Trances, visions, speaking in many tongues, irrational social behaviour including the discarding of clothes have been widely interpreted by psychoanalysts as a psychopathological condition. However, parapsychologists are increasingly looking at the grey zone that blurs the rigidly held distinctions between psychoses and spirituality. Stanislav Grof, in his remarkable book Beyond the Brain:...
This brief essay emerges from an ongoing study of relations between imaginative writing and liminal states or movements of consciousness, especially those on the threshold between waking and sleep, or between consciousness and its loss or inhibition. In the examples considered here, such writing is meditative and self-reflective, and brings the first person into the centre of its concern. Its...