Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Outstanding and Important, 8 Sep 2003
If you are interested in drugs and mysticism, religious experience, neuroscience, meditation, and issues that arise in these areas this is the book for you. For a start, it's much more readable and engaging than quite a few of the writers discussed and so saves you the bother of reading them as well.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Rational or not, it seems mysticism without purpose other than escapism , 17 Oct 2007
In "The End of Science", Horgan contacted leading scientists. In "Rational Mysticism" he has contacted leading mystics.
It seems harder to establish what a leading mystic is: the quiet old lady down the street may have more mystical wisdom than latest guru to make the cover of a New Age magazine.
This book may be intended as an introduction to many mystical paths so that you can follow up on those that intrigue you
To his credit, Horgan recognizes the dangers of authorities within Eastern relgions: Westerners running from Christiantity seem often to fail to recognize the lack of substantiation for enlightenment or for rebirth. He has, at least, taken to heart the "Anti-Guru" observations of Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer. But Horgan seems to have been misled by Huston Smith and Stephen Batchelor into overvaluing ideals: how far is one beyond belief if one measuring oneself against abstracted qualities that one can always imagine an improvement upon.
If by the end of this book a lot is still up in the air, how can it be honestly otherwise? Horgan does identify our reliance on one assumption: free will but in so doing indicates little else can be assumed. But what is the value of knowing of all these mystics if none of them seemed to have helped Horgan get through his day? At least he hasn't, that I have seen, shown how all this study of mysticism helps him cope with life in Hudson Valley (except to provide perhaps some income). Perhaps, as he has done now with science and then mysticism, he can present a book of wisdom on ordinary living (in a world tottering on unsustanability).
A rational mysticism, then, may not be noteworthy if all it amounts to is an assumption of our free will. This may then be a good point for Horgan to review a decision he presented in "The End of Science" to esteem Nohm Chomsky at the expense of B.F. Skinner [ My review of "The End of Science" alludes to that]. Skinner's analysis of how to address private events (not only mystical but just plain thinking) in a natural science as well as his concerns about how religions may function as control agencies seems relevant to Horgan's investigations. Radical Behaviorism was, at least, an effort to follow natural scientific method. Whether it can help in a way mysticism can't I don't know, but I don't recall or other responsible Radical Behaviorists advocating we take drugs to induce special states of mind. They seem content with gradual steps at improving behaving.
Whether Horgan, who relegated Dzogchen (arguably as mind-blowing a teaching as to be found anywhere) to a footnote in this book, has more of offer about science and mysticism, I don't know. If the burden of rationality meant opting for Huston Smith and Ken Wilber, the cost of recognizing any genuine mystical input may have been too high. Perhaps what Horgan has done is popular, this cataloging of sciences and mysticisms. However, a return to science in the form of a study of Radical Behaviorism may be another area, besides just studying how people get by in ordinary ways, in which his exploratory and explanatory gifts may be better utilized.
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