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Chapter 2: The Stepstones of My Pilgrimage

–or–

How I Got from Preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ to This Place in a Spiritual Desert

There have been a few stepping stones as I wandered in this spiritual wilderness, stones that have given me a firm footing for at least one step, that have guided me, or even directed my wandering. I will tell you about them.

But before I start I must first state a few axioms about my spiritual wanderings. The first I learned from my homiletics teacher. One day after class he corralled me, “Jack, you have an absolutely puritanical sense of honesty.” That comment followed on my refusal to preach what I did not myself believe (I had refused to parrot an obvious but obnoxious theological point). My puritanical honesty seemed a strange notion to him. I mulled over that notion of my puritanical honesty only a few instants and then agreed. As you read you need to be aware that I do have a puritanical sense of honesty. It is one of my drivers.

The second of my axioms is that St. Luke’s is my chosen circle of standing stones. American Protestant Episcopalianism is the DNA of my spiritual bones, it is the flowing blood that gives me life. I was born into it; I chose it; it shaped me, my mind, my spirit. I could choose no other, even if I wanted to. And St. Luke’s is the flesh and spirit and community of American Protestant spirituality which I have chosen. I may be still somewhat new to most members, but St. Luke’s is today parent and forebear to me. So wherever my spiritual pilgrimage might lead me, St. Luke’s is a given, is axiomatic. That is not as simple as a conscious choice; it is home, and in my bones. It matters not what I think, what I believe, what direction my soul wanders, St. Luke’s is my circle of standing stones. It is where I live, even on days when I seem not part of it.

My other axiom is this: as a servant of the church I have always been more of a searcher than I ought to have been. I was employed to tend to the institution; my drivenness was to relentlessly search for truth. Those two motivators are in conflict. Those who tend the institution serve best docilely and parrot-wise. My sense was always that we (church professionals) spent far too much energy and investment on very dumb institution matters, and far too little on helping people develop their spirituality and spiritual lives. But that latter impulse dumbfounded me because I, for one, did NOT know how to enable people’s spiritual lives, nor did I know anyone who could teach me how to do that. That seems to have been a lost art in the church. So I struggled very hard trying to keep peace within me toward the orthodox teachings of the church, mainly through my studies, particularly studies of the Scriptures, all the while stumbling along to keep the institution from bumbling into some roadside ditch. And finally I retired! I was no longer required by my professional responsibilities to stay within the boundaries of orthodoxy. I was free to wander! And so I have. Far and wide. Searching.

For the next step of this narrative I borrow an image from my readings of sea-stories, particularly of the Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower series: there was once upon a time a naval battle maneuver called “club-hauling.” When a sailing ship in battle (a smaller warship, e.g., a frigate) was in immanent peril of being taken by broadside or boarding, one extreme means to escape was to turn the ship so sharply that the pursuer could not turn simultaneously and therefore lost tactical advantage, so that the pursued could then re-engage from a more advantageous position, or else flee to escape. Club-hauling was perhaps the only way to execute such a radical turn of a ship, and it could only be done in waters shallow enough that an anchor could reach and grab the bottom. While at full speed the captain dropped the anchor on that side of the bow to which he needed to turn. As the anchor grabbed the bottom it was stopped off and would then jerk the head of the ship toward that side wrenching the ship into that direction so quickly that the engaging enemy could not react fast enough to keep his advantage. The one disadvantage of this maneuver was the loss of the anchor; the cable had to be cut the very instant the ship was turned, and before the anchor slowed the forward motion of the ship; under those conditions there was no opportunity to retrieve the anchor; a best bower was expensive equipment. But to rescue the ship in battle, or better yet, to turn the tide of the battle was worth that cost. Club-hauling.

In my spiritual pilgrimage since retirement I have experienced several club-haulings, books that have so violently jerked my head around as to send me spiritually off in an entirely other direction, escaping the muddle I was in, wondering whether to re-engage or to flee. While not as spiritually painful as my middler year of seminary when my childish theological foundations were necessarily ripped up and a more solid set of theological foundation stones set into place, while less painful, these have been equally traumatic and have sent my spirit wandering off in equally new and different directions.

