Kabbalah: A Neurocognitive Approach to Mystical Experiences
Shahar Arzy and Moshe Idel
Abstract
The human body and self play a prominent role in mysticism. Various mystics endeavoured to achieve altered bodily states such as a feeling of their body expanding beyond its physical limits, a feeling of “forgetting” their own body or sensing “something” filling it. Some reported perceiving the self as doubled, elevated, or semi-permeable, whereas others have reported a unity between self and object, a splitting of the self, or an experience of themselves in inhabitual positions. These altered states further enabled the mystics to investigate the boundaries of mind, consciousness, and self-con ... More
The human body and self play a prominent role in mysticism. Various mystics endeavoured to achieve altered bodily states such as a feeling of their body expanding beyond its physical limits, a feeling of “forgetting” their own body or sensing “something” filling it. Some reported perceiving the self as doubled, elevated, or semi-permeable, whereas others have reported a unity between self and object, a splitting of the self, or an experience of themselves in inhabitual positions. These altered states further enabled the mystics to investigate the boundaries of mind, consciousness, and self-consciousness, for it is from these altered states that these obscure mental functions may be newly enlightened. Particularly, ecstatic mysticism developed complicated techniques of mental imagery, transformation, and concentration for experiencing altered conscious states; through them the mystics not only viewed the mystic self or “soul” but also encountered celestial entities and God. In this book we investigate the phenomenology, neurology, and underlying cognitive techniques of ecstatic mystical experiences as described in the writings of mystics of major trends in Jewish Kabbalah, including the prophetic Kabbalah, the Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, and Hassidism. These mystics achieved their most prominent mystical experiences by using practical ecstatic techniques that changed their internal mental state. We detail experiences, techniques, reports, and instructions as described by the mystics themselves. These are further compared with similar phenomena found nowadays in healthy individuals and in neurological patients or induced in the laboratory. Using neurological and neuropsychological studies, as well as analyses of brain lesions, experimental psychology, and neuroimaging, we endeavor to decode the brain mechanisms and processes underlying these mystical experiences. This enables further understanding of not only the mystical techniques but also the ecstatic experiences and their various contexts.
Keywords:
mysticism,
ecstasy,
brain,
cognition,
neurology,
psychiatry
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300152364 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: January 2016 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300152364.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Shahar Arzy, author
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Moshe Idel, author
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
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