The everyday consciousness of most people is not at a deep level, nor, it appears, do very many people want to deepen it, or, if they do, they don't know how. In fact, many people do not even know they can deepen their consciousness. This is especially true of scientists, whose training and practice is to think outward, not inward. Thus far science has been carried forward by people whose minds were mechanically and/or mathematically inclined and who could think in a highly abstruse and detached manner. It is this sort of consciousness that has created the current scientific paradigm, which has been highly successful in so many ways. But it has also resulted in the development of exclusively extraverted, not introverted, methodologies.

When it comes to increasing our understanding of consciousness, I don't think we can go about it simply by conducting our scientific business as usual. This has been a failing of both psychology and parapsychology, yet one would assume that they would be the disciplines most directly in­volved in increasing our understanding of consciousness. It is because psychology and parapsychology aim to be empirical sciences that they can only get a grip on the outermost layers of consciousness. To understand the deeper levels of consciousness, we need to be there. We need to go as deep as we need to know. I believe there is an endpoint, but each person must find it for themselves, and when they do, they will know it, and so will others.

But between that place and where we are now we have a long way to go, and major changes will have to be made. First, we must find ways of changing our direction, starting from where and who we are. Until now a scientist proceeded by sharpening his or her mind and instruments so they were "up" to the task at hand. The task that now confronts us requires not only a vastly different approach, but a reversal of orientation. We must get down to it. Instead of sharpening our minds, we must let them go. In­stead of tackling the problem, we must surrender to it.

Those who have been able to deepen their consciousness, of course, are the mystics and psychics. But for the most part they have cut themselves off from science as sharply as science has disassociated itself from them. To mystics the sharp dissecting mind of the scientist is anathema, in the same way that their undifferentiated oceanic consciousness is abhorrent to clear-headed scientists. But if scientists now want to find ways to deepen con­sciousness, their attitude must change.

The big question is how to go deeper in a scientific manner. Even if persons think they have achieved a deeper level of consciousness and in­creased their understanding, how can this be relayed to others? How can their results be generalized? This is the main activity of science, after all.

But before we assume that as we are we are capable of answering these questions, or even asking the right ones, let us remind ourselves that we are discovering increasingly that science itself is not as objective as was once thought. Any knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is situated. The Western scientific paradigm has really only existed for about 450 years, and it has been developed primarily by white male middle class Europeans and North Americans. We may also find that the ways of deepening conscious­ness are just as situated. We may even find that that they are absolutely individual. Personally, I think this may be an essential aspect of the process. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that we can find a basis from which to generalize. In fact, I propose that precisely what we are seeking is common ground, or more precisely, common consciousness. Scientists at a similar level of con­sciousness might find considerable areas of agreement. Charles Tart (1972) has already laid the groundwork for such state-specific sciences.

Traditional spiritual disciplines, of course, teach methods of deepening consciousness, but they need to be freed from their specifically religious con­texts so that they can be used by any one. What the 21st century requires is an approach that is open to and speaks to the needs of everyone--in whatever life situation they may be in and in whatever everyday state of consciousness they may find themselves. Existentially, many people, includ­ing many scientists, are involved in a state of anomie rather than feeling involved in a meaningful discipline that deepens consciousness. Science has had a lot to do with this. Science is not only a highly secular activity, it is also protestant. If you want to find out how something works, you get the scientific recipe and you follow it yourself and you get the same results. Science builds on the assumption that this is the only sure way to discover that there is order in the world. But science, and especially technology, have possibly created as much disorder as order, and because of the ad­vancement of science and technology, the very planet and all forms of life upon it are in danger of destruction. Our task, then, is to find a way to deepen the consciousness of as many people as possible so that we can solve the problems created by a science formulated by and conducted from su­perficial levels of consciousness.

In the past, religion touched people's daily lives, but I don't think this is generally the case any more, even though church attendance, at least in the U.S., is high. Religion still performs many social functions, but it enables only a small proportion of people to experience the sacred. (I speak, now, mainly for Western industrial societies.) In order to deepen conscious­ness we must discover secular approaches to sacred experience. This is necessary because Western society is secular. And, even though it does not seem to have been deliberately brought about, by becoming secular we have reached a stage in human history where the truths of the world's religions can be available to everyone. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God is here and now, within us. Taoism teaches that "usual life is the very Tao." The Hindus teach that the Atman is Brahman. These teachings point to the in­separability of the spiritual and the secular. People who have followed their religious teachings to the limit have experienced this. But now, in this time of great reversals, we must find secular analogues that will lead to the sacred experience. In this view, a specifically spiritual discipline would be seen as only one of possibly hundreds or even thousands of essentially secular approaches to the sacred.

