Journal of Psychedelic Studies
June 19, 2023
Tra-Ill Dowie, Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
24 citations
The book "Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience" fosters a dialogue between philosophy and psychedelic studies. It examines foundational, ontological, and epistemological questions raised by psychedelic experiences, such as the hard problem of consciousness, the metaphysical nature of the self, and the aesthetic meaning of the sublime. The work explores prevailing metaphysical frameworks, epistemic belief structures, and modes of inquiry, bringing together multiple dialectics, practices, perspectives, and methods.
Journal of Consciousness Studies
February 1, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
12 citations
The project of finding neural correlates for Buddhist awakening faces serious definitional, operational, and methodological obstacles. Awakening is highly contested within and across Buddhist traditions, its meaning context- and concept-dependent, and possibly non-conceptual and ineffable. Secular operationalized definitions divorced from soteriological and cultural factors bear little relation to traditional Buddhist constructs. Introspective and neuroimaging issues further complicate secular approaches, though recent advances in empirical first-person phenomenology may help reduce introspective bias. Overall, decontextualizing awakening and placing it within a scientific naturalistic framework creates significant problems that require careful attention to these obstacles.
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
September 25, 2023
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Floren Matthews
11 citations
Psychedelics may help generate the perceptual shifts needed to imagine and pursue social transformation under alienating conditions, but their revolutionary potential risks being co-opted by economic structures. They could be instrumentalized to regulate individuals into unjust systems, redirect usage toward productivity, distract from systemic control, turn non-ordinary states into self-care, or commodify psychedelic experience. However, psychedelics also resist co-option by challenging industrial society's assumptions, provoking alternative epistemologies, expanding selfhood to ecological constructions, and offering enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world—potentially sparking the desire for collective emancipation.
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
September 21, 2023
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Tra-Ill Dowie
10 citations
A critical response to Hauskeller's monograph argues that while his socio-political critique of psychedelic psychotherapy under neoliberalism is valuable, it underestimates how psychedelics challenge reductive biomedical models. Indigenous knowledges, combined with emerging sciences, can engage ethnomedicines less harmfully and reveal how psychedelics achieve therapeutic change through transpersonal experience. This offers a revisioning of Western psychology and cognitive science, overturning deficit models of psychopathology and expanding understanding of mind-body relations. Such an approach implicitly challenges the pharmaceutical industry and neoliberal globalization.
Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia
March 27, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire
9 citations
Embodiment and mindfulness interventions offer benefits for individuals living with trauma, but their integration into group work lacks clarity. This article presents a framework for incorporating these interventions into structured resourcing groups, with guidance on a phasic, staged approach for trauma-oriented group work. These practices help participants counter experiential avoidance, reorient attention to the present moment, and increase bodily and affective self-awareness, reducing reactivity and supporting symptom stabilization, reflective ability, and self- and co-regulatory capacities needed for trauma processing. The interventions also benefit facilitator wellbeing, group cohesiveness, and norming processes. Safety considerations include contraindications for certain trauma presentations and necessary screening and exclusion criteria.
Anthropology of Consciousness
July 5, 2024
Julien Tempone-Wiltshire, Floren Matthews
7 citations
A critical response to Jylkkä's argument that psychedelic-induced unitary experiences reveal an epistemic gap between experiential and relational knowledge. The authors argue that Jylkkä's comparison between psychedelic nondual experiences and Buddhist contemplative states requires more rigorous characterization, as such parallelism risks conflating distinct traditions. They highlight internal tensions in Indo-Tibetan conceptions of nonduality, the dangers of decontextualizing culturally embedded practices like ceremonial ethnomedicine, and the potential of psychedelics to reduce introspective bias in phenomenological inquiry.