After pointing out the existence of altered states of consciousness (though not by that name), James adds, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.” Dan’s article had begun with this very passage from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, a call to study altered states of consciousness. These states, as James saw, are discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. And, he observed, “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of
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