The first of these club-haulers was William James’s lectures of 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experiences. I probably should have read this book while still in seminary, but I cannot recall that anyone suggested it to me then. James might have helped me start to build a much sounder theological2 foundation and framework. To read James’s book had occurred to me a few times previously, but I may have been shied off by an early experience of a flaky parishioner who was into paranormal stuff and engaged in automatic writing; her correspondent was William James. So after I retired I finally picked up Varieties to read. It was not an easy read; it forced me to re-sort some of my theological thinking. In these twenty-four lectures James tackled the psychology of religious experiences. A hundred years later, there is nothing radically striking to us in this work, but reading it set me to the task of organizing anew much of my thinking about religious experiences, the spiritual life, and my own spiritual development, not just from a faith point of view, but from the vantage of early psychology as well. James did not challenge or attack religious belief and experiences, but rather examined them from a nonjudgmental outsider’s vantage (though I think he was a Christian believer himself.) I came away from his lectures with a deeper and clearer understanding that there are two fundamentally different religious orientations. He called the one “healthy-mindedness,” a dedicatedly positive and affirming orientation toward the good. The other he called “the sick soul,” an unshakeable orientation to dwell on the evil aspects. The first sees man and the world as fundamentally good, the other sees man and life as irretrievably bad. This second type of soul is the one inclined toward the conversion experience, understanding that the only available salvific force from unrelenting evil is God; the “healthy-minded” soul is inclined not to conversion, but to grow gradually in his faith. Through James’s eyes I could understand why the two are so irreconcilably different in their makeups and outlooks, and unable even to comprehend or be at peace each other. In passing, James also pointed my attention briefly toward the mystical experience.

This book alone was not earth-shaking for me. But James’s analysis did set me to re-think and draw some new conclusions from my observations about spirituality and religiosity, and about my own spiritual experiences and yearnings. In essence I suppose it urged me onward in the spiritual pilgrimage which I had already begun after my retirement (that is, when my profession no longer seemed to prohibit my exploring far beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy). This, my first club-hauler.

At my retirement party Bishop Ken Price had given me my second club-hauler, a book he liked and thought I might find interesting. It was Jack Miles’s God: A Biography.The title alone is jarring, as was intended; how can one presume to write a biography of God? The book had lain on my shelf untouched and outside of my curiosity for several years when for some unfathomable reason I picked it up. I read with fascination. It was definitely inside my ballpark, i.e., it accepts the Hebrew Scriptures unquestioningly. Miles begins by stipulating his premise that the order of the books as presented in the Hebrew (the Masoretic text a.k.a. the Tanach) Scriptures is not mere happenstance (certainly not chronological), but is itself the editor’s statement about God as profoundly theological as the words of the texts themselves. Miles then guides us through each of the books in Masoretic order, focusing solely on the nature of the god therein presented: “What does God say? “What does God do?” and “How is God described?” This approach began to make order for me out of what had formerly been a chaos, God appearing so radically differently in various parts of the Scriptures. I read with interest and fascination. Then a year or so later I volunteered to teach Miles’s book in a short adult series at St.Luke’s Church; that effort forced me to really internalize Miles’s book, not simply read it while nodding yes. I was profoundly shaken. I understood now a pattern in God’s various behaviors, and even more, I very much disliked and disapproved of the God I found there. These Scriptures, which I adore, taught me a god whom I would not choose to worship, adore, or be obedient to.

