This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Religious Experience in the Hindu Tradition that was published in Religions

Life and works of Robert Charles Zaehner, 1913-1974, British anthropologist and Bede Griffiths, 1906-1993, Anglican philosopher.

Is MER (The Mystical Experience of Reality) What Humans Are All About? The Mystical Experience of Reality book and blog series by Keith Michael Hancock is a uniquely serious case history of newly emerging facts about the mystical experience of Reality (MER). It is presented here to add to the growing scientific and academic literature being produced around the world today–what human existence is really all about. Does God exist, or is much more revealing itself in our evolutionary progress? Many scientists and scholars are experiencing the answer–Yes! Mystical Experience of Reality Volume I, and now Volume II, are compiled of posts from Keith's Blog, Mystic Experiences. Volume II was thought necessary because Keith’s latest revelations have brought these historically important messages to a concluding realisation of what the human condition is all about. See Summing Up at the end of the book. Scholars, scientists and spiritual Seekers around the world who visit and follow his blog will appreciate Summing Up as a uniquely new, complete understanding of why we're here. In this book Keith has aimed to keep each topic shorter and on point, always leaving you with a new thought to ponder, always encouraging you to dig deeper and recall your own experiences thus far. WHY KEITH? He doesn’t know! He says he is not aware of any qualification he had or has for receiving the mystical experiences of Reality (MER), the truth of Reality’s existence. He says he wasn’t religious or spiritual and didn't even know the word ‘mystic’ when they started. The Mystical Experience of Reality, as Keith calls it, is a well-known, historical, non-biological, non-human historical phenomena that engulfed him as a 14-year-old several times every year until his late thirties, filling him with the experience of a Reality in which all things known and unknown exist at Its behest, guarding, guiding, accepting everything that exists, separately, personally, individually. It is benign and uninterested in human wants or constructs such as religions, politics, ideologies. It only deals with individuals. The experiences bring profound joy and love, with a knowledge beyond all human experience. Keith insists the experience of Reality is caught, not taught. The books are filled with posts from Keith’s blog, mysticexperiences.net, for the author to examine himself and his existence in accordance with the way of Reality. Accordingly, he says he found by comparison that there is nothing in humanity worth studying. The first book, Mystic Experiences of Reality Volume I, and this one, Volume II, are summations of years of using writing to explore the awareness given Keith by his mystical experiences, in the hope it will add to the literature on the subject, which is now being more seriously studied around the world than it has ever been. Keith’s writing also seeks to pass on Reality's personal message to him–All Is Well.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1919 Edition.

Responding to our modern disillusionment with any claims to absolute truth regarding morality or reality, this book offers a conceptual approach for discussing absolutes without denying either the relevance of divergent religious and philosophical teachings or the evidence supporting postmodern and poststructuralist critiques. Case studies of mysticism within Advaita-Vedānta Hinduism, Mādhyamika Buddhism, and Nicene Christianity demonstrate the value of this approach and offer many fresh insights into the metaphysical presuppositions of these religions as well as into the nature and value of mystical experience. Like Douglas Hofstadter's Gōdel, Escher, Bach, this book finds ultimate reality to be rationally graspable only as an eternal fugue of pattern and paradox. Yet it does not so much counter other philosophical views as provide a conceptual tool for understanding and classifying incommensurable views.

Originally published in 1977, The Hindu Religious Tradition provides a detailed exploration into the different doctrines regarding the nature of Religious Reality and the many paths of search for this Reality within the Hindu religion. The book discusses these differing doctrines from the point of view of their philosophical significance and their use in man’s search for the divine in consideration of the traditional teaching that the divine is already in man and can be realised in direct experience. It provides a comprehensive account of this tradition through considering all aspects that are integral to it, and highlights that the profundity of this tradition lies in that it cannot be limited to the requirements of any one form of conceiving the divine. The Hindu Religious Tradition will appeal to those with an interest in Hinduism, religious philosophy, and theology.

This volume offers a sample of reflections from scholars and practitioners on the theme of death and dying from scholars and practitioners, ranging from the Christian tradition to Hinduism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, while also touching on the themes of the afterlife and near-death experiences.

Yoga, karma, meditation, guru—these terms, once obscure, are now a part of the American lexicon. Combining Hinduism with Western concepts and values, a new hybrid form of religion has developed in the United States over the past century. In Transcendent in America, Lola Williamson traces the history of various Hindu-inspired movements in America, and argues that together they constitute a discrete category of religious practice, a distinct and identifiable form of new religion. Williamson provides an overview of the emergence of these movements through examining exchanges between Indian Hindus and American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and illuminates how Protestant traditions of inner experience paved the way for Hindu-style movements’ acceptance in the West. Williamson focuses on three movements—Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, and Siddha Yoga—as representative of the larger of phenomenon of Hindu-inspired meditation movements. She provides a window into the beliefs and practices of followers of these movements by offering concrete examples from their words and experiences that shed light on their world view, lifestyle, and relationship with their gurus. Drawing on scholarly research, numerous interviews, and decades of personal experience with Hindu-style practices, Williamson makes a convincing case that Hindu-inspired meditation movements are distinct from both immigrant Hinduism and other forms of Asian-influenced or “New Age” groups.

"This study in comparative mysticism (originally given as lectures at the Sorbonne) explores the relationship between Hindu mystics (notably Shankara and Sri Ramakrishna) and Christian Carmelite mystics (notably St. John of the Cross), using jnana, bhakti, and raja yogas as a basis for comparison as well as the sacred scriptures of both traditions."-- Publisher.

This book is one of the first wide-ranging academic surveys of the major types and categories of Hindu contemplative praxis. It explores diverse spiritual and religious practices within the Hindu traditions and Indic hermeneutical perspectives to understand the intricate culture of meditative communion and contemplation, devotion, spiritual formation, prayer, ritual, and worship. The volume extends and expands the conceptual reach of the fields of Contemplative Studies and Hindu Studies. The chapters in the volume cover themes in Hindu contemplative experience from various texts and traditions including classical Sāṃkhya and Patañjali Yoga, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the role of Sādhana in Advaita Vedānta, Śrīvidyā and the Śrīcakra, the body in Tantra, the semiotics and illocution of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sādhana, mantra in Mīmāṃsā, Vaiṣṇava liturgy, as well as cross-cultural reflections and interreligious comparative contemplative praxis. The volume presents indigenous vocabulary and frameworks to examine categories and concerns particular to the Hindu contemplative traditions. It traces patterns that cut across Hindu traditions and systems and discusses contrasting methods of different theological/philosophical schools evincing a strong plurality in Hindu religious thought and practice. The volume provides intra-religious comparisons that reveal internal complexity, nuances, and a variety of contemplative states and transformative practices that exist under the rubric of Hindu practices of interiority and reflection. With key insights on forms and functions of the contemplative experience along with their theologies and philosophies, the volume suggests new hermeneutical directions that will advance the field of contemplative studies. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of religious and theological studies, contemplative studies, Hindu studies, consciousness studies, yoga studies, Indian philosophy and religion, sociology of religion, philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and South Asian studies, as well as general readers interested in the topic.