Читать книгу The Art of Losing Control - Jules Evans - Страница 9
Оглавление1: The Entrance Gate
In the winter of 1958, a 17-year old American named Barbara Alexander wandered into the tiny town of Lone Pine, California. She’d spent the night in a car with two friends, hadn’t slept, and had barely eaten in days. As the sun rose over the Sierra Nevada, she left her two friends sleeping in the car by the highway, and wandered through the desert and into town. She walked through the empty streets, and then suddenly:
the world flamed into life . . . There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All’, as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once . . . Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, ‘inside’ and out, the only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.1
The experience – or ‘encounter’ as she thought of it back then – didn’t burst out of nowhere. For some years, Barbara had experienced moments of dissociative absorption, when something ‘peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words’ and she felt plunged into ‘the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed upon world arises’. She was also a depressed, introspective and solitary teenager, with an alcoholic father, a suicidal mother, and few friends or boyfriends. She was gripped by a search for life’s meaning, torn between a reductive materialism and the Romantic mysticism of Dostoevsky and Walt Whitman.
The encounter seemed a response to her searching. But who or what had she encountered? She had no religion to make sense of it – she had come back from a Baptist summer-camp contemptuous of the ‘mental degenerates’ she’d met there. Her confusion and sense of loss when the moment failed to reoccur led to a half-hearted suicide attempt. And then, gradually, she grew up and joined the human race: she went to college, took a PhD in cellular immunology, got married, had kids. When lab work seemed too dry for her, she became a freelance writer and campaigner for socialism and feminism. Like others in the progressive movement, she was a committed atheist, and wrote off her teenage experience as a mental disorder, possibly even an attack of schizophrenia. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling she’d betrayed her younger self.
In middle age, she experienced the ‘return of the repressed’. She started to write about the history of ecstasy, first about the ecstasy of war in her 1997 book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, and then the ecstasy of dancing in her 2006 book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, both of which were big inspirations for this book. Barbara Ehrenreich, as she was called by then, was engaging with her own past through the medium of third-person cultural history. And then in 2014 she took the plunge and wrote a first-person account of her own spiritual experiences, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. She has decided her teenage experiences really were ‘encounters’ with spiritual beings, but she still isn’t sure who They are, what Their purpose is, whether They even care about humans. She is worried her fellow scientific atheists will think she is insane (‘when good sceptics go bad’ is how leading atheist Jerry Coyne reacted) but she insists she remains committed to rational empiricism. ‘I want science to look at these odder phenomena,’ she told one perplexed fellow atheist in an interview, ‘and not rule out the possibility of mystical experiences. We need databases. It is unexamined, the data that might be there . . . This is going to sound totally crazy to you but this is a public health issue! When people have a shattering type of experience and never say anything about it, it is time to investigate.’2
The science of spontaneous spiritual experiences
In fact, such a database already exists. In an unassuming building in the Welsh town of Lampeter there is a room full of cardboard boxes, and in those boxes – like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark – there is a collection of 6,000 accounts of people’s spiritual experiences, filed and classified for scientific research. A crowd-sourced Bible stuffed with so many revelations that some remain unread to this day – who knows what divine message has slipped down the back of the filing cabinet?
The Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) – where this archive exists – was the brainchild of Sir Alister Hardy, a distinguished biologist who devoted the last two decades of his life to studying religious and spiritual experiences. Hardy grew up in Nottinghamshire, where as a teenager he’d experienced moments of spiritual communion with the natural world:
There was a little lane leading off the Northampton road to Park Wood as it was called, and it was a haven for the different kinds of brown butterflies. I had never seen so many all together . . . I wandered along the banks of the river, at times almost with a feeling of ecstasy . . . Somehow, I felt the presence of something that was beyond and in a way part of all things that thrilled me – the wild flowers and indeed the insects too . . . I became so overcome with the glory of the natural scene that, for a moment or two, I fell on my knees in prayer.3
Hardy studied zoology at Oxford, where one of his tutors was Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous. He eventually became the Linacre chair of zoology at Oxford, the leading marine biologist of his day, with students including Richard Dawkins. Hardy always considered himself a fervent Darwinian, yet he felt that the reductive materialism which usually accompanied evolutionary biology missed out something important – the spiritual aspects of human nature, and in particular humans’ ubiquitous sense of being in contact with a spiritual power, presence or energy, which guides and revitalises us. In this sense, he was more of a disciple of Alfred Russel Wallace than Charles Darwin. Wallace, who discovered natural selection at the same time as Darwin, believed in a spiritual and teleological dimension to reality that is part of the evolutionary process. But he was side-lined for his embarrassing views, and evolutionary biologists stubbornly debunked the spiritual aspects of human existence. As a result, Hardy believed, Western culture had become spiritually desiccated. Christianity was intellectually incredible, but there was no new cult to help us connect to God. People still had spontaneous spiritual experiences, but they were embarrassed to talk about them in case people thought they were mad. Hardy himself never told any colleagues, or even his family, about his spiritual experiences or his interest in the topic.
