Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings: Phenomenology, Altered States, Individual Differences, and Well-Being – Jessica Corneille
Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings (SSAs) are subjective experiences characterised by a sudden sense of direct contact, union, or complete nondual merging (experience of oneness) with a perceived ultimate reality, the universe, “God,” or the divine. These profound transformative experiences have scarcely been researched, despite extensive anecdotal evidence suggesting their potential to catalyse drastic, long-term, and often positive shifts in perception, world-view, and well-being. The aims of this study were to investigate the phenomenological variances of these experiences, including the potential differences between SSAs and Spontaneous Kundalini Awakenings (SKAs), a subset of awakening experiences that the authors postulate may produce a higher likelihood of both physical and negative effects; to explore how these experiences compare to other altered states of consciousness (ASCs), including those mediated by certain psychedelic substances; and understand their impact on well-being.
Nonlocality and Exceptional Experiences: A Study of Genius, Religious Epiphany, and the Psychic – Stephan Schwartz
The paper surveys some of the most important relevant research from quantum biology, physics, psychology, medicine, anthropology, and parapsychology. It proposes that more attention should be paid to the autobiographies, correspondence, and journals of men and women to whom history unequivocally accords the designation of genius, saint, or psychic, offering examples from these sources. And it presents comparisons between ethnohistorical material and spiritual traditions, suggesting they arrive at a similar worldview. Finally, it proposes that meditation research, some examples of which are cited, be seen in the context of psychophysical self-regulation, and that it offers one powerful avenue for producing these exceptional experiences.
Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality: A Brief History of the “Sursem” Project – Edward F. Kelly
The rise of modern science, accompanied by its many technological triumphs, has led to widespread acceptance among intellectual elites of a worldview that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the world’s institutional religions.
Science and Spiritual Practices
However, Rupert immediately experienced tension between the mechanistic objectivity of the scientific approach and his own feelings for animals and plants - they were killed in order to be studied, and everything was broken down into reductionist components.
Religion as Metaphor
Subtitled ‘beyond literal belief’, this searching study steers a middle course between the Scylla of uneducated belief or religious literalism and the Charybdis of educated disbelief or fundamentalist atheism. As a sympathetic scholar of Jung, David parts company with Freud and Dawkins by maintaining that religion is in fact metaphorical rather than illusory or delusory.
Psychic Phenomena and the Brain: Exploring the Neurophysiology of PSI
In his Introduction Williams outlines the scope of his inquiry, discusses the pioneering survey achievements of the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, presents some interesting anecdotal cases, looks at the work of J.B. Rhine and surveys the range of modern neurological research into psi phenomena.
Evolution and the Transcendence of Mind – Theodore Roszak
Perhaps, then, with a bit of humility and a sense of humour, computer science can help us learn something about the mind's radically transcendent nature. After all, it is the human mind that invents artificial ones (as much for the fun as for the utility of it) and then has room left over to defy the logic or grow bored with their predictable correctness. That 'room' is the evolutionary margin of life still waiting to be explored. What computers can do represents so many routinised mental functions we can now delegate and slough off as we move forward to new ground. The machines are behind us, not ahead.
The Physics of Organisms and the Naturalistic Ethic of Organic Wholeness – Mae-Wan Ho
Participatory knowledge knows no bounds nor boundaries. There is no fragmentation into disciplines, no demarcation into secular versus sacred domains: it is at once sublime and practical. It is one, and integral to life. By living our life as parent, builder, gardener, labourer, artist, scientist, all, we participate in celebrating and creating reality.
The Issue Before Us: Reassessment of the Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science – Willis Harman
The scientific and medical communities have given a rather unfriendly reception to research in psi phenomena, dissociative states, altered states of consciousness, extraordinary healings, and other areas related to consciousness in some of its non-normal forms. This has been mainly because the meaning and significance people tended to attach to these experiences seemed to clash so directly with prevailing assumptions about the nature of scientific reality. But perhaps it is our "official" concept of reality that is wrong.
– Erwin Schrödinger
– Prof David Bohm
– Albert Einstein
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