ARE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES REAL OR ILLUSORY?

“In the absence of any reason for disbelieving, we should believe that the experiencer is telling the truth.”   -  Philosopher Charles Swinburne

This was the topic of the Philosophers’ Café in May.  I began the meeting by asking, “How many of you have had what you consider to be a spiritual experience?”  At least two thirds of the group, including myself, answered in the affirmative.  I was not surprised.  Spiritual experiences (SEs) are quite common, and there is a huge literature of stories about them dating back thousands of years.  I cited just one example - the famous account by Richard M. Bucke of his experience of “Cosmic Consciousness” in his book of the same title.  (http://sacred-texts.com/eso/cc/cc05.htm, pp. 9-11)  The story is too long to reproduce here, but if you take the time to read it, you will find that Bucke’s description of his extraordinary experience and his subsequent interpretation of it contain nearly all of the features common to SEs discussed in the literature and in this essay. 

Stories of SEs have been part of human experience since the earliest days of homo sapiens.  We have numerous records of shamanic spirit possessions, sacred visions and voices, ecstasies, mystical experiences, trances, psychic phenomena, altered states induced by drugs, music, poetry, and art - all have been thought of as spiritual by one person or another.  But what does that mean?  Obviously, these are not all the same. Are they all spiritual?  If so, what makes them spiritual?  This is one of the first questions we must ask in seeking a philosophical understanding of these extraordinary phenomena.

Our topic is:  Are spiritual experiences real or illusory?  Clearly we need some degree of agreement on what a spiritual experience is.  To arrive at that was my aim in the first hour of the meeting.  Then in the second hour we tackled the question of whether or not SEs are real.

What is a spiritual experience?

Rather than lead off with a formal talk, I asked the assembled philosophers to share with us their ideas about what a spiritual experience is.  What ensued was one of the best PC discussions in recent memory.  Several people shared their own SEs with the group.  The quality of the answers suggests that many people take spiritual experience seriously and know a lot about it.  Answers to the question included the following:

Spiritual experiences are:

· Universal:  all human experiences are spiritual; we are spiritual beings.

   · Extraordinary:  different from ordinary religious experiences - prayer, ritual participation, etc.
   · Transformative:  SEs often cause a radical change in a person’s life.
   · Physical:  SEs are just an unusual type of brain activity.
   · Profound:  they often reveal deeper connections between self and world.      
   · Culturally interpreted, usually in a religious, but sometimes secular, framework.

Except for the claim that SEs are nothing but brain events, all the ideas listed above seem right to me.  To that list I would add a few additional characteristics that would probably elicit general agreement:

Spiritual experiences are:
   · direct experiences, not the result of reasoning; hence non-rational;
   · brief in duration;
   · ineffable to some degree;
   · ecstatic:  SEs often induce states of extreme joyousness or bliss;
   · noetic:  the individual believes they have learned something significant about reality and self.

Specialists in the study of spirituality or mysticism find it useful to classify the different types of spiritual experience and to rank them according to some criterion.  For our purposes, it may be enough to distinguish two broad categories: dualistic and non-dualistic.  In the dualistic type, the individual has an extraordinary experience of being directly in contact with a divine being or a transcendent reality which is felt to be separate or distinct from oneself.  Supernatural visions of Jesus or Krishna or other holy person would be of this type.  Such experiences are emotionally powerful and even physically shocking, as in the case of St. Paul who, we are told, fell from his horse upon hearing the  voice of Jesus from the heavens.  A striking contemporary account was posted by ‘Steve’ on a spiritual website: 

“I had an intense vision of a shining cross that felt almost physical..a feeling as if I had been struck.  l had been reading a book on Billy Graham as I was searching for a belief system at the time.this was 40 years ago, yet I am still searching. I have no doubt that God is everywhere,but I feel that I received a message...yet failed to respond..as I don't know why it happened.”

Nature mysticism might also fall into this category.  In an ecstatic experience while walking in a forest, for example, a person may experience herself as a small part of the vast Web of Life but intimately connected with all other natural beings.

Non-dual mysticism is an experience, spontaneous or induced, of the dissolution or transcendence of ego, in which the individual intuits himself as identical with the Ground of Being or the Supreme Identity.  Hindu ‘moksha’ and Zen ‘satori’ are enlightenment experiences of this type.

It is to these two broad types of SE that I will direct the question “Are spiritual experiences real or illusory?” in what follows.

Are spiritual experiences real?

Is any experience real?  This may seem a startling question, but serious doubts about this come from two quarters.  The first is from the wisdom traditions themselves which claim that our ordinary experience is unreal or illusory in the sense that it hides the Truth about our real nature from us.  The second is from the materialist camp of academic philosophers and scientists.  Enamored of high-tech neuroscience, they assert that conscious experience is not what most people think it is.  Consciousness, they argue, is nothing but the buzzing of brain waves in response to external stimuli.  Subjective experience, therefore, is an illusion that neuroscience will one day dispel completely.

Standing aloof from this controversy for the moment, I want to distinguish two meanings of the word ‘real.’  When we ask if a spiritual experience is real, we can mean “Did it actually occur?”  To doubt this is to believe the experiencer may be lying.  Assuming we are not in the grip of an extreme cynicism, we can take Swinburne’s maxim as a reliable guide in most situations, especially when so many people claim to have had similar spiritual experiences.

When asking whether SEs are real, philosophers usually have the second meaning of ’real’ in mind, namely interpretive validity.  For humans, interpreting our experiences is unavoidable.  We cannot help but try to give some cognitive meaning to them, especially extraordinary ones of the kind we are discussing.  For example, philosophers are right to be skeptical of what we might call deity mysticism: claims made by people about their visions, voices, and other alleged supernatural phenomena.  Someone may interpret a vision of a being of awesome power and radiant light as an encounter with Jesus Christ - not just an imaginary Jesus, but the real Jesus appearing in the person’s visual field like any other person.  The usual objective validity tests are appropriate here:  Did anyone else witness the event?  Can the experience be replicated?  Could it be accounted for by some unusual conditions in the environment or some abnormal physical state of the experiencer?  Cultural relativity is another problem.  How is it that Christians in western countries always see Jesus or the angel Gabriel or some Christian saint but never the Hindu god Krishna or the fearsome Kali with her garland of skulls and skirt of severed arms?

