Neuroscience Selflessness And Spiritual Experience

Download or read book Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Experience written by Brick Johnstone and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Transcendence conveys the manner by which selflessness serves as a neuropsychological and religious foundation for spiritually transcendent experiences. The book combines neurological case studies and neuroscience research with religious accounts of transcendence experiences from the perspective of both the neurosciences and the history of religions. Chapters cover the subjective experience of transcendence, an historical summary of different philosophical and religious perspectives, a review of the neuroscience research that describes the manner by which the brain processes and creates a self, and more. The book presents a model that bridges the divide between neuroscience and religion, presenting a resource that will be critical reading for advanced students and researchers in both fields. - Creates a common focus on selflessness as a reliable construct for use by all disciplines interested in the basis of spiritual experience - Links neuroanatomical data with religious texts from multiple faith traditions to describe the necessity of selflessness for spiritual experience and transformation - Highlights disorders in neurological functioning that result in disorders of the self

Download or read book A Playful Spirit written by Mark W. Teismann and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great narratives of religion and nationhood were battered in the twentieth century by the dual forces of globalization and postmodernism. In the uncertainty of broken traditions, many people looking for God retreated into a regressive fundamentalism, and others abandoned themselves to nihilism and cynicism. But is there another way? In this volume, esteemed sociologist and therapist Mark W. Teismann offers a fresh approach to spiritual pursuits, one that neither relies upon absolutes nor leaves seekers in a void of disbelief. This approach is to consider the exercise of spirituality as a type of play. Teismann takes the reader on a whirlwind ride through the different aspects of play and how they relate to spirituality. Teismann draws on classical philosophers, memories of childhood, developmental science, poets, and his long career as a psychotherapist to create a deep understanding of how the spirit of play informs our moral pursuits and spiritual yearnings. A conclusion and epilogue summarize the book’s tenets and touch on Mark Teismann’s battle with cancer and how the practices of meditation and play accompanied him on his spiritual journey in the context of an incurable disease. The book’s appendix gives interested readers a detailed description of how to approach the practice of meditation.

Download or read book The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience written by Patrick McNamara and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience, now updated and expanded in a new edition, updates key topics covered in the first edition including: decentering and self-transformation, supernatural agent cognitions, mystical states, religious language, ritualization, and religious group agency. It expands upon the first edition to include major findings on brain and religious experience over the past decade, focusing on methodology, future thinking, and psychedelics. It provides an up-to-date review of brain-based accounts of religious experiences, and systematically examines the rationale for utilizing neuroscience approaches to religion. While it is primarily intended for religious studies scholars, people interested in comparative religion, philosophy of religion, cultural evolution, and personal self-transformation will find an account of how such transformation is accomplished within religious contexts.

Download or read book Waking Up written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirituality.The search for happiness --Religion, East and West --Mindfulness --The truth of suffering --Enlightenment --The mystery of consciousness.The mind divided --Structure and function --Are our minds already split? --Conscious and unconscious processing in the brain --Consciousness is what matters --The riddle of the self.What are we calling "I"? --Consciousness without self --Lost in thought --The challenge of studying the self --Penetrating the illusion --Meditation.Gradual versus sudden realization --Dzogchen: taking the goal as the path --Having no head --The paradox of acceptance --Gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles.Mind on the brink of death --The spiritual uses of pharmacology.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness written by Philip David Zelazo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness is the first of its kind in the field, and its appearance marks a unique time in the history of intellectual inquiry on the topic. After decades during which consciousness was considered beyond the scope of legitimate scientific investigation, consciousness re-emerged as a popular focus of research towards the end of the last century, and it has remained so for nearly 20 years. There are now so many different lines of investigation on consciousness that the time has come when the field may finally benefit from a book that pulls them together and, by juxtaposing them, provides a comprehensive survey of this exciting field. An authoritative desk reference, which will also be suitable as an advanced textbook.

Download or read book Believers: Faith in Human Nature written by Melvin Konner and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthropologist examines the nature of religiosity, and how it shapes and benefits humankind. Believers is a scientist’s answer to attacks on faith by some well-meaning scientists and philosophers. It is a firm rebuke of the “Four Horsemen”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—known for writing about religion as something irrational and ultimately harmful. Anthropologist Melvin Konner, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew but has lived his adult life without such faith, explores the psychology, development, brain science, evolution, and even genetics of the varied religious impulses we experience as a species. Conceding that faith is not for everyone, he views religious people with a sympathetic eye; his own upbringing, his apprenticeship in the trance-dance religion of the African Bushmen, and his friends and explorations in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and other faiths have all shaped his perspective. Faith has always manifested itself in different ways—some revelatory and comforting; some kind and good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive, and violent. But the future, Konner argues, will both produce more nonbelievers, and incline the religious among us—holding their own by having larger families—to increasingly reject prejudice and aggression. A colorful weave of personal stories of religious—and irreligious—encounters, as well as new scientific research, Believers shows us that religion does much good as well as undoubted harm, and that for at least a large minority of humanity, the belief in things unseen neither can nor should go away.

Download or read book Questions in the Psychology of Religion written by Kevin S. Seybold and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it means to be human? What is the origin of religious beliefs? Why are we moral creatures? Are religious experiences different from our everyday experiences? Is my brain involved in my experiencing God? What is a soul and do I have one? Is religion a result of evolutionary processes? How might psychology and religion relate? Religious experiences (behaviors, thoughts, and emotions) are determined, at least in part, by natural physical processes. As a result, the empirical methods used in psychology to try to identify the natural mechanisms that influence why we act, think, and feel the way we do can provide important insights into the fundamental and universal phenomena of religion. Drawing on current research from a variety of disciplines, Questions in the Psychology of Religion is appropriate for college students studying psychology, pastors as they help their congregations understand how religion and science might go together, and anyone who learns about recent discoveries in psychological science and wonders how these findings pertain to religion and religious experiences.