Polytheistic
Experiences
Those who ask what a god is, like those who
have to ask what a mountain or an eagle or a
forest is, will not learn the answer from a book.
When I became an adult during the sixties and seventies, social scientists’ general view was that religion was a declining force with little future. Anthropologist Anthony Wallace spoke for many when he observed that “belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge … the process is inevitable” (Wallace, Religion, 264–5). Modern science’s evisceration of biblical literalism and its concept of a monotheistic creator god had proven convincing for virtually everyone who studied the issues. As described in Chapter 4, science had not only broken free from most of its Christian assumptions, it had completely refuted them.
Most social scientists subscribed to “secularization theory,” which held religions would fade, first from government, and then from public life. Religion’s last hold-out would be private devotion. In time, even that would be replaced by some variant of modern secularism.
Today, here and in much of the world as a whole, religion is a more potent political force than it has been in many years. Southern Baptists and Pentecostals now form the backbone of the Republican Party, which dominates many states and many of whose leaders want to toss the Constitution aside and replace it with theocracy (Philips, American Theocracy). Whenever science disagrees with their beliefs, they reject it.
However, in many ways America’s predicted secularization has continued as expected. According to a new Pew poll, between 2007 and 2014 the number of Americans who did not identify with any religion grew from 36.6 million to 55.8 million (Lipka, “A closer look”). When asked their religious affiliation, those who report “none” now total around 25 percent of the populations of both Europe and the United States. In 2015, 34 to 36 percent of those born after 1980 reported having no religious affiliation. As with atheists and agnostics, this percentage has been increasing (Shermer, “Silent No More,” 77). In 2007 78.4 percent of Americans identified as Christians. Seven years later the number had dropped to 70.6 percent (Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape”). And the United States is the most religious among developed nations.
In keeping with secularization theory, Americans’ growing secularism is most clearly associated with urban living and relatively high levels of education, which would explain the hostility of many conservative religious believers to learning, as well as to cities. The strong countervailing pattern developing in the opposite direction disproportionately includes our country’s least educated, least traveled, and least urbanized citizens. A great bifurcation appears to be opening between declining numbers of dogmatic believers and a larger, increasingly secular, population.
But appearances can be deceptive.
A complication appears
While the broadest pattern secularization theory predicted is happening, a third development brings the theory itself into question. If we examine the most secular portions of our population, most say they are not atheists or even agnostics, and believe some more-than-human context provides ultimate meaning to life. Only 37 percent of those reporting that they have no religion say they do not believe in God (Alper, “Why America’s ‘nones’ don’t identify”). A 2018 Pew study discovered 62 percent of agnostics believe in a higher spiritual force (Pew Research Center, “Most agnostics”). A 2014 survey indicated 32 percent of those calling themselves agnostic thought people experienced consciousness well after death (Shermer, “Silent No More,” 77).
These numbers are not what one would expect for the few who identify themselves as atheists. But according to Pew Research Center’s findings, 8 percent of atheists say they believe in God or a universal Spirit and 2 percent are “absolutely certain” such exists. Over half, 54 percent, of declared atheists feel “a deep sense of wonder about the universe” (Pew Research Center, “10 facts about atheists”). In marked contradiction to secularization theory, these beliefs in a spiritual dimension are positively related to education. John Michal Greer writes that in 1975 a British national poll found 36 percent reported at least one encounter with “a god, spirit, or sacred entity.” The percentages reporting such contacts increased with education (Greer, A World Full of Gods, 68–9). Other investigations found the same correlation. In a 2011 study of top scientists at research universities, Elaine Ecklund reported that most scientists at major research universities described themselves “as spiritual.” In general they considered spirituality as “a substitute for religion” (Ecklund and Long, “Scientists and Spirituality”).
There is nothing new about these findings. In his The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm explored how spiritual and occult ideas have played a consistently important role in the thinking of many of our scientific greats, including Marie Curie, Gregory Bateson, John Dewey, Thomas Edison, William James, Arthur Koestler, Ernst Mach, Alan Turing, and Alfred North Whitehead, and many others (Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 305). Many people are having experiences or intuitions convincing them there is more to life than the secular image of a meaningless, godless, world, but they often lack the vocabulary to describe it, believe organized religions do not connect with it, and so often use the less precise term “spiritual.” They are profoundly right.
“Spirituality” focuses on experience whereas “religion” usually refers to institutionalized belief and practice. A 2012 Pew survey on religion and public life reported nearly half of all Americans experienced what they report to be a “religious or mystical experience,” double the number Gallup reported in 1962, when only 22 percent of Americans reported such experiences (Pew Research Center, “Many Americans”). That number increased to 31 percent in 1976, and has apparently remained relatively constant through 1994 when Newsweek reported 33 percent.
