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Showing posts with label religious experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religious experience. Show all posts
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, one of the acknowledged "fathers" of modern psychology, distinguished between outer and inner religious faith. To him, "outer religion" was the province of rituals, sacraments, vestments and bells, while "inner religion" was a state of consciousness. In the true sense of the word, he viewed "inner religion" (from the Latin ligare, meaning to 'tie' or 'unite') as a state of natural, unitive and acceptive consciousness in which "religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands."
"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," he observes, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the folds and waterspouts of God."
"In this state of mind," he notes, "what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."
"This enchantment," he points out, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift or our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word or command."
"Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life," he concludes. "It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste." "There are plenty of men," he adds parenthetically, "in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so."
"I stand at the bottom of the pond as the fulcrum of limitless space, within and without, a gateway to both, an icon that joins the two. But who am I, so small and insignificant yet at the heart of existence? As I ponder this question, infinite space reveals itself once more. For as hard as I look, I cannot find myself. I can only find thoughts, memories, fears, beliefs and concepts that constantly arise and cease. But whoever I am does not arise or cease. I am who I have always been. Different thoughts and a new body, but I am who I am. And as my mind stills consciousness expands without limit. There is a deep sense that, indeed, it has no limit. It too is infinite, a vibrantly alive space. As I stand at the bottom of the pond, I am the still center of awesome space, but so is every other human being. And, in its own way, so is every animal, plant, virus, bacteria and living cell. And in some far distant galaxy, on another insignificant lump of rock, at the bottom of another pond, stands another still center of space staring uswards and inwards, filled and humbled by the mystery of existence."
-- Simon Small -- ("At the Bottom of a Pond")
In a recent interview (attached below) Iain McNay, co-host of ConsciousTV, sat down with Rev. Simon Small, an ordained Church of England clergyman and author, to explore the latter's journey from run-of-the-mill modern materialist businessman to a Christian contemplative. Small's inner journey of self-inquiry led him from spiritualism, through A Course in Miracles, to Theravada Buddhism and back to his Church of England roots, revealing to him the spaciousness and interconnectedness that is at the heart of all the world's great wisdom traditions.
Small describes the fruits of the inner path in the following terms: "One begins to experience a taste that one is not separate to everything else, that this hard sense of being separate and cut off from all of this, and just relating to it, is actually just a perception, and that whatever I am is flowing out of the source of everything, just as this table is, and this room, and everything outside."
"Contemplation," he notes, "is an ancient Christian word for a universal experience. (It) describes what happens when we have those moments . . when suddenly our very small world that we are living out in our head almost seems to dissolve and suddenly there is this vast mystery there in the moment. We all have experiences like this. Many of us have them out in nature. We will be walking along and there will be a moment when the sunlight coming through the branches and hitting the leaves just stops us in our tracks. There is a sense of time almost stopping as well, and there is almost a sense of resonance in the moment so that we are no longer separate to the sunlight and those leaves. There is something vibrating there that is vibrating in us as well. We all have these moments."
A life of contemplation may not, however, be for everyone. The fruits of the inner path and contemplation are very rich, Small notes, but they come at a price, a price that many people are, perhaps, loathe to pay.
"At first, (contemplation) is a wonderful experience," he points out, "because you have never quite tasted anything quite like it. It is like the finest wine you have ever tasted, and you become aware. . . . Suddenly life has gone to colour from black and white. But then very quickly," he warns, "one begins to realize that if you are going to pursue this you are not going to be able to live the same way anymore in the world. Things that you used to value, you won't value anymore. And you will begin to value things that you have never dreamed of before."
Small's advice to those who wish to explore the contemplative way is: "Enter stillness. Try and taste the wonder of being. Go out into nature, (into) whatever it is that brings this sense of wonder into your life. And then as you are experiencing that quality of consciousness, hold the question: Where do I go from here?" The answer will come, he notes.
According to the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung - the "Einstein of the mind" - the individual is born with an inherent disposition that becomes masked by the ego as he or she matures. And it is only by penetrating through the ego's mask that he or she discovers what and who she is. The danger, however, is that in doing so one will inevitably find a certain kind of madness.
In the lengthy video interview, attached, Jung observes that
"Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it."
"We are only deeply unconscious of these facts" Jung notes, "because we live all by our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. And when a man discovers it, in our days, he thinks he's crazy . . . and really crazy."
Jung's view was that without some real, inner religious experience, the madness of the human ego could and would drive the individual actor to the depths of madness, a view that is readily understandable given the collective insanity witnessed by Jung during the first half of the twentieth-century. In candid correspondence written in the last year of his life, Jung observed:
"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouse so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible."*
The existential question for Jung, then, was: "Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving into the crowd?"
"To this question," he remarked, "there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself, but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration of his own human dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness - that is, towards the unconscious, the only accessible source of religious experience."
