This book throws down a challenge to the field of religious studies. It offers new and exciting approaches for our understanding of religious experience, drawn from the methods of cognitive science, neuropsychology, developmental psychology, philosophy of mind, anthropology, and the many other fields that have joined together to investigate the phenomenon of consciousness.

This is a sequel to Forman's well-received collection The Problme of Pure Consciousness (OUP, 1990). The scholars in this book put forward a hypothesis about the cause of mystical, or 'pure consciousness' experiences. All of them agree that mysticism is the result of an innate human capacity, rather than a learned, socially conditioned constructive process. The contributors look at mystical experience as it is manifested in a variety of religious and cultural settings, including Hindu Yoga, Buddhism, Sufism, and medieval Christianity.

This collection of contributed essays challenges the widely accepted interpretation of mystical experience as a constructed and mediated product of previously held beliefs and concepts. Forman and his colleagues argue for the existence of a single type of mystical experience that cuts across cultural and linguistic lines.