A leisurely, discursive, donnish ramble on science and spiritual
homelessness, religious mysticism and its current cartoon in the
psychedelic drug cult, the reality of evil and the rare radiance of
good (Pope John XXIII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer) in the 20th century,
the meanings of death and of faith. The book is just this diverse,
diverting and ultimately pointless; the author is an Oxford
professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics and a thinking Catholic,
and the book was expanded from a series of lectures. Zaehner says
that however warm our mystical experiences we must admit the cold
truth science has taught us, that the world of nature doesn't
really have any sympathy with us, or any Mind at work in it. Then,
after proving with lively Orientalist erudition that there is not
one mystical experience but many, he gives serious consideration to
LSD prophets' claims to the genuine article. He concludes that
while there are parallels between Huxley's and Leary's epiphanies
and some kinds of religious mysticism - especially Hindu
Upanishadic and Tantric - on the whole psychedelics produce rather
a kind of expansive delusion warned against by Muslims and
resembling manic-depression. Nor do they produce the lasting
results with which Zen rewards its devotees' exertions. Zaehner
also discusses French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos on
confusing the bleak Void with the holy, and concludes with Teilhard
de Chardin that death is "God's greatest gift to man" - the only
way most of us will shed our selfishness! Zaehner's Concordant
Discord (1970), which is frequently referred to here, is the most
likely beginning point to fully appreciate this varied,
inconclusive, skeptical, witty, moral, concerned, and ultimately
Christian mind at work. Both books will appeal mainly to
non-mystics interested in mysticism and religious intellectuals.
(Kirkus Reviews)
The author, one of the foremost writers in the history of
religions, intended this book to be the starting point for those
searching for a personal religious experience and begins with an
examination of the nature of mystical states and their
differentiation from drug-induced states. He proceeds to the
question of whether there is religious experience to either state.
He offers those impatient with a traditional Christianity alternate
routes to explore, by examining Zen, the Upanishads, Huxley,
Bonhoeffer, Leary, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and commenting upon
each with his ascerbic wit. This reprint of the 1972 American
edition published by Pantheon contains a new foreword by one of
Zaehner's former Oxford students, William L. Newell.
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