Book Review: The Spirit Transcendent

The Spirit Transcendent: Exploring the Extraordinary in Human Experience
By Mark Yama

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What happens when a licensed psychologist truly listens to his patients? His entire perception of reality changes.

In The Spirit Transcendent, Dr. Mark Yama, a psychologist from rural Idaho explores his patients experiences with an open heart and an open mind. Many of his patients suffer from severe pain, often resulting from horrific car accidents, chronic cancer, and even mauling’s by vicious animals. Through the pages of this book, Dr. Yama recounts their near-death experiences, intervention by angelic hosts, visitations from deceased loved ones, and brushes with demonic forces.

Through it all, Dr. Yama attempts to fit his patients’ experiences into a neat psychological box, coming up short every time. The similarities of his patients’ experiences cannot be ignored. Nor can the fact that the events were often witnessed and confirmed by persons other than his patients. Each new case puts a crack in the foundation of science he built his practice upon.

Certain that his patients are not psychotic or experiencing hallucinations, he does what no other psychologist dares—he searches for truths not bound by science. Armed with questions and the consent of this patients, he invites their networks of friends and relatives into his confidences. As he is awakened to a new spiritual reality, he begins to understand that his patients are not delusional. They are mystics, seers, and ordinary people who have either tapped into, or stumbled upon, a world that has remained hidden from science.

The book is rich with Dr. Yama’s own case notes as well as personal musings on a number of topics, including:

Death and Transcendence
The Theory of the Soul
Science and Spirituality

Each chapter is filled with endnotes and references that direct eager readers to more information and further writing by others in the field. The case studies presented in this book demonstrate that the spiritual world is just as real as the physical world that surrounds us.

This book is a great read for anyone who’s ever longed to be a fly on the wall as the readers are introduced to the real-life patients of a working psychologist. Whether the information presented between the pages confirms your beliefs or causes you to question everything you know, getting a glimpse into the spiritual lives and minds of others is undoubtably a unique experience. Giving this book two thumbs up!

About the Author:

Mark F. Yama, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Idaho, where he teaches abnormal psychology and the history and philosophy of psychology. His research seeks to understanding the direct spiritual experience, events which are often among the most central and important in a person’s entire life. In addition to teaching and research, he is a Licensed Psychologist (Idaho) who has been in private practice for 25 years. That clinical work inspired his book, The Spirit Transcendent: Exploring the Extraordinary in Human Experience, which documents the experiences of patients who recounted visions of God and spirits, premonitions of the future, and an awful lot of the paranormal.