Religions
November 8, 2025
André Van der Braak
The dominant 'mystical experience model' of psychedelic spirituality—which holds that ego dissolution and unitive experiences drive well-being—is critiqued for being too religious, neglecting learning processes, and privileging individual extraordinary states over shared ritual. An alternative model based on theurgy (from Iamblichus's Neoplatonism) and Bruno Latour's participatory ontological pluralism is proposed. Theurgy emphasizes ritual mediation, competence, and transformation, accommodating encounters with autonomous entities or 'beings of religion' reported in psychedelic ceremonies. This framework complements the mystical model by focusing on collective transformation within a differentiated cosmos rather than escape into undifferentiated unity.
Religions
October 31, 2025
A Sahaf Kashani
A new philosophical religion is emerging from the intersection of psychedelic ministry, transpersonal psychology, and participatory metaphysics. Drawing on Schelling's participatory metaphysics, Grof's findings, and Ferrer's participatory turn, the article argues that psychedelics can function sacramentally, granting participatory access to the creative ground of reality. It proposes transpersonal ministry as a framework to meet the spiritual and metaphysical demands of psychedelics, offering churches, ministers, and congregants a shared language that unites experiential participation with metaphysical inquiry, providing a non-dogmatic framework for integrating transformative states.
Religions
October 29, 2025
Ronald V. Huggins
John Marco Allegro's 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross argued that a 12th-century fresco in Plaincourault Chapel, France, depicting the Fall of Adam and Eve, shows a mushroom-like Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, evidence of a clandestine psychedelic mushroom sect persisting in Christian Europe since New Testament times. A small group of writers, led by Carl A. P. Ruck, later sought to validate this theory by finding other examples of psychedelic mushrooms in early Christian and medieval art. This article examines these claims, focusing on the Plaincourault tree and similar images, and concludes that the arguments fail because they overpress similarities while ignoring differences.
Religions
October 20, 2025
Rodolfo Bastián Valle-Kendall, Carlos Piñones Rivera
Cacao ceremonies, a neo-shamanic ritual growing in popularity, can foster well-being by enabling participants to reconfigure their subjectivity. Drawing on González-Rey's theory, the article argues that cacao acts as a symbolic mediator generating new subjective senses, while rituals stabilize dynamic subjective configurations. Shamans guide this process through discourse, materials, and emotions. These transformations are not mechanically determined by social context but arise as historically situated singular productions. However, the ritual is ambivalent: it can both foster genuine subjective change and reproduce neoliberal logics.
Religions
October 11, 2025
Hans van Eyghen
A philosophical paper argues that mystical experiences brought on by psychedelics should be considered authentic, not counterfeit. It examines three counterarguments: such experiences are too easily achieved, lack lasting spiritual or moral effects, and do not involve divine grace. Positive arguments for authenticity include that these experiences rely on similar neural mechanisms and are phenomenologically alike to other mystical experiences. The paper concludes that the positive arguments are more convincing, making a case for the genuineness of psychedelically induced mystical experiences.
Religions
October 7, 2025
Hong Zeng, Shu Su
The Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, traditionally guides consciousness through postmortem states toward liberation. This essay proposes that its bardo model can also frame digital identity dissolution and transformation. Drawing on Tibetan Buddhist thought, extended mind theory, digital anthropology, and cognitive science, it reinterprets bardo states as phenomenological thresholds manifesting in virtual liminality—moments of ego disintegration, avatar deconstruction, and reidentification in digital environments. By mapping the six bardos onto digital experiences, the paper synthesizes esoteric Tibetan metaphysics with posthuman theory, offering insights into consciousness, ethical selfhood, and the future of identity.
Religions
July 25, 2025
Henry Albery
A seventh-century Sanskrit yoga manual from Qïzïl describes the practice of immeasurable joy (muditā) as part of a bodhisattva's path to awakening. The manual's author relied on a version of the *Vibhāṣā, a major Vaibhāṣika treatise on Buddhist metaphysics. The paper identifies parallels between the two texts and presents a new edition of select passages from the preface to immeasurable joy, which the text calls a theory of practice (prayoganirdeśa). It shows that Vaibhāṣika ontological and phenomenological principles are instantiated at the experiential, structural, and representational levels of the practice that the manual exemplifies.
Religions
July 21, 2025
Géraldine Mossière
An anthropological study examines how the concepts of energy and movement are used to foster well-being, based on fieldwork with Core Energetics and 5Rhythms groups. The circulation of energy is achieved through bodily movements, dances, sensory attention, somatic self-cultivation, and deep conscious experiences. Ritual elements, including a specific spacetime framework and intersubjective exercises, facilitate experiences that renew one's subjective and intersubjective relationship to the self in a restorative way. The author argues that these mind–body–energy groups conflate two Western sources: the legacy of marginalized early Western medical offshoots and discursive references to contemporary interpretations of quantum physics.
