Traveling to Other Worlds: Lectures on Transpersonal Expression in Literature and the Arts - Tapa dura

"Bruce Ross has collected for this book of lectures on literature and art a unique purview of human consciousness and its expression in heightened states, often coinciding with the inner dimensions of established spiritual traditions." (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, President of The World Phenomenology Institute; Editor of `Phenomenological Inquiry and Analecta Husserliana') "`Traveling to Other Worlds' is a book of stunning breadth and insight. It is not only a journey across a wide range of cultures but also a quest into the deep north of the interior landscape. The reader's mind is expanded and vivified by these explorations into the source and forms of transpersonal creativity." (David Landiss Barnhill, Director of Environmental Studies and Professor of English, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh; Editor and Translator of `Basho's Haiku: Selected Poems' and `Basho's Journey: The Literary Prose of Matsuo Basho')

The lectures collected for this book focus on transpersonal expression - heightened states of feeling, emotion, and deeper regions of the psyche, from the Paleolithic (so-called rock art), to the medieval (Solomon Ibn Gabirol), to the modern (Rilke), and postmodern (Haruki Murakami). This study suggests the psyche is hard wired for spiritual experience, for aesthetic and ethical expression, and that transpersonal expression in literature and the arts is a universal human exploration of perhaps a fundamental ground of being. The focus of the chapters provide evidence for these suggestions: mysticism in Gabirol, Rumi, and Rilke; reckoning with suffering in Murakami's postmodern fables; spiritual failure and grace in the triptychs of Bosch, Beckman, and Bacon; epiphany in Basho, Suthorn Pho, and contemporary world travel haibun; altered states in Romantic ballet; metaphysical space in Ra'anan Levy's painting; epiphany and social communion in Paul Theroux's travel writing; sustaining the world in modern Aboriginal art; the nature of "big mind" consciousness as internal space; visitation to the heavens in world petroglyphs and pictographs; "absolute metaphor" in traditional American haiku; and spiritual spaciousness as a key element in haiku.