Supernatural interpretations of dualistic mysticism, whether Christian or Hindu or other, come from the individual’s religious culture, usually a mythic frame of reference.  As such they are non-rational and therefore provide no evidence for rational assent.  ‘Pre-rational’ is a better characterization for reasons which we will see in a moment.

In a different category are the non-dual types of profound insight experience usually called ‘mystical.’  Mystics of this type do not describe their experiences in terms of visions, voices, or revelations from beyond.  They do not attribute their occurrence to any external source.  Many of them do not describe their experiences at all, reflecting the verse of the Tao Te Ching which cautions:  “Those who know do not speak.”  Deep mystical insight is a matter of absolute subjectivity, and those who do decide to describe their mystical experiences for teaching purposes always insist that their explanations are inadequate and paradoxical, beyond the reach of language and of reason itself.  They are properly termed trans-rational.  Study of texts and philosophy are useless.  Students are told that they must experience spiritual awakening directly for themselves by means of a deep interior investigation of their own minds.  Although enlightenment experiences can happen spontaneously, people usually need guidance by a master who will instruct them in specific spiritual practices and validate their experiences when they occur.

So what has philosophy to say about mystical experience?  Not much, because those who “know” are quite happy to admit that their interpretations are non-rational and therefore beyond the grasp of rational philosophies.  Buddhist masters, for example, willingly embrace the prevailing scientific theories about the cosmos, life, and the evolution of humans.  They are unfazed by the charge that their “philosophies” are replete with irresolvable paradoxes.  Zen masters challenge their students with ‘koans,’ paradoxical stories or sayings intended to defeat the rational mind.  Adepts and masters of all the traditions draw attention to the limitations of reason, its relativity and incompleteness, and its total inability to grasp the nature of Ultimate Reality.

As trans-rational direct apprehension of Original Mind, mystical insight transcends the domain of reason which is limited to the relatively superficial features of the sensory world and of rational thought.  Suddenly it’s not so clear who is the victim of illusion.

Direct experience is not accessible to the eye of reason.  The rational point of view is objective, the investigation of phenomena from the outside; whereas the vantage point of mystical insight is radical subjectivity, the view from within.  Meister Eckhart wrote, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He sees me.”  There is no scientific procedure that will yield that kind of result.

When asked why anyone should believe such claims, the mystics say, “Do not believe them!  See for yourself.  Try these practices.  In time, with dedication and patience, you will realize Enlightenment.  You will see eye to eye with the Buddha, who is none other than your True Self.”

For the skeptic to set intellectual argument aside and actually walk the walk of spiritual practice herself is to practice what Ken Wilber calls ‘good science,’ in this case good spiritual science.  The approach, he says, is exactly analogous to the standard experimental method of physics, chemistry and the rest.  The seeker is offered a hypothesis:  If you want a glimpse of Ultimate Reality, you must take up this meditation practice.  Check it out for yourself; perform the experiment.  Then seek out confirmation of your experience with one or more members of the community of enlightened beings.

So, are spiritual experiences real or illusory?  As we have seen, countless people have told their stories of extraordinary experiences, and, for the most part, we have no reason to think they are lying.  Many of those accounts fail the validity tests available to science and philosophy and are therefore justly called illusions.  Others, however, those I have called mystical are beyond the reach of objective truth-tests.  To validate them requires direct experience of Ultimate Reality which, we are told, is available to anyone who has the courage and the dedication to undertake the recommended practices.  When confronted by such claims, mere philosophy must honestly admit, “I don’t get it.”

 * * * *

I concluded the meeting with the following remarks:

It is difficult to imagine the evolutionary history of human culture without spiritual experiences.  The founders of the great religious traditions were all inspired by profound experiences of the Sacred.  However, until recently such experiences were thought to be available only to special persons:  medicine men, saints, and mystic sages.  Everyone else was expected to be only religious, not spiritual.

Nowadays the situation is vastly different.  Because we have access to all the world’s spiritual traditions as well as the great contributions of western psychology and philosophy, we know that SEs are part of the birthright of all human beings.  We also know that while a spiritual experience is only a brief opening to Spirit, techniques such as meditation and yoga, are widely available to help us transform our entire lives in the direction of ever-increasing truth, freedom, beauty, and goodness.

Mystical experiences in particular and the spiritual philosophies that flow from them reveal the higher potentials of human existence.  At the very highest level, mystical experiences awaken us to the constricting smallness of our ordinary selves with their egocentric desires and habits.  They point us toward what the sages have always told us is what we really desire - union with the Infinite.

This ennobling yet mysterious ideal is captured nicely in a poem by the 20th century Tibetan lama and Buddhist master, Kalu Rinpoche:

You live in illusions

                     and the appearance of things.
                    There is a Reality;
                    you are that Reality.
                    When you recognize this,
                    you will realize that you are no thing
                    and being no thing, you are Everything.

 

SEARCHING FOR GOFFMAN

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.  

              -  William Shakespeare, As You Like It

One of the themes of postmodern philosophy the general public does not want to hear about is the deconstruction of the self.  Your self - the person you think you are from birth to death -  we are told by postmodern sages, is nothing but a socially constructed concept or image or narrative shaped by historical forces and concealing numerous biases and strategies of deception.  The self until recently had been conceived as the independent ‘I’ of Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” the sovereign individual as in ‘rugged individualism,’ the John Galt of Atlas Shrugged, the bearer of the universal human rights and freedoms ensconced in the world’s constitutions and charters.  That sturdy, enduring self or ego, the postmoderns tell us, does not exist.  It’s an illusion.

