DEE WILSON CONSULTING

Imagination, Belief and Experience
in Response to the Sacred (part two)

This is part two of the third installment in our series Dimensions of the Spirit

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Sacred experience that is not mystical

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Most experience of the sacred within or outside of religious communities has nothing to do with mysticism. I would be surprised if in the aggregate persons who identify as Christians or Moslems and who regularly attend church services, have more understanding or interest in mysticism than persons in Western countries who lack religious belief and never attend church.

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Skeptical Perspectives 

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Wayne Proudfoot’s book, Religious Experience (1985) is an articulate cogent attack on William James’ perspective that religious experience has a special authority in the understanding of religious belief. In his chapter on mysticism, Proudfoot debunks the efforts of some scholars, including James, to distinguish religious and/ or mystical experiences from the interpretations of those experiences. Proudfoot asserts:

“A difficulty arises, however, from the fact that these attitudes and beliefs are typically adopted prior to the experience rather than subsequent to it. The experience is shaped by a complex pattern of concepts, commitments and expectations which the mystic brings to it. These beliefs and attitudes are formative of, rather than consequent upon, the experience. They define in advance what experiences are possible.” (p. 121)

For this reason, Proudfoot maintains that mystics who belong to different religious traditions and have very different beliefs and “rules for identifying their mental and bodily states to their experiences,” cannot possibly have the same experience for which they have different names. For example, “The fact that Jewish mystics do not experience union with God is best explained by reference to parameters set by the tradition that has formed their beliefs about persons and God and their expectation for such experiences… In a similar fashion the experience of the Buddhist is shaped by his tradition.” (p.  122)

Proudfoot comments that “Guides, gurus and spiritual advisors in the several traditions do not teach mysticism in general but specific ways to specific goals. Detailed regimens are prescribed to prepare a disciple.” (p. 122) Proudfoot goes on to assert: “In fact, the connection between the mystics’ antecedent beliefs is not a causal one but a conceptual one.  … The logic that governs the concepts by which people interpret their experiences in different traditions shapes those experiences…  the interpretations are themselves constitutive of the experiences.  … One cannot attain nirvana by accident. This is a logical matter, not just a contingent fact. “Further, if there is no core experience, and if mystical experiences vary substantively from one tradition to another, what justification is there for continuing to employ the phrase mystical experience at all?” (p. 123)

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Here is a bold argument:  based on the study of first-hand accounts and scholarly texts, a philosopher maintains that there is no need to do research of mysticism, compare mystical experiences in various religious traditions, take psychedelic drugs or engage in other approaches to mystical experience to understand mystical experience, because logic suffices to dismiss not just the validity but the reality of mystical experience as something independent of religious beliefs.  

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Imagine a similar argument applied to aesthetic experience

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Children in every culture around the world are socialized from an early age to experience beauty and to employ the language of beauty in culturally specific ways and, in fact, the same objects and experiences that members of some cultures believe are beautiful, members of other cultures or subcultures believe are ugly. Aesthetic experience merely reflects cultural ideas and expectations regarding what is beautiful.  The experience of beauty varies so widely and is so dependent on cultural beliefs that it makes no sense to look for the common elements of beauty cross culturally. Indeed, why talk about aesthetic experience at all?  

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Every type of human experience, including love, sexuality, mental illness, war and other organized violence, is accompanied and shaped by ideas, beliefs, and a myriad of social factors. Nevertheless, romantic love, sexual pleasure, aesthetic experience cannot be contained, much less reduced to, the cultural messages that shape their expression in all societies. The same is true of sacred experience, and one of its embodiments, mysticism.

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James agrees with Proudfoot that the beliefs that interpret mystical experience and explain its metaphysical significance vary widely:

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“… religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church. It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. … The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies …” (p. 425)

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Insisting, as Proudfoot does, that mystical experiences can be best understood in reference to the beliefs they reflect ignores the distinctive features of mystical experience that James and others have pointed out:

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a) mystical experiences have a revelatory noetic quality;

b) they are often ecstatic or paradisal; and

c) they efface or fundamentally alter or eliminate experience organized around a subject, or self.

