In his book De l'habitude (Of Habit), 1838, the philosopher and archeologist Felix Ravaisson deals with the study of habit by using a broad spectrum of sources ranging from Aristotle to Butler, Leibniz, Hume, Main de Biran and Schelling, among others. The combination of these authors together with the originality of Ravaisson's own results produces a work which, though brief, has inspired some...
A new era has emerged in research on entheogens largely due to clinical trials conducted at Johns Hopkins University and similar studies sponsored by the Council for Spiritual Practices. In these notes and queries, I reflect on implications of these developments for psychological studies of religion and on what this research may mean for Christian churches in the United States. I conclude that...
Renewed research with entheogens (psychedelic substances) has been able to facilitate the occurrence of mystical forms of consciousness in healthy volunteers with a high degree of reliability. This article explores the potential significance of this development for religious scholars, especially those interested in the study of mysticism. The definition of “mystical consciousness” employed in...
Perceiving a body is a phenomenal experience completely different from experiencing a body as one's own body. Visual presentation of bodies or body parts recruits several occipitotemporal regions in the brain. Are these activations sufficient in order to change the phenomenal status of a body in one's own body? In this paper, I will review consolidated experimental evidence showing that the...
ABSTRACT In 1957, Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, a work that would galvanize debates regarding the sacredness and profaneness of mystical consciousness. In connecting psychedelically inspired, unmediated perception with mystical, and perennial, modes of understanding, Huxley, critics like R. C. Zaehner declared, elided the conditions that make mystical consciousness possible,...
Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has eluded resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects' reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended 'ensemble properties' can be detected 'for free' without decreasing working memory capacity.
Starting from the Christian concept of incarnation, seen as a theological way of posing the problem of the relationship between primary and higher consciousness, between logos and perception, the two authors link it to the studies of Sanders and Tronick's infant research, which highlight the extraordinary richness of procedural consciousness, of the prelogical and corporeal moment of our...
What neural mechanisms underlie the seamless flow of our waking consciousness? A necessary albeit insufficient condition for such neural mechanisms is that they should be consistently modulated across time were a segment of the conscious stream to be repeated twice. In this study, we experimentally manipulated the content of a story followed by subjects during functional magnetic resonance...
Entheogens or psychedelic drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin are associated with mystical states of experience. Drug laws currently limit research, but important new work is under way at major biomedical research facilities showing that entheogens reliably occasion mystical experiences and thereby allow research into brain states during these experiences. Are...