"This is not to say," Jung cautions, "that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem."
[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self, pp. 101-102]
* Letter from Carl Jung to Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), dated January 30, 1961. Jung died on June 6, 1961.
Unitarianism - the faith of Emerson and Thoreau, Dickens and Coleridge, Jefferson and Adams - was the essential faith of the American Transcendentalists, and its legacy can be traced through the New Thought movement to elements of the New Age movement today.
"Religion," writes James Freeman Clarke in 'The Manual of Unitarian Belief', "may be defined as the worship and service of God. It is necessary," he observes, "because man is feeble, and needs Divine power to give him strength; he is ignorant, and needs Divine light to guide him; he is sinful, and needs Divine mercy to give him peace; he is mortal, and needs faith in things unseen and eternal to give him the hope of continued existence."
"That religion is natural to man," Clarke observes, "appears from the fact that in a higher or lower form it has been found among all races and nations, among civilized and savage people, on ancient and modern times."
"Natural religion," he points out, "is that which is awakened by the sight of the order and beauty of nature, of its adaptations to the use of living beings, of its variety and unity; leading the mind up to the conception of a Supreme Being, perfect in power, wisdom and goodness."
"Revealed religion," he notes, "consists of the revelations of Divine truth made to the souls of inspired men, thus producing lawgivers, prophets, and spiritual leaders of the human race.
"Saint Augustine," Emerson writes, "described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere, We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms."
"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."
1. God's presence is made known in a myriad of ways. Religion should promote a free and responsible search for truth, meaning, communion and love.
2. Reason is a gift from God. Religion should embrace reason and its progeny, including the scientific enterprise which explores God's creation.
3. Free will is a gift from God. Religion should assist in the effort to find a path that exercises that gift in a responsible, constructive and ethical manner.
4. Conscious of the complexity of creation, of the limits of human understanding and of humanity's capacity for evil in the name of religion, we hold that humility, religious tolerance and freedom of conscience should be a central part of any religious experience.
5. Religious experience is most fulfilling in the context of a tradition. Our religious tradition is the Unitarian tradition, which emphasizes the importance of reason in religion, tolerance and the unity of God.
6. Revelation is ongoing. Religion should draw inspiration not only from its own tradition but from other religious traditions, philosophy and the arts. Although paying due regard for the hard lessons learned in the past and to the importance of religious tradition, religion should not be stagnant but should employ reason and religious experience to evolve in a constructive, enlightened and fulfilling way.
7. Conscious of the spiritual and material needs of our fellow men and women, the evil they may be subjected to and the tragedies they may endure, works of mercy and compassion should be a part of any religious experience.
The word "contemplate," meaning "to view with attention" is derived from the Latin 'con + templum' signifying "an open space for observation." Thus, the modern contemplative - like the near-enlightened Trappist monk, Thomas Merton - might be seen as the person whose mind provides him or her the open space for the observation of the realities of consciousness and being that exist beneath the external 'realities' of our common lives.
In his book, "Mystics and Zen Masters" (as well as in the attached video), Merton examines the depth and commonality of this open, contemplative experience, and discusses what the "ecumenism" of religions revealed by a common contemplative life has to offer as an aspiration for the non-contemplative.
"(G)enuine ecumenism," writes Merton, "requires the communication and sharing, not only of information about doctrines which are totally and irrevocably divergent, but also of religious intuitions and truths which may turn out to have something in common, beneath surface differences."
"Ecumenism," he observes, "seeks the inner and ultimate spiritual "ground" which underlies all articulated differences. A genuinely fruitful dialogue cannot be content with a polite diplomatic interest in other religions and their beliefs. It seeks a deeper level, on which religious traditions have always claimed to bear witness to a higher and more personal knowledge of God that that which is contained simply in exterior worship and formulated doctrines."
"In all religions," he notes, "we encoutner not only the claim to (divine) revelation in some form or other, but also the record of special experiences in which the absolute and final vailidity of that revelation is in some way attested."
"Furthermore," he points out, "in all religions it is more or less generally recognized that this profound "sapiential" experience, call it gnosis, contemplation, "mysticism," "prophecy," or what you will, represents the deepest and the most authentic fruit of the religion itself. All religions, then, seek a "summit" of holiness, of experience, of inner transformation to which their believers - or an elite of believers - aspire because they hope, so to speak, to incarnate in their own lives the highest values in which they believe.
In the following video, a letter which Merton addressed to one of his many correspondents is used to highlight the fruit of the gnostic consciousness that is experienced by the true contemplative - a higher consciousness which is available to us all, regardless of religious tradition.
Western science is just now coming face-to-face with the question of just 'what' consciousness is, although much of its work is still concentrated on the quest to find the neural correlates of consciousness - a sign that the scientific search is still for consciousness arising as a phenomenon of the brain, rather than as an independent phenomena. This, of course, indicates the Western bias for materialism.
