The Objectivity of Spiritual Experiences: Spontaneous Mental Imagery and the Spiritual Space

The purpose of this article is to investigate the nature of spontaneous mental imagery that people experienced after ritualistically ingesting Ayahuasca. The combination of ingestion of Daime and the participation in a ceremony appear to reliably promote the occurrence of spontaneous mental imageries, referred as mirações, which were considered as a process of perception, the moment when different entities (physical body, thoughts, feelings, culture, emotions, mind, soul, spiritual space, etc.) become connected within consciousness. Mirações are believed to take place in a non-physical - although very objective - “spiritual space,” which is believed to the shared by participants in the ceremonies. The spiritual space is immaterial and multidimensional, precluding, nesting and informing the material world. The spiritual space is perceived as original, generating dispositions, intentions, and meanings, and as containing within it the physical and psychological levels of existence. The exploration of that space during a ceremony was considered a process of spiritual development.

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Wartime

Keep the Days ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640969.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 47-69

Author(s):

Steven M. Stowe

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Working Class ◽

White Men ◽

The Novel ◽

World War ◽

Material World ◽

The Moment

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.

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Soul and Body

Mind and Body in Early China ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190842307.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 65-99

Author(s):

Edward Slingerland

Keyword(s):

Personal Identity ◽

Mental States ◽

Mortuary Practices ◽

Material World ◽

Physical Body ◽

Textual Evidence ◽

Afterlife Beliefs ◽

Qualitative Distinction

This chapter presents traditional archaeological and textual evidence against the strong soul-body holist position—that is, the claim that the early Chinese lacked any sense of a qualitative distinction between an immaterial soul and a physical body. This evidence includes afterlife beliefs as gleaned from mortuary practices and textual evidence drawn from both the received corpus and archaeologically recovered texts. The early Chinese appear to have distinguished between a relatively corporeal, physical body and a relatively incorporeal soul (or set of souls). The former was part of a material, visible world and was viewed ultimately as peripheral to the essence of one’s personal identity. The latter was the focus of ancestor cults, sacrifices, and oracles, and partook of an invisible, numinous world, qualitatively distinct from our own. The “specialness” of the next world and the beings that inhabited it lent to them, and to items and practices associated with them, a degree of numinosity that is not at all alien to conceptions of the holy or sacred in Judeo-Christian traditions. The chapter concludes with the argument that soul-body dualism is ultimately parasitic on basic mind-body dualism, which sees mental states or consciousness as somehow qualitatively distinct from the material world of things.

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Revisiting the life of things: A cognitive semiotic study of the agency of artefacts in Amazonia

Public Journal of Semiotics ◽

10.37693/pjos.2020.9.22012 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 30-52

Author(s):

Juan Carlos Mendoza-Collazos ◽

Göran Sonesson

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Field Study ◽

Special Form ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Human Agency ◽

Cognitive Resources ◽

Material World ◽

Alternative Approach ◽

The Moment

Many contemporary scholars have recently defended the idea that the agency of things is symmetrical and equivalent to human agency. We propose an alternative approach to artefacts’ agency based on a field study concerned with contextually situated observations of the process of design of artefacts in Amazonia. By means of participant observation and interviews, we address the role of artefacts in relation to human agency. In so doing, we focus on the human-unique capacity for design as it is related to cognitive resources such as intentionality, decision-making, planning, and volitional adaptations of the material world to human purposes. We argue that such cognitive resources are ultimate manifestations of human agency. The findings allow us to conclude that artefacts possess a special form of agency, which operates in different ways from the agency of true agents. This agency is derived: it depends on the actions of true agents, with either function as remote intentions or are required for the artefact to work at the moment of use. Thus, the relation between artefacts and agents is asymmetrical. Given that the derived agency of artefacts allows people to expand their own agency, we propose the notion of enhanced agency for the prosthetic incorporation of artefacts into the agentive capabilities of human agents.

