Chapter 19
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —I Corinthians 13:11.
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GOD: A superhuman person regarded as having power over nature and human fortunes; a deity. Also, the deity of a specified area of nature, human activity, and so on.
SKEPTIC (late sixteenth century [origin: from Greek “skeptikos,” plural “skeptikoi,” from “skeptesthai,” look about, consider, observe]: (2) A person who doubts the validity of accepted beliefs in a particular subject; a person inclined to doubt any assertion or apparent fact. (3) A person seeking the truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite convictions. —Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “god” and “skeptic”
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When I’m functioning as a scientist, I try to be as objective as possible. I report the data, the facts of what I and others have observed, as completely and accurately as I can, and I work hard to keep my own hopes and fears, desires, and aversions out of reporting data or formulating possible explanations. When I theorize and present ideas about what this data means, I try to make it clear that this part is my or someone else’s theory, not the data. This attitude carries over into the rest of my life too. It’s not that I would be described as a “cold fish”; I don’t habitually suppress my emotional and bodily responses to life: indeed I’ve devoted great effort to sensitizing, honoring, and educating my emotional and bodily “brains,” to use Gurdjieff’s term (1986), as part of developing my full humanity. But I take care not to confuse my ideas and feelings with the facts, insofar as I’m able.
But the material we’ve been discussing in this book isn’t simply intellectually interesting, isn’t mere facts; it has enormous personal implications for all of us.
Am I a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos, the result of zillions of meaningless molecular collisions that just happened to turn out this way? A meat-based computer that will soon die, whose life doesn’t really matter to anything or anyone but my illusion of a self? Are you?
Or am I some sort of spiritual creature, potentially in touch with something greater and higher, as well as my biological and physical existence? Are you?
Should I live in accordance with that possibility? Should you?
So, how have I ended up after all this scientific and personal searching and thinking about our possible spiritual nature? Yes, I’m a scientist and a spiritual seeker, and many other things, each of which is just a part of being a whole human being. How do I see the world now, how do I live, given the kinds of things we’ve discussed in this book? It’s not that I’m the model for how people should live—different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes—but sharing the views relevant to this book that I’ve worked out may be helpful for some readers as you formulate or modify your own views.
Let’s start back at the beginning: When I was a child, I thought and felt as a child. My wonderful, loving grandmother, my Nana, took me to Sunday school and church, and if those places were good enough for someone as wonderful as her, they were good enough for me. If God was anything like my Nana, a source of unconditional love, comfort, and treats, he was indeed wonderful, and both Nana and my mother, although she didn’t go to church herself, said it was so.
It was a simple but basically understandable worldview to my child mind, which, like most child minds, thought in absolutes. God had created the world and set up “the rules.” We were to obey the rules. If we did, we were rewarded and, after death, went to heaven. If we didn’t, we were punished and went to hell.
But it did get rather complicated at times. I can remember a kind of moment of awakening, being taught in Sunday school over and over that God was a god of love but also that he was a jealous and wrathful god, punishing not only sinners but also, as I recall it, the sinner’s children and the sinner’s children’s children down to the seventh generation. Wow! This God fellow could really hold a grudge! (My memory was a bit exaggerated, because the Bible says that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, even to the third and fourth generation [Exodus 20:5, 34:6–7; Deuteronomy 5:9] but not the seventh. Still, how incredibly mean!) I could almost never stay mad at anyone after a night’s sleep. But this holding of grudges and retribution was a manifestation of God’s love? And how could God be so incredibly mean as to punish innocent children? Something didn’t compute.
As I mentioned earlier, by the time I was in my teens, I faced a serious struggle between my childhood religion (Lutheran) and modern thought and science. My grandmother had died, so I was no longer receiving that unconditional love to smooth over the rough spots of life. My mother was loving but not in an unconditional way, as my grandmother had been. I’d read extensively in science by then and loved it, but it was clear that a lot of the “facts” science had discovered didn’t fit with my religion. I knew by then that many scientists dismissed all religion as primitive and psychopathological superstition that we’d be better off without, and it seemed clear that science was right about at least some of this. Like most teenagers I had also become very good at spotting the hypocrisy of adults, and too many of the adults in my church weren’t living the beliefs they preached. Discovering psychic research and its modern form, parapsychology, was my vehicle for working toward a satisfactory resolution of religion or spirituality and science, as I hope this book has demonstrated in various ways.
It was not that there was some simple and final resolution of the conflict between science and spirit, but rather, a process of investigation and discrimination began for me that continues as central to my life. Learn as much as I can about many things; separate the wheat from the chaff when I can; the essential, valid, and nourishing from the superfluous, false, and toxic; and try to fit the knowledge together. Here are the claims of religions A, B, and C, and here’s modern science and psychology: how do they cast light on each other?
Here’s an example from my young adulthood: Freud and other psychoanalytic investigators demonstrated quite convincingly that some (they tended to claim all, but I’m always skeptical about any claims that something explains everything) of our feelings toward God are unconscious, emotionally driven manifestation of our feelings as young children toward our parents, projected outward onto the idea of God. There’s clearly a lot of truth here. When we were infants and young children, our parents were amazingly superior to us, knowing so much, capable of doing such incredible things compared to us in our ignorance and helplessness. Naturally we loved and admired them (and perhaps feared and hated them too), and they were as gods to us.