In 2002, Gallup asked respondents to rate the statement “I have had a profound religious experience or awakening that changed the direction of my life” on a scale from 0 to 5, with 0 standing for “does not apply at all” and 5 for “applies completely.” Gallup reported 41 percent of Americans said the statement completely applies to them (Gallup Jr., “Religious Awakenings”).
While Pew reported “mystical or religious experiences are most common among people who regularly attend religious services,” 30 percent of those describing themselves as religiously unaffiliated also reported such experiences and 25 percent of people with no religious preference said the statement applied to them completely, as did 27 percent of people who said they rarely or never attend religious services. These percentages are greater than the 22 percent Gallup reported in 1964 for the country as a whole, when a larger percentage of Americans described themselves as Christians. This might reflect a genuine increase in such experiences, for Pew found 55 percent of baby boomer generation Americans reported having had such experiences whereas only 43 percent of seniors had.
The persistence of such phenomena, rooted in experience rather than belief, was not predicted in secularization theory. It is also not linked to traditional American religion. Secularization theory’s most abstract prediction is happening, but people’s reported spiritual experiences reflect something different.
I am one of those for whom this proved true.
My strongest grounds for rejecting the atheists’ alternative to monotheism are not historical, philosophical, theological, or scientific, although such grounds exist. They are experiential. Trying to puzzle these experiences out explains why I, a PhD in the very secular discipline of political science, ultimately came to write such a book as this.
A personal account
Growing up in culturally conservative Wichita, Kansas, the only thing I knew about religion was Christianity, along with a vague awareness that Jews and others even stranger existed. Learning the Bible was the word of God, in high school I tried to be a fundamentalist for about a year, before abandoning it in 1964. But the nagging fear that I had made a mistake with eternal implications persisted for some years to come.
Once in college, I read much of the literature explored by intellectually adventuresome young people, including authors such as Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, and Aldous Huxley. But I found no person or message that truly appealed to me. In graduate school I continued a little exploration, from Carlos Castaneda to Jane Roberts. Watts was perhaps my favorite of all, because of his emphasis on nature as spiritually important. My deepest “spiritual” love was wild nature, and while I occasionally wished something like pantheism was true, I believed it was not. Very rarely, I had strange experiences, like repeatedly seeing an aura around someone, but only that person. Neither that, nor any other such event, persisted or seemed to lead anywhere.
By graduate school, for all intents and purposes I was a devotee of secular social science. I thought there was more to reality than this (I could not deny that aura experience), but I was equally committed to the view that, whatever ultimate reality was, no one knew much about it, and it was irrelevant to the task of living in this world. I did pay attention to books like The Tao of Physics and wondered about the meaning of experiences over the years with entheogens. But if I had any religious interests at all, they were in Buddhism and mystical kinds of Judaism because, compared to Christianity, I thought both respected learning. However, I knew very little about either. As for polytheism and pagan deities, I thought such ideas were the beliefs of primitives.
I resembled many who called themselves vaguely spiritual, but not religious.
The bet that changed everything
As a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, I had a problem. I lacked the money I needed to support myself while I researched and wrote my dissertation, and had discovered there was no security in part-time academic appointments. I also knew if I got an 8-to-5 job, the dissertation I dreamed of writing would probably never get written.
A fellow graduate student suggested I try and sell versions of the envelopes I frequently decorated when sending letters to friends. At my wits’ end as to any other alternative, I decided to try it. I decorated stationery and envelopes with my pen and ink art, had them printed, and waited for the world to beat a path to my door. The world paid no attention. I knew nothing about running a business.
To avoid bankruptcy, I ended up selling them as a street vendor on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. To my delight, my business began to flourish, and eventually I even had a significant wholesale market. However, I still had to continue as a street and craft fair vendor to cover my own expenses. Slowly, the dissertation took shape, while I was otherwise immersed in an environment very different from traditional academia.
When selling my art, I met people I normally would have never encountered while on the Berkeley campus. In a friendly conversation, one customer—noting my envelopes with dragons and unicorns—asked if I had any wizards or magicians, as he had a personal interest. When I asked him if he performed on stage, he said he “didn’t do that kind of magic.”
I thought he must be another Berkeley loon, of which there were a great many. Telegraph Avenue’s sidewalks were regularly visited by crowds of chanting Hare Krishna devotees, religious fundamentalists with their bullhorns, and simple ranters running on about an amazing variety of bizarre things. But this man was a good customer, didn’t rant, and was not interested in the state of my soul, so I just replied, “That’s interesting.” Still, I was disappointed a person I had taken an immediate liking to turned out to be a nut.
A year or so later, I had finished my dissertation, had it accepted, and thought I would soon leave this world for an academic position. I was wrong. As I remember those events (and I will never forget them), this is what unfolded. When Don, for that was his name, came by to get gifts for the holiday season, I decided to ask him if he could show me some “real magick.” I was curious as to how he would weasel out of my request, since I was sure he couldn’t.