Perhaps, Hardy wondered, there could be a science of religious experiences, a new sort of natural theology, which would build up a sufficient evidence base to prove this was a very common aspect of human nature, one that was positive, beneficial and adaptive. ‘What we have to do,’ he later wrote, ‘is present such a weight of objective evidence in the form of written records of these subjective spiritual feelings and of their effects on the lives of the people concerned, that the intellectual world must come to see that they are in fact as real and as influential as the forces of love.’4 The database would be the foundation for a new ‘experimental faith’.
Collecting specimens
The endeavour was inspired by the example of William James, Frederic Myers and the Society for Psychical Research, which had tried to launch the scientific study of religious and paranormal experiences in the 1890s by collecting first-person accounts and searching for common features. Hardy wondered if he could continue their work in a more systematic fashion. When he turned 60, he decided to leave behind the plankton and dedicate the rest of his life to his spiritual research. He would collect specimens of religious or spiritual experience, as Darwin and Wallace had collected specimens of fossils, birds and insects. He set up the RERC at Manchester College in Oxford, then set out nets to collect the specimens, via a series of announcements in newspapers. He posed what’s become known as ‘the Hardy Question’: ‘Have you ever been aware of or influenced by a presence of power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?’
The specimens began to flood in, numbering around 4,000 within ten years. But how to classify them all? A good science of spiritual experiences needs a reliable taxonomy – one needs to be able to categorise and classify the specimens, like Linnaeus classifying the natural world into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera and species. Without a good taxonomy, you simply have a jumble of anomalous experiences – less like the Natural History Museum, more like a seventeenth-century cabinet of wonders. And yet religious experiences proved hard to pin down. Hardy initially tried to classify experiences according to a dozen categories (visual, auditory, sensory and so on) but the taxonomy rapidly spiralled out of control, with more and more categories being added. The 18th entry in the database is classified by the following labels: ‘Visions nitrous oxide dentists movement tunnels light karma beard Paul reincarnation Jesus Christ brain’. As the decades progressed, the RERC classification system grew even more complicated. A recent entry is classified: ‘Presence of Deceased Relative. Tears. Noises. Ghost. Apparition. Dreams. Guidance. Automatic Writing. Healing. Father. Voice. Hymns. Book. David Cameron.’ Even the numerical classification for the online database goes haywire: it goes from one to 2,000, then jumps to three million, then back to 4,000. Many of the entries are also blank – revelations apparently so ineffable they were beyond words.
Bertrand Russell, who himself had a mystical experience shortly before the First World War, thought that one of the arguments mystics had in their favour was the apparent unanimity of their experiences. They seemed to point to a common core experience. But what conclusions can one draw if the specimens one collects are incredibly varied, from psychic experiences to UFO abductions to encounters with evil spirits to celestial visions on the dentist’s chair? Is there something in the nature of ecstasy that resists rational classification?
Spiritual experiences are becoming more common
One conclusion we can draw, at least, is that such experiences are common, and apparently becoming more so. In 1978, 36 per cent of respondents to a RERC survey said they’d experienced ‘a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, different from your ordinary self’. In 1987, the figure had risen to 48 per cent. In 2000, more than 75 per cent of respondents to a UK survey conducted by RERC director David Hay said they were ‘aware of a spiritual dimension to their experience’. In the US, spiritual experiences are also apparently becoming more frequent – in 1962, when Gallup asked Americans if they’d ‘ever had a religious or mystical experience’, 22 per cent said yes. That figure rose to 33 per cent by 1994, and 49 per cent in 2009. I carried out my own online spiritual experiences survey in 2016, sending it out through my website and newsletter.5 I asked people if they had ‘ever had an experience where you went beyond your ordinary sense of self and felt connected to something bigger than you’. I received 309 responses to the survey from a cross-section of Christians, atheists, agnostics and those who describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’ that is roughly equivalent to national demographics. A surprising 84 per cent of people said they had; 46 per cent had had less than ten such experiences in their lives, while 37 per cent had them quite often.