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 James is fascinated by religious experience, while Proudfoot is uninterested or dismissive. However, both Proudfoot and James have made a strong case that mysticism in all its many forms is ontologically empty. Mystical experience is often accompanied by metaphysical speculation, as in Huxley’s case (and my own), or may strengthen belief in a religious tradition, but cannot not validate these views or doctrines. 

Other issues raised by Proudfoot’s critique of James and of other scholars who emphasize the distinctive features of religious and or mystical experience deserve comment:

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1. It is not true that all mystical experience occurs within a religious tradition. Many people who take psychedelic drugs have mystical experiences with paradisal elements and some (as in my case) become religious as a result of their experiences with psychedelics. Atheists or persons who lack religious belief can have mystical experiences, (see Barbara Ehrenreich’s, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (2014).

2. It is not true that mystics who belong to various religious traditions invariably have mystical experiences that conform to religious doctrine. Monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam that emphasize the otherness of God and the will of God have occasionally led to charges of heresy directed at mystics who insist on union with God during mystical experience. Proudfoot and others might argue that schools of mystics within a monotheistic religion, e.g. Sufism, have their own idiosyncratic traditions to which members conform. Yet Sufis arguably developed their traditions because their mystical experiences did not fit comfortably with orthodox Islamic doctrine. In the case of Sufis, the experience of mystics shaped heterodox interpretations of Islamic doctrines.

There is not a one-way causal nexus between religious or mystical beliefs, experiences or imaginary elements of religious thought; these different strands of religious or mystical traditions are difficult to disentangle.  Nevertheless, James is right that no beliefs as impactful as religious beliefs have been in human history could have been sustained without an experiential basis. The idea that these experiences can be discounted or ignored because they usually occur in association with belief systems is a ridiculous bit of intellectual chutzpah. Furthermore, there is no belief or expectation that can adequately prepare a person for the reality of mystical experience.   

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Consider the following story of mystical experience from David Hawkins’ book, Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (1995):

Hawkins, a teenager, while delivering papers on his bicycle, was caught far from home in 20 below weather. Exhausted, he dug out a burrow in a snowbank. “The shivering stopped and was replaced by a delicious warmth … and then a state of peace beyond all description. This was accompanied by a suffusion of light and a Presence of infinite love, which had no beginning and no end… The mind grew silent; all thought stopped. An Infinite Presence was all that was or could be, and in was beyond time or description.” Hawkins is rescued by his father and reports making a conscious effort to return to his body “because of his (father’s) anguish.” (pp. 10-11)

Hawkins states: “This experience was never discussed with anyone. There was no context available with which to comprehend it. I had never heard of spiritual experiences (other than those reported in the lives of the saints). But after this experience, the accepted reality of the world began to seem only provisional; traditional religious teaching lost significance and, paradoxically, I became an agnostic.” 

In this teenager’s experience, mystical experience appears to have been a preparation for death; and “Infinite Presence” sounds Christian. Yet no amount of Catholic observance in childhood can account for this astonishing near-death experience.

There is much more to Hawkins’ story. When he was 38 years old and close to death from a fatal illness, Hawkins states: “As my final moment approached, the thought flashed through my mind, What if there is a God?  If there is a God, I asked him to help me now. …  When I awoke, a transformation of such enormity had taken place that I was struck dumb with awe. The person I had been no longer existed. There was no personal self or ego left – just an Infinite Presence… This Presence had replaced what had been “me” … The world was illuminated by the clarity of an Infinite Oneness, which expressed itself as all things revealed in their immeasurable beauty and perfection.” (p. 12)

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Living for months in this state of awareness, Hawkins discovers that “It was not possible to function effectively in the world. Along with fear and anxiety, all ordinary motivations had disappeared.”   Nevertheless, Hawkins discovered that he had the ability to assist troubled people with emotional healing. In addition, he states: “The overall condition of my nerves improved slowly, and another phenomenon began – a sweet, delicious band of energy started to flow continuously up the spine and into the brain, where it created an intense sensation of continuous pleasure,” which sounds like a description of kundalini energy in Hindu thought. Hawkins began to read the spiritual teachings of Buddha and other “enlightened sages” and more recent teachers … “Suddenly, the Bhagavad Gita made complete sense; eventually the same spiritual ecstasy reported by Sri Ramakrishna and the Christian saints occurred.” (p.14). Hawkins, like many mystics, recognized the similarity between his experience and the experience of both Hindu and Christian mystics. His mysticism was syncretistic, in no way sealed off logically or experientially from the experience of mystics in various religious traditions. 

