ANTHROPOLOGY, CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE LECTURE
Wed 28 Nov, 6.30 – 8.00
Blackwell's Bookshop,  87 Park Street, Bristol.

Dr. Fiona Bowie 
“Sixth sense, psychometry and spirits of place: Everyday experiences of invisible forces in contemporary Britain” 

The Lecture explores the common, everyday end of the psychic spectrum in contemporary Britain. Many people claim to have a ‘gut feeling’ about something, have a pre-cognitive dream or intuition, or get a particular sensation when walking into a building or visiting a certain location. We may have knowledge of somebody or some event when making contact with a physical object associated with them or it. Having such experiences is not necessarily associated with any particular belief in the paranormal. This raises the issue of the rationalisation of psychic experiences within a secular society. Rationalist, materialist discourses dominate much of the media and academia, but exposure to a coherent system of explanation, such as that given by Theosophy or Rational Spirituality, can lead to a gradual or sudden interpretive shift. Instead of viewing psychic experiences as psychological, neurological or metaphorical, they may be seen as real events, external to the individual psyche. Many of those who testify to such experiences do so within a broadly scientific rather than religious, faith-based paradigm. Contemporary physics and cosmology are seen as proposing an expanded view of the universe that can accommodate what have hitherto been regarded as religious, metaphysical or spiritual experiences. Accounts of phenomena such as déjà vu or precognition, encounters with non-human beings or telepathic communication may be universal, but rationalisations of such phenomena change in line with other aspects of contemporary life and thought. Listeners are invited to participate in the session by bringing with them examples of such phenomena from their own experience, and to think about the interpretive frameworks used to account for them (if any).

Audio recording of the Lecture: http://anthreligconsc.weebly.com/lecture-archive.html 

In this seminar I will review my research into the relationship between afterlife beliefs and certain types of ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’ experiences worldwide as found in the texts of early civilizations, and in the earliest ethnographic reports on indigenous societies. The key issue is the extent to which afterlife conceptions are consistent cross-culturally, and with the spontaneous, evidently universal near-death experience.

In opposition to contemporary postmodernist-influenced assumptions that religious beliefs and experiences are entirely culturally constructed, I argue that afterlife conceptions in human societies are commonly formed not only by a combination of culture-specific socio-historical and environmental factors, but also universal cognitive factors and universal anomalous experiential factors. This is demonstrated by the existence of thematically consistent narratives of near-death experiences found in nearly all times and places, which in turn correspond to the widespread general similarities found in afterlife conceptions worldwide. This is despite differences in social organization and scale, and high degrees of cultural independence and geographical and chronological distance between the societies considered.

THIS PUBLIC SEMINAR WILL BE HELD IN THE SUTRO ROOM OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD, AT 8:30PM ON THURSDAY 15TH NOVEMBER 2012, WITH DRINKS AT 8:15PM.
Speaker Information

Gregory Shushan is author of the Grawemeyer Award-nominated Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations: Universalism, Constructivism, and Near-Death Experience (Continuum Advances in Religious Studies, 2009). He has been Visiting Lecturer in Religious Studies at University of Wales Lampeter, Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork where he helped establish the first such department in the Republic of Ireland, guest lecturer in Anthropology of Religions at Swiss University, and Research Fellow at the Centro Incontri Umani (The Cross Cultural Centre) at Ascona, Switzerland. He has presented his research in seven different countries, and is the recipient of six academic awards, including the Gordon Childe Prize. He holds a Diploma in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology from Birkbeck College (University of London), a BA in Egyptian Archaeology and an MA in Research Methods for the Humanities from University College London, and a PhD in Religious Studies from University of Wales Lampeter. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford, researching comparative afterlife beliefs in indigenous religions worldwide in the context of shamanic and near-death experiences. The project is supported by a grant from the Perrot-Warrick Fund, Trinity College, Cambridge.



For more information visit:

http://www.ianramseycentre.info/seminars/near-death-experience-and-the-origins-of-afterlife-beliefs.html