Religious experience: Rethinking how our lives touch others

If religious experience can be reproduced, that has implications for how we live. Some few of us may be great artists who could communicate a religious experience in that way, but I think the greatest of spiritual gifts may be the most common, and most under-valued. Consider that some of the most poignant of timeless moments can be conversations, times when peoples' lives meet in profound ways, when people recognize themselves in each other. Or they can be simple moments of kindness that leave us changed. True fellowship is a profound experience.

We are each involved somehow in creating a measure of the holy somewhere in this world, for ourselves, for our families, for our neighbors. When we think of following in Christ's footsteps, we see the way he touched other peoples' lives. I think that, in some ways, our challenge in this world is more than simply having a religious experience, even of the quiet and everyday type. Our quest is not merely to acquire religious experience as religious consumers in the world. From what I can tell from reading the gospels, many people acted as though being with Jesus was itself a religious experience. I think the challenge is to be that unfailing warmth and trustworthiness, so that our homes and our lives become other peoples' profound moments of fellowship. The greatest gift one person can give another is love. It transforms not only the giver but the receiver as well. There is something about being loved that lifts us up and reflects worth and dignity. There is something about being loved that gives us strength and hope. That is what God does for us, what God does for the world. This is what he calls us to do for each other. When our fleeting "peak experiences" have gone, this is what makes the lasting substance of our lives.

Religious Experience in Art and Literature

Is it possible to capture or reproduce a religious experience?

There are some common themes in religious experience. As we've seen before, one of those is nature. Nature, in its unspoiled state, is an essential part of what makes "paradise". The nature-triggered religious experience may involve recognizing the paradise within nature, perceiving the holy or the timeless quality of what we see. While religious events and spiritual retreats are held in natural settings to increase the background perception of holiness, that is not quite the same as capturing it.

Some authors may have recorded a religious experience in a way that it can be re-experienced by the reader. There are some well-received authors who have done a respectable job, such as Coleridge and Tolkien. Tolkien, for example, describes nature so vividly that someone with a good imagination could have a nature-based religious experience from his description. Even if reading does not trigger a "peak experience", the reader may still have a quiet and persistent sense of the holy.

Likewise a painter or musician may attempt to capture a religious experience in such a way that it can be re-experienced by others. The Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah seems to have captured some of the essential traits of a religious experience in such a way that many people have a sense of the holy when listening to it. When it comes to Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, the words manage to form one part of the experience. They convey the sense of timelessness ("forever and ever ... "), the sense that God's benevolence is the ultimate power in the world ("For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth"), that any trouble we have in this world is a small thing compared to the world to come ("King of kings, and Lord of lords!"). There is some artistry in portraying a sense of underlying unity as all the different voices join in the one song, but with slightly different timing, so that you don't lose the sense that there are a series of different voices joined together. The music is also crafted so as to reinforce those messages, and enhance the sense of an intricate beauty, where beauty is also an underlying motif of religious experiences.

There is, in the best of art or literature, something profound, something that transcends. And for some artists who are drawing on the depths of the holy for their inspiration, that art itself can communicate the holy.

Religious commitment and health, well-being, quality of life

In Hinman's recent book, The Trace of God, he cites studies that compare religious and non-religious people and their quality of life. Here he relates a study by Gartner and Allen:

The Reviews identified 10 areas of clinical status in which research has demonstrated benefits of religious commitment: (1) Depression, (2) Suicide, (3) Delinquency, (4) Mortality, (5) Alcohol use, (6) Drug use, (7) Well-being, (8) Divorce and marital satisfaction, (9) Physical Health Status, and (10) Mental health outcome studies ... The authors underscored the need for additional longitudinal studies featuring health outcomes. (Hinman p 89, citing J. Gartner, D.B. Allen, The Faith Factor: An Annotated Bibliography of Systematic Reviews and Clinical Research on Spiritual Subjects Vol. II, emphasis added)

Here I want to focus on a distinction that Gartner and Allen make. While most of Hinman's book focuses on religious experience, here Gartner and Allen trace the health benefits of religious commitment. And Hinman's book then tries to determine how much of the health benefit of religious commitment is due to the rules and behavioral norms of the religious group (what Hinman terms "sin avoidance"), how much is due to social factors, and how much is due to other factors.