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Hawkins’ story is unusual in that he reflects on the evolution of mystical awareness in the light of his need to function in society. He sought to maintain an intense meditative awareness in the midst of ordinary activities. He also struggled with his fear of non-existence: “I drew back from it repeatedly” (p.23) And “When vacillation between heaven and hell becomes unendurable, the desire for existence itself has to be surrendered … the illusion of existence one transcends here is irrecoverable. There’s no returning from this step …” (p.24)

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While mysticism, considered as a whole, resists a consistent metaphysical or religious interpretation, it offers a straightforward directive for persons seeking paradisal experience: “Lose Thy Self,” i.e., seek to stop organizing perception and cognition around one’s subjectivity. This prospect when it becomes real is so frightening that the gates of paradise are guarded by a monster, a projection of one’s self and its fear of extinction. In this perspective, personal immortality is an oxymoron.   

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Religion as Make-Believe

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In Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination and Group Identity, philosopher Neil Van Leenuwen makes a strict distinction between factual beliefs and religious credence. According to Van Leeuwen, the four principles of factual belief are as follows:

1. If you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it.  

2. Factual beliefs guide action across the board.

3. Factual beliefs guide inferences in imagination.

4. Factual beliefs respond to evidence. (p. 71)

Religious credence, on the other hand, is widely viewed as a) voluntary; b) compartmentalized to religious settings or other sacred spaces; c) acknowledges the cognitive governance of factual beliefs in the same way that children’s play recognizes the difference between pretending to fly and flying; d) is routinely not open to evidentiary disconfirmation. (pp. 71-96) 

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In Leeuwen’s view, religious beliefs are largely a form of imaginative make believe, albeit often deadly serious, regarding which believers utilize a different set of rules than how they adopt, sustain and change factual beliefs. These rules include ways of interpreting personal experiences in the light of their religious beliefs. Van Leeuwen cites evidence from the origins of three religious communities outside mainstream Christianity: Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous and A Course in Miracles (a religious self-help program).  Van Leeuwen discusses the scholarship of Ann Taves to debunk the claim that these movements grew out of an original revelatory experience. He asserts: “In all three cases, a small group of devoted followers formed around the person who had the initial vision, and they worked out their ensuing mythology and official doctrines over the course of many long discussions and collaborative efforts. Furthermore, the resulting official doctrines and mythology were influenced by various motivations of individual small group members, as well as the need to reach a larger audience.” (p. 105)

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Van Leeuwen maintains that “Creativity in religious “belief” formation sometimes works like this: people choose to make one or more representations of a deity, then they choose to “believe” that the entity represented is real and has supernatural powers. In such cases, the worshippers do not come across antecedent evidence from which they infer that some deity exits already; rather, feeling the need for a divinity to worship, they creatively “make a god” – and religious credence to go with it, which is choice.” (p. 105) Imagination and belief determine how believers’ religious experiences will be interpreted, not vice versa.

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Van Leeuwen’s insistence on the difference between factual beliefs given in human experience of the natural world and therefore unavoidable and the religious belief that ritual practices and formulas can bring worshippers into communion with a deity is unassailable as long as examples of factual beliefs are carefully chosen. However, per Daniel Kahneman’s discussion in Thinking Fast and Slow, when there is uncertainty regarding what is factually true and the need to act under time pressures, System 1 (i.e., automatic thinking) “is radically indifferent to the quantity and quality of information.” When System 1 lacks information, it fills in the blanks by making up a plausible story consisting of factual and imaginative elements. Furthermore, the stories developed by System 1 are often highly resistant to change due to confirmation bias and other heuristic biases. Factual beliefs regarding mundane matters are often developed in concert with speculation and imagination, not in opposition to them and false beliefs are often highly resistant to disconfirmation, regardless of evidence. Factual beliefs, as defined by Van Leeuwen, “If you factually believe it, you can’t help believing it,” indicates complete certainty in the belief. According to this definition, scientific theories, medical and mental health diagnoses, beliefs regarding the motives of others, or one’s own motives, or any type of speculation regarding any subject would not be factual beliefs any more than religious beliefs are. Beliefs regarding any subject are likely to be held with varying degrees of certainty. It is also true that groups with different political and social values often differ in their version of the facts, e.g., whether the 2020 US election was “stolen.” 

