The Varieties of Spiritual Experience is a book that was begging to be written and David Yaden and Andrew Newberg beat everyone to it. Based on an attempt to update William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), this volume takes both James’ topic and methodological agnosticism seriously. In terms of updating and expansion, the authors bring over a century’s worth of interdisciplinary research to bear on James’ original considerations, nascent trajectories, and even unforeseen possibilities. They claim their aim “is to carry forward James’s insights and fill in some of the empirical gaps of his speculations with decades of scientific work on spiritual experiences” and “to provide a contemporary, scientific guide to spiritual experiences” (9, 12).
Divided into three parts with six or seven chapters each, the first part, “The Science of Altered States,” seeks to provide contextual continuity to the overall project and establish basic principles that recur...
University of California Press