Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning

Exploring Myth, Metaphor, Magic for Sustainability

Maureen Ellis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040353509
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Navigating a diversity of religious myths and worldviews in both conventional and nuanced secular ways, this edited volume explores transdisciplinary common knowledge and global citizenship ideology through the lens of spirituality, depth hermeneutics, and multimodality.

Guided by a broadly semiotic approach, this book examines ancient spiritual myths, metaphors, and magic/wisdom, raising crucial questions of identity, current conflicts, military power, and crises which threaten mental health for many. Chapters take an anthropological and chronological approach through targeted case studies, in part using Systemic Functional Semiotic (SFS) frameworks and linguistic anthropology to tackle issues of contemporary importance such as human rights, conflict resolution, environmentalism, and sustainable development. Featuring a truly international, multidisciplinary team of contributors applying the lenses of mysticism, neuroscience, quantum theory, psychology, and phenomenology to the themes discussed, this book uncovers deep ultimate connections between different religious and philosophical traditions, highlighting shared metaphors, narratives, and allegories that transcend disciplinary, cultural, and geographical boundaries.

Driven by a collaborative attempt at achieving spiritual understanding, this book will be of interest to postgraduate students, researchers, and scholars working in global citizenship education, philosophy of education, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics more broadly. It will also be useful for scholars of spirituality, philosophy of language, and ancient religions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of editors and contributors
• Introduction
• 1 From myth to math: chaos and consciousness
• 2 Varieties of musical experience: cognitive neuroscience of myth, ritual, and healing
• 3 Metaphor, metonymy, meronymy: conscience as moral imagination
• 4 Persuasion through the water metaphor in Dao De Jing
• 5 Shinto and the sacred: an analysis of its God-images through the holotropic paradigm, Jungian archetypes, and the Imago Dei of contemporary psychotherapy
• 6 Sacred knowledge of healing, biocultural relations, and modern science in the Mayan Lowlands
• 7 Zarathushtra and the magi: Mazdean beliefs, myths, and metaphors
• 8 Bharatanatyam: the contemporary relevance of an ancient Hindu classical dance form
• 9 Good (Puṇya) and sinful (Pāpa) actions and their karmic consequences (karma phala) in Jain Karma doctrine
• 10 Buddhism and essential Onenesses
• 11 From gloss to figure, between mythic and divine violence: a comparative reading in Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Abu Ubaydah’s political exegesis of Isaiah 60:18, 1 Samuel 15:3, and Quran 9:11–14
• 12 From mystical illiteracy in the west to creation spirituality where science and mysticism meet
• 13 Is God the Lord of the armies or the Most High? Revisiting Judeo-Christian metaphors to give peace a chance
• 14 Mīrī pīrī: the connection of spiritual and political consciousness
• 15 Work as worship, prayer as practice
• 16 Testifying about universal access: liberal Quakers and the pure principle
• 17 Gift or exchange? The mother or the market?
• 18 Evolutionary learning in an age of mediated illusion: virtual realities and mediated ‘dream’ images for cultural healing
• 19 Humanism as a worldview and way of being
• 20 The Word-in-Conversation as evolutionary learning: how ecoacoustics, sound symbolism, qualia as advanced modelling systems, and Peircean semiosis can help us re-science the Christian Bible, recover its inherent indigeneity, and find a conciliatory path forward
• 21 Conclusion
• Index