Religions
April 16, 2025
Feng Qu, Thomas Michael
Shi (1993) observes that Chinese scholars view shamanism as a prehistoric phenomenon that declined in post-industrial society, yet they are puzzled by its continued vitality in the present day. The paper examines this apparent contradiction, suggesting that shamanism persists and adapts in modern contexts, challenging the assumption that it is solely a relic of the past.
Religions
March 25, 2025
David H. Nikkel
Embodied, enactive, and extended cognition challenges the standard cognitive science of religion, which focuses on unconscious brain mechanisms and downplays religious meaning, adaptiveness, and cultural influence. The standard model treats religion as epiphenomenal, denies its adaptive value except as costly signaling, and views perception as indirect representation. It ignores how social, embodied, and tacit engagement with the world shapes religion, and overlooks how rituals promote bonding through synchrony and endorphins or enhance environmental knowledge, thus missing ways religion can be adaptive.
Religions
February 25, 2025
Denae Dyck
Poetry can evoke spiritual experiences by opening readers to surprise and wonder, moving beyond the divide between religious faith and doubt. Drawing on William James's Varieties of Religious Experience and Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, this article argues that Victorian lyrics by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dollie Radford reimagine hope and reframe revelation as an invitation rather than a proclamation. The analysis shows how receptivity to spiritual states in literature challenges the hermeneutics of suspicion and suggests an interpretive disposition that does not guard against but welcomes poetry's potential to transform.
Religions
January 28, 2025
Jenny Anne Miller
This paper introduces a transpersonal psychological understanding of mystical consciousness by comparing contemplative approaches across Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christianity. Drawing on Thomas Merton's interreligious thinking and Evelyn Underhill's mystical contemplation, it applies post-Jungian theories of the 'Spectrum of Human Consciousness' to the scholarly field of mysticism. The author suggests how Merton might have used transpersonal models to articulate his writings on 'pure consciousness'. The paper concludes by posing a contemplative question: whether the ancient sculpture of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite serves as an art-theological symbol for the soul's inner repose in God's Unity, where action flows as a manifestation of contemplative solitude.
Religions
January 24, 2025
Nirmal Selvamony
The author explains the early Tamil concept of meyppāṭu as a kind of action involving embodying the spirit, manifesting in ordinary emotional experience, love at first sight, theatre emoting, and spirit possession. Using the personaic triad (mūviṭam) from puttiṇai theory, the author outlines meyppāṭu across primal community, state society, and industrialist state. In the primal world (viḻuttiṇai), meyppāṭu ensured a love-based lifeway necessary for the wellbeing of people and non-human beings. The author argues this understanding is needed today to end the Anthropocenic industrialist lifeway that has brought humans and other beings to the brink of disaster.
Religions
January 22, 2025
John C. Thibdeau
Mysticism requires ethical work to cultivate experiences of the divine, and those experiences in turn enable new ethical relationships with oneself, others, and the divine. The article connects ascetic practices (zuhd) with Sufi mystical experiences through the concept of tarbiya, understanding taṣawwuf as an ongoing process rather than an end. It argues for an 'inner-worldly' mysticism absent from Weber's analysis, which does not fit his passive–active distinction between mysticism and asceticism. Drawing on fieldwork with two related Shadhiliyya Sufi orders in Morocco—the Karkariyya and the Alawiyya—the author examines how direct experiences of the divine are made possible by ethical work and how those experiences enable ethical engagement and action, showing mystics as deeply concerned with changing their social worlds.
Religions
January 19, 2025
Arjun Nair
Scholars of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism have found common ground in studying the unio mystica, but the concept is expressed in irreducibly diverse ways across traditions, raising questions about the usefulness of generic cross-cultural categories. Translating mystical texts risks misrepresentation, especially in a post-colonial context. The author argues that specialists of non-Western traditions should approach mysticism from within their own conceptual horizons. This work models that approach by reformulating the unio mystica using the theoretical framework of the 12th/13th-century Muslim mystic Ibn ʿArabī and his early school, unpacking terms like “God,” “the human being/self,” and “union” to challenge prevailing Christian-derived understandings and show the benefits of tradition-specific theoretical development.
Religions
December 16, 2024
Song Bin
Yang Shi pioneered a Neo-Confucian method of self-cultivation centered on quiet-sitting, which involves techniques like breathing and calming the mind to return to a state of centrality. This state, once achieved, is preserved and expanded in everyday life. The practice is grounded in a moral psychology and metaphysics where Tianli, the comprehensive pattern-principle of the universe, becomes fully manifest in the human heartmind. Yang's approach inherits key features from Cheng Hao's philosophy while diverging from Cheng Yi's. Despite his metaphysical views aligning more closely with Huayan Buddhism's idea of perfect fusion between pattern-principle and things, Yang insisted that his quiet-sitting philosophy remained distinctively Confucian.
Religions
September 27, 2024
Alexander E. Massad
Gamification, a form of experiential learning that emphasizes student choice and activity, can transform information-heavy courses like those on religious mysticism and hagiology. In a "Masters and Mystics" course comparing Christian mysticism and Muslim Sufism, gamification's use of game mechanics and experience design promoted intrinsic student motivation, even when dealing with complex, affectively charged material. The article analyzes successes and failures of this approach and describes how lessons learned led to a redesigned "Comparative Mysticism: Christianity and Islam" course with new gamification practices.
