Notes
- A team composed by a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist discovered that under the temple of the Delphic oracle, vapours of ethylene able to produce temporary states of euphoria were generated by an underground fault.
- Transcendence procedures used to bring about mystical experiences, similar to those described here when dealing with the dhikr, are described also by Jewish cabalistic texts from the thirteenth century. In Natan Ben Sa’adyah Har’ar's Sa’ Are Sedeq (The Doors of Justice), a detailed account is given of Master Avrham Abulafia's cabalistic techniques (Idel, 2001). Abulafia developed the new ecstatic and linguistic Qabbalah, different from the conceptual transmission typical of the theophysical and liturgical Qabbalah. This consisted in a collection of procedures that lead to a closeness to God thanks to experience-driven techniques. The basic technique of the ecstatic Quabbalah consists in the combination/decomposition of the 72 letters composing the tetragram of the Divine Name. The combination of the letters making up the tetragram (i.e. making them appear and disappear according to their original order) is a technique aimed at drawing the superior spiritual forces on the person that exchanges the letters according to a control procedure defined by Idel as ‘talismanic’. The mystic-based experience is made of a number of specific stages that are similar to those described in the text:(a) The transcendence experience occurs during a state of wake thanks to the prior annulment of all the senses.(b) The purely mental decomposition/recomposition (without verbalization) of the letters of the Divine Name. The effect of the combination of the letters of the Divine Name is the colouring of the letters themselves, followed by an increasing divine illumination. The switching on and off sequence of the letters may result in receiving a specific message by the God and giving a meaning to the experience.(c) In other instances, ‘the appearance of the coloured and illuminated letters (of the Divine Name) produces an altered state of consciousness’ characterized by an accelerated speculative activity and by visual and sound experiences.(d) The technique of combining the letters making up the Divine Name may lead to the divine power's entering the human body, over-triggering its potential. The coexistence with God may bring the gifts of divination, prophecy, photism, invisibility, basically a detachment from the body that makes a return into the latter pointless, in fact undesired at the end of this experience. The apical experience is a metaphorical and mystic death that represents the attempt to remain united with the spiritual source from which extreme experiences stem. The erotic element in detachment techniques, i. e. ‘death through the divine kiss’ can be found among the aspects that can facilitate the acceptance and valorization of the suicide/martyrdom.
- Studies on healing trances, on the spiritual experiences of the religious seeker, on religious conversion and on many kinds of psychological conditioning, aimed to achieving a rapid and permanent change in man's beliefs and behaviour, show an exceptional convergence, widely recorded in the history of psychiatry and ethno-psychiatry, on the phase of ‘transmarginal inhibition’ as a prerequisite to enter new mental performances. The detachment from previous functions of the neuronal network in the brain has been indicated as an internal depatterning (Sargant, 1957) or a sudden unlearning of the previous intentional structure (Freeman, 1995).
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