I summarize the course, and therein a god very much in flux. We first encounter God in the two creation stories. In the first God is remote, majestic, solitary and absolutely omnipotent; in the second God is little more than a bumbling incompetent, and is vengeful to boot. While I prefer the second, I do not like or trust that God. After the first eleven chapters of Genesis God becomes little more than a family friend to Abraham’s lineage, and a not terribly helpful friend at that. In the second book, Exodus we encounter a quite different, ferociously militant God, brutal and unrelenting in organizing, leading and flogging this people whom God had chosen for himself, but who had not really chosen God for themselves. In the third, Deuteronomy God is at his absolute zenith, militarily competent but a harsh and very demanding lord. But thereafter God appears to be in decline (in my eyes, not Miles’s appraisal) In the four books about the kings God tinkers and complains, [so-and-so] “. . . did evil in the eyes of YHWH” is the drumbeat in these stories. And then in the books of the prophets God seems to have a mental breakdown, alternately and vehemently berating, cajoling and bemoaning (sounds bipolar!) And from that point God seems to diminish and wane through the story, appearing less powerful, less present, and less a part of the story until at last in Esther God is neither present nor even mentioned!

Now I had to take a deep, deep breath, and begin to ponder. This is not the God I had thought it was. Nor is this an attractive God. Not a god I want. The God of the Christian writings is somewhat more desirable (though not in John’s Revelation). But still not the God I had thought I was worshiping. Gradually my mind and my spirit began to watch my swirl of spiritual notions from a different vantage point. What if the God who is portrayed in our Scriptures is not so much the God but is more the god whom the people need at that moment in their history? That makes some sense of the changing-ness of the God of Hebrew Scriptures, and allows an even different God during the time of early Christian formations. So God, or at least the god we worship, perhaps is relative, a perception shaped by the needs of our era and culture.

The next club-hauler that came to my hand was Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. Armstrong’s purview is broader yet. She is primarily interested in the God of Scriptures, which takes in Jewish, and Muslim understandings as well as Christian (and she takes some sidelong glances at Buddhism as well), and she looks at the whole scope of writings, not just the Holy Scriptures of each. Her task is to trace how the concept of god changes and evolves through the course of the history of each religion. She presents a breathtaking vista. Tracing the history of each of these three religions in turn, she shows how they develop separately (though not without contact and mutual influence), but in parallel. Their patterns come out similarly. And I began to understand through her eyes that the god we know at any point in history is the god whom we need at that particular point in our history. Obversely, the Holy Scriptures are not so much the story of our relationship with the god as the history of the evolution of our perceptions of God, perceptions founded not so much on observations of the god in action as on what we need from God at that moment in our history. The god who stands behind all that is really not very visible at all in those writings. And what we do get is very much an acculturalized version of the God; for Christians a Trinity, for Jews a YHWH, for Muslims an ’Allah, versions that evolve as the cultures evolve.

A new book came on the scene, Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God and I picked it up. Wright is a journalist, a writer, a cultural evolutionist and a devotee of games theory who is widely read with a prodigious grasp. Wright3 begins by looking at god as witnessed in the most primitive societies we can reconstruct, the hunter-gatherer groups of early humans. And he traces the concept of god through the evolution of societies, and finally to monotheism. He then takes on the Hebrew Scriptures through the eyes of historical criticism which begins to date the several threads of those Scriptures (J, E D and P, et al.) glancing at how the political situation at those dates shapes the separate stories which are then woven together into one as though it were a single text, creating a near-chaotic jumble (e.g., Does Noah invite two of each species into the ark, or seven? Both lines are in the final copy of his story). He looks at the several threads in the early Christian writings and their several emphases. And then he looks at Islam in its two phases of Mohammad’s life. Much of his understanding about how religion evolves is built around his understanding of game theory, of zero-sum games vs. non-zero sum games. And the way he puts it together makes sense to me. In the end Wright allows that his own conclusion is to be, not atheistic, but agnostic. Does he believe in God? Probably not in the traditional sense, he allows; but as one who sees culture as evolving, he thinks he detects in that evolution a moral axis built into the created universe. And if we want to call that “God,” that is as close as he can come to believing.

I came away from Wright’s book with an appreciation of his shredding of the Holy Scriptures, a high respect for his notions, and a skepticism about his conclusions. But also to discover with a wide open field who might be the God behind all this.