The theory behind this claim is called social constructionism.  There are at least two versions.  Whereas some postmodern thinkers use deconstruction to expose the self as a creature of Eurocentric triumphalism and male chauvinism, Erving Goffman took a more empirical, sociological approach.  Goffman, termed by some “the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century,” made his mark with a book titled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  He argued that humans in social situations constantly position themselves to be perceived by others in the best light possible by taking on roles appropriate for the given social context, much as an actor adopts a persona or mask in a stage production.  Different masks are required for work, parties, official gatherings, school classrooms, etc., sometimes juggled one after the other depending on who is encountered in fast-changing interactions.  Although Goffman did allow that in one’s private life, the masks can be dropped and a person can be herself,  he nevertheless drew the conclusion from his dramaturgical analysis that there is no True Self, no enduring entity answering to the pronoun ‘I.’*  The self just is a collection of masks and nothing more.  Many other contemporary thinkers have taken the same view.  Philosopher Julian Baggini states the  no-self argument with startling candor on Ted Talks.

The first thing to notice about this argument is that Goffman’s conclusion does not follow from his premises.  Granting for the sake of argument that:

People perform various habitual roles in different social situations,

it does not follow that:

There is no such thing as a person’s true self.

Goffman states his argument from an objective, sociological standpoint, but one’s true self, if it exists, will not be revealed by any objective approach because ‘self’ is essentially a subjective concept.  ‘Who am I?’ can ultimately be answered, if at all, only by me.  Objective facts do not lead necessarily to subjective conclusions.  I may infer from Donald Trump’s rhetoric that he is a racist, but that may only be one of his masks.  Perhaps deep inside he is not a racist; only he can know for sure.

A recent lighthearted summary of Goffman’s theory appeared recently on the Aeon Magazine website.  (Press here to see the two-minute video.) It hinted at a second serious flaw in the no-self position.  Who exactly is telling us this story?  A social role called Erving Goffman?  Is Goffman himself communicating behind a mask?  His theory says he is.  Does he actually consider himself to be just a mask labeled ‘Sociologist?’  If so, can we be sure that, behind the mask, he is telling us what he actually believes?  If he insists, “Yes, yes, I am telling you the truth,” can we be certain he has not just put on another mask labeled ‘Truth Teller,’ which conceals another mask labeled, perhaps, ‘Very Insistent Truth Teller,’ and so on?  This is the dreaded quicksand of infinite regress—masks behind masks behind masks indefinitely.  That might suit impish deconstructionists just fine, but Goffman wants to be taken seriously as a sober-minded scientist. Like ourselves, he can’t live with an infinite regress. 

Another big problem.  Can Goffman deny the existence of his selfhood without committing a performative contradiction?  Here’s what I mean.  A performative contradiction occurs when someone states a claim that is falsified by the act of stating it.  For example, if a person says, “I will not mention Susan’s divorce in this conversation,” the contradiction between the statement and the act of saying it is immediately apparent.  (This is different from a logical contradiction, which is a clash between two statements both of which cannot be true.  For example, “Socrates was a Greek,’ and ‘Socrates was not a Greek.’)  Similarly, if Goffman is required by his theory to admit, “I am just a mask,” he would appear to be uttering something equivalent to “I do not exist.”

In order to convince the rest of us that we are something like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, Goffman has to deal with the pesky feeling of ‘I am’ that we all have moment-to-moment at least during our waking hours.  Whenever I wish I can report to myself or to others what I am or what I am doing.  The popular custom of continuous texting gives self-reporting more air time than at any time in history.  A texts B:  ‘What’s up?’  B replies, “I’m fixing dinner.”  Five minutes later, A:  “Hey, I’m watching the hockey game.  What are you doing?”  B:  “I’m eating dinner.”   This “I am” could be prefixed to anything we are doing at any time, and we are convinced that this ‘I’ that I am is the same ‘I’ that I mentioned or felt or intuited five minutes ago or five days ago, perhaps even five decades ago.  Yes, the self undergoes many changes over a lifetime, some quite dramatic, but unless we suffer serious brain damage somewhere along the way, the sense of our core identity over time for most of us is very hard to dislodge, even if difficult to explain. 

Actually, our sense of self-identity needs no theory to support it.  It is a simple feeling of being that is ever present in our waking lives and even when we are dreaming.  “I am” seems to be the enduring background of our entire lives, the organizing principle of all our thoughts, feelings, memories, decisions, and actions.  Prior to any of those activities is this simple ‘I amness.’  Prior to taking on any social role—father, friend, business manager, socialite, cook, etc.— you simply are this ’I,’ the actor who executes the parts in your social drama and the one who is aware of yourself performing the roles.   Without that sense of being you, the agent and experiencer of all the role-changes life requires of you, your social process would be utterly incoherent, something very like insanity.

Although everyone has access to the sense or intuition of their enduring selfhood, that doesn’t mean they understand it or how it works.  Most of the time we identify with a particular role or set of roles that we think define us and are only dimly aware of the foundational ‘I amness’ that provides the ground of all our conscious activities.  If this Self is not a role or an emotion or a thought, what is its function?  An ancient Hindu philosophy, Vedanta, provides the answer:  ‘I am’ is pure awareness, the One who notices or observes or is aware of everything that happens in your life but is not involved or active in any of it.  For that reason, Vedanta calls it the Witness.  The Witness has no thoughts or feelings but is aware of all your thoughts and feelings.  It makes no judgment about what you do but merely observes your actions.  It is not a role that you enact in society, but it sees your roles just as they are.  The Witness, according to the tradition, is your True Self.

Philosophers say that the Witness is ontologically prior to any thinking, feeling, sensing, imagining, or role-playing that you may experience day-to-day, moment-to-moment.  If you were not already aware of what happens in your experiential space, you could not think about what is happening in the experience or have any feeling about it.  For example, while on a walk in the local park, you look up from the pavement and see a rosebush in full bloom.  Just there, in that indivisible moment, you are purely aware of the flowers.  The reaction follows in a flash: “Beautiful!” First the awareness, then the feeling.