Instead he replied “Sure, how about tonight?”
Embarrassed, I answered I needed to package more stationery for tomorrow. For us vendors, Christmas season was the equivalent of harvest time for farmers. But I swore when I saw him again I’d ask the same question, and, no matter what, take him up on it if he answered the same way.
I did and he did. In January he showed me “real magick.”
I arrived at his south-of-campus apartment around ten at night, as requested. He answered the door wearing a black cloak while carrying a staff. “Let’s go up on campus,” he said.
“OK,” I replied, while thinking, “I hope I don’t meet anyone I know.”
It was an extraordinary night, and the final, most decisive, event happened at an open-air plaza surrounded by buildings on all four sides. None of the buildings opened out to the plaza. The plaza itself was elevated a story above ground level, and could only be accessed by a spiral staircase within a narrow opening between two buildings, or, on the other side, by outside stairs that disappeared into the ground and entered a basement to emerge on the other side, with still more steps rising up to the plaza. The plaza itself was square, with a circular platform in the middle. There was a sidewalk extending from one entrance to the other. The rest was a “sea” of gravel over which a footbridge arched from the sidewalk to the circle, as if the gravel were water. On the far side, two large chimneys rose, giving the place a kind of spooky temple image. I had been at Berkeley for ten years and never known this place existed, although, like most everyone, I knew where Trader Vic’s statue of a saber-toothed tiger stood, near the base of the spiral stairs leading up to it.
We sat on a bench at the plaza’s edge. Don had said its strange design and unusual privacy had led some Bay Area occultists to use it for rituals. Sometimes they conjured up entities, and one of them had never been returned to wherever it had originated. Perhaps we could see a six-foot-tall angry something-or-other trapped on the gravel surrounding the plaza.
No such entity ever appeared.
Instead, across the circular plaza, between two juniper bushes growing along the narrow strip between the sidewalk and an adjoining building, I saw something short and almost invisible. It was stationary, transparent, pale, cylindrical, and whiteish. Don asked me whether I saw anything. I decided to give him the minimal information.
“Yes.”
“Is it between those two bushes?”
“Yes.”
“Is it about three feet tall?”
“Yes.”
“Is it white?”
“Yes, but I can barely see it. It’s very faint.”
“Let me see what I can do about that.” With that, Don walked to the center of the circle, placed his staff on the ground, and leaned his head against it. The image glowed much brighter!
“My God,” I thought. “This guy’s for real.”
He returned, and asked if it was easier to see. I said it was, and we sat together on the bench. I wasn’t going to walk over to it, and it made no attempt to visit us (which was fine by me). In time, simply sitting, with whatever it was standing motionless between the bushes, became kind of dull, and it had grown very late. We decided to leave. Before we did, Don walked to the center, leaned again on his staff, and the apparition vanished completely.
When we walked past where it had been, I got down on my hands and knees to see whether I could detect anything unusual on the ground between the bushes. Nope. Nothing. Coarse gravel, with a brick wall behind the bushes, was all that was there.
My secular Western worldview collapsed that night, as did my suspicion that, while there was more to the world than the modern outlook acknowledged, no one knew much about it. Don clearly could enter into communication with entities we both could see, but which modern science denied existed.
At that point I could have filed this night away as an amazing experience, as I had with seeing auras around one guy, and returned to living life as I had lived it before, or I could explore further. In a decision whose full implications I did not grasp at the time, I asked to study with him. Don agreed, and we began meeting together weekly.
About six months later he invited me to a Wiccan midsummer sabbat to celebrate the summer solstice.
A sacred encounter
We gathered in a glade surrounded by live oaks in Berkeley’s Tilden Park. Perhaps fifty or sixty people were there, maybe more. Hours after the ritual was supposed to have started, it finally began. This was my introduction to “Pagan Standard Time.” By then I had shifted from excitement at witnessing an actual sabbat performed by actual Witches, to being fed up with the glacial pace of things and was contemplating leaving.
When we gathered to form a circle in a small clearing, my thoughts were, “It’s starting, that means it will end, and I can go home.”
After the circle was cast, the High Priestess and High Priest walked to its center. When he invoked the Wiccan Goddess, she came. Powerfully. Overwhelmingly. Beyond anything I could have imagined beforehand.
She was not visible to my eye, and at that time I got no sense of how she looked, but I experienced her presence as more real than I was. It was as if my normal experience was one dimension of a multidimensional reality, and what exists in many dimensions was more real than my world, which exists in only a few.
