WillSpirit!

In recent months, a plan has formed to wean myself away from the comforting bosom of therapy. A post I wrote six months ago detailed the huge amount of psychotherapy and group work I’ve completed. Some of it enlightened me, some of it led me astray, and much if it had little effect at all.

Just as I prepare to swear off therapy forever, fate has brought me a counselor who truly helps me. Partly it’s a good personality match; partly the ACT philosophy he adheres to works well for me (as discussed on this site many times); and partly I’m finally ready for a fundamental change.

Not that I’m close to ‘cured’, or even ‘stable’, but something inside seems to be shifting. One good example came in my most recent session. It was the first in almost two months, and had been arranged as an urgent appointment because of severe depression.

The biggest reason for my suffering, being perfectly blunt, has always been self-hatred. My upbringing beat it into me. My earliest memories are of my parents’ bitter divorce, during which it became obvious that my dad despised the role of father. In most of my memories of my mother, she lies in bed nearly catatonic with depression. She couldn’t offer much love. After that came her death, a probable suicide; a six-year-old takes a mother’s dying as a personal rejection. Within weeks I began living with my bitter father and sadistic stepmother. The woman humiliated and tormented me with cold, calculated efficiency. (Those interested can read about her in a memoir fragment .) My dad, narcissistic and obsessed by his work, was also an alcoholic. In short, my childhood taught me to feel unwanted, unworthy, despised, tormented, and abandoned.

Sadly, I still feel all those things, only now the hatred comes from my own heart. This is probably the most sensitive secret I’ve revealed on a site riddled with self-disclosure. It is the root of the worst of my problems. It keeps me at arms length from life and loved ones, because I never believe I deserve either.

My counselor and I have talked about this self-loathing many times. On this last visit, he instructed me to hold out my hand. “Can you love your hand?” he asked.

To my surprise, the answer was, “yes”; loving a body part seemed easy. The full significance did not sink in right away.

My adoration of biology, which goes back to my earliest days gardening and fishing with my grandfather, makes admiration of anything alive no problem at all. People, redwood trees, mice, and all other living things enthrall me. I’m even fascinated by mosquitoes. I have an inborn reverence for everything that lives. But until recently, I had never honored myself for my own biology.

For some time, I’ve practiced a meditation where I simultaneously feel and visualize my internal physiology. I sit on my meditation cushion and breathe, all the time imagining the air seeping into the tiniest passages and pockets of my lung. I think of the oxygen turning my blood corpuscles bright red. While concentrating on the sensation of my heartbeat, I form a mental picture of my heart pumping this freshened blood to the rest of my body.

Even though I regularly settle into my biological nature, it had never occurred to me to love myself as a living organism. I was too busy hating my personality, my decisions, and my sins. All my hatred has been directed at me. Which raises the question, “what am I?” Am I a disembodied mind? Can I really separate what goes on in my brain from the body that holds it? The obvious answer is “no”.

After my appointment with the therapist, I did my usual ‘biological’ meditation, only this time I honored the miracle of my animal form, and allowed reverence to surface. At the same time, I held the thought that I am my body. After all, the sensation of a mind separate from the physical self is an illusion, or even a delusion. It’s the ego’s way of isolating and empowering itself. The truth is that body and self are one. In accessing my respect for my own life processes, I discovered a bit of love for myself. It feels wonderful.

Not long ago, I thought my recent spiritual growth had banished inner darkness. Soon after, I found myself fueling a depression with my habitual self-contempt. The old obsessions, regrets, and fears returned with full force. Having learned from that relapse, and despite this insight about my value as a living animal, I will be shocked if the horrible despair does not soon resurface. On the other hand, perhaps I will remember to feel reverence toward my body, and the biological mind it supports. Perhaps I will feel a trickle of love for myself.

