Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit—such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as “porous,” or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become “absorbed” in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.
Caregivers’ quotidian actions challenge prevailing views of care that rely on the emotional or attentive orientation of the caregiver. The routinized care tasks provided by two middle‐aged women for their bedridden mother in northern Thailand reveal the realities of long‐term caregiving. For these sisters, care transforms “merit” and “karma” without reliance on internal conviction. This context in turn reflects how people enact values and maintain social worlds through habituated physical practices of providing for others. Ordinary care in practice—termed “rituals of care”—dislodges fixation on particular personal sentiments and affirms the study of care as a powerful tool for assessing enduring modes of moral experience as well as subtle forms of social change. [care, ritual, phenomenology, Buddhism, Thailand, embodiment, morality]
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