What Is a “Spirit”?
Several volumes would be needed for an adequate study of all the problems that arise in connection with the mere idea of “spirits” and of their possible relations with human beings…
—Mircea Eliade 83
What then is a spirit? The Oxford dictionary defines it as “a supernatural, incorporeal, rational being or personality, usually regarded as imperceptible at ordinary times to the human senses, but capable of becoming visible at pleasure, and frequently conceived as troublesome, terrifying or hostile to mankind.” This has been a widespread view of spirits throughout history. However, if we set aside historical notions such as these, we need to ask questions such as the following: Are “spirits” mental or nonmental? Part of, or separate from, the medium? Expressions of health or pathology? In short, what is the psychological and ontological status of spirits? We can best explore these questions by examining both shamanism and other traditions.
To do this, we need to first look carefully at how exactly a “spirit” is experienced. Essentially, it is an interaction with what is felt to be an intelligent, nonmaterial entity separate from the ego or self. In the shaman’s case, the entity may provide information or power that the shaman believes she cannot access alone.
ENCOUNTERING SPIRITS AND GUIDES
Spirits may be seen outside or sensed inside. Outer spirits may appear as spirit intrusions in a patient’s body and require exorcism. Shamans can recognize intrusions with their trained, and sometimes psychedelically enhanced, spirit vision. However, an occasional anthropologist has been shocked, and had their Western belief system rattled, by seeing spirits themselves. An astounded Edith Turner reported that during a Zambian ritual, “I saw with my own eyes a large gray blob of plasma emerge from the sick woman’s back. Then I knew the Africans were right, there is spirit affliction, it isn’t a matter of metaphor and symbol, or even psychology.”373 This is a powerful example of the potential impact of open-minded, participatory anthropological research.
If spirits can be seen, could they be photographed? At the height of nineteenth-century spiritualism, a veritable industry of spirit photography flowered briefly. However, it quickly sputtered out under the weight of pictures which were “for the most part, grossly and transparently fake.”320
Encounters with spirits can be either troublesome or beneficial. In a religious context, troublesome examples include being tormented or possessed by unfriendly entities such as spirit intrusions, ghosts, or demons. In fact, dealing with troublesome spirits is one of the shaman’s most frequent tasks. In a psychological context, these same “spirits” might be interpreted as hallucinations.
Interactions with spirits can also be beneficial. Here the spirits may be valuable sources of information, guidance, and wisdom. In a religious context, such sources might be viewed as transcendent beings. Examples include the shaman’s “helping spirits,” the Hindu’s “inner guru,” the Quaker’s “still small voice within,” the Naskapi Indian’s “great man,” and for Christians, the “Holy Spirit.” However, mainstream Western psychology would regard all such inner sources as aspects of the psyche, such as sub-personalities.
A transpersonal psychological interpretation straddles these two views. Since transpersonal psychologists acknowledge capacities of mind transcendent to our usual egoic awareness, they might interpret these inner sources of wisdom in several ways. The first would be, like the traditional psychologist, as mundane sub-personalities. However, transpersonal psychologists might also view these sources of wisdom as transcendent aspects of the psyche “above and beyond” the ego. Examples include the “higher self”; the “transpersonal witness”; the Jungian “self,” which is the center of the psyche; and the “inner self-helper,” which is a helpful and apparently transcendent personality that can occur in multiple personalities.
Many religions and some psychologies recognize the possibility of accessing wisdom from inner sources that seem wiser than the ego. Indeed, considerable effort has gone into refining methods for facilitating this access.
Religious methods include diverse rituals, prayers, and altered states of consciousness. These altered states include possession, soul travel, or quieting the mind so as to be able to hear the “still small voice within.”