The years 1999 and 2000 were the worst of my adult life. Work-related spinal injury ended my career as a surgeon. I found out the damage in my neck foreshadowed lifelong pain with the possibility of paralysis. In 1999 my wife and I abandoned the city we called home, and a house we’d lovingly renovated, in order to move closer to my work and spare my neck the long commute. But even so, within a year I could no longer operate. My colleagues reacted negatively to what they perceived as my abandonment of responsibilities. As an added blow, a long-running lawsuit settled against me. I felt very alone and very lost.

Soon after, I found out how badly my mind could go awry. Depression had been an intermittent companion for twenty years, but I sank to depths that exceeded anything previously experienced or imagined. I ended up in a psychiatric ward on a suicide watch. Discharged after twelve days but not feeling much better, I left the hospital on a powerful new antidepressant.

Five days later I landed in another psychiatric unit, only this time in a state of extreme mania and florid psychosis. The new medications may have triggered it. Never having experienced such insanity in myself, I feared my mind had permanently snapped. Those were my lucid moments. More often, I drifted in a novel world where God spoke to me and magic was everywhere.

The intense mania resolved quickly, but full recovery has been slow and painful. My psychiatrist convinced me that my mind now had a terrible illness. Depression that hitherto had been unpleasant, but never disabling, had morphed into a dangerous brain disease. My moods needed potent medications and lots of coddling. Slips into hypomania threatened my sanity in ways my doctor assured me were dreadful, but never really explained. Rather than encouraging me to regain strength and reenter the world, she cautioned against ‘taking on too much’.

I became hesitant and fearful. I abandoned career opportunities when confronted with difficulty and conflict, because of my psychiatrist’s ceaseless admonition that I now had ‘poor stress tolerance’. Better to live a boring and disabled life than risk jostling my fragile brain.

That message led me into a trap that is proving difficult to escape. I’ve weaned off most of the drugs, and feel eager to work. But after ten years of minimal productivity, potential employers no longer take me seriously. My future probably depends on developing a freelance career, but the long running discouragement eroded my confidence. And years of inactivity have sapped my endurance.

I write this as a warning to others. Be very cautious about allowing your doctors to set limits on your potential. It is safer for them if you stay at home in a medicated daze than if you take risks. But it’s worse for you. Our minds may be different, but they remain vital and capable. Be your own best friend, and don’t let the concept of mental ‘illness’ limit your dreams.

Humility too often sounds like a dirty word in our culture. It goes against the dominant values of competition, self-promotion, and egotism. Prominent figures seldom exhibit anything like it. Sometimes we see weak attempts at false modesty, but only rare and special leaders are truly humble. The Dalai Lama comes to mind, but not many others.

This is unfortunate. Humility not only fosters cooperation within society, it promotes mental health. Alcoholics Anonymous has figured this out, and of course most spiritual systems advocate against excessive pride. But as a general principle of psychiatric wellness, we seldom hear of it.

The problem is that people misunderstand the word. We hear talk about the importance of self-esteem, and we suspect humility implies lack of belief in oneself. But the truth is we can’t be genuinely humble without first being confident of our worth. We all understand that the people who talk themselves up the most are often the ones who feel the most insecure. The converse, also true, is less well known. Those who feel more love and respect for themselves have less concern about proving themselves to society.

My dictionary defines humility as “a modest or low view of one’s importance.” It is easy to get caught up in the phrase ‘modest or low view’ and miss the fact that it refers to downsizing our opinion of our importance; not our opinion of our selves.

How important is any human? As hard as it is to grasp, millions and billions of years will eventually pass, and sooner or later we will all be forgotten. In fact, few people are remembered after five generations. Many of us inherit photographs from parents and grandparents. Isn’t it the case that you don’t have any idea who most of those people were? Even the few humans who achieve ‘greatness’ become mere names and ideas with the passage of time.

Seeking importance does not lead to contentment. To begin with, status is not really a question of achievement, but of acclaim. And since society’s attention is always shifting, those who seem important today may well be overlooked tomorrow. This is as true in families as it is in global politics. The result: craving importance is a recipe for chronic anxiety. Such uneasiness is increased, of course, by the hostility and resentment self-inflation provokes in others. What’s more, status-hunger and attention seeking discourage the exercise of higher qualities. By fighting for our importance, whether at work or at home, we feed pride at the expense of anti-competitive qualities such as helpfulness and empathy. Humane traits may well remain rudimentary.