Spiritual experiences seem to happen all through life, but particularly in childhood and adolescence. They are slightly more common in women than in men and, interestingly, more common in ‘spiritual but not religious’ than in the religiously affiliated. This may be because some Christian denominations, like Baptists, are suspicious of putting too much emphasis on spiritual experiences, although this is not the case with Methodists, Pentecostalists and other charismatic Christians. Atheists are the least likely to report such experiences: 43 per cent of atheists in my survey said they’d never had a spiritual experience, although that still means the majority of atheists had had one or more. William James thought such experiences mainly happened to people on their own. In fact, 63 per cent of respondents said they’d had spiritual experiences with others.
Why are spiritual experiences becoming more common? As I argued in the introduction, I think it’s a consequence of the sixties counter-culture and the explosion of interest in ecstatic experiences, which has lessened the taboo around discussing them. When David Hay undertook his first survey in 1976, 40 per cent of people said they had never told anyone about their spiritual experience, out of fear of being thought mad.6 In my survey, 75 per cent of respondents agreed that there was still a taboo against talking about such experiences in Western society. However, 70 per cent said they had told a few other people about them. So, although it’s still deemed a bit weird and taboo to talk about spiritual experiences, particularly if you claim an encounter with a spiritual being, we’re becoming more prepared to admit to them.
Spiritual experiences may also be becoming more common because we increasingly expect to have them, due to the expansion of higher education since the 1960s. Hay’s surveys found spiritual experiences occur more often to the university-educated than those who leave education at 16 or 18. This suggests the importance of education, particularly arts education, in establishing cultural expectations of epiphany. We are primed for them through our reading of Romantics, like Wordsworth, Whitman, Tolstoy, Kerouac and others.
Although the RERC database houses an initially bewildering variety of specimens, and my own survey also brought in a rich and exotic haul, one can identify three spontaneous experiences that seem to occur quite often in a similar form:
1) epiphanies of connection and oneness
2) a surrender to God when at a particularly low ebb
3) near-death experiences
Epiphanies of connection and oneness
One evening in the winter of 1969, the author Philip Pullman had a transcendent experience on London’s Charing Cross Road. He told me:
Somewhere in the Middle East, some Palestinian activists had hijacked a plane and it was sitting on a runway surrounded by police, soldiers, fire engines, and so forth. I saw a photo of it on the front page of the Evening Standard, and then I walked past a busker who was surrounded by a circle of listeners, and I saw a sort of parallel. From then on for the rest of the journey [from Charing Cross to Barnes] I kept seeing things doubled: a thing and then another thing that was very like it. I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement throughout the whole journey. I thought it was a true picture of what the universe was like: a place not of isolated units of indifference, empty of meaning, but a place where everything was connected by similarities and correspondences and echoes. I was very interested at the time in such things as Frances Yates’s books about Hermeticism and Giordano Bruno. I think I was living in an imaginative world of Renaissance magic. In a way, what happened was not surprising, exactly: more the sort of thing that was only to be expected. What I think now is that my consciousness was temporarily altered (certainly not by drugs, but maybe by poetry) so that I was able to see things that are normally beyond the range of visible light, or routine everyday perception.
Pullman has rarely discussed the experience, although it left him with a conviction that the universe is ‘alive, conscious and full of purpose’. He told me: ‘Everything I’ve written, even the lightest and simplest things, has been an attempt to bear witness to the truth of that statement.’ Most famously, the experience informed the world of his Dark Materials trilogy, in which an animist cosmos is filled with conscious particles of dust.
Many of us have also had spontaneous experiences in which we have a sudden blissful and quasi-mystical sense of the oneness of all things. When I asked people to describe their spiritual experiences, the most common word they used was ‘connection’, and similar words like ‘unity’, ‘at one’, ‘merging’, ‘dissolving’ – such words appeared in 37 per cent of survey respondents’ descriptions. This tallies with what Dr Cheryl Hunt, editor of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality, told me: ‘Connection is the word people use most often to describe such experiences.’ Connection to what? Lots of things. People reported feeling connected to nature, to humanity, to all beings, to a loved one, to a group of people, to an animal, to the cosmos, angels, the Logos, the Holy Spirit, God, to the interdependence of all things. Atheists and theists reported similar moments of deep connection; they just interpreted them differently.
Here, for example, is one report of a connection to nature and the cosmos:
It was in a park, recently. A windy day, and I cut through these magical woods en route, and passed a natural pond, which was absolutely alive. The wind was in such a direction that it was inspiring all kinds of amazing patterns in the pond. I was mesmerised looking at this and felt in a trance. I imagined diving into this mystery. I felt part of the pond, the wind, the patterns, my thoughts and feelings, the trees, wildlife, and was laughing out in joy.