But is our search for a god or worship of one nothing but a projection of these childhood feelings? Certainly such projections are likely to be there as part of our spiritual seeking, but might this be a distorting obstacle to overcome, rather than a reason for totally dismissing the spiritual?
I can remember a dramatic personal breakthrough one evening in the 1970s, while doing psychological work as part of my efforts toward spiritual growth: I suddenly realized that my childhood image of my mother was interposed on and relatively dominant over my conception of what God might be like! Particularly, my mother—bless her soul—was a perfectionist. But in this world, nothing ever quite comes up to the standards of a perfectionist, so it’s one disappointment after another. I’d been implicitly thinking of God that way: I had to try and try to do my best, but nothing would ever be good enough to satisfy God. I had to recognize that aspect of my projection.
This was a very liberating insight, because I realized I actually knew nothing about the actual characteristics of whatever or whoever God might be, and I could look at that whole direction of spiritual reality anew, afresh, instead of with the implicit assumption that I would always fail to please a too perfectionistic mother-god. And just to make things more puzzling and interesting to me, this was a very unusual insight; it didn’t feel like my regular psychological insights, which came from the usual “place” inside me where all my thoughts and feelings came from. This one experientially “zoomed in” from outside of me, to my left, as if something outside myself were giving me this insight, even though I was doing a psychotherapeutic process designed to provoke insight.
This is not to say, though, that we’re completely full of irrational childhood ideas and feelings that must always be harshly uprooted and exterminated. A lot of our basic energy—and, I believe, spiritual nature and energy—is rooted in our childhood, and my best understanding is that we need to honor it, understand it, and do some selective weeding and fertilizing, not wholesale plowing up. This is personally hard for me, because I picked up a lot of my mother’s perfectionism and thus tend to be hard on myself, but for me, at least, a gentler style of discovery and understanding works better than harsh rejection.
Returning to my personal story of trying to accommodate both religion and science, as I grew into adulthood, I trained in the sciences, first with the intention of becoming an electrical engineer—I had already learned enough electronics on my own to pass Federal Communications Commission examinations and become a licensed radio engineer with a First-Class Radiotelephone license—then to become a psychologist. In my psychological training I learned more and more about how to do science properly and, since I took a lot of clinical courses, more and more about psychopathology and the various ways we easily fool ourselves.
I’d like to say that I’ve learned enough now about how I fool myself and how others fool themselves that I never do it anymore. But while I can think of many instances in my life, such as the one just mentioned, where I’ve seen such distortions and eventually stopped or transcended them, by definition I can’t see the ones I don’t know about yet; I can only be alert to the possibility of distortion, to the signs that I might be fooling myself, such as finding I’m a lot more emotional about some idea or situation than it reasonably calls for, or that I have funny body feelings. The personal picture I’ll draw next, then, while it’s my best current understanding of myself and the world, is always open to revision if new facts, new understandings arise.
So what “happened” to God or, rather, to my conception of God, in my life? First, I’ve realized that while there might indeed be a greatly superior being (or perhaps lots of them), compared to me, I haven’t had any direct experience of such a being, and thus must realize that what I think and feel about superior beings or God is largely just that, my ideas and feelings. Put in scientific terms, I have lots of theories and beliefs, as well as lots of descriptions of and theories about experiential data collected and experienced by others, but I don’t have any direct data myself. In accordance with essential scientific practice and common sense, I need to hold my own theories and understandings lightly. And, especially important, I need to be aware of my emotional investments in various ideas about God if I hope to learn anything about this aspect of spirituality, rather than just cling to my own emotional hopes and fears.
A part of me has always longed for direct experience of contact with God or higher beings. Like all of us, I am a weak, vulnerable biological being in a big universe, and it would be nice to have some direct reassurance, beyond doubt, that everything will turn out all right, as Bucke had in his Cosmic Consciousness experience. Some people have experiences that give them such reassurance, and their descriptions of such experiences are data that I’ve studied. At the same time, I realize it’s a certain kind of advantage that I haven’t had such personal experiences: since my main work has been building bridges between essential science and essential spirituality, I can do it more effectively by being a practical, grounded scientist, because, out of prejudice, too many scientists and laypeople might automatically dismiss my work and arguments without really thinking about them if I were a “mystic.”
At the same time I don’t take my lack of direct, experiential certainty to mean I should live some sort of pale, wishy-washy life, where, believing I don’t understand any ultimate truths, I don’t commit myself to doing what I think is right. Understanding and accepting the tentativeness of my knowledge is one thing, and turning it into a psychological or spiritual defense mechanism to excuse avoiding grappling with the hard parts of life is quite another.
Second, while honoring and nourishing the child in me, that basic part of my being on which so much was constructed, my inner child still needs to be nourished and educated. An important part of this education and training is to learn to discriminate which parts of my childhood (and current) spiritual longings are actually spiritual longings and which parts are psychological needs that could be more healthfully satisfied on a more ordinary psychological level. When they’re confused, we tend to debase the spiritual and overvalue the ordinary. Here’s an example:
When I was nineteen, I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments movie and was very moved by it. In my forties I saw the movie again but had meanwhile done a lot of psychological and spiritual growth work on myself, so I saw it with new eyes. And I was embarrassed! I especially loved the scene where Moses got angry with the Israelites and cast down and broke the tablets of the Commandments, with all hell threatening to break loose! Why was this scene so appealing to me? I realized I still had a lot of unresolved childhood anger at people who’d been cruel to me, and I wanted to hurt and punish them! But since I thought of myself as a good and spiritual person, a desire for revenge wasn’t an allowable feeling. But righteous wrath, as Moses showed, was good! Some part of me was misusing my childhood spiritual feelings to justify feeling angry and wanting revenge on those damned sinners, those people who’d been cruel to me. I could have my cake and eat it too; I could punish those I didn’t like while still feeling spiritual.