Humility and great accomplishment can, and often do coexist. In fact, contributing to society’s advancement can be a profoundly humble act, provided it is done for love of others rather than promotion of self. What’s more, striving to help is the surest route to achieve meaningful success, the honest affection of others, and stable self-esteem. When you have all that, who needs to feel important?

This picture captures how I feel right now, spiritual progress notwithstanding. Sometimes, often in fact, I envy those who don’t get depressed. Perpetual sorrow has an an element of beauty, but it is also cold and lonely.

Now that’s convincing! Not too many entries ago, my newfound spiritual basis seemed pretty solid. It felt different from the worn-out emotional trampoline that normally supports me: the one that’s sagging in the middle and kind of bouncy. This new foundation seemed secure, and unlikely to be just another illusion of mental health, soon to give way like all the other false structures that tempt my grasp. When the slump described yesterday occurred, my hopes for ongoing support weakened only slightly. Who wouldn’t feel defeated after getting partially blinded and treated like a peasant during a visit to one’s former kingdom? The acid-test is in resilience. Did spiritual calm return, along with an accepting attitude and sense of lightness? It did.

The episode gives fuel for discussion. First, spiritual centration does not free us from all distress. It helps us take the buffets of life in stride, with a relaxed confidence in our strength to survive. However, what sucks still sucks, and bad days still come. But they also go. Rather than remaining in a funk, yesterday saw me go about my business chagrined, but ready to work through the storm. Today sees me fully back in the sunshine. During cold winter rain, faith acts as a kind of trenchcoat or umbrella; not like a permanent relocation to Hawaii.

Second, faith works. Sound familiar? To the other ways belief helps, we can add: it makes accepting disappointments easier. Genuine faith includes the belief that the world is working more or less as it should. Not that cruelty and tragedy are ‘God’s will’, but that our presence and our experience are not giant cosmic mistakes. We are living as humans live, sharing the human lot. The faithful believe that humanity is more than a pointless accident in an utterly heartless cosmos. In my case, I believe people serve as witnesses, allowing creation to experience itself. Deepak Chopra said something to that effect on a video; without quoting him exactly he told an audience that they were the ‘eyes of the universe’. The goal of life, in that view, is simply to observe and learn. Christians believe that our trials give us opportunities to overcome sin, and thus move closer to Christ. Regardless of how we envision ‘God’, when we feel spiritually centered, we know that we can profit from whatever comes. Every tragedy offers a particle of wisdom, invites us to rise above base instincts, and adds to the treasure gained from life. Faith is not just a superficial belief system, either. The current runs much deeper, so that we feel these truths as warm and solid supports in times of trial.

Third, it’s vital to dispense with the disparaging comments about my spiritual experiences. This insight comes from jss who has been helping me stay in line during my discussion of faith. (As a neophyte, I need lots of assistance with getting it right.) Up until now, each description of one of my mystical moments has come with a proviso saying that it could have just been ‘a spasm’ or ‘craziness’ or ‘pathetic’. The pejorative language is unfair. Even if these events do not point to any larger consciousness in the cosmos, the fact that they lead to acceptance and peace means they should be labelled with healthier-sounding words. Writing about my peak experiences of ten years ago has improved my attitude, increased my resilience, and delivered contented peace to my heart. All this without any betterment in material circumstances. Given that they have provided so much, those experiences may have been my brain at its best, not at its sickest.

The spirituality project that began more than twenty posts back was supposed to help people in Alcoholics Anonymous get past the ego’s resistance to faith. No one in my regular AA group has expressed much interest in this effort. Fortunately, my online community has been far more receptive. But whether anyone else benefits or not, it has carried me to a place I’ve sought for decades. The act of writing has transformed my unusual experiences, which were too overwhelming to assimilate ten years ago, into solid cornerstones of faith. Due to both the memories and the gentle answers to my rational mind’s objections, the creative process has helped me release my death-grip on the piers of materialism. It has freed me to swim in the tropical waters of faith, which teem with hidden and beautiful forms of life.