Facts are not features of the world; rather beliefs described as facts reflect a high degree of certainty that a statement of belief is true. Some religious believers have a greater degree of certainty regarding their religious faith than others, though in the modern era dogmatic certainty regarding religious belief is likely to be viewed as off putting rather than admirable.   

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Nevertheless, Van Leeuwen is right to insist that religious belief systems are replete with imaginative elements, some of which are embodied in myths, historical stories, doctrines or symbols, and others which involve religious believers’ interpretation of their own subjective experiences.  James’, The Varieties of Religious Experience includes a remarkable chapter, “The Reality of the Unseen,” which includes several lengthy examples of experiences which suggest a divine presence:

“There was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person, and after it went, the memory persisted as the one perception of reality. Everything else might be a dream, but not that.” (pp. 60-61) 

Another informant wrote: “Quite early in the night I was awakened, … I felt as if I had been aroused intentionally. …  I then turned on my side to go to sleep again, and immediately felt a consciousness of a presence in the room, and, singular to state, it was not the consciousness of a live person, but of a spiritual presence. … I do not know how to better describe my sensations than by simply stating that I felt a consciousness of a spiritual presence.”   I felt at the same time a feeling of superstitious dread, as if something strange and fearful were about to happen.” (p. 62)

James quotes an account of religious experience from a French psychologist’s documents. The informant was Swiss and was on a several days hike with friends. He states: “I was in perfect health… I was subject to no anxiety, either near or remote. … all at once I experienced a feeling of being raised among myself, I felt the presence of God – I tell of the thing just as I was conscious of it, as if his goodness and his power were penetrating me altogether. … I thanked God that in the course of my life he had taught me to know him … I begged him ardently that my life might be consecrated to the doing of his will. … Then, slowly, the ecstasy left my heart, that is I felt that God had withdrawn the communion which he had granted … The impression had been so profound that in climbing the slope I asked myself if it were possible that Moses on Sinai could have had a more intimate communication with God.  …  in this ecstasy of mine God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste … his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. … God was present, though invisible, he fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.” (p. 68) 

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James’ chapter provides several additional first-hand accounts of the experience of a divine Presence, sometimes referred to by informants as God, sometimes not.  James comments: “Such is the human ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth.” Many first-person accounts cited in James VRE are imaginative attempts to cognitively map religious experiences from the realm of affect in terms taken from sensory experiences, for example, “presence (of God)” but which has no specific location.  James quotes from a first-person account: “God surrounds me like the physical atmosphere.  … I have the sense of a presence, strong … which hovers over me.  Sometimes, it seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms.” (pp. 71-72)    

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James goes on to state: “If you have (religious) intuitions at all they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of result and something in you absolutely knows that the result must be truer than any logic chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.” (p.73) Whatever else might be said of experiences described above, they are not religious “make believe,” and they are not explained by the goal of strengthening the cohesion of a social group, per Van Leeuwen’s account.

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Mind and the sacred

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At least since the publication of James’ groundbreaking work on the psychology of religion, there has been a persistent effort to understand religious experience from a naturalistic perspective. All naturalistic perspectives are interested in how the human mind/ brain causes and processes religious experience or experiences of the sacred more broadly considered, either neurologically or due to early experiences, or in response to social forces or suffering.     