In trying to improve science, I think we also have to turn everything upside down. Instead of starting at the beginning, we need to start at the end. This is the reverse of the current scientific method, which generalizes from individual data points. Until large numbers of us actually deepen our consciousness, I think we should provisionally work with the findings and generalizations that religion and the humanities provide. We must steep our­selves in them. We are fooling ourselves if we think at our present stage we will be able to discover forms of consciousness outside that heritage. The major innovation ahead of us lies in finding ways in the midst of secular ac­tivities, including science, to experience that deepening of consciousness that in the past was primarily the province of religion and possibly art. But science has hierarchically positioned itself above religion and art and has cut itself off from them. We need to reverse this. To develop methods of deepening consciousness, we have to turn to the humanities, including the performing arts and even sports, and scientists must learn to follow, and in order to do that, they must relinquish their role as leaders and prime knowers.

We must study the common teachings of the world's religions in order to obtain a clear idea of how a person with a deepened consciousness views him- or herself, other people, and the world, as well as time and eternity, life and death, and so forth. Aldous Huxley (1945) and more recently, Piero Ferrucci (1990), Michael Murphy (1992), and others already have pulled much of this material together.

Scientists must also familiarize themselves with the components of mys­tical experience, which in Western societies at least, appear to be very similar. The content of near-death experiences (NDEs) may be especially relevant because NDEs appear to be one of the most commonly triggered mystical experiences of our day. Scientists need to become familiar with these wisdom teachings and experiences so they can recognize the signposts on the path as they begin to deepen their own consciousness. For example, here is an account of a near-death experience I published in the latest issue of Exceptional Human Experience. It was sent to me by a man, and it hap­pened at a time when he was very troubled. He nearly ODed, and he was taken to a hospital where electric shock was applied to his heart. He writes: "My heart had stopped. I don't remember the emergency procedures. What I do remember is a profound experience." His experience consisted of con­secutive envelopments in light, accompanied by blissful feelings. The final light experience he describes as follows:

It was beautiful. I was overwhelmed by its absolute beauty. It bedazzled me with wonder. The light has a form like a beauti­ful diamond, but with infinite facets of individual colors. . . . Next I remember going into this form of light that was like a jewel. And then I stopped moving, suspended in total motion­lessness. I was immediately greeted by people I know, some dead and some still alive, then by others I don't know. It was like everybody who has ever existed has their being there. They all welcomed me home. It was the strangest feeling, like being loved and feeling at home, secure without thinking. I wanted to know where I was, and something told me I was at the center of the universe. I asked, "Where is that?" And was told, "You're at the center of yourself." (Sawyer, 1992, p. 44)

I am not suggesting we take this experience literally, but metaphori­cally. It was as if he were in the light, surrounded by everyone who ever lived, in a place that was at once the center of himself and that contained everyone else. At the end of the account, he says what this experience left him with was the conviction that there is "one supreme mind," and at the same time "individuality of the self continues forever." I, too, once had a near-death experience, and was left with a similar conviction, though--as you can see--nearly 40 years later I am still working it out in terms of time and space.

Once a sufficient number of scientists are familiar with the methods, modes, and results of spiritual consciousness, it will be possible to form generalizations as to the provisional goal of deepened consciousness. Then we will be in a position to start the process of moving toward it. I do not want to make it seem like this is easy. I think it is an overwhelmingly dif­ficult task, and that is why we have put off doing it. But the wisdom we need is there for the taking. If our path has led to an unscalable wall, to the edge of a cliff, to the bottom of an abyss, to a desert surrounded by miles of sand, to being lost in a swamp, or bobbing on a log in the ocean, or abandonment on the polar ice, or gasping like a fish on dry land--wherever we are metaphorically in ourselves, we can begin. We can begin by admitting with every bit of consciousness we can muster that the problems confronting us are too big for us to handle, and know that that is all right! It is part of the process! It is what science has traditionally called identifying the problem or formulating the right question. That the problem seems to be insuperable is not a good reason for not tackling it. All we need to do is admit that it is our starting point.

