Download or read book Mystical Experience written by Ben-Ami Scharfstein and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reality and Mystical Experience written by F. Samuel Brainard and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responding to our modern disillusionment with any claims to absolute truth regarding morality or reality, this book offers a conceptual approach for discussing absolutes without denying either the relevance of divergent religious and philosophical teachings or the evidence supporting postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. Case studies of mysticism within Advaita-Vedānta Hinduism, Mādhyamika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity demonstrate the value of this approach and offer many fresh insights into the metaphysical presuppositions of these religions as well as into the nature and value of mystical experience. Like Douglas Hofstadter's Gōdel, Escher, Bach, this book finds ultimate reality to be rationally graspable only as an eternal fugue of pattern and paradox. Yet it does not so much counter other philosophical views as provide a conceptual tool for understanding and classifying incommensurable views.
Download or read book Mystical Experiences In 30 Days written by Keith Harary, Ph.D. and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exercises in Mystical Experiences in 30 Days by Keith Harary, PhD, and Pamela Weintraub teach readers to pay attention to subtle feelings, ideas, and capabilities just beneath everyday awareness. By shifting consciousness from mundane concerns, readers can learn to experience life from the vantage point of the sage.
Download or read book Mystical Encounters with the Natural World written by Paul Marshall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-07-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some experiences of the natural world bring a sense of unity, knowledge, self-transcendence, eternity, light, and love. This is the first detailed study of these intriguing phenomena. Paul Marshall explores the circumstances, characteristics, and after-effects of this important but relatively neglected type of mystical experience, and critiques explanations that range from the spiritual and metaphysical to the psychoanalytic, contextual, and neuropsychological. The theorists discussed include R. M. Bucke, Edward Carpenter, W. R. Inge, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, R. C. Zaehner, W. T. Stace, Steven Katz, and Robert Forman, as well as contemporary neuroscientists. The book makes a significant contribution to current debates about the nature of mystical experience.
Download or read book The Mystic Experience written by Jordan Paper and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mystic, zero, or void experience—the ecstatic disappearance of self along with everything else—is considered by those who have had it to be the most beautiful, blissful, positive, profound, and significant experience of their lives. Offering both a descriptive and a comparative perspective, this book explores the mystic experience across cultures as both a human and cultural event. The book begins and ends with descriptions of the author's own mystical experiences, and looks at self-reported experiences by individuals who do not link their experiences to a religious tradition, to determine characteristics of this universal human experience. These characteristics are compared to statements of acknowledged mystics in diverse religious traditions. The mystic experience is also situated within other ecstatic religious experiences to distinguish it from similar, but distinct, experiences such as lucid dreams, shamanism, and mediumism. Jordan Paper goes on to look at how the mystic experience has been considered in various fields, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, and comparative religious studies.
Download or read book The Mystical Mind written by Andrew B. Newberg, Eugene G. D'Aquili and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this scheme to mythmaking, ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experiences, and theology itself. Anchored in such research, the authors also sketch the implications of their work for philosophy, science, theology, and the future of religion.
Download or read book Sacred Knowledge written by William A. Richards and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.
Download or read book Mystical Experience of God written by Jerome Gellman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2001: Engaging contemporary discussion concerning the validity of mystical experiences of God, Jerome Gellman presents the best evidential case in favor of validity and its implications for belief in God. Gellman vigorously defends the coherence of the concept of a mystical experience of God against philosophical objections, and evaluates attempts to provide alternative explanations from sociology and neuropsychology. He then carefully examines feminist objections to male philosophers' treatments of mystical experience of God and to the traditional hierarchal concept of God. Gellman finds none of the objections decisive, and concludes that while the initial evidential case is not rationally compelling for some, it can be rationally compelling for others. Offering important new perspectives on the evidential value of experiences of God, and the concept of God more broadly, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers including those with an interest in philosophy of religion, religious studies, mysticism and epistemology.
Download or read book Dimensions of Mystical Experiences written by Ralph W. Hood and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2001 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Main headings: Part 1. Conceptual issues in the empirical study of mysticism. - Part 2. The measurement of mysticism. - Part 3. The quasi-experimental elicitation of mystical experience. - Part 4. Mysticism, religious orientation, eroticism and death. - Part 5. Triggers and evaluation of mystical experience. - Part 6. The veridical nature of mystical experience. - Epilogue.