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 Few scholarly experts have been able to match James’ extraordinary curiosity and openness to a broad range of religious experiences with his dispassionate analysis and insistence that religious experience, either in part or as a whole, is not credible evidence of religious doctrines or metaphysical beliefs. Nevertheless, James’ view that religious experience accounts for the power and persistence of religious belief has been met with strong criticism from some philosophers of religion. I have already discussed the views of Wayne Proudfoot and Neil Van Leeuwen, and there are others who share a similar perspective. Consider the following quote from T.E. Luhrmann:

“In effect, people train their mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all – but God’s. They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensation as God’s touch or the response to his nearness. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events.” (quoted in The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, ed. by Yaden and Newberg, 2022). In effect, religious believers are trained by their religious community and tradition to think about and talk about their subjective experiences in a way that reflects and sustains their beliefs.

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Proudfoot suggests an even more radical possibility, i.e., that religious belief systems operate as blueprints that may have the power to produce experiences that conform to the blueprint, either through the power of expectations or in other ways he does not describe. Proudfoot’s view regarding beliefs serving as blueprints for experience sound similar to the rationale for religious practices such as prayer, meditation, commitment to austerities, etc.  developed in various religious traditions. The efficacy of religious practices which a spiritual teacher encourages as the road to direct experience of religious truth Proudfoot and like-minded philosophers dismiss as blueprints for illusions.  From this perspective, beliefs are far more likely to cause experiences that confirm them than vice versa. Proudfoot insists that the relationship between belief and mystical experience is logically necessary in that a belief system is constitutive of a specific powerful mystical experience, a view that invites mockery. Why study the history of religion or go to great lengths to describe a wide range of mystical experience when it’s possible to bypass this effort with logical analysis? 

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Van Leeuwen maintains that much religious belief is a type of make-believe activity in which religious believers are implicitly aware of the difference between “religious credence” and factual beliefs to which they default as required. Van Leeuwen points out that religious faith is chosen rather than compelled, may be compartmentalized to religious settings, and resists invalidation from experience. Van Leeuwen believes the function of imaginative religious credence is to define and strengthen group identity, a perspective which does not illumine many first- hand accounts of religious experience in James’ VRE which occur in solitude, independent of any well-defined religious faith or involvement in a religious community, and are attended by a sense of certainty. Per an account in VRE: “I could not even more have doubted that He was present than that I was.” (p.60)

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Yet Van Leeuwen offers compelling evidence of religion as make believe in his discussion of the Protestant neo -Pentecostal Vineyard movement with twenty -four hundred congregations around the world and in his survey of religious beliefs in societies around the world. His discussion highlights the reality that any belief system that posits a personal relationship with God or other unseen forces will unavoidably include an imaginative response to one’s personal experience. The same is true of a religious faith’s interpretation of historical experience, for example Old Testament prophets’ interpretation of the Babylonian captivity as punishment for Jewish apostasy. Given that interpersonal relationships include imaginative efforts to understand the motives and thinking of others, even when persons in these relationships have frequent contact, imagination is sure to figure prominently in efforts to understand relationships with unseen powers or forces, which exert influence through the unconscious mind.  Imaginative interpretations of personal experience are not necessarily false, but they may not be open to confirmation or disconfirmation from either other persons or one’s self.

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Experience of the sacred begins in a valuing of the cosmos that transcends oneself

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The idea that experience of the sacred includes a powerful type of valuing invites a comparison with experiences of beauty, which I have argued in “Why Is the World Beautiful?” and “The Portal of Beauty” is a value humans bring to sensory experience that embody homeostatic flourishing, and less frequently to concepts.  

Experiences of beauty and art have been present in all societies for more than 30,000 years and to a greater or lesser extent are available to all, or almost all, humans.  The same is true of experiences of the sacred with one major exception, i.e., some people have no experience of the sacred and no idea what the sacred might be.  It is the presence of the awareness of beauty and of the sacred in all societies that suggest both have a genetic basis. However, experiences of the sacred are associated with spiritual traditions and beliefs, which is rarely true of experiences of the beautiful except when an artist takes an original path that violates existing canons of beauty and requires articulation. Powerful experiences of the sacred often challenge existing beliefs about the world in a way that experiences of beauty do not because the sacred involves transcendence of self.  