I suggest that what the problem may be is that our consciousness is too narrow to encompass our subject matter. The first step in enlarging it would be to admit that we currently lack what we need to see things whole. After that, we need to consciously call on a higher power. I don't think it matters if we conceive of that higher power as a deeper level of ourselves, a civilization in outer space, the traditional god or gods of the world's religions, or simply what has been called "the nobler hypothesis." Take your pick. I don't think we are even required to believe. I think we are required only to recognize (1) we are in a mess; (2) we don't know how to get out of it, and (3) promise as sincerely as we possibly can that we will do our best to follow whatever clues come to hand or mind, no matter how crazy or unlikely they may seem, in the matter of deepening consciousness, and along with it, science.

I might add that we should expect the clues to be crazy, for the whole point is that because our present paradigm is inadequate, the solution has to lie outside it. As Nietzsche (1960) pointed out, the impulse that ushers in the new is always initially perceived as evil or wicked. The new is seen as the enemy of the good:

The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them, the agriculturists of the spirit. But every soil finally becomes exhausted, and the plowshare of evil must always come once more. (p. 40)

Our soil has been exploited and depleted, not only globally but intellec­tually, so we must deliberately look to experiences and ideas and anomalies that lie outside the standard scientific paradigm. And if we follow the steps I listed, I think we will observe anomalous oddities cropping up in our own lives, and strange coincidences and synchronicities taking place that will draw us out until we begin to sense that we are immersed in a process that is unfolding, both within us and outside us, and we will begin to see for our­selves that what we need more than anything else is not to lead but to fol­low. I predict each of us will then find him- or herself drawn to practices or forms of discipline that already exist or that we may even develop on our own, and that in following these disciplines indigenous to ourselves and our lifeworlds--these situated disciplines--our consciousness will deepen, and at the same time it will widen, and if we persist long enough and well enough, voila! each one of us will know what the mystics have always taught, but this time around we will know it in a very secular and scientific way (but not by the science of the present paradigm, which is inadequate). The new form of science we require will be an outgrowth of our deepened conscious­ness.

Actually, it is likely that the new paradigm cannot be worked out and understood until a sufficient number of the people who appreciate the need for a new paradigm have also realized this deepened consciousness. This is because, as Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley taught, cognition, or what we know, depends on being, or the depth of our consciousness. As Huxley phrases it: "In the world of spiritual realities, knowledge is always a func­tion of being; the nature of what we experience is determined by what we ourselves are" (in Heard, 1949, p. 78).

One of the first questions a person would ask from the present paradigm is: Who is to be master? How do we determine which people have deepened consciousness? How will we decide which view is right? I think the answer is this: At the point where the inner and outer worlds interact--that is-- where we are individuals--it is virtually impossible to attain any consensus. But as consciousness deepens, we will reach levels that are common to increasingly more people, until finally we may even reach a level where we won't need words or even concepts to communicate.

What humans hunger for most, after their basic needs are answered, is meaning, but neither science nor the media are disposed to provide it. Even religion has become consumer-oriented, and although it still answers many social and even personal needs, it does not, as in the past, speak to the human need for transcendence and spiritual transformation. At the in­dividual level, most people are identified primarily with their own personal and acquisitive concerns and their immediate circle of relatives and friends but certainly not with strangers nor with the planet itself.

How, then, do we proceed? I think the most promising approach would be to follow George Leonard (1968), who linked "education" and "ecstasy," and I would subsume science under education. Along with Leonard, I think we must shift the base of Western industrialized society from technology to transcendence, from drudgery to delight, from science to meaning. For science does not create meaning. It is the act of humans pon­dering data who see the connections and provide the meaning. In the West we have been schooled to look first to the outer world, to the data, and only then to look for meaning, and for whole sections of disciplines, not even then. I think this is our primary stumbling block. We can do without data but we make a pretty messy job of it without meaning.