(This post was revised as of 7 January 2010, 13:45 PST.)

This is post number 100. A commemorative essay about all the wonderful things blogging has taught me seems in order. But I’m not in the mood.

Mystical themes come to mind. More of my transcendent moments demand to be shared. I’m brimming with ideas about peak experiences. But yesterday sucked. I don’t ‘feel spiritual’. (Note: see the comments on this post regarding the distinction between emotional feelings of spirituality, and the moment-to-moment fact of our spiritual natures.)

The problem was my appointment with an ophthalmologist. As it happens, she started working at my old department at Kaiser soon after my departure. We’ve spoken several times, but yesterday she seemed to have forgotten. I was ‘just another patient’, which happens more and more as time passes. Before, most of the doctors and staff at my local Kaiser recognized my name. And when you’re a Kaiser physician you get a gold-colored membership card to identify you. So the service used to be, well, gold-plated.

What a difference a decade makes. Now I get treated like everyone else. It should have been like that all along, of course. If Kaiser doctors could see the system through the eyes of ordinary patients, they might work harder to improve the experience. Until recently, it was difficult for me to understand why so many people complain about Kaiser. Now, without the coveted gold card, I feel like ‘just another body’.

The technicians were brusque and dismissive. The visual field operator refused to show me the results of my study. He was neither polite nor apologetic. When the next technician came to put dilating drops in my eyes, I asked her if we could dispense with the dilation, because it would cause me to lose a day of writing. She told me dilation was ‘required’ by the doctor, and necessary for good photographs. A moment later she lined up the camera and took pictures, long before the drops took effect.

Later, during a quick exam, the ophthalmologist used two lenses that I know require dilation. But I also know that she could have assessed my issue without those instruments. Nauseous and unable to read or write, I came away with deep resentment about how the technician did not slow down, get the MD, and allow for a reasoned discussion about the need for drops. The fact it was my own fault for not being assertive left me feeling even more frustrated.

The doctor spent less than five minutes with me, and seemed confused about why she sees me every year. I understood she felt harried, and she did not do anything technically wrong. Still, I disliked the assembly line style of care.

In truth, grief and regret were the real reasons the saga bothered me. Ten years have passed since the last time I worked as a physician in that department. All the old people are gone. No one remembers me. Instead of being an important guy, a subspecialist getting referrals from all over Northern California, I’m just another patient who gets pushed through in minutes. Although I sometimes think my ego has toughened, and can thrive without those old props, it is clear that part of me still hurts. With a hard-won career in ruins, it’s troubling that others perceive me as nothing but a washed-up surgeon with a crippled neck and major psychiatric problems, living on disability.

No matter how much progress my psyche makes, it remains vulnerable. Careless words, bored facial expressions, abrupt treatment in the clinic, all these things get to me.

Anyone watching my trajectory for the past four years would say that my condition has greatly improved. Consider what happened over a short period starting ten years ago: I lost my career; nearly committed suicide; spent time in two different mental hospitals; suffered a psychotic break; learned that my severe chronic pain could not be cured; had reason to believe my spinal cord had been damaged; almost lost my marriage; had a lawsuit settle against me; moved out of the city I’d called home for sixteen years; and began accumulating distressing medication side effects. Over the subsequent six years, my body grew into an obese caricature of its former shape, I failed at three new career directions, and dreadful hormonal imbalances struck at the core of my identity as a man. My father, two good friends, and my stepmother all died (losing my abusive stepmother led to a lot of emotional conflict, complicated by anger that her will deprived my sister and me of most of my dad’s estate). My spirits sank and sank. In recent years, thankfully, I’ve started to turn things around. I’ve lost fifty pounds, gotten at least some of my sexual identity back, and have learned to forgive myself for the early retirement. I’m writing regularly, and beginning to see how my wife and I might scrape by financially. My flight path is climbing, and most of the time I soar above the clouds.