This bare witnessing is the reason you can remember past experiences.  During the racketball game yesterday, you were completely immersed in the activity.  You were the player, dodging, leaping, making shots.  At the same time, unnoticed by you the player, the Witness was noticing everything you did and filing it away somehow in memory.  This doesn’t mean you will remember everything - some people can apparently - but without the Witness dispassionately recording your performance, you could remember nothing at all.

All of the foregoing is what philosophy tells us.  But you don’t have to rely on mere speculation to apprehend the reality of the Witness.  You can directly experience your ’I amness’ whenever you have a quiet moment.  It’s not complicated.  Sit in a quiet place, relax, and just begin to notice what comes up - bodily sensations arise, thoughts, feelings, memories - one after another, never the same moment-to-moment.  Let them go; try not to analyze or judge them.  Before long, you will realize that you are not any of those sensations, thoughts, feelings, or memories.  You are the Witness of those, the ‘I am’ that operates above and beyond the stream of ever-changing experience, noticing all of it, recording everything like a video camera, without judgment, without preference, without emotion.  Pure awareness, pure ’I am’ - that’s who you really are. 

The Witness is always on duty, usually in the background, a perspective on all you do but hidden from your ego-self in the stream of everyday experience.  The Witness is not a social role that you can take on and take off. It is not any particular mask that you might use to present yourself to the world.  It is not even your ‘authentic self,’ for that too may be just another mask or a delusional self-image.  

Imagine Erving Goffman searching among his masks for his true self.  Like most of us, he did not know how or where to look.  It was there the whole time, “hard to find, but impossible to avoid.”

____________________________

* For a humorous portrayal of one man's attempt to 'be himself,' watch the video Just Be Yourself  here.

DOES GOD EVOLVE?

This was the topic discussed at our January Philosophers' Cafe.  The following contains the text of my opening presentation.  - C. Marxer

God has evolved right along with humans.  Like us, his precise origins are lost in the fogs of prehistory.  His lineage can be dimly traced back through many generations of animal ancestors and nature spirits, worshipped by ancient hunting/gathering clans and tribes.  When people invented farming, the nature spirits were replaced by more anthropomorphic deities.  These tended to be power gods bent on outdoing competitors and helping their tribes or chiefdoms conquer territory, enslave enemy peoples, and set up permanent kingdoms.  Our God was one of those.  Let’s begin with his first appearance in history.

 Apparently God—called El or Yahweh in the old days—was born into a dysfunctional family of Mesopotamian deities about 4000 years ago.  He grew up in a tough neighborhood.  In order to protect his Chosen People, called Israelites, and receive the worship to which he felt entitled, he had to do some terrible things like wipe out a few tribes and kill the firstborn of Egyptian families.  As a result of all that nastiness, he developed some unfortunate character traits:  narcissism, jealousy, impulsive anger, bossiness, misogyny, sexual prudishness, and a fondness for murder and genocide.  His early career was marked by many triumphs and humiliating defeats at the hands of other gods. 

Finally sometime in the sixth century BCE, Yahweh became the chief god of the Jews and the only one whose existence they would acknowledge.  After a few more decades, Yahweh became fed up with the stresses of his job and decided to let the Jews fend for themselves.  As usual they made a mess of things, so God decided to intervene one more time.  He sent his only-begotten son Jesus to set things right, but that didn’t work out very well, either.  So the Heavenly Father recalled his son, quit the earthly life altogether, and retired to heaven to become the One and Only transcendent God of the whole universe.  Good career move.

God is acknowledged as the One Supreme Being today by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He no longer meddles in human affairs or performs miracles to prove how awesome He is but prefers to rule from an infinite distance through the laws of nature and the instructions of the various priests, preachers, prophets, popes, and imams who serve as His ministers on Earth. 

Philosopher and filmmaker Woody Allen once allowed that God is not evil, that the worst you could say about him is that he is an underachiever.  I disagree.  I think God is a case of arrested development.  His evolution from polytheism to monotheism indicates a certain gain in maturity, but he seems to have exited the world before attaining his full potential.  So we must ask:  what kind of a god is God these days?  Is he the best that he can be, or is he still a work in progress?  What would his psychograph look like?  Does he need therapy?

Like that of humans, God’s psychological development, has been uneven.  

For example, the level of humanity’s cognitive development is very high.  Literacy rates worldwide are at record levels, and among the intellectual elite we have advanced logic, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, and Scientology.  The level of God’s cognitive development is also very high (according to some, he knows everything).

On the other hand, the level of humanity’s moral evolution is unimpressive -  approximately that of an average 14-year old with anger management problems.

God, too, has evolved morally to about the level of a 14-year old, but with precocious power (some say He’s omnipotent).  Anger management problems are the least of his disorders.  I mean, look at what he allows to go on around here:  massacres, genocides, suicide bombings, American imperialism, and Donald Trump.  God apparently still hates pagans, unbelievers, idolators, homosexuals, transvestites, masturbators, fornicators, birth controllers, African Americans, Syrian refugees, Palestinians, and Muslim women.  In fact, he seems not to think very highly of women in general, ever since that minor transgression in the Garden of Eden.  He just can’t get over it.  Also, although he is supposedly pro-life, he aborts millions of unborn humans every year in procedures called miscarriages.

Here’s another of God’s adolescent traits.  The Heavenly Father is more like a Heavenly Voyeur (some say he knows and sees everything.)  He seems to enjoy watching us screw up.  He also likes to watch humans and animals suffer so-called natural disasters such as falling from high places, sinking in quicksand, being eaten alive, suffocating in sandstorms, drowning at sea, burning to death in fires, succumbing to horrible diseases, and fatally ingesting peanuts.