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Extended Imagining: the case of the aphantasic artist

10.31234/osf.io/cuy87 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew MacKisack ◽

Adam Zeman ◽

Crawford Winlove ◽

John Onians ◽

Fiona Macpherson ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Study ◽

Mental Imagery ◽

Cognitive Functions ◽

Spatial Relationships ◽

Mental Images ◽

Art Making ◽

Material World ◽

Internal Process ◽

Visual Mental Imagery

Can visual imagining ever be other than a brain-bound, organismically internal process? The practices of artists with aphantasia - the congenital or acquired incapacity to generate visual mental imagery - suggests that it can. Here we report on a qualitative study of ‘aphantasic’ artists and find that imagery lack coincides with a dependence on external, environmental, structures to generate artwork. Indeed, physical manipulations of external media seem to take place in lieu of the ability to generate and manipulate internal, mental images. Cognitive functions that could, for the non-aphantasic, be carried out by mental imagery - such as bringing non-conscious visio-spatial relationships to awareness - can only be carried out for the aphantasic by manipulating their environment. Thus aphantasic art-making constitutes extended visual imagining. As such, it undermines the universality of the ‘hylomorphic’ model of art-making, in which the work is mentally preconceived before being realised in the material world, with the fact of neurocognitive diversity.

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Resurrection of the Body: Continuity in Christ through Death in Christ

Irish Theological Quarterly ◽

10.1177/00211400211017693 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002114002110176

Author(s):

David J. Norman

Keyword(s):

Spiritual Transformation ◽

The Body ◽

Eternal Life ◽

Physical Body ◽

Good Friday ◽

2 Corinthians ◽

In Christ ◽

The Moment ◽

Spiritual Body ◽

The Church

This article examines the question of when the resurrection of the body begins. Matthew 27:51–53 testifies to the resurrection of bodies on Good Friday; and 2 Corinthians 5:1 speaks of those who die in Christ receiving a building/body from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Eternal life begins for Christians with baptism into Christ’s death; they become members of his Body, the Church. Through the presence of Christ’s Spirit, our bodies undergo a spiritual transformation up to the moment of death. Those who die in Christ pass from resurrected life in the physical body to the fullness of resurrected life at death in Christ’s spiritual body. Whether one is in the (physical) body and away from the Lord or with the Lord and away from the (physical) body, one remains in Christ.

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The Now and the Universe

Advances in Theoretical & Computational Physics ◽

10.33140/atcp.04.04.02 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 (4) ◽

Keyword(s):

Specific Energy ◽

Material Object ◽

Material World ◽

Energy Field ◽

The Moment ◽

The Many ◽

The Universe

The present, at any particular moment, is the realization of one of the many intentions of the All-creating Intellect. Here "realization" specifically means the materialization or the appearance of an object in the material world, which had not existed until now. This newly born material object exists only for the duration of the moment of "now". This moment is infinitely short, or, if we use a concept from calculus, it is infinitesimal in duration. In my hypothesis, this new object is a product of a specific energy field of the All-creating Intellect. We call this particular energy field Time.

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KONSEP DUḤKHA DAN MOKṢA DALAM CHĀNDOGYA UPANIṢAD SEBAGAI PEDOMAN MENCAPAI KEBEBASAN

Jurnal Penelitian Agama Hindu ◽

10.25078/jpah.v1i1.128 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 32

Author(s):

Ni Made Sumaryani

Keyword(s):

Qualitative Research ◽

Research Question ◽

Bound State ◽

The Body ◽

Material World ◽

Physical Body ◽

To Come ◽

The Universe ◽

Chāndogya Upaniṣad ◽

The Way

Chāndogya Upaniṣad is a holy scripture which also a part of Veda Śruti. Usually every Upaniṣad contains teaching about Brahman, Ātman and the Universe. Chāndogya Upaniṣad is a mean to realize that there is no difference between jivātman (self’s soul) and Paramātman (Source of the Soul). The main objective of this scripture is to do the inquiry deep into the last home truth which reaches a step when a person became rather wise and mature to disconnect him/ her from all karmas. Chāndogya Upaniṣad texts have been chosen to be examined in this research because this scripture explain clearly about the consept of duḥkha and mokṣa. The problems which will be investigated on this research are: 1. how is the concept of duḥkha and mokṣa in Chāndogya Upaniṣad? 2) How is the way to be apart from duḥkha to attain mokṣa based on Chāndogya Upaniṣad?Related to the research question above, this research only use one theory to analyze it, which is the Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Theory. Hermeneutic theory is the scalpel on interpreting the meaning which consists on texts. This is a qualitative research, therefore, the collection of the data using the technique of literature and document studies.The result of this research can be told as follows: 1) the concept of duḥkha in Chāndogya Upaniṣad is the bound state of the soul with the physical body materially. When the soul bounded with the senses materially, then it is causing billion of desires to come out. All bounds towards these desires will throw the soul into the depth of sorrow (duḥkha). The concept of mokṣa in Chāndogya Upaniṣad is a state when ātman reach the abode of God, Brakmaloka and would never came back to this material world. 2) The way to release from the bond of duḥkha based on Chāndogya Upaniṣad is through realize the essence which relies on every being, the ātman who gave life into the physical body, comprise of shaper elements of the body. This can be realized by the help of Spiritual Teacher who’s already acquainted Brahman itself.

