Download or read book Psychosis or Mystical Religious Experience written by Susan L. DeHoff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new paradigm for distinguishing psychotic and mystical religious experiences. In order to explore how Presbyterian pastors differentiate such events, Susan L. DeHoff draws from Reformed theology, psychological theory, and robust qualitative research. Following a conversation among multidisciplinary voices, she presents a new paradigm considering the similarities, differences, and possible overlap of psychotic and mystical religious experiences.
Download or read book Psychosis and Spirituality written by Isabel Clarke and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of this successful text builds on the very latest research to present an original and unique exploration of the psychology of both spirituality and psychosis. The editor brings together fascinating perspectives from a broad range of distinguished contributors. This new edition covers the most recent body of research, both qualitative and quantitative, in its exploration of the interface between psychosis and spirituality, and investigation into anomalous experiences Ten new chapters added and the remaining text completely updated New to this edition is an expanded clinical section, relevant to clinicians working with psychosis Offers a fundamental rethink of the concept of psychosis, and proposes new insights into spirituality Includes feature chapters from a distinguished list of contributors across a broad range of disciplines, including Peter Fenwick, Peter Chadwick, David Kingdon, Gordon Claridge, Neil Douglas Klotz and David Lukoff
Download or read book Psychosis and Spirituality written by Isabel Clarke and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirituality and psychosis both inhabit the region where ordinary reason ceases to function and barriers break down. The connection between them is evident - what is remarkable is how conventional thinking obscures the connection. This book challenges conventional understandings with a radical new perspective. The interface between psychosis and spirituality is explored, drawing on key research and latest developments from a wide spread of disciplines: Gordon Claridge on schizotypy, Peter Fenwick on the neuropsychological perspective, Neil Douglas Klotz on a new understanding of spirituality, Peter Chadwick on the mystical side of psychosis, David Kingdon on CBT for psychosis and religious delusions, are just five of the 12 distinguished contributors to this book. This new perspective will be important for those professionally interested in both psychosis and spirituality (therapists, priests, etc.) people seeking a well grounded framework for their own direct expererience in this area and everyone interested in the latest thinking and research on this topic.
Download or read book Insanity and Divinity written by John Gale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How close is spirituality to psychosis? Covering the interrelation of psychosis and spirituality from a number of angles, Insanity and Divinity will generate dialogue and discussion, aid critical reflection and stimulate creative approaches to clinical work for those interested in the connections between religious studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology and hagiography. Bringing together an international range of contributors and covering many different types of religious experience, this book presents its theme in three parts: Psychoanalysis, belief and mysticism Anthropology, history and hagiography Psychology, psychosis and religious experience. Each section includes discussion of the hinterland between madness and religious experience from the perspective of a number of religions, autobiographical accounts of those who have experienced a psychosis in which spirituality played a key part and a comprehensive review of the position of psychology research into the meaning and function of spirituality in relation to the psychoses. Insightful, enlightening and wide-ranging, Insanity and Divinity is ideal for clinicians, academics and chaplains working in clinical settings.
Download or read book A Philosophy of Madness written by Wouter Kusters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.
Download or read book Hearing Voices Demonic and Divine written by Christopher C. H. Cook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.
Download or read book How God Becomes Real written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.
Download or read book Acute Religious Experiences written by Richard Saville-Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages the problem of how, in the 21st century, we are to speak about experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which occur on a transhistorical and transcultural basis. Critical re-readings of seminal texts show how 20th-century theoreticians in the humanities sought to erase madness from their irrational subjects. This propensity to sanitize madness in the study of religions was mirrored by the instinct of psychiatrists to degrade religious experiences by reducing mad consciousness to psychosis or dissociation. Richard Saville-Smith introduces explanatory pluralism as a way of recognizing these disciplinary biases and mad studies as a way of negotiating this understanding. The disproportionate significance of madness in shaping the fabric of the human story can then be recovered from both erasure and dismissal to be given the recognition previously denied - as acute religious experiences. Acute Religious Experiences divides into three sections, beginning with re-readings of William James's pathological programme, Rudolf Otto's numinous, T. K. Oesterreich's possession, Mircea Eliade's shamanism, Walter Stace's mysticism, Walter Pahnke's psychedelic experience, and Abraham Maslow's peak experiences. These ideas are shown to constitute the beginnings of a fractured discourse on the irrational. In part two, contemporary psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and Foucault's History of Madness are re-read to reposition madness as not necessarily pathological. This opens the way for the identification of acute religious experiences as a new holistic and post-colonial approach through which religious data can be organized and addressed on a comparative basis. In part three, The Gospel of Mark is re-read as a case study to demonstrate the novel insights which flow from the identification of acute religious experiences. Richard Saville-Smith draws on his own experiences of madness and his PhD from the School of Divinity at The University of Edinburgh to elucidate his research.