For another sense of this experience, think of a beautifully painted tree or person. Real as it can seem, it only has two dimensions. As a being, an actual three-dimensional tree or person is more real. Another comparison that might help give a sense of my experience is, if life is normally experienced on a two-dimensional movie screen, with her it became three dimensional, no 3-D glasses needed.
But there was an even deeper dimension of inner psychic reality. We can get a small sense of such a presence in unusually close and intimate encounters with those who are special to us, as compared to an encounter structured entirely by social roles, such as a waiter, waitress, or customer. In one case we encounter a Thou; in the other, a role.
She also radiated unconditional love, not just for me, but for everything. It was universal, but also deeply personal. It was as if she had complete access to everything that I was, my many failings included, and still embraced me without reservation. There was nothing impersonal about it.
I had always thought I knew what love was, but that afternoon I discovered I only knew enough to recognize that hers was more real than anything I could have previously imagined. The love I have both given and received was real enough, but diluted by needs and expectations. She was a deity, and therefore free of the limitations of human love. If my capacity for love was a flashlight in the dark, hers was the sun, abolishing all darkness. Again, it was as if what I experienced in a few dimensions, I now experienced in many.
Years later, in another encounter, I told her, “Someday I hope I will be worthy of your love.”
She responded, “You have always been worthy of my love.”
I had a brief moment of pride, of feeling special, until she added: “All beings are always worthy of my love.”
This message and the experience of unconditional love was in keeping with many mystics’ reports of God as love, except that encountering the Godhead is experiencing only love; she was feminine, and possessed other individuated qualities.
I am a political scientist by training, and we study power—particularly power in a hierarchical sense. I was both attracted to and repelled by it. Repelled because of the destruction, suffering, and atrocities committed by people caught up in exercising it; and attracted because, if I or those like me had enough of it, we could radically reduce those crimes against humanity and nature. Or so we convinced ourselves. We would be exceptions to the rule, which is an all too common delusion for those attracted by power.
I remember thinking at the time, “With love like this, who needs power?” Another interpretation of my experience would be that love is the most powerful thing in the world, but it is a power of presence, not of hierarchy or control. From that time on, my attraction to power in any hierarchical sense plummeted. This completely unexpected psychological shift on my part occurred in minutes and has now lasted over thirty years.
Today, when I look at Donald Trump and others like him, it seems to me they have become largely vehicles for power, parasitized at the cost of their humanity, and are now withered husks of what they had once been or could have become. Opposing them is necessary for the good of others and the earth, but were they not so powerful, they would be pathetic.
Another distinctive quality accompanied her. As I experienced her, it seemed as if she was accompanied by forests, meadows, and streams. She was somehow integrated with the world of nature. Since that first encounter, whenever I use a name for her, she is my Lady of Forests and Fields.
She was not the Godhead. In time I would experience that as well, but not now. She had personal traits, whereas, as I experienced it, the Godhead was pure love, the source for all that existed, neither male nor female, neither just in the earth or just transcendent to it. She was an individuated and aware being, far closer to this source than I, or anything I had ever experienced.
Finally, she was beautiful. Again, more so than anything I had ever experienced. The Wiccan Charge of the Goddess, which I had not heard at the time, caught her beauty as well perhaps as words ever could: “I, who am the beauty of the green earth, and the white Moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters, and the heart’s desire, call unto thy soul.” Precisely.
When she departed I remember thinking “So THIS is a deity! And here is a religion that asks their god to come, and she does.”
That afternoon in Berkeley’s Tilden Park was my introduction to polytheism, as well as my entrance into Wicca. But much more was to come.
Varieties of polytheistic experience
Initially I thought everyone present had had the same experience I did at that sabbat, or in similar ceremonies. I soon discovered this was not the case. Some had similar ones, others had different kinds of encounters, and some simply felt that at last they had come home.
I did not have many such experiences in the years that followed. She appeared, although less intensely, in two other sabbats, and in one esbat, or full moon ceremony. But for the most part, she did not. It has now been decades since I had my last such encounter.
I wondered why these appearances were so few, and now believe were we to experience her more often, we would live just for those times. And apparently, whatever the purpose of our life, in Wicca at least, it is not for people to become dependent on deities. It is less clear to me why everyone did not have experiences such as mine. But I was to discover that encounters with polytheistic deities took many forms within many traditions, and within each not everyone had similar encounters.
An encounter on Mount Saint Helena
Perhaps a year after that midsummer sabbat, Don asked me whether I was interested in attending a sweat lodge ceremony high up Mount Saint Helena at a former Girl Scout camp. Mount Saint Helena is the highest mountain in what Californians call the North Bay region, rising 4,342 feet, the highest point in both Sonoma and Napa counties. I was not particularly interested in collecting religious experiences; my goddess encounter had been sufficient for me, but I have always loved nature, and it sounded interesting, so I joined him.
