Modern Thought
Comparative religion, psychology of religion and consciousness studies.
- Comparative mysticismThe modern study of mysticism across religions, from Max Müller and William James to the perennialists and their critics.
- Modern philosophyWestern philosophy from Descartes and Spinoza to the present, and its questions about mind, knowledge and God.
- Friedrich Max MüllerGerman-born Oxford scholar of Sanskrit and founder of the science of religion.
- William JamesAmerican philosopher and psychologist who studied religious experience.
- Evelyn UnderhillEnglish writer on mysticism and editor of The Cloud of Unknowing.
- Rudolf OttoGerman theologian whose Idea of the Holy described the numinous.
- Aldous HuxleyEnglish writer whose anthology The Perennial Philosophy shaped modern comparative mysticism.
- W. T. StaceBritish philosopher whose Mysticism and Philosophy proposed a common core of mysticism.
- R. C. ZaehnerOxford scholar of religions who argued, against Huxley, that mystical experiences are of different kinds.
- J. KrishnamurtiIndian teacher who rejected all authority and method, and taught choiceless awareness of what is.
- Comparative religionThe systematic comparison of religious traditions.
- Mystical experienceExperience reported as direct contact with, or union with, ultimate reality.
- The perennial philosophyThe claim that one wisdom underlies the world’s religious and mystical traditions.
- The numinousRudolf Otto’s term for the holy as wholly other, awesome and fascinating.
- ConsciousnessAwareness: the fact that there is experience at all.
- The Varieties of Religious ExperienceJames’s Gifford Lectures on religion as personal experience, drawn from the testimony of saints, mystics and converts: healthy-mindedness and the sick soul, conversion, saintliness, and in lectures XVI and XVII mysticism, with his four marks of mystical states.
- The Perennial PhilosophyHuxley’s anthology of passages from the mystics of many traditions, arranged by theme, from “That Art Thou” and the nature of the ground to grace, prayer and contemplation, with his commentary arguing for a common core of mystical teaching.
- Arthur SchopenhauerGerman philosopher of the will, the first major Western philosopher to engage Indian thought.
- Rabindranath TagoreBengali poet, philosopher and educator, the first non-European Nobel laureate in literature.
- TranscendentalismThe New England movement of Emerson and Thoreau, which found the divine in nature and in the depths of each soul.
- Ralph Waldo EmersonAmerican essayist and lecturer, the leading voice of Transcendentalism and of the Over-Soul.
- Henry David ThoreauAmerican writer and naturalist, whose Walden describes a life of simplicity and attention in nature.
- Over-SoulEmerson’s name for the universal mind in which every individual soul shares.