What then, can we do to find meaning? Science, as we know it, has always looked to nature for its answers. It has progressed on the assump­tion that if one asks the right questions of the world we live in, the answers will be found, and we will be able to use those answers to enrich our lives. I think nature will still provide the answers we need. Many people who are not even scientists are asking. Even if they haven't formulated questions, their needs are crying out. The very Earth is crying out. But scientists themselves need to ask these questions. The answers must come to those people who are the conscious bearers of the regnant paradigm and the paradigm to be, and they are the scientists and the philosophers and the educators, and we who are gathered here are among them. We are the con­scious observers and potential knowers. We have to look around at what is happening. We must consciously decide not to try to fit everything we ob­serve into the current paradigm. We have already agreed it is inadequate. Our answers lie not in what fits but in what does not fit. It is to these outliers we must look to find indications of the more encompassing paradigm the world requires.

And to me the most meaningful outliers are what I have called excep­tional human experiences, or EHEs for short. Under this umbrella term I have isolated 49 types of experience that are generally characterized as "psychical" or "mystical." Over half of the combined European/North American population reports having had at least one of these experiences (Haraldsson & Houtkooper, 1991). This is a datum we dare not ignore. This is more than a whisper. Nature itself is fairly shouting to us, and still we turn a deaf ear!

Instead of ignoring this statistic, let us work with it. In order to do so, we need a new context, a new secular container that will hold psychic and mystical experiences and make sense of them. I would like to present to you one possible container for exceptional human experiences.

Some of these EHEs are of the type that parapsychology has tried to study in the lab, but I think we need to look at them as they occur in people's lives. I think they are messages from our deeper self--that self we have already agreed we need to contact--calling to our present conscious­ness, which as we have seen, is not adequate to the task of saving our world. This greater consciousness may well contain the answers we seek. The call is coming to people in all walks of life at all levels of education and regardless of age, race, sex, or social class, although differences have been noted. This is a grassroots act of nature.

Heretofore when scientists have paid any heed to EHEs at all, they have tended to think of them as one-time events or occurrences. Even the people who have them tend to isolate them from the rest of their lives and put them out of their minds because they make one feel different and strange. But if more than half the population is willing to admit having had one, it is even stranger not to have had one! The major reason for their strangeness is the old paradigm, which last year's conference admitted was inadequate.

In considering them, it is absolutely essential that we drop the analytic approach of the Western scientist and scholar. Daniel K. Kuhn (1971) writes:

When intellect seeks to understand an aspect of experience through rational categories, it immobilizes the perception for pur­poses of measurement and calculation and usually imposes some artificial unit upon the subject which splits it up and robs it of its wholeness, temporality, and inner process. Intellect analyses experience into static existents, and logic determines the struc­tural relationships between these immobilized units. Therefore rubricated and scientific thinking do not grasp the essence of experience because they ignore its deviation, flux, and growth. (pp. 194-195)

And that is precisely how we have treated EHEs. They have been viewed as "static existents," when in fact they have "duration, flux, and growth," or would, if we would attend to them. Science, in particular, has tried to pin them down and gain control of them. I think we should do the opposite. We should seek not to control them but to be guided by them. Instead of ends in themselves, they should be viewed as signs guiding us to the entrance to a path, a not unhazardous one, and one that may well last a lifetime. And the direction in which that path leads is not without, but within.

It appears to me that each exceptional human experience is potentially life-changing in its significance. Whether or not it is depends on how the person receives it and what she or he does with it. I am calling them pre-paradigmatic experiences, because they seem to herald a new paradigm, or at the least, they fly in the face of the one with which we now live. So each one really offers the experiencer (and to some extent, those who read or hear about a given experience) a window with a new view, and they provide an opportunity to choose between belief or doubt. (I think this is an oppor­tunity of unparalleled importance.) One must decide whether to provisionally trust the experience or explain it away or dismiss it. Those who choose to believe find they have opened a door leading to additional experiences that provide entrance to a world where their lives become charged with meaning. Those who doubt stay outside the gate, surrounded by the familiar in­hospitable and even abusive arms of the androcentric paradigm that has been with us since the Enlightenment, and which we were taught was reality. It is a deprived if not depraved paradigm in which we are seen as separate beings living determined lives. Time and distance are insuperable barriers except to technological innovation, and communion of souls let alone between one's soul and the universe or, heaven forbid, the sacred, is considered a delusion.

