The introduction to this issue referred to the exclusion of certain ways of knowing by the dominant, scientific, culture, and that spirituality was among the topics regarded as beyond the pale. I am here going to consider some of the arguments for and against exclusion, with special reference to mental health. First of all, the vexed question of definition needs consideration, and the very difficulty of definition takes us to the heart of the debate about whether such an elusive concept has any place in scientific discourse. The dictionary places the word in varying contexts, such as the sacred, the religious, or "concerned with spirits or supernatural beings." None of that is relevant here. Religion would be a particular contextualisation of spirituality, whereas we are here looking at a broader area of experience. The contributors to this issue do not provide easy answers. Kate Maguire writes "to define spirituality rationally for me is not possible......I know what it is not, I do not know what it is; but I experience it when I encounter it and experience it when it is not there." Nigel Mills profers the following concise but elusive definition: "a full and direct experience of the present moment". Other contributors develop further the characteristics of that quality of experience noted by Maguire, and fluidity of conceptualisation and interconnectedness recur as key features. Jennifer Elam uses the term "transliminal" (Thalbourne et al. 1997, quoted in Claridge 2001) to describe such experience, as this avoids distinctions inherant in the labels "psychotic" and "spiritual", and Peter Chadwick provides a powerful description of the blurring of boundaries bewtween individuals characteristic only of the more extreme manifestations of this state, as follows:

"[the borderline experience is] beneath mind-matter differentiation. Hence the paranormal becomes normal, the uncanny becomes the rule. Clearly the physics of consciousness is no trivial research field. . . . . Read Full Text