Rational Mysticism: Dispathces From the Border Between Science and Spirituality

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