However, God is not entirely disengaged from his creation.  Just as humans love board and video games, God is obsessed with planetary games, usually of a violent sort, such as whipping up monstrous storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, plagues of locusts and pine beetles, species extinctions, and global warming.  One of his favorite games is World of Warfare, which now looks to become as eternal as he is.  He’s saving his absolute favorite for last, called the Rapture, which He wins by destroying the world.

This is all pretty immature.  Like us, God has a long way to go.

*  *  *  *  *

This somewhat cheeky account elicited a wide range of challenges:

  -  “Ideas about God change, but God Himself is eternal and unchanging.”

  -  “God doesn’t exist; ideas about God change in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions.”

-  “What about other gods in other traditions?”

-  “What about the God of the heart or feeling?”

-  “I have conversations with God every day, so this topic is irrelevant.”

-  “God is not necessarily a ‘He.’”

Surprisingly, no one accused me of shortstopping the story with the death of Jesus, the Son of Yahweh.  What about Jesus’s legacy?  What about Christianity?  What about the good news of universal salvation in the Gospels?  What about the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology? Isn’t God now the loving Heavenly Father and, being so, has he not achieved full maturity in his moral development? 

I confess to the crime.  God’s biography does not end in the first century CE. Jesus corrected the bad reputation his father had acquired over the centuries, proclaiming that God actually loves people and has prepared a new destiny for them: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John: 3:15, New International Version)  Jesus further announced that the old, severe Mosaic law was to be enhanced by a new law of love extending even to one’s enemies.  We can justly call this a considerable leap forward in moral maturity.

Unfortunately, Jesus had preached a mixed message.  Yes, he enjoined his followers to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves and even to love their enemies, but he also said he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).  Furthermore, those who rejected him, he warned, would suffer eternal hellfire, a terrifying doctrine much emphasized by the Christian Church which took Jesus literally in his comment about that “sword.”  Crusades and inquisitions followed a few centuries later.  So this new God was not so different from the old boss God.  He still demands exclusive obedience and faith and continues to allow the horrors I listed above (and many others). 

As I said earlier, this God still has a long way to go.  My Christian critics are right about one thing, though:  there is a larger story to tell about the evolution of God, but what many don’t yet recognize is that the Abrahamic God represents just part of it.  Developmental psychology, anthropology, and spirituality tell us that over some 200,000 years human cultures and their God(s) have evolved through at least 6 identifiable stages or structures, each of which represents an advance over the previous stages while retaining the most important features of those stages.  In the following brief summary, I will continue to use the name ‘God’ as convenient shorthand for the various stages of spiritual development and to stress the underlying unity of the evolutionary story. 

The overall pattern of the evolutionary story is that of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or emergence, crisis, transcend-and-include.  All cultural stages—the archaic, the magical, the mythic, etc, eventually encounter problems that can’t be solved at their level of consciousness.  A higher level then emerges along with changes in technology and social organization.  The God of the earlier stage is replaced by a more adequate God who helps the society to stabilize itself at the higher level.  Magical God evolves to mythic, mythic to rational, rational to pluralistic, and beyond.

First to appear (emerge) in humanity’s spiritual story is the magical God of the survival clans of ancient times.  It was perceived as nature and ancestral spirits which could both harm and benefit the group.  Shamans exercised supernatural power through visions, rituals, curses, and spells.  Eventually, crises of various kinds, e.g. population growth, required God to exercise more power.

With the emergence of larger tribal societies and chiefdoms comes the magical/mythic God, still polytheistic but more anthropomorphic and more powerful.  He/she required worship and sacrifices in return for protecting the tribe from enemies, demons, dragons and other horrible beasts, and natural disasters.  The young Yahweh was just such a god, a warrior god, as we have seen, endowed with great magical power over people and nature.  Again crises forced God to adapt and vanquish rivals.

Next to appear is the mythic God, often portrayed as Creator and Ruler of the world whose Sacred Power and Absolute Law is revealed in scriptures or through prophets. His plan for the salvation of all is administered—often brutally—by emperors, kings, or religious authorities who claim to rule by Divine Right.  This God was virtually unchallenged for hundreds of years until the myths began to crumble under the assault of a new, naturalistic engine of truth—science.

The modern era saw the rise of a rational God who relies on the scientific method as the sole source of truth about the world.  This God is dismissive of magic and myth, which are seen to be literally false.  He prefers rational discourse to religious command as a means of achieving cooperation in human affairs.  Salvation in the form of endless Progress is promised by the God of reason and technology.  This structure dominates in today’s globalized civilization, but is now facing multiple serious crises.

A few decades ago, a pluralistic or holistic God appeared, taking a broader perspective than the analytic and materialistic rational God, who was perceived to be shot through with gender, racial, and ethnic bias; its economic system guaranteed to produce gross inequalities and class conflict.  Rational God was also oblivious to its destructive effects on the environment.  The new pluralistic God identifies itself with the Great Web of Life, seeing all things and people as interrelated and interdependent.  Relativism, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism, truth and reconciliation, environmentalism, animal rights, consensus decision-making, and emotional sensitivity are among its principal values.  All positive and noble in theory.  Unfortunately, pluralistic God’s political correctness, extreme relativism and deconstruction, narcissism, and contempt for all other Gods seems now to a growing number of thinkers to be an obstacle to the more radical approach needed to effectively address the various crises the world now faces.

In response, just emerging now among a small but growing  number of individuals worldwide is an integral or holistic God that discovers the patterns that connect the previous stages with one another in a coherent, global evolutionary process.  He/she/it preserves all of the life-enhancing traits of earlier Gods, while critiquing those aspects of the mythic, rational, and pluralistic Gods that lead to environmental destruction, military and culture wars,etc, blocking solutions to the wicked problems we face in today’s world.  Integral God uses information from all major cultures, traditions, and academic disciplines and fully honors all higher spiritual levels and states of conscious development.  He/she/it is taking the first steps toward a Theory of Everything that has wide applicability to the problems faced by a fragmented, broken world.