It was a sobering revelation. I had to learn to accept the fact that, of course, I’m human, and I don’t like people who are cruel to me; nobody does. Of course, I would get angry and want to get back at them! Accepting this, then I could decide whether or not to act on those feelings and take responsibility for whatever I did, but I could stop fooling myself that I was somehow being spiritual and justly participating in the wrath of God unleashed on guilty sinners who deserved it.
Third, I’ve had to realize that I’ve projected a lot of my unresolved childhood conditioning on God in the form of automatically thinking of God as male, with lots of cultural reinforcement for that, unfortunately. After doing a lot of psychological growth work on my relationships with my parents, I’ve faced up to a lot of what I perceived as inadequacies on my father’s part—not to mention my own!—such that I wanted or needed a powerful father figure in my life, and thus projected a lot of what I wanted onto my ideas of and feelings about God, the big “he.” The rise of feminism in my lifetime has helped my attitudes and understandings, but I’m still working on semiconscious feelings here.
Fourth, I often have to look at my idea of what spiritual growth or enlightenment is, to bring my semiconscious and unconscious ideas about it to consciousness, so that they stop working in the background as biases that might distort my view of reality.
For example, in the last few years I’ve gotten an increasingly clear picture of my expectations of what a mystical “enlightenment” experience for me should be like, given the childhood roots of my spirituality. Since it involves (my ideas about) God and sets standards for God to live up to, one of my insights is to see the unconscious arrogance involved. “Look, superior being, this is how you should do it in order to come up to my standards.” I learned from my perfectionist mother, it’s no problem at all to set standards for God. When I can just look at these expectations as my personal psychological preferences and needs, though, not as arrogant, automatic injunctions, they’re much less of a problem, because I can remember that reality is what it is and I’m reasonably good at coping with reality, even when it doesn’t meet my “standards.”
What were some of the expectations I discovered? They included that I would (1) have a mystical experience that solved all my problems, but (2) while it would be spiritually and emotionally overwhelming, it would come on gradually so as not to frighten me, while (3) it gave me the absolutely correct answers to all life’s questions, “the rules,” so that I’d never be in doubt about “the right thing to do.” This would include, of course, (4) direct reassurances from God that I was okay, as well as (5) a guarantee that nothing would ever hurt or upset me in any way ever again, and that (6) everyone would recognize my spiritual superiority and respect me. Given how much I’ve always identified with being a good student, this revelatory experience would probably also (7) include getting some sort of certificate or diploma testifying to my enlightenment and spiritual superiority.
When I look at these expectations rationally, from my adult perspective, they’re kind of embarrassing and ridiculous, as well as amusing. I doubt very much that real spirituality works that way or that I can make demands on an order of reality (I try to transcend the connotations of using the word “God” here) way beyond me as to how it should manifest. And yet they do represent longings from my childhood, still relevant in some ways, so I need to gently respect them even if I shouldn’t hold onto them too tightly.
So what’s my current working view of the spiritual and material nature of reality? It’s a “working view” in the sense that it’s not fixed or absolute; it’s the best I can come up with at this time, but it’s always open to change as I learn more.
How do I say these things? I don’t want to say “I believe,” because that has too much absolutism about it. “I postulate” sounds much too formal and stuffy. “I think that” seems kind of weak and evasive, and “My working hypothesis is” sounds much too formal. How about, “My current best bet is…?” That conveys the openness of my understanding to growth and change, while simultaneously making it clear that there are consequences from thinking and feeling about reality this way; it’s a bet that there are stakes, that my life and happiness (and that of others) are on the line; it’s not just idle speculation.
My current best bet is that there’s a real spiritual realm, as real or perhaps even “more real” (in some sense that’s hard to understand in our ordinary state of consciousness) than ordinary material reality. My current best bet is that this spiritual realm has purpose and is intelligent and loving in some profound sense. My current best bet is that our human nature partakes of this spiritual nature. The deep experience of many mystics that we are one with all of reality, including spiritual reality, is about something vital and true. The several psychic ways we occasionally connect with each other (telepathy) and the material world (clairvoyance) are partial manifestations of this inherent connection with all of reality, spiritual as well as material.
Moving toward traditional specifics, how about God? Or gods? Angels? Demons? We’re incredibly arrogant in regarding ourselves as so intelligent that we can dismiss the idea of the existence of any intelligent being who is superior to us in any way, so I’m betting that we should be open to such possibilities and actually investigate them, not just believe or disbelieve on the basis of conditioned childhood belief systems or reactions to them, rather than with any real looking at the data. At the same time we have to understand the numerous psychological functions such ideas can play in allowing us to be intellectually lazy (God or the devil did it, so I don’t have to think about it) or morally irresponsible (it’s God’s will, it’s the devil’s work, or it’s karma).
My current best bet is that there might be independently existing spiritual beings, and I work with two mutually helpful attitudes toward this possibility, one from Buddhism and one from G. I. Gurdjieff (1886?–1949).
