Spiritual Experiences Explored in Book by U of I Psychologist Mark Yama

University of Idaho Associate Professor and Licensed Psychologist Mark Yama of the Department of Psychology and Communication Studies has published, “The Spirit Transcendent: Exploring the Extraordinary in Human Experience.”

The paperback published this summer by McFarland and Co. Inc. explores spiritual experiences relayed to Yama by his clients during his work as a clinical psychologist.

“The book emerged out of my work with psychotherapy clients over a number of years,” Yama said. “At first, I was unprepared, given my background and biases, for the spiritual experiences which they related. I became captivated by them and in the book, I tried to accurately and faithfully represent what they told me.”

Yama argues that rather than being disparaged as hallucinations or delusions, direct spiritual experiences should be considered a unifying spiritual reality apart from the material world.

“To my surprise and delight, my experiences told a story, one that contains not just spiritual experiences of my patients, but actual evidence for a very old concept, that something about the person can survive after death,” Yama said.

Yama, who has been at U of I for 33 years, earned his Ph.D. in sensory psychology at Indiana University. He later trained in clinical psychology at the University of Texas.

The book’s stories, according to the publisher, “argue for a deeper reality that places spirituality on an equal footing with the material world.”