Here’s another moment of nature-connection: ‘Standing on the tip of a mountain, watching the snow fall and suddenly feeling a strange sense of expansion and contraction where I became aware of an underlying “sameness” between me, the snow and the mountain.’
People also report moments of ecstatic connection in cities: ‘I was in Bangkok surrounded by strange sounds and smells. Bells were ringing. It was quite hot, I was in a rickshaw. Momentarily I felt as though my own spirit had left my body and I became part of everything.’ T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets of how ‘the intersection of the timeless moment/Is England and nowhere never and always’ – a particular time and place suddenly seems flooded with the eternal. The most unlikely times and places can be intersections, as in this account from the RERC database:
Vauxhall Station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God! . . . The third-class compartment was full . . . For a few seconds only (I suppose) the whole compartment was filled with light . . . I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose . . . A most curious but overwhelming sense possessed me and filled me with ecstasy. I felt that all was well for mankind . . . All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy.7
In these moments, we feel we have transcended time and space. We also transcend the fretful ego and feel a love-connection between ourselves and other beings. One survey respondent writes: ‘On public transport, surrounded by people I have no connection with, I suddenly get an overwhelming feeling of love for them all.’ The love-connection can be with humans or non-humans – a recent moment of ecstasy for Barbara Ehrenreich came when she was kayaking in a bay and was surrounded by dolphins. The rationalist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of one moment of ‘mystical illumination’ he experienced when ‘I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances.’8 Those five minutes, he said, turned him from an imperialist into a pacifist.
Moments of surrender in life-crises
The second most common type of spontaneous spiritual experience is a moment of surrender in a life-crisis. People find themselves at a low ebb, they feel powerless and helpless, and they give up, surrender to God/the cosmos/a higher power. They then often report a sense of healing power, or grace, which enables them to continue with life and sometimes radically improves their situation. They’re not so much ‘peak experiences’ as ‘trough experiences’. Here’s one such account from the RERC:
During my late 20s and early 30s I had a good deal of depression. I felt shut up in a cocoon of complete isolation and could not get in touch with anyone . . . things came to such a pass and I was so tired of fighting that I said one day, ‘I can do no more. Let nature, or whatever is behind the universe, look after me now.’ Within a few days I passed from a hell to a heaven. It was as if the cocoon had burst and my eyes were opened and I saw. Everything was alive and God was present in all things . . . Psychologically, and for my own peace of mind, the effect has been of the greatest importance.
Here is the dramatic moment of grace experienced by Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, when he hit rock-bottom in his struggle to give up booze:
All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!’ Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me in my mind’s eye that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay there on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness . . . and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’ A great peace stole over me.9
William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, noted that such moments of surrender can be profoundly healing. They’re the precise opposite of the self-help attitude of Stoicism and CBT. You’re not relying on your self, you’re surrendering to some Other. ‘Give up the feeling of responsibility,’ James wrote, ‘let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.’ But what are we surrendering to? James was ambivalent. One may be surrendering to a genuine ‘higher power’, or it may be a healing power in the subliminal mind, which we access via a sort of self-hypnosis. ‘If the grace of God miraculously operates,’ he wrote, ‘it probably operates through the subliminal door.’
Either way, it works for a lot of people, as the success of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programmes shows. Several AA attendees I’ve spoken to say the ‘surrender to a Higher Power’ aspect of the programme was very helpful for them, even if they weren’t sure what they were surrendering to. However, AA doesn’t work for everyone: AA says 33 per cent of participants are still abstinent after a decade, while other reports suggest only 5 to 10 per cent stay sober.
Near-death experiences
Finally, the third most common type of spontaneous spiritual experience is the near-death experience. I had one of these myself, back in 2001, when I’d been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for five years, following a terrifying trip on LSD when I was 18. For 5 awful years, I had been beset by panic attacks, mood swings, depression and social phobia, which made me deeply ashamed and crippled my ability to connect to others. I felt dissociated, a stranger to myself, and had no idea if I would ever get better.
