Cultural U-Turns in Mental Well-Being: Acknowledging the Dilemma – Tobert, 2018
I wrote this article to acknowledge our dilemma between challenging frameworks of knowledge, to explore the gap between different perspectives, and to suggest that we need a cultural U-turn toward more sensitive training in our educational institutions.
Death and Rebirth in LSD Therapy: An Autobiographical Study – Bache, 2015
This article explores the dynamic of death and rebirth in LSD therapy beyond ego-death. Drawing upon my experience in 73 high dose LSD sessions conducted between 1979 and 1999, it asks three questions: (1) Why does death become as large as it sometimes does in psychedelic therapy? (2) Why does death repeat itself so many times? And (3) what is actually dying and being reborn in this extended transformative process?
Perspective Awareness and Postmortem Survival – Braude, 2009
Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. However, critics can’t simply beg the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary.
Personal Identity and Postmortem Survival – Braude, 2005
As many have noted, what is often called the "problem" of personal identity can be understood either as a metaphysical issue or as an epistemological (and somewhat more practical) issue. Metaphysicians typically want to know what it is for one individual to be the same person as another.
Parapsychological Phenomena as Examples of Generalized Nonlocal Correlations – Walach et al., 2014
We will analyze the standard paradigms of PSI-research along those lines and describe how they can be reconceptualized as instances of such generalized nonlocal correlations. A direct consequence of this conceptual framework is that misrepresentations of these phenomena as local causes, as is done in direct experimentation, is bound to fail long-term. Strategies to escape this problem are discussed.
On Some Essential Requirements for a Fruitful Consciousness Research – AK Mukhopadhyay, 2014
By weaving several novel ideas in series, in parallel and at multiple levels overarching several disciplines, a distinct roadmap has been drawn for a dispassionate consciousness research. Several workable propositions in the paper, interdisciplinary in its true sense, might lead to opening of multiple new doors of science.
Non-Observable Influential(s) in the Domain of Consciousness – AK Mukhopadhyay, 2013
There are non-observable factors, which influence behavior of a living system at the observable level. If science has to be expanded beyond Planck’s scale of measurement, then these non-observable influential(s) are required to be conceptually defined, localized and described. Their operational mechanism is to be explored.
Near-Death Experiences The Last Word – Alexander III, 2015
Any evaluation of reports of near-death experiences must involve a mindset that is suitable to the task. These experiences challenge our understanding about the fundamental nature of consciousness, indeed of all of existence, at the most basic of levels, and if the mindset is too limited, we compromise our ability to approach the grander truth underlying our observations and attempts to understand them.
Mysticism and Psychedelics: The Case of the Dark Night – Bache, 1991
This study uses a model of consciousness derived from LSD-assisted psychotherapy to illumine an enigmatic set of painful experiences that occur on the mystic's path known in Western circles as the "dark night."
Moments of Grace – Reason, 2015
For me, moments of grace occur when, contra Pascal, the reason of the heart is at one with the reason of reason.
Kuhn, Consciousness, and Paradigms – Schwartz, 2018
The Schwartzreport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.
Is the Sacred Medicine Path a Legitimate Spiritual Path? – Bache, 2003
In the latter vision, life is deeply and inherently integrated. Though we may value our boundaries and exalt our differences, the deeper currents of life nourish the connective tissue of our collective existence.
The Participatory Turn in Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies – Ferrer & Sherman, 2008
Do we really need another 'turn' in academia and the study of religion? After all, it seems that when one or another turn has been proposed - whether linguistic, interpretive, narrative, pragmatic, or postcolonial - scholars often presented it as a kind of epistemic rupture with the past, a revolutionary paradigmatic shift that would drastically change the way the phenomena studied in their disciplines are to be approached.
How quantum brain biology can rescue conscious free will – Hameroff, 2012
Orch OR can account for real-time conscious causal agency, avoiding the need for consciousness to be seen as epiphenomenal illusion. Orch OR can rescue conscious free will.
Reincarnation and the Akashic Field – Bache, 2006
This article argues that Laszlo's concept of the Akashic Field (A-fleld) does not render the concept of reincarnation either redundant or unnecessary, that reincamation is a fact of nature, something the universe is doing at this stage of its evolution. Not only is Laszlo's theory compatible with the concept of rebirth, it actually strengthens that theory by clarifying some of the processes involved.
Reconstructing the Meaning Effect – Walach, 2014
And hence the placebo-effect, as it showed in clinical trials that were necessary to prove the specific efficacy of these interventions, was considered a nuisance and, technically speaking, error variance to be minimised. Research and clinical experience showed how powerful such effects can be in practice.
Yoga, Physics and Consciousness – Ravindra, 2004
In spite of our wish to reconcile science and spiritual insight, we are very far from even having clear questions to raise about the two approaches to reality. We wish these disciplines to be reconciled because they both appear to us to be significant and profound manifestations of the human psyche, and we imagine that somehow in modern times we have found a reconciliation.
Yoga and the Future Science of Consciousness – Ravindra, 1999
Am I primarily a body which has, in response to accidental material forces and laws, produced a mind and a sense of self which can think and which has both self-consciousness and consciousness of other people and things?
Wholistic and Healing Integrity – Benor, 2017
Wholistic healing addresses every level of our being – individually and collectively – including body, emotions, mind, relationships (with other people and the environment) and spirit. Healing that is truly wholistic includes all of these as a unity which is indivisibly interlinked.
Veterinary homeopathy and the naivety of reductionists – Foster, 2018
All that can be said about most orthodox medicines is that they work unless they don’t. The same can be said about homeopathic medicines.
Tucker, Stevenson, Weiss, and Life – Gibbs, 2017
The work of researcher Jim Tucker and regression therapist Brian Weiss on past-life memories suggests a transcendent or non-reductionist view of human life. In this view, mental life or consciousness does not entirely reduce to the neural activity of the brain, and bodily death involves a return to a nonphysical realm.
Trisula: Trident Model of Person in Indian Psychology – Rao, 2010
Acceptance of the trimorphous formula of knowing and the primacy of consciousness as an irreducible ground condition for true knowledge leads to a paradigmatic shift in understanding human nature and the different sources of information.
Transpersonal Psychology, Science and The Supernatural – Ferrer, 2017
This article critically discusses the scientific status of transpersonal psychology and its relation to so-called supernatural claims. In particular, analysis focuses on Friedman’s proposed division of labor between a ‘‘scientific’’ transpersonal psychology and ‘‘nonscientific’’ transpersonal studies.
The significance of consciousness studies and quantum physics for researching spirituality – Walton, 2017
The purpose of this paper is to argue that researchers interested in studying spirituality may benefit from paying attention to the phenomenon of consciousness. Despite consciousness being integral to human experience, it is largely ignored in research into spirituality. Yet there is evidence to suggest that the study of spirituality, and explorations of consciousness, have much to offer each other.
The Quantum Origin of the Life: How the Brain Evolved to Feel Good – Hameroff, 2017
According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, adaptations through random mutations serve an organism’s genes, the fittest genes surviving through reproductive success. However, Darwin’s theory renders consciousness epiphenomenal and illusory, leaves apparent gaps in evolution, and has been questioned as its sole guiding force.