Buddhism accepts the idea that there are all sorts of gods, goddesses, angels, demons, extraterrestrials, and so on. Everybody believed that during the period when the Buddha taught. But just because such beings are different and superior in some ways and inferior in others, before we try to get very involved with them, we have to ask, “Are they enlightened?” A being might have godlike powers but be quite neurotic and unenlightened. Buddhism generally doesn’t put much emphasis on such beings, because its doctrines regard most of them as unenlightened.
The goal of Buddhism is for each of us to become enlightened, to eliminate all the psychological qualities that create useless suffering in us and others, and to discover our true spiritual nature. That nature is that we’re all actually Buddha in essence, just “asleep” to our real nature at this time, caught up in our delusory dreams but able to wake up, end our personal suffering, and help each other. We can learn from enlightened beings, but we have to do the work ourselves; no other being can do the work of enlightenment for us. If help comes from a spiritual level or being, great; accept it, be thankful, and get on with the work of enlightenment. But don’t mistake spiritual or psychic experiences per se as enlightenment. Even the gods, in Buddhism, are not enlightened, and eventually suffer as a consequence of their unenlightened behavior.
Gurdjieff expressed his advice here in a lovely, somewhat paradoxical form, by admonishing his students to work as if everything depended on work but pray as if everything depended on prayer.
The work admonition reminds us of the Buddhist injunction that enlightenment, rediscovering our true nature, comes from work, hard work and lots of it. Give such work your best efforts as if everything depends on it, as if nothing else matters. The second part cries out for and accepts help from a spiritual level when it’s given. Pray as if nothing matters but divine grace. Holding both injunctions in mind, which isn’t easy, can remind us to be humble, that we need help and guidance, but it also reminds us to keep doing our best to learn, grow, and manifest our spirituality.
So my current best bet is that there may well be spiritual beings that may help us, and I pray that they do exist and will help us, but meanwhile I focus on what I know how to do and what I can do for myself and others.
The evidence for survival, in some sort of postmortem psychic or spiritual state, as reincarnation, or both, is among the many maybes as I’ve currently bet on it. Belief in some kind of survival is a psychologically dangerous idea in some ways, because it so readily provides a rationalization to not do your best or to not be adequately concerned about the conditions of ordinary life. So the poor suffer and are exploited? No problem; they’ll get their reward in heaven if they obey the rules, or perhaps it’s just their karma from past lives and there’s nothing I can do about it. This kind of thinking is a too-convenient excuse for ignoring or exploiting others.
Nevertheless I’m betting that some sort of postmortem survival is possible and, importantly, that the kind of postmortem existence you have is strongly dependent on the way you live your life now. That is, I’m betting on causality, on karma, which is causality carried from one lifetime to another, as part of the survival package. So I try to live a moral life, mainly for the inherent satisfaction in it, but also for the possibility that I’m creating karma for future lives.
I’ve expressed this bet on survival in an earlier chapter in the form of two expectations. First, I won’t be surprised if, after the initial shock and confusion of death (I hope there’s not too much of that!), I regain consciousness and am still existent. Second, I’ll be quite surprised if I, my ordinary self, regains and maintains consciousness. That is, I’m quite impressed by our current evidence for postmortem states and reincarnation, even if I still list it among the many maybes, so I won’t be surprised if I regain consciousness after I die, which, of course, will be very interesting to me and answer all sorts of questions I’ve wondered about. But, both my professional studies of psychology and my personal explorations have shown me just how much my sense of self, my particular “I,” is shaped by and at least partially dependent on having a physical body in this material world. How much can “I” remain unchanged when my physical body no longer functions, shaping my experience? So “something,” some deeper part of who I am—I think of it and experience it as my basic ability to be aware—may go on after death, but I don’t think Charles T. Tart will persist too long as the being he is now, which is scary in some ways, because I like myself. In other ways, it’s a quite liberating idea: may the worst parts fall away and the best parts go on in some form! Benjamin Franklin’s self-written epitaph expresses my hopes quite well.
The body of
B. Franklin, Printer,
(Like the Cover of an Old Book,
Its Contents torn Out,
And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)
Lies Here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall not be Lost;
For it will (as he Believ’d) Appear once More
In a New and More Elegant Edition,
Revised and Corrected
By the Author.
You might notice that my current best bet on postmortem survival is a safe bet in an important way. Thinking that something interesting will happen after death makes current life more interesting and lowers my fear of death. But if I’m wrong and death is truly the end of consciousness, I’ll never have to suffer the embarrassment of knowing that I was wrong.
There’s also a psychological advantage to my attitude, based on what I’ve termed the Law of Experience. Given my engineering background, I think of it as
(Q)E = f(R,A)
Put simply, the quality of our experience, Q of E, is a function of the interaction between the actual reality we’re experiencing, R, and our attitude, A, toward that experience. To take a simple example, if I hoped to win a big lottery and got a hundred-dollar win on my dollar ticket, I might curse my luck for not hitting the million-dollar jackpot and the whole experience would be one of suffering. A lot of people might see a hundred-to-one gain as quite positive. Applying this law to dying, if my attitude is that death is the absolute end, that all I’ve learned and accomplished in life is now lost, I suspect my dying will be experienced as much more painful than whatever its reality actually is, whereas if my attitude is that this process will be interesting, even if painful, and I’m probably going to get answers to all sorts of important questions once I reach the other side, I think I’ll have a much better death.
