“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.” ― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
So, you might be forgiven for wondering where a self-avowed
atheist gets the presumption that he’s qualified to write about religious
experience. Not religious history, nor philosophy, nor the relation of faith
and science, but direct honest-to-goodness personal experience of the apparently
divine. Never mind that the operating thesis of this blog is that the feelings
invoked in religious contexts are a common heritage of human experience, and
that there other targets for our feelings of awe, duty and belonging. Never
mind that – even if the following weren’t the case – presumption is not
something I’m lacking in. No, the reason I feel I have a little something to
say on the subject is that I’m no stranger to ‘religious experience’.
I’m not saying I’ve had experience of religion, in the sense of attending ‘church’ and engaging in
ritual, although I have that to. I mean a
particular, arresting event that on first sight is difficult to process except
in the context in which it presents itself: divinely, religiously, miraculously
– whatever. Don’t worry - this isn’t a confession of regular visions of
messiahood or anything. It’s a story of the kind of Weird Shit I’ve mentioned before, but that happened to me personally and on which I’ve
spent a lot of thought. As I’ve said, while it would be wrong to say I was
raised Buddhist I was raised around
it, and there have been times when that kind of faith has been more appealing.
Once upon one of these periods, in an instructional context at a Buddhist
centre I decided I couldn’t follow the in-depth notes about a particular
technique, so I decided to meditate and just do the visualisations being
suggested. After a while, I found myself in what one might call, for the
frustrating lack of a better term, an ‘altered state of perception’. The most
superficial aspect, and most easily describable, is that all my sensations of
touch – the feel of my clothes, the weight of my body, the feeling of a paper
clip in my hand – were experienced as something akin to ‘pins and needles’. Paresthesia, if you will.
Harder to explain is the sense in which I feel I could ‘see’ the thinness of
the phenomenal world, like the screen of a shadow-puppet show. By ‘see’ I don’t
mean to romanticise a new intellectual perspective. But nor do I mean the
phenomena was merely, or even really, visual either. Enough to say, the experience
– not unpleasant while it was occurring – knocked for me for six after I came
back to earth, and had me mulling it over for quite some time.
It might not sound like much, but I can’t stress the lasting
effect it had on me. But then, if that’s the case, you might ask why this
supposedly religious experience was not also a conversion experience. Certainly,
at the time, the pull of more worldly delights was a strong disincentive. But,
over the longer term, I have other reasons for viewing this experience as
formative, but not definitive in
terms of the way I see the world. My academic training provides me with plenty
of science babble to nicely box this experience in such a way that I wouldn’t need
to think more deeply about its implications – hypnosis, suggestion,
hallucination. Such are the terms that safe ‘scepticism’ is usually couched in. That not why the reason you don’t
see me in red robes today.
I recently listened to this podcast , ‘A sceptics
guide to the mind’, which I heartily recommend. In summary, the guest
speaker makes the observation that while feeling and sensations – happiness,
recalling a memory, feeling certain – occur in our conscious minds (and/or
brains); the process by which they
come about isn’t available to us. When you construct a sentence in your native
tongue, the words spring to mind and you
don’t have to piece a sentence together piecemeal selecting a verb here, a preposition
there. When you pick up a cup, the subjective you doesn’t compute the force, the velocity, the geometries
required. It just happens. The speaker’s interesting point is that this is also
true of feelings of certainty. I may have a sensation of unassailable logical
certainty in regards to a proposition, but the certainty is a sensation of mine
– produced by a process I have no
access to – not a feature of the proposition.
It seems to me something similar hold for the feeling of
religious awe, of the numinous, of divine presence. They are a feature of us, whether or not they’re an
appropriate reaction to something or someone out there. We, in our heads, don’t know how they arise - we don’t have
access to the process that brings them about. So lights, trumpets and warm
cuddly feelings aside, one still has to decide for oneself what view of the
world makes sense for – or of - them. In the marketplace of ideas, even when
the ads are overwhelming, you still have to haggle.
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| Photo by Agnonymous, some rights reserved. |
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