If the God behind all this can not really be discerned by looking through the several so-very-culturally-defined windows in the several collections of holy writings, then how can the god be discerned, I pondered? Can one find that god for himself? Each of the great religions of the world has had its mystics. Is mysticism the better, the more direct way to god than the holy writings? I have always looked askance at the mystics. Now I opined that with a better look at mysticism perhaps I can learn my way into my own contemplative, mystical experiences, and thereby know god for myself. A copy of Evelyn Underhill’s 1911 book Mysticism: a study in the nature and development of man’s spiritual consciousness had lain on my bookshelf virtually untouched for over two decades. I had several times tried to read from the writings of Julian of Norwich and a very few other Christian mystics, but those attempts had fairly baffled me, and I had always come away with a sticky-sweet (or better, a “sickeningly-sweet”) slightly nauseated feeling, very unenlightened, always disappointed. Those writings are simply incomprehensible to me. So on leaving for a three-week cruise on the coast of Norway, I packed Underhill’s book along with two other unfinished volumes to fill in my idle travel time. After finishing the other two volumes, I began to force my way through Underhill’s book; tough reading. Very understandable, but very difficult reading.

Underhill was of the same era as William James. And her task was similar to his. Underhill would appear to have been a mystic herself, but the task of this book was to codify the mystical experience. Ranging through the history of (primarily) the Christian church, Underhill fretted out the pattern of a mystic’s development. She discerned very specific steps and stages in the evolution of the mystic’s experiences of the divine and laid them out in fair detail with examples of each step from different mystics across the ages. She was very clear from the outset of her book (whether accurately or not) that one does not choose to be or to not be a mystic. You either are, or you are not. That much is immutable, a given, she claims. Some, perhaps only a few, are fated to have deeply mystical experiences, but most of us are not, and cannot. (That revelation belayed my desire to experience the mystical for myself; I have never been a mystic, and therefore, in Underhill’s world and word, I can never become one. No good to pine for it.) Then as I forced my way through her description of the nine successive stages in the development of the mystic’s life I realized that I would not have wanted that life anyhow. It is painful, disorienting, solitary, and indescriptable. I would not have been healthy as a mystic. While a deep introvert who enjoys and very much needs his time alone, I also need some intellectual interaction with others (which is why I seek your company) to keep me on even keel; as a solitary mystic I would easily be tipped toward insanity (i.e., living in my world of pure fantasy). So I am thankful in one sense that the mystical experience is not available to me.

Several conclusions I drew from Underhill’s work are unsettling for me. It seems abundantly clear from her point of view that many, if not most, of the great innovators and motivators of the church have been mystics. The church owes much to them out of their experiences. It seems equally clear that the experiences of the mystics are outside of the rational realm, and are beyond any comprehendible description. The writings and art produced by mystics simply do not make sense to those of us who have not had such experiences ourselves; their verbal or artistic representations are bizarre, and defy any rationality or understanding. So why should we credit them at all? Why not discard them as uninformative and useless? Because those mystics have themselves proved to be very valuable in the life of the church, as inspirers, as motivators and innovators. Through their mystical experiences they become highly energized persons with direction and purpose which spills over onto others around them. Underhill is also clear that mystics’s attempts to communicate the content of their experiences are always shaped by their own (religious) culture; so Christians tend to have experiences around the Trinity and around the life (past and present) of Jesus. Jewish and Islamic mystics likewise tend to have experiences consistent with their religious worlds. So while the content of their experiences might appear to be different, the pattern of their experiences and evolution are surprisingly similar. And in addition Underhill is clear that while the mystical experiences themselves are supra-rational and almost entirely incommunicable, they are very self-authenticating. They cannot be authenticated by rational processes or by any form of outside observation; but they are so very powerful, and so impactful on the life of the mystic her/himself as to be self-authenticating (this is very problematic for me: a schizophrenic’s auditory hallucinations are likewise completely authentic and impactful for that schizophrenic). Lastly, Underhill seems clear that the mystics appear to have two different kinds of experiences of the divine which sound very similar to James’s two kinds of basic religious orientation, the “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick-soul.” While all mystics experience some of both types, some of them are more oriented toward experiences of overwhelming love and inclusion (union), and others sound more oriented toward experiences of emptiness, lostness, and unworthiness (transcendence).