Whether EHEs are fact, fancy, or both, we may never be able to say with certainty. But I say it doesn't matter! They are at once offerings of the gods to us--and our opportunity to individually contribute to the universe, to enter the cosmic dance. Call them stories if you like. Or texts. But do not call them deliberate fabrications, for their very essence is their spontaneity. I have said that we might learn much by looking to the humanities, and I will illustrate this by applying to the subject of excep­tional human experiences what Roland Barthes has written about the reading of texts. Barthes writes: "The text is an object of pleasure." . . . But pleasure must be taken. The challenge of literature is how can this work concern us, astonish us, fulfill us" (quoted in Culler, 1983, p. 91). Yes! And so it should be with EHEs. I would only add: What meanings does this ex­perience suggest? Barthes also observes: "The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas" (quoted in Culler, 1983, pp. 92-93). Adapted to EHEs, the epiphany of the exceptional human ex­perience is when the body pursues its own meaning. Not separate from life, but of it. Barthes adds:

This enjoying body is also my historical subject; for it is at the end of a very complex process combining biographical, historical, sociological and neurotic elements . . . that I balance the con­tradictory interplay of (cultural) pleasure and (non-cultural) ecstasy. (quoted in Culler, 1983, p. 93)

And so it is that each EHE is a situated meeting between an in­dividual human being and that self we all share. From such meetings mean­ing is born, a meaning that is both mine and yours. Meaning, like air, is for everyone to share, but only an individual can take it in and then give it back again. (People have tended to take EHEs in, but they have been timid about giving them back to life.)

Barthes notes that in reading "there is a chance of avant-garde when­ever it is the body and not ideology that writes" (quoted in Culler, 1983, p. 96). Just so. And in the exceptional human experience the body shouts in ways that cannot be expressed in words. At such moments, we are inside the new paradigm. The body thrills; it is unmistakable. Barthes refers to "the dissolve that seizes the reader at the moment of ecstasy" (quoted in Culler, 1983, p. 99). Jonathan Culler (1983) says that according to Barthes, "the text of ecstasy . . . is `the text that imposes a state of loss, that dis­comforts. . . unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assump­tions" (p. 98). Just so with EHEs. When he reads, Barthes says: "I await the fragment that will concern me and establish meaning for me" (quoted in Culler, 1983, p. 100). Exceptional human experiences are those fragments of our lives that come to get us--to pull us out of anomie and disconnection into a world of meaning and connection. They are profoundly disrupting, nonetheless, and so we shun them, thereby cutting ourselves off from our very selves, including that deep self we all are. But, as George Leonard (1968) points out: "Life and joy cannot be subdued. The blade of grass shat­ters the concrete. . . . Those who would reduce, control, quell must lose in the end. The ecstatic forces of life, growth, and change are too numerous, too various, too tumultuous" (p. 233).

We as a species are nearing the end of the world as we grew up knowing it. The foundations have cracked, and a new life is emerging. By heeding the message inherent in our own EHEs and those of others we can flow with that new life, safely free as the walls of our old world crumble to the ground.

For, if you look at the people who have had EHEs, their lives appear to be enriched as a result of their experience. They also tend to have in­creased empathy for others and for the species and the planet as a whole. Those I have studied thus far have led me to wonder whether the fact that so many people are reporting EHEs may not be a response to the many dangers that besiege this planet. I think each experience offers a significant growth opportunity. The individual is confronted with the choice of denying his or her experience and therefore affirming the old paradigm, or affirming his or her experience and therefore finding her- or himself in the territory of a new paradigm. They don't even have to think about it--their body tells them so.

I propose that the seeds of our further growth are carried by our EHEs. EHEs, in one way or another, are experiences of transcendence. Al­though each one seems to start out personally, its import is, if not collective, then at least communal. Science is about dissection, EHEs are about connec­tion. Science treats persons as fixed; EHEs indicate that persons are beings in process. Science needs EHEs to connect with its future. EHEs can catapult us to a place that logic, rationality, and empiricism cannot take us. Once we are in that place, we will know what the next step is.

