Download or read book Mystical Consciousness written by Louis Roy, O.P. and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a philosophical account of ordinary consciousness as a step toward understanding mystical consciousness. Presupposing a living interaction between meditation and thinking, the work draws on Western and Japanese thinkers to develop a philosophy of religion that is friendly to the experience of meditators and that can explore such themes as emptiness, nothingness, and the self. Western thinkers considered include Plotinus, Eckhart, Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, and Lonergan; and Japanese thinkers referenced include Nishitani, Hisamatsu, and Suzuki. All employed centering prayer, Zen, or other forms of mental concentration. Particular emphasis is placed on the work of twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, whose writings on consciousness can inform an understanding of mysticism.
Download or read book Mysticism Mind Consciousness written by Robert K. C. Forman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-06-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an exploration of mystical texts from ancient India and China to medieval Europe and modern day America, Robert K. C. Forman, one of the leading voices in the study of mystical experiences, argues that the various levels of mysticism may not be shaped by culture, language, and background knowledge, but rather are a direct encounter with our very conscious core itself. Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness focuses on first-hand accounts of two distinct types of mystical experiences. Through examination of texts, recorded interviews, and courageous autobiographical experiences, the author describes not only the well-known "pure consciousness event" but also a new, hitherto uncharted "dualistic mystical state." He provides a thorough and readable depiction of just what mysticism feels like. These accounts, and the experiences to which they give voice, arise from the heart of living practices and have substance and detail far beyond virtually any others in the literature. The book also reexamines the philosophical issues that swirl around mysticism. In addition to examining modern day constructivist views, Forman argues that the doctrines of Kant, Husserl, and Brentano cannot be applied to mysticism. Instead he offers new philosophical insights, based on the work of Chinese philosopher of mind Paramartha. The book concludes with an examination of mind and consciousness, which shows that mysticism has a great deal to tell us about human experience and the nature of human knowledge far beyond mysticism itself.
Download or read book Awakening Mystical Consciousness written by Joel S. Goldsmith and published by Acropolis Books (GA). This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of "The Infinite Way" The timeless words of Joel Goldsmith have provided comfort to individuals from generation to generation who ultimately reach a defining moment in life when frustrated by their inability to find inner peace, they surrender and ask, "How can I experience a spiritual life in a material world?" Blending insightfulness with a refreshing simplicity of approach, Awakening Mystical Consciousness provides essential principles that enable readers to cope with the personal, community, national, and global problems that wear down the soul such as physical well-being, relationships, financial setbacks, and limitations. Special empha sis is then placed on attaining a con sciousness of spiritual empowerment that overcome and soothe common fears that engulf the world. From this enlighten ment comes the opportunity to awaken and embrace the inner peace and spiritual power that brings in its wake personal wholeness and world stability.
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 Mysticism a study in the nature and development of man s spiritual consciousness written by Evelyn Underhill and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1930-01-01 with total page 1046 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophers on Consciousness written by Jack Symes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know, more intimately than anything else, what it's like to undergo a rich world of experiences: agonizing pains, dizzying pleasures, heady rage and existential doubts. But, despite the incredible advances of physical science, it seems that we're no closer to an explanation of how this inner world of experiences comes about. No matter how detailed our description of the physical brain, perhaps we'll always be left with this same question: how and why does the brain produce consciousness? This book is a short, accessible and engaging guide to the mystery of consciousness. Featuring remastered interviews and original essays from the world's leading thinkers, Philosophers on Consciousness sheds new light on the most promising theories in philosophy and science. Beyond understanding the mind, this is a journey into personal identity, the origin of meaning, the nature of morality and the fundamental structure of reality.
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 Unwitting Mystic written by Mary Reed and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unwitting Mystic: Evolution of The Message of Love is a rare journey from Washington, DC to India and into otherworldly Divine realms in the company of God, Jesus, Buddha and a woman with no previous interest in, or understanding of, spiritual teachings. Through intimate details of profound metaphysical events and a miraculous recovery following a serious suicide attempt, this transcendent story goes beyond the borders of conflict-driven human experience to offer hope in the promise that the ever-increasing willingness to resurrecting one's own divinity is resurrecting a new love-driven consciousness throughout the world.
Download or read book Mysticism Mind Consciousness written by Robert K. C. Forman and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges the prevailing view that mystical experience is shaped by language and culture and argues that mystical experience is a direct encounter with consciousness itself.
