Co-Advisors: Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal | Professor William B. Parsons

Daniel Rezinovsky is a psychologist and doctoral researcher in Religious Studies at Rice University. His work lies at the intersection of comparative mysticism, psychology, philosophy of religion, consciousness studies, art, and emerging technologies. He holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Religious Studies, and practiced clinically as a psychologist for more than a decade before turning his research increasingly toward transformative and anomalous forms of human experience.

His research examines spiritual awakening, mystical and visionary experience, and the ways such states challenge conventional psychological, philosophical, and religious models of the person. He is particularly interested in comparative approaches to Advaita Vedānta, Zen and Ch’an Buddhism, and modern accounts of altered and exceptional states of consciousness.

His current work also explores the relationship between consciousness, artificial intelligence, artistic practice, and immersive technologies such as virtual reality. He is interested in how new forms of machine intelligence and technologically mediated environments may reshape human self-understanding, creativity, religious imagination, altered states, and the study of consciousness itself.

More broadly, his work asks how experiences traditionally described as enlightenment, nonduality, revelation, or self-transcendence might be understood across religious traditions without reducing them either to pathology or to purely doctrinal categories. His current research explores the phenomenology and interpretation of transformative states of consciousness, the relation between spiritual experience and psychological development, and the possibilities opened by artificial intelligence, art, and immersive media for investigating new forms of mind and experience.