I am pleased to announce that a new book edited by Dr. Olga Louchakova-Schwartz is set to be published this November. I am honored to have contributed a chapter to this insightful collection, titled "The Problem of Religious Experience."
My contribution is titled:
"[Chapter 2] Reconnecting the Self to the Divine: The Body’s Role in Religious Experience"
Interestingly, this is the first time I have formally explored religious experiences through the lens of embodiment. While my work often focuses on the phenomenology of the body in more secular or psychological contexts, investigating the "divine" through our physical existence has been a profoundly rewarding challenge. For those interested, here is the abstract of my chapter. I hope it sparks some reflection on how our bodies "know" more than we often realize.
[Abstract]
This chapter explores spontaneous religious experiences—those that occur outside traditional religious beliefs or institutions but remain inherently religious in nature. These can range from a deep feeling of unity with nature to the peak states in sports, or even the sudden ecstatic sensation one might feel when listening to a harmonious chorus. Although these moments are not always labeled as "religious," they are intense enough to awaken spiritual feelings. What is experienced as "something beyond the self" may be the foundational source of divinity underlying all religious activity. My goal is to explore this experience from the perspective of the embodied self and the sense of agency. William James (1902) famously listed "passivity" as a hallmark of mystical experience: the feeling that one's actions are guided by "the Other" even while maintaining a sense of agency. In my view, this state originates in the function of the body schema coordinating actions with the environment. Just as the body schema organizes new actions beyond our conscious intentions in unfamiliar situations, the body in spontaneous religious experiences operates beyond habit, acting as if it were following a divine will.
Cheers,
Shogo