Given Hinman's approach, he reviews the academic studies from the social sciences that work to separate the "sin avoidance" aspects of religion, the "social connectedness" aspects of religion, and the remaining aspects of religion. For example, the studies might compare religious and non-religious people, controlling for people who likewise don't smoke, or are regularly involved in social settings. Hinman's focus is on the "remaining aspects of religion" that are left over after controlling for "sin avoidance" and social connectedness. But I'd like to take the other path there, and consider that religious commitment calls for both "sin avoidance" and "social connectedness", and the effects that will have on health, well-being, and quality of life.

Let me first tackle some objections: Why is that worthy of consideration? Why couldn't an unbeliever just adopt the same "sin avoidance" (healthy life-choices) rules, and build the same social connectedness? In theory they could; in practice they generally don't. The difference between groups is such that the studies had to correct for it and control for it: religion promotes certain healthy behaviors, and atheism has no mechanism to promote the same, so there will be a difference. This difference is worthy of consideration because it is a legitimate way in which organized religion (which might as well be the bogeyman, according to some) actually sets up the social structure to ensure long-term health benefits and improve the quality of life. In the same way that Hinman argues that the long-term personal benefits of religious experience are what you would expect if God were involved, likewise the long-term, society-wide benefits of religious commitment are what you would expect if God were involved. (More will be said in an upcoming post about the usual atheist charges that organized religion is a cesspool of evil. For now I will simply say: If that were really so, why would the studies show that religious commitment is associated with higher ratings of health, well-being, and quality of life?)

Couldn't someone argue that conventional morality was adopted by the various religions simply because it works well and produces these benefits? Well, you certainly could argue that, but that does amount to arguing that organized religion is responsible for promoting society-wide programs to improve health and quality of life -- and that these positive benefits were attributable to the dreaded so-called "authoritarian" rules of the religion. (It also amounts to admitting that the modern determination to throw out these quality-of-life measures is hardly "progress".) Is it merely ideology that says the "sin avoidance" aspects of religion aren't worth considering when looking at religious benefits? It is through those much-maligned rules that religion achieves a measurable portion of the benefit of health, well-being, and quality of life. A similar argument could be made for social connectedness: many religions actively promote social connectedness along with related items like stability of marriage and harmonious relationships with other people. All of that is part of the quality of life. If health improvement and quality of life are built into the religious system, why should those benefits be discounted simply because they come from a disapproved method (religious rules, norms, or gatherings) rather than from an approved source? If someone has religious experience alone, without commitment, they may still be missing the real and measurable benefits that come specifically from religious commitment.

On a possibly-related note, Hinman's book mentions that the people who had religious experiences sometimes had long-term positive effects (it was life-changing), and sometimes did not. I would be curious what caused some people to have longer-lasting positive effects than others. Did it matter whether the people had (or found) a religious framework that could help them interpret the experience? Did religious support, religious commitment, or religious community make any difference to whether that experience was perceived as important, and had a lasting effect on their lives?

"Religious Experience" and the World of Nature

Does God leave any sign in this world that he is out there? Does he leave a footprint, a track, a trace? Hinman's recent book, The Trace of God, reviews a number of studies on religious experience. I'd like to concentrate here on just one trend: that one of the most common triggers of religious experience is an experience of the natural world.

My first point is this: If we consider that God is the cause behind the natural world in any sense -- use what language you like, whether you think of God as "Creator" or "Ground of Being" -- then we would expect to find the trace of God in the natural world because God is the cause behind the natural world. I think this is a common experience. "Religious experience" has a whole range of different levels of intensity, from the ecstatic religious experience or peak experience on the one end, down to a quiet sense of the holy. This sense is often experienced in a place that is wilderness. The poet Coleridge made this connection, between what is "savage" (wild) and what is holy: 

A savage place! as holy and enchanted ...
(Coleridge, Xanadu)

The Psalmist of the Bible drew a connection between the natural world and a sense of the holy, which in his tradition is associated with the glory of God:

The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19)

And in this, both Coleridge and the Psalmist speak to what is a fairly common human experience: the sense of the holy in the natural world. The point here is simple: If God is the cause of the natural world, then we would expect to find the "trace of God" there. This is not an argument from "experience of the holy" to an act of Creation. It is more a comment directed to religious people that, on the view that God caused the world, we should expect to find traces of him there, and feel a closeness to him there, more than in a man-made setting. Consider how often religious retreats choose natural settings, and how often monasteries and holy places of various different religions are in the wilderness or at least surrounded by nature. These are testimony to how effective it is to heighten the religious sense by regaining our connection to the natural world.