Download or read book Psychosis Psychiatry and Psychospiritual Considerations written by Brian Spittles and published by Aeon Books. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a psychiatric perspective, psychosis is generally viewed as a psychopathological and often incomprehensible mental disorder of biological cause. In his book, Brian Spittles argues that this represents a rather limited view, and that a psychospiritual investigation of psychosis may enable a better understanding of its nature and determinants. His aim is not to negate the discipline of psychiatry, but to demonstrate the viability and efficacy of incorporating psychospiritual considerations into psychosis research. Within these pages, Spittles challenges several core psychiatric beliefs, and calls for the discipline to extend its investigative parameters beyond the limited epistemological bounds of materialism. The book uses an open-ended heuristic approach that enables the systematic examination and critical appraisal of views on psychosis across the materialist-to-metaphysical spectrum. This is structured in four 'Focal Settings' that sequentially examine the construal of psychosis within different paradigms of psychospiritual understanding, which provide a historical overview of evolving understandings of psychosis within the tradition of psychiatry, in which psychospiritual matters are generally not considered.
Download or read book Acute Religious Experiences written by Richard Saville-Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages the problem of how, in the 21st century, we are to speak about experiences of the extraordinary/anomalous/extreme which occur on a transhistorical and transcultural basis. Critical re-readings of seminal texts show how 20th-century theoreticians in the humanities sought to erase madness from their irrational subjects. This propensity to sanitize madness in the study of religions was mirrored by the instinct of psychiatrists to degrade religious experiences by reducing mad consciousness to psychosis or dissociation. Richard Saville-Smith introduces explanatory pluralism as a way of recognizing these disciplinary biases and mad studies as a way of negotiating this understanding. The disproportionate significance of madness in shaping the fabric of the human story can then be recovered from both erasure and dismissal to be given the recognition previously denied - as acute religious experiences. Acute Religious Experiences divides into three sections, beginning with re-readings of William James's pathological programme, Rudolf Otto's numinous, T. K. Oesterreich's possession, Mircea Eliade's shamanism, Walter Stace's mysticism, Walter Pahnke's psychedelic experience, and Abraham Maslow's peak experiences. These ideas are shown to constitute the beginnings of a fractured discourse on the irrational. In part two, contemporary psychiatry's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and Foucault's History of Madness are re-read to reposition madness as not necessarily pathological. This opens the way for the identification of acute religious experiences as a new holistic and post-colonial approach through which religious data can be organized and addressed on a comparative basis. In part three, The Gospel of Mark is re-read as a case study to demonstrate the novel insights which flow from the identification of acute religious experiences. Richard Saville-Smith draws on his own experiences of madness and his PhD from the School of Divinity at The University of Edinburgh to elucidate his research.
Download or read book Breaking Open written by Jules Evans and published by Aeon Books. This book was released on 2020-04-26 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal accounts exploring the shift from mental illness to spiritual awakening. The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence? "This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.' Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science
Download or read book Crazy for Life written by Victoria Maxwell and published by . This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spirit Tech written by Wesley J. Wildman, Ph.D and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a Foreword by Mikey Siegel, founder of Consciousness Hacking. Technology can now control the spiritual experience. This is a journey through the high-tech aids for psychological growth that are changing our world, while exploring the safety, authenticity and ethics of this new world. We already rely on technology to manage our health, sleep, relationships, and finances, so it’s no surprise that we’re turning to technological aids for the spiritual journey. From apps that help us pray or meditate, to cybernauts seeking the fast track to nirvana through magnetic brain stimulation, we are on the brink of the most transformative revolution in the practice of religion: an era in which we harness the power of “spirit tech” to deepen our experience of the divine. Spirit tech products are rapidly improving in sophistication and power, and ordinary people need a trustworthy guide. Through their own research and insiders’ access to the top innovators and early adopters, Wesley J. Wildman and Kate J. Stockly take you deep inside an evolving world: - Find out how increasingly popular “wearables” work on your brain, promising a shortcut to transformative meditative states. - Meet the inventor of the “God Helmet” who developed a tool to increase psychic skills, and overcome fear, sadness, and anger. - Visit churches that use ayahuasca as their sacrament and explore the booming industry of psychedelic tourism. - Journey to a mansion in the heart of Silicon Valley where a group of scientists and entrepreneurs are working feverishly to bring brain-based spirit tech applications to the masses. - Discover a research team who achieved brain-to-brain communication between individuals thousands of miles apart, harnessing neurofeedback techniques to sync and share emotions among group members. Spirit Tech offers readers a compelling glimpse into the future and is the definitive guide to the fascinating world of new innovations for personal transformation, spiritual growth, and pushing the boundaries of human nature.
