PSI Annual Journal 1999

Spiritual growth is not easy. If it were, we would all shortly be enlightened and that might well end the purpose of human existence.

Paradoxically, as Aldous Huxley and numerous other students of mysticism are quick to point out, we all are already enlightened. But we didn' t know it. In the Atman Project, Ken Wilber, one of our brightest and most innovative metaphysicians, says, "It is not that an individual is first an ego and then may become a Buddha (enlightened one) – it is that he was first Buddha and then became an ego.

In other words, our human beingness is a finite expression of the infinite Great Being which manifests itself in the countless realms of creation with an endless diversity of forms and events.

And the nature of the Great Being is suggested in a Buddhist teaching: "All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but One Mind, beside which nothing exists." One Mind, beyond space and time, that is the basis of everything, outside of which there is nothing. And through our finite interconnectedness we are all related to this infinite One Mind.

We do not know, however, of this vast interconnectedness until we "awaken", as the Vedantists would put it. Until then, we feel and act unenlightened, egotistical, alienated, attached, fearful of loss, away from home, and subject to all the private and public ills of existence.

Besides attachment and egoism, there are other associated roadblocks standing in the way of our recognizing the Atman within and knowing that we are part and parcel of Brahman. The possibilities for misinterpretation and abuse are almost unlimited, especially for the naïve and devious. An important mitigating factor is that, for those who are disciplined and sincere, possibilities for growth are also almost unlimited.

Some persons, upon first hearing of the "I am God" idea, come to the facile conclusion: "That being the case, why bother? I' ll just lie back and enjoy my exalted position. If I' m God, I can do whatever I please."

Ramakrishma, a well-known Hindu mystic, had a favorite fable that reveals the fallacy in that line of thinking:

A young spiritual novice has just been taught by his guru that he is identical in essence with the power of the universe. He walks away in a state of ecstatic absorption, and as he is going down the road leading out of the village, he beholds, coming in his direction, a huge elephant bearing a howdah on its back with the driver riding on the beast' s neck. Striding along, the young candidate for sainthood is meditating on the proposition, "I am Brahman; all things are Brahman." When he sees the huge elephant coming toward him, he thinks, "The elephant, too, is Brahman. We are all one."

Meanwhile, the elephant, with its bells jingling to the rhythm of its stately approach, is bearing down upon the novice who, in his ecstasy, is maintaining his course in the middle of the road. And the driver, seeing this, becomes alarmed and starts shouting, "Clear the way! Clear the way, you idiot! Clear the way!" But the youth, caught up in his rapture, is thinking, "I am Brahman; the elephant is Brahman," and when he hears the shouts of the driver, he adds, "Should Brahman be afraid of Brahman? Should Brahman clear the way for Brahman?"

The distance rapidly closes. The driver keeps shouting; the elephant lumbers on; the youth, continuing his meditation, holds the center of the road. Suddenly, as a collision is about to take place, the elephant reaches out with its trunk, picks up the novice, and hurls him into the bushes.

Physically shocked and spiritually stunned, the youth recovers his senses enough to stand up, dust off his clothes, and return to the guru for further instructions.

Somewhat indignant, he blurts out an account of his experience with the elephant and continues, "You told me that I was Brahman."

"Yes," answered the guru, "and so you are."
"You told me that all things are Brahman."
"Yes," responded the guru, "all things are indeed Brahman."
"That elephant, then, was Brahman, too?" asked the youth, his voice edging toward hysteria.
"So it was," replied the guru. "That elephant was Brahman. But why didn' t you pay attention to the voice of Brahman, shouting from the elephant' s neck, and get out of the way?"

I would like to explore now why mystical experience is so important to spiritual growth. But first a definition or two.

As a mystic is one who is actively interested in coming into harmony with the Divine Principle (God, Brahman, One Mind, Cosmic Consciousness, Eternal Thou, Whomever), so a mystical experience is an unexpected yet unforgettable result of making progress on this ultimate spiritual task. To begin our consideration of mystical (or religious) experience, let me share something that happened to me almost a quarter of a century ago.

It had been a long day. My friend Sam Wright and I were midway on a backpacking trip along the John Muir Trail in California' s Sierra Nevada. The weather was changeable. It had started out sunny as we made our way along the South Fork of the San Joaquin River and came into the lower end of Evolution Valley. Of all the lush meadows of the High Sierra, Evolution is perhaps the most memorable. The hiker ascends through a succession of stepped plateaus, each a little greener and fresher than the previous one.

We paused along the creek in Colby Meadow to eat lunch and wash our clothes, stretching the jeans and shirts, socks and underwear on warm, flat granite rocks to dry in the sunshine. Already thunderheads were boiling up over the mountains to the west. Up ahead, peaks with names like Darwin and Wallace and Huxley were being brushed by fast-moving clouds. An afternoon rain seemed likely.

