‘It is sometimes tempting to dismiss one’s own spiritual experiences as the random firings of one’s over-stressed brain.’ Photo: by David Matos on Unsplash
‘A way of understanding spirituality which makes it integral to the experience of being human.’
Psychologists have often struggled to quantify spiritual experience. Carole Sutton discovers a more liberating approach
Consider the following account, from Raynor Johnson’s The Watcher on the Hills (1959): ‘I prayed for help from out of the darkness, and there, behold, as a flash, the scene changed. All became alive, the trees, the houses, the very stones were animated with life, and all became vibrant with the life within them. All breathed effulgent light, vivid sparkling light, radiating out and in every direction and not only that, but everything seemed to be connected with everything else. Although all separate forms, and all vibrating with their own intensity of life, yet they all seemed to be connected by their vibrations into one whole thing.’
What are we to make of this vision?
The clinical psychologist Isabel Clarke, who spoke at the Quaker Universalist Group meeting at Woodbrooke some years ago, has developed a way of understanding such phenomena that, for me, is particularly helpful and illuminating. Isabel is a member of the Transpersonal Psychology section of the British Psychological Society. Her work in the field of spiritual experience is enlightening and provides a counterbalance to the views of those scientists who are relentlessly analytical and reductionist.
This Transpersonal Section of the British Psychological Society is of only fairly recent origin. Opposition from within the Society towards ways of understanding human experience that could not be quantified or measured has sometimes been strong. The impact of the Section and its publications are, however, increasingly evident.
Clarke suggests that, based on detailed experimentation by psychologists, the human brain works via many subsystems and she notes two of particular interest:
• the primarily cognitive, verbal and logical subsystem, which underpins our sense of self. It draws upon rational thinking and analysis
• the relational subsystem, which deals with perceptions of the whole and with emotional meaning. It extends to phenomena beyond the individual
We are unaware of the distinction between these two main subsystems as they work together smoothly most of the time. Practising certain spiritual disciplines, or taking certain substances, may bring about a person’s becoming aware of a ‘decoupling’ between the two subsystems and to their then having a different quality of experience.
Clarke goes on to suggest that this formulation offers a way of understanding spirituality which makes it integral to the experience of being human. In other words, we all potentially have access to this relational realm, which goes beyond the recognised field of, for example, nonverbal communication, and includes relationships with animals. Some people with experience exclusively within the cognitive or propositional system, however, go so far as almost to deny the existence of the other, relational, system, because they themselves have not encountered it.
What seems to happen when the two subsystems ‘decouple’?
Normally the two subsystems operate alongside each other in an integrated way. Sometimes, however, we experience the relational subsystem as dominant, either very briefly or for longer periods. We may then undergo a ‘spiritual’ quality of experience, when logical and analytic processes are temporarily subordinated. Clarke’s hypothesis is that ‘we encounter a “spiritual” quality of experience when the implicational [relational] subsystem is in the ascendant. This allows a state of being in relation with the whole, whether mediated by, say, an experience of Nature, or a more abstract experience of God or the ultimate. This experience is generally received as ecstatic and awe-inspiring in the short term.’
Other researchers, such as Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry, confirm that there is an increasingly well understood neuroscientific underpinning to this account of cognitive and relational architecture, but, because of the complexity of the interconnections, we cannot map these exactly. Researchers into brain processes across the world point to physiological and neurological processes which suggest a similar model of continuous interplay between different systems within the brain and the mind.
I have found this way of conceptualising human experience extremely liberating. To people trained either formally or informally through cultural convention to think critically and analytically, as we in the west now are, it is sometimes tempting to dismiss one’s own spiritual experiences as the random firings of one’s over-stressed brain, or as auto suggestion, and so to cut oneself off from experiences of profound significance.
I remember Ralph Hetherington, a former general secretary of the British Psychological Society, who gave the Swarthmore Lecture in 1975, telling me how he had been sought out by a fellow psychologist who was an atheist. This man was in a very agitated state, as he had had a spontaneous experience which could only be described as ‘mystical’. This was deeply disturbing to him. The experience lay so far outside his usual and circumscribed mode of consciousness that he could only conclude that he was going mad. Ralph was able to reassure him.
So what’s new?
Many people reading this article may respond, ‘But of course… There’s nothing new here’. But for those who, like me, have been ground down by the reductionist views of people such as professors of the public understanding of science, Clarke’s views are clarifying and illuminating. Here is an analysis that makes sense – cognitively and psychologically – of the wealth of data reported concerning spiritual experience. There is no need to dismiss the strange and sometimes disorienting phenomena which many people experience as the random firings of an over-stressed brain. If wisdom seems to come from beyond the parameters of scientifically accepted sources, we can regard these phenomena as valid in their own right and as offering reassurance and inspiration.
Comments
In the middle of an unhappy adolescence, over sixty years ago, I had this experience. I went out of the house into the garden one late evening: there was a full moon, and small fluffy clouds were blowing along on a gentle south-westerly. I was suddenly struck with a powerful assurance that everything was as it should be (I cannot describe it more accurately than that). The feeling was so powerful it stayed with me for the rest of the evening and the whole of the following day. I’ve never experienced that again: but at the time the assurance was powerful.
By RogerP on 3rd September 2020 - 10:52
The American philosopher and theologian John Cobb provides the most powerful critique I have ever read of normative science, reductionism and dualism (i.e. the artificial mind-matter bifurcation), plus the negative spiritual impact of scientific thinking’s dominance in and of the contemporary mainstream university. This is particularly in relation to the question of God. It can be be found in his 2016 book “Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed” (Fortress Press). It is a book written for the general reader rather than the academic theologian and is very accessible. I know it answered a lot of questions for me about God that had been left unanswered by a Roman Catholic education. Another rendering of it, though more academic and focused more on the problem of research-focused universities, can be found in his paper “The Anti-Intellectualism of the American University.” This is published in Soundings (2015, 98[2]: 218-232) and in turn answered a lot of questions for me about the reasons for the sorry state of my former profession of academe, hinted at in the article above. Retirement is bliss!
By markrdibben@gmail.com on 3rd September 2020 - 23:39
The ‘awakening’ shock of satori in Zen is very much about derailing the logical mind to open the deeper mind. When this happens the acolyte steps out of the world as habituated and into a world as illuminated. Such experience is not unknown in our Quaker tradition:
“Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. (George Fox: QF&P 26.03)
By D.Lockyer on 6th September 2020 - 8:11
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