Charles D. Laughlin, Ph.D. is an emeritus professor of anthropology & religion in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the So (Tepes) people of Uganda, Tibetan lamas in Nepal, Chinese Buddhists in Southeast Asia, and the Navajo Indians of the American southwest. He spent six years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk and is one of the founders of transpersonal anthropology. He is the author of Communing with the Gods and co-author of The Spectrum of Ritual, Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, Science as Cognitive Process, Brain, Symbol and Experience, and The Power of Ritual. The author lives in Seattle, Washington.