Where did I fit into this spectrum, or parade, of theological options? Officially as an atheist, of course, the progeny of a working-class lineage that had come to see the “one true God” as a prop for human power relations and his priests as cynical parasites. They were right, these ancestors, as far as I could see, particularly the great-grandmother whose dying act was to throw off the cross that had been placed on her chest. She understood that the great, unforgivable crime of the monotheistic religions has been to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of hierarchy and justice. When the pious bow down before the powerful or, in our own time, the megachurches celebrate wealth and its owners, the “good” and perfect God is just doing his job of legitimizing human elites.
But nonbelievers have mystical experiences too, and mine seemed to locate me squarely in the realm of animism. That was more or less the state of things as I encountered them in May 1959—a world that glowed and pulsed with life through all its countless manifestations, where God or gods or at least a living Presence flamed out from every object. For most of my adult life I had denied or repressed what I had seen in the mountains and desert as unverifiable and possibly psychotic. But thanks to my years of research into history, prehistory, and theology, I was intellectually prepared, maybe as recently as a decade ago, to acknowledge the possible existence of conscious beings—“gods,” spirits, extraterrestrials—that normally elude our senses, making themselves known to us only on their own whims and schedules, in the service of their own agendas. In fact, I began to think, edging to this conclusion bit by bit and with great trepidation, that I had seen one.
But what was I going to say? Not that many people were asking, but I was no longer a social isolate or solipsist. I had embraced my species and accepted the responsibilities that go with membership in it, which meant, at the very least, that I could not tell a lie. When the subject of my atheism came up in a television interview a few years ago, I said only that I did not “believe in God,” which was true as far as it went. Obviously I could not go on to say, “I don’t have to ‘believe’ in God because I know God, or some sort of god anyway.” I must have lacked conviction, because I got a call from my smart, heroically atheist aunt Marcia saying that she’d watched the show and detected the tiniest quaver of evasion in my answer.
Chapter 12
The Nature of the Other
It took an inexcusably long time for me to figure out that what happened to me when I was seventeen represents a widespread, if not exactly respectable, category of human experience. For what they are worth, some surveys find that almost half of Americans report having had a “mystical experience,” and if the category is expanded to “religious experience,” the number is even larger. In a culture where a routine observation can be judged “awesome” or an unusually good meal deemed a “religious experience,” I doubt that such surveys have much to tell us except that many otherwise ordinary people have had powerful and unusual experiences for which they cannot easily find words. But every now and then I come across something that rings true to me, such as this, which I should mention is from fellow writer and atheist Daniel Quinn:
Everything was on fire.…Every blade of grass, every single tree was radiant, was blazing—incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine.…But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation’s everlasting, silent hallelujah.
Of course all such experiences can be seen as “symptoms” of one sort or another, and that is the way psychiatry has traditionally disposed of the mystically adept: The shaman was simply the local schizophrenic, Saint Teresa of Ávila a clear hysteric (although it should be noted that she was also an able and busy administrator). The Delphic oracles may have been inhaling intoxicants; all of the great Christian mystics showed clear signs of temporal lobe epilepsy; indigenous people possessed by spirits are succumbing to “regressive id drives.” A recent paper from Harvard Medical School proposes that the revelations experienced by Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Paul can all be attributed to “primary or mood disorder–associated psychotic disorders.”
It’s also possible that some reported mystical experiences never happened at all. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus seems sincere enough—at least if it’s true that he was temporarily blinded and rendered mute—but later, when he starts boasting to the Corinthians about his ability to fall into trances and speak in tongues, it’s hard not to suspect some jostling over status in the emerging Christian hierarchy. I have always been a little suspicious too of Saint Hildegard of Bingen’s career-advancing revelation that she should found a convent—which she did indeed go on to do. Between the possibilities of mental illness, fakery, and opportunism, we are on slippery ground here.
There has been a certain amount of scientific interest in mystical states in recent decades, piqued by psychoactive drugs in the sixties and later spurred by the development of brain-scanning techniques showing, for example, metabolic changes associated with prayer and meditation. But for subjective accounts of naturally occurring, as opposed to drug-induced, experiences, the most useful work remains the psychologist William James’s chapter on “Mysticism” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, now more than a century old. I wish I had found it many years ago, but I acquired the book just in the last decade, and then for narrow historical research purposes, only turning to the “Mysticism” chapter in the last couple of years, when I fell upon it with almost prurient interest. Here are more than a dozen personal accounts of “cosmic consciousness,” “the ineffable,” even a consuming “fire,” and James judges none of them insane or unreliable. In fact, he seems to respect his informants, who include philosophers and psychiatrists, women and men, atheists and believers, and, it has been suggested, possibly also James himself, disguised as an anonymous source.
The accounts vary widely in emotional tone, from reported bliss to terror, but what strikes me on closer reading is that so many of them involve an encounter with some other form of being or entity, usually identified as “God,” though sometimes more neutrally as “the Infinite” or “a living Presence.” Neuroscientists today see anomalous mental experiences as entirely internal events, involving only the interactions of neurons and networks of neurons. In the subjective accounts curated by America’s first psychologist, however, whatever happens to a person in a mystical experience does not seem to be the work of that person alone.
