The Ecstatic Experience

Author : Diana Stein
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000464733
Total Pages : 560 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World written by Diana Stein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.

Author : Jules Evans
Publisher : Canongate Books
ISBN 13 : 1782118772
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Art of Losing Control written by Jules Evans and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring. He sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control. Jules' exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey balancing personal experience, interviews and readings from ancient and modern philosophers that will change the way you think about how you feel. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and life-enhancing journey through under-explored terrain.

Author : Felicitas D. Goodman
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253014646
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind written by Felicitas D. Goodman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990-08-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dr. Goodman has pioneered in the study of bodily postures and altered states of consciousness.” —Stanley Krippner, professor of personal mythology and parapsychology “And suddenly the understanding of my own vision washed over me like a mighty wave . . . For life or for death, I was committed to that mighty realm of which I was shown a brief reminder, the world where all was forever motion and emergence, that realm where the spirits ride the wind.” —from the Prologue Anthropologist and spiritual explorer Felicitas Goodman reexamines our notions of the nature of reality by studying the ritual postures of native art assumed by her subjects during trance states. For readers desiring to discover this world of ancient myths, she has included a practical guide on how to achieve such ecstatic experiences. “The book is clearly written for the general reader and includes many descriptions of trance experiences. It may serve as a good introduction to the nature and appeal of the shamanic revival in modern Western cultures.” —Theological Book Review “A case study in experiential anthropology that offers a unique mix of autobiography, mythology, experiential research, and archaeological data to support a challenging thesis—that certain body postures may help induce specific trance states.” —Shaman’s Drum “This is a spellbinding and exceptionally readable book by an extraordinary woman.” —Yoga Journal

Author : Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271045833
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ecstatic Quotidian written by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.

Author : I. M. Lewis
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780415305082
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.8X/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Ecstatic Religion written by I. M. Lewis and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author : Ralph Metzner
Publisher : New York : Macmillan
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ecstatic Adventure written by Ralph Metzner and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1968 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Belinda Gore
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1591439728
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ecstatic Experience written by Belinda Gore and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-27 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trance-inducing postures for shamanic journeying, initiation, healing, divination, and transformation of the soul • Provides practices from Mayan, Egyptian, African, Native American, Sumerian, and other ancient and indigenous traditions • Shows how these practices can detoxify the energy body The human need for ecstasy--the ability to be free of the limitations of ordinary consciousness--is as imperative as the need for food. Renowned anthropologist Felicitas Goodman claimed that being deprived of ecstasy was the fundamental cause of all forms of addiction. Indigenous cultures and the civilizations of antiquity were aware of this and developed specific rituals to induce and channel trance energies to detoxify and nourish the subtle body in order to experience the ecstatic reality that gives life to matter. The body postures seen in ancient art from Mayan, Egyptian, African, Native American, Sumerian, and other ancient and indigenous traditions are a doorway to inducing this kind of ecstatic trance. People who assume these postures in a ritual context are able to experience expanded and transformative states of consciousness. Following up on the groundbreaking introduction of this practice in her first book, Ecstatic Body Postures, Belinda Gore provides a new series of 20 sacred postures and exercises that allow for a deeper understanding and utilization of these shamanic practices. She shows how to use the energy awakened by these practices for healing, shapeshifting, initiations into the mysteries of death and rebirth, divination, spirit journeying, and restoring balance to the cosmic patterns disrupted by destructive human activity.

Author : Marghanita Laski
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 574 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Ecstasy written by Marghanita Laski and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : D.J. Moores
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 0786478160
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ecstatic Poetic Tradition written by D.J. Moores and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is not only a general inquiry into ecstatic states of consciousness and an historical outline of the ecstatic poetic tradition but also an intensive study of five representative poets--Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tagore. In a refreshingly original, wide-ranging engagement with concepts in psychology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and history, this book demonstrates that the poetics and aesthetics of ecstasy represent an ancient, ubiquitous theory of poetry that continues to influence writers in the current century.

Author : Jonas Grethlein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192587633
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece written by Jonas Grethlein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece pursues a new approach to ancient Greek narrative beyond the taxonomies of structuralist narratologies. Focusing on the phenomenal and experiential dimension of our response to narrative, it triangulates ancient narrative with ancient criticism and cognitive approaches, opening up new vistas within the study of classical literature while ably deploying the ancient material to demonstrate the value of a historical perspective for cognitive studies. Concepts such as immersion and embodiment help to establish a more comprehensive understanding of ancient narrative and ancient reading habits, as manifested in Greek criticism and rhetorical theory. The thirteen chapters presented here tackle a broad range of narrative genres, broadly understood: besides epic, historiography, and the novel, tragedy and early Christian texts are also considered alongside non-literary media, such as dance and sculpture. Authored by international specialists in the language, literature, and culture of ancient Greece, each chapter utilizes a rich set of theoretical and methodological tools drawn from cognitive studies, phenomenology, and linguistics that place them at the vanguard of a strong new current in classical scholarship and literary criticism more generally.