Sweat lodges are most often associated with Native American traditions, though they or similar activities have long taken place across the northern regions of the world. To build a sweat lodge today, people construct a framework of willows into a dome too low to stand up in, and canvas tarps are used to cover it except for a small entrance that can be closed. Enough tarps are used so even on a bright day it is completely dark inside. A pit in the center is used to hold red-hot stones, which are brought in at the beginning of each of four rounds. The first round invited in spirits to help with the ceremony; during the second, we asked for healings; the third was the healing round; and the fourth, one of thanksgiving.
That sweat was dark, long, and hot, but for me, not a powerful spiritual event. I was a little disappointed. Once it was over I walked to a nearby stream to dunk myself in its cold waters. I also had a metaphysical question that had long nagged at me: Why were we here? What was the purpose of life?
As I stood knee deep in its cold waters, a feminine presence made herself felt. She was not the Wiccan Goddess—there was no sense of perfect love, of superhuman beauty, or of her being much more real than I was. But she radiated a deep beauty and kindness, and wisdom beyond the human. I also had a vague sense of her appearance. She seemed more European than Native American, which answered another question that bothered me. Was it appropriate for me, a White guy, to engage in practices rooted in a culture that my people had treated with criminal brutality? That a friendly spirit showed up indicated that this was not an issue, at least if my motivations were good.
She gave me a short message: “See what you have been given.” To this day, decades later, there are several possible meanings to her message, and I was too surprised to ask her what she meant. But it was friendly, and not obviously Wiccan.
I was learning that the polytheistic world has a variety of entities, from fully superhuman to some who were far closer to us, but wiser and kinder. And some that apparently were neither.
Mount Shasta provides an attitude adjustment
I liked sweats and the sense of being close to nature, especially to the spirits of the land, for sweats were about as earthy a practice as you could do. And I hoped for a repeat visit from that entity, though she never returned, to me at least. In time the group’s leader announced he would teach a year-long course he called “Coyote’s Kindergarten.” It would involve learning more about Native American practices to harmonize and learn from the spirits of the land. It did not conflict with my Wiccan practice, and so I decided to attend.
At the end of that year, during which I had no powerful experiences, we each had a solitary three-day vision quest high up on California’s Mount Shasta. Within California’s alterative spirituality community, this immense, glacier-clad volcano had a reputation as a place where unusual things happened, from UFOs to Bigfoot sightings to encountering underground “Lemurians,” and what have you. Personally, I regarded most of this as nonsense. But the mountain was beautiful, I would spend three days alone high up on it hoping for a vision or something, and I had enjoyed Timothy’s teachings, which were now coming to an end. I also had come to believe that while the Spirit world of earthly energies was very real, it was not very powerful, since our society seemed to be destroying every sacred site and practice it encountered. As it continues to do today.
I hiked up to where I would spend three days and nights, a little below timberline, and laid my sleeping bag out in the small spot I would stay for that time. I carried water but no food. And then I sat. Or chanted. Or simply enjoyed the beauty of Northern California’s wild mountain country. Once a ptarmigan came within a few feet of me, but I was too dense to ask what that meant. The third night I was supposed to stay up until dawn, praying and chanting for a vision, but decided I would rather get a good night’s sleep. I thanked the mountain for my time there, apologized for not staying up, and went to bed.
It took me a while to fall asleep, but eventually I did. Then, around 2 a.m. (I checked my wristwatch after the event) I woke up. Something was nearby, something VERY big. All I felt was a sense of approaching immensity. Suddenly, I was immersed within it, with intense pressures squeezing me from every direction. When I describe it now, I say it was like being at the bottom of the ocean, with the all-important difference that I could breathe.
The scale of this presence was so vast that I have since compared myself to it as an ant would to a bulldozer. It had no discernable personality or individuality. It seemed to be pure power.
I could not move of my own volition, though my body thrashed about within my sleeping bag. I was terrified. Then, suddenly, it departed. I relaxed, thinking it was over.
Only it almost immediately returned for a second round. Panicked, I realized I was in way over my head, and utterly alone. The only force that seemed large enough to handle it was the mountain itself, and so I called out “Shasta! Shasta!”
My voice seemed far away, perhaps like hearing someone scream half a block away on a quiet night. But with my call, that force immediately vanished. Somehow, I knew it would not return, and it did not.
I stayed in my sleeping bag and soon fell asleep, not to awaken until dawn.
When I arose, the events of the night before seemed unreal, and yet I knew beyond doubt they had happened. After a while I gathered my stuff and, profoundly shaken, began walking down to the place we would all gather after finishing our time on the mountain.
Many years later Timothy told me he had noticed my increasingly lackadaisical attitude toward the Spirit world, and had asked the mountain to provide me an “attitude adjustment.” It did.
