Beck attempts to describe the mystical allegory of the third book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, relating his journey through paradise, and points out its similarities with other religious accounts of personal enlightenment. Based on these correlations, she suggests that the account may not be allegorical after all: “I believe Dante’s Paradiso is an account of his own awakening. What reads like a fantasy could be closer to a literal description than most of us imagine” (266).

Among the common themes of such accounts of personal enlightenment are a sense of the oneness of all things and the experience of being surrounded by love to the point that one’s own soul is completely dissolved in it. Such experiences are not only subjective accounts, Beck contends, but have the support of several neurological studies, which point to a permanent rewiring of the brain through the experience of enlightenment. Two areas of the brain appear to be largely “switched off” in people who claim to have attained such enlightenment: the areas that underlie “the sense of being a separate thing, distinct from the rest of reality, and the sense that we’re in control of ourselves and our situations” (269).