Spiritual Inquiry Research Articles

Into the Mystery

Can we gain spiritual knowledge by tuning into the body’s inherent wisdom? This paper explores such a possibility through the lens of Embodied Spiritual Inquiry (ESI), a participatory approach to transpersonal learning, developed by Jorge N. Ferrer, proposing the integration of multiple ways of knowing through physical, somatic, vital, emotional, mental and spiritual experiences. The focus of this phenomenological study was on the experience of ESI and its potential transformative value for inquirers. Seven individuals who previously participated in ESI research were interviewed. Findings emerged through eight essential themes: four textural constituents - transpersonal experiences, intimacy with self and others, transformation in everyday life, and serendipity; and four structural qualities - inquiry container, intuitive knowing through the body, collaborative research, and enhancement of other practices. Results reflected the intrapersonal, interpersonal and transpersonal experiences of participants, suggesting that ESI may have a transformative value for researchers engaging with the method. While these results require further investigation in regard to their transferability, they may inspire future studies in light of the implications of transpersonal research in the field of psychology and beyond.

The Role of Religious Centre in Monash University: Perspective of Three Indonesian Muslim Students

This study aims to explore the perspective of three Indonesian Muslim students at Monash University concerning the availability of Religious Centre which facilitates some aspects of students’ spiritual inquiry. This study deals with the primary data through observation and semi-structured interviews as qualitative research. This research reveals that Religious Centre has a significant role in fulfilling students’ spiritual needs, including the prayer room for Muslim students, and also fosters students’ tolerance by putting prayer rooms for all religions in the same building. The university students found that Religious Centre is significant in preserving their religiosity and relieving them to perform prayers inside the campus. Likewise, it has eased students in managing academic challenges. In addition, this study found that Religious Centre has contributed to maintaining the religiosity of three Indonesian Muslim students: helping them cheering educational challenges and controlling their academic stresses.

Logos, Thomas Carlyle, and The Everlasting Yea

Logos, Thomas Carlyle, and The Everlasting Yea Raymond N. MacKenzie, Editor Keywords Thomas Carlyle, Romanticism, Catholic Romanticism This is my first issue as Editor at Logos, and I want to begin by saying just a few words about my predecessor, Dr. David Deavel. Dave has taken a new position with the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and he will be very much missed here. His contributions to Logos were too many to count; many readers will remember, in particular, his many fine prefaces, which seamlessly blended personal reflection with intellectual and spiritual inquiry. And all Logos readers are in his debt for his work in soliciting, evaluating, and editing manuscripts, and for shaping and nurturing the journal for nineteen years (six as editor-in-chief). We here at the journal wish the very best for Dave and his family. As I begin my tenure as editor of Logos, I’m naturally drawn to the question of ends, of goals. I’ve been thinking about the question, what is this journal for? The obvious answers—the journal is a place for scholarly inquiry, for intellectual exchange—are satisfactory as far as they go, but those are true of all academic journals. Does Logos have something else to do, something larger to provide? Our website provides a good place to start thinking about the question. There, we read the following: [End Page 5] Springing from our commitment at the St. Thomas Center for Catholic Studies to contribute to national and international developments in Catholic higher education, we began publishing Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture more than 20 years ago. Since then, Logos has served as an interdisciplinary meeting point for scholars to publish their finest work and for readers to remain engaged in the beauty, truth, and vitality of Christianity as it is rooted in and shaped by Catholicism. Engaging readers in the beauty, truth, and vitality of Christianity: now we can see a better answer to the question taking shape. Continuing to think about the subject, my attention was piqued by a concept that is developed in this issue of Logos, in Peter Gorday’s article. I will give a proper introduction to Reverend Gorday’s work later in this preface, but right now I want to pick up a specific point, though it is one that at first seems far removed from the question of what Logos can offer. He cites the French writer Henri Bremond as arguing that Romanticism is in its essence mystical; Bremond spoke of a conservative romanticism, even a Catholic romanticism. He seemed to see Romanticism as profoundly religious and thus, by implication, as a literature that is closely connected to faith. Was Romanticism essentially mystical? Was it that close to Catholicism? Nowadays, it is rarely discussed in such terms; scholars tend to stress the revolutionary side of Romanticism, its political radicalism, its flouting of taboos and breaking of boundaries. But I think Henri Bremond was right. Romantic poetry, especially the British variety, is very often marked by what can only be called a sacramental vision: Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a prime example, as Catholic a poem as any non-Catholic ever wrote. Robert Penn Warren saw this already back in 1946 in a classic study of the poem that explored Coleridge’s “sacramental conception of the universe.”1 Coleridge’s haunting allegory of unmotivated sin, repentance, penance, and redemption not only expresses Catholic themes and ideas, but it foregrounds Catholic imagery and rhetoric. And Coleridge is [End Page 6] not alone among the Romantics in his profound quest for the spiritual. His friend Wordsworth is always in search of the transcendent: Our destiny, our being’s heart and homeIs with infinitude, and only there . . . 2 Wordsworth is often cast as a pantheist for the way he almost seems to deify nature, but when we read more closely, it is clear that for him, the natural world conceals a mighty power behind it, almost as if in illustration of an important point St. Athanasius makes: “He [God] provided the works of creation also as means by which the Maker might be known.”3 Across the Channel...