Underhill’s analysis of the mystic’s experience and evolution is a hundred years old now. Nor am I aware of any other analyses that would come to different conclusions about mysticism (though I have not yet actively tried to search those out). But I am still curious. I have asked around, but not yet pursued, whether there are any contemporary, unbiased (not written out of a pro- or anti-religious bias) psychological or psychiatric appraisals of the mystical experience. Are we dealing with a psychiatric abnormality? Or are mystics normal (i.e., psychologically, mentally, spiritually healthy) persons with very abnormal experiences? I have pondered so deeply as to wonder whether the person who has mystical experiences is simply someone blessed (or cursed) with a capacity of memory so powerful that s/he can recall (in contemplation) memories of in utero experiences, memories from before there were sufficient stimuli to create describable memories. That might explain the shape the mystic’s experiences seem invariably to take.

In my frustration with the limits and frailties of Christian thinking, I have taken a couple of very cursory glances at Buddhist writings. Most of those come out to me as a sort of gibberish, utilizing English language to try (but fail) to express ideas very foreign to Western thought and language. The result for me has always been incomprehension and a vague notion that “this guy may be saying something intelligible, but I can’t make it out, and he might just as plausibly be deliberately writing gibberish and pawning it off as wisdom in order to make some money.” But one book by a Roman Catholic theologian Paul Knitter, Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian made sense to me, comparing and contrasting, and enlightening Christian thinking by squinting through Buddhist eyes; but he did not go far enough for me. A friend loaned me three books on Buddhism, and one of those, written by the Dalai Lama himself, makes profound sense to me. No gibberish. Just three simple concepts: interwovenness, ignorance, and compassion. And then I had an opportunity to hear the Dalai Lama in person. I went to see him with some anticipation. I came away from an hour and a half assured that I had been in the presence of a true mystic, that his vision is both understandable and made sense of my world, and, that it came from beyond himself. And further, that I had been with the warmest, most personable, most charming presence I had every experienced (that while sitting at the extreme fringe of a crowd of ten thousand gathered in that stadium!) I am far too old, far too far along in my life, far too imbued in the Western, Protestant-Anglican, Celtic-Christian milieu to ever become a Tibetan Buddhist, but he certainly did tempt me. And his notions greatly encouraged my wonderings.

I started writing about these stepping stones in 2011. Since then several more books have fallen into my life with some impact. One was Jim Holt’s book, Why Does the World Exist? in which he surveys philosophers, theologians, physicists and mathematicians across the ages. No new insights for me in those pages, but a confirmation of where I was already headed, that there is no clear (or even vague) reason why humankind or the world or universe should exist, no purposefulness; and in the process he stumbles across the issues of whether the God exists, likewise to no conclusion.

A most impactful book was Psychiatry & Mysticism,4 a collection of twenty-five professional papers. Since reading Evelyn Underhill’s study of mysticism I had been searching for some even-handed psychiatric appraisal of mysticism: were mystics some kind of kook, or normal persons with some abnormal ability? Were their reports credible in the everyday world or just religious flotsam? After several blunted searches I finally stumbled into Dean’s book, and found four of those papers5 quite informative to my question, and in particular the very last by Julian Silverman, On the Sensory Bases of Transcendental States of Consciousness. This was a real club-hauler!