Download or read book The Heart and the Fountain written by Joseph Dan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Dan is one of the world's leading authorities on Jewish mysticism. In this superb anthology, Dan not only presents illuminating excerpts from the most important mystical texts, but also delves into the very meaning of mysticism itself. Dan takes readers through the historical development of Jewish mysticism, from late antiquity to the modern period. He explores the Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition that delves into the secrets delivered by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, the emergence of Hasidism, and much more. He presents the great texts, from Hekhalot Rabbati, "The Greater Book of Divine Palaces," set in the temple in Jerusalem; to the apocalyptic vision of Abraham Abulafia in the thirteenth century; to the Zohar, perhaps the best-known volume of all. For each piece, he offers an extended introduction that deftly places the work in the context of its time and its antecedents. "Mysticism is that which cannot be expressed in words, period," Dan writes. In this remarkable volume, he guides us through that seemingly impenetrable barrier to show how the inexpressible has been expressed in some of the most profound and challenging writing in existence.
Download or read book Psychedelic Mysticism written by Morgan Shipley and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.
Download or read book Kabbalah written by Shahar Arzy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this original study, Moshe Idel, an eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism and thought, and the cognitive neuroscientist and neurologist Shahar Arzy combine their considerable expertise to explore the mysteries of the Kabbalah from an entirely new perspective: that of the human brain. In lieu of the theological, sociological, and psychoanalytic approaches that have generally dominated the study of ecstatic mystical experiences, the authors endeavor to decode the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena. Arzy and Idel analyze first-person descriptions to explore the Kabbalistic techniques employed by most prominent Jewish mystics to effect bodily reduplications, dissociations, and other phenomena, and compare them with recent neurological observationsand modern-day laboratory experiments. The resultant study offers readers a scientific, more brain-based understanding of how ecstatic Kabbalists achieved their most precious mystical experiences. The study further demonstrates how these Kabbalists have long functioned as pioneering investigators of the human self"--
Download or read book Philosophy of Mysticism written by Richard H. Jones and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones's inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism.
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Phenomenology and Mysticism written by Anthony J. Steinbock and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rūzbihān Baqlī—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and suggests that contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience.
Download or read book DMT The Spirit Molecule written by Rick Strassman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clinical psychiatrist explores the effects of DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. • A behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of psychedelic research. • Provides a unique scientific explanation for the phenomenon of alien abduction experiences. From 1990 to 1995 Dr. Rick Strassman conducted U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. DMT, a plant-derived chemical found in the psychedelic Amazon brew, ayahuasca, is also manufactured by the human brain. In Strassman's volunteers, it consistently produced near-death and mystical experiences. Many reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences, aliens, angels, and spirits. Nearly all felt that the sessions were among the most profound experiences of their lives. Strassman's research connects DMT with the pineal gland, considered by Hindus to be the site of the seventh chakra and by Rene Descartes to be the seat of the soul. DMT: The Spirit Molecule makes the bold case that DMT, naturally released by the pineal gland, facilitates the soul's movement in and out of the body and is an integral part of the birth and death experiences, as well as the highest states of meditation and even sexual transcendence. Strassman also believes that "alien abduction experiences" are brought on by accidental releases of DMT. If used wisely, DMT could trigger a period of remarkable progress in the scientific exploration of the most mystical regions of the human mind and soul.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Study of Mysticism written by Richard H. Jones and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title The purpose of this book is to fill a gap in contemporary mystical studies: an overview of the basic ways to approach mystical experiences and mysticism. It discusses the problem of definitions of “mystical experiences” and “mysticism” and advances characterizations of “mystical experiences” in terms of certain altered states of consciousness and “mysticism” in terms of encompassing ways of life centered on such experiences and states. Types of mystical experiences, enlightened states, paths, and doctrines are discussed, as is the relation of mystical experiences and mysticism to religions and cultures. The approaches of constructivism, contextualism, essentialism, and perennialism are presented. Themes in the history of the world’s major mystical traditions are set forth. Approaches to mystical phenomena in sociology, psychology, gender studies, and neuroscience are introduced. Basic philosophical issues related to whether mystical experiences are veridical and mystical claims valid, mystics’ problems of language, art, and morality are laid out. Older and newer comparative approaches in religious studies and in Christian theology are discussed, along with postmodernist objections. The intended audience is undergraduates and the general public interested in the general issues related to mysticism.