An embodied spiritual inquiry into the nature of human boundaries: Outcomes of a participatory approach to transpersonal education and research.

Embodied spiritual inquiry (ESI) is a radical approach to integral and transpersonal education and research offered as a graduate course at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). Inspired by elements of participatory research and cooperative inquiry, ESI applies interactive embodied meditations to access multiple ways of knowing (e.g., somatic, vital, emotional, mental, contemplative) and mindfully inquire into collaboratively decided questions. This article presents the learning outcomes of an inquiry into the nature of human boundaries within and between co-inquirers, providing an example of how ESI is implemented in the classroom and can be used to study transpersonal subject matter. In particular, the study found that boundaries were experienced in terms of their dynamic effects rather than as static qualities, with a relationship between dissociation and overly firm boundaries, as well as a relationship between integration/merging and more varied combinations of firm and permeable boundaries. Other notable inquiry outcomes include the identification of (a) experiential qualities of the states of dissociation, merging, and integration; (b) a recursive relationship between fear and trust in the modulation of optimal interpersonal boundaries; and (c) the phenomenon of shared emergent experience between practitioners, which suggests the existence of an intersubjective transpersonal field.

Landscape and Divinity Spoken in the Same Breath

From where can we draw inspiration to cultivate an intimate sensibility into the spiritual nature of landscape, the foundation for designing gardens for meditation and healing? Through various spiritual lenses, this inquiry penetrates fundamental grounds for our subtle relationship with landscape. Beginning with excerpts of a private audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Middlebury College, at which I present my proposed plans and designs for Milarepa Center in Barnet, Vermont, this inquiry looks into the profound links between spiritual inquiry and the practice of designing gardens, making design of landscape integral to a spiritual path, and the profound relationship between Landscape and Divinity. It is presented in three parts: (1) spiritual inspiration; (2) setting terms on the table; and (3) expressions of sacred landscape.

Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit by Nagueyalti Warren

Reviewed by: Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit by Nagueyalti Warren Rochell Isaac (bio) Warren, Nagueyalti. Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit. Landham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-1538123973. $129.85 Hardcover. In multiple interviews, Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker, has shared the story of seeing the dead body of her classmate's mother whose husband had shot her in the face. Walker explains that as a child, she knew that she would tell that woman's story and that while she didn't yet have the words, she would learn, and that story would be about poverty, rage, oppression, sexism, and misogyny. As Walker surmised at a young age, she would indeed learn to tell such stories; in fact, addressing these social ills has been the focus of her life's work. Professor of African American Studies, Nagueyalti Warren, in Alice Walker's Metaphysics: Literature of Spirit, seeks to securely place Walker and her work in the African American homiletic tradition. Warren's ambitious book delves fully into Walker's body of work. She locates Walker in the tradition of Sojourner Truth who wrote on matters of race and gender drawn explicitly from her own lived experiences. The truth is Walker's only guide and compass. Warren blesses her audience with theological, metaphysical, ecocritical, ecofeminist, cultural, and structuralist readings of Walker's texts. Her access to Walker's private notes and manuals provides profound insight into Walker's thinking, further heightening the book's appeal. Warren presents Walker's works as the culmination of an aesthetic vision of her theology of spiritual liberation and transformation, embedded with a rejection of religion, dualism and suffering. She depicts Walker's search and exploration of mystical truth for self-empowerment. Alice Walker is represented as literary mystic, pagan sage, and healer. Warren introduces Walker as mystic born of childhood trauma: the eye injury she sustained at 8-years-old, the unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and a long illness which she self-diagnosed as Lyme disease. These existential crises brought Walker to experience the dark night of the soul, a common experience for mystics, and as mystic, she draws on her own experience as an African American woman in her writing. I was first introduced to Walker's work as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University and was instantly captivated by Walker's own story. The daughter of sharecroppers, Alice Walker rose to become a major writer of the 20th century, becoming the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple. A prolific writer, Walker has written several novels which Warren dissects chronologically illustrating how with each novel, Walker takes her audience deeper into the "mystical realm." Warren concludes that Walker's collective work has brought about a paradigm shift, which unveils and challenges our archaic binary thinking [End Page 320] about life as simply defined by our notions of good and evil. Walker's writing then, opens up a sacred and communal space to the "infinite possibilities" created in a spiritual universe for readers who dare to journey with her. Walker's first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Warren describes as a "mediation on choice" where free will, fate and destiny are highlighted with sexism, classism, and poverty categorized as intersecting symptoms (21). Walker's second novel, Meridian (1976), is followed by her magnum opus, The Color Purple (1982), which Walker herself posits is a theological work and which Warren depicts as a sermon. The novels: The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), and a memoir, The Chicken Chronicles (2011) follow to varying degrees of acclaim. Walker has also produced several collections of short stories: In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Woman (1973), You Can't Keep A Good Woman Down (1971), Alice Walker Banned (1996), The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000). Warren uses Organic Inquiry—a research method and spiritual inquiry blend aimed at transformative change—to unpack Walker's...