My family and I were on our annual skiing holiday in Norway, where my great-great-grandfather had built a hut in the woods. On the first morning, we decided to go down the black slope on the mountain opposite our hut. At the steepest part of the slope, I crashed through the fence on the side of the mountain, fell 30 feet or so, broke my femur and back, and knocked myself unconscious. I woke up and was bathed in a warm white light. It felt like the white light was conscious, that it was a separate being that loved me, but also that it was the deepest part of my nature, and of all our natures. It was incredibly peaceful to rest in the unconditional love of this white light, like coming home after long wandering. I felt released from all the anxiety and fear I had been carrying around for the last five years – the fear that my brain was broken and I was destined to be miserable, the need to prove myself to others. It seemed to me that there is something within us far bigger than the ego, and this ‘something’ – this luminous loving-wisdom – can never be entirely lost, not even in death. I still don’t know what it was exactly that I encountered – whether it was my soul, or God, or just a bang on the head. But I do know that this brief experience was fundamental to my recovery from PTSD. It gave me the insight that what was causing my suffering was not burned-out neural transmitters but my own beliefs, which I could change. I felt rejuvenated, reconnected to my deepest self, able to open up and trust other people. I never told anyone what had happened, because it was so beyond my normal frame of reference. But I’ve always felt grateful to whatever it was that I encountered, and it permanently changed my attitude to death.
The scientific study of near-death experience (NDE) began in the late-nineteenth century, and took off in the 1970s with the publication of scientist Raymond Moody’s bestseller, Life After Life. NDE research is now a well-established academic field, with several research teams around the world.10 Thanks to better cardiac resuscitation methods, more and more people survive cardiac arrests, and roughly five per cent of survivors report some sort of NDE. In a few cases, survivors have out-of-body experiences during surgery and are able to report many details of the operating procedure. People often report quite similar NDEs, and researchers have built up a model of typical features: an NDE is rated ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’ according to how many of these features it has (my own NDE rates a shallow four, rather gallingly). The typical characteristics include:
• an out-of-body experience, seeing the body left behind
• moving through darkness, often described as a tunnel
• going into a light
• meeting deceased relatives
• an encounter with a ‘being of light’ often identified as God, accompanied by feelings of peace, joy, bliss
• a life-review
• visions of celestial lands, often seen as a garden
• a barrier or border
• a decision whether to go on or go back, sometimes made by the NDE-er, sometimes made for them
• return into the body
• life-changes such as increased openness and spirituality
If NDEs are genuine journeys to another dimension, you’d expect them to be similar in all times and places, but are they? Gregory Shushan, a cultural historian at the University of Oxford, has compared contemporary NDE accounts from around the world with historical accounts of NDEs from the religious literature of India, China, Egypt and Mesopotamia, and found marked similarities – leaving the body, rising into a light, meeting spirits, a life-review, the return. We see similar accounts in classical literature (Plato’s myth of Er is a famous account, as is Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) and in Christian accounts, although medieval Christians tended to report seeing Hell populated by corrupt priests. Shushan speculates that various cultures’ conception of the afterlife may have sprung from a core NDE experience, with cultural dogma then added to survivors’ accounts.11
There are some cultural differences in people’s accounts, however. Some Western accounts report meeting Jesus, particularly in evangelical Christian books, while Indian NDE-ers are more likely to meet Yama, god of death. Indians are also more likely to say they were sent back to their body not because they had a mission to complete, but because of a bureaucratic error. In general the similarities are more marked than the differences. This is one reason that evangelical Christianity, having become briefly enraptured by ‘heaven-tourism’ accounts, like Heaven Is Real and the recently debunked The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, now distances itself from NDE research. In 2015, a leading evangelical bookstore stopped selling heaven-tourism books,12 because most NDE accounts do not fit with traditional Christian accounts of the afterlife: the physical body is not resurrected, the soul goes to Heaven immediately rather than at the Last Judgment, the soul doesn’t necessarily meet Jesus, and it doesn’t apparently matter if you’re Christian or not. And most NDE survivors come back less religious, less likely to identify with a particular religion and less likely to go to church.
