Interviews with 30 experienced non-native practitioners of the Native American sweat lodge ceremony revealed 184 reports of transpersonal experiences. Interview questions sought to disclose how practitioners discern or critique their own experiences, consider alternative explanations for practitioners’ experiences, and critically reflect on the sweat lodge ceremony per se as a spiritual practice. It was found that practitioners generally interpreted their experiences as trustworthy interactions with a spiritual reality, did not seriously consider alternative explanations for their experiences, and neglected to reflect (...) critically on the sweat lodge ceremony per se as a spiritual practice. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs often express their reliance on intuition for several types of decisions while labelling its source somewhere hidden in a black box of our mind. Such expressions leads us to the exploration of the concept of intuition in the field of spirituality as this field addresses the inner aspects of our mind. Therefore this paper embeds intuition in the domain of spirituality for understanding entrepreneurs’ use of intuition. It examines the following questions. What is spirituality? Where do the fields of (...) spirituality and entrepreneurship meet? What is the place of intuition in the literature on entrepreneurship? What could be the epistemology on intuition as part of spirituality? What is intuition? How is intuition acquired? What do people know about their intuition? How do we know what we know about intuition? What is the potential role of intuition in disciplines such as education? For understanding the concept of intuition a philosophical base has been followed, inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo on types of knowledge and levels of consciousness. The use of intuition is somewhat subjective as it stems not from the analytical mind, nor the subconscious mind, but from higher consciousness. Intuition therefore has been considered as a holistic spiritual approach to facilitate entrepreneurial processes and activities through a coping style to manage external stimuli and as a core training part in the process of entrepreneurship so that it works as an internal resource in all entrepreneurial processes. (shrink)