Brazilian healing
My Mount Shasta experience transformed my spiritual life in another very important way. We ended our vision quests with a fire ceremony, and after I had sung my thanksgiving song, my right foot began vibrating. The vibrating rapidly spread throughout my body, and soon I was flat on my back, with my body arching effortlessly, with only my heels and head touching the ground. It was out of my control, and eventually stopped on its own.
My teacher in these matters told me what was happening was good, but he did not feel able to teach me much. He suggested I explore African Diasporic traditions, whose leaders knew about such things. Returning to Berkeley, my Wiccan friends and coven mates did not have any idea what was going on either. When I raised my athame, a ritual knife, within a Wiccan circle, my arm would begin to jerk around, leaving some wondering whether I might accidentally hurt myself, or one of them. I never did, but decided to investigate an African Diasporic group meeting in Oakland, led by the remarkable Luisah Teish.
I enjoyed their rituals and the people were very friendly, but I was uncomfortable with animal sacrifice. So, I never joined, but for some time remained a frequent guest at their events. It was there that I met a woman who told me of a healing circle in Berkeley, where I lived at the time. It was an eclectic group whose leader, a Brazilian, was deeply involved in Brazilian Umbanda, and in Tibetan Buddhism. The woman was good-looking, and so, for reasons much more earthy than spiritual, I visited the center.
As soon as I walked in the door, I entered into a light trance and felt a bit dissociated. I sat down in a row of chairs, along with the other people who came to receive healing. When my turn came, I went to the central area and sat in another chair. Four mediums dressed in white stood around me and began applying healing energy. As soon as they began, I lost control of my body as had also been the case on Mount Shasta. I fell out of the chair and began thrashing around on the floor. I remained clearheaded, but I had no control over my body.
The center’s leader came out of a side room where he had been working with someone, and soon took better control of my body than I had, even though he never touched me. Once I had calmed down, he told me that what was happening could be either a great blessing or a great curse, and asked me to work in the temple, to ensure the former. I asked whether I could still practice Wicca, because my commitment to the Goddess was total.
He said yes.
I stayed for six or seven years, and gradually became a major practitioner of those healing techniques. It was as demanding as getting my PhD at Berkeley, but involved neither reading books nor writing papers. The center’s leader told us one time, “I could teach you everything that could be put into words in a weekend, and it would be worthless.” Instead, we gradually developed our own capacities to interact with the Spirit world and to move healing energy within our own bodies as well as sending it to others. In time I no longer lost control of my body. In Wiccan circles my athame was steady.
I was so impressed with the knowledge this tradition had that I occasionally told the Wiccan Goddess I would transfer my primary identity to the healing group, if she would show up during one of their sessions. She never did.
However, once a year, our leader would invoke the presence of his major spiritual teacher, an enlightened Buddhist who now existed on a spiritual plane. His name was “Venerable Master Shidha” (pronounced Shi-dee-hah). Usually I felt little to nothing when he was invoked. However, on one occasion his presence was about as strong as had been the case with that first encounter with the Wiccan Goddess. Again, there was a sense of unconditional love, but his presence was masculine and ethereal rather than imbued with a sense of nature and the feminine.
This blessing from VM Shidha was fascinating because, while he radiated perfect unconditional love and I experienced him as somehow more real than I was, he was presented to us not as a deity, but as an enlightened being who had once been human. But he shared those two superhuman qualities with the Wiccan Goddess.
An encounter with the Godhead
Becoming actively involved with Wicca and with healing groups did my academic career no good, not because there was active discrimination against me as a Pagan, though there was some, but because I lacked the single-minded job-at-any-cost attitude beginning academics had to have to get their foot in the door. During the first crucial years I stayed in the Bay Area, teaching as a visiting professor, so I could continue learning from Don and others. Consequently, my professional life became a mix of temporary teaching positions and posts in think tanks rather than a secure academic position. In one case I suddenly lost my position in a think tank because the organization encountered unexpected financial stresses. I was suddenly out of a job.
I moved back to Oakland from Sonoma County, to once again become a full-time street vendor. I was deeply depressed with the course events had taken.
I was driving south through a rural part of Marin County when suddenly I was immersed with the presence of all that is, or the Godhead. This was an experience of unconditional love for all things, but unlike my encounter with the Wiccan Goddess, it was not female. Nor was it male.
It was the Creator in the sense that all that existed in my world seemed to emanate from it, as light might come from the sun. This was a loving emanation, seemingly for the sake of manifesting love in as many ways as possible. All things, even those most objectionable from our perspective, were included.
When I thought about what had happened, it seemed as if love and reality emanated from this source, gradually to become individuated into deities and the like, and still farther from that source, beings like ourselves, although always illuminated by it.
