This chapter examines the origins of Jewish mysticism and the Hekhalot liteature. The findings do not confirm the trend in modern scholarship which locates the origins of Jewish mysticism in the Qumran literature and wishes to see an unbroken chain of distinctly mystical ideas leading from Qumran through rabbinic Judaism to the Hekhalot literature. The result also suggests that the category of...
Given the contentiousness of the hermeneutics debate among sinologists, I will begin my analysis of Daoist embodied mysticism with a brief discussion of methodology. As J. J. Clarke has pointed out, the traditional interpretation of Daoism for the West was established by scholars who stressed a false dichotomy between philosophical and religious Daoism.
This article examines the boundaries between madness and mysticism by presenting a narrative analysis of a medieval first-hand account of madness. TheBook of Margery Kempedetails one woman’s spiritual visions and voices, and her struggle for a sense of belonging amongst different medieval communities. Part of its fame is that it is considered by some to be an early first-hand account of...
The greatest contemporary challenge in the arena of cognitive neuroscience concerns the relation between consciousness and the brain. Over recent years the focus of work in this area has switched from the analysis of diverse spatial regions of the brain to that of the timing of neural events. It appears that two conditions are necessary in order for neural events to become correlated with...
Ibn Gabirol (c.1021–c.1058), Rumi (1207–1273), and Rilke (1875–1926) each produced poetry that reflected what might be called mysticism. Some of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol and Rumi has in fact been incorporated for liturgical and devotional purposes. Rilke’s poetry, reflecting the challenges of the modern world, has been interpreted and alluded to by many artists, writers, and musicians. Ibn...
This chapter explores Kenan Gürsoy’s attempted comparison between Islamic mysticism (tasavvuf) and twentieth century French existentialism. Kenan Gürsoy is a contemporary Turkish thinker whose recent book entitled Etik ve Tasavvuf (English: Ethics and Tasavvuf ) explores similarities as well as differences between the two perspectives mentioned above. The present chapter is a sympathetic...
Book review : Turning-points in Buddhist mysticism and philosophy / Jacobus S. Kruger. ISBN: 978-0-6203-9731-5. Publisher: Aurora Press, New Mexico, pp. 192.
Contemporary research suggests that a path is now open for critical dialogue between mysticism and mental health. Data are accumulating regarding the frequency with which mystical experience occurs in the general population. Social science researchers are undertaking studies to determine whether people can knowledgably differentiate between the presence of a mystical experience and other types...
A contribution to the sixth installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” this article argues that a strong strain of quietism runs through German intellectual history, from medieval mystics such as Eckhart to the main line of modern philosophers, including Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Magee treats each of these in turn,...
People are looking for therapeutic ways to deal with the damaging rhythms and handicaps of modern life styles which threaten the physical, social and psychological endurance of human-beings. Reconsideration of "old" philosophies, ancient wisdom and spiritual/mystical paths in a contemporary context was among the solutions that were launched to overwhelm the modern sense of alienation in the...