Relevance. At the present stage of development religious studies, importance revealing psychological "slice" mysticism is increasing from point view comparing two approaches – reductionist, which reduces to intense and unusual experiences, anti-reductionist, sees in something more than just subjective experiences. The purpose supplement understanding limits reduction religious‒mystical experien...

In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with ...

This paper is an extension of Buddhist phenomenology, Barendregt 1988], hereafter called part I. That paper is a personal account of part of the mental training towards the puriication of consciousness. For the reading of the present paper, however, no acquaintance with part I is required. This paper continues the description of experiences obtained during the practice of intensive vipassana me...

Upon reading Wittgenstein’s Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the book is in a similar line of business to any other work of analytical philosophy. True enough, Wittgenstein’s professed aim of drawing a limit to the expression of thoughts is exceptionally ambitious; and one could not fail to be struck by the immodesty of the claim that...

This paper critically examines whether, and how, mystical insights can be conveyed in language. First, the problem of mystical ineffability is briefly presented: how, if at all, is it possible to express the supposedly transrational and transconceptual (non-dualistic) mystical experience in rational and conceptual (dualistic) linguistic terms? Second, drawing on the Wittgensteinian distinction ...

The ethical review of research on human beings, and indeed the ethical review of broader ranges of human activity, is a growth industry. I want to look here at the ethical review of research on humans and raise some questions about the direction it is taking. I am pessimistic about where the institutions that we have set up are leading us and I want to sound a warning note and suggest some chan...

Health research initiatives worldwide are growing in scope and complexity, particularly as they move into the developing world. Expanding health research activity in low- and middle-income countries has resulted in a commensurate rise in the need for sound ethical review structures and functions in the form of Research Ethics Committees (RECs). The urgent need for continued capacity development...