The authors in this volume explore a wide variety of the contemporary approaches to mystical and religious experience to elucidate what religious experience is, in its own terms, and how its practitioners understand it. This anthology features contributions that point out that contemporary studies of consciousness, sociology, hermeneutics, neuroscience, medicine, and other fields, are revealing that there is much more to be said for the inner life of a human's consciousness than reductionists and behaviorists will allow.

This book is one of very few that primarily takes the stance of academic practitioners, explaining their own experience, rather than that of academics trying to explain the phenomena away, as really politics, or sociology, or delusion, or psychological pathology, or literary flights of fancy, or an aberration of any of the other academic fields. Most of the authors in this volume embrace the task of explaining and analyzing religious experience, mysticism, and the healing power of silence and presence, using the resources of all of the academic disciplines, as appropriate.

The essays contained analyze religious, and non-religious, mystical and profoundly personal experiences across several world religions, and in areas such as art and music, as well as in solving personal crises such as family disruption and patriarchal oppression. The authors address the subject matter through analyses of the frequent and destructive failures of language, or just noise, to capture or express the nuances of the inner life of a person. It is this very ineffability of self that renders the spiritual, emotional and interior life of individuals beyond cognition and perception, of the straightforward sorts embraced by most cognitive disciplines. The contributors come from a variety of cross-disciplinary fields to bring forth the possibilities for an intuitive and creative, rich and growing inner life for a human. This text appeals to students, researchers, and practitioners.

Brings together a group of practitioner-scholars on the topic of ineffability and silence Takes mysticism seriously, analyzing it for what it is, rather than attempting to reduce it to something else Analyzes mystical and religious experience comparatively, across many religious and non-religious traditions

Autorentext

Laura Weed is a Professor of Philosophy at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY, where she has been teaching for 28 years. She served for many years on the Mysticism Group of the American Academy or Religions, and is Director in the United States for the International Institute for Field Being, which meets regularly at the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division Meetings. Her research interests include Consciousness Studies, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Asian Philosophies, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology. She is currently working on a monograph on Pan-psychism.

This edited volume employs a wide variety of academic disciplines, expanding the traditional western and analytical points of view.

Inhalt

Part I. Mysticism, Ineffability and Silence in a Few World Religions.- Chapter. 1. The Shakti of Aksobhya.- Chapter. 2. Ineffability: A Post-Post Modernist View of Contentless Consciousness.- Chapter. 3. Ineffability and Silence in Judaism and Jewish Mysticism.- Chapter. 4. Mystical Joy: A Theopoetics of Expressive Silences in Christianity.- Chapter. 5. Spiritual Diagram as a Guardian of Silence in Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism.- Chapter. 6. Yoga, Silence and Ineffability in Hinduism.- Part II. Interdisciplinary Methodologies for Analyzing Mysticism, Ineffability and Silence.- Chapter. 7. Polanyi, Zen and Non-linguistic Knowledge.- Chapter. 8. Four Ways of Understanding Mystical Experience.- Chapter. 9. Injured Love Beyond Language: Exploring the Tacit Dimension in the Amelioration of High-Conflict Divorce.- Chapter. 10. Silence at the Non-Substantialistic Turn in Epistemology.- Chapter. 11. William James' Ineffable 'More': In Philosophy of Language and Neuroscience.- Chapter. 12. Speechless Meaning or Meaningless Speech: The Science of Ineffability.- Chapter. 13. A Scientific Discovery and a Zen Discovery: Intuitive, Non-verbal Knowledge.- Chapter. 14. Against Absolute Ineffability.- Chapter. 15. A. N. Whitehead: Mysticism and the Expressive Impulse.- Index.