I’ve left out one of the most widespread ideas about what happens after death, of course, and that is the idea of hell. I’m an optimist by nature and an idealist by choosing. If there’s any kind of superior being such as God, then this being must be superior to me. I’m nowhere mean and petty enough to condemn anyone to eternal punishment, knowing how difficult it is to do the right things in this life, and I wouldn’t expect it of God (which shows I’m rather like my mother; I have standards for God to live up to). Yes, there are hellish experiences in this life, some from actual physical suffering, many from psychological attitudes that distort our experience. Since my current best bet is that something like karma is real, that our past and current actions are constantly shaping our future—not totally determining it since we often can make new choices—perhaps there are even afterlife periods that seem hellish but still offer opportunities for learning and growth, and thus lead on to a better existence. Purgatory? Bardos? My bet is that I’ll have some direct experiential data on this some day.
As I write this, I have a new insight: I’m really angry at the people who have such petty and warped conceptions of God that they made him into a blown-up version of an insecure, petty tyrant, ruling by force and needing to be praised all the time to soothe his insecure ego. All the useless psychological suffering such ideas have created! Okay, there probably have been lots of kings and despots who were like that and, unfortunately, lots of parents who were like that, but let’s not confuse them with the idea of a truly superior being.
Back in the introduction, I distinguished basic spirituality from organized religion. This book has been almost exclusively about basic spirituality, about the fact that we humans have certain kinds of experiences that point toward a larger, nonmaterial order of reality, and we have a lot of rigorous scientific data telling us to take these signs seriously; it’s not just wish-fulfilling imaginings. We also looked at the four ways of knowing—experience, authority, reason, and revelation—and discussed that very useful way of combining them, through refining knowledge, resulting in essential science. So what do we make of organized religions then? Suppose we ask the question, has there been any progress in spirituality, as there has been in all the physical sciences in the last few centuries?
I’m inclined to argue that, by and large, the answer is no. Religions start from the way of experience: a founder has profound spiritual or psychic experiences, or both. While there are small numbers of people in all religious traditions who try to work from this basis, by themselves having and expanding the basic kinds of experiences that started it all, their efforts are swamped by the theoreticians, the people who make some kind of intellectual and emotional “sense” of the experiences. These people too often have had no direct experiences themselves, but they’re smart people, capable organizers, creative theorizers. The way of reason is very attractive! I know from far too much personal experience how seductive a good idea can be!
So far the process is fairly parallel to essential science, but now a major change in direction takes place. The organizers of most religions make their theories into doctrines, too often doctrines that must be believed or you’ll be damned! The scientists, in contrast, delight in their clever theories that make sense of the data, of their experiences, but then submit (even if grudgingly) to the discipline of essential science that these theories may be the best that they can think of at the moment, but they’re always subject to further tests, refinement, and possible rejection.
There are innumerable human complexities in both these processes, of course. Both religions and science, for example, become embedded in the social structure in ways that reinforce themselves. Children are taught the dominant religion at home, in church or temple, and in special schools. The public schools in most Western countries teach the findings of science, as they’re known at the time. Shaping children’s minds can both implicitly and consciously shape the way they perceive the world to fit the doctrines and theories of religion and science. The difference is that religion is almost never taught with the attitude, “This is the best sense we can make of these things so far; we hope you find it useful, but ask questions and stay open to your own experience, and perhaps you can come up with a better understanding.” Science, when properly taught, is taught with exactly that attitude. Religions are too often taught with an attitude that you must not question the doctrines and that you’re a bad person if you do and you’ll be punished. Properly, science is taught in a way that stimulates wonder and questioning.
Progress in spirituality and progress in religion—will we develop experimentally oriented spiritual systems and religions that can respect and profit from old ideas, the way of authority, but go on to test, refine, reject, and expand our basic knowledge of spirituality?
That’s a very big question, beyond the scope of this book, although I’ve worked at it a little in appendix 4, on transpersonal psychology.
We’ve looked at various kinds of evidence suggesting that some aspect of our consciousness might survive bodily death. Examining evidence involves evaluation, rationality, and thinking, but as we discussed earlier, this is much more than a “rational” issue, for at some level or levels we’re usually terrified at the thought of, much less the reality of, death. How rational can we be about it? Can we get beyond the extreme of unquestioned religious faith, on the one hand, and just as rigid a materialistic denial of the possibility of any kind of survival on the other? Most would suspect that this fear of death is built into the hardwiring of our nervous systems, so we can never really get beyond it. Does any evidence of survival, no matter how strong, really overcome such innate fear of death?
Thinking about this recently, I remembered something that happened or, more accurately, didn’t happen, when I came close to death a few years ago. For several years now, I’ve had chronic atrial fibrillation, A-fib, a heart condition where the upper chambers of the heart, the atria, have chaotic and rapid electrical firings. Since the main pumping chambers, the ventricles, receive the overly rapid electrical signals from the atria, a fast and erratic heartbeat occurs. If the atrial fibrillation rate can be controlled, it’s usually not much of a problem. When the rate isn’t well controlled, one can get light-headed and even lose consciousness. The most worrisome complication of atrial fibrillation is due to its propensity for blood clots to form in the heart, which can lead to a stroke if the clot were to travel to the brain.
Sound a little scary? I certainly understood it to be that way when I was initially hospitalized for it and then told I had to be on blood-thinning medication for the rest of my life to reduce the chance of clots, as well as other medication to try to control the A-fib itself. It was a powerful reminder of my mortality! My heart, not some abstract heart, could go on me! Not that I panicked or brooded too much about it—I’m usually not that type—but I gave it serious attention.