Even though the world has become secularized, and the bridges to the past have collapsed, we can still have transcendence; the sacred can still lead us on. But, to borrow from Daniel Defoe, it is in the secular that we must immerse! The call to transcendence still whispers to us, perhaps in greater numbers than ever before, and it draws us, not away from life, but to the very heart of it. It speaks to us, not from the pulpit but in the midst of our most personal concerns, and especially, I suggest, in our recreational activities--those we engage in not because we have to but because we want to. And, many forms of recreational activity are conducive to EHEs; this may be one of the reasons for the ever-expanding interest in sport and recreation.

Thus, these experiences can be viewed as baptisms, initiations, foretastes of what could be, glimpses of a larger, more connected self. They are calls to follow, not lead. They introduce one to a path tailored to each unique individual's life that can lead to mastery, and this road to mastery calls for a form of athleticism (e.g., see Leonard, 1991), an opportunity to achieve excellence in a particular way uniquely suited to the individual. Each of us has a chance to live our lives in pursuit of that excellence, even as at the original Olympic Games, which according to Henry (1976, p. 11), "had religious significance," athletes went all out to exceed their previous records in their chosen sport here at Olympia. In so doing, they provided a model we would do well to follow in the 21st century.

In a sense, these experiences are calls to each one of us to engage in a kind of inward Olympics by pursuing a discipline that has grown out of our own life experience and that serves as a vehicle for each of us to develop his or her unique gifts, whether as a lifework or simply as an avoca­tion. Although initially this project might be solitary, as one progresses, or perhaps I should say as one grows, one will begin to join others who are moving in the same direction. Some people will then become still better known outside their own circle and may be mentioned in the media, which would increase the likelihood that one would become part of a vast network. In an unpublished paper I have called these uniquely situated disciplines "projects of transcendence" (White, 1992). I urge each one of us to enter his or her own inner Olympic event, because only by deepening our con­sciousness will we be able to achieve the understanding that will enable us to save our wonderful planet and the life upon it.

Olympic records are accomplished in the outer world of time and space. People are still accomplishing wondrous feats such as swimming or skiing faster, throwing or jumping farther than anyone has ever done. But these are feats of the old paradigm. They can be measured and compared. Now we are called to a new kind of Olympics--to the inward games. Here the aim is reversed. Instead of trying to stand alone, we must go within to find common ground. Although at first the inner realm may seem chaotic and a jumble of personal memories, urges, likes and antipathies, as we learn to go deeper we will reach common ground, first with like-minded people, then with increasingly more people representing positions or charac­teristics that previously we were unable to understand or identify with, and finally to a felt empathy with criminals and even killers. But that is not the end. We must go still deeper to find the inner levels that are consonant with all of life, and beyond that with the mineral world, and still beyond that to the ends of the universe. Wondrous worlds await the inner athlete, who will find that the further within he or she grows he or she will be that much more in touch with the outer world. I would not pretend to be able to even guess what experiences and levels of knowing these explorers might attain, but I am convinced there is a whole new world waiting for us, even though it is a world as old as the universe--requiring us to set it alight with a knowing that will never be realized unless the new inner athletes bring the torch of consciousness to that place deep within where everyone is everything. And as we in the West begin to do that, we will know what the next steps we must take will be, because we will be inside the new paradigm that we are now seeking from without.

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Heard, G. (Ed.). (1949). Prayers and Mediation. New York: Harper.

Henry, B. (1976). An Approved History of the Olympic Games. New York: Putnam's.

Huxley, A. (1945). The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper.

Kuhn, D.K. (1971). The joy of the Absolute: A comparative study of the romantic visions of William Wordsworth and C.S. Lewis. In C.A. Huttar (Ed.), Imagination and the Spirit (pp. 189-214). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Leonard, G.B. (1968). Education and Ecstasy. New York: Dell.

Leonard, G.B. (1991). Mastery: The Keys to Long-Term Success and Fulfill­ment. New York: Dutton.

Murphy, M. (1992). The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Nietzsche, F. (1960). Joyful Wisdom. New York: Ungar.

Sawyer, J.T. (pseud). (1992). Exceptional human experience 9: Near-death experience. Exceptional Human Experience, 10, 44.

Tart, C.T. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176, 1203-1210.

White, R.A. (1992). The sacralization of everyday life: Projects of transcen­dence. Unpublished paper for course on the Sociology of Culture, SUNY Stony Brook.