John Horgan’s new book Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, $25) is an intriguing journalistic excursion into the ever-expanding territory of science and spirituality.
Actually, Horgan is mainly concerned with the new science of consciousness studies, which seeks to study mystical and religious experiences. He revisits the well-trod grounds of psychedelic drugs and how they relate to mysticism. Horgan also explores the frontiers of neurology that attempt to map mystical experience though brain scans (which remain inconclusive with wildly inconsistent results) and another device that stimulates the brain to have such experiences.
While based around Horgan’s own philosophy and view of such phenomenon, the book does profile a wide range of gurus and specialists of spiritual consciousness, such as Huston Smith and Ken Wilber, as well as skeptics.
