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Appendix 11 273
work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile, and for preferring to do it well.” This is in contrast to man’s lower nature, which seeks selfish gratification of the animal drives and instincts.
Terms of this new psychology, such as “peak” and ecstatic experiences, self-transcendence and self-actualization, energy flow and energy fields, love, consciousness, the spiritual dimension— create a language similar to that of mystics and spiritual aspirants. Investigators believe that worthwhile data can be gained by experiencing altered states of consciousness, as are found in meditation, hypnosis and sensory deprivation.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, Maslow described a powerful transcendental state he called “peak experience,” in which the person experienced a sense of heightened noetic clarity and understanding, intense euphoria, and an appreciation of the holistic, unitive and integrated nature of the universe and one’s unity with it. He hoped that studies of peak experiences would help bridge the gap between the relative and the absolute and establish a scientific basis for experiences of unity and eternity.
More recently, investigators have shown growing interest in studying psychic phenomena. Stanley Krippner writes: “It is likely that the apogee of the publication of books on parapsychology was reached in the years 1974-1976 . . . .”2 In his bibliography he lists ninety-three books under fourteen subject headings, some of which include: “Medicine, Psychiatry and Parapsychology,” “Parapsychology and Other Sciences,” “Philosophy and Parapsychology” and “Religion and Parapsychology.”
Questions about the nature of consciousness, and the relationship of brain to consciousness, are centuries old. The nineteenth century Prussian professor of logic and metaphysics, Immanuel Kant, declared, “No experience tells me that I’m shut up someplace in my brain.” Charles Darwin, on the other hand, stated, “Why is thought, being a secretion of the brain more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter?” Some, confused by the issue, might have taken the point of a satirist’s insight, “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” Schopenhauer termed the impasse between mind and matter, this “world knot.”
In the field of physics and the neurosciences, the question of the


































































































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