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Faust/ina. In Radiance by Artur Pałyga

Załącznik Kulturoznawczy ◽

10.21697/zk.2019ee.01.14 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol ENGLISH EDITION (1) ◽

pp. 257-283

Author(s):

Jacek Kopciński

Keyword(s):

Spiritual Development ◽

World View ◽

Eternal Life ◽

Way Of Life ◽

Scientific World ◽

Immortal Soul ◽

The World ◽

Intellectual Control ◽

History Of ◽

The Moment

In his essay, author deals with the interpretation of a very original, new monodrama by Artur Pałyga, entitled In Radiance (2016), whose heroine is Maria Skłodowska-Curie. The author is interested in a poetic and performative dimension of Maria’s dozen monologues, which the author described as completely unknown letters’ of the scientist. These monologues reveal the process of Maria’s spiritual development from the moment Faust/ina of attaining maturity, until her death due to excessive irradiation. Author focuses on the aspects of Maria’s consciousness that Pałyga has brought forth from the myth of Faust, which comprises the foundation of the scientific world-view. In this monodrama, Skłodowska-Curie is the Polish Faust who is ready to break the moral rules and pay the price of her and others’ life for sheer possibility of revealing the mystery of the universe. Kopciński confronts this original literary image of a scientist with the history of her life and highlights the moments in her biography that can be read as the execution of the ‘Faustian arrangement’. At the end of his work, he compares the character of Skłodowska-Curie, who calls herself Faustina, with the figure of another extraordinary woman who has also adopted this name − Maria Faustina Kowalska. The comparison of the scientist and the mystic woman allows us to see many similarities in the characters of both, their way of life and their relationships with other people, but it also describes fundamental differences in the world-views they represent. Finally, two Faustinas are two different symbols. The figure of the scientist symbolises desire for the intellectual control of the world, which constantly changes like elements discovered by Maria Skłodowska. On the other hand, the figure of the mysticist symbolises desire for an inner union with loving God, which involves the sacrifice of one’s ‘self’ to gain the eternal life of the immortal soul.

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Effect of Surya Namaskar with and Without Walking on Body Mass Index among College Girls with Premenstrual Syndrome

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering - 2 ◽

10.35940/ijrte.e4913.018520 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (5) ◽

pp. 316-318

Keyword(s):

Body Mass Index ◽

Body Mass ◽

Premenstrual Syndrome ◽

Life Style ◽

Science And Technology ◽

Good Health ◽

Standard Of Living ◽

Material World ◽

Physical Body ◽

The People

Health is wealth. Keeping our body in good health is our duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear. Science and technology have revolutionized the life style of mankind. Increased standard of living has brought great comfort to mankind. Along with this developments, the modern man becoming submerged in the material world with large number of problems and recurrent ailments. Stress and frustration and physical ailments have become common among the people in this world1 . Birth is not for being tortured by diseases and problems. Happiness is the birth-right and the nature of mankind. Health only can give the happiness. But the happiness of women is disturbed very much by the menstrual problems. Every Woman may become physically, mentally and emotionally healthy through Yoga. The practice of Yogasanas for physical body and Pranayama for mind through Surya Namaskar will bring a positive change in mind & body, which in turn make people free to enjoy a harmony, healthy and wealthy life.

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The Now and the Universe

10.47363/jpsos/2021(3)155 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-2

Author(s):

Berov G Lyubomir ◽

Keyword(s):

Specific Energy ◽

Material Object ◽

Material World ◽

Energy Field ◽

The Moment ◽

The Many ◽

The Universe

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