Recent academic discussion of magic has largely fallen into three camps: the psychological study of magical thinking, in an effort to explain it away; the sociological or anthropological study of magical beliefs and practices, remaining agnostic about their efficacy; and some attempts to make magic presentable as a subject of serious cognitive science. The present paper presents an alternative...
Introduction There is a growing and renewed interest in the use of hallucinogenic drugs in the treatment of psychiatric disorders, especially since the FDA approval of esketamine treatment for resistant depression. The response to hallucinogenic psychedelic substances (ayahuasca, psilocybin, LSD, ketamine) in the treatment of depression and addictions calls for a theoretical explanatory model....
Using a validated and quantitative measure of mystical experience called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ30), we assessed whether and to what extent participants report mystical experiences during orgasmic meditation (OM), and to what extent that experience is correlated between the partners. In the first half of this study, we asked participants to complete the MEQ30 with a single...
Psychedelics, contemplative practice, and fasting are physiologically unrelated interventions that nevertheless converge, across cultures and centuries, on a common experiential endpoint: the mystical state. Here I propose that this convergence reflects shared disruption of a single computational architecture, the precision-weighted predictive hierarchy, through three mechanistically distinct...
Mindfulness may be defined as the non-focal awareness of consciousness as the condition of all one’s focal awareness. Cultivating mindfulness is a powerful discipline for corporate leadership development. Beyond performance enhancement, mindfulness can elicit transformative awareness of the conditions of better leadership. Mystical mindfulness—the product of mystical experience reflectively...
This study investigates whether artificial intelligence can emulate human mystical experiences through algorithmic rationality, focusing specifically on the generative mechanisms of “Perceived Sacredness” within AI-assisted tarot divination. Grounded in the original “Triadic Framework for Human-AI Spiritual Interaction,” three sequential experiments systematically examine how sacredness...
Since Marx first declared religion to be the opiate of the masses, institutions of religion and spirituality have often been resisted by scholars. The assumption of many seems to always be that religion is either a reactionary response to difficult realities or a mere illusion, delusion, or epiphenomenon of brain/social function. This paper looks at the "authentic core" of religious...
El fenómeno místico se entiende como una experiencia profunda y límite de la realidad, donde el ser humano llega a un estado de conciencia tal que trasciende los conceptos ordinarios con los que entendemos el mundo. Dicha experiencia sugiere una noción de la realidad según la cual existe un orden subyacente a los fenómenos físicos (la realidad fundamental) y diferente a los mismos, donde todo...