Spiritual and Scientific Inquiry as ways the East and the West have sought to understand the nature of Reality

Western and Eastern philosophical cultures have different perspectives on inquiring about the nature of reality. These influences have shaped the approach to what qualifies as science in the West and Spiritual Inquiry in the East. These perspectives are intimately related to the topic of the reliability of scientific theories and spiritual inquiry and the ultimate purpose of both approaches. This paper mainly examines whether there is something to be gained from an Eastern way of thought and presents its benefits given that our current science has largely been influenced by Western thought. However, any evaluation of both perspectives must also contemplate how future science may be advanced by incorporating these complementary approaches.

Exploring the Meaning of Spirituality and Spiritual Care with Help From Viktor Frankl.

Problem: A difficult concept to understand, spirituality is not often addressed in healthcare. Purpose: This paper will explore the concept of spirituality and spiritual care using the theory of meaning by Viktor Frankl. Implications: Authors will provide ways for nurses to think about spiritual needs and spiritual care for patients and identify barriers to spiritual care implementation. Suggestions are made for spiritual inquiry, resources are provided for spiritual care education and training, and recommendations are made for nursing education curricula and health care policy change. Conclusions: With a greater understanding of spirituality, nurses practicing holistic care can increase their spiritual care competence and implement spiritual care into practice.

Physicians’ Attitude towards Patients’ Spirituality at a Tertiary-Care Health Facility in Southern Nigeria

Background: It has been shown that patients would like to discuss their spiritual beliefs with their physicians and that they have spiritual needs which are often under addressed by health care professionals. Whereas, addressing those needs in clinical practice is a component of the holistic care that every patient deserves, the attitude of physicians towards addressing them has not been ascertained in our environment.
 Objectives: To explore physicians' attitude and self-reported behavior towards patients’ spirituality in clinical practice at a tertiary health facility in Southern Nigeria.
 Methods: In this cross-sectional survey carried out between August and November 2020, a semi-structured and self-administered questionnaire was completed by the participating physicians which were of various ranks and working in various departments of the hospital. Their attitude towards their patients’ spirituality in clinical practice and self-reported behavior were analyzed using SPSS version 25.0.
 Results: A total of 200 physicians participated in the study, 90% of them were residents of various cadres, two-third (n=122; 61%) had less than 10 years work experience. Majority of respondents (n=163; 81.5%) considered it appropriate to make inquiries about their patients’ spirituality and less than half of them (n=98; 49%) were aware that there is a religious leader in the hospital who offers pastoral care. Half of the respondents (n=104; 52%) reported they rarely take spirituality history of patients, 18 (9%) often pray with the patient while 100 (50%) rarely refer patients for pastoral care. Insufficient time was the most frequent barrier to discussing spiritual issues with patients. However, only 5 (2.5%) respondents were able to name 3 common tools a health worker can use to assess patients’ spiritual needs.
 Conclusion: Physicians enquiry into patients’ spirituality was inconsistent, and there were gaps between their attitudes to discussing these issues with their patients and its practice. Incorporating spiritual care courses into physicians’ training is recommended to overcome the barriers to both patient and physician spiritual inquiry.

