Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations

ISBN-13: 9780199279432 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 338 str.

Paul Marshall

Opis

Some experiences of the natural world bring a sense of unity, knowledge, self-transcendence, eternity, light, and love. This is the first detailed study of these intriguing phenomena. Paul Marshall explores the circumstances, characteristics, and after-effects of this important but relatively neglected type of mystical experience, and critiques explanations that range from the spiritual and metaphysical to the psychoanalytic, contextual, and neuropsychological. The theorists discussed include R. M. Bucke, Edward Carpenter, W. R. Inge, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, R. C. Zaehner, W. T. Stace, Steven Katz, and Robert Forman, as well as contemporary neuroscientists. The book makes a significant contribution to current debates about the nature of mystical experience.

Recenzje

Marshall has produced an important, careful book that deserves to be widely read by students of psychology, philosophy, religion, and anomalous experience.

O autorze

Paul Marshall is an independent scholar with research interests in the philosophy and psychology of religion, the philosophy of mind, and the study of science and religion.