Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Hard cover. Good. No dust jacket. Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality by Horgan, John Mass-market paperback. Houghton Mifflin Company (2003) Very good. No dust jacket. like new Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust... Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality by Horgan, John Mass-market paperback. Houghton Mifflin Company (2003) Very good. No dust jacket. like new Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 304 p. Audience: General/trade. I cannot recall exactly when I first learned about the extraordinary way of perceiving, knowing, and being called mysticism. Certainly by the early 1970s, when I was in my late teens, the topic was impossible to avoid....Along with millions of others in my generation, I puzzled over esoteric mystical books, and I dabbled in yoga, meditation, and psychedelic drugs. I never dedicated myself to the mystical path, however. Friends who had done so typically by joining one of the countless guru-led groups that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s seem to have abandoned their rationality and autonomy....By the early 1980s, I had decided that science represents our best hope for improving our condition and for understanding who we are, where we came from, where were going...Thrilled by science's ambitions, I became a science writer, and for more than a decade I wrote articles about particle physics, cosmology, complexity theory, and other fields that promised great revelations....But I soon found that investigations of mysticism are proceeding along a broad range of scholarly and scientific thoughts. During the 1990s ordinary consciousness, once considered beneath the notice of respectable scientists, became a legitimate and increasingly popular object of investigation. Emboldened by this trend, some scientists have been focusing on exotic states of consciousness, including mystical ones....Eventually I decided that the time was right after all for a book on mysticism...The book would be journalistic, based primarily on face-to-face interviews with leading theologians, philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and other professional ponderous of mysticism. I would assess their respective findings and conjectures, trying to determine where they converge or diverge, where they make sense or go off the deep end. ---excerpts from book's Introduction