the Holy Spirit, a Hindu about absorption into Brahman, a Buddhist about the extinction of the self. But if one is able to see beyond the superficial, culturally determined differences between these accounts one discovers a single unvarying core. Or so goes the argument advanced by William James (1961/1902), Rudolf Otto (1958/1917), Aldous Huxley (1946), W.T. Stace (1960) and Robert Forman (1990), among others. Needless to say there are important differences in the views of these scholars, but all more-or-less agree that it is possible to distinguish between a core experience (or c