Publication details
Vnímat tmu : terapie tmou, autorita a spirituální zkušenosti
| Title in English | Sensing the dark : The Dark therapy, authority, and spiritual experience |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Subjective religious experiences are part of many world traditions. But to what extent is their content purely subjective and to what extent is it tied to cultural learning and influence of other people? My dissertation project focuses, among other things, on qualitative research on religious experiences in the cultural context of alternative spirituality (spiritual experiences), specifically on the experiences induced by dark therapy (DT). DT combines the effect of prolonged visual deprivation - participants are usually in total darkness for a week - with the influence of a prestigious authority, represented here, for example, by a "dark therapy guide". I will therefore present my theoretical framework for the study of spiritual experiences, combining predictive processing theory with evolutionary theories of social dynamics and authority, and complement it with examples from a preliminary analysis of collected field data. |