Two experiential phenomena, performance and feeling, were defined operationally by a model that indicated gradients and possible interrelations between phenomena (Privette, 1985). Six events characterize major gradients and interrelations: peak performance, functioning at one's best; peak experience, highest happiness; flow, intrinsic reward, identified as a sport or game; an average event,...
The varieties of psychotic LSD experiences are many. A very few may resemble a delirium, some are quite reminiscent of schizophrenia and others have an idiosyncratic quality not seen in the naturally occurring psychoses. The psychotic response to LSD is better understood than transcendent experiences because its neurochemistry and phenomenology have been worked out. Additionally, there is...
A review of the historical trends in LSD research clearly indicates that LSD and similar drugs are too powerful and unique in their psychological effects to be mistaken for and studied as just another group of psychotropic compounds. The importance of the theoretical understanding and expectations of the researchers in determining the subjective effects and results of LSD treatment is...
PROFESSOR DANIEL INGALLS is neither a sceptic nor a mystic. But it is obvious to some of us that he has sympathy for both. It may be that he has more sympathy for the sceptic than for the mystic. In my study of the history of scepticism in India I have often been struck by the following phenomenon: The outstanding and even extreme sceptical arguments are usually to be found in the writings of...
Much work on mystical experience has taken for granted a certain view about the relation between experience and its interpretation. This ‘traditional view’ has received perhaps its most explicit statement in Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy. It is a view which is attractive to proponents of the doctrine of unanimity, the doctrine (roughly put) that at the phenomenological level all mystical...
Recent criticisms of the place and function of "consciousness" in "cognitive science" are considered and rejected. Contrary to current orthodoxy subjective experience during abstract cognitive activity, especially when placed in its natural series with phenomenal accounts of so-called "altered states of consciousness," can provide unique and crucial evidence concerning just that core of...
southern coast of Brittany (fig. 1). In its fantastic configurations of grottoes, needles, and reefs formed by the incessant workings of the wind and waves, Belle-Ile offers as fine an example as any in France of that category of natural scenery that during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came to be designated as the sublime. It is not the sublime forces and forms of...
State manifestations of the trait of absorption--a trait associated with differential responsivity to hypnosis, meditation, marijuana intoxification, and electromyograph (EMG) biofeedback--were assessed to determine (a) if absorption correlates with various (sub)dimensions of phenomenological experience, and (b) if individuals of differing absorption ability experience different states of...
Is consciousness sensational inference? The Austrian Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations (1953), gives a long, deep, fascinating discussion of sensation and whether it is possible for us to compare our sensations. He also asks whether it is meaningful for a machine to have sensations. The concern is over generalizing from one's own sensation to other...
In order to find out how successful or unsuccessful Spinoza's philosophy of mind is, I will examine what Spinoza says about (1) the nature of mind, (2) its relation to the body, (3) its adequate/inadequate and true/false ideas. In doing so I will see what problems critics say he runs into and then find out if what they say about these difficulties can be resolved. If these difficulties can be...