Over the years, the defining feature of my research has been the attempt to know and understand the phenomena of religion and religiosity and their influence on people’s ways of experiencing, thinking, feeling and acting. During the 1970s and 1980s I spent several years in South Asia, primarily India, studying the philosophy and practice of yoga and Theravada meditation. After my PhD, my primary focus was for twenty-five years the encounter between Islam/Muslims and Europe/Sweden. During the last twenty years my interests have returned back towards India and the Indic religious and cultural traditions. In this connection I have entered into cooperation agreements and joint projects with Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, Jadavpur University in Kolkata, Visva-Bharat University, Santiniketan , Pondicherry University, Puducherry, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; I have also since the early 2000s developed field study courses and organized field study trips to India for LIR and other students. 2009-2012 I was the leader of the go:India platform, which is one of four interdisciplinary projects the University of Gothenburg has granted funding (2011-2013) as part of its Global University venture.In addition to my interest in empirically oriented research, I have throughout my career displayed a keen interest in the theoretically oriented study of such matters as the workings and potentialities of the human mind (especially in relation to so-called alternative states of mind), the phenomenology of religion (which focuses on such phenomena as religious experience, religious consciousness, mysticism, theory of meditation), the nature of religious change in a late-modern globalized world, and the cultural-hermeneutical challenges that arise when attempting to understand and communicate with persons whose culture, religion and interpretive patterns differ from one’s own.