How Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual, Mystical Experiences Become Effective
The Oxford Handbook of Psychedelic, Religious, Spiritual, and Mystical Experiences November 19, 2024 Anne Koch
The concept of efficacy in religious practices, such as intercessory prayer and healing rituals, is grounded in both theory and individual experience. It involves causality, belief, and intentionality, and is examined through predictive mind and embodied cognition, relating to how religions construct the 'really real'. The paper explores how people acquire or abandon beliefs based on apparent evidence, drawing on placebo research, ritual theory, aesthetics of religion, and cognitive science. Aesthetic categories like aestheticscapes, time perception, absorption, ritual enactment, evaluation, synchronous speech, and tool use are used to understand components of efficacy, including belief systems as expectations, prediction precision, familiarity with healing narratives, healer charisma, and collective alignment.