The Seba library treats Rapture in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Grof, Stanislav, Winhall, Jan).
In states of rapture, trance and highest intuition, as characterized in a great work of art: the rapture of the creative act and the enjoyment of those who contemplate the completed work
Govinda distinguishes two forms of rapture within Tibetan Buddhist soteriology — the generative rapture of the Bodhisattva's sadhana and the receptive rapture of contemplative reliving — grounding both in the Sambhogakaya doctrine.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
When it reaches the absolute experiential limit, the situation ceases to have the quality of suffering and agony; the experience then changes into a wild, ecstatic rapture of cosmic proportions that can be referred to as 'volcanic ecstasy.'
Grof identifies rapture as the dialectical inversion of extreme BPM III suffering, a 'volcanic ecstasy' that emerges precisely at the threshold where anguish exhausts itself.
, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975thesis
The ahhhhh place of rapture. Wrapped in rapture. But I know I can't live without him. My body does not know how to live, to breathe without him. I am in deep trouble. I am addicted to this boy/man. Rapture … and rupture.
Winhall renders rapture as the somatic nucleus of addictive attachment, a felt-sense state inseparable from its structural companion, rupture, thereby pathologizing the term without dismissing its experiential reality.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis
the poetry of love was normally to that unitive rapture epitomized in the cry of the Persian Sufi mystic Bayazid of Bistan: 'I am the Wine-drinker, the Wine, and the Cupbearer!' 'Lover, beloved, and love are one!'
Campbell contrasts Eastern 'unitive rapture,' which dissolves all distinction between lover, beloved, and love, with the Western courtly ideal that honors the irreducible individuality of the beloved.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the mo
James, drawing on Ethel Puffer, locates the psychological mechanism of rapturous religious experience in the dissolution of self-sense and the merger of consciousness with its object.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
women were excluded from Mithraic rites, they were essential to the Orphic-Dionysian, both as inciters of the mystic rapture and as vehicles of the revelation.
Campbell notes that in the Orphic-Dionysian mysteries women functioned structurally as both triggers of mystic rapture and as bearers of the revelation itself.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
its metaphors of rapture were not confined to sermons but displayed in temple sculpture and translated into rites of the kind of our Gnostic friends, the Phibionites.
Campbell observes that Indian devotional theology translated metaphors of erotic rapture into concrete ritual and iconographic programs, contrasting this embodied approach with the purely sermonic register of Bernard of Clairvaux.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
His duality has manifested itself to us in the antitheses of ecstasy and horror, infinite vitality and savage destruction; in the pandemonium in which deathly silence is inherent.
Otto's analysis of Dionysiac madness provides the mythological matrix within which rapture, as a species of ecstasy, must always be understood alongside its shadow of horror and destruction.
, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965aside