Living with a Visionary

Living with a Visionary PDF Author: John Matthias
Publisher: DOS Madres Press
ISBN: 9781953252388
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his afterword, Igor Webb writes, "The lament, uttered when love and death are most closely bound, is something like an essential accessory to mortality. . . . 'Living with a Visionary' is the poet's account of his, and (and his wife) Diana's, descent into hell (from effects of Parkinson's disease). . . . But it's in 'Some of Her Things,' a fable in the form of a long prose poem, . . . that Matthias most powerfully, and poignantly, deploys his language. . . . it is a courtly threnody for lost time." Literary Nonfiction

Living with a Visionary

Living with a Visionary PDF Author: John Matthias
Publisher: DOS Madres Press
ISBN: 9781953252388
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his afterword, Igor Webb writes, "The lament, uttered when love and death are most closely bound, is something like an essential accessory to mortality. . . . 'Living with a Visionary' is the poet's account of his, and (and his wife) Diana's, descent into hell (from effects of Parkinson's disease). . . . But it's in 'Some of Her Things,' a fable in the form of a long prose poem, . . . that Matthias most powerfully, and poignantly, deploys his language. . . . it is a courtly threnody for lost time." Literary Nonfiction

Visionary Experiences Examined

Visionary Experiences Examined PDF Author: Daniel Klimek
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Experience (Religion)
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation will make a contribution to debates on mysticism and religious experiences by exploring the neuroscientific and medical studies performed on the Medjugorje visionaries and analyze what hermeneutical contributions these studies make to our understanding of extraordinary religious experiences. In June 1981, in the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina (the former Yugoslavia), five teenagers and one child reported experiencing daily apparitions of the Virgin Mary, visionary experiences. Three of the six visionaries report to continue experiencing daily apparitions as adults. Throughout the past three decades, the Medjugorje visionaries have been subjected to an extensive amount of medical, psychological, and scientific examination, even while experiencing their apparitions. An exploration of the various scientific studies related to the visionaries of Medjugorje adds to our understanding of extraordinary religious experiences and responds to the need for incorporating new, multidisciplinary approaches to the study and interpretation of religious and mystical experiences. This dissertation examines the major hermeneutical and epistemological debates surrounding the topic of religious and mystical experiences, tracing the major philosophical developments of the twentieth century. Using a constructive-relational method, this study presents and analyzes the scientific examinations on the Medjugorje visionaries in juxtaposition, for the first time, with the major scholars and hermeneutical discourses focusing on religious experience. This dissertation demonstrates that the scientific studies on the Medjugorje seers make a threefold contribution: a contribution that is epistemological, hermeneutical, and that strengthens a criteria of adequacy in discerning religious experiences. The scientific studies in Medjugorje challenge an epistemological reductionism that denigrates every extraordinary religious phenomenon, such as visionary experiences, into a pathological or natural category of interpretation. Making a contribution to the history of hermeneutical debates about mystical experiences, the scientific studies on the Medjugorje visionaries point to something more in the experiences that the visionaries undergo through empirical examination of their apparitional phenomena.

Medjugorje and the Supernatural

Medjugorje and the Supernatural PDF Author: Daniel Maria Klimek
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190679212
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Gnostic Visions

Gnostic Visions PDF Author: Luke A. Myers
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1462005470
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Gnostic texts are filled with encounters of strange other worldly beings, journeys to visionary heavenly realms, and encounters with the presence and spirit of the divine. In Gnostic visions, author and Gnostic scholar Luke A. Myers presents evidence demonstrating how Gnostic visions were created and the connection these visions have to naturally occurring visionary compounds that are still in existence today. The culmination of more than ten years of research, Gnostic Visions advances the understanding of classical ethnobotany, Gnosticism, and the genesis of early Christian history. In this book the author discusses the prehistoric foundations of early human religion as well as the visionary religious traditions of the classical Greeks and Egyptians. Using these as a foundation, the book presents new and never before seen research explaining how Gnostic visions were created and what types of compounds were used by these ancient people to create them. Gnostic Visions presents evidence directly linking visionary Ayahuasca analogs with the creation of Gnostic and Hermetic visionary experiences. Gnostic Visions also describes the decline of Gnosticism, other visionary practices used in the Dark Ages and gives a brief tour of the visionary plants of the new world. In Gnostic visions, Myers tells of his personal experience with the divine and includes some of his own reflections of the importance of mankinds relationship to the natural world. He communicates that altered states of consciousness have been responsible for many of the most profound mystical religious experiences in human history.

