Contents:
Book Info
The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience
Ralph Metzner, 2010 (1986 Ed.: Opening to Inner Light).
http://amzn.com/098183180X
My Book Review
My review at Amazon, Oct. 28, 2005:
5 stars of 5
Metaphors describing dissociative-state experiencing
This book is an organized inventory of the various metaphors that have been used to describe the phenomena encountered in the mystic dissociative state. Dissociative psychoactives are mentioned in an integrated manner throughout the book.
This is a revised edition of Opening to Inner Light: The Transformation of Human Nature and Consciousness. Benny Shanon’s book Antipodes of the Mind is a good companion volume similarly explaining dissociative-state cognitive phenomenology as the origin of mythic metaphor.
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My November 2020 comment on that review:
I want to dig out this book and read it more thoroughly. I ended up with both editions in my personal library.
I still recall Metzner’s book being outstanding as a survey of mythemes — religious mythology elements that describe by analogy, cognitive phenomenology. I don’t know of another book that hits this target so squarely: an inventory of religious mythemes describing the altered state, just as in the 2nd half of my Egodeath theory research.
The Egodeath theory 