Journey beyond Belief'

Abstract

"Journey Beyond Belief' is an autobiographical account of the experiences and understandings that emerged from a personal exploration of a variety of growth disciplines. The author traces his trajectory from a hard-nosed neuroscientist with no faith in things subjective or emotional through the repeated shattering of his belief systems to a recognition of the vast reaches and varieties of inner experience. Beginning with psychotherapy and progressing through a number of humanistic, group, and meditative disciplines, he began to appreciate the limited and limiting nature of many of his own and the culture's beliefs, experiences, and behaviors. He was repeatedly shocked by the extent to which he had underestimated the vastness and richness of the inner universe, by the extent to which the untrained mind is out of control and continuously creates encompassing and entrapping illusory realities, by the amount of unnecessary suffering which this causes, by the fact that it is possible to train the mind to degrees considerably beyond those usually recognized by Western psychology, and by the fact that, at least at their usually unrecognized esoteric core, the world's great religions represent roadmaps for mental training designed to induce transcendent states.

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