The clothing dried quickly and we collected our gear. We moved a bit more urgently than usual. The trail now rose rapidly, skirting the jumbled granite shoulder of the Hermit and leading onward toward Evolution Lake at nearly eleven thousand feet. Coming in from the southwest, the rain swept in like a curtain driven from the wind, stinging our faces as we trudged on under our ponchos. A mile or two later we arrived at the lake which, under such adverse conditions, was a wild and lyrical place.

We pitched our camp some thirty or forty feet above the troubled waters on a narrow peninsula projecting into the lake. Gradually the rain slackened and we assembled our fly rods, intending to have trout for supper. Under still menacing skies we caught four goldens and took them back to our campsite to embellish our powdered soup, instant potatoes, and coffee.

And then it happened.

Sundown was only minutes away. Far to the west, over the valley we had just traversed, the sun broke through the blue-gray storm clouds. The whole world flamed crimson. The mountain slopes behind us flowed with an undulating luminescence, and the water below reflected the aura of incandescent clouds.

Startled, delighted, we were transformed. Whooping our joy, we dashed up the mountainside striving for new vistas and reveling in the chromatic explosion that surrounded us. For fifteen or twenty minutes it continued while we, now thoroughly pagan creatures, alternately ran around and stood still, eyes ablaze, jaws slack, arms waving in wonderment and praise.

As the color abated, we made our way, separately and without words, back to our modest camp above the lake. When only a dull scarlet triangle remained of the recent glory, we looked at one another and wept unashamed tears. Then, spontaneously, we made a pact and shook on it. Whoever lived the longer agreed to bring the other' s ashes to Evolution Lake for consignment. Again without words, we undressed and climbed into our sleeping bags as droplets of rain began drumming on the taut canvas over our heads. Even as I drifted off to sleep, I knew that death had forever lost some of its sting.

This is the sort of occurrence that William James called a "religious experience." Abraham Maslow named it a "peak experience." And James Joyce used the word "epiphany."

An epiphany is "a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace experience," reports the Random House dictionary. The Greek source, epiphaneia, was a happening during which the gods revealed divine secrets to human beings.

William James wrote an entire and classical book on religious experience. Abraham Maslow more recently did likewise, drawing upon an exhaustive study of the subject. Maslow pointed out that peak experiences are far more common than most of us admit, even to ourselves.

Since the experience is an emotional one, usually nonrational, the compulsively objective person either avoids epiphanies from the beginning or minimizes their significance. Maslow calls such people nonpeakers. And he includes us religious liberals among the nonpeakers. But a lot has changed for religious liberals in the quarter century since Maslow wrote his book. We are now much more accepting, and even welcoming, of peak experiences than we were then.

Curiously, among the orthodox, mysticism or religious experience has had a bad name for quite a different reason. Such an experience, being personal and not easily mediated or moderated by the powers-that-be, is threatening to institutional hierarchies. When the faithful look to their own intuitions instead of the directives of leaders, the leaders are apt to lose their power. That is why the Gnostics, one of the more fascinating and enlightened of early Christian sects, were bitterly and violently opposed to the church fathers.

In his book The Bond of Power, Joseph Chilton Pearce comments pungently on this. In a chapter titled, "The Great Vaccination," Pearce asserts that most contemporary churches play it safe by inoculating their members with just enough religion that there' s little danger they' ll catch the real thing and slip the leash of ecclesiastical control.

When we look at the early histories of most religious movements and at the biographies of their founders, we are struck by the centrality of religious experience. As Abraham Maslow says, "The very beginning, the intrinsic core, the essence, the universal nucleus of every known high religion has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some accutely sensitive prophet or seer."

Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Mohammed were all such prophets. In each case, a religious institution sprang up to promulgate and enlarge upon the original vision. In essence, what these institutions sought to do, at least in their beginnings, was to communicate the prophet' s peak experience to the world of nonpeakers. Then comes an ironic institutional development. The churches fall into the hands of nonpeakers, and the original vision is lost or corrupted, even though the institutions themselves go on. Partly because they lack the skill or stomach for administration, the mystics get shoved to one side. It seems clear, for example, that had it not been for the apostle Paul, a real organizer, the mystical insights of Jesus would have been lost altogether.

Religious experiences – epiphanies – are the signals that tell us of significant spiritual growth. That is their real meaning. The situations that yield such growth, causing the signal, are many and varied. Gautama Buddha is said to have spent six years fasting and mortifying his flesh without finding the answers to the questions about death and suffering that troubled him. Only when he gave up ascetic practices and sat down under the Bo tree did the long-sought enlightenment flash into his mind. His response was a faint half-smile of knowing, followed by forty-five years of traveling and teaching which changed the world.

A woman I know described the birth of her first child as a peak experience. She apprehended not only the miracle of life but the mystical union of all creatures. Most of all, she knew in a fundamentally different way her own participation in the creative web of things. Years later, she still could not describe the experience without shedding tears of joy over the depth of her recognition.

Most of us have, I suspect, spent time with another human being which was so rich and so affirming in terms of the communication achieved that forever afterwards the wholeness of existence seemed more real and practical.

