Mystical experience has intrigued both religious and non-religious persons for centuries. Several elements of mystical experience have been identified by scholars of the psychology of religion. This essay explores those critical elements and appropriates them in developing a theological anthropology. This understanding is expanded using the framework of the mystic, Howard Thurman, who argued...
Jena Romanticism and Zen Dennis McCort (bio) But what drew him with all its power was a tall, light blue flower that stood beside the stream and touched him with its broad, glittering petals. Surrounding it were countless flowers of all colors, and the rare fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and regarded it for a long while with indescribable tenderness. Finally he...
2C-T-7 ('Blue Mystic'), an illicit compound which shows similarities with MDMA and other designer drugs, has been only occasionally identified in the EU, but discussion on the Internet between experimenters has recently grown significantly. We aimed at collecting together in a review the available information on 2C-T-7, both at the cyber and at the street market level. 2C-T-7 was first...
Reviewed by: Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present Jeremy Dauber Matt Goldish , ed. Spirit Possession in Judaism: Cases and Contexts from the Middle Ages to the Present. Raphael Patai Series in Jewish Folklore and Anthropology. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Pp. 476. On July 1, 1912, S. Anski, the noted Yiddish and Russian writer,...
The purpose of this paper is to explore theistic mysticism as exemplified by the Spanish Carmelites St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross on the one hand and some of the bhakti poet-mystics on the other. The investigations will be undertaken particularly with a view to the attitudes shown to ‘this world’, namely the material world of our day-to-day activities with all its limitations and...
Abstract This chapter classifies mystical epistemologies into five types (direct contact, post-Kantian, mediatory, radical contextualist, naturalistic), and examines two competing perspectives on mystical experience. On the one hand, radical contextualists such as Bruce Garside and Steven Katz have claimed that mystical experience is largely a product of indoctrination and enculturation and is...
Abstract The focus here is naturalistic explanations that put great weight on the functioning or malfunctioning of the brain or mind. R. C. Zaehner turned against nature mysticism and put forward several unflattering explanations. He likened extrovertive experience to the mania of manic-depressive illness, but his most promising explanation calls upon an inner mental model of the world. Freud...
Abstract The study of explanations in Part II commences with some notable transpersonal approaches to extrovertive mystical experience from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. R. M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter put forward evolutionary theories of cosmic consciousness, and Carpenter’s theory of race-consciousness and the Ideas anticipated C. G. Jung’s theory of the collective...
AbstractAlthough empty of contents, pure consciousness formed the basis of W. T. Stace’s explanation of content-rich extrovertive mystical experience, an explanation in which spirit and nature were radically separated. However, Stace’s approach is complicated by his borrowings from philosophical ideas that are not entirely harmonious, empirico-phenomenalist, Kantian, and Hegelian. The result is...
Abstract The classic characterizations of extrovertive mystical experience by R. M. Bucke, Rudolf Otto, W. T. Stace, and R. C. Zaehner are summarized and their limitations exposed. The author proceeds to give a more nuanced description of extrovertive phenomenology, based on his study of a large number of mystical accounts. Several kinds of extrovertive unity are distinguished, and details are...