Author’s blurb
SACRED SCIENCE
Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle
John HeronPCCS Books, 1998, ISBN 1 898059 21 7, 156×234, pp 288, £18 pb
This cutting-edge book breaks new ground in transpersonal psychology. It argues for a people-based, person-centred religion which holds that spiritual authority is within each individual, and that spiritual initiation is a path of lived inquiry, for which all traditional systems are a secondary resource. Topics covered include:
- The emergence of a self-generating spiritual culture of independent pathfinders.
- An affirmation of the person as a real spiritual presence on the crest of divine becoming.
- The nature of long-term lived inquiry, and of short-term co-operative inquiry, into the spiritual and the subtle.
- A radical account of what happens when inner spiritual authority is projected outward on to traditions, texts and teachers, with an expose of the authoritarianism in spiritual traditions.
- A critique of the gender-laden theory of a perennial philosophy.
- A practical, working model of internal spiritual authority, to dialogue with the reader’s working model.
- An exploration of the issues involved in do-it-yourself subtle (psychical) research.
- A provisional new dipolar map of the spiritual and the subtle, and a critique of other maps.
- A new classification of methods of inner transformation, and a critique of a traditional Buddhist approach.
- Reports of eleven short-term co-operative inquiries into the spiritual and the subtle, showing how the method works.
- A presentation of a participatory worldview, with the paradigm of participatory inquiry and a sketch of a dipolar theology of embodiment.
Sacred Science will be of interest to all those who believe in the emergence of the self-determining human spirit within the field of religious belief and practice. It is written for the general reader, yet specialists in transpersonal studies will find that it addresses critical issues at a sophisticated level.
Contents
Part 1: Perspectives of lived inquiry \ Introduction and background \ Spiritual inquiry and projected authority \ Spiritual inquiry and the authority within \ Issues in subtle inquiry \ The challenge of cartography \ A dipolar map of the spiritual and the subtle \ Methods for the second form of spiritual transformation
Part 2: Co-operative inquiry reports \ Procedures \ Reports, adequacy and viability \ Spatiotemporal extensions \
Impressions of the other reality \ The bliss nature and transtemporal regression \ Knacks in entering altered states \ Charismatic expression \ Transpersonal activities in everyday life \ Transpersonal inquiry within a self-generating culture \ Ritual and interpersonal process \ Empowerment in everyday life and group life \ Co-creating \ Coming into being \ Epilogue to Part 2
Part 3: A participatory worldview \ Participatory research \ Participatory theology and cosmology
References \ Index
John Heron is an international consultant, researcher and writer based at the South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry in New Zealand. He founded the Human Potential Research Project at the University of Surrey, and was Assistant Director of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation at the University of London. His most recent other books are Helping the Client (2001), The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook (1999), Co-operative Inquiry (1996), Group Facilitation (1993), Feeling and Personhood (1992), Helping the Client (1990) and The Facilitators’ Handbook (1989).
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