The Religious Argument—How We Substantiate Divine Authority in Human Terms

Religious beliefs are unprovable except by empirical argument. The human race has struggled with full submission to these beliefs because beliefs, by definition intangible. The Argument, if performed well, substantiates valid religious beliefs and their utility to in human society, do not exact a price upon it or presume to self-enforce. Still, several kinds of arguments exist: Religion as an absolute, far from optional, and the other provides logic as to how we find God, the Real One, connect with Him and the beautiful universe around us without the constant redirection of religious nonsense-or its proponents in the way?This paper will examine Arguments from Islam, the Fatwa, the Greek, called a Polemic, the Apologetic, which exists in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity, the Chazakah, or presumption used in Judaism, and the Upanishad, an ancient form of spiritual inquiry and scientific method used by Vedantin Hindus. My objectives include overview of the history, structure, and forms of each type of Argument, and finally, recommendations for a standard format all religions can take advantage of.

Agnosticism II: Actions and attitudes

AbstractWithin contemporary philosophy, practical consequences of agnosticism about the existence of God have mostly been discussed on the margins of other topics—such as the nature of faith or the problem of divine hiddenness. The aim of this article is to present the existing views on the practical upshots of suspending one's judgment on God's existence, briefly discussing the way in which agnosticism relates to practical atheism, non‐doxastic faith, fictionalism, apophaticism, and spiritual inquiry.

Yvette Centeno: uma poética ao rés do tempo e das coisas sem tempo ("Entre Silêncios. Poesia 1961-2018")

Like a fold-out map that displays in more or less detail the possible coordinates of locations of interest, a poet’s (almost) complete works collected together in a single volume can be read and analyzed from vari-ous perspectives: chronological, thematic, symbolic. The present essay undertakes a multifaceted reading, both global and analytical, of Yvette K. Centeno`s book of poems Between Silences. Poetry 1961 to 2018. In its rhetorical bareness her poetry gives voice to a distilled awareness of the world made of affections, ranging from pain to joy, from irony to rebellion, from erotic allusion to spiritual inquiry, from subjective passion to universal love, from the woman’s body to the politics of the feminine being, from filial sentiments to the maternal feelings, from the sense of the tragic to the hope of redemption. However, her poetry also makes cultural and literary references that, albeit without programmatic affiliation and with occasional incursions into the French language, undeniably form part of the Portuguese lyrical tradition.

INTEREST GROUP SESSION—RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY AND AGING: KEEPING FAITH ALIVE: ADVANCING THE NEXT GENERATION OF RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL INQUIRY IN GERONTOLOGY

A compelling body of evidence suggests that church attendance and spiritual practices increase as persons approach the end life. In fact, a growing number of baby boomers in the United States are returning to church and reconnecting with their faith communities. A primary reason for this surge in religious engagement involves a personal desire to turn away from the material pursuits of life and achieve a sense of meaning and fulfillment amid increasing frailty and vulnerability. However, most religious institutions do not have the necessary resources to support an ever increasing older membership. The graying of religion will require gerontologists to develop innovative approaches to advance theoretical thinking, measurement and assessment practices, and program evaluation. Therefore, the purpose of this symposium is to advocate and synergize a new generation of religious and spiritual inquiry in gerontology. Of particular interest is exposing theoretical models, measurement strategies, mixed-methodologies, and evidence-based findings to promote and sustain positive faith connections as persons grow old. Empirical advancements surrounding commitment and practice of one’s religious faith in old age, evolving feelings of religious belief versus doubt, disposition to seek and engage in acts of forgiveness, and faith-community responses to dementia care will be shared. Implications relevant for building interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connections across behavioral and social science research, social work, clinical counseling, and pastoral ministry will be highlighted.