While my cardiologists were trying to find the best medication to control my A-fib, I read about a treatment that European doctors had found very helpful, although it hadn’t been used much yet in America. There’s a drug called Flecanide that tends to regularize the heart rate in A-fib, and some people take regular daily doses of it for this purpose. I didn’t like the regular-doses idea, because I read about a lot of possible undesirable side effects of daily usage. The European treatment, which they called a “pill-in-the-pocket” approach, was not to take Flecanide regularly but to carry some of the drug with you at all times and, if you had a strong A-fib episode, take triple what the normal daily dose would be. They reported that in almost all cases the A-fib attack quickly subsided and there were no recurrences for some time.
That sounded like a good idea to me, but Flecanide is a potentially dangerous drug in some people, so it has to first be administered while you’re hospitalized, with your heart continuously monitored, to be certain you don’t have an adverse reaction to it before it will be prescribed for daily use. My then cardiologist—let’s call him Dr. A—arranged a day’s hospitalization so we could see if I had an adverse reaction to the drug. I didn’t, so he wrote me a prescription for it. On examining the prescription and my hospital record, though, I found that Dr. A had not tested me at the triple dose of the pill-in-the-pocket approach but at the usual daily dose for regular use the rest of my life, and thus was expecting me to take the drug daily.
I was angry. I had made it clear to Dr. A on several occasions that I didn’t want to chance the potential nasty side effects of the daily-dose approach and he was supposed to be testing the safety of the pill-in-the-pocket approach. Because both my wife and I had already noticed several times that Dr. A had a strong tendency to not hear what I was saying but be caught up in his “expert opinion,” that was the last time I consulted him.
Fortunately, I’d already gotten a second opinion from another cardiologist, Dr. B, who listened, as well as applied his expertise. He checked with several American colleagues, who agreed that the pill-in-the-pocket approach looked promising. Since I was scheduled to see Dr. B for a routine appointment in a few weeks and the Flecanide seemed to be safe for me at the normal dose, when my appointment with Dr. B came up, I took the triple dose an hour before it, even though my A-fib was mild at the time, figuring that if there were any mild adverse effects from the higher dose, it was much better to experience them when Dr. B would be examining me than when I was off on a trip somewhere (my wife and I camp a lot), far from medical attention. But I expected no problems, given what I knew and the “okay” result at the usual daily-dose level in the earlier hospitalization.
By the time I saw Dr. B, my body felt weird. He took a quick recording of my heart’s electrical activity and, after looking at it, got me in a wheelchair in seconds and pushed me through the hospital corridors to the emergency room! I was in ventricular tachycardia, the main pumping chambers of my heart beating at more than two hundred beats per minute. This heart arrhythmia can easily degenerate into ventricular fibrillation, a lethal heart rhythm. I was rushed into emergency, a medical team of a half-dozen doctors and nurses seemingly appeared from nowhere, an intravenous line was inserted in me, electrodes were taped to my chest, and a mild sedative and analgesic drug, Brevitol, was shot into my veins. I don’t remember the actual shocking, because the Brevitol knocked me out temporarily, but the shocking stopped the ventricular tachycardia and restored a normal heart rhythm.
What I found rather amazing, not at the time but with the clarity of hindsight, is that I didn’t get very excited by all this. Yes, it was quite clear to me that I was having a potentially fatal reaction to the Flecanide and that the odds were high that I might die before the medical staff could do anything about it. But until the Brevitol made me stupid, I was alert, calm, and cooperative, and asked questions of the doctors and nurses, because I was interested in what they were doing. I was practically oriented, such as making sure that my wife, who was out in the cardiology clinic waiting room, was informed about what was happening to me, because I didn’t want her to worry that I was in the clinic for such a long time. Not that the news that I was being rushed to the ER would be an improvement, but she would want to know. I thought about the possibility that some part of my mind might survive if I did die and figured it would be very interesting to finally have a direct, personal answer to such questions, but I also knew that I enjoyed life and felt that there was a lot I’d still like to do (like writing this book), including activities that might help people. So I definitely preferred not to die at that time, but tried to maintain an attitude of, “Thy will be done”; meanwhile there was no reason not to be present, alert, helpful, and cheerful.
Being this way seemed quite normal and appropriate during the experience. It’s only in retrospect that I wonder why I didn’t panic. That would’ve been quite “normal”! Why did I stay in clear contact with everything happening in and around me instead of tuning out to try to avoid realizing I might be dying? Why in the world was I finding my real chance of dying interesting?
Insofar as I understand myself, I have to give part of the credit for my clarity and calmness to the psychological training in meditation and mindfulness that I’ve been involved in over the years. But part of the credit must go to my knowledge of the research on postmortem survival. I wasn’t convinced that if I died, the scientistic materialist’s “final failure” experience awaited, nothingness, but rather that I might well be able to continue living, growing, and serving. That was a comforting thought.
This is all a retrospective look at a personal experience, of course, and I could be reading things into it that don’t really support my thesis that knowing about the evidence for survival can be helpful in facing the stress of impending death, but what way do we have of making sense of life and preparing for death other than working with our own and others’ knowledge and experience?