Are NDEs epiphenomena caused by physiological processes, or glimpses of another dimension? The evidence is not decisive either way. Some researchers have tried to prove consciousness leaves the body by hiding a sign in the top corner of an operating theatre to see if any NDE survivors happen to catch a glimpse of it on their way to Heaven. None has. Sceptics have put forward materialist explanations for NDEs: they are the last fireworks show of a brain shutting down from oxygen-starvation; the tunnel is the visual processing system atrophying; the loving white light and gathered spirits of loved ones are the ego trying to console itself in the face of its annihilation. If that is the case, if the brain is capable of putting on such a vivid, coherent and consoling virtual-reality show while going offline, all I can say is ‘Well played, brain.’ The alternative to the brain-restricted theory of consciousness is that the mind is not confined to the brain, the brain instead acts as a sort of filter or radio-receiver, and consciousness survives and expands after the brain dies. Ecstasy, then, is a glimpse of a vaster consciousness that our sense of self emerges from and returns to. That is what Myers, James and Huxley believed. It was what I felt during my NDE. But you’d need some pretty solid evidence to overturn the brain-restricted theory of consciousness, such as strong proof of telepathy, or remembrance of past lives, or messages from beyond the grave. Myers, James and colleagues began to collect such evidence in their work for the Society for Psychical Research, which attracted some of the best minds of the day, including Marie Curie and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Unfortunately, para-psychology does not have the prestige it had in James and Myers’s day. Today, it is often written off as a respectable object of enquiry by the guardians of science and it struggles to attract funding, which is a pity, considering there’s plenty we don’t yet understand about the nature of consciousness.13
The fruits and risks of spontaneous spiritual experiences
What are the fruits of spontaneous spiritual experiences? In all three cases – the moments of connection, the moments of surrender, and near-death experiences – people typically report positive benefits to their mental health. They find such moments healing, connecting and inspiring. People responding to my survey said they felt their spiritual experiences had made them feel more ‘at home in the universe’; they felt more connection and empathy to other beings, and also more love for themselves. Spontaneous spiritual experiences also make people more open: they ‘made me open to other ways of looking at things’, they ‘made me less sceptical, less quick to judge, more compassionate’. They made some people feel that we are not ‘just’ our brains, bodies or egos, and perhaps something in us survives after death. One of the most common emotional changes from NDEs is that people come back less afraid of death because they think death is not the end.
For some people, including me, spontaneous spiritual experiences led to a feeling of deep psychic regeneration after a time of crisis. One respondent writes: ‘It allowed me to relinquish my desperate control over my negative feelings, either physical pain or mental depression or spiritual guilt. It’s like my well has run dry, but the very last bit of digging uncovers the spring that refills the well of my soul.’ Although such experiences are very different from the rationalism of CBT, there are parallels. We are stuck in a prison of negative ego-beliefs; liberation comes when we let go of them. In CBT, this liberation comes from the slow, rational dismantling of beliefs, a chipping away at the walls of the shed. In ecstatic experiences, people are suddenly liberated – the walls fall down and they are free. But you probably still need regular ethical practices to turn your epiphany into durable habits.
However, it is a mistake to think that spontaneous spiritual experiences are always joyful and life-enhancing. There can be aspects of spontaneous experience that are difficult to accept or integrate. First, people may encounter a spiritual presence they perceive as threatening, evil or demonic. Up to 10 per cent of NDEs involve a Hell experience – some accounts are worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. And, of course, many people’s experience of hearing voices or seeing spirits is deeply intrusive and distressing, for example a voice repeatedly telling you to kill yourself. How should we view such negative experiences? I’d suggest the best way is to see them as ‘shadow’ aspects of our own psyche, not fundamentally real, just a projection from our subconscious that we can transform if we maintain courage, wisdom and compassion. The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us: ‘Be not daunted or terrified or awed. Recognise whatever appears as the reflection of your own consciousness.’ Eleanor Longden, who delivered a much-watched TED talk about hearing voices, says she managed to come to terms with an intrusive, aggressive and ‘grotesque’ demonic presence, who plagued her for years, by recognising him as ‘the unaccepted aspects of my self-image, my shadow’. By taking a more practical and compassionate approach to him, and not letting herself be bullied, Eleanor and her shadow managed to work out a more balanced and amicable relationship.14
Even positive spontaneous experiences can be difficult to integrate into one’s life. One can find mundane reality disappointing after having had an ecstatic glimpse of God or Heaven. Some NDE survivors say they wish they hadn’t come back. Personally, I have longed to have another such experience but am still searching for the door. It can also be very difficult to communicate an ecstatic experience. Other people may not understand or care. The RERC database is full of tragi-comic moments like this:
Starting around 1967, there were several different times in the middle of the night that silvery figures appeared on my side toward the bottom of the bed . . . At one time in particular I was so startled that I made a noise which awakened my husband as they vanished. When I told him that there were three humanoids standing there, he sarcastically shouted, ‘Well, do me a favour: the next time they come don’t wake me up.’ From that time on I never mentioned anything of the sort to him.
