Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
April 17, 2026
Sevil Mehdilou, F Davari Dolatabadi, Masoomeh Yaghoobi
1 citation
Sacred presence in architecture is not a fixed symbolic meaning but a fragile, repeatable achievement that arises when four analytic fields—Embodied, Mnemonic, Symbolic, and Resonant—are coordinated by a cross-field operator called LUX, which organizes salience through light, shadow, and visibility. Applying this Existential Hologram model to the Jameh Mosque of Isfahan and Chartres Cathedral reveals distinct configurations: an aligned field of co-presence under LUX-as-containment in Isfahan, and a hierarchical narrative field of participation under LUX-as-solicitation in Chartres. The model offers a transparent protocol for comparative analysis focused on configurations rather than inventories of forms or doctrines.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
June 25, 2026
Liu Liu
Phenomenology concerns both real and imaginary entities, including necessary beings, hypothetical objects, possible objects, and modal properties. Because the range of potential intentional objects is vast, the total number of mental states would far exceed the number of possible physical states. This numerical excess of noema is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of supervenience, which holds that mental states depend on physical states. The argument offers an alternative to those advanced by Abelson and Porpora, rooted in the mind's capacity to think about natural numbers. The consciousness problem may require trialism rather than dualism, as necessary beings and hypothetical objects form a distinct ontological category separate from minds and physical objects.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
April 6, 2026
Xinyue Tian, Benqian Sang
Religious practices like prayer, chanting, asceticism, and meditation activate pleasure-related circuits in the brain, according to neurobiological and psychological evidence. Ascetic practices do not inherently conflict with the human tendency to seek pleasure. Religion's evolutionary adaptability allows it to sustain well-being even with low resource consumption. The paper reinterprets religious practices as a strategy of finding joy in hardship and proposes that faith may result from practice rather than cause it, with deities as peripheral institutional tools. The Ascetic Practice Model is offered as an evolutionary-friendly framework for dialogue with adaptationist and byproduct accounts.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
September 25, 2025
S. Devadas Pillai, Hemaa Manimaran, Glenn B. Mannheim et al.
Bhāvanā, an ancient contemplative principle meaning 'bringing into being,' remains under-defined in empirical research despite its presence in classical Indian texts. This study provides the first practitioner-grounded model of Bhāvanā, based on interviews with 27 long-term practitioners of the IAM®-35 meditation practice. Using Grounded Theory methodology with open, axial, and selective coding, the authors developed the PAL framework: Prerequisites for practice, Aspects of the meditation process, and Levels of Bhāvanā experience. Participants described Bhāvanā as an immersive internal process integrating awareness, memory, and multisensory engagement, fostering transformative experiences of personal and spiritual unity. The framework bridges ancient contemplative principles with modern experiential insights.