But yesterday hit me hard. By the time I returned home my mood had plummeted. Everything looked blurry and my stomach churned. Unable to sit at the computer, unable to read a book, unable to go outside (too bright, even with sunglasses), I became bored and angry. Most of the afternoon passed with me curled up on the guest bed with one of the dogs. We laid together in the dark, and felt sorry for ourselves. (Actually, Ralphy probably felt fine, getting all that attention.)

So it wasn’t a banner day. I would feel fraudulent writing about grand spiritual ideas after an afternoon like that. And celebration is more fun when you feel celebratory. Today, I feel hammered and bruised. But the morning is just getting started. I’ll walk the dogs, go to the gym, spend the afternoon writing, and try to get back on track. As they say in AA, “Progress, not Perfection.”

This post is one in a string of essays about spirituality. If you want to read the whole project, take this link back to its first entry.

The last entry promised to describe more of my visions. Let’s begin by going into further detail with the one mentioned in my ‘About‘ section, and already quoted. Briefly, the creation of the universe played out in my consciousness. This is hard to explain, but the unfolding event appeared as a sudden flash of awareness, and not like watching a movie. In the course of my weeks of enlightenment, each wave of epiphany had a theme. The theme of reliving the big bang was: ‘unity’. As instantaneously as my mind is capable of functioning, I ‘saw’ that our vast and ancient universe is really one seamless entity in space, matter, energy, and time. In the same way that reason breaks things down into parts to comprehend them, my spiritual experience showed me that you can understand just as much by seeing the cosmos as one living whole.

People debate how God’s experience (set aside, for the moment, doubts about God’s existence) compares to our human lives in the currents of time. Do the hours pass for It like they do for us? Is the future hidden, and the past beyond grasp? Or can this awareness ‘see’ all moments as one? When the curtains opened for me in my psychotic (or was it psychic?) epoch, I caught a glimpse of the hidden depths of creation. I realized that our yesterday, today, and tomorrow appear to this central consciousness (metaphorically) as if painted on an unrolled scroll; the BIOPE ‘sees’ the entire story, start to finish, all at once. Physical theories make clear that our experience of time’s flow is illusory. In our day-to-day lives, we see an hour as an hour. Yesterday is half as far back in time as the day before. Yet if modern theories reflect the actual personality of our universe, then one person might see two friends yawning at almost the same instant, while from another’s perspective they do so hours apart. How can that be if time is as rigid, measured and invariant as ‘common sense’ tells us?

Einstein consoled a widower by explaining that somewhere in the fabric of space-time, his wife still existed. We cannot move from this moment to those ‘behind’ us, but the ‘universal awareness’ can. That became clear to me in my moment of grace. Somehow I ‘felt’ the simultaneous presence of every speck of matter, both as things are now, and as they were all the way back through time to the very start. I felt intimacy and kinship with every fragment of the universe, at every moment in time. There existed connections between me (and hence all of us) and the tiniest subunits of substance, from right here and right now, to everywhere and ‘every-when’, no matter how distant in ordinary measures of space and time. In one brief moment I ‘saw’ or ‘felt’ the evolution of our vast cosmos from its birth out of a unitary point. Standing and experiencing the present, I also experienced that instant when an impossibly small point ruptured open, then blossomed like an unfolding rose, layer after layer shattering open. This is very hard to describe, but it all appeared to me as one single thing: speck and universe, then and now, all one. Most importantly, creation’s evolution was not just a mindless explosion, for a new awareness was born. A new consciousness opened its ‘eyes’, and said “Yes!”

Now let’s insert the proviso that instead of these visions being from God, my brain might have created this illusion all by itself. As mentioned previously, strange experiences can arise on their own. Feeling small, and suffering after crushing losses, maybe my mind leaned upon its old knowledge of evolution, relativity, and molecular fine structure, in order to generate a grandiose vision. Perhaps it conjured an illusion of shaking hands at once with the entire confusion of creation. Perhaps, in some despairing and plummeting fragment of my personality, my goal was to build a sense of importance. The belief that God was granting me secret knowledge could have just been a pathetic defense against the humiliation of losing all the props of my pride. This happened, after all, at a time in my life when everything that gave me confidence was dropping away from me. What a boon an epiphany would have been, and was. So it might have been false.

