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Rating: 
Summary: I can't believe we're on the eve...
Review:
I approached this book thinking it was titled Rational Spirituality. That's my mistake, not the author's. I was expecting a rational discourse on metaphysics and religion. Given John Horgan's access to the best and the brightest in the scientific community, I was expecting an all-or-nothing assault on transcendent issues. My mistake.
This is a fine book if approached without expectations. I do highly recommend it to folks interested in altered states of consciousness. Mr. Horgan imposes himself more here than in his other works. That's okay, but I didn't really need the details on the drugged out pow-wow. Ingesting something that makes you throw up to achieve a mystical state is so 60s. What did Barry McGuire sing in "Eve of Destruction"?
You might leave here for three days in space,
But when you return, it's the same old place.
There is a difference between the mystical and the spiritual.
Rating: 
Summary: Foolishness, with good intentions.
Review: Ah, the nightmare. This book has good intentions, but the author ultimately falls short, lacking both experience with contemplative mysticism and cognitive ability in understanding primordial wisdom. In the end, his "skepticism" is seen as nothing more than your usual empiricist's narcissism.
This is most obvious in the section of the book in which Horgan attempts to summarize and interpret the writings of Ken Wilber, wherein he not only misunderstands the mystical foundations of Wilber's Integral Philosophy, but riddles his entire analysis with subtle--yet entirely sophomoric--ad hominem attacks on a man he either 1) envies or 2) totally misinterprets. During the interview sequence with Wilber, Horgan makes various attempts at examining Wilber's "moral character" through his own tainted lens of mystical understanding--the obviousness of his lack of both knowledge and experience--and for that matter, mystical validity--is easily grasped by anyone with contemplative experience and especially those close to Wilber.
Don't read this book if you're looking for an informed overview of the integral of mysticism and rationality. I would have given this book only 1 star if it hadn't been so terribly amusing.
Laff.
GG, newb.
Rating: 
Summary: An assortment of not so rational nuggets
Review: I was prepared to dislike this book. I haven't read Mr. Horgan's previous book, The End of Science, but his conclusion there as I understand it is that science has revealed about as much of our fundamental nature and the nature of our world as it can, which seems pretty silly given the potential of the genetics and neuroscience revolutions that have just started to play out, even physics as well where new forces are being added to the 20th century quartet. Furthermore I was already familiar with and dismissive of some of his topics here.Instead I loved this book. It's only the second one in 10 that I rate as five stars. Horgan won me over with his quite readable prose, his journalistic approach to his topics and that he kept coming up with clear descriptions of points that other authors can make frustratingly abstract. His interviews with those whose work he describes were unexpected treats. Unlike some other reviewers I found his personal reflections on each topic a positive feature. He mostly raised the right questions and pointed out the most critical weaknesses. The descriptions of his drug-induced visions were useful in pointing out how such experiences can be both liberating and/or a trap, as can visions from other sources, even psychosis. He mostly stays away from the latter though. Like other surveys of mysticism this one is limited by the subject matter. In the end one comes away knowing that many people, both modern and historical, have put much effort, both in words and in deeds, into describing a reality beyond our tangible, verifiable, physical reality. All that human experience has some seeing unifying principles behind it, but are they from some structural longing within us, from the cosmos, maybe both? Others see some as right, some as wrong, some as logical albeit mystical, some as sheer fantasy. Some of us think there's something there and have our reasons why, which don't convince those who say the physical world is enough for them. Perhaps God is His own prophet, leading only whom He chooses to find Him, or He is only within reach through extraordinary people or circumstances, or He is a mislabeled abstraction, even more than one. Regardless this is an interesting book for anyone intrigued enough to explore such an idea.
Rating:
Summary: valuable overview filled with pointers to further sources
Review: John Horgan has written a wonderfully entertaining and informative account of his attempt to find who is productively applying science to the field of mysticism. One other Amazon.com reviewer said that they do not like this sort of book, which is based on interviewing individuals and commenting on their personalities as well as their ideas, but I personally prefer this approach as an introduction to the lives and works of others. I found the book to be very insightful, as Horgan always seemed to ask the questions and raise the issues that I was interested in hearing about. His open-minded yet skeptical approach is one I find refreshing.
