Mystical Consciousness

Mystical Consciousness PDF Author: Louis Roy, O.P.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487318
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
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.

Mystical Consciousness

Mystical Consciousness PDF Author: Louis Roy, O.P.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487318
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Sacred Knowledge

Sacred Knowledge PDF Author: William A. Richards
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540914
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

Mystical Activism

Mystical Activism PDF Author: John C. Robinson
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1789044197
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
In Mystical Activism, we each hold the power to change the world right where we are. To call these "end times" is not hyperbole. We are in trouble and the signs are everywhere: extreme political divisions; xenophobic violence; enormous wealth inequity; poverty and homelessness; racism, sexism, and ageism; arms buildups and unending wars; and, most critical of all, terrifying climate disruption associated with man-made global warming. We are the cause of these dark times. Driven by left-brain beliefs, illusions and obsessions, humanity races headlong toward the collapse of civilization. Fortunately, the solution to these mounting crises also lies in the human psyche, arising from a most surprising source: the right-brain’s natural mystical consciousness. Our survival depends on whether we grasp and resolve this paradox in time.

Philosophy of Mysticism

Philosophy of Mysticism PDF Author: Richard H. Jones
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438461208
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones's inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism.

Mystical Hope

Mystical Hope PDF Author: Cynthia Bourgeault
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1561011932
Category : Hope
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
In five interwoven meditations, Mystical Hope shows how to recognize hope in our own lives, where it comes from, how to deepen it through prayer, and how to carry it into the world as a source of strength and renewal.

The Singularity of Awareness

The Singularity of Awareness PDF Author: Michael Kosok
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781410784629
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In order to comprehend the vastness and depth of the universe in which we are an expression, it is essential to understand the nature of awareness itself. Awareness turns out to be a singularity of inseparable distinctions: any aspect of the universe as content to any perceiving being as a context of awareness, while distinct, is not separable from its context, and while inseparable, is not indistinctly of one nature with its context. Now both contemporary physics and mystical theology reveal essential singularities and both thrive and develop by various forms of paradox, although expressed in different forms. It is the author's contention that both of these singularities are expressions of the root singularity of awareness itself, meaning that all subjective-spiritual states and objective space-time modalities are interwoven in a nonlinear and nonlocal way, revealing a vast and awesome multidimensional universe that is far different from bringing science and religion together as two individually developed disciplines sharing some common ground. What is required and here presented is an intrinsic dynamic of awareness revealing far ranging levels of singularity through methodology called here a "triune monadology" based on a logic of paradox.

The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough

The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough PDF Author: Jeff Carreira
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781954642126
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough, meditation and awakening teacher Jeff Carreira takes you on a journey through some of the farthest reaches of mystical revelation. For many years Jeff was a devoted spiritual seeker pursuing rigorous extremes of practice. What he experienced was a succession of extraordinary events that gradually left him free of existential doubt and perpetually open to new and higher dimensions of reality. In these pages you will explore the sacred path created by your own profound breakthroughs. You will learn how to illuminate your way forward guided only by the light of your deepest inner revelation. There comes a time on the path when you can no longer follow any preconceived notions or ideas. At this point you must autonomously step out beyond any doctrine or teaching and follow the light of your own heart's longing. In this book, you will find a source of wisdom and insight that gives you the confidence and courage to trust the truth inside yourself and uncover the path of your unique spiritual fulfillment.

Reality and Mystical Experience

Reality and Mystical Experience PDF Author: F. Samuel Brainard
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271041810
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Responding to our modern disillusionment with any claims to absolute truth regarding morality or reality, this book offers a conceptual approach for discussing absolutes without denying either the relevance of divergent religious and philosophical teachings or the evidence supporting postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. Case studies of mysticism within Advaita-Vedānta Hinduism, Mādhyamika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity demonstrate the value of this approach and offer many fresh insights into the metaphysical presuppositions of these religions as well as into the nature and value of mystical experience. Like Douglas Hofstadter's Gōdel, Escher, Bach, this book finds ultimate reality to be rationally graspable only as an eternal fugue of pattern and paradox. Yet it does not so much counter other philosophical views as provide a conceptual tool for understanding and classifying incommensurable views.

Mystical Encounters with the Natural World

Mystical Encounters with the Natural World PDF Author: Paul Marshall
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019153546X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Some experiences of the natural world bring a sense of unity, knowledge, self-transcendence, eternity, light, and love. This is the first detailed study of these intriguing phenomena. Paul Marshall explores the circumstances, characteristics, and after-effects of this important but relatively neglected type of mystical experience, and critiques explanations that range from the spiritual and metaphysical to the psychoanalytic, contextual, and neuropsychological. The theorists discussed include R. M. Bucke, Edward Carpenter, W. R. Inge, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, R. C. Zaehner, W. T. Stace, Steven Katz, and Robert Forman, as well as contemporary neuroscientists. The book makes a significant contribution to current debates about the nature of mystical experience.

Magical Consciousness

Magical Consciousness PDF Author: Susan Greenwood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317517202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
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.