Seeing while healing
While working with the Brazilian healing circle I was offered a visiting professorship at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, Washington. I accepted, and spent two years there teaching American politics. My first year, a student—older than most, and a former Marine—told me he needed to withdraw, and needed my approval because the time for a free withdraw had passed. I told him there was no problem, but asked him why he needed to drop the course.
He told me he had been rear-ended while stopped at an intersection, and had hurt his back. X-rays showed that the impact had crushed a disc in his neck. “I am either in so much pain I cannot pay attention or I am so drugged up I can’t pay attention.” He was going to need an operation.
My experience with energetic healing work convinced me it was effective, but I still wondered whether this effectiveness was in the work itself, or whether it triggered a placebo effect. Here was a chance, maybe, to help someone and also to clarify my thoughts on that matter. His X-ray indicated a genuine injury causing intense pain.
I suggested that, if he was open to it, he come to my apartment and I would see if I could help him. Somewhat to my surprise, he agreed.
In every session we both stood and I worked behind him, silently. During the first session I “looked” with my mind’s eye into his neck, and “saw” what appeared to be a dark spider wrapped around his spine, where the injury was. I tried to “pull” it off psychically, and failed. I then tried to “dissolve” it with energy, and again failed. Finally, I sent a thin beam of healing energy into it, hoping to weaken it from within.
Afterwards, I “looked” elsewhere in his back, and “saw” what seemed to be many small black insects. I envisioned a psychic rake, and “raked” them out. I then tapped his shoulder and said I was done.
He turned and said, “Before you say anything, let me tell you what I experienced.” After maybe thirty years I obviously cannot remember his exact words, but he said something like “Around my spine was an eagle’s claw, and you tried to take it off, and couldn’t. Then you tried to dissolve it, and couldn’t. Finally, you managed to weaken it. There also seemed to be something like ants in my back and you raked them out.”
“Eagle’s claw” and “spider” are different, but of course what we “saw” was neither. What they shared in common was something with appendages wrapped around the injury. He also correctly described the order of my attempts to remove it and their semi-successful outcome. I will always remember his verb “raked” because that was exactly what I envisioned doing.
The most reasonable conclusion was that we interpreted what happened in slightly different but complementary ways. No matter the explanation, clearly minds could access information within another body that there was no way of explaining in secular terms. I no longer worried that what I was doing was somehow energizing a placebo response.
He was never able to repeat that accurate a description again, but after four sessions his pain was largely gone (as was the “spider”). He remained virtually pain free and did not need an operation through at least the final year I taught there.
An unexpected blessing from Yemaya
Our Brazilian group held annual celebrations and made offerings to Yemaya, the Brazilian orisha of the ocean, on a beach every New Year’s Day. In time I left the group, on friendly terms, because its focus was becoming increasingly Buddhist, and much as I respect that tradition, it was not mine. However, I and some other friends continued honoring Yemaya every New Year’s on the Sonoma coast. Every time I made offerings to her, the water would rise, and I’d get wet.
One January a big winter storm had blown in, and when I tried to contact my friends who also made offerings, no one was home. I decided to go make offerings on my own. I also decided to do it at Coleman Beach, a small rocky beach that was hard to access even in good weather because the stairs down the cliff face were in poor shape. That meant I’d have it to myself.
Once at the bottom, the size of the incoming waves made standing on the beach itself dangerous. So, I looked around at the surrounding huge boulders, trying to find one that was not getting periodically swamped with a big wave, but still jutting far enough out that I could make the offering. One rock seemed perfect.
I figured water would still come over the rock, as it always seemed to whenever I made an offering to her. Consequently, I removed my shoes, walked to its edge, and emptied cornmeal into the water. Suddenly a wave came up well over the top, hitting me waist high. I thought it would knock me over, but as it receded, I remained standing, holding a jar of molasses.
Determined to finish the offering, I unscrewed the top and began pouring the molasses into the ocean. As I emptied the last of the molasses into the sea, I looked up.
And up.
And up.
A wave far above my head was almost to the rock. And then it was on top of me, sweeping me off my feet.
I remember thinking “I’ll be a newspaper article tomorrow …”
I was carried back, perhaps twenty feet or so, to the cliff face, and deposited, standing up, into a narrow crack. Had I encountered that crack a few inches in either direction, I would not be writing these words today. But instead of having my head smashed, I had a tiny scratch on a single knuckle.
And the water was warm!
I was exhilarated, joyous, and grateful for the event. I felt wonderful. The thought of having barely escaped death was not important.
I had received a blessing, although I was aware that this kind of blessing was not wisely pursued. My subsequent offerings have been in much safer places. But no matter where, the waters come up far higher than they had been—in one case rising high enough to extinguish a beach fire that had been burning for hours, far from the water’s edge.
