Atheists have mystical experiences. They don’t have them as much, because such experiences do tend to lead unbeliever who have them to God. My own case was not mystical per se [editor note: by criteria like the M-scale which Joe will talk about soon], but the sense of numinous was clearly involved in the conversion part. The surprising thing is when atheists have them the experiences are the same. They work just like the other religious people (I say “other” on purpose) in that atheists explain it with their own doctrine and put the name from their own tradition it (no name, or “void.”) They do have the same experience and they respond to it in the same way.
It is as though the constructs we use to understand things are the lens and the thing the lens focuses upon is colored by the lens. Atheists are doing that no less than the religious types.
ha! if you said that you would have no interviews.
Problem is I never learned to score it. I didn’t need to all I did was report Hood’s findings. I didn’t administer it myself. I’ve looked at the question I feel I would score high on it, but I didn’t score for myself. I’m just writing the book not applying for a job as a mystic.
ha! I always know i can count on Jason to come up with more questions!
Good question. There is a huge body of literature (a sub field) that deals with drugs and religious experiences. I’ll give you a link to such a site later.
I don’t advocate drugs of any kind. I did them before I was a Christian. That’s part of my conversion story. The sense of God’s presence when I prayed took away my desire for drug high. I just said 'what do I need this stuff for, I can feel God’s presence, that’s much more than just a high and they can’t bust me for praying."
Having said that here’s a link to a site, the Council on Spiritual Practices. They are pshrinks who deal with religious experience. On that sight you can read much about both mystical experience and drugs and religious experience.
William James theorized that there is a continuum from very mild experiences that are really little more than just “insightful moments” all the way up to Moses on the mountain top or whatever. There’s a continuing range in between. Most of the experiences that are strong enough to warrant notice and produce conversions are sort of in the middle range. I did know a guy whose conversion experiences amounted to shedding a tear in church. That was what from the outside, there was more going on in his heart.
There’s more to these experiences than that, or they would not be worth talking about. The review by Wordgazer of my book shows her experience. She talks about her mystical experience.
Both of those guys are among my favorites. I read different books in researching for my book, but by the same same authors. Hick had been a favorite of mine since way back in the 70s (undergraduate days). He figured prominently in my early conversion. I was looking for intellectual Christians, since I was an undergraduate who fancied himself a big intellectual. I first found him in the ‘arguments for God’ articles in philosophy anthologies.
Alston is great. I see him as a bigger name and bigger thinker than Hick, but that’s saying something because I see Hick as great. I discovered Alston in Seminary. It was William Abraham who put me on to him. I read a book about epistemology and religious experience by him for the book I wrote. I can’t think of the title off hand.
A bit more about drugs and religious experiences. Many atheists argue that this is proof that religious experience is just a matter of brain chemistry. They point to the Good Friday Experiment by a guy named Walter N. Pahnke. He gave psilocybin to the experimental group and the control group just went to church. The experiential group had way more mystical experiences than did the other group.
The problem is his data was contaminated. Everyone in his sample had mystical experiences a child. That opens the door to the possibility that they were just being refreshed in memory rather than having new experiences created by the drugs. There are a lot of differences in drug induced and “natural” mystical experiences. That leads Hood (the M scale guy) make the argument about “receptors.” He uses that answer against all the arguments that Mystical experience is just induced by brain chemistry. The answer is that the drugs open the receptors that God created us with so we can sense his presence. So it’s just triggering the experience not creating the experience.
Other differences include time duration, drug induced lasts a lot longer. The quality is different. With my experience my actual prayer life included feelings of love for God and God’s love for me. A pot smoking high did not.
I talk about all of this in the book. I even go into detail on the Good Friday follow up study. Chapter seven is about drugs and placebos.
I know exactly what the lady is talking about. I struggled with intense shame and fear most of my life. I went to a Dr. Phil seminar back before he was popular. We played this game where we had to dress up and sing what was called our “stretch song”. Well they made us do it until we did it right. My song was “Walking On Air”. When I finally let go of all the intense shame and fear and started dancing I became focused in on the moment. The whole place went up in an uproar. After the song was over everybody came out and lifted me up in the air and they played the song “Hero”. When we were through I went outside by the pool and laid down in a chair. Running up the side of the building were the most beautiful lights I have ever seen. The wind was gently blowing across the water making tinny waves. The peace and joy was intense. God just seemed real to me. I was looking people in the eye and communicated better than I ever had. That night when I went to bed and I woke up the next morning the intense fear and shame were back.