If this story is accurate, we can see that God has indeed evolved, not really with us, as I said initially, but rather in us.  The history of God is our history.  It should be clear by now that I have been extending the name ‘God’ far beyond the Yahweh or Allah of the Abrahamic religions.  If ‘God’ makes you uncomfortable, you can substitute ‘Spirit,’ ‘Consciousness,’ or some other term that feels better to you. 

Whatever term you use, the story will be the same, the story of an evolving universe that seems to have put humans at the cutting edge of creative advance where the next stage will emerge.  Will God have a central role to play in the coming transformation?  If so, which God?

*  *  *  *

Sources:

For more on Yahweh’s moral development from an atheist perspective, see Robert Wright, The Evolution of God.

Good introductions to Integral Philosophy can be found in  Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution and Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything.

Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview is an award-winning documentary featuring comments by 15 scholars, journalists, and philosophers on why a radical new vision for the world’s future is needed.  It can be viewed free at http://crossroadsfilm.com/.

REINCARNATION SCIENCE

This is a slightly enhanced text of the talk I gave at the November 14 Philosophers’ Café.

It’s hard to know what to think about reincarnation.  The Dalai Lama says he does not remember his previous lives.  Shirley MacLaine says she remembers all of hers.  So did the Buddha, according to the legend, although he advised his disciples not to think about the afterlife – they weren’t going to find out anything about it.  His Tibetan disciples of later times thought a great deal about reincarnation and still do.  They think the most urgent task of life is to strive for moral perfection so as to escape the seemingly endless cycle of birth and rebirth that humans are fated to endure.  Not exactly a recommendation.

Reincarnation is the religious or philosophical belief that a human life does not end at death, that in some manner an essential aspect of a person survives and is born into a new body with a whole new life to live.  We have to define the term rather abstractly because different traditions hold different notions about what it is exactly that reincarnates. 

Reincarnation is not a mainstream belief in western cultures, but it is well established in many others:  the ancient Greeks (Plato), Hindus, Buddhists, West Africans, North American natives, even early Christians.  Some modern esoteric philosophies embrace the doctrine as well.
Mainstream philosophy these days tends to be materialistic and oriented towards science, math, and logic as the only reliable sources of knowledge.  Most mainstream thinkers, therefore, are dismissive or even contemptuous of all supernaturalistic beliefs.  Hence, there is not much literature on the subject of reincarnation.

I had not taken much of an interest in reincarnation before starting work on this talk.  Frankly, the thought of this life being only one of an interminable series of existences I found rather depressing.  But philosophers must face music of all kinds, so I started to find out what current (and respectable) literature is available.  In addition to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, I read three recent books on the subject, each approaching the subject from a different point of view.  Robert Thurman’s Infinite Life was written from the standpoint of an expert on Tibetan Buddhism and spirituality.  Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake’s The Immortal Mind aims for a synthesis of empirical research and quantum physics in search of a paradigm shift in how we should think about human life and afterlife.  Life Before Life by Jim B. Tucker is a strictly scientific study of children’s stories about their previous existences.

Does it surprise you to learn of scientific interest in reincarnation?  A considerable body of serious research into the subject has accumulated over nearly 50 years. There are many books that contain the stories of people who remember their past lives, but I have confined my attention to the work of two researchers at the University of Virginia, Dr. Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim B. Tucker.  Together they have compiled and evaluated over 2500 cases of children's memories of previous lives. Dr. Stevenson, who wrote the introduction to Life Before Life, is the preeminent expert in the field, having specialized in this type of research for over 40 years.

Time does not allow for recounting even one of the stories, which tend to be lengthy and detailed, so I will restrict my remarks to the scientists' methods and their conclusions. Researchers in this field are working in the domain of social psychology. That means the data they are interested in are the reports or stories they are told by their subjects, in this case children who have or had memories of previous existences. The research requires travel to the homes of the children, detailed interviews with the children, their parents, and other adults who may be familiar with the stories, and careful checking of the stories by interviewing anyone who might have known or known of the previous person.

The researchers adopted a strictly open-minded, analytical approach, as required by any scientific investigation. The goal of the project is “to determine the best explanation for the statements by the children and to see if science should consider reincarnation as a possibility.” The broad approach is that of systematic skepticism: reject any case as unsolved that could possibly be accounted for by normal explanations; resort to paranormal explanations as a last resort.

The subjects of the research were usually children, who began to tell their stories between 2 and 4 years of age. The basic pattern of the stories is that a young child repeatedly claims to have memories of a previous life and gives enough details to identify a deceased individual whose life matches the child's statements. The remembered lives tend to be recent, the median time between death and the new life being only 15 – 16 months. Almost always only one life is described. Physical marks, behaviors, and emotions seem to carry over as well as memories. The children always speak from the viewpoint of the previous person, e.g. “I was your grandmother.” “You are not my parents; I need to get back to my real parents.” “This is my house.”

Most of the children stop talking about their previous lives at 6 or 7 years of age. Some even deny remembering, which is not surprising. At this age many childhood memories are lost,  (“early childhood amnesia”).  They almost never talk about what happened between the lives, and rarely offer any words of wisdom. The focus is on people and events.

After confirming the statements that could be confirmed, the scientists were faced with the question of how to explain these bizarre stories. They considered two types of explanation: normal and paranormal:

• Normal: fraud (intentional lying by adults), fantasy, coincidence, knowledge acquired through normal means, faulty memory, and genetic memory (not generally accepted by scientists).

• Paranormal: telepathy, clairvoyance, spirit possession, and reincarnation.

In Life Before Life, Prof. Tucker describes in detail the meticulous process of ruling out normal explanations for the cases the researchers categorize as “strong.” No single explanation applies to all the features of a given case. Birthmarks and birth defects; childrens' statements; past-life behaviors; and children's recognitions of persons still alive may call for different normal explanations to be applied. All the normal explanations failed in the strongest cases. For those the researchers were forced to consider the paranormal.