Download or read book Spiritual Emergency written by Stanislav Grof and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1989-09-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Spiritual Emergency to Healing and Rebirth Increasing numbers of people involved in personal transformation are experiencing spiritual emergencies — crises when the process of growth and change becomes chaotic and overwhelming. Individuals experiencing such episodes may feel that their sense of identity is breaking down, that their old values no longer hold true, and that the very ground beneath their personal realities is radically shifting. In many cases, new realms of mystical and spiritual experience enter their lives suddenly and dramatically, resulting in fear and confusion. They may feel tremendous anxiety, have difficulty coping with their daily lives, jobs, and relationships, and may even fear for their own sanity. Unfortunately, much of modern psychiatry has failed to distinguish these episodes from mental illness. As a result, transformational crises are often suppressed by routine psychiatric care, medication, and even institutionalization. However, there is a new perspective developing among many mental health professionals and those studying spiritual development that views such crises as transformative breakthroughs that can hold tremendous potential for physical and emotional healing. When understood and treated in a supportive manner, spiritual emergencies can become gateways to higher levels of functioning and new ways of being. In this book, foremost psychologists, psychiatrists, and spiritual teachers address the following questions: What is spiritual emergency? What is the relationship between spirituality, “madness,” and healing? What forms does spiritual emergency take? What are the pitfalls — and promises — of spiritual practice? How can people in spiritual emergency be assisted by family, friends, and professionals? This groundbreaking work reveals that within the crisis of spiritual emergency lies the promise of spiritual emergence and renewal.
Download or read book The Problem of Religious Experience written by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time, the philosophically difficult topic of religious experience has been on the sidelines of phenomenological research (with a notable exception of Anthony Steinbock, who focused on mysticism). The book The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, with Reflections and Commentaries brings together preeminent as well as emerging voices in the field, with fresh views on the topic. Originating from dialogues of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, these two volumes cover a spectrum of phenomenological approaches, with a thematization of the field in the form of case studies. Contributions from theology, comparative religion, psychology and the philosophy of religion come together in the commentaries and meta-narrative written by Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (the editor). Volume I, The Primeval Showing of Religious Experience, examines religious experience with regard to its lived “interiority”, in light of the problem of the ego cogito, including the recent research on the embodiment of subjectivity and phenomenological materiality. Volume I also sheds light on religious experience in regard for the problems of its constitution, passive synthesis, the world, and otherness. Volume II, Doxastic Perspectives in the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, addresses the phenomenology of revelation, shows how different approaches treat the question of essence in religious experience (i.e., what is it that makes religious experience religious?), and demonstrates how religious experience contributes to the psychological horizon of meaning. The book identifies the “growing edges” in the phenomenological research of religious experience and is useful for psychologists, philosophers, and theologians alike. "The two volumes offer an excellent interdisciplinary introduction to the phenomenon of religious experience. The case studies presented in them are arranged under the central topics of self, alterity, revelation, and psychological aspects of religious experience and provide outstanding examples of applied phenomenology." Hans Rainer Sepp, Charles University, Prague, and Central European Institute of Philosophy "In the context of the "return of religion," this book offers both a timely and necessary contribution to confront the peculiarities of religious experience. Providing readers with applied phenomenological descriptions in an interdisciplinary spirit, these debates will prove stimulating for a resurgent field of research that is starting to refine its conceptual devices and methodological presuppositions." University of Vienna.
Download or read book Medjugorje and the Supernatural written by Daniel Maria Klimek and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1981, six young Croatians in the village of Medjugorje, in the former Yugoslavia, reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. The Medjugorje visionaries say that Mary has returned every day since then, bringing them important messages from heaven to convey to the world. Throughout history, people have reported encountering extraordinary religious experiences-apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visions of Jesus Christ, weeping statues and icons, the stigmata, physical healings and miracles, and experiences of the afterlife-and interpreted them as supernatural in origin. Scholars have often tried to reinterpret such experiences, including those described by the great mystics like Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila, into natural or psychopathological categories, such as hysteria, hallucination, delusion, epileptic seizures, psychosis, the workings of the unconscious mind, or fraud. Are such reductionist explanations valid? Over the past three decades the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to extensive medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while undergoing their visionary experiences. Daniel Klimek argues that the case of Medjugorje affords a rare opportunity to understand a deeper dimension of extraordinary religious phenomena. Presenting and analyzing the scientific studies on the visionaries in juxtaposition with the major scholars and debates surrounding religious experience, Klimek concludes that a multidisciplinary approach grants a more holistic and deeper understanding of such extraordinary religious experiences.
Download or read book The Heartland written by Nathan Filer and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful work of non-fiction and the natural sequel to his Costa Book of the Year Award-winning The Shock of the Fall.