Implications
My experiences, these and others, led me to a decades-long effort to try and find a scientifically respectable way of making sense of them. During the first year or so I kept a small notebook where I recorded them. I was concerned that I would get so “far out there” as to lose touch with reality, whatever that was. So, I wrote down what happened, whether it was expected (usually not), whether there were other witnesses (sometimes yes), and whether I had imbibed or smoked anything at the time (I think never).
I also observed how my life went, and while it was not going the way I had anticipated when getting my PhD, I kept my old friends, ran my business successfully, and published papers in refereed social science journals. Other than having such experiences, nothing was happening in my life to indicate I was losing my mind or otherwise failing to handle consensus reality.
In time I decided it was more irrational for me to doubt the reality of such experiences than to accept that, somehow, I was encountering dimensions of reality most Americans did not experience, or want to.
But I always sought for a way to link them with the world I shared with everyone else. Now, more than thirty years after they began, I think I finally have something to offer.
Patterns?
Based on these experiences, and some others, one observation leaps to the front: the extraordinary variety of encounters. They range from the Godhead to spirits that seem small, passive, and anything but superhuman. Some are visible, some are not. Some have an ethical presence dwarfing ours, others seem to consist of pure energetic power, particularly my experience on Mount Shasta. But even this latter responded powerfully to what I did (as well as, perhaps, to what my teacher, Timothy, had earlier requested). And yes, some seem unfriendly.
A second observation is more universal. It was possible to enter into relationship with them. But here, again, variety applies. Some initiated the encounter, others responded when an effort was made to contact them. Some provided a message or teaching, others an experience. Some transformed my life, but most did not. Some could be seen by others, some were purely private encounters, invisible even to people nearby.
A third observation is that the details of these experiences seem largely confined to the cultural context in which they occurred. The Wiccan Goddess never appeared within a Brazilian ceremony. Nor did a preto velho or caboclo, so central to many Brazilian ceremonies, ever appear in a Wiccan circle, though I admit they were never asked. To a large but perhaps not complete degree, entities from different spiritual traditions, rarely “crossed over.” Of those I am told did, the people with whom they interacted had previous experience with one that later showed up in a different context.
Finally, there is no certain way of determining whether an entity is who it says it is in a particular encounter. While some encounters are repeatedly with the same entity, or at least appeared to be, beyond this, only context and perhaps what the entity said was a clue for identity. And there is no guarantee they spoke truthfully. I am reminded of a report of Michael Harner’s describing an Ayahuasca experience to an indigenous shaman. He had been told by some entities he encountered that they were the real masters of the planet. His guide responded “Oh, they’re always saying that” (Harner, The Way of the Shaman, chapter 1). But, as with people, repeated encounters gave a sense of their character, and most were very welcome over the years, like treasured friends.
A key clue for me was the sense of reality in an encounter. In terms of personal presence, many appear as real as an encounter with another human being. However, the most loving manifest as more real than myself. Whereas the Wiccan Goddess, who possesses these qualities, came as a deity immanent with the world, VM Shidha, sharing these same qualities, was in some important sense removed from the world, although in loving relation to it. Further, he had supposedly once been human, whereas the goddess was clearly super human.
For thousands of years, people in every society of which we have knowledge have reported personal experiences with sacred powers. The earliest evidence for modern human beings, or even our earlier Neanderthal cousins, is frequently accompanied by evidence many archaeologists think shows they experienced their world in spiritual terms (Rendu et al., “Intentional Neanderthal burial”). We have no way of knowing how these practices and beliefs arose, but there is no shortage of more recent evidence that competent people in all cultures have experiences that led them to similar conclusions.
Some of history’s greatest thinkers, including Socrates, the man who more than any other inspired Western philosophy, had such experiences. Important figures in the history of mathematics and science have either reported such experiences or taken their existence very seriously—figures such as Blaise Pascal, Emanuel Swedenborg, Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, Freeman Dyson, and Brian Josephson—going well beyond describing subjective insights. These examples should dispose of the easy reply that such people are weak-minded or suffering from some mental disease more substantial than simply disagreeing with a skeptic.
A secular culture whose members think about these matters through inherited monotheistic filters would have great difficulty acknowledging the existence of such a reality. The filters need to be removed. Those of us who have had such experiences would also welcome supporting evidence that our encounters are not simply the firing of synapses within our skulls. But if our experiences are in any sense accurately interpreted, the world within which we live is fundamentally different from how the dominant Western consensus about reality conceives it.
In the following chapters I will not argue that I have penetrated to the ultimate truth of spiritual reality. I will argue that the world around us is alive to a far greater extent than we normally imagine, all the way down, and all the way up. In terms of what we can reasonably believe to be true, the evidence for such a reality is stronger than for either a monotheistic view or for a purely secular one. Our world is in some strong sense aware, and there are spiritual entities within it with whom we can enter into beautiful, loving, and transformative relationships.