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Title: The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience by Eugene G. D'Aquili, Andrew B. Newberg ISBN: 0-8006-3163-3 Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Heavy Reading--Excellent Results
Comment: The text of this book is difficult to work through. It is not designed for the light reader or the quick student. Taking twice as long to read this book was a drain, but the payoff was excellent.
He does not simply give facts, but works to tie them together into a specific working hypothesis, which is yet to be proven. Yet he has asked the correct questions and cannot be faulted in not having all the answers.
Highly recommended.
Rating: 1
Summary: Misconceptions...
Comment: I'd looked forward to reading this book, hoping that it would describe the resesarch and actual experiences in some detail. Instead it was a hotch-potch of assumptions and generalisations that ultimately add nothing to our understanding of these states. The writers started off with the opinion that the states weren't real and set out to prove that this was so, rather than weighing up the evidence and then drawing a conclusion.
On the whole, the researchers make exactly the same mistake about what meditation is as every other researcher does, Persinger in particular. Meditation in the way that most think of it is only a tool to calm the mind, not meditation itself. No practitioner will sit staring for hours at religious images, nor is there a trance state that is the platform for such experiences. In meditation (and in spontaneous events) the perfect 'ground' for enightenment experiences is a perfectly natural awareness of the moment, not a 'locked in' state of not thinking.
Anyone who wants to seriously examine how meditators create a ground for these experiences should read books covering Mahamudra and Dzongchen rather than misinformed nonsense like this.
Ian Harling
Rating: 3
Summary: Frustrating and incomplete
Comment: Given the title of the book, and the author's pioneering research background, I had expected some in depth discussion of the author's research and results. Instead, we are presented with pedantic background material having to do with religion and biology which is widely available in thousands of other books, and perhaps 5 pages altogether of research reports. And those 5 pages are not even contiguous! As a result, I find myself quite skeptical of the author's hypothetical framework that he labors so hard to present in this work.
There is at least one glaring omission as well - there is no discussion of the commonality of the kundalini experience among the major mystics, nor any background on the chakra system and its relation to the endocrine system. To have ignored these topics in a book dedicated to 'probing' mysticism, is to be presented with a very shallow probe indeed.
This book is evidently intended as an undergraduate text for a narrowly focused survey class, and not for the general reader.
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