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This book is an earlier edition of The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience, which has additional chapters. Provides 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. 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.

Extraordinary book. Not a long book, but very rich and deep. Synthesizes many philosophical texts and ideas in conjunction with an examination of metaphors and analogies used to describe breakthroughs, awakenings, cosmic realizations and the like. A pleasure to read, with many valuable and leading footnotes. I could often anticipate his lines of thought, but they were so well-stated that they served to bring me further illumination, as well as affirmation of thoughts I already had. It's hard to convey how good this book is. Metzner very closely associated with Leary, but this work deals very little with drugs.