For long I had puzzled over the place and authority of mysticism and mystical experiences. I gathered, along with William James and with Evelyn Underhill, that mystical experiences are at the core of the foundational experiences of many (perhaps most) great religious leaders and movers. I take Jesus himself to have been a profound mystic whose forty days in the wilderness produced insights that drove him into the prophetic ministry that has stretched into this day. Paul gives evidence on the Damascus road that he too was a mystic, and while his experience did not markedly change his personality, it did absolutely reverse his mission, and may have continued to energize his ministry throughout the rest of his life. The insights of the mystics who have been of significant importance in the life of the Christian church were not merely new, but also profoundly realistic and change-making. Our legends are rife with such stories that changed and motivated and energized and directed religious heroes.

They engaged in a certain kind of prayer in which, through the practice of a variety of disciplines, they thought themselves to enter the very presence of the God, sometimes returning with deep and exhilarating insights, which they attributed to being in God’s presence. But I can not cite evidence, other than their convictions, that those insights were from God. Their reports of those experiences are incomprehensible to my scientifically inclined mind. I have gone so far as to wonder whether those visions/experiences are a sort of psychotic episode? They seem unlike anything normal I can see clearly how potent they were for the persons experiencing them, but to me their descriptions of those experiences seem gibberish. I do not doubt that the authors actually experienced them. But I do question the source, the origin, the genesis of those experiences. Other than the fact that those experiences are almost universally reported in god-talk language, I find no convincing evidence that they are in fact from, or about, some deity. So I was left wondering about the source, the meaning and therefore the value of those mystical experiences. And I was left questioning how the experiences might validate the usefulness of the subjects’s wisdom, teaching, leading.

In this light Silverman’s paper made profound sense to me. He sets a scientific framework6 for examining the sensory and attention patterns of those mystical experiences. From Silverman’s and the other three papers I deduce that the mystic, the person reacting to LSD or mescaline, the incipient or acute schizophrenic and the sensory deprived person are all experiencing similarly altered states of consciousness/awareness with similar interpretations/understandings of those. (Most mystics achieve their mystical experiences through several forms of sensory deprivation, i.e., attention narrowing.) I come away from Silverman’s paper concluding that the mystic is momentarily experiencing a quite different reality than I am in my normal state of consciousness, and that because of temporarily altered psychological structures may actually arrive at new and different knowledge or understandings of reality.

In other words, their insights may be beneficial, but not reliably so. In such transcendental (altered) states of consciousness (i.e., awareness) persons can acquire genuinely new insights, though those insights are not necessarily valid in an ordinary state of awareness (i.e., consciousness); which is to say, such insights are not self-authenticating (as Evelyn Underhill claimed in her study), and must be adjudged with the light of others’s normal state of consciousness. To say those are of God is to step out of a scientific or logical metaphor and make a statement that cannot be verified. For myself I am not willing to assert that the insights of schizophrenics, druggies and sensory deprived persons are necessarily from God; nor, therefore, can I be confident that the insights of mystics are necessarily from or about God. I conclude that I need not be necessarily accepting of, or trusting of mystical experiences, or accepting that they are of God. Nor am I myself any longer drawn to them.

For me Julian Silverman’s study demystified the whole corpus of mysticism. I no longer wrestle with the authority of mystical experiences. The insights that arise out of some are profound, life-changing, even history-changing. The insights of others seem little but bits of gibberish. The real test for me is that some work i.e., are successful in coping with this ordinary reality and bringing about extraordinary change while others do not. For me the authority of those insights comes not from their source, but that they work in this reality. Whether the experiences themselves are of the God or about the God or caused by the God is indeterminate. I accept from catalogers like Underhill and Williams, and from the reports of the mystics themselves that the mystical experiences are exquisitely gizzard-tickling; but for my money they are throw-aways unless the insights they yield are useful and beneficial.

Suffice it to say I came away from his study convinced that the mystical experience is as simple as an altered state of awareness, and that the experiences and insights of mystics (whether about the God or anything else) are no more self-authenticating, reliable or verifiable than the insights of schizophrenics and psychedelics to which they are akin and need to be scrutinized just as closely and objectively as those others.

Since arriving at that conclusion I have felt somewhat like I’m wandering spiritually without a guide, but fortunately with a small coterie of similarly wandering friends.