Really what the Holy Spirit is - is love, joy, peace. It’s having hope and loosing your fears of living in the moment. It’s an experience you have when your ego deflates and you become more humble and filled with a childlike wonder.
Well instead of guest-scoring (so to speak), could you give readers an idea of the questions (generally and particularly) which are asked for evaluating the M-scale, and how those questions are important?
I think doing so will help address questions of how various scientists are testing for any distinctions between mere chemical reactions and something more than chemical reactions, as well as opening up a way to discuss how results from such tests can be used as the co-determinate evidence you were talking about earlier.
You might also thus open up a line of discussion on why you don’t recommend using the content of the experiences to build doctrinal sets, and/or how the results of the experience point toward something other than an omnidirectional moral mush (which obliterates the idea of good or leads to the idea that Satan and God are equal or are equal aspects of the same yin-yang or whatever).
I’ve seen the whole thing on line before. Now of course when I need it I can’t find it. I did find some of the questions from the M scale in an article explaining the Johns Hopkins study, which was about drugs evoking mystical experience and used the M scale as a measure of mystical experience.
It talks about a couple of the questions:
Doctrine is a specific set of information that must be encoded in exact terminology and relates to the discourse of a tradition. The nature of mystical experience is beyond words. I’m not saying that some basic doctrines are reinforced by it, in the way that general revelation backs general belief: God is love for example. But when I say “doctrine” I mean specifically theological prescriptions such as the doctrine of the incarnation or the doctrine of the Trinity. Something that is beyond words can’t be used to communicate exacting verbiage.
Mystical experience is about knowing God. It’s experiencing God’s presence and reality, it’s not a communication of doctrinal positions. Often such experiences contradict cherished doctrines. Trying to base doctrine on something that is fundamentally beyond doctrine would be a mistake.
Eh, I already answered that question for Joe in the introduction.
Okay, but I think people may want to know how you connect this position, with using the results of such experiences as co-determinate evidence for the existence of God. And by “God” you’re certainly talking about something with one set of characteristics and not another. For example you’re talking about the ground of all reality and not about an object within overarching reality.
How does your argument using experience-results as evidence, not amount to discovering characteristics (and thus basing doctrine by reference to one rather than another set of characteristics) of something “fundamentally beyond doctrine”? If it’s fundamentally beyond doctrine, how can that not mean it’s fundamentally beyond any ability to infer facts about it (including by means of appeal to a co-determinate as evidence, the “trace” of it?)
Nice to meet you Well I’ve been called here by my friend Jason who is a complete gentleman. I’ve had my mind on other things but since he’s’ called me and I do possibly have something to contribute to your fascinating discussion here, I am here like the genie in the lamp.
First of all I’ve been a person on this site who has talked quite a lot about the Christian mystics – so it’s appropriate that I do try and give some thoughts.
ON a personal note I had lots of broadly mystical experiences in my adolescence at precisely the time when I was in a rather authoritarian fundamentalist charismatic mileu – and my peers did not help me in any way to cope with these. A canny spiritual director who knew something about the human heart and with some broader knowledge of medicine would have been able to help. I actually have temporal lobe epilepsy – and I’m very happy to take the medication that stops the visions and the involuntary emotional bombardments that are a part and parcel of temporal lobe complex partial seizures. So that’s me for you
I’ve read and greatly enjoyed William James’s classic on mystical experience. Also in my late adolescence I read some of the countercultural stuff like Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and the fraudulent books of Carlos Casteneda linking experimentation with drugs and mystical experiences (very uneasy ). I think these self validating experiences of oneness are perennial; perhaps they occur more in religious people but they are not confined to religious people (I remember the writings of an Atheist named Richard Jeffries often came up in studies of mystical states).
I remember profiting from reading R.C. Zahener’s book Mysticism Sacred and Profane which is an answer to Aldous Huxley. He helpfully surveys the mystical literature across religions and distinguishes an amoral perception of everything being one and of being one with everything, to other mystical states where the person having the experience is not sucked into an amorphous oneness but rather has a perception of the ‘personalising energy’ of universal compassion coursing through and sustaining all things (which is found across the religions and not confined to Christianity, Judaism and Islam). My reading in world religions – especially regarding religion and violence – has confirmed Zahener’s misgivings about the validity of ‘everything is one’ experiences – that he terms pan-en-henism. This for example is a state that is striven for with harsh and brutal discipline in the samurai Rinzai sect of Japanese Zen – and actually turns people into highly efficient amoral killers for whom life and dearth are one. I remember Zahener drawing parallels between Rinzai Zen writings and the ramblings of Charles Manson.
