Broadening Access to Awakening: A Review of Steve Taylor’s Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation

This important book contains multiple reports of spiritual awakenings in very difficult situations such as combat, serious illness, imprisonment, and addiction. While their situations differ, these “shifters” had virtually the same awakening experience. This provides evidence for the identity of the state of enlightened consciousness beyond the surface differences of religious cultures, doctrines, and practices. This view of the spiritual life is often dismissed as “perennialism” by religion scholars, yet the evidence provided by the cases reported by Steve Taylor along with countless others and the findings of contemplative neuroscience suggest that there is an essential core of features that all deep mystical experiences share.

Another significant feature of this well-written book is that it shows that awakening is far more widespread than commonly thought. It is not the occasional saint who awakens but our neighbors, friends, family members, students, and colleagues who also awaken. By expanding access to awakening, by suggesting that it is our evolutionary future, and by offering practices that can open the way to our own awakening, Steve Taylor has broadened access to the awakened state.

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