies theories about the self’s relation to the other (Certeau). It argues that these interpretations of the immanence and alterity of...