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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago
Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago
Publications and Research
The field of contemplative science is rapidly growing and integrating into the basic neurosciences, psychology, clinical sciences, and society-at-large. Yet the majority of current research in the contemplative sciences has been divorced from the soteriological context from which these meditative practices originate and has focused instead on clinical applications with goals of stress reduction and psychotherapeutic health. In the existing research on health outcomes of mindfulness-based clinical interventions, for example, there have been almost no attempts to scientifically investigate the goal of enlightenment. This is a serious oversight, given that such profound transformation across ethical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive domains …
The Structure Of Consciousness, Lowell Keith Friesen
The Structure Of Consciousness, Lowell Keith Friesen
Open Access Dissertations
In this dissertation, I examine the nature and structure of consciousness. Conscious experience is often said to be phenomenally unified, and subjects of consciousness are often self-conscious. I ask whether these features necessarily accompany conscious experience. Is it necessarily the case, for instance, that all of a conscious subject's experiences at a time are phenomenally unified? And is it necessarily the case that subjects of consciousness are self-conscious whenever they are conscious? I argue that the answer to the former is affirmative and the latter negative.
In the first chapter, I set the stage by distinguishing phenomenal unity from other …
Shamanic Cosmology As An Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Michael Winkelman
Shamanic Cosmology As An Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Michael Winkelman
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
The biological foundation for a shamanic epistemology is indicated by the cross-cultural distribution of a shamanic cosmology derived from knowledge obtained during altered consciousness. These special forms of consciousness involve integrative brain conditions that access ancient ways of knowing, expressive systems which have evolutionary roots in the communicative and social processes involved in animal displays or rituals. These were augmented over the course of hominid evolution into expressive and mimetic activities that provided a basis for significant epistemological expansions of consciousness exemplified in shamanic out-of-body (OBE) experiences. These manifestations of consciousness involved new modes of self and processes of knowing, …