Overall conclusion

Tucker, Stevenson and others working in the field have become convinced “that reincarnation is the best - even though not the only - explanation for the stronger cases we have investigated.” As Prof. Stevenson put it, “Memories, emotions, and even physical injuries can sometimes carry over from one life to the next.” However, they insist, the evidence does not warrant postulating a soul as the vehicle of reincarnation. Exactly how the personal characteristics move from one life to the next remains a mystery.

Tucker admits this is an astounding conclusion but insists it is not more so than some currently accepted in theories in physics (“weird science”). Therefore, he says, as required by good science, we must be willing to consider reincarnation as a possibility. He is careful to point out that this conclusion requires the assumption that (non-physical) consciousness is a fundamental part of the universe.

In my opinion Tucker's conclusion is somewhat too conservative. Since there is no scientific law that precludes reincarnation as defined in the studies, philosophers have known all along that reincarnation is a possibility. There is no contradiction in the notion that consciousness can exist independently of the body, which partly explains why people throughout history have found it easy to imagine a soul going to heaven or hell, ghosts returning to haunt the living, spirits taking over a person's mind, and so on. What the modern studies have added to the tradition is empirical evidence that reincarnation is a fact. Again, the claim is about evidence, not proof. Proof of the sort found in mathematics and physics is not attainable in this domain. But it seems to me that the evidence contained in the researches we have been examining warrant the conclusion that reincarnation is to some degree probable, not merely possible.

All scientific conclusions and predictions are more or less probable.  Well established theories in physics and chemistry enjoy a high degree of probability.  Social sciences have to settle for a lower standard, but the best results in those domains nevertheless qualify as knowledge.  There is no reason to expect less from a scientific study of stories of past lives.  Here is the basic argument of the reincarnation project:

1. We have lots of data - stories told by children in all regions of the world about past lives they remember.
2. Working hypothesis: at least some of these stories may not be explainable through normal means; a paranormal explanation may have to be employed. 
3. Investigation and analysis have revealed a number of cases (deemed 'strong') that cannot plausibly be explained through normal means.
4. Other paranormal explanations are useless (unverifiable, unfalsifiable).

Therefore, reincarnation is the best explanation for the strong cases.  I contend that if Tucker and company want their investigations to be regarded as advancing the cause of science, that is, as new knowledge, they should be willing to say that reincarnation is probably real.

TROUBLE WITH THE BRAIN, Part 2

By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems.    -  H. Rittel and M. Webber

Neuromania has become popular as a term for scientists and others who have been so dazzled by advances in neuroscience in the last few decades that they have persuaded themselves that brain science can explain everything about the human mind, consciousness, and selfhood.  Prof. Joe Herbert is afflicted with neuromania, but at least he understands the fundamental problem that is blocking progress toward preventing and treating mental disorders.  It is that we cannot answer the question: How does the brain produce consciousness?  Let’s call this the Standard Question.

One serious problem with this formulation is that it rules out approaches by psychoanalysis and other branches of psychology that have a lot to say about consciousness and mental problems but do not concern themselves with the brain.  Could it be that many so-called mental disorders can be understood as problems of living that are best dealt with by the methods of talking therapy and not by drugs or other brain treatments?  If so, then a balanced approach should be interdisciplinary, which calls for abandoning the Standard Question in favor of a more open definition of the problem.  My suggestion is explained below. 

Part of the reason why science has failed to find an answer in several hundred years is that the question is not amenable to investigation by the experimental methods of brain science.  The brain is objective; it is observable.  Consciousness is subjective.  It cannot be observed.  Your thoughts, feelings, and dreams are private.  No one can know what they are unless you choose to say what they are.  So, to learn anything at all about what a brain event means, neuroscientists have to ask the subject what she is experiencing.  Even neuromaniacs know this.  What they don’t seem to realize is that by doggedly sticking with the Standard Question they beg the prior question, does the brain produce consciousness?  If it doesn’t, then there is no hope of finding out how the brain produces consciousness.  If you define a problem incorrectly at the outset, your chances of hitting upon the right solution are nil.

Does the brain produce consciousness?  Let’s make this specific:  does the brain produce thoughts?  There is not the slightest evidence that it does.  ‘Produced’ is a causal metaphor taken from agriculture and manufacturing.  In both of those we can watch the process of production take place - a farmer’s field produces crops, products roll off an assembly line.  We can see the beginning, we can watch the process unfold, and we see the product at the end.  By contrast, no one  has ever seen a brain produce a thought.  Here’s an ordinary thought from arithmetic:  5 + 7 = 12.  When you think that thought, will a neuroscientist be able to see it in your brain with his scanner?  Of course not.  What’s in the brain is physical; the neurons have mass; the energy of their activity can be measured.  A math equation is not visible, has no mass, no measurable energy, no physical characteristics whatsoever.  Therefore, it cannot be in the brain, nor can it be produced in any simple sense by the brain.  ‘Production’ is a bad metaphor for our purposes.

To realize this is not to deny that our brain interacts with our mind.  It clearly does, and neuroscience is making great progress in learning more about brain-mind correlations.  But because of its narrow focus, neuroscience never gets beyond this basic premise:  the brain is a necessary condition for mental activity to occur.  No brain, no thoughts or feelings.  Damaged brain, impaired thinking or feeling.   Take off the tunnel viewer and we realize the brain is only one item in a large network of necessary conditions, including our cardio-vascular system, our digestive system, and the other parts of our bodies that are essential to life and therefore to the proper functioning of the brain.  So the whole body is involved along with other, non-body conditions that I will discuss later.  Neuromania commits the Fallacy of the Single Cause:  the assumption that because the brain is a necessary condition, then it must be the sole and sufficient cause of our mental lives.  That’s plainly false.  (It’s not science, by the way, since no experiment supports the assumption.  It’s bad philosophy.)