I feel a little unesay with identifying mysticism with Maslow type peak Julian of Norwich and William Law – my two favourites – are not focussed on this.
Julian had a series of near death experiences as a young woman which supplied her with a powerful fund of images and experiences to work with. I think the great women doctors of the spiritual life often work like this – they keep their roots in experience (often bodily experience) and work creatively with images and intuition rather than with purely rational categories (Catherine OF Genoa, Metchild of Magedeburg and Hildegard von Bingen also spring to mind). But what matters with Julian is her reflections upon her experiences over a life time as much as the experiences themselves. She enquires after them for greater and more compassionate understanding of the lot and the perplexities of her fellow ‘even Christians’. She is concerned that her experience should be interpreted in the language of Holy Church and not to contradict this – but she is able to come up with stunning insights into the reach of the love of God in Christ for us poor creatures. And her visions enabled her to reach out to her neighbours in their affliction with illness, war, famine with a message of comfort and edification.
William Law – although counted a mystic – is on record as saying that he never had any special experiences. His writings are to do with the inner work of trying from self to God over a life time. (He was almost certainly influenced by Mother Julian and in turn influenced George MacDonald). It’s interesting that he had so many run ins with his dear friend John Wesley who loved Law but did not comprehend him. Two points of contention were over Laws’ purgatorial universalism and his specific interpretation of God’s wrath – very different from Wesley’s. Btu another thing that affronted Wesley was Law’s stress that states of inner assurance were not to be idolised as fruits of the spirit. Wesley took great exception to this – which is surprising (or perhaps not so surprising ) because Wesley’s private correspondence reveals that he lacked the experience of settled assurance that he preached (Wesley was a depressive). I’m rambling but I think another emphasis of the mystics that I see as good sorts(including Catherine of Genoa who von Hugel majored on) is an understanding that peak experiences may come but they also go (and they are no mark of begin special) and that there will be a place and a time for lack of feeling, and for patience in dry prayer – sitting faithfully turning the will away from self towards Love especially when we fell nothing. I know that dry prayer in Quaker meetings saved my sanity and perhaps my life after too much high octane religion and too much confusion because of epileptic states when I was young. So I’m a fan of it
Good stuff Dick.
I might add that in that part of my journey when I was studying/practicing Zen, I learned a good lesson: that is, that people tend to find what they are told they will find, when it comes to meditation or other consciousness-changing methodologies.
For instance, in sitting meditation, a beginner might be told that “as you become aware of sensations in your foot, or your abdomen, or neck, scalp, etc. - try to feel what the sensation is telling you about emotions you may have packed away, these emotions will block parts of your body” - well if you are told to look for it, you’ll interpret whatever sensation you come across, that might be just a random sensation, as something meaningful.
I think Hick, and perhaps Joe (?) would say that many ‘mystical’ experiences are somewhat like that - as water takes the shape of the bowl it is poured into, the same water will appear in different shapes. Likewise our experiences are formed and interpreted by the ‘vessel’ that ‘has’ them.
Well I’ll wait to read Joe’s book before I go further on that.
Yes Dave just because I slagged off the Rinazi sect of Zen above I don’t think that all types of Zen meditations lead down this road. In fact it is a Soto Zen priest that has blown the lid on just how much Rinzai Zen contributed to Japanese genocide in Manchuria during the second world war. One lesson here is that mystical experience divorced from moral discipline can result in evil (I understand that in Burmese Zen schools where Zen is gentle and pacific it is never taught outside of the Eightfold Path of moral discipline). I have found it ironic that so many of the Zen teachers snapped up by sixties hippies like Alan Watts have turned out to be Japanese War criminals in denial about Emperor worship.
A lesson that William Law always drove home is that if a person turns to God wihtout having first at least begun to turn away from self then they can become far worse than they were in their natural state.
