Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between by John Horgan
By John Horgan
John Horgan, writer of the best-selling the tip of technology, chronicles the main complex study into the mechanics—and meaning—of mystical reviews. How do trances, visions, prayer, satori, and different mystical reviews “work”? What induces and defines them? Is there a systematic cause of non secular mysteries and transcendent meditation? John Horgan investigates a variety of fields — chemistry, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, theology, and extra — to slim the distance among cause and mystical phenomena. As either a seeker and an award-winning journalist, Horgan consulted quite a lot of specialists, together with theologian Huston Smith, non secular inheritor to Joseph Campbell; Andrew Newberg, the scientist whose quest for the “God module” used to be the focal point of a Newsweek conceal tale; Ken Wilber, admired transpersonal psychologist; Alexander Shulgin, mythical psychedelic drug chemist; and Susan Blackmore, Oxford-educated psychologist, parapsychology debunker, and Zen practitioner. Horgan explores the awesome similarities among “mystical technologies” like sensory deprivation, prayer, fasting, trance, dancing, meditation, and drug journeys. He participates in experiments that search the neurological underpinnings of mystical stories. And, ultimately, he recounts his personal look for enlightenment — adventurous, poignant, and occasionally unusually comedian. Horgan’s conclusions resonate with the debatable climax of the tip of technology, simply because, as he argues, the main enlightened mystics and the main enlightened scientists prove within the comparable position — confronting the imponderable intensity of the universe.
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Extra resources for Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality
Example text
A nun called Margaret the Cripple also oscillated between periods of agonizing estrangement from *Spelling out the disturbing implications of tsimtsum, Arthur Green, a scholar of Jewish mysticism at Brandeis University, once wrote (“The Aleph-Bet of Creation: Jewish Mysticism for Beginners,” Tikkun, vol. , no. , p. ): “To say that I exist thanks only to God’s absence is to make me a being who thrives on alienation, who needs to be far from the One at least as much as he needs to be near. Will I then seek darkness as much as light?
Smith exuded intelligence, humor, and generosity of spirit — all the traits that one looks for in a sage — but he could be sharp-tongued, too. ” “I’m the first to insist that not everything about them is wise,” he said. ” Many young people turn away from religion, Smith lamented, because it is presented to them in the worst possible way. ’” Smith’s missionary parents had imparted very different religious precepts to him: “First, we’re in good hands. ” After a lifetime of studying many religions, Smith had found no better formula.
But Marion believed that poetry and literature, modes of discourse that “require endless interpretations,” can help us express the inexpressible. Kevin Hart retorted that if you can’t talk about the mystical, you can’t “whistle” about it either. In other words, he explained, art and literature are inadequate, too. The meeting also revealed the dizzying diversity of mysticism just within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Several speakers discussed Meister Eckhart and Dionysius the Areopagite, who are seminal figures of negative theology.