One other book has factored exceedingly important in my wanderings, the book which gave me real permission. I had been wandering some time, knew I had wandered beyond the hedges of orthodox doctrine, and while not feeling lost, was uncomfortable, unsure of where I was wandering. I sat down one afternoon with the Lutheran associate pastor at St. Luke’s who is trained in spiritual direction and he helped me walk through and sort out what was going on for me. At the end of our session John loaned me a copy of James Fowler’s book, Stages of Faith. Nothing else has been so affirming and assuring. Out of his research Fowler described six stages of faith development.7 I learned that I was not lost, simply wandering my way beyond the conventional faith where I’d labored for all of my career, and out into the next stage. Known territory, unfamiliar to me but known to others. I was freed to wander.

2. Read “spiritual,” since as an INTP (Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory) my primary method of doing spiritual work is quite intellectual; Thomas Aquinas is my model.

3. For my fuller discussion of Wright’s book, see Chapter 3 (54–57)

4. Dean, Psychiatry & Mysticism

5. The four papers of greatest interest in Psychiatry & Mysticism

Adams, Paul L. “Metapsychiatry and Quaker Meditation” 185-193

Benson, Herbert, Beary, John F., Carol, Mark P., “Meditation and the Relaxation Response” 207-222

Girof, Stanislov, “Varieties of Transpersonal Experiences: Observations from LSD Pychotherapy” 311-345

Silverman, Julian, “On the Sensory Bases of Transcendental States of Consciousness” 365-398

6. Detail of Silverman’s schema: When, by whatever cause, a person’s perceptions (i.e., interpretations of stimuli) and response patterns are altered (i.e., non-normal) his consciousness (i.e., awareness) is altered, and his normal psychological structures for interpreting and responding to stimuli are interrupted (i.e., disorganized), so that the usual boundaries which structure his thought and perceptions become fluid. The key understanding is that perceptual and conceptual structures (i.e., the ways [processes, screens, filters, patterns] my brain has developed to perceive and understand the world in which I find myself) require the constant nutrient of their accustomed stimuli; conversely, prolonged minimal scanning and minimal differentiation weaken and disrupt these psychological structures, their functioning is no longer stabilized by constancies and their reality breaks down; new and awesome meanings may abound. Silverman discovered in his study that such altered perceptions and resultant disruption of psychological structures within the mystical experience have a high correlation with the sensory and attention patterns of persons (1) in the incipient or acute stages of a schizophrenic episode, (2) undergoing LSD psychotherapy, and (3) in conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. All four (mystics, schizophrenics, psychedelics, and sensory deprived) of these sets of persons experience (idiosyncratically) cosmic consciousness, oneness with the universe, ultra consciousness (i.e., one defying description), exhilaration, ecstasy, serenity, strong positive affect, oceanic engulfment, transcendence of time/space, ancestral and collective unconsciousnesses, new and startling insights, knowledge and understanding, heaven and hell, a diabolical mysticism.

The Bowers paraphrase of this process is that when perceptions are significantly changed, then the psychological structures we need to receive and process incoming data and our response to it begin to break down, and those psychological structures in turn begin to search for a new reality which makes sense of this new data set, which in turn potentially opens the door to new insights, new comprehensions of reality. My conclusion out of this (perhaps too simplistically) is that the insights of mystics are of roughly the same ilk as those of schizophrenics, drug-trippers, or sensorily deprived persons, and are no more to be automatically trusted than these. All such insights should be taken seriously, but scrutinized in light of this reality in which we daily live, and not from within such perception-altered experiences.

7. a.) Intuitive-Projective Faith [3-7 years],

b.) Mythic-Literal Faith [ca. 10 yrs, though some never grow beyond this stage],

c.) Conventional (i.e., fits general beliefs) Faith [adolescence, sometimes permanent in adults],

d.) Individuative-Reflective Faith,

e.) Conjunctive Faith [no simple definition], and

f.) Universalizing Faith [only a few, e.g., Gandhi and Mother Theresa].