Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1982
Robert D. Ogilvie, Harry T. Hunt, Paul D. Tyson et al.
61 citations
Among 10 good dream recallers, awakenings from REM sleep periods with high alpha brain activity produced significantly higher ratings of lucidity compared to low-alpha REM periods. Alpha feedback training before sleep did not affect lucidity or alpha levels during REM. The authors discuss parallels between lucid dreaming and meditative states.
Review of General Psychology
September 1, 2007
Harry T. Hunt
47 citations
Spiritual suffering in the 'dark night of the soul' involves a painful loss of felt meaning that resembles the anhedonia seen in schizophrenia's negative symptoms. Paul Schilder's concept of body image instability helps explain both the disorganized hallucinations of psychosis and the enhanced sense of self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence, measured through physical balance and spatial abilities, underlies integrative versus disintegrative consciousness changes. The dark night's suffering is a semantic satiation that deletes experienced presence after its previous enhancement, a focused version of the broader anhedonic despair found in clinical schizotypy and secular culture.
Archives of General Psychiatry
July 1, 1976
Harry T. Hunt
43 citations
The term "psychedelic" applied to altered states of consciousness suggests that such subjective anomalies arise from normal psychological functioning. Anomalous experience depends on sensitization to immediate subjective state, which is nonadaptive and cuts off intentionality at a primitive microgenetic level. This hypothesis was confirmed experimentally: groups given instructions for direct sensitization to immediate subjective state reported striking incidence of anomalous subjective reports after ten minutes of isolation and inactivity, compared with nonsensitization groups. Additionally, analysis of early introspectionist experimental protocols revealed subjective anomalies similar to those in drug and meditational states, supporting a psychedelic model of altered states.
August 5, 2022
Harry T. Hunt
4 citations
A futural spirituality might renew the sense of the sacred through a collective neo-shamanism, possibly energized by entheogens, to counter the loss of meaning from secularization, commodification, and hyper-rationalism. Jung, Toynbee, and Sorokin saw such renewal as inevitable, rooted in an originary ur-shamanism, while Bourguignon, Weber, and the later Heidegger foresaw blockage by globalizing materialist economy. The renewal could be adjustive, mirroring hyper-individualism like Stoicism or New Age spirituality, or revolutionary like early Christianity. The question is whether neo-shamanism can resacralize planet and nature to address climate change.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
September 1, 2019
Harry T. Hunt
2 citations
Heidegger's later philosophy of numinous Being-experience is examined as part of a series on thinkers who, from the 1930s onward, envisioned a futural 'New Age' spirituality to counter globalizing materialism and disenchantment. The paper situates Heidegger within transpersonal psychology, religious studies, and James's 'pure experience,' while also addressing his early involvement with National Socialism as a spiritual metapathology of narcissistic inflation. From the mid-1930s, Heidegger moved toward a radical critique of universal commodification and technology, proposing an 'Other Beginning' and a 'last god' that would re-sacralize humanity for the guardianship of the planet and life.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
September 1, 2018
Harry T. Hunt
1 citation
Wilhelm Reich developed a vitalistic transpersonal psychology that envisioned a future spirituality to counter global materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. His work, framed as a "religion for the children of the future," drew on intuitions of a transformative life energy, though its supporting research in orgone physics and biology is questionable. Reich's personal development paralleled classical mystical stages of purgation and illumination, culminating in a "dark night" crisis interpreted as spiritual emergency. The paper distinguishes Reich's spiritual insights from his dubious scientific claims and situates him among other mid-20th-century thinkers who articulated overlapping visions of a New Age spirituality.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
February 20, 2024
Harry T. Hunt
The numinous, or felt sense of the sacred, evokes unity, humility, and healing. While traditional religion schematizes it in absolutes, phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger analyze it as a symbolic unification of a fragmented life-world. The numinous amplifies the nondual organism-surround relationship seen in non-symbolic organisms, reflected in Uexküll's animal umwelten and Gibson's "envelopes of flow." Husserl's passive synthesis and James's pure experience intuit forms underlying a transspecies consciousness, differentiated into concrete lifeworlds down to sentient protozoa and abstractly amplified as the human numinous. With its social template in an ethically responsible shamanism, the numinous now calls for care and conservation of Spirit shared with all sentient beings amid the human-caused climate crisis.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1985
Harry T. Hunt
A previously developed cognitive theory of mystical and altered states is extended. The theory holds that these states directly exteriorize normally hidden processes of semantics or 'felt meaning.' The human ability to 'turn around on the schemata' for symbolic recombination is based on cross-modal or synaesthetic embodiment of geometric and luminosity patterns afforded by disassembling visual-spatial perception. Orthodox accounts that treat synaesthesias and geometric imagery as primitive or nonsymbolic are rejected. This reinterpretation offers new understanding of ordinary insight, body-percept changes in schizophrenia, yoga chakra experience, and the mystical void. The psychology of thought and of altered states mutually illuminate each other.