Religious experience is brain-based, like all human experience. Clues to the neural substrates of religious-numinous experience may be gleaned from temporolimbic epilepsy, near-death experiences, and hallucinogen ingestion. These brain disorders and conditions may produce depersonalization, derealization, ecstasy, a sense of timelessness and spacelessness, and other experiences that foster...
The role of some form of breathing meditation in most of the world's great mystical traditions has long been known, but few have seen much evidence for this in early Taoism. By ‘early Taoism’ I mean the formative stages of the tradition, from its mysterious origins to the completion of theHuai-nan-Tzu (139 B.C.). Perhaps scholars have seen so little evidence of meditative practice in early...
Summary The recent emergence of mystical experience in psychological literature and the burgeoning of spirituality within mainstream counselling are beginning to challenge many assumptions on which the field of counselling psychology is precariously perched. Mystical experience itself is being reported by significant numbers of clients, and a developing theory describes it as a positive and...
Abstract: Westerners who arrive in Banaras, a city in India, to conduct research, study music, or just live among Indians, waste no time in shedding the outer signs of their Western identity in favor of kurtas and pajamas. During the past century, the phenomenon of magic, which is dispersed more widely than even religion, has been attacked from various quarters. On the one side have been the...
I would like begin this talk by stressing the orthodoxy was strictly observed and prescribed by Eckhart, Shankara and Ibn Arabi. This needs be stressed at the outset since so many of their pronouncements go beyond the boundaries of religion narrowly-conceived, and thus have been taken by some as pretexts for abandoning formal religion in the name of a supra-religious mystical essence. My...
In 1962 Sidney Cohen presented the medical community with its first warning about the dangers of the drug LSD. LSD had arrived in the United States in 1949 and was originally perceived as a psychotomimetic capable of producing a model psychosis. But in the mid 1950s intellectuals in Southern California redefined LSD as a psychedelic capable of producing mystical enlightenment. Though LSD was an...
Article reviewing Christopher Bache's perinatal account of near-death experiences (NDEs) and suggesting that it does not go far enough. The author then presents a new model, bliss/abyss, derived from the study of mysticism; shows that pleasant and frightening NDEs can be accommodated within the model; and discusses the predictions that can be drawn from the new theoretical framework.
The deleterious effects of the modern divorce of spirituality and theology can and must be redressed by the revival of mystical theology, theology that is ultimately concerned with the union of God and humanity. Aquinas’Summa Theologiae provides a model of such a mystical theology, a work which is both an exhortation to contemplation and an act of contemplation. The mystical themes of the Summa...
Breaches the wall between the psychotherapeutic and the sacred as respected pioneers in the field give their vision of the synergistic potential in these two powerful traditions. Since its original publication in 1980, this book has become a classic in transpersonal psychotherapy. This new edition contains articles by the major figures in the field, including new contributions by Stanislav...
Kabbalah Refracted: Review Essay KABBALAH REFRACTED Review Essay by MarkVerman Depanment of Religion Carleton College 123 Through a SpeculumThat Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, by ElliotWolfson. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994. 452 pp. Elliot Wolfson is arguably the country's premier scholar of Jewish mysticism. Through a Speculum That Shines (hencefonh...