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Mystical Encounters with the Natural World
Experiences and Explanations
Paul Marshall
336 pages
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numerous line drawings and tables
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216x138mm
978-0-19-927943-2
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Hardback
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07 July 2005
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- The first modern study of mystical experiences of the natural world and their explanation
- Offers a distinctive idealist perspective on the essential nature of these experiences
- Draws upon numerous first-person accounts, as well as providing historical coverage of the theme
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. Readership: Scholars and students of the philosophy and psychology of religion, of parapsychology, of Jungian and transpersonal psychology, and of the philosophy of mind, especially consciousness studies; readers interested in Romantic spirituality, nature religion, or the nature of religious experience.
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Paul Marshall, Independent scholar
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"This is a terribly exciting book and, potentially, a very important one... [a] wonderful book" - Jeffrey J. Kripal, Religion "a clear, up to date and excellently resourced investigation which is very ballanced... This book that I am sure that I shall return to again and again as both a stimulating read and as a research tool." - Peggy Morgan, Bulletin of the British Association for the Study of Religions "Marshall has produced an important, careful book that deserves to be widely read by students of psychology, philosophy, religion, and anomalous experience." - Matt Colborn, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
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I. The experiences
1: Extrovertive mystical experience: definition and incidence
2: `Being all, knowing all, loving all': phenomenology
3: Sex, drugs, and Beethoven? Circumstances and consequences
II. The explanations
4: Divine cosmos: encountering spirit in nature
5: Empty your mind: uncovering pure consciousness
6: Scholars lock horns: construction or deconstruction?
7: On the couch, in the lab: pathology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience
8: Mind beyond the brain: reducing valves and metaphysics
9: Fashions, failures, prospects
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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