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Libra Esoterica

Zen, drugs, and mysticism

by R. C. Zaehner

  • First published:
  • 20th century
  • Language: English

Description

Description from OpenAlex (opens in a new tab)

The author, one of the foremost writers in the history of religions, intended this book to be the starting point for those searching for a personal religious experience and begins with an examination of the nature of mystical states and their differentiation from drug-induced states. He proceeds to the question of whether there is religious experience to either state. He offers those impatient with a traditional Christianity alternate routes to explore, by examining Zen, the Upanishads, Huxley, Bonhoeffer, Leary, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and commenting upon each with his ascerbic wit. This reprint of the 1972 American edition published by Pantheon contains a new foreword by one of Zaehner's former Oxford students, William L. Newell.

Provenance

Why this book is in the catalog

Included because retained bibliographic metadata links this work to Consciousness, mysticism, and metaphysics.

  • Consciousness, mysticism, and metaphysics

    Controlled discovery queries from openalex matched “mysticism”. Retained metadata contains “Mysticism” in the title, “Mysticism” in the subject metadata, and “Mysticism” in the edition title.

    • “mysticism”· via OpenAlex
    • “Mysticism”· in title
    • “Mysticism”· in subject
    • “Mysticism”· in edition title

Membership records how this book met the catalog’s discovery criteria — relevance to a tradition, not a judgment of the book’s claims.

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Editions

One edition cataloged here.

OpenAlex scholarly book record

1973-01-01Japan Society of Medical Entomology and Zoology; Medical Entomology and ZoologyEnglish—Unknown

Subjects

16 subject headings

Identifiers & provenance

How this record was assembled, and the authority identifiers it carries.

Cataloged from

Catalog id
openalex:W1567223608
Edition coverage
Openalex source record
Retrieved