I could not seriously entertain the possibility of an “encounter” in my own case until two things had happened. One is that I had emerged, in my early twenties, from solipsism. Starting on that night in the lab with Jack, when I got the idea that there was a mind behind his plain face, when I took the further imaginative leap to sense the human torment behind the headlines, and then, beyond any doubt, when my own children arrived in the world, I came to accept the idea of other minds as rich, complex, and tangled with emotion as my own. Once you have accepted the reality of other human minds, you open yourself up, for better or for worse, to the possibility of still other locations for consciousness, whether in animals or in things normally thought of as “things.”
The other development that nudged me in the direction of acknowledging an actual encounter was that in my early fifties I rather abruptly immersed myself in nature. That’s a dumb, anthropocentric word—“nature”—implying as it does that what is not man-made is somehow residual, which was far from the case in my new setting. For almost twenty years I had endured the aesthetic deprivations of a lower-middle-class suburb so that my children could go to the town’s first-rate public schools. Then the kids grew up and moved out and, independently of that, my second marriage came to an end. I made a midlife dash to Key West, where I had a few friends from our past vacations, and soon took up with a good-looking local who shared my love of the water. We liked our Old Town apartment building well enough, but eventually, worn down by the all-night pool parties in the guesthouses next door, decided to look for a
place of our own “up the Keys,” where the houses were cheaper and the nights still as death.
The second, and last, place we looked at was in Sugarloaf Key, a patch of land jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico from the lone highway connecting the necklace of islands that make up the Keys. We drove to the end of the paved road, then onto a dirt road cutting through a low jungle of indigenous buttonwoods, poisonwoods, sea grapes, and thatch palms. At the end of that was a pleasant gray house linked to the water by a boardwalk and a dock, and at the end of the dock was a kind of revelation: more than 180 degrees of turquoise water dotted with a series of tiny emerald mangrove islands. Live here, said a voice from the blue-green vastness—whatever it takes.
It took far less than it might have, because the former owner had the interior decorating tastes of a serial killer. All floor space was occupied by mounds of old newspapers, receipts, porn magazines, and crusty Styrofoam containers. We had the place cleaned out and painted, hauled up some used furniture from a store in Key West, and settled back to savor the gaudy sunsets and try to figure out what kind of a wild place we were settling.
Down in Key West, you can imagine you are in a patch of urban civilization, slightly shiftless and louche, but well stocked with restaurants, supermarkets, gossip, and thick human drama. In fact you could live your whole life on Key West, if you chose, without bothering to notice that you were on an island suspended more than a hundred miles below the Florida peninsula in the middle of the Caribbean. But on Sugarloaf there was no evading the fragility of our existence. Under us, a thin uprising of fossilized coral; to the south, the Atlantic; to the north, the Gulf. Here, you don’t think of global warming just as an “issue” but as the vivid, if remote possibility of being eaten by sharks in bed.
The very idea of an Atlantic and Gulf side is a conceit more appropriate to continent-dwellers, because there is of course just one all-surrounding sea. But our side, the Gulf side, a.k.a. the “back country,” is different in ways that can make town folks a little uneasy. Before moving up there, I remember talking to a sponger—that is, a man who fished for sponges in the shallow transparent waters of the back country, living for days in his motorboat—and he said a lot about the velvet silence of the tropical nights, the smooth, undulating traffic of the stingrays and sharks. But then he faltered as if there were something he couldn’t figure out how or even whether to say it.
I worked, in my usual disciplined, Calvinist way, at a desk facing a wall, but the outdoors was always tugging at me. If your idea of “nature” was formed in, say, the Catskills or the Cotswolds, you may think of it as a kind of absence or quiet, a soothing alternative to highways and cities. But here there was just so much going on, especially in the spring and summer when the water cycle goes into overdrive. All day the sky sucks steam from the warm seas, dumping it back in the psychotic violence of a late afternoon squall, then finishing up with a sweet, consoling rainbow. You might get waterspouts skidding across the Gulf in late summer, miniature tornadoes that mainly bother the birds but can peel off a roof. There may be almost too much to take in at one time—a sunset in the west, the rising moon in the east, a black storm riven with lightning moving in from the Gulf. One July night we stepped outside to find the horizon ringed with at least six discrete lightning storms, each in its own separate sphere of pyrotechnics, leading my friend—a man not known for metaphysical pronouncements—to mutter, “There is a God.”
Neither of us actually thought it was a “god,” but I began to understand that I was being drawn into something, maybe into that very thing that the sponger had hesitated to describe. I came to think of it as the Presence, what scientists call an “emergent quality,” something greater than the sum of all the parts—the birds and cloudscapes and glittering Milky Way—that begins to feel like a single living, breathing Other. There was nothing mystical about this Presence, or so I told myself. It was just a matter of being alert enough to put things together, to catch the drift. And when it succeeded in gathering itself together out of all the bits and pieces—from the glasslike calm of the water at dawn to the earsplitting afternoon thunder—there was a sense of great freedom and uplift, whether on my part or on its.
