Altered States of Consciousness
Author: Charles T. Tart
Publisher:
Published: 1972
Total Pages: 589
ISBN-13:
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Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century
Author: Jake Poller
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-02-21
Total Pages: 441
ISBN-13: 0429590288
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe twentieth century saw an unprecedented spike in the study of altered states of consciousness. New ASCs, such as those associated with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, were cultivated and studied, while older ASCs were given new classifications: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psychokinesis, extrasensory perception. Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century analyses these different approaches and methodologies, and includes exciting new research into neglected areas. This volume investigates the representation of ASCs in the culture of the twentieth century and examines the theoretical models that attempt to explain them. The international contributors critically examine a variety of ASCs, including precognition, near-death experiences, telepathy, New Age ‘channelling’, contact with aliens and UFOs, the use of alcohol and entheogens, analysing both the impact of ASCs on the culture and how cultural and technological changes influenced ASCs. The contributors are drawn from the fields of English and American literature, religious studies, Western esotericism, film studies, sociology and history of art, and bring to bear on ASCs their own disciplinary and conceptual perspectives, as well as a broader interdisciplinary knowledge of the subject. The collection represents a vital contribution to the growing body of work on both ASCs and the wider academic engagement with millennialism, entheogens, occulture and the paranormal.
Altered States of Consciousness and PSI
Author: Edward F. Kelly
Publisher: Parapsychological Monographs
Published: 2010-04
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781931747318
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst published in the 1970s, this edition has an updated preface that renders the material current. The authors feel that the distribution of voluntary psi abilities within the general population is far from the bell-shaped or "normal" curve, and that many of the field's strongest experimental outcomes are obtained in a repeatable fashion because high between-subject variation seemed certain in terms of psi capacity and whatever properties of physiological organization and function might underlie it. The central strategy advocated was to approach psi indirectly, through intensive study of various altered states of consciousness with which it appears to have been strongly associated, historically and cross-culturally. These unusual states of consciousness seem more accessible than psi itself to psychophysiological analysis with a possibility of a solution to the replicability problem.
Mind Beyond Brain
Author: David E. Presti
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-10-02
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 0231548397
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmong the most profound questions we confront are the nature of what and who we are as conscious beings, and how the human mind relates to the rest of what we consider reality. For millennia, philosophers, scientists, and religious thinkers have attempted answers, perhaps none more meaningful today than those offered by neuroscience and by Buddhism. The encounter between these two worldviews has spurred ongoing conversations about what science and Buddhism can teach each other about mind and reality. In Mind Beyond Brain, the neuroscientist David E. Presti, with the assistance of other distinguished researchers, explores how evidence for anomalous phenomena—such as near-death experiences, apparent memories of past lives, apparitions, experiences associated with death, and other so-called psi or paranormal phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition—can influence the Buddhism-science conversation. Presti describes the extensive but frequently unacknowledged history of scientific investigation into these phenomena, demonstrating its relevance to questions about consciousness and reality. The new perspectives opened up, if we are willing to take evidence of such often off-limits topics seriously, offer significant challenges to dominant explanatory paradigms and raise the prospect that we may be poised for truly revolutionary developments in the scientific investigation of mind. Mind Beyond Brain represents the next level in the science and Buddhism dialogue.
Living Mindfully Across the Lifespan
Author: J. Kim Penberthy
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-22
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 1000281531
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLiving Mindfully Across the Lifespan: An Intergenerational Guide provides user-friendly, empirically supported information about and answers to some of the most frequently encountered questions and dilemmas of human living, interactions, and emotions. With a mix of empirical data, humor, and personal insight, each chapter introduces the reader to a significant topic or question, including self-worth, anxiety, depression, relationships, personal development, loss, and death. Along with exercises that clients and therapists can use in daily practice, chapters feature personal stories and case studies, interwoven throughout with the authors’ unique intergenerational perspectives. Compassionate, engaging writing is balanced with a straightforward presentation of research data and practical strategies to help address issues via psychological, behavioral, contemplative, and movement-oriented exercises. Readers will learn how to look deeply at themselves and society, and to apply what has been learned over decades of research and clinical experience to enrich their lives and the lives of others.
Irreducible Mind
Author: Edward F. Kelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 836
ISBN-13: 9781442202061
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCurrent mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
Altered States of Consciousness
Author: Marc Wittmann
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-11-07
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 0262546086
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness. Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction. If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.
Consciousness Unbound
Author: Edward F. Kelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2021-03-16
Total Pages: 531
ISBN-13: 153813943X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBuilding on the groundbreaking research of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism, Edward Kelly and Paul Marshall gather a cohort of leading scholars to address the most recent advances in the psychology of consciousness. Currently emerging as a middle ground between warring fundamentalisms of religion andscience, an expanded science-based understanding of nature finally accommodates empirical realities of spiritual sorts while also rejecting rationally untenable overbeliefs. The vision sketched here provides an antidote to the prevailing postmodern disenchantment of the world and demeaning of human possibilities. It not only more accurately and fully reflects our human condition but engenders hope and encourages ego-surpassing forms of human flourishing. It offers reasons for us to believe that freedom is real, that our human choices matter, and that we have barely scratched the surface of our human potentials. It also addresses the urgent need for a greater sense of worldwide community and interdependence - a sustainable ethos - by demonstrating that under the surface we and the world are much more extensively interconnected than previously recognized.
Beyond Physicalism
Author: Edward F. Kelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2015-02-19
Total Pages: 636
ISBN-13: 1442232404
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe rise of modern science has brought with it increasing acceptance among intellectual elites of a worldview that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the world’s great cultural traditions. Most contemporary scientists and philosophers believe that reality is at bottom purely physical, and that human beings are nothing more than extremely complicated biological machines. On such views our everyday experiences of conscious decision-making, free will, and the self are illusory by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. It follows that mind and personality are necessarily extinguished at death, and that there exists no deeper transpersonal or spiritual reality of any sort. Beyond Physicalism is the product of an unusual fellowship of scientists and humanities scholars who dispute these views. In their previous publication, Irreducible Mind, they argued that physicalism cannot accommodate various well-evidenced empirical phenomena including paranormal or psi phenomena, postmortem survival, and mystical experiences. In this new theory-oriented companion volume they go further by attempting to understand how the world must be constituted in order that these “rogue” phenomena can occur. Drawing upon empirical science, metaphysical philosophy, and the mystical traditions, the authors work toward an improved “big picture” of the general character of reality, one which strongly overlaps territory traditionally occupied by the world’s institutional religions, and which attempts to reconcile science and spirituality by finding a middle path between the polarized fundamentalisms, religious and scientific, that have dominated recent public discourse. Contributions by: Harald Atmanspacher, Loriliai Biernacki, Bernard Carr, Wolfgang Fach, Michael Grosso, Michael Murphy, David E. Presti, Gregory Shaw, Henry P. Stapp, Eric M. Weiss, and Ian Whicher
States of Consciousness
Author: Charles T. Tart
Publisher: Dissertation.com
Published: 2000-12
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780595151967
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStates of Consciousness, a classic by world authority Charles T. Tart, is a basic understanding of how the mind is a dynamic, culturally biased, semi-arbitrary construction and system. A systematic exploration of how and why altered states can come about and their possibilities. As a student of his remarked, “For the first weeks of class I didn’t understand what those diagrams were about, but I’ve realized the book is all about the way my own mind works!” Useful in understanding some of the important ways your mind works before you start altering it.
