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