This personal experience doesn’t carry the kind of weight and deep conviction that a personal OBE or NDE would that I’ll definitely survive death in some form, the feeling those experiencing such phenomena have that they “know” they’ll survive rather than “believe” they will, nor does it guarantee that I won’t panic or otherwise have a miserable time the next time I come close to death. I can’t help but envy those lucky people who’ve had such OBE and NDE experiences, and transcended the fear of death so deeply. If you’re such a person, don’t worry; I’m not “jealous” in any negative sense, I’m happy that you’ve been blessed this way. For you this book has probably been too mild, too conservative. But for the many like me, who haven’t had this kind of life-changing psychic or mystical experience, who need to make the best guesses about life and the way to live it that we can, based on our own and others’ knowledge and experience, I hope this survey of why it’s sensible to be both scientifically oriented and spiritually inclined will help to smooth the path of your life.
I’ve always been very curious about many things, and while I can handle it, I don’t like to be fooled, either by others or, more embarrassingly, by myself. Essential science, as a disciplined way of investigating and thinking, as a systematic refinement of common sense, has thus served me well both personally and professionally. Observe the facts as clearly and objectively as possible, come up with possible explanations, make some predictions from those explanations, and test them against new observations. Share all this with peers you respect, and listen to their feedback. Do this with a humility that recognizes that you can be wrong and fixated in your error, but do prefer truth over just sticking to your opinions. Slowly, sometimes erratically, as we do get sidetracked by our limitations and biases, but in the long run steadily, we develop understandings of reality that work better and better.
I’ve shared with you my five decades of observing and collecting facts that have consequences for trying to understand the spiritual. These have been largely the basic facts of parapsychology, the solid and some of the not so solid, but possible, the big five and the many maybes.
So reality is, in many understandable and useful ways, “material” in a classical, Newtonian sense, a bunch of “things” that bump into each other and cause reactions. But this material reality leaves the existence of mind itself a great puzzle and has no room at all for “spiritual” things or beings. Modern physics, though, with its quantum phenomena, has the solid Newtonian materiality as a special case, not the be-all and end-all, and suggests a “nonlocal” world with mysterious, instantaneous connections all through the universe. I haven’t discussed quantum views here and their implications—again, I highly recommend Dean Radin’s book for that (2006)—because I know how little I understand quantum physics and I don’t want to misrepresent it. But I do know the data of parapsychology, and this data soundly shows that Newtonian materiality and its lack of a place for spiritual possibilities is not enough. The human mind sometimes behaves as if it’s “nonlocal,” connected to other minds and the material world through telepathy and clairvoyance, connected to the future with precognition, perhaps to the past with postcognition, and sometimes able to affect the material world (and other minds?) through PK and psychic healing effects. That’s the sort of mind that would be basically “spiritual,” a mind that involved the brain but was more than the brain, a mind that transcended the usual limits of ordinary matter, a mind intimately connected to other minds at some level, and a mind that was open to—ah yes, open to what?
Open to what, exactly? This is a nice phrase, and a meaningful one for those who are curious and those who are scientifically inclined. One of the things I like about essential science is that it’s based on data as the primary source, so no matter how satisfied or fulfilled you are by a particular theory or explanation, that theory is always open to upgrading or rejection or modification if new data comes in that requires it.
I’ve tried to show with this book that it’s sensible and reasonable to be both scientifically inclined and serious about seeking the spiritual. Given the enormous amount of unnecessary suffering people have undergone who think science has shown all their spiritual impulses and experiences to be nonsense, if I’ve helped anyone feel better about being both ways, scientific and spiritual, I’m quite pleased.
But that’s only the beginning, of course. If we developed sciences that were not only open to spirituality but also wanted to help advance spirituality, and spiritual systems that were not only open to science but also wanted to help advance science, where might this openness take us?
Advance spirituality? Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, I enjoy asking spiritually inclined friends, partly teasingly but really very seriously, “Has there been any progress in spirituality in the last few centuries?”
I don’t mean surface things like spiritual ideas being more widely available or the number of believers in particular religions increasing; I have a practical orientation. Are spiritual or religious training systems significantly more efficient than they used to be in making people more intelligent, wise, and compassionate?
If you asked this kind of question about medicine, for example, or just about any other field where essential science has been applied, the answer is a resounding yes! Diseases that were fatal a century or two ago are now routinely cured, for example. But are there any spiritual systems that can say something like, “It used to be that only N percent of our students reached such and such levels of performance, enlightenment, or salvation, and now it’s three times as high.” You hear a lot of complaints in spiritual circles about the degenerate times we live in—certainly that’s part of reality—but that kind of thinking, regardless of what truth value it has, can also serve as an excellent way of not facing up to a lack of progress.
Thinking about spiritual progress is a whole book in itself, but as a final note in this book, I’ll give one example of where we might go, a “dream project” I’ve hoped would come about for a long time, although it’s too late in my life for me to start it. This dream is to make spirituality more “efficient” by improving one of its principal methods, meditation.
A spiritually inclined life is much more than just practicing some special technique like meditation, of course, but let’s focus on that here.
Some years ago I was talking with my friend and colleague, Shinzen Young, who is, in my not-so-humble opinion, one of the best meditation teachers in the world. A native of Los Angeles, he’s proficient in several Asian languages and spent many years as a monk studying under various masters in the East before returning to the United States to teach and continue his own development. He also knows a great deal about how Buddhism, his primary interest, had to adapt itself to the various cultures it moved into in the course of its history, and has tried many experiments to make the basic meditation technique he teaches, insight meditation, or vipassana, work more successfully for Western students. Take a look at his website (www.shinzen.org) if you’re interested; there’s fascinating material there.