In psychology, major techniques include hypnosis and guided imagery. In fact, it is relatively easy to create an experience akin to channeling with hypnosis, as Charles Tart describes:
From my studies with hypnosis I know I can set up an apparently independent existent entity whose characteristics are constructed to my specifications and the person hypnotized will experience it as if it’s something outside of his own consciousness talking. So there is no doubt that some cases of channeling can be explained in a conventional kind of way. There is nothing psychic involved.195
Schools of psychology, such as Jungian, post-Jungian, and Gestalt, use guided imagery to access inner wisdom. In a technique called “dialogue with the sage or inner teacher,” the therapist asks the patient to imagine himself in a pleasant environment where he meets a person of great wisdom. The patient is then encouraged to allow a dialogue to emerge spontaneously and to ask whatever questions seem most helpful. Such dialogues can elicit novel, valuable information, and a growing number of authors, artists, and businesspeople now employ these methods for inspiration.378 Such techniques have obvious similarities to shamanic journeys to find a spirit teacher.
Inner teachers can also arise spontaneously and have life-changing effects. Some major historical figures have been directed by such inner teachers. The philosopher Socrates, the political leader Gandhi, and the psychologist Carl Jung all reported that they were advised by inner guides who arose unbidden from the depths of the psyche.
Carl Jung provided dramatic examples. One inner teacher, whom he called Philemon, provided Jung with a wealth of information about the psyche. Philemon first appeared during a fantasy of Jung’s in which
suddenly there appeared from the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if he were about to open a lock. He had the wings of the kingfisher with its characteristic colors....Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I....I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.
Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.184
Even a single experience of an inner guide can have life-changing effects. A dramatic example is given by a woman called Lillian who suffered chronic pelvic pain for which no medical cause could be found. Lillian began practicing visual imagery and obtained some benefits. She started by imagining
a stream of cool water circulating through her pelvis, and knotted ropes being untied. What felt like a cement block in her lower back was imaged as dissolving. She said she felt better; the burning was still there, but covered a smaller area.
Then one night when Lillian was practicing her imagery at home, a coyote named Wildwood flashed into her mind. He advised her to stay by his side, and watch what was about to happen, and told her that what she saw would be related to the fire in her body. She then sensed herself sitting by a campfire, in the midst of a hostile tribe of Indians who held her captive. She experienced the horror of being brutally gang-raped and murdered. “At the instant of my death….I woke up and was back in my body in the room, only my pain was completely gone, and hasn’t returned since.3
What is one to make of such an experience and its dramatic outcome? Lillian attributed it to a past life. A shamanic interpretation would be that her helping spirit guide or power animal, the coyote Wildwood, had taken her on a journey in which she had undergone rape, death, and a healing rebirth. A psychological explanation would be that her own mind had, by a wisdom and means far beyond our present understanding, provided her an experience of profound psychosomatic healing power. Whatever the explanation, one can only feel awe for the healing power of the psyche, its images, and its inner guides.
Of course, not all inner guidance is beneficial. Consider the case of a young World War I soldier who sat down in a trench to eat a meal when he heard an inner voice tell him to get up immediately and move to the far end of the trench. He did so, and a minute later a shell exploded, killing everyone in the group where he had been sitting. The soldier’s name? Adolf Hitler.158
THE ONTOLOGY OF SPIRITS
How are we to understand these sources of inner guidance? What exactly is their nature, or, in philosophical terms, what is their ontological status? Asking the sources themselves is not particularly helpful, because the answers may range all the way from “I am part of you” to “I am God.” Clearly we’re not going to get much help here, although some people swallow channeled claims totally. However, those of us who are more cautious need to think our way through the issue very carefully, and to make our own decisions about the sources of information and the processes involved.
From a psychological perspective we can account for inner guides and channeling if we recognize transpersonal aspects of the psyche. In this view, inspired channeled works would be creations of transpersonal facets of mind “above and beyond” the ego, such as psychosynthesis’s “higher unconscious,” Aurobindo’s “intuitive mind,” Tibetan Buddhist “yidams,” or certain Jungian archetypes.
However, psychological explanations do not disprove the existence of spirits (intelligent, nonmaterial entities independent of the channel’s mind) or their role in some channeling. Indeed, it is not at all clear that it is possible to either prove or disprove them.