It is now over 100 years, however, since William James "threw down the gauntlet" (as Alan Wallace notes in a convincing Google TechTalk), challenging Western science to investigate just what "consciousness" is, and why there appear to be so many different forms - particularly higher forms - of it. "
In his masterwork, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," James writes that: "(P)ersonal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness." And, describing the qualities of such higher states of consciousness, beyond our ordinary egoic, self-consciousness, he observes that "(t)hey are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time."
Moreover, he notes, "(m)ystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence. . . . They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and feeling of an enlargement of perceptions which seems imminent but which never completes itself."
[Wm. James, "Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 379-384.]
Two of the examples he cites are from the Canadian psychiatrist, Richard M. Bucke (author of the renowned book, "Cosmic Consciousness"), and the great Indian teacher and spiritual ambassador to the West, Swami Vivikenanda.
Writing of his own experience of a higher, transcendental consciousness, Bucke observed:
"Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run guaranteed. The vision lasted but a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed."
The Indian yogi, Swami Vivikenanda, burst onto the Western stage with his appearance at the Parliament of the World's Religions, held at Chicago's World Fair in 1893 and exposed Westerners, most for the first time, to the millennia-old yoga (or religious) teachings of the East. Vivikenanda's views on transcendental consciousness were extracted by James, from Vivkenanda's famous work, "Raja Yoga," in which he observed:
"(T)he mind itself has a higher state of consciousness, beyond reason, and . . . when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes. . . . All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samadhi. . . . Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, and which, also, is not accompanied with the sense of egoism. . . . There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves - for Samadhi lies potential in us all - for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite and its contrasts of good and evil altogether and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul."
[Ibid., p. 400.]
When a man emerges from the experience of Samadhi," James notes, "the Vedantists assure us that he remains "enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illiumined." The same conclusion is drawn of course by Bucke, and is a central tenet of his book, "Cosmic Consciousness."
All this goes to show, that the experience of individuals in the West and East (as amply demonstrated by both William James and Bucke) attests to higher states of transcendental consciousness beyond the mere egoic consciousness that the vast majority of us function and suffer (to greater or lesser degrees) in. Yet, it appears that Western-based science continues unabated in its attempt to find and map the neural correlates of these states of heightened consciousness, even while they have so far been unable to find the neural basis, or even come to a generally accepted working definition, of consciousness itself.
A video critique of William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" by the distinguished American philosopher, Richard Rorty, is included, below.
Richard Dawkins, the noted biologist and critic of all things 'religious,' gave what has become a bit of a 'stump speech' (entitled "Queerer than We Can Suppose: The Strangeness of Science") on Ted.org several years ago. Dawkins - whom I would describe, having been one, as an "evangelical atheist" - along with Christopher Hitchins, is in the forefront of an all-too ideological battle against what comedian Bill Maher has called "religiousity."
While many "religious critics" have found Dawkins' pitch antithetical to their ideas and beliefs about God and the universe, I don't share that view. Dawkins is both an eminent scientist and influential social critic, but while many found Dawkins evolutionary critique of fundamentalist religious teaching challenging, I found it profoundly inspiring.
Perhaps the fundamental conflict that Dawkins and others have with "religion" or "God," per se, (Dawkins' formal religious critique is, after all, called "The God Delusion") consists of a definition of terms. Dawkins and Hitchins rail against an "anthropomorphic God" - i.e., a man-like God behind the universe somewhere, 'pulling the levers,' so-to-speak, like an eternal 'Wizard of Oz.'
While this anthropomorphic view may be a popular conception of what "God" is, or may be, it is an old and disavowed view which, nonetheless, continues to hold some capital with those who have not given much thought to what such metaphysical terms might mean. I suspect it is still informed somewhat by the iconic images on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel. Nonetheless, it has been disavowed by most authorities, including the Vatican and the Pope, himself.
If one examines experiential religion - what the founding father of introspective psychology, William James, called "inner religion", as opposed to the "outer religion" of dogma, creeds, temples, vestries and incense - there is no inherent conflict with the evolutionary scientific perspective of Dawkins and Hitchins. Their choosing to oppose fundamentalist, outer and anthropomorphic theism with science is just that, a choice. Yet even the Vatican's chief astronomer has said that the 'Big Bang' is the most likely version of the Creation. And the current head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, besides lifting the ex-communication of Galileo, has said that the debate between evolution and creationism is "an absurdity," pointing out that the two can co-exist.
A more informed debate would occur if there were agreement as to the terms and concepts being discussed. More's the pity since this does not appear to be likely even though such a debate would likely prove to be beneficial to both science and metaphysics. (A point made by Alan Wallace, an accomplished scientist and Buddhist practitioner, in a fascinating, if lengthy, "Google TechTalk.")