Horgan's subjects--Huston Smith, Steven Katz, Bernard McGinn, Ken Wilber, Andrew Newberg, Michael Persinger, Susan Blackmore, James Austin, Albert Hofmann, Stanislov Grof, Terence McKenna, Alexander "Sasha" and Ann Shulgin--are all quite interesting people. Horgan seemed most sympathetic to Blackmore, Austin, Wilber, McKenna (personality-wise more than idea-wise), and the Shulgins. He was--correctly, I believe--skeptical of Persinger after finding his pro-psi views. My own view of Persinger is that he attempts to fit everything into his temporal lobe epilepsy/tectonic strain theory views, but has often been unskeptical about the data he's pushing into the theory; I've never understood why skeptics like Blackmore and Michael Shermer have thought him to be plausible. (I've authored a critical review of Persinger's Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events for including bogus debunked events as items to be explained by his theory, and The Arizona Skeptic published an extensive bibliography of critiques of his TST assembled by Chris Rutkowski of the University of Manitoba in the July 1992 issue).
In the end, Horgan is skeptical of all of his subjects, and thinks that they've missed out on the importance of a sense of awe and wonder, as well as playfulness and fun (though McKenna seems to have had that down). I'm not sure I agree with Horgan on that--I thought that what most of these people seemed to have in common was being very comfortable (most seem to be wealthy, famous, respected, and living well) and being advocates of a quietistic conservatism that advocates being content with the way the world is. That's an easy position for someone who is comfortable to take. Horgan does touch on this subject briefly a few times, such as when he writes about "the nature does-not-care principle" and the problem of natural evil (pp. 192-194) and when he raises the issue of suffering with Austin (p. 131).
Horgan seemed most at odds with Katz, a view I shared--Katz's views seem sheer unsubstantiated dogmatism, when he insists that drug experiences have absolutely nothing to do with mystical experiences, and in his insistence on a commonality between all forms of mysticism, which reminded me of the Bahai faith--a religion that disagrees with all other religions in arguing for the compatibility of all religions.
In the end, I found myself scrawling notes of other books I'd like to read as a result of the references in this book: Austin's Zen and the Brain, Georg Feuerstein's Holy Madness, V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, Francisco Varela's Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying, Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay, and Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, as well as finding numerous references to other works that seem to me to be likely to be "on the right track" (Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism without Beliefs, Ronald Siegel's books on hallucinations and drug experiences). Reading Horgan's book was for me a valuable experience that I recommend.
Rating: 
Summary: Not wide-eyed, but certainly open-minded
Review: John Horgan is a scientifically-trained writer, with the unemphatic skepticism that usually goes along with that. He expects things to be plausable even when they are not amenable to controlled testing. From the way he even-handedly discusses religions and their gods, as well as the very idea of God, I would make him an agnostic. "Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason?" he asks, in his introduction. He is a journalist, and so his seeking takes the form of interviews with people prominent in various of the areas -- the "perennial philosophy", psychedelic drugs, meditation, and so on -- that are associated with the rather imprecise term "mysticism". In preparation he studies with some care the writings and reputations of those he will talk to as well as the "classical" works on mysticism and altered mental states. Moreover, he brings with him the memory of an extreme psychedelic episode of his own.
Then, basically, he subjects the claims, wild and mild, of the seekers, sages, and scholars with whom he talks to the test of a skeptical rationality. Sometimes they fail on Horgan's terms; sometimes they even fail on their own terms. But fail they do. To his credit it never seems a foregone conclusion that he will not embrace one or another approach. He is, after all, himself a seeker -- though of course also an author with an eye to the market -- but one for whom the need for the consolations or exhaltations of an altered perception seems to be qualified by his firm grounding in this world.
This book is easy to read and entertaining. The writing is clear and accomplished without being grandiose, and Horgan seems a civilized and warm-hearted guy. But he is not really into psychedelics or other drugs (although he did participate in an ahuasca ceremony for research purposes), and in the end he rather mildly concludes that perhaps the Zen exhortation to just pay attention to your life is the best we can usually do. I suspect that, for those of us that share his rational humanist outlook, our spiritual yearnings will have to be satisfied in the low-key way he finally arrives at.
Rating:
Summary: A much-needed overview
Review: John Horgan's RATIONAL MYSTICISM provides a much-needed overview of contemporary attempts at deriving a rationally-explicable basis for mystical experiences. The non-fawning interview of Ken Wilber alone, with Horgan's bang-on observations regarding kw's evident narcissism, unconvincing self-deprecation, and authoritarian streak, would make the book worth reading. One need not feel obliged to sympathize with the tendencies of some of the more reductionistic interviewees in the book, in their predictable attempts to explain (or induce) mystical experiences solely in physical terms. Nor need one be disappointed that Horgan does not profess definitive spiritual answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything-no one else has those answers either. Any book which can bring together often-credulous "believers" like Wilber and Stanislav Grof, and reasonable skeptics such as Susan Blackmore, into the same pages, is definitely on the right track, and is a necessary read for anyone interested in the relationship between science and spirituality.