Right. Yes I am influenced by the theology of Paul and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, John Macquarrie, and others who say God is the ground of being. But that’s another book. I don’t go into that too much in the Trace of God. I agree with Balthasar and not Tillich that God is consciousness (except a certain reading of Tillich might imply that God is conscious. Tillich says God is “the ground of consciousness,” depending upon how one takes that…)
You are saying the argument for co-determinate is a soft ball? The first chapter is about why we have to have arguments and why we cannot just make observations directly of God at work. God is not given in sense data because he’s the foundation of sense data, of all there is, not a thing in creation to be given in sense data. If you think it has to be direct empirical knowledge to be “hard ball” whatever that analogy means in terms of philosophy, how are you going to get that in dealing with something that is not subject to empirical data? God is beyond our understanding. One might think to do “hard ball” one would need to understand. The God correlate as Tillich called it, co-determinate is associated with Schleiermacher, the best we will get. Is that soft ball?
The first thing you have to do is find a means of demonstrating what the co-determinate is, or could be. If you already know then you must already know God exists and you don’t need the argument. To see how I do that, you need to read the book. Chapters 1 and 2.
I’ll give you a hint, I make two major God arguments. (1) Co determinate and; (2) argument from epistemic judgement.
(1) says we have a set of criteria which we can take to be the trace of the divine, for historical and other reasons. Then these characteristics are found in mystical experience. The result of the experience is life transforming. I use this term to group all the different results into one label. That label is meant to imply positive dramatic long term changes. Your life changes for the better and that can be broken down into different categories distilled from the findings of two studies, Wuthnow and Nobel.
Wuthnow:
*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
•Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style
Noble:
*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion
That’s from that council on spiritual practices page that I already linked to.
All of that together I germ “life transforming.” That is what religion promises. That’s the nature of religion to offer life transformation and these experiences are religion delivering on that promise. Therefore we should be able to assume that this is the Trace, it’s the effect of God on human lives.
The second argument is epistemological. I set up a criteria through which we understand that our experiences are real. We understand the reality of our experiences according to a criteria that we employ naturally. That is:
If the phenomena is regular, every time I try to walk through walls I bounce off, I always bounce off in the same way, the wall appears to be solid. I eventually learn “I can’t walk through walls.” I check my experience against that of others. no one I have ever met can walk through walls. Of course we don’t spend a great deal of time worrying about it. We conclude these things immediately but that’s basically the process we observe, and when a phenomena is regular and consistent and shared by others, we assume it’s real.
We also assume it’s real if the enables us to navigate in the world. We do what works. Think of Dr. Phil’s annoying and shallow little question “how’s that working for ya?” There is a point to it, if it’s not working why are you still doing it? Although I do want to punch him when I hear him say that.
So religious experience meets this criteria. I find that it’s regular and consistent and so many others. Every time I pray if I really seriously put attention into it I’m not dashing off “thanks for the food,” I feel a presence of holiness. I say that because it’s also the same kind of feeling. It’s both regular and consistent. Then, not that my very experience is shared, but I find other believers describing similar sounding feelings when they pray. So I assume it is a shared experience in kind.
That is borne out by these studies. They are not just anecdotal, they giving us quantitative analysis which establishes scientifically that these are the effects of religious experience. Something is being experienced it’s not a trick of the mind, and it fits the criteria we use to judge reality.
As for “navigation” the studies also show that the effect of the experience is enable one to navigate in live in the sense that one is able to cope with the vicissitudes of life. One is better able to make decisions in a clear headed mature way by having the mental capacity, wisdom and understanding of life to do so. These are the result of those experiences.
Since the experiences fit the criteria we use to decide reality, we should trust that they are indicative of a reality. We are not imposing wishful thinking. Since the experiences fit the criteria for epistemic judgement we should assume we are experiencing a realty beyond ourselves.
Good then you have a clear idea of what I’m taking about.
William James is a sort of hero for me. I read the Varieties way back, maybe as an undergrad. My early exposure to mystical experience was through Underhill’s major book, Mysticism and due to the influence of the woman who led me to the Lord I read some Madme Guyon.
I was attempting to do a William Barett type piece, what he did for existentialism in Irrational Man I was attempting to do for mystical experience. So my engagement with it in the book is not as nuanced as the writers we are talking about. It is nuanced and hopefully not ponderous but the nuances are about the studies not the classic writers.
I think the M scale studies establish that if it fits the Stace criteria it’s mystical. Anything else we might term “spiritual” or “religious” experience. The quantitative researchers are using the umbrella term: Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STE).