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The experience of beauty is typically not threatening, but unprotected contact with the sacred has been widely believed to be potentially fatal, or a threat to sanity. Consequently, humans have defenses that keep the potential for sacred experience in check, and religions surround the sacred with rituals and with intermediaries. Nothing is more effective at keeping experiences of the sacred at bay than immersion in the everyday profane world. In contrast, it is possible to learn how to go about everyday tasks while enhancing the sense of beauty. Search for the sacred often includes retreating from the world and usually requires long periods of isolation. 

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The beauty of the world is typically enhanced in psychedelic experiences, especially at low doses, while more profound psychedelic experiences associated with higher doses may include a sense of joining with the objects of perception, and experiencing them from the inside (so to speak), per Aldous Huxley’s mystical experiences discussed above. Mystical experiences and other powerful experiences of the sacred alter the subject/ object structure of most human experience and effaces the boundary that protects awareness of self.  It is possible to experience the world from an ‘unselfed’ perspective, though next to impossible to vividly communicate to others the nature of this experience.

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Is it plausible that the capacity for sacred ‘valuing’ could give rise to a bewildering array of religious beliefs, including a belief in gods or God, spirits, salvation, enlightened states of being, liberation, etc.?   Again, it is worth reflecting on how the human mind bestows beauty on objects of sense perception in a way that has convinced great philosophers that beauty is a feature of the world, rather than a value perceived in objects of desire, or disinterestedly in perceptions that embody homeostatic flourishing.  Valuing of all types shapes perception in a way that is taken for granted because all perception has affective valence.

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However, possibly the main reason experience of the sacred leads to religious belief and metaphysical speculation is the association with paradisal experiences. It is an astonishing revelation that human beings have access to paradise, i.e. that this idea is not religious myth, but not so surprising that humans can create hell on earth, or that the human mind can be a source of terrible suffering.  The experience of sacred valuing given concrete expression in paradisal worlds begs for an explanation that make sense of a cosmos with these potentials.  For this reason, the Garden of Eden story is one of the world’s deepest and most profound myths.

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One dimension of the sacred is valuing characterized by self-transcendence and/or by aspirations to release from selfishness and self-absorption.  A second dimension is power or powers believed to be the result of direct experience with sacred reality, spirits, or God or gods. The powers of shamans as describe by Mircea Eliade and Michael Harner (see Cave and Cosmos) are similar to the “siddhis” of Hindu mystics: healing, telepathy, clairvoyance, control of body temperature, out of body experiences, direct contact with spirits or gods, etc., or the powers of Christian saints and mystics. What is unusual in Christianity is the emphasis on the power to love one’s enemies, on forgiveness and rejection of revenge as a motive for conduct. This is not a power to which many human beings of whatever faith aspire, and it is a spiritual power difficult to cultivate and practice, as astonishing as levitation.       

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The power of seemingly miraculous healing serves as validation of faith in every religious tradition, though these powers transcend theological and philosophical differences. In shamanism and in every mystical tradition, ecstasy, paradisal experience and special powers are connected. Experiences of loss of self and spiritual power are joined in ways that every spiritual tradition explains in its own way. However, all spiritual traditions subject believers who seek direct experience of the sacred to extreme conditions, with the goal of weakening psychological defenses that keep the deepest level of mind under wraps. Organizing experience around a subject is a survival strategy that can be undone, but not without peril.     

References

Campbell, J., Myths to Live By (1972), Penguin Books, New York City.

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Eliade, M., Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), translated by Willard Trask, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 

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Eliade, M., The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1957), translated by Willard Trask, Harcourt, Inc., New York City.   

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Harner, M., Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality (2013), North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California.

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Hawkins, D., Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior (1995), Hay House, Inc., Carlsbad, California.

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Huxley, A., The Doors of Perception (1956), Harper Brothers, New York City.

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James, W., The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, 1982), Penguin Books, New York City.

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Proudfoot, W., Religious Experience (1985), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

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Van Leeuwen, N., Religion as Make-Believe (2023), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England.

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Yaden, D. & Newberg, A., The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences: 21st Century Research and Perspectives (2022), Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.