The Standard Question also ignores the fact that the relationship between brain and mind is a two-way street.  It is inter-action.  Mental activity can bring about changes in the brain.  Neuroplasticity and the placebo effect are just two items of evidence that demonstrate this.

The brain does not produce thoughts, feelings, dreams or any other experience.  So to ask “How does the brain produce consciousness?” is to mis-define the problem.   It sends researchers off in a direction that cannot fail to mystify them in the way so poignantly described by Prof. Herbert in his Aeon piece.  In my previous post I asked three questions that pose no difficulty for any six-year-old child but leave neuromaniacs scratching their heads.  Here they are again:

1. If I imagine my mother’s face, why can’t a neuroscientist see the image in my brain, even with his state of the art scanning machine? 

2. If pain sensations occur entirely in my brain, why do I feel the pain of a sore toe in the toe and not in my head?

3. Suppose I spot a bird in a tree and point it out to a friend.  If seeing the bird takes place entirely in my brain, why do I point away from my head toward the tree? 

Here are the straightforward answers that anyone not afflicted with neuromania understands perfectly well:

1.  Because the image of my mother’s face is not in my brain.  

There is no “inner theater” inside my brain equipped with a little screen on which my imagined pictures are projected.  The same goes for my dreams.  So, you may ask, if not in my brain, then where are they?  This is another misguided question.  People assume everything real has to have location in space, but we have seen already that this belief is false.  Thoughts are real, so are dreams and the phantoms of my imagination, but because they have no physical characteristics, they are not physical realities and therefore cannot be located in our very physical brain.  And if they are not in my brain, then they are not anywhere at all.  There may be a way to avoid this strange conclusion, but if there is it won’t be through the dogmas of neurophilosophy. 

2.   Because the pain you feel is actually in the toe, not in your brain. 

This is laughably obvious.  Only a neuromaniac would try to persuade you that you are really feeling the pain in your brain, as if there were no difference between a toe-ache and a headache.  Of course, that’s not how the point is usually stated.  Materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett says that experiences like painful toes are illusions.  The pain seems to be in the toe, but that’s an illusion created by the brain, which is where the pain really is.  Surprise!  Your brain is a sly illusionist that has evolved over millions of years in order to fool you about the nature of your most ordinary experiences.  How the species survived all this time while trying to adapt to an illusory world is not explained.

3.  Because you are seeing the bird in the tree, not in your head.

There is a story going around about a psychiatric patient who was convinced that he had a squirrel in his head.  Now a condition of that sort is not impossible if the squirrel is small enough, but a bird in a tree is another matter altogether.  The tree is too big. 

Squirrel in Head 

No doubt I will be accused of trivializing the serious ideas of highly paid professors of philosophy and neuroscience.  My bad, but these absurdities are just the logical consequences of trying to cram all of our experiences into a 3-pound lump of meat and then poking around in it to somehow find them again in the tangle of 86 billion neurons that make up the meat. 

Back to our main issue - if the Standard Question is poorly formulated, how should we state the mind-body problem?  I suggest we scrap it altogether because, as we have seen, it is based on faulty assumptions and has unbelievable implications. 

1. The Standard Question assumes that the brain alone is fundamental (materialism) and mind is secondary - a mere product or epiphenomenon. 

2. It assumes that the brain is like a factory, “producing” thoughts and feelings like the liver produces bile. 

3. It implies, weirdly, that mental activity begins and ends in the brain and that our experience of a body and a world outside the brain is an illusion. 

4. It implies that brain science is the only reliable source of knowledge about consciousness and the only path to discovering treatments for mental dysfunction.

5.  Strangest of all perhaps is that the materialist project dismisses the most basic conviction people hold about how their lives work, namely that it is the self who thinks, perceives, feels, and acts.  Here is world-famous neuromaterialist Patricia Churchland who has worked long and hard to convince herself that she is just a brain in a skull:

           My brain and I are inseparable. I am who I am because my brain is what it is. Even so, I often think about my brain in terms different from those I use when thinking about myself. I think about my brain as that and about myself as me.  I think about my brain as having neurons, but I think of me as having a memory. Still, I know that my memory is all about the neurons in my brain. Lately, I think about my brain in more intimate terms as me.

All of these ideas have been seriously damaged, if not demolished, by philosophical criticism.  Since we are very far from a significant consensus among scientists and philosophers on these matters, there is no good reason to stick with the Standard Question.  Philosopher Colin McGinn argues that we cannot answer it, because the human mind lacks the basic concepts to link the subjective realm of mind with the objective realm of the physical brain.  This is another way of recognizing that the Standard Question is a badly formulated problem. 

Can we do better?  Yes, but we are not likely to get a simple, all-encompassing question that can guide our investigations.  Here are the facts we have to work with: 

1. I am a conscious person whose essential nature is awareness.  I am aware of my inner world of thoughts, perceptions, memories, dreams, emotions and a lot of other interesting phenomena.

2. I am intimately related to my body without which I would have no life or consciousness.  My body is part of an external world of objects and events with which I interact constantly.

3. I live in relationship with other beings who have inner lives and with whom I must achieve mutual understanding and work cooperatively.

Each of these aspects of my world is taken as a domain of investigation by various branches of inquiry:  introspective psychology and spirituality, the physical sciences, and the social and cultural sciences, respectively.  Each is defined by its own broad, orienting question:

1.  Who am I?  What can I know about my own mental activities and potentialities?

2.  What can we know about the world we live in?

3.  What can we know about our relationships with others and how we should behave towards them? 

After a 400-year philosophical digression into an unfortunate debate about mind and body, we have circled back to the Big Three Questions that have always defined the project of philosophy.  It feels like coming home. 

Is there a way to integrate these great fields of inquiry, to show how they all fit into a larger map of knowledge and reality?  Perhaps, but that’s a story for another time.