Rather than engaging in a debate with 'fundamentalist' religious types (and stereotypes) over the 'usefulness' or 'social harm' caused by organized religion, a more utilitarian debate informed by the works of modern theologists, philosophers and scientist, like the Jesuit paleontologist, Teihard de Chardin (that's right, a Jesuit paleontologist) or progressive spiritual leaders like Andrew Cohen, who teaches what he calls "Evolutionary Enlightenment," would add much good to both the public discourse and to science.
While we wait for such a debate, as an inwardly-focused yet not "outwardly religious" spiritual aspirant, I find Dawkins' lecture to be both immensely informative and profoundly inspiring. I suspect that many, if not most, seekers after authentic, inner religious experience who are at all informed about the wonders of evolution, relativity theory and the uncomprehendable (not 'incomprehensible') wonders of quantum mechanics, may find that Dawkin's "polemic" is both profound and, dare I say, spiritually uplifting.
In a 2006 Google TechTalk, Alan Wallace, noted Buddhist scholar and polymath scientist, challenged neuroscientists to "pick up the gauntlet thrown down by William James" (the father of American introspective psychology and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience) and shift their investigations to the nature of consciousness itself, rather than narrowly focusing efforts on the search for the neural correlates of mental phenomena and emotions.
Wallace stresses that a synthesis of Eastern consciousness and contemplative training with Western scientific methodologies holds the potential for the first real "revolution" in the mind sciences" - a revolution equivalent to that sparked in the physical sciences by Galileo's challenge to Thomas Aquinas' medieval Christian 'scholasticism.'
The problem of exactly what consciousness "is" looms large, particularly given the integral roles that "the observer" and "observation" play in determining the results of quantum effects. Yet, as Wallace notes, 'consciousness studies' has really only emerged as a distinct field in the last 20 years or so.
Even now, however, pure consciousness studies are largely restricted to finding the "neural correlates of consciousness" - the set of functional properties and structures existing amid the neurons in the brain which are sufficient to bring about a conscious experience - which, is a bit of a fool's errand or wild goose chase in Wallace's view, given that there is not even a "scientific definition of consciousness." "How can you study consciousness," he asks, "if you don't even have a definition for what you are studying?"
Calling consciousness "the retinal blindspot in the scientific vision" he challenges the predominant scientific and psychological view that all "things" can be reduced to a physical cause - what Wallace calls the "Limitations of Physcial Reductionism." He notes that:
·Mathematic theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of matter and energy in the universe.
·Physical theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of life in the universe.
·Biological theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of consciousness in living organisms.
·Psychological theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of religious experience in conscious beings.
It is in the "emergence of religious experience" that Wallace proposes a way out of what many analysts have called "the hard problem" of the neurosciences: Does the brain produce consciousness, or does consciousness produce the brain? As yet, and largely because the latter half of the problem has not been examined at depth, there is no answer to this "hard problem."
(Cristof Koch - perhaps the leading authority amongst neuroscientists working on the neural basis of consciousness - has observed that, " (t)he characters of brain state and of phenomenal states appear too different to be completely reducible to each other." He suspects, however, "that the relation is more complex than traditionally envisionsed.")
Wallace believes, however, that a truly scientific study of the focused states of higher consciousness achieved by seasoned contemplatives and meditators schooled in Eastern wisdom traditions, may hold the key to breaking open the problem of just what consciousnsess is exactly. In contrast to Western science, which had its origins in Greek philosophers taking a "God's-eye view of matter," Eastern wisdom schools, typified by (but not limited to) Buddhism, started from the perspective that "the investigation of the mind was primary, (as) there is no world of expereience without consciousness.”
The vital 'religious' or 'spiritual experiences' reported by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" have been reported in all ages in virtually every culture. For Wallace, they hold the key to any revolutionary breakthrough into what the "nature of consciousness" is. In the past, he notes, there was "too much dogma suppressing the empirical study of mental phenomena." With the advent of "the Information Age" and the meeting of Eastern wisdom traditions, such as Daoism, Buddhism, Sufism and Advaita Vedanta, with the Western scientific perspective, there is a potential for a breakthrough, Wallace believes.
It should now be possible, Wallace asserts, to "(i)ntegrate rigorous first-person and thirdl-person methodologies in collaboration between cognitive sceintists and contemplatives with exceptional mental skills and insights resulting from rigorous, sustained, mental training in observing and experimenting with states of consciousness.”
This has, of course, been the direction of a great number of studies in the intervening five years since Wallace presented his views to Google, including studies by Wallace's Santa Barbara Institute. Cracking the fundamental nature of what consciousness "is" and how it helps to form both our physical and mental realities may well turn out to be the key to a truly integrated scientific "theory of everything," uniting physics with psychology and a true metaphysics.