My other point is this: It is not spiritually healthy to be too far removed from the natural world. As the world becomes more urban and more citified, has that been a contributing cause to the increase in atheism? The atheists I'm sure would object that any modern increase in atheism is due to "progress". Perhaps; but perhaps it is also -- at least in part -- due to decreasing religious experience in everyday life, as people are removed from natural settings in which they experience the holy.

Are "Religious Experiences" hijacked by our existing understanding?

How does a religious experience fit into our existing understanding, our conceptual framework? Or does it? Does the assumption that it should fit cause us to force a fit?

Many (not all) people who have a religious experience are strengthened in their existing beliefs. They see the experience as a validation of what they knew or understood before then, or a validation of the religion in which they had the experience and understood the experience. While there are a number of known exceptions to that general rule, still the general rule raises the question: Did we understand the religious experience on its own terms, or does that "validation" phenomenon mean that our existing understanding reinterpreted whatever we may have experienced, and made that experience fit within that understanding?

I'd like to consider two trends that Hinman documents in his book, The Trace of God, that have some relation to the question.

First, Hinman (among others) has documented that religious experience or mystical experience is notoriously difficult to describe in words. One of the commonly-observed characteristics is that mystical experience is "ineffable" -- beyond expressing in human language. But if the religious framework interpreted the religious experience to fit itself, why would we find anything that we couldn't describe in the language provided by that framework? Doesn't our struggle with the vocabulary suggest that there is something more going on, something that our existing concepts and vocabulary have difficulty grasping? It seems that, if the framework had been able to fit the whole of the religious experience into itself, we should have no problem describing that experience in the terms provided by that framework. But in peoples' religious experiences, we find that there are consistent problems with finding the words to describe it. That suggests that the framework was not able to reinterpret or assimilate the religious experience completely. The ineffability itself suggests something beyond the framework's vocabulary.

Next, religious experiences and mystical experiences often cause a transformation. That is to say, it can change peoples' lives, and often does change peoples' lives. But if religious experience is wholly a function of someone's prior religious understanding which they had all along, then where does the transformation come from? If everything was already there in that person's religious understanding -- if the religious experience added nothing new -- then how did it cause a change? And there is still another facet to the question, "Where did the change come from?" If someone puts forward an alternate explanation that the religious experience didn't cause the change, that the experience was the product of the religious system -- then that may mean that the power to transform lives is already present in the religious system itself. On that view, we would then have to consider whether a "religious experience" is the religious system's breakthrough moment with a person, in which it crosses the threshold needed to change someone's life.

Do our ideas taint our experiences?

When we ask, "Are religious experiences real?", part of the discussion revolves around whether we really remember the thing itself, or whether our later thoughts about what happened alter our memories and shape the experience.

This was discussed in Hinman's book The Trace of God, as he interacts with Proudfoot's understanding of religious experience: 

"He is arguing that the experience is reformed in our minds ex post facto as we re-describe what happened." (p 193)

In general, I think that phenomenon happens -- that experiences are reformed to some extent as we re-describe. I remember hearing of an experiment on the reliability of witnesses where witnesses were shown a video of a car accident They were more likely to report that the car accident involved broken glass if the question was phrased to use the word "smashing" or something to that effect, rather than in more neutral terms like "collision" or "accident". So even the questions we're asked about something have the potential to shape our recollections. That may be especially true when the recollections were brief or confusing. However, I think there are limits to how much our memories can be shaped: I don't expect that any question could lead the witnesses to "recall" that there was no collision. So what are the effects and limits of re-interpretations?

The more "pre-cognitive" our original experience is -- the more it was an experience without any expectation or interpretation in the moment that it happened -- the more open it is to re-interpretation in terms of our background expectations of the world. That does not mean the original experience is worthless or unreal; it means we have an especially tricky task in getting beyond our own frameworks. (On the topic of trusting our perceptions, I think this is less of an indictment of those unfiltered experiences, and more of an indictment of how much filtering we generally perform on routine events that we expected.) When we examine our recollections, it's because we're seeking understanding, we're seeking meaning, we're trying to put it into perspective when we describe it. And that exercise consists of fitting it into our conceptual framework; it carries a risk of misinterpretation. (That's how different religions -- and atheists -- can come up with some conflicting interpretations for their sense of the holy or transcendent.) That kind of reinterpretation doesn't happen only to religious experience, it happens to all experience.

