Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experience (Library of Spiritual Classics) [Paperback]

Marghanita Laski (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: J. P. Tarcher (July 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0874775744
• ISBN-13: 978-0874775747
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,378,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Research about ecstasy - this time a real one, December 7, 2006

By 

Helle Kaasik (Tartu, Estonia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experience (Library of Spiritual Classics) (Paperback)

The book is a 544-page monograph classifying and systematizing ecstatic experiences. (There is nothing said about MDMA, misleading promotion of which has almost occupied the ancient term "ecstasy" today, but some other drugs and their effects are mentioned in the book.)

Basis for the research are:
* 63 interviews conducted by the author,
* 27 descriptions of ecstasy in literature,
* 22 examples of religious texts about the subject and
* 52 cases of schoolchildren reporting their extraordinary experiences.

All this primary material is included into the book as appendices. The material is analyzed thoroughly and processed into a classification of ecstatic states. First, ecstasies are divided into "withdrawal" and "intensity" types, the latter type is the main subject of further analysis. Intensity ecstasies are divided into "adamic" (peace+love+kindness), "knowledge" and "contact" ecstasies, in increasing order of "greater" experiences. Various triggers of ecstasy, special cases, related phenomena, also "overbeliefs" (i.e. interpretations with external assumptions, often with a share of wishful thinking) and their formation are analyzed. A variant of content analysis is applied to primary material and various number and percentage distributions are presented as tables.

In this rare and complicated field of study, some advantages of this book in comparison with most writings about the subject are:
* absence of any religious (pro- or contra-) agenda, neutral position;
* absence of evident strong prejudices, "letting the data speak";
* clarity of intellect and logic (as a Ph.D. in physics, I had to make no "humanities discount" at all, to my surprise);
* keen attention to the subject-related phenomena even in unexpected circumstances and
* moderate level of self-critical thinking.

I tried hard to find also some disadvantages, those may be:
* the rich vocabulary of author (a professional writer), making the book a non-easy reading for a reader with non-native English;
* the book has not been cited often by specialists (psychologists, sociologists etc.);
* the book is out of print and many libraries do not have it.

In conclusion - if you are seriously interested in understanding ecstatic experiences to work yourself through a serious study, this is definitely the book for you.