Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1998
Thomas Natsoulas
By addressing work on consciousness that has been published in this journal, I bring contemporary material to bear on my ongoing exploration of William James's stream. How do psychologists of the present day demonstrate or acknowledge the relevance of their great predecessor's introspectively grounded theses and arguments to their own work? I am considering the first fifteen volumes of...
Choice Reviews Online
February 1, 1998
35 citations
Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Religion and Reality: 1. Religion and philosophy 2. Where does the world come from? 3. The ontological argument and proof 4. Remarks on reality and religion 5. Natural theology 6. Religion and language 7. Belief in God 8. Wittgenstein on language and ritual 9. Religious practices 10. Notes on religion and reductionism 11. 'The divide' between religion and...
Journal of Analytical Psychology
1998
James S. Grotstein
In the Freudian and Kleinian conception of unconscious mental life, credence is given to the existence and functioning of peremptory instinctual drives as the putative causation of all mental life, yet they are denied an organization or a personality. It is especially when we come to the notion of how dreams are created or how the free associations of an analytic hour are orchestrated that we...
Behavioral Medicine
1998
H Walach, E Käseberg
Mind machines are said to induce relaxation and an altered state of consciousness. The influence of optical-acoustic (OAS) and electrical stimulation (ES) mind machines on general well-being, electrodermal activity, and altered states of consciousness was investigated and compared with pure rest and a placebo. Thirty participants underwent 4 conditions in random sequence: rest, placebo...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Diane Jonte-Pace
Abstract NEARLY A CENTURY after William James initiated the psychological study of mysticism with the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience, Robert Forman has returned to James’s project by issuing a call for a psychologia perennis. This “perennial psychology” would investigate mystical or nonordinary states of consciousness and the transformative processes that produce them....
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Anthony N Perovich
Abstract “SHUT YOUR EYES, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.” Plotinus, understood in the context provided by the spiritually charged atmosphere of Neoplatonism and of his own writings, here endorses the idea that an innate capacity for mystical union is possessed by all of us. (He sounds as well the frequently accompanying note in mystical writers...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
John Dourley
Abstract JUNG’ s UNDERSTANDING OF the nature and dynamic of the psyche is intrinsically religious in that the encompassing process of psychic maturation it seeks to describe has as its foundational telos, or intentionality, a movement toward a state of consciousness that can, and perhaps must, be described as mystical. “Mystical consciousness,” in this context, is taken to mean the conscious...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
G William Barnard
Abstract SEVERAL DECADES AGO, Western philosophers of religion frequently claimed that mystical experiences were the result of direct contact with an undefined, but usually vaguely Christian, Ultimate Reality. In recent years, however, a significant philosophical shift has taken place. In most contemporary philosophical discussions of mysticism, it is now almost axiomatic that mystical...
The Innate Capacity
December 4, 1997
Robert K C Forman
Abstract It is commonly observed that many, if not most, seminal religious leaders have undergone some form of mystical experiences. Less commonly known is how surprisingly widespread such experiences are; summarizing several large-scale studies, David Hay, in Religious Experience Today, concludes that nearly half-43 percent of all Americans and 48 percent of all British people-have had one or...
December 4, 1997
9 citations
Abstract This book is the sequel to Robert Forman’s well-received collection, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford, 1990). The essays in the earlier volume argued that some mystical experiences do not seem to be formed or shaped by the language system--a thesis that stands in sharp contradistinction to deconstruction in general and to the “constructivist” school of mysticism in particular,...