Interactive Meditation Practice as Research Method: An Introduction to Embodied Spiritual Inquiry

This article presents Embodied Spiritual Inquiry (ESI), a participatory approach to integral education and transpersonal research that has been offered since 2003 as a graduate course at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, by core faculty Jorge N. Ferrer. Inspired by elements of participatory research (e.g., Reason, 1994a; Reason & Bradbury, 2008) and cooperative inquiry (Heron, 1996), ESI applies Albareda and Romero’s Interactive Embodied Meditations (Ferrer, 2003) to access multiple ways of knowing (e.g., somatic, vital, emotional, mental, spiritual) and mindfully inquire into collaboratively decided questions about the human condition. Past inquiries have included diverse psychospiritual topics including the experiential features of relational spirituality (Osterhold, Husserl, & Nicol, 2007), the nature of human boundaries within and between co-inquirers (Sohmer, Baumann, & Ferrer, 2018), felt-sensed markers discerning genuine versus unreliable spiritual knowledge, experiential understandings of the personal and collective “shadow,” and the multidimensionality of the human condition. After presenting an overview of the ESI methodology and two case studies, this article discusses the merits, limitations, and future horizons of this approach for integral education and transpersonal research. KEYWORDS Transpersonal Research, Integral Education, Multiple Ways of Knowing, Interactive Embodied Meditations, Cooperative Inquiry, Participatory Research, Embodied Spirituality.

A Contemporary Paradigm: Integrating Spirituality in Advance Care Planning.

In the 25years since advance care planning first drew the attention of the national healthcare and legal systems, gains in the rate of advance care directive completion have been negligible despite the effort of researchers, ethicists, and lawmakers. With the benefit of sophisticated healthcare technology, patients are living longer. Despite the benefits of increased longevity, it is widely acknowledged that enough has not been done to adequately address end-of-life care decisions at the crossroads between medical futility and quality of life. To arrive at a solution, researchers have focused on patient self-reflection, provider attitudes, health literacy, communication and the logistics of surrogacy, setting, payment, and documentation. However, a survey of the literature reveals one conspicuously absent theme. It is a phenomenon one would expect in the context of end-of-life discussion and decision making, that of spiritual inquiry. This article explores the history leading up and past approaches to advance care planning and then suggests the use of a theoretical model and a body of work concerning spiritual care as a new tack in the ongoing development of advance care planning.

El nervio humanista de la universidad

Reflexión sobre las características de una universidad que quiera ser realmente “humanista” en el contexto social actual. La universidad debe estar al servicio de la sociedad entera, no sólo de los grupos dominantes, y para ello debe hacer una opción por los pobres. Por otra parte, en sociedades culturalmente plurales la universidad debe promover el diálogo intercultural e interreligioso y favorecer la indagación de caminos de crecimiento espiritual más allá de las diferentes tradiciones religiosas. Para ello la universidad ha de educar “la persona entera” y asumir una antropología compleja que dé cuenta de la multidimensionalidad del ser humano. Aunque pueda parecer paradójico, este tipo de universidad generaría una capacidad de innovación y creatividad que la haría más capaz de enfrentar los desafíos actuales de nuestras sociedades.

The Psyche in Psychedelic

The Psyche in Psychedelic

Earth-based Spirituality in Australian Outdoor and Environmental Studies

Australian Outdoor & Environmental Studies (OES), under the curriculum framework of Health and Physical Education (HPE), is influenced by dominant discourses of androcentric perspectives of wilderness. As such, inherent adventure hegemonies impact the type and depth of relationship that can emerge with nature. Through an eco-feminist lens, I will draw on the stories of three adolescent students and their encounters with spiritual pedagogy, namely meditation practices within Australian OES. These student stories, collected during a 5-day hiking expedition in a remote coastal environment in southern Victoria, demonstrated that ideas of ‘femininity’ are subjugated and inferiorised to ideas of ‘masculinity’ in the outdoors. Therefore, I call for OES pedagogical approaches to work towards a more robust integration of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ psyches towards values of deep ecology. In this paper I will draw on Merleau - Ponty’s emotional embodiment theories and Jung’s psychological theories, to argue for a reshaping of OES pedagogical approaches that more thoroughly include spiritual and emotional inquiry, in order to create deeper connections to the natural world in the context of contemporary global environmental challenges.

Resolving Spirited Debates: Recasting Communication Inquiry as a Spiritual Practice

This paper argues that communication inquiry can be understood as a spiritual practice. Specifically, it looks at three paradigms of communication inquiry: classical scientific, interpretive, and critical. It identifies the spiritual traditions that align with each paradigm and shows how understanding each paradigm from a spiritual perspective can improve the practice of inquiry. Understanding communication inquiry as spiritual also helps address the problem of interparadigmatic incommensurability. This paper closes by identifying common components of spiritual inquiry across the three paradigms.

The Evolution of a Meme Cluster: A Personal Account of a Countercultural Odyssey through <em>The Age of Aquarius</em>

The Evolution of a Meme Cluster: A Personal Account of a Countercultural Odyssey through <em>The Age of Aquarius</em>