Rating: 
Summary: Tabloid Reading
Review: There are precious few mystical classics; Rational Mysticism isn't one of them. In this book John Horgan attempts to describe the indescribable but doesn't get out of the batter's box. Horgan fails because he lacks a basic understanding of mysticism -- he fails to recognize the soul. Writing about mysticism without discussing the soul is like writing about daylight without acknowledging the sun.
Horgan devotes much of Rational Mysticism to justifying his use of illicit drugs. In fact, the book includes an entire chapter on the benefits of LSD. The book reads as if the author never returned from one of his drug-induced trips. For example, he viciously attacks the great mythologist Joseph Campbell without citing his source(s).
The book becomes more difficult to read as it goes on because it becomes more and more ridiculous. Horgan interviews a series of quacks such as a man who believes he has constructed a machine where one simply plugs-in and, voila, one finds God. Horgan gives no credence to the difficult path of mysticism: loving one's enemy, following God's will, performing works of charity, crushing one's ego... Instead, Horgan believes, God can be found simply by popping the right pill.
One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know. John Horgan does not know.
Rating:
Summary: Scientific perspectives on spirituality
Review: This is a masterful discussion of scientific perspectives on spirituality, supplemented with a series of interviews with many of today's prominent (mostly US) proponents of various views on mysticism and spirituality. Horgan is a skeptical mystic whose personal struggles with a wish to find a graspable truth is tempered by his theodicy - a difficulty in accepting that there could be a God who would allow the degrees of evil, suffering and pain that have been experienced in the world.
Horgan considers the perennial philosophy through an interview with Houston Smith, supplemented by Smith's writings and those of William James. Smith glories in the wisdom teachings of diverse traditions.
Horgan's interview with Steven Katz a champion of postmodernism, is instructive in understanding the elusiveness of spiritual truths. Katz dismisses personal experiences as evidence for a mystical reality because all he can relate to are the descriptions of others about their mystical experiences - words that are derived from their expectations and cultural contexts. Katz comes up short in responding to Horgan's inquiry about his personal mystical experiences - minimizing this as of any real value.
Space does not permit detailed analyses of Horgan's enlightening interviews with Ken Wilber, one of the internationally acknowledged experts on Buddhist meditation and mysticism, Susan Blackmore, a skeptical UK parapsychologist; nor of many others interviewed; James Austin, a Zen Buddhist neurologist; Stanislav Grof (researcher), Terence McKenna (psychedelic author) and other explorers of entheogenic effects; and neurotheologist Andrew Newberg, who has mapped areas of the brain that become active during deep meditation.
Horgan's own spiritual search is a linking thread in his presentation, adding a pleasant tension to his thesis.
This is an excellent consideration of an edifying spectrum of views, supported by well-researched notes and references, very worth a thoughtful and deliberate read.
Rating:
Summary: Cherish your memories and be there now
Review: Unfortunately, Horgan excluded a piece that perfectly states my dislike of Buddhism. Fortunately, this outtake is available on his website.
From WHY I GAVE UP ZEN by John Horgan: "Every time I order myself to be here now I'm not being here now. I'm thinking about being here now. It's self-defeating from the start, like trying to remember to forget. In heeding the command, I violate it. My rebellion spread to other spiritual truisms, to Sumi's injunction to be child-like. Childrens' spontaneity and joy spring from their self-absorption and ignorance. What do they know of death, suffering, the woes of the world? A spirituality that denies these realities is shallow, escapist. And what's so great about being in the moment, anyway? We should revel in our minds' ability to range freely through space and time rather than being trapped like animals in the here and now."
Rating:
Summary: A good primer in empirical consciousness exploration
Review: _Rational Mysticism_ should be one of the first books that consciousness exploration neophytes read. It was one of the first books I read upon embarking on this path.
If you are interested in an experiential, empirical approach to your own spirituality, and skeptical of the sea of New Age gurus and dogma we are currently awash in, this book will help you break free and find your own way. As other reviewers note, it also does a fine job of helping us break through one of the most troublesome dualisms of our age, resolving the supposed divide between Science and Religion. And in doing so it infers a path which also collapses the divide between laity and the priesthood. The stories in this book point the way toward a 21st century mysticism, an experiential path toward God.
Written in a journalistic style, it covers many of the leading thinkers and approaches to consciousness exploration. It deals fairly and in detail with the area of psychedelics. It is balanced, and a quick read. I usually recommend this book to entheogenic beginners, along with Daniel Pinchbeck's _Breaking Open the Head_.
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