Maslow links Peak experience with religious experience although he also shows that’s not limited to religious people. He shows its related to the kinds of experiences of the mystics. There’s no reason to exclude it from the mystical category. It’s not part of mystical theology, because mystical theology seeks to explain mystical experience through a theological understanding, rather than a psychological one. That’s talk about the experience not the experience itself.
That’s really interesting. I say that sincerely not to brush it off. There was a time when I was really into studying those kinds of figures. Your level of knowledge is very impressive. I just don’t want people to buy The Trace of God expecting to find a lot of in depth of analysis of the writings of those people. I didn’t go into that aspect. The reason is because my mission was to popularize the body empirical work that demonstrates the goodness of religious experience.
I am not prescribing religious experience as a panacea to solve all problems. I’m not writing a spiritual hand book. I’m not trying to lead people into a deeper spiritual life. I think we can benefit from knowing about the validity of these experiences. My main purpose is apologetic and I want to make known the fact that there is a huge body of scientific work that shows us that religious experiences make your life better and refer to a reality that’s there. Although I do hope aspects of the book can suggest a deeper spiritual life.
I don’t deal with a level of personal meditation or “inner life.” I do have a chapter on placebos. It’s on both placebo and drugs. I think in a general sense I establish that mystical experience is not a self fulfilling prophesy or the result of placebo. That’s not exactly what you are saying. It’s true in cultivating “inner life”, one must learn to focus upon the source of the life not the epiphenomena.
Good analogy, water conforming to the shape of a basin. Lots mystical author use that in various ways. I think about in relation to culture, mystical experience adapting to the various forms of culture in being a universe experience.
I think you and Sobor (real name Dick) will get along famously. Thanks for the comments, Sobor!
Re: softball, the analogy is about pitching easy or hard questions for the ‘batter’ to hit. Dave was joking about pitching the softest possible question (do you suggest he should buy the book). I was joking in return about what I consider to be an easy set-up question for you to reply to (because even what I consider my softball questions are detailed, i.e. I was poking fun at myself). That’s all.
Let’s talk about Kuhn’s paradigm theory for a while. You write in some detail about this early in the book, when discussing rational warrant for belief. I expect at least some forum readers won’t be familiar with it, but I also expect a lot of members (and guests) will be VERY familiar with what the theory describes, having gone through it themselves on some important topics (which may or may not be related to the forum’s reason for existence. ) In fact anyone converting from one belief to another will likely have gone through this, depending on how strongly they held the initial belief.
Would you introduce the idea for us?
(Obviously other developing discussions can continue, too.)
I know. I was trying to be funny. My brother always warned me not to try that.
Kuhn based his theory upon the works of Swiss child psychologist named Jean Piaget (pee-air-jjjjay) (with that grating French sound you can’t write). That theory says children learn by setting up models of how they think things work, “paradigms”. Then these paradigms get worn down as they are contradicted by reality over time. As long as they can absorb the contradictions or “anomalies” into a paradigm they will keep it. When they can no longer do it, there are too many contradictions, they have set up a new paradigm.
Here’s a link to my page on my first website (Doxa) that explains Kuhn. This is one of the first pages I put up on the web. It was written while I was still in doctoral work. Although it’s not on a level I would have written for a professor. I was trying to be a popularizer for my website. I think it hits most of the highlights: In the section on Science and religious belief: Kuhn. Please read the link to gain some understanding of Kuhn.
But why does he come up in The Trace of God? In chapter 1 I’m explainingwhy we need to make arguments for God rather than just go out and get scientific “proof” of God. I explain why the atheist demand for scientific proof of God is really an unfair demand. In so doing I present Kuhn as a means of understanding the limitations in science. The atheist is expecting this relative construct of human thought to give us definitive information about the basis of reality (God).
Kuhn shows us that all of those things that atheists take as “facts” will be seen as anomalies in another generation.
)
Well I’ve been called here by my friend Jason who is a complete gentleman. I’ve had my mind on other things but since he’s’ called me and I do possibly have something to contribute to your fascinating discussion here, I am here like the genie in the lamp.
). I think these self validating experiences of oneness are perennial; perhaps they occur more in religious people but they are not confined to religious people (I remember the writings of an Atheist named Richard Jeffries often came up in studies of mystical states).
Thanks for clearing that up!
) In fact anyone converting from one belief to another will likely have gone through this, depending on how strongly they held the initial belief.