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Subtitled ‘beyond literal belief’, this searching study steers a middle course between the Scylla of uneducated belief or religious literalism and the Charybdis of educated disbelief or fundamentalist atheism. As a sympathetic scholar of Jung, David parts company with Freud and Dawkins by maintaining that religion is in fact metaphorical rather than illusory or delusory.

This provides an excellent theoretical framework as well as three practical tests that can be applied to any spiritual tradition: the egocentrism test relating to the overcoming of self-centredness in practitioners, the dissociation test addressing the extent of fully embodied integration, and the eco--socio-political test ‘assessing the extent to which spiritual systems.

This comprehensive volume updates the original Handbook that was published back in 1977 - so nearly 40 years ago. During that time, more research has taken place, but we have also seen the rise of organised scepticism with continuing vigorous attempts to debunk the whole field, part of which is manifest in the control by guerrilla sceptics of the Wikipedia parapsychology pages, including the Society for Psychical Research, where readers will find that about one third of the entry is devoted to fraud.

Over the last 40 years, near-death experiences have become familiar to the general public and are now taken seriously within science and medicine – 65 NDE research studies have been published involving over 3,500 near-death experiencers. The debate about the interpretation continues to evolve, and these books are very differently angled in that respect.

The book mixes narrative text with answers to questions, and articulates essential spiritual themes with remarkable clarity and lucidity. An important item of background information is the calibration scale based on muscle testing developed by Hawkins, which effectively positions people, ideas and emotions on a scale of 1 to 1,000, although there are aspects of reality well beyond that.

This extraordinary story joins the likes of Proof of Heaven by Dr Eben Alexander and Dying to be Me by Anita Moorjani as a classic of recent NDE literature and with the same essential message of healing, love and wisdom. It is as if the spiritual world is trying to wake us up to the wider and deeper context of life, as the title of this book suggests.

10 years in the making, this tour de force is a critical examination of scientific theories and evidence - systematic observation or experiment - about the origin and evolution of matter, life, consciousness and humankind. As such, it could scarcely be more ambitious, but the result is a triumph of detailed conceptual analysis covering the fields of fundamental cosmology, physics, biology and the evolution of philosophical and religious ideas.

Here is Roger Trigg at his most incisive and succinct as he returns to his examination of where the limits of the modern scientific enterprise might legitimately lie. He makes a clear and persuasive case for the validity of explanations in metaphysics, ethics, and theology, against both the reductive stance we have inherited (through various permutations) from positivism and the abnegation of universal truth claims of post-modernism.

The book is grounded in inter-spirituality and endorsed by Ravi Ravindra with its deeper exploration of the spiritual transformative journey, which is the primary purpose of religion – hence the term interspiritual rather than interreligious dialogue.

The author is surely correct in describing the collaboration between Krishnamurti (1895-1986) and David Bohm (1917-1992) as uncommon, since, as he points out, most collaborations take place within the same discipline. There is no doubt that they were both men of genius, deeply concerned with the human situation, its limitations and prospects.

There is no doubt in my mind that the book is a seminal one for philosophy of science and should be much more widely known in the field. It consists of five parts, namely metaphysics beginning with Aristotle, anti-metaphysics, the existence of God, the metaphysics of Kant, and causation.

John Casey gives a magisterial overview of the Western eschatological tradition – death, judgement, heaven and hell – providing sympathetic and lucid summaries of a vast range of different and at times conflicting sources that is a real pleasure to read.

At all stages, it is important to let go of fear and anger resulting in accumulating pain and leading to energetic instability. Richard shows how management of the emotions is a key in this respect, although the fulfilment of the ego’s needs and the soul’s desires is even more critical.

The subtitles of these books are significant in referring to a spiritual vision for modern man and the integration of experiment with experience in arriving at a coherent worldview. Both Max and Peter epitomised the Network approach of balancing rigour with openness, and indeed it was Peter who invited Max to join the Network after the initial meeting recommended writing letters to possible members.

In elucidating these topics, Rao has exhibited a commendable intellectual courage in the face of academic pressure to dismiss or ignore parapsychology. He identifies the limitations of scientific materialism with respect to both parapsychology and spirituality.