The human body and self have a prominent role in mysticism. Mystical experiences may be characterized by feelings of expanding one’s body beyond its physical limits; feelings of forgetting one’s own body; or sensing ‘something’ filling the body. In other instances, the self is perceived as doubled, elevated or semi-permeable, while others have reported a unity between self and object; splitting of the self; or experienced themselves in bizarre positions. Such mystical experiences might therefore express relevant characteristics about the relations between mind, consciousness and self-consciousness, found usually within complex mental activities and perceptions. Of special importance is the ecstatic mysticism in which the mystic uses a certain technique for going through a specific mystical experience.

In this book, distinguished scholars Idel and Arzy investigate the phenomenology, the neurology and the underlying techniques of ecstatic mystical experiences as described in the writings of major trends in the Jewish mysticism, including the prophetic Kaballah, The Lurianic Kabbalah and Hassidism. These mystics achieved their most central mystical experiences by using a practical technique which changed their internal mental state. They detail experiences,techniques, reports, and instructions as were written down by the mystics themselves. They review similar phenomena as found in neurological patients and other populations, or as induced in the laboratory, and look for similarities and differences. Using neurological and neuropsychological studies, as well as lesion analyses, experimental psychology and neuroimaging, they try to decode the brain mechanisms used by the mystics in order to induce their mystical experiences. This enables further understanding not only of the techniques but also the experiences and their context. It is hoped that such an analysis will deepen our understanding of the subjective experience, which these Kabbalah mystics attempted to induce.

These analyses benefit consciousness studies as well as neuropsychological understanding of the “self”, since they separate the “self” from the body in different ways. The Ecstatic Kabbalah mystics may be therefore considered as pioneering investigation of the human “self”.