One also often finds competing interpretations between the experiencer, who thinks their encounter is spiritual, and a psychiatrist, who thinks it is indicative of schizophrenia. Western psychiatry has, thankfully, become better in the last two decades at overcoming its strong historical aversion to spiritual experiences, and less hasty to label them as physical pathologies requiring medication. Instead, psychiatrists are realising that ‘out-of-the-ordinary experiences’, like hearing voices, seeing a spirit or sensing a presence, are quite common in the general population. Myers and his colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research first pointed this out in a national survey of 1882, where they found around 10 per cent of the population reported having had ‘a vivid impression of seeing, or being touched, or hearing a voice . . . not due to any external cause’. More recent surveys have also put the prevalence of ‘hallucinations’ in the general population at around 10 per cent – much higher than the one per cent diagnosed with schizophrenia.15 Sensing a presence is particularly common among the bereaved: 50 to 90 per cent of bereaved people sense the presence of their loved one following their death. Crucially, for most people, sensing a presence is not distressing, not correlated with mental pathology, and has never required medication or hospitalisation. On the contrary, it’s more often found to be comforting and associated with improved mental health. Cognitive scientists now suggest that all of our experiences of reality are, in a sense, ‘controlled hallucinations’ – our minds improvise a version of reality based on the flood of raw data from our brains and senses.16 How we interpret incoming data depends in large part on our culture.
But some people’s spiritual experiences really do seem pathological. This is all too apparent as one reads through the RERC database. Although Hardy intended it to prove the spiritual nature of man to ‘the intellectual world’, it sometimes seems a catalogue of human folly. Hardy actually had to start a whole category, ‘File Z’, for reports that seemed to be sent straight from the asylum. Respondents leap to conclusions, seizing on the flimsiest evidence as certain proof of divine communication. Some think they can control the weather, travel through time, or alter geopolitical events with their mind. They lose a sane sense of their ego’s boundaries. They also ramble on for pages and pages - sometimes even the heroic patience of Hardy’s secretary wears thin as she transcribes the accounts:
The Revelations started in 1968 and got stronger. At first I was told with a Voice in My Head. Then 1969 The Vioce [sic] said Get Pen & Paper. The Vioce [sic] which said I AM The Lord The Lord of Hosts they call Me. If you asked for The Sun I would not give it you, then went on to tell me why. Then said You have heard the saying a bad Apple in a barrel of Good ones will turn all bad unless taken out. (This goes on in a disjointed and illogical manner for 3 pages, which have not been put on to computer disk.)
One would expect this mixture of the sublime and the pathological in spiritual experiences, according to the James–Myers–Jung theory of the psyche. The subliminal mind, wrote Myers, ‘is a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house’.17 Spiritual experiences, by their theory, are liminal moments when the border between the conscious ego and the subliminal mind becomes porous, and the contents of the subliminal mind burst through. It can reveal pearls of wisdom, healing and power. But it can also reveal a lot of nonsense. We need to find a middle ground between the uncritical embrace of such experiences as perfect revelations, and the complete rejection of them as mental pathology.
What to do in a spiritual emergency
In 1971, the 23-year-old David Lukoff dropped out of Harvard’s doctoral programme in social anthropology and hitchhiked his away across the USA. In San Francisco he dropped acid for the first time. Four days later, he woke up in the middle of the night, went into the bathroom in the friend’s flat where he was crashing and looked in the mirror. He saw his right hand was in the classic mudra position. He immediately realised he was the reincarnation of the Buddha. And Jesus. He also realised his mission: to create a new Holy Book to redeem the human race. For the next week, he wrote in a rapture, barely sleeping, channelling the spirits of the Buddha, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Jung, R. D. Laing and Bob Dylan. When he’d finished his 47-page revelation, he made several copies, then handed them out on a street corner in Berkeley. To his surprise, his new religion failed to take off. Over the next two months, his messianic certainty began to fade. He was still sure he’d written a work of genius, but as he read more widely and realised how unoriginal many of his insights were, this certainty also began to fade. He became ill, insomniac and depressed. Luckily for him, all this time he was supported by friends and family, who kept him fed, gave him somewhere to sleep and didn’t hospitalise him or insist he was crazy. Gradually, he began to recognise the positive aspects of his experience. He became interested in other people who’d gone through temporary psychoses with a strong religious or spiritual component. He came across the term ‘spiritual emergency’, introduced by transpersonal psychologists Stanislav and Christina Grof in 1978.18 He took a doctorate in psychology and worked at UCLA and elsewhere, particularly with psychotic patients also convinced they were God or the Messiah, to whom he found it quite easy to relate.
In 1989, Lukoff managed to get a new diagnosis introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, volume IV, the handbook for clinical psychiatry and psychology in Western culture, called ‘religious or spiritual problem’. This distinguished temporary spiritual psychosis, such as he had experienced, from the classic diagnosis of schizophrenia. A religious or spiritual problem was temporary, not a biological brain disorder, but could involve psychotic features, such as ego-inflation, hyper-meaning detection and disordered conduct. It might have positive aspects, like a greater sense of meaning and motivation.
