The fruits and risks of spontaneous spiritual experiences
What are the fruits of spontaneous spiritual experiences? In all three cases – the moments of connection, the moments of surrender, and near-death experiences – people typically report positive benefits to their mental health. They find such moments healing, connecting and inspiring. People responding to my survey said they felt their spiritual experiences had made them feel more ‘at home in the universe’; they felt more connection and empathy to other beings, and also more love for themselves. Spontaneous spiritual experiences also make people more open: they ‘made me open to other ways of looking at things’, they ‘made me less sceptical, less quick to judge, more compassionate’. They made some people feel that we are not ‘just’ our brains, bodies or egos, and perhaps something in us survives after death. One of the most common emotional changes from NDEs is that people come back less afraid of death because they think death is not the end.
For some people, including me, spontaneous spiritual experiences led to a feeling of deep psychic regeneration after a time of crisis. One respondent writes: ‘It allowed me to relinquish my desperate control over my negative feelings, either physical pain or mental depression or spiritual guilt. It’s like my well has run dry, but the very last bit of digging uncovers the spring that refills the well of my soul.’ Although such experiences are very different from the rationalism of CBT, there are parallels. We are stuck in a prison of negative ego-beliefs; liberation comes when we let go of them. In CBT, this liberation comes from the slow, rational dismantling of beliefs, a chipping away at the walls of the shed. In ecstatic experiences, people are suddenly liberated – the walls fall down and they are free. But you probably still need regular ethical practices to turn your epiphany into durable habits.
However, it is a mistake to think that spontaneous spiritual experiences are always joyful and life-enhancing. There can be aspects of spontaneous experience that are difficult to accept or integrate. First, people may encounter a spiritual presence they perceive as threatening, evil or demonic. Up to 10 per cent of NDEs involve a Hell experience – some accounts are worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. And, of course, many people’s experience of hearing voices or seeing spirits is deeply intrusive and distressing, for example a voice repeatedly telling you to kill yourself. How should we view such negative experiences? I’d suggest the best way is to see them as ‘shadow’ aspects of our own psyche, not fundamentally real, just a projection from our subconscious that we can transform if we maintain courage, wisdom and compassion. The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us: ‘Be not daunted or terrified or awed. Recognise whatever appears as the reflection of your own consciousness.’ Eleanor Longden, who delivered a much-watched TED talk about hearing voices, says she managed to come to terms with an intrusive, aggressive and ‘grotesque’ demonic presence, who plagued her for years, by recognising him as ‘the unaccepted aspects of my self-image, my shadow’. By taking a more practical and compassionate approach to him, and not letting herself be bullied, Eleanor and her shadow managed to work out a more balanced and amicable relationship.14
Even positive spontaneous experiences can be difficult to integrate into one’s life. One can find mundane reality disappointing after having had an ecstatic glimpse of God or Heaven. Some NDE survivors say they wish they hadn’t come back. Personally, I have longed to have another such experience but am still searching for the door. It can also be very difficult to communicate an ecstatic experience. Other people may not understand or care. The RERC database is full of tragi-comic moments like this:
Starting around 1967, there were several different times in the middle of the night that silvery figures appeared on my side toward the bottom of the bed . . . At one time in particular I was so startled that I made a noise which awakened my husband as they vanished. When I told him that there were three humanoids standing there, he sarcastically shouted, ‘Well, do me a favour: the next time they come don’t wake me up.’ From that time on I never mentioned anything of the sort to him.
One also often finds competing interpretations between the experiencer, who thinks their encounter is spiritual, and a psychiatrist, who thinks it is indicative of schizophrenia. Western psychiatry has, thankfully, become better in the last two decades at overcoming its strong historical aversion to spiritual experiences, and less hasty to label them as physical pathologies requiring medication. Instead, psychiatrists are realising that ‘out-of-the-ordinary experiences’, like hearing voices, seeing a spirit or sensing a presence, are quite common in the general population. Myers and his colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research first pointed this out in a national survey of 1882, where they found around 10 per cent of the population reported having had ‘a vivid impression of seeing, or being touched, or hearing a voice . . . not due to any external cause’. More recent surveys have also put the prevalence of ‘hallucinations’ in the general population at around 10 per cent – much higher than the one per cent diagnosed with schizophrenia.15 Sensing a presence is particularly common among the bereaved: 50 to 90 per cent of bereaved people sense the presence of their loved one following their death. Crucially, for most people, sensing a presence is not distressing, not correlated with mental pathology, and has never required medication or hospitalisation. On the contrary, it’s more often found to be comforting and associated with improved mental health. Cognitive scientists now suggest that all of our experiences of reality are, in a sense, ‘controlled hallucinations’ – our minds improvise a version of reality based on the flood of raw data from our brains and senses.16 How we interpret incoming data depends in large part on our culture.
But some people’s spiritual experiences really do seem pathological. This is all too apparent as one reads through the RERC database. Although Hardy intended it to prove the spiritual nature of man to ‘the intellectual world’, it sometimes seems a catalogue of human folly. Hardy actually had to start a whole category, ‘File Z’, for reports that seemed to be sent straight from the asylum. Respondents leap to conclusions, seizing on the flimsiest evidence as certain proof of divine communication. Some think they can control the weather, travel through time, or alter geopolitical events with their mind. They lose a sane sense of their ego’s boundaries. They also ramble on for pages and pages - sometimes even the heroic patience of Hardy’s secretary wears thin as she transcribes the accounts:
The Revelations started in 1968 and got stronger. At first I was told with a Voice in My Head. Then 1969 The Vioce [sic] said Get Pen & Paper. The Vioce [sic] which said I AM The Lord The Lord of Hosts they call Me. If you asked for The Sun I would not give it you, then went on to tell me why. Then said You have heard the saying a bad Apple in a barrel of Good ones will turn all bad unless taken out. (This goes on in a disjointed and illogical manner for 3 pages, which have not been put on to computer disk.)
One would expect this mixture of the sublime and the pathological in spiritual experiences, according to the James–Myers–Jung theory of the psyche. The subliminal mind, wrote Myers, ‘is a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house’.17 Spiritual experiences, by their theory, are liminal moments when the border between the conscious ego and the subliminal mind becomes porous, and the contents of the subliminal mind burst through. It can reveal pearls of wisdom, healing and power. But it can also reveal a lot of nonsense. We need to find a middle ground between the uncritical embrace of such experiences as perfect revelations, and the complete rejection of them as mental pathology.
What to do in a spiritual emergency
In 1971, the 23-year-old David Lukoff dropped out of Harvard’s doctoral programme in social anthropology and hitchhiked his away across the USA. In San Francisco he dropped acid for the first time. Four days later, he woke up in the middle of the night, went into the bathroom in the friend’s flat where he was crashing and looked in the mirror. He saw his right hand was in the classic