In fact, the nature of “spirits” may be one of the great puzzles at the heart of shamanism, a puzzle at the intersection of three major philosophical conundrums: incommensurability, underdetermination of theory, and ontological indeterminacy.
In brief, incommensurability argues that there can be major difficulties in comparing or deciding between competing theories or worldviews. The shamanic worldview and theories, on one hand, and conventional psychological worldview and theories, on the other, hold such different assumptions, beliefs, and values that adjudicating between their different interpretations—of spirits, for example—is inherently problematic.
Underdetermination of theory by data suggests that it is always possible to come up with more than one theory to explain observations. Put another way, there may never be sufficient information available to decide definitively between two competing theories.v
Ontological indeterminacy implies that we may be unable to determine the precise nature or the ontological status of something. In this case, the ontological status of “spirits” cannot be decided definitively (i.e., is indeterminate) because the available information can be interpreted in many ways (underdetermination of theory by data), and we have no absolute method by which to decide which interpretation(s) are best (incommensurability).
Practically speaking, what this means is that people’s interpretations of phenomena in general, and of spirits in particular, are determined by their “world hypothesis”: their fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world and reality. Since fundamental beliefs are rarely questioned, most people’s decisions about the nature of spirits and channeling will be decided by these beliefs. Thus a philosophical materialist who assumes that everything is composed of matter will obviously view “spirits” very differently from the contemplative who believes in a transcendent realm of pure consciousness or spirit. For the philosophical materialist, shamanic spirits and worlds are merely mental projections that shamans mistake for independent entities and realities. All sources of inner wisdom, all perceived entities, all voices and visions are simply the expressions of neuronal fireworks, and probably deranged fireworks at that.w Michael Winkelman attempted to relate spirit possession to temporal lobe dysfunction, but cites no actual neurophysiological studies of mediums to support this.418
Things are very different for the believer in panpsychism. This is the view that everything in the universe, even including plants and inanimate objects, has some kind of psychological being or awareness. For panpsychists, some of the shaman’s helpers, voices, and visions could indeed be spirits. For psychologists, such as post-Jungians, spirits are best interpreted in terms of images and imaginal realities.259
Of course we have no proof whatsoever that all sources of inner wisdom have the same nature. For all we know, some might be merely aspects of mind, and not terribly impressive aspects at that, while others might be transcendent sources within or beyond us. We may simply be unable to decide definitively between such interpretations. Consequently, an agnostic view of spirits and channels, in which we confess their indeterminacy and our epistemological limitations, may be the most intellectually honest conclusion. It also avoids the danger of what Edith Turner calls “intellectual imperialism” in which we force native experiments into our own conceptual categories.
This conclusion may be honest but not terribly satisfying. Indeed, it can be downright annoying. But annoyance reflects attachment to our opinions as well as discomfort with ambiguity.
Yet psychology, philosophy, and religion all agree that life is fundamentally and inescapably mysterious, and that being willing to tolerate ambiguity and to open to the ultimate mystery of existence are essential for maturity. For Hinduism, maya is forever unknowable; for Buddhism, reality is shunyata (beyond all concepts), and for Taoism, “Tao is beyond words.”236 “Things keep their secrets,” observed Heraclitus,159 so much so that the great religious scholar Huston Smith concluded: “Reality is steeped in mystery; we are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.”347
Yet this sense of bottomless mystery can bless as much as stress. It can release us from rigidity and dogma, open us to awe and humility, and, according to Albert Einstein, “stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”224 “Keep don’t know mind” urges Zen.
So the fact that we cannot decide about the existence of spirits is actually not surprising. Rather, it reflects both the mystery of existence and the limitations of our knowing. This may not be wholly satisfying, but it is usefully humbling.”x
Mediumship can be interpreted in many ways. However, it certainly points to capacities of mind that remain as yet little understood and reminds us that we have underestimated the wisdom and creative powers latent within us. Long ago shamans became the first pioneers to explore and cultivate these powers.