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Fourteen authors on the numinous introduce the reader to paradox. They refer to Jung's use of Otto's seminal description of the numinous as something to be lived, exceeding definition, evoking amazement, awe, and an experience that grips us, seizes us, makes us shudder and fill with dread before its immensity, even its monstrousness. It is the experience of the numinous that heals, not our understanding of it; it can be awakened but not transmitted, and calls for our acknowledgement. Yet the authors have written papers about this ineffable numinous as an epistemological object, bringing to the text an inevitable heaviness for the lightness of being, for the right order of Maat's ostrich feather.
Shamdasani argues for reinterpretation of James's Varieties of Religious Experience as not establishing universal ontological bases for religion nor for psychotherapy, proposing instead that experiences of the numinous are better read as individuals’ states of transformation (p. 13). Casement examines the numinous in negative forms of witchcraft and says that organized religion does not meet the need for access to the numinous (p. 32). Corbett offers different examples of persons’ numinous experiences in therapy, including in and through the body, and their overall effect of reducing the hegemony of the ego (p. 66). Stein sharply distinguishes numinous experiences that give us hints of the psyche's non-egoic powers, from the work of individuation aimed toward wholeness (p. 47). Kuras sees the numinous as actual, immediate experience of spiritual reality which we access in fantasy thinking through a consciousness imbued with eros, directed toward unity beyond the ego complex (p. 80). Ahumada shows the negative use of the numinous in an example of delusional disorder, illustrating how the place of the numinous shifted from the cosmos to aesthetics and politics, spawning a consumer attitude where the numinous object now becomes an opportunity for self-affirmation. In positive e