In the way that a religious experience can redefine our understanding of the world, social constructs can redefine our understanding of a religious experience. None of that touches the fact that the religious experience was experienced before we sought the understanding. The experience was the original cause for seeking that understanding. So the act of seeking understanding doesn't invalidate the reality of the experience itself. The experience was, as Hinman's book terms it, "pre-theoretical", even if later retellings pick up the signs of reflection. (It's the same reason that historians tend to put more weight on the Gospel of Mark than the Gospel of John. Whether or not you agree with the Gospel of John's interpretation of things, there is no doubt that there has been a lot of reflection and interpretation in it, and the only way to double-check the validity of the later view is to go back to earlier sources.)

How do frameworks shape our understanding of the world? Consider a toddler who touches a hot stove: the toddler's immediate reaction shows an experience and some emotions, without understanding or concepts. But when we help the toddler understand, not all the "concepts" that we teach to the toddler are going to cloud his judgment. We teach concepts that lead to a fuller understanding of the world: concepts of excessive heat, injury, pain, healing, the uses of stoves. We teach enough of the concepts -- which are built on shared experiences -- to allow the toddler to navigate the kitchen without injury in the future. We give the toddler a framework for understanding the nature of injury and healing that may help him cope with the next tragedy in life, such as a skinned knee.

So not all conceptual frameworks poison or distort our understanding. There is such a thing as a good understanding, in which our experiences take their rightful places in a coherent and reality-driven understanding of the world. The better the conceptual framework, the more successfully people navigate the world.

Book Review: The Trace of God by Joseph Hinman

My thanks to Joseph Hinman and to GrandViaduct publishers for sending me a review copy of The Trace of God. This book is probably unlike anything you have ever read. It reviews the scientific literature -- mostly from the social sciences -- on religious experience and mystical experience, and tackles some of the big questions for those of us who have had religious experiences: Do other people have them? How common are they? Are they just a random trick of brain chemistry, or is there something real behind them? Was I seeing only what I expected to see? More than that, he tackles these questions by reviewing the scientific literature: psychological studies, cross-cultural studies, and studies on the extent to which the same effects can be produced by other methods. He reviews the counter-explanations, and makes a case for the prima facie explanation: that what is perceived may, in fact, be a genuine experience of the "trace of God".

Readers with any kind of orthodoxy -- whether religious or naturalistic -- will find that the book, the argument, the author himself does not fit neatly into expected categories. Hinman does not aim to "prove" God's existence, but to demonstrate that belief in God is a rational interpretation of what we know about religious experience and mystical experience. Throughout the book, he builds his case that the numbers of people having comparable experiences across cultures and across the centuries -- and the long-term positive effects that many people have after these experiences -- provide a rational warrant for believing that there is something objectively real in these experiences. He closes with an explanation of how he sees that thought fitting into a view of religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

The book is heavily documented with scientific studies and psychological research, and is a lengthy read at nearly 400 pages of content. But like some of my favorite longer books, when I came to the last page, I found myself wishing for more. Whether or not you are fully convinced by his arguments, the book will make you think.

My summer series this year (already pre-written) will interact with a number of Hinman's basic arguments and lines of thought, because there are some things that Hinman does particularly well: getting people to think, and getting people to talk.

Are "religious experiences" real?

Over the coming weeks I hope to write a few posts exploring religious experiences, whether they mean anything, and what (if anything) we could understand by it. But I'll begin this undertaking with remembering one religious experience I had. It wasn't the first, and it wasn't the most recent, but it was (to me) the most memorable. I don't remember that I've ever put it into words before, but I'll try it here.

One early summer afternoon, while I was sitting indoors, I looked out the nearby window. At first it was just the usual pause to notice that the outside looks better than the inside. That became a still longer pause as I realized that it was a finer day than usual, and stopped to really look. But next ... it was no longer a simple instance of me looking out the window. The beauty of the world was so intense it was piercing. The scene was gripping, in a way that my whole focus was given over to it, and it came with a sense of amazement. The details were vivid -- the color of the sky, the bright and shaded patches on the clouds, the intensity of the light, the color of the crape myrtle tree. It felt like I was seeing them -- really seeing them -- for the first time. There was a sense of a deep current of goodness flowing through all of reality. There was a sense that this reality that I was seeing was always there, timeless. At the time I felt joy, and wonder, and delight -- and those words are nearly too shallow. I felt like I was overflowing with that sense of goodness.