It is not always benevolent, this Presence. Oh, it can be as seductive as the scent of joewood flowers riding on a warm November breeze, as uplifting as the towering pink, self-important, Maxfield Parrish–type cumulus clouds that line up to worship the rising sun. But then, just like that, it can turn on you. I’ve gone out in my kayak on a perfectly inviting day, only to find myself fighting for my life against a sudden wind and the boiling chaos of the sea. I learned to keep going when survival was not guaranteed, did not even seem likely, by uttering a loud, guttural “unhh!” with each stroke of the paddle as a way of postponing exhaustion and defeat. I was not afraid of dying, because it was obvious that the Other, the Presence, whose face I could almost begin to make out in the foam, would continue just fine without me.
I know the currently popular scientific response to this kind of wild talk: that it is a mistake to see spirits in trees or to interpret certain states of mind as “encounters,” and it is, regrettably enough, a mistake that we humans are hardwired to make. But why would evolution favor an innate propensity to error? Here the cognitive biologists invoke the archaic threat of animal predators. Nothing is lost if you interpret that rustling sound in the night as the approach of a lion and there turns out to be no lion there. But the opposite mistake—dismissing the sound of an approaching lion as a wind in the trees—would be fatal.
So, according to the cognitive scientists, our brains are afflicted with a “Hyperactive Agency Detection Device,” predisposing us to imagine gods, faces in clouds, divine beings in rocks. This has become, in just the last decade or so, the killer argument against religion, as if we needed another one: that it is an odd relic of our evolutionary history as prey, this tendency to imagine “agents” where there are none. (Though I should mention that the ability to imagine other humans as conscious beings or “agents,” rather than as, say, androids, is never attributed to an oversensitive mental “device.” That ability is deemed healthy and normal.)
What the cognitive biological account tends to downplay, or rush right past in its hurry to get to a thoroughly anthropocentric conclusion, is that there actually were lions in the night, bears in the forest, and snakes in the grass. Suppose that of all the mystical experiences reported over the centuries, some actually were encounters with another sort of being or beings. Wouldn’t it be wise to investigate? After all, these other beings appear to be, at least for the duration of the encounter, more powerful than a human and at least as awe-inspiring as lions. They can even leave people temporarily unhinged, as I was in the months after May 1959. Saint Teresa reported that her revelations were sometimes accompanied by “great pain” or “an agony carrying with it so great a joy” as to leave one “ground to pieces.” Her contemporary Saint John of the Cross likened the Other he encountered in his mystic transports, who was presumably the Christian deity, to a “savage beast.” In our own time, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick experienced a theophany—a “self-disclosure by the divine”—which left him feeling more like “a hit-and-run accident victim than a Buddha.” He disintegrated into what was diagnosed as mental illness, to the point of earning a bed in a locked psychiatric ward for several weeks. If only from a public health perspective, we need to know whether there is some sort of etiological agent at work here other than the vague pall of “mental illness.”
Here is a humble analogy—some would say too humble and hence completely out of place in any discussion that touches on the “divine.” Until a little under two hundred years ago, most human cultures blamed disease on supernatural forces like spirits, curses, or the wrath of God or gods. More sophisticated societies traced illness to imbalanced “humors” or impediments in the flow of qi. As late as the mid-1800s, enlightened Europeans were focusing in on invisible airborne “miasmas” as the source of di
seases like cholera. If you had proposed in, say, 1800 that many of the most virulent diseases are in fact caused by tiny living creatures, similar to the “animalcules” detected by Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, your contemporaries would probably have judged you mad. It would be like suggesting that the love between people is mediated by a species of very small love bugs.
We forget now, after the easy triumph of the germ theory of disease at the end of the nineteenth century, how improbable the theory must have originally seemed. Humans had thought themselves alone on the earth, except for the animals and any spirits or gods, but we are an insignificant minority on a planet thickly populated by the invisible living beings we call microbes, leading biologist Stephen Jay Gould to call this the “Planet of the Bacteria.” Some are benign or even judged to be “good,” like Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which gives us wine, beer, and leavened bread. Others, like the smallpox virus or Yersinia pestis, the agent of bubonic plague, are vicious predators and, some argue, worthy targets for eradication.
Most accounts of mystical experiences—at least of those I have read, which by no means amount to a representative sample—insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be “living” or alive, as in “living God.” But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce—an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose? Every now and then a whiff of the biological breaks through the incense-ridden atmosphere of recorded mystical thought. Meister Eckhart, for example, the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century German monk who is often considered the greatest of the Christian mystics, proposed what could be interpreted as a shockingly zoomorphic God, one whose “nature…is to give birth,” over and over, eternally, in every human soul that will make room for him. In order to prepare a perfect setting for the divine birth—a sort of nest, or as Eckhart sometimes put it, a “manger”—a person must empty his or her soul of all ego and attachments and turn the resulting space over entirely to God.