The foundational framework most later scholarship on mysticism responds to: James proposed four marks that qualify an experience as mystical — ineffability (it resists being put into words), a noetic quality (it feels like a direct insight into truth), transiency (it doesn’t last), and passivity (the person feels acted upon rather than in control).
A sequence of progressively deeper, highly stable states of meditative absorption described in the earliest Buddhist texts, cultivated through sustained concentration practice and traditionally treated as a tool on the path to liberation rather than an end in themselves.
Not a single theory but a comparative pattern: many religious traditions independently describe a state of direct union with, or dissolution into, ultimate reality as the highest goal of contemplative practice — unio mystica in Christian mysticism, fanā’ in Sufi Islam, moksha in Hindu traditions, and nirvana in Buddhist traditions — presented here descriptively as a shared structural pattern rather than as evidence any one tradition’s specific interpretation is correct.
A probabilistic framework for estimating the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy, multiplying factors like star formation rate, the fraction of stars with planets, and the fraction that develop intelligent, communicating life.
Holds that free will and determinism are not actually in conflict — that acting freely just means acting on one’s own reasons and desires without external coercion, regardless of whether those reasons were themselves ultimately caused by prior events.
Holds that only the present moment is real — the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist — matching the common-sense view of time as a knife-edge “now” moving forward.
Holds that the human mind is fundamentally an information-processing system — that cognition, and perhaps consciousness itself, is a form of computation running on the brain’s neural “hardware.”
Not a single theory but a family of beliefs describing consciousness or the soul persisting beyond bodily death — heaven, hell, and purgatory in Abrahamic traditions; reincarnation and liberation from rebirth in Hindu and Buddhist traditions; ancestor veneration and continued presence among the living in many other traditions — presented here descriptively rather than as an endorsement of any one account.
A well-tested psychological theory (not itself a claim about what actually happens after death) proposing that awareness of our own mortality is a uniquely human source of existential anxiety, and that cultural worldviews, religious beliefs, self-esteem, and a great deal of ordinary human behavior function partly to manage that anxiety.
The standard model of cosmology: the universe began ~13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot, dense state and has been expanding and cooling ever since.