Download or read book The Problem of Pure Consciousness written by Robert K. C. Forman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are mystical experiences formed by the mystic's cultural background and concepts, as ""constructivists"" maintain, or do mystics sometimes transcend language, belief, and culturally conditioned expectations? Do mystical experiences differ throughout the various religious traditions, as""pluralists"" contend, or are they somehow ecumenical? The contributors to this collection scrutinize a common mystical experience, the ""pure consciousness event""--The experience of being awake but devoid of intentional content--in order to answer these questions. Through the use of historical Hindu, Buddhist,
Download or read book Mysticism written by Evelyn Underhill and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of a noted British authority on mysticism, it is divided into two parts: the first provides an introduction to the general subject of mysticism and its relation to metaphysics, psychology, theology, magic, and symbolism. The second and longer part contains a detailed study of the nature and development of spiritual or mystical consciousness, including such topics as the awakening of the self, the purification of the self, voices and visions, introversion, ecstasy and rapture, the dark night of the soul, and the unitive life. An interesting appendix provides a historical sketch of European mysticism from the beginning of the Christian era to the death of Blake.
Download or read book Approaches to Consciousness written by B. Les Lancaster and published by Palgrave. This book was released on 2004-05-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consciousness, and the relation between mind and brain, is a topic of contentious debate, and increasing interest amongst both academics and students of psychology. In this text, Lancaster takes a refreshingly balanced look at consciousness, bringing in approaches from neuroscience, cognitive science, depth psychology, philosophy and mysticism. With a distinctive 'transpersonal' orientation, this text will be an invaluable authoritative overview of this subject, integrating scholarship and research from diverse areas.
Download or read book Psychology of Mystical Consciousness written by Carl Albrecht and published by Herder & Herder. This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carl Albrecht: Psychology of Mystical Consciousness is the first English translation of the ground-breaking study by the German medical doctor, psychotherapist and mystic Carl Albrecht (1902-1965), first published in 1951 as Psychologie des Mystischen Bewußtseins. The book, reprinted in Germany in 1976, 1990 and 2018, has remained untranslated to date and is now made available to international scholarship in an annotated English edition. The book offers the results of Albrecht's meticulous long-term empirical research into mystical consciousness. Albrecht's results are unique in that they derive from a pioneering methodological approach based on 'Autogenic Training', which enabled a practitioner to verbalize spontaneously what he/she is experiencing while immersed in an altered state of consciousness. These spontaneous utterances of mystical (and non-mystical) experience were concurrently recorded by Albrecht (supplemented by his own utterances recorded by a confidante) and provided him with invaluable empirical data for his detailed phenomenological analyses. The outcome was a most comprehensive, systematic psychological phenomenology of mystical consciousness informed by long-term empirical research, which is unique as regards authenticity, immediacy and scope. Unlike other empirical studies in this field, which are either based on records of mystical experience retrieved retrospectively, or derived from behaviorist research, or both, Albrecht's empirical data originate from immediate (not rationally mediated) verbal testimonies spoken by subjects while transported into a mystical state, in addition to records of great mystics from Eastern and Western mystical traditions. Psychology of Mystical Consciousness is now accessible to English-speaking scholars and scientists world-wide and will surely provide a new impetus to interdisciplinary enquiries into mysticism and the spiritual nature of man.
Download or read book The Light of Consciousness written by Richard Dewey Mann and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
Download or read book Mysticism A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness written by Evelyn Underhill and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remaining a classic in its field, this book explains first how mysticism relates to such things as vitalism, theology psychology, symbolism and magic. This treatment may seem unusual for Christian mysticism, but it relates widely to the world as we know it and the different practices therein. Part Two explores the awakening, purification and illumination of yourself and gives solid groundwork for such things as voices, visions dreams and other mystical experience.
Download or read book Magical Consciousness written by Susan Greenwood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a mind think magically? The research documented in this book is one answer that allows the disciplines of anthropology and neurobiology to come together to reveal a largely hidden dynamic of magic. Magic gets to the very heart of some theoretical and methodological difficulties encountered in the social and natural sciences, especially to do with issues of rationality. This book examines magic head-on, not through its instrumental aspects but as an orientation of consciousness. Magical consciousness is affective, associative and synchronistic, shaped through individual experience within a particular environment. This work focuses on an in-depth case study using the anthropologist’s own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. As an ethnographic view, it is an intimate study of the way in which the cognitive architecture of a mind engages the emotions and imagination in a pattern of meanings related to childhood experiences, spiritual communications and the environment. Although the detail of the involvement in magical consciousness presented here is necessarily specific, the central tenets of modus operandi is common to magical thought in general, and can be applied to cross-cultural analyses to increase understanding of this ubiquitous human phenomenon.