But it felt very real, and I feel compelled to work with it as if it were. Wouldn’t it be a shame to have God or BIOPE reach out, only to respond by retreating back to rationality? Of course, that is exactly what happened for many years. But recent days of writing have brought the seeming reality of those experiences back to mind. Their unspeakable power to move me has once again shifted my view. For now, and hopefully for ever, the interwoven and unitary nature of the universe, time, and God seems obvious to me. All is one.

This post is one in a string of essays about spirituality. It may make sense to start with the first entry in the project. On the other hand, the writing gets easier to read, and the posts shorter, later in the series.

The past two entries launched discussion of the second of my ‘Keys to Faith:’ The Experience of God is Real.

Everyone knows that many people—well over half according to some studies—enjoy what seem like mystical experiences. Many feel the nearby presence of a God-like entity, and even more gain sudden awareness of universal love, cosmic unity, and the ‘rightness’ of creation. Peak moment stories are easy to find. So in planning the spiritual series on this blog, it did not seem necessary to give specific examples of mystical moments, my own or anyone else’s. It seemed safe to take as given the fact that people often feel touched by God.

As already emphasized, religious experiences do not prove the existence of mystical forces, much less God. On the other hand, it is impossible to disprove the strong impression epiphanies give of being influenced by supernatural currents. Besides, even if peak experiences arise from nothing more than neural fluctuations, they say a great deal about the nature of the human mind and its need for faith. These statements demand elaboration, and the initial plan had been to head straight into exploring them. But then a reader and fellow blogger‘s comment prompted me to discuss one of my personal peak moments. For reasons that were at first unclear, writing about a breakthrough left me feeling unusually contented. So the next post went a little further in the same direction. After that, my mood lifted, faith became easy, and the future looked brighter. Wow! And it’s not hypomania, in case anyone wonders; I can tell. It feels like a combination of humble acceptance of what ordinarily drives me nuts, and serene confidence in my ability to weather whatever comes. Time will tell, of course, but my current state feels supported by a solid spiritual foundation, rather than the usual shifting emotional winds.

After some sixteen-thousand words devoted to rational justifications for faith, the act of writing only a few paragraphs about my breakthroughs brought me to the endpoint: convinced spirituality. Discussing the events required me to relive them, and reliving brought their impact back into my consciousness. As a result, I once again know that the universe is loving, cohesive, and on-track.

Predictably, my rational mind stepped in and started arguing with these feelings. How can the universe be on-track when the world is in such dire straits? What evidence is there for any love surrounding me, or that the warmth and peace that fill me have any source outside my own personality? And sure, the idea that everything is connected makes sense, but does it have any bearing on my past and future, or my regrets and fears? So there is still need for my effort to establish ways to overcome rational objections to faith. If nothing else, it will help me stay connected with my rediscovered spiritual core. (My fervent hope, of course, is that it will help others, too.)

In contrast to my initial plan, it now feels ‘right’ to describe my spiritual experiences. Even after ten years, they awaken joy in my heart, and make me want to ‘spread the word’. That seems like a natural response given the surprising transformative power of my experiences. I’ve mentioned before that my father raised me as an atheist; if memory serves me there was no time during my upbringing when the idea of God seemed like anything more than myth. So faith was not ingrained in my outlook, and this is not a case of a person reconnecting with childhood beliefs. Admittedly, in 1987 Alcoholics Anonymous convinced me that recovery from addictions depends on building a spiritual foundation for life. But until my epiphanies ten years ago, I made little progress in actually constructing one. After my visions in 2000, I enjoyed several years of pretty strong faith. But then skepticism crept in, and I returned to my baseline atheism. The past several days of writing about my peak moments has restored my beliefs. If mere memories of unusual feelings, sights, and human interactions from ten years ago can so alter my outlook, