For those interested in a more academic treatment of this subject, a number of books are quite useful.
There are two I would recommend as coming to the subject from a more scientific point of view.
The first is Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber.
One of Wilber’s main interests is in mapping what he calls the “neo-perennial philosophy”, an integration of some of the views of mysticism typified by Aldous Huxley‘s The Perennial Philosophy with an account of cosmic evolution akin to that of the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo. He rejects most of the tenets of Perennialism and the associated anti-evolutionary view of history as a regression from past ages or yugas.[19] Instead, he embraces a more traditionally Western notion of the great chain of being. As in the work of Jean Gebser, this great chain (or “nest”) is ever-present while relatively unfolding throughout this material manifestation, although to Wilber “… the ‘Great Nest’ is actually just a vast morphogenetic field of potentials …” In agreement with Mahayana Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta, he believes that reality is ultimately a nondual union of emptiness and form, with form being innately subject to development over time.
The second is The Matter with Things: Our brains, Our delusions, and the Unmaking of the world by Iain McGilchrist.
Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.
He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.
He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009)
Both of these gentleman are rigorous and erudite. Highly recommended.
All stare at the same moon.
