“Transcendence is a fundamental part of the human experience. Since the dawn of our species, people have been losing themselves in ritualistic prayer, song, and dance. Even so, for a long time, the prevailing consensus in psychology was that such experiences were pathological rather than natural. Freud believed that ‘oceanic feelings of oneness’ were neurotic memories of the womb and the signs of a deranged mind. … The person who got transcendence right, [research psychologist David] Yaden says, is William James.”