High Weirdness

High Weirdness PDF Author: Erik Davis
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1907222871
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 562

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

Visions from San Francisco Bay

Visions from San Francisco Bay PDF Author: Czeslaw Milosz
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374517630
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."

They Shimmer Within: Cognitive-Evolutionary Perspectives on Visionary Beings

They Shimmer Within: Cognitive-Evolutionary Perspectives on Visionary Beings PDF Author: Bruce Rimell
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0244962839
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Get Book Here

Book Description
The use of psychedelic drugs plants is rising, and with it the number of reports narrating encounters with otherworldly visionary beings. Approaches to these experiences have often been literal, archetypal or dismissive. Evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion suggest innate and non-imagistic mental foundations for these phenomena arising from easily-triggered evolutionary functions during emotive periods of high cognitive demand. Such functions include agent detection, social intelligence faculties and metacognition. This wide-ranging book explores how our deepest mental processes predispose us as humans to believe in supernatural agents, and presents a new hypothesis of how these same cognitions facilitate the emergence of those agents to become present when psychedelic drugs and plants are ingested. Bruce concludes that visionary beings shimmer within as awe-inspiring products of the mind, an experience which rests at the heart of what it is to be human.

Trials of the Visionary Mind

Trials of the Visionary Mind PDF Author: John Weir Perry
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791439876
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
A comprehensive summary of the author's revolutionary approach to psychosis.

Visionary

Visionary PDF Author: Graham Hancock
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1633412636
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 642

Get Book Here

Book Description
The latest archaeology and history redefining book from bestselling author Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods), who is featured in Ancient Apocalypse, a hit Netflix original docuseries. "With the original unabridged text of Supernatural, I offer the reader an investigation that explores the human experience with psychedelics from the Stone Age to the Space Age and the role of these extraordinary plant medicines as tools to investigate the nature of reality itself."—Graham Hancock Discover the pathway to the gods. Less than 50,000 years ago mankind had no art, no religion, no sophisticated symbolism, no innovative thinking. Then, in a dramatic and electrifying change, described by scientists as "the greatest riddle in human history," all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers. In Visionary, Graham Hancock sets out to investigate this mysterious "before-and-after moment" and to discover the truth about the influences that gave birth to modern human mind. His quest takes him on a journey of adventure and detection from the stunningly beautiful painted caves of prehistoric France, Spain, and Italy to remote rock shelters in the mountains of South Africa, where he finds a treasure trove of extraordinary Stone Age art. Hancock uncovers clues that lead him to travel to the depths of the Amazon rainforest to drink the powerful plant hallucinogen ayahuasca with Indian shamans, whose paintings contain images of "supernatural beings" identical to the animal-human hybrids depicted in prehistoric caves and rock shelters. Hallucinogens such as mescaline also produce visionary encounters with exactly the same beings. Scientists at the cutting edge of consciousness research have begun to consider the possibility that such hallucinations may be real perceptions of other "dimensions." Could the "supernaturals" first depicted in the painted caves and rock shelters be the ancient teachers of mankind? Could it be that human evolution is not just the "blind," "meaningless" process that Darwin identified, but something more purposive and intelligent, something that we have barely even begun to understand? Previously published as Supernatural, this definitive edition includes a new Introduction by Graham Hancock as well as restored chapters that were omitted from the original paperback release.

Freedom's Coming

Freedom's Coming PDF Author: Paul Harvey
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.