Supportive communities
The challenge for a person having an ‘out-of-the-ordinary experience’, and for their loved ones, peers, psychologist or psychiatrist, is to integrate the experience and recognise its positive aspects, while guarding against the negative, like paranoia or ego-inflation, and then to find a positive calling that connects the person back into society. Lukoff says: ‘I was lucky in having a supportive peer group and family. Otherwise, I’d probably have ended up hospitalised with a lifelong diagnosis of schizophrenia, with all the stigma and medication that goes with that.’ A 2012 study by Charles Heriot-Maitland et al. found that while out-of-the-ordinary experiences like hearing voices or sensing a spirit happen in roughly 10 per cent of the population, those who are hospitalised for such experiences tend to have a worse outcome than those who aren’t.19 The crucial factor for determining if such an experience is problematic, they decided, was whether people found a community that helped them to a positive interpretation for their experiences. Most psychiatric hospitals are the precise opposite of such places: you are locked up and told your voices are the product of a crippling lifelong biological disease, that they’re meaningless and should be ignored, and that your diagnosis means you’re likely to be on the scrapheap of society for the rest of your life.
Of course, there are risks on the other side too: spiritual or religious communities may impose their own equally dogmatic interpretation on your experience, declaring it to be the Holy Spirit, or a demon, or a past life, or an alchemical symbol from the collective unconscious. One friend of mine, suffering from drug-induced psychosis, was told by a psychic healer that he was suffering karmic retribution for his previous life as a Nazi war criminal. This was not helpful. The best support networks seem to be more grassroots communities, which share authority horizontally and have a pragmatic, flexible and sympathetic response to the variety of people’s interpretations of their experiences.
A good example is the Hearing Voices Network, which was launched in 1987 and has revolutionised Western psychology’s attitude to voice-hearing. It was launched by two Dutch psychiatrists – Marius Romme and Sandra Escher – and by a voice-hearer called Patsy Gage. While in treatment, Gage read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argues that voice-hearing used to be a much more ubiquitous phenomenon earlier in the development of the human brain – look how often people in ancient Greek culture heard the gods talking to them, from Galen to Socrates. Gage declared to Romme: ‘I’m not schizophrenic, I’m ancient Greek!’20 Together, they helped to create groups where voice-hearers could meet to discuss their experiences, explore meanings, and provide support for each other. There are now several hundred Hearing Voices groups around the world, and they’ve been a life-saver for Eleanor Longden and many others. What I like about them is they’re pragmatic in their metaphysics. Many people in the group think their voices or experiences are encounters with spiritual beings; others think they are aspects of the self. The groups support and help you, give you a social connection and a social role, no matter what your metaphysics. It helps people to find a more balanced and equal relationship with their voices – they learn that they don’t have to take their pronouncements as the Absolute Word of God.
As for Hardy’s grand vision, in some ways it could be said to have been a failure. The RERC constantly ran out of money, and was moved from Oxford to Lampeter in 2000, where the database slumbers, its warehouse of revelations more or less ignored. And yet, in other ways, Hardy’s vision has become mainstream. People in Western societies report more and more spiritual experiences, and the attitude of mainstream psychology and psychiatry to such experiences has shifted considerably in the last two decades. While the number of church attendees continues to decline across Western societies, the number of ‘spiritual but not religious’ rises.21 Spiritual experience could be said to be at the centre of the West’s new democratic spirituality – we rely more on our own personal experiences than on traditional institutions, authority figures or sacred texts.
The risk of this cultural shift, however, is that our post-religious spirituality becomes all about experiences, descending into a sort of consumerist thrill-seeking. Philip Pullman warns: ‘Seeking this sort of thing doesn’t work. Seeking it is far too self-centred. Things like my experience are by-products, not goals. To make them the aim of your life is an act of monumental and self-deceiving egotism.’ Hardy’s database is full of comments like ‘That moment was worth more than all the rest of my life put together.’ Is that a healthy attitude to the spiritual life? Imagine a marriage where you thought all the value existed in one date.
We need to integrate these moments into our everyday reality. But how? Hardy, like James, Myers and Jung, was wary of collective ecstasy. Their preferred spirituality was highly individualistic. Yet surely communities have an important role in helping us to make sense of ecstatic experiences, supporting us in the disciplines and practices we need to integrate them, and directing us outwards to serve our fellow beings.
It was with this in mind that I decided to join a charismatic Christian community. Let’s head to the Revival Tent to meet them.
