Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [12]
For psychologists, James said, those forces are subconscious; but for the converted, they are supernatural. James himself yearned for, but never found, the transforming spirituality about which he spoke. But, he told his colleagues, he had become persuaded that “twice born” people—those who had been touched and converted by spiritual experience—were the healthiest, not the sickest, among us.
James then turned his gaze to the spiritual virtuosos: the mystics, who know firsthand “the reality of the unseen.” All mystical experiences share certain common elements, he contended—and his descriptions presaged the words of Sophy Burnham. First, they are ineffable: they cannot be described adequately with words. Second, they have a noetic quality—a truth or deep insight that is truer to the person than the material world itself. The insights may differ from person to person, but there are certain shared threads: the unity of all things, the love of a conscious “other” or God, and the confidence that all is as it should be—as Julian of Norwich voiced it,“all manner of things will be well.” Third, James observed, mystical experiences quickly ebb, usually within a few minutes. Last, these experiences pounce on the mystic: some power outside of the person takes control, pushing the mystic into the passenger’s seat. As James put it,“The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”7
After placing mystics under his searching and sometimes critical gaze—for example, he looked dimly at Saint Teresa’s erotic flirtation with God as so much exhibitionism—the Harvard scientist came to an extraordinary conclusion.
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different,” he said.
He went on to write, “We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”8
For many believers then and now, William James had endorsed “God.”At the very least, he had vouched for the mental health of those who claim to know God. James might have viewed it differently: he readily conceded that science could neither prove the reality of a spiritual dimension, nor rule it out. But these experiences, he argued, point to “the possibility of other orders of truth.”9
James’s lectures caused a stir in academic circles around the world, drawing accolades and more than a few attacks. But if James triggered a revolution in the scientific approach to spiritual experience, that revolution was soon overcome by alternative theories that excluded the mystical.
One theory, launched by psychologist James Henry Leuba around the time of James, declared God to be illusion. In this view, electrical or chemical activity in the brain is the source of all mystical experience;10 epilepsy and psychedelic drugs only prove the point. Sigmund Freud dismissed spiritual experience as pathology. Freud stated that religion offers protection against suffering through a “delusional remolding of reality.” The “oceanic feeling” that mystics describe is a memory of an infantile state, he argued, perhaps unity with the mother—but whatever it was, it represented an escape from reality, not a perception of it.11 Others went a step further, arguing that mystics longed for their mother or the womb, a desire sparked by the sexual frustrations of chastity. Piled on top of these psychological arguments was a sociological one: French sociologist Émile Durkheim12 and others theorized that mystics are correct