I remember a peace march in San Francisco during the Vietnam War. There were an estimated sixty thousand people in the march itself, and standing along the curbs were many thousands more, some signaling support, others waving fists and shouting obscenities. Suddenly, our section of the procession reached the crest of a high hill, from which we could see a multitude of people sidewalk-to –sidewalk stretching down into the valley and disappearing over the next hill. Instantly, my despair and fatigue about the war evaporated, and I was exhilarated to realize how many others shared my concerns. My feelings, which I would describe as oceanic, even extended to include the hecklers on the sidewalk whom I no longer hated, but recognized as fellows and as an aspect of my own doubt and frustration.

Once I heard a young woman tell of nearly drowning when she was a child. So close to death was she that her terror gave way to resignation and then to the perception of soft, lilting music and misty, colored lights. When she was revived, her first reaction was enormous regret at having been called back from something so beautiful and promising. As she told her story to a gathering, she suddenly stopped and choked up. Finally, she said, "I' ve never told this story before, and now I realize how lonely I' ve been."

Finally, I recall the death of a man in one of my congregations. An ex-seaman, he had true joie de vivre. He was diagnosed as having an incurable cancer. But instead of retreating into the desperation of his condition, he redoubled his usual activities as one bringing humor and sanity into the lives of others. His family (a wife and three nearly grown children) was the particular focus of his caring and courage. His death, when it came, was the most assertive affirmation of life I' ve ever witnessed. Following the memorial service, in a true celebration of life, we all gathered at his home for an uproarious wake that rivaled any the Irish have ever given.

Not every religious experience is mind-blowing. Most, in fact, if we are paying attention, come as nudges and sparks, as subtle awarenesses and after-the-fact recognitions. We wake up one morning and recognize that we are different from the persons we were five years ago. We are surprised and pleased.

Sometimes the intellectual content of an epiphany is so whimsical or even trivial that the experience does not receive the respect it deserves. I once had such an episode.

Shortly after the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Russians in 1984, a sports writer turned out a newspaper column on upsets. The greatest upset of all, suggested the columnist, was a particular horse race. I' m not enamored with horse races, but I read on. The contest took place many years ago at Saratoga, New York. Before the race, it had been a foregone conclusion among the experts that either Gallant Fox or Whichone would win. The other entrants were too undistinguished to merit mention. But then the race began and, as one commentator told it, "A total stranger came pounding down the Saratoga horse track late this afternoon, flinging huge muddy divots into the countenance of the aristocratic Gallant Fox. A chestnut colt by the name of Jim Dandy won the Travers by six lengths, at odds of 100 to one."

As I read those words, I practically came unglued right there over my morning coffee. There was something about an underdog winning that touched a glorious responsive chord in me. Tears came to my eyes. Even now, a lump rises in my throat.

Some epiphanies don' t get classified as such. I think of creative insights. This is a whole subject in itself, but my readings on creativity, my conversations with creative people, and my own personal experience persuade me that authentically creative episodes are of the same essence as religious experience.

Generally, there is a period of preparation during which one is undergoing the work or discipline necessary to acquire a potentially creative skill – learning to paint, play music, write, gain proficiency in a scientific field, whatever. Then comes a time of focus and effort, often marked by fatigue and discouragement. Finally comes the creative burst, the discovery or insight or artistic achievement. Like a peak experience, this comes unbidden; it cannot be ordered up on command. It has a different source than does linear thought or activity. It comes "whole," so to speak. Frequently, this creative burst only comes after one backs off, moves away from the task or concern. As almost all of us know, the insight, when it hits us, is surprising, pleasing, and transforming.

The one essential common characteristic of all epiphanies I' m sure is that they do in their own way signal a nonreversible change in human lives. We are not, in other words, the same persons that we were before the epiphany happened.

The feelings – the signals -- include excitement, exuberance and ecstasy, delight, bliss and aliveness, wholeness, absorption and involvement, simplicity, uniqueness, acceptance, gratitude, elation and affection for the nature of things. More often than not, authentic religious experiences will lie at least partially beyond the reach of language. Words may be inadequate, but there is an encompassing feeling of connection, an awareness of belonging, a sense of being part of a nourishing and creative cosmos.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was no doubt reporting a peak experience when he wrote in his Journal, "We walked this afternoon to Edmund Hosner' s and Walden Pond. The south wind blew and filled with bland and warm light the dry and sunny woods. The last year' s leaves blew like birds through the air. As I sat on the bank of the Drop, or God' s Pond, and saw the amplitude of the little water, what space, what verge, the little scudding fleets of ripples found to scatter and spread from side to side and take so much time to cross the pond, and saw how the water seemed made for the wind and the wind for the water, dear playfellows for each other, I said to my companion, I declare this world is so beautiful I can hardly believe it exists."

Inevitably, when I reflect upon religious or mystical experience, T.S. Eliot' s lines from "Little Gidding" come to mind:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Thus, to me, religious experience always has a "coming home" aspect to it. And you wonder why you ever left…

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 1999