During the course of our conversation, we got on to the question of how well meditation “works” for most people, and Shinzen’s observation shocked me. He noted that when he taught a course or workshop introducing Westerners to meditation, it worked well enough that just about everyone indicated that he or she would make meditation a regular part of life. If he came back a year later, though, and 5 percent were still meditating, he felt quite successful as a meditation teacher.
I couldn’t believe it! My model of teaching is Western educational institutions. If we admitted students and 80 to 95 percent were still enrolled for the second year, we’d be doing well, pretty much as expected. But a 95 percent dropout rate? Unheard of! With such a rate, I’d be convinced that we, the faculty, were rotten teachers! Something was badly wrong with our educational program! Certainly a few would drop out because they didn’t have enough motivation, and a few would drop out because they didn’t have the needed talent, but 95 percent? And here I thought Shinzen was an excellent meditation teacher.
Shinzen noted that this was not just his personal experience; it was also the experience of the many Western meditation teachers he knew. Further, it was like that among the venerable Eastern teachers—and they didn’t worry about it. If they thought about it, the enormous dropout rate was attributed to karma. If you had enough positive karma from your past lives, you came around seeking meditation instruction. If you had even more good karma, you stuck around and learned; if not, you drifted off. If you accumulated more good karma in the future, maybe you came around again a few lifetimes down the road.
Well, maybe. Maybe reincarnation and karma are real, and the vast majority who show an interest in meditation don’t have enough good karma or personal development to stick with it. But this idea can also function as a great rationalization for teaching very ineffectively. “I’m teaching just fine; there are no faults with me; it’s the poor karma of my students.”
Shinzen has been experimenting with more effective teaching methods for years and has, I believe, had some notable successes. Also, people who learn meditation today as the only effective way to deal with chronic-pain problems, a whole new Western development (Young 2005, Kabat-Zinn 1990), stick with it much better, because they have the motivation of enduring horrible pain if they don’t.
So here’s the problem: one of the principal methods of spiritual development, meditation, apparently can’t be taught effectively to the vast majority of Westerners.
I’d been given meditation instruction by a number of teachers over the years and, until I met Shinzen, I’d long ago decided that whatever special talent it took to be a meditator, I didn’t have it, so I’d given it up. I’d also heard many spiritual teachers talk about how their system was individualized for particular students to get best results, but I often have the impression that it’s generally a one-size-fits-all approach: a given teacher teaches the way his teacher taught. Was my own failure, or that of many others, to get anywhere with meditation really a function of my bad karma (I could theorize that my karma might be much worse than I can imagine, but who knows?) or more that the teaching methods don’t match the needs of individual students in our times?
If friends or students come to me saying that they want to become more spiritual and asking what they should do or what teacher or system they should study with, my honest answer is that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s best in general, and I certainly don’t know what’s best for individuals. They’ll just have to try a variety of systems and see what happens in each (I have some more detailed advice along those lines in my Waking Up book [published by iUniverse, 1988]). The risk is that, at best, they’ll waste a lot of time doing spiritual practices and meditations that really aren’t suitable for who they are and, at worst, get discouraged or be damaged by unsuitable practices.
So back to my dream project. We take some very large number, say a hundred thousand, of people who are starting down various spiritual paths, and we give them extensive psychological testing. We don’t know enough yet to know what psychological tests would really be effective for what we want to know, so we just give an awful lot. And then we follow these students up every few years and collect statistics. How many people of personality type P went into Zen, say? How long did they last? Were any hurt? Do any feel they have made significant spiritual progress? Were any enlightened? Did any go nuts? Don’t even ask at this point how in the world we’ll measure enlightenment! But we can work toward it. Some might find a technical discussion of some of the dimensions of “enlightenment” useful (Tart 2003).
When we’ve collected many years of such data, we can do brute-force, empirical correlations and develop a way of testing that can give people more specific individual guidance. Then a student asks me what spiritual path to try, and I have her take the developed test, and I end up giving answers on the order of, say, “For your type, avoid Zen; there’s a 2 percent enlightenment rate after fifteen years but a 12 percent psychosis rate; that’s a pretty high risk. Sufism, on the other hand, has a 15 percent strong spiritual growth rate for your type with only a 1 percent psychosis rate.”
A dream? Yes. But in the long term, we do need to use science to help our spirituality and vice versa. I’ll say some more about these kinds of possibilities in appendix 4. I hope some of you dreamers out there will help make this kind of progress real!
Let me end by sharing a beautiful Tibetan prayer*, usually done at the end of periods of spiritual practice, to dedicate whatever merit the practice has created to the betterment and ultimate enlightenment of all beings. This is Sogyal Rinpoche’s translation (1992). The bulk of my “spiritual practice” is the research and writing I’ve been doing, and while I’m not too impressed with the “power” of my practice, it does aim toward truth, so in the spirit of this dedication prayer, I pray:
By the power and the truth of this practice,
May all beings have happiness,
And the causes of happiness,
Be free of sorrow,
And the causes of sorrow,
And never be separated from the sacred happiness,
Which is sorrowless.
May they live in equanimity,
Without too much attachment
Or too much aversion,
And live, believing
In the equality
Of all that lives.
[[* From the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche and edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey, Copyright © 1993 by Rigpa Fellowship. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins publishers.]]