Religions
September 27, 2024
Michael Andrew Ceragioli
This essay argues that Josiah Royce's communal model of religious experience, presented in The Sources of Religious Insight, complements rather than merely criticizes William James's individualistic account in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Rather than opposing the two thinkers, the author contends that James's concept of the "sick soul" finding health through religious conversion gains depth when paired with Royce's emphasis on overcoming alienation through communal participation. The essay suggests that bringing together these two models offers an instructive account of individual transformation through communal renewal, particularly relevant in times of dislocation and self-preoccupation.
Religions
September 2, 2024
L. Liu
Wang Yangming's philosophy of oneness, while appearing to describe a mystical union with all things, is better understood as a form of introvertive mysticism. This is due to his specific definition of "thing" and the central role of the heart-mind. The realm of oneness arises from a heart-mind that pervades the universe, with liangzhi serving as both pure consciousness and the foundation of reality. Viewing his theory through a mystical philosophical lens reveals it as a spiritual philosophy that goes beyond mere ethical claims, deepening the understanding of his philosophy of mind.
Religions
August 28, 2024
David H. Nikkel
William James's polar categories of healthy-minded, once-born religion versus the sick soul who must become twice-born for religious peace do not fit James himself, according to biographers. This paper argues instead that James's life best fits the sick-soul pattern: he was a sick soul searching for and ultimately finding twice-born religion through mystical experiences. James theorized mystical experiences as connecting with divine realities in naturalistic ways compatible with the science of his time. Today, scientific knowledge makes direct divine input harder to evidence, but James's pragmatic criterion for truth—beneficial or adaptive effects—still offers value in religious experiences.
Religions
August 20, 2024
Maria Exall
Modern spirituality often assumes that spiritual experiences are experiential events, but this 'experiential bias' misreads pre-modern texts like those of Pseudo-Dionysius, which describe faith through negative dialectics rather than positive experiences. Scholars Denys Turner and Bernard McGinn argue that classical apophatic tradition denies 'mystical experience' as experience per se. Yet theologians Sara Coakley, Karl Rahner, and Louis Dupré have integrated experiential interpretations into their theologies—Coakley through spiritual sense in bodily theology, Rahner through spiritual touch in grace, and Dupré through religious significance in atheistic emptiness. This paper contrasts these integrations with the classical critique of mystical experience.
Religions
August 13, 2024
Fernando Carlucci, Daniel de Luca‐noronha
Empathy is central to religious experience in the Brazilian Umbanda religion, a syncretic faith blending African spiritual practices, Catholicism, and Kardecist spiritism. In Umbanda rituals, mediums embody spirits of old slaves (pretos velhos), creating profound empathic exchanges that facilitate communal healing and personal transformation. The article argues, through predictive processing theory and embodied cognition, that these empathic interactions are deeply rooted in participants' physical and social embodiments, not merely psychological. This perspective shows how Umbanda serves as both a spiritual practice and a socio-cultural mechanism helping individuals navigate personal and collective life challenges, exemplifying how religion can be a powerful conduit for social cohesion and personal introspection.
Religions
June 29, 2024
Tiantian Cai
In Yogācāra epistemology, prapañca refers to multiple dimensions of cognition, including consciousness, language formation, the conceptualization of subject–object duality, mental defilements, and ignorance. A contextual examination of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra shows that prapañca is associated with dualistic conceptualization and the evolution of consciousness within saṃsāra. It exhibits qualities of the beginningless conceptual structure of conditioned negativity and is related to language formation. The discourse presents prapañca as the root of suffering; liberation from it is a prerequisite for reaching enlightenment and achieving Buddhahood.
Religions
November 1, 2023
Haddy Bello
Edith Stein's philosophy of freedom centers on the idea that human beings achieve authentic self-realization by configuring themselves in the image of God, whose own life is lived in perfect freedom. Stein defines freedom as "I can" (Ich kann). This capacity rests on two foundations: the phenomenological concept of intentionality, drawn from Brentano and Husserl, and the human experience of divine love. The argument traces how Stein's thought, rooted in phenomenology, becomes increasingly shaped by theological and mystical concerns, culminating in the view that historical human fulfillment requires participation in divine life.
Religions
October 27, 2023
Abraham Vélez de Cea
Panikkar's philosophy of mysticism rejects both monistic views of oneness without a second and dualistic views of the divine as wholly other, instead proposing holistic experiences where the divine, the universe, and human consciousness are distinct yet constitutively interrelated. He argues that traditional dualisms—between this life and the next, worldly and heavenly existence, material and spiritual, body and soul, action and contemplation—have wrongly portrayed mysticism as negating life and escaping the world. Panikkar restores equilibrium among these diverse yet united aspects of Reality and the human condition. The article first introduces mysticism as an anthropological dimension involving holistic experiences, then examines pure consciousness and mystical experiences as results of mediating factors.