And that gripping moment -- that seemed timeless, while experiencing it -- I'm sure on a clock it might have only been some short minutes. I've never used this word to describe the moment before, but if I were to call up language that someone religious might understand, I'd say the world was transfigured, where the glory was seen without any disguise. I wonder now, does my everyday apathy prevent me from seeing it like that all the time? What did it take to break through my routine expectations of a simple glance out the window? When I felt like I was overflowing with that sense of goodness -- had I reached the capacity of my heart and mind to experience it? Would it be possible to come back with a greater capacity, and experience it more fully?

These days I have an idea that our minds -- the parts that see the world in video -- don't work too differently from the way computers render video: that is, I wonder if our minds only render the part that changes from one moment to the next, from one day to the next as we see the same thing time after time. I wonder if we learn to tune out the rest as background. I wonder how much of the world is right in front of us that we never see, or have trained ourselves not to notice. 

Prophetic Dreams

The Bible mentions quite a few prophetic dreams. The current book I'm reading -- Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed -- contains some passages showing the author had given extensive thought to the topic of prophecy, vision and dream.

Despite Maimonides' acknowledgment that the will of God is required for prophecy (Part II Chapter 32), there are times when his thoughts run along nearly naturalistic lines: 

Prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty; it is the highest degree and greatest perfection man can attain; it consists in the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty. (Part II, chapter 36).

Both philosophy and prophecy, in Maimonides' view, are human perception of the Divine Intellect -- the philosopher being limited to the rational faculty, while the prophet has also developed the imaginative faculty. As for dreams:

In Bereshit Rabba (sect. xvii.), the following saying of our sages occurs:

Dream is the unripe fruit of prophecy.

This is an excellent comparison, for the unripe fruit is really the fruit to some extent, only it has fallen from the tree before it was fully developed and ripe. In a similar manner the action of the imaginative faculty during sleep is the same as at the time it receives a prophecy, only in the first case [the dream] it is not fully developed, and has not yet reached its highest degree. (Part II, chapter 36)

Maimonides believed that these prophetic visions and dreams were things for which someone can train and prepare himself. In his comments on what makes a person fit to receive a prophetic vision or dream, this one passage particularly caught my eye:

... all his desires must aim at obtaining a knowledge of the hidden laws and causes that are in force in the Universe; his thoughts must be engaged in lofty matters; his attention directed to the knowledge of God, the consideration of his works, and of that which he must believe in this respect. (Part II, Chapter 36)

Our dreams naturally tend to follow the aim of our desires, and what engages our thoughts, and that to which our attention is directed. Wouldn't that tend to cause dreams on those topics? Maimonides acknowledges that there are people who dream things that are not fit to be called prophetic dreams, despite the dreamer's insistence.  Still, in Maimonides, the line seems thin between a dream of Divine Things and that "unripe fruit of prophecy".

Reading Jesus' words is a religious experience

Jesus, more than anyone else in human history, speaks about the things of God with authority, knowledge, and credibility.

Jesus explained what the kingdom of heaven is like at length. He sure sounded like he knew what he was talking about. But that was not the only time when his knowledge was plain to see.

Anyone who speaks to a Jewish crowd, to people who are followers of Moses, and claims to surpass the Law of Moses -- he had better have something good to follow through on that claim. And Jesus did. They believed him and considered that there might be a more excellent way.

Anyone who speaks to people who hope for a resurrection -- or debate the reality of the resurrection -- and claims to know exactly how the Last Day will happen, had better have something good to say. Again, he did. He gave a detailed description of the Last Day that is at the same time believable, just, and desirable. Hearing his teaching doesn't inspire arguments about its justness; its justice is self-evident. What it inspires is awe. The people who first heard him noticed. They were amazed at his teachings, because he spoke as one having authority.

In the beatitudes, some of the blessings Jesus proclaimed were bold promises: the pure in heart shall see God; the meek shall inherit the earth. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied; those who mourn will be comforted. Anyone who claims to know the heart of God, and to know what God will do in the future, better have something good. And Jesus did. The blessings meet and even exceed our sense of rightness, that this is how things should be. God's goodness surpasses our hopes, and restores our confidence enough to hope.

Many people go to religion or spirituality looking for a religious experience; the surest way I know to have a religious experience is to read what Jesus said.