In 1989, Lukoff managed to get a new diagnosis introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, volume IV, the handbook for clinical psychiatry and psychology in Western culture, called ‘religious or spiritual problem’. This distinguished temporary spiritual psychosis, such as he had experienced, from the classic diagnosis of schizophrenia. A religious or spiritual problem was temporary, not a biological brain disorder, but could involve psychotic features, such as ego-inflation, hyper-meaning detection and disordered conduct. It might have positive aspects, like a greater sense of meaning and motivation.
Supportive communities
The challenge for a person having an ‘out-of-the-ordinary experience’, and for their loved ones, peers, psychologist or psychiatrist, is to integrate the experience and recognise its positive aspects, while guarding against the negative, like paranoia or ego-inflation, and then to find a positive calling that connects the person back into society. Lukoff says: ‘I was lucky in having a supportive peer group and family. Otherwise, I’d probably have ended up hospitalised with a lifelong diagnosis of schizophrenia, with all the stigma and medication that goes with that.’ A 2012 study by Charles Heriot-Maitland et al. found that while out-of-the-ordinary experiences like hearing voices or sensing a spirit happen in roughly 10 per cent of the population, those who are hospitalised for such experiences tend to have a worse outcome than those who aren’t.19 The crucial factor for determining if such an experience is problematic, they decided, was whether people found a community that helped them to a positive interpretation for their experiences. Most psychiatric hospitals are the precise opposite of such places: you are locked up and told your voices are the product of a crippling lifelong biological disease, that they’re meaningless and should be ignored, and that your diagnosis means you’re likely to be on the scrapheap of society for the rest of your life.
Of course, there are risks on the other side too: spiritual or religious communities may impose their own equally dogmatic interpretation on your experience, declaring it to be the Holy Spirit, or a demon, or a past life, or an alchemical symbol from the collective unconscious. One friend of mine, suffering from drug-induced psychosis, was told by a psychic healer that he was suffering karmic retribution for his previous life as a Nazi war criminal. This was not helpful. The best support networks seem to be more grassroots communities, which share authority horizontally and have a pragmatic, flexible and sympathetic response to the variety of people’s interpretations of their experiences.
A good example is the Hearing Voices Network, which was launched in 1987 and has revolutionised Western psychology’s attitude to voice-hearing. It was launched by two Dutch psychiatrists – Marius Romme and Sandra Escher – and by a voice-hearer called Patsy Gage. While in treatment, Gage read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argues that voice-hearing used to be a much more ubiquitous phenomenon earlier in the development of the human brain – look how often people in ancient Greek culture heard the gods talking to them, from Galen to Socrates. Gage declared to Romme: ‘I’m not schizophrenic, I’m ancient Greek!’20 Together, they helped to create groups where voice-hearers could meet to discuss their experiences, explore meanings, and provide support for each other. There are now several hundred Hearing Voices groups around the world, and they’ve been a life-saver for Eleanor Longden and many others. What I like about them is they’re pragmatic in their metaphysics. Many people in the group think their voices or experiences are encounters with spiritual beings; others think they are aspects of the self. The groups support and help you, give you a social connection and a social role, no matter what your metaphysics. It helps people to find a more balanced and equal relationship with their voices – they learn that they don’t have to take their pronouncements as the Absolute Word of God.
As for Hardy’s grand vision, in some ways it could be said to have been a failure. The RERC constantly ran out of money, and was moved from Oxford to Lampeter in 2000, where the database slumbers, its warehouse of revelations more or less ignored. And yet, in other ways, Hardy’s vision has become mainstream. People in Western societies report more and more spiritual experiences, and the attitude of mainstream psychology and psychiatry to such experiences has shifted considerably in the last two decades. While the number of church attendees continues to decline across Western societies, the number of ‘spiritual but not religious’ rises.21 Spiritual experience could be said to be at the centre of the West’s new democratic spirituality – we rely more on our own personal experiences than on traditional institutions, authority figures or sacred texts.
The risk of this cultural shift, however, is that our post-religious spirituality becomes all about experiences, descending into a sort of consumerist thrill-seeking. Philip Pullman warns: ‘Seeking this sort of thing doesn’t work. Seeking it is far too self-centred. Things like my experience are by-products, not goals. To make them the aim of your life is an act of monumental and self-deceiving egotism.’ Hardy’s database is full of comments like ‘That moment was worth more than all the rest of my life put together.’ Is that a healthy attitude to the spiritual life? Imagine a marriage where you thought all the value existed in one date.
We need to integrate these moments into our everyday reality. But how? Hardy, like James, Myers and Jung, was wary of collective ecstasy. Their preferred spirituality was highly individualistic. Yet surely communities have an important role in helping us to make sense of ecstatic experiences, supporting us in the disciplines and practices we need to integrate them, and directing us outwards to serve our fellow beings.
It was with this in mind that I decided to join a charismatic Christian community. Let’s head to the Revival Tent to meet them.
2: The Revival Tent
I’m standing on a stage in a packed church, in front of 500 believers, next to the most famous Christian preacher in Britain, Nicky Gumbel. ‘So, Jules,’ he says, ‘what difference has Jesus made to your life?’
What am I going to tell the audience, I wonder? And how did I end up here?
It all started in 2012. When I finished my last book, Philosophy for Life, I’d become aware of the limits of Stoic philosophy: it was too rational, too individualistic; it left out important things like the arts, myth, ritual, sex, dancing and ecstatic experiences. I was searching for deeper community. I was a Stoic, single-dweller, bachelor, freelance writer – I was about as individualist as you could get. Philosophy clubs like the School of Life or my own London Philosophy Club were fun, but not the sort of loving community I imagined churches might provide. I was dating a Christian woman, and was impressed by how she and her Christian friends cared for one another. They seemed more open to ecstatic experiences than philosophers. One of my girlfriend’s mates, Jack, was a curate at Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB), home of the famous Alpha Course. Jack asked me if I fancied doing the course. I’d rejected Christianity when I was 16, never read the Bible and tended to think Christians were weird. But why not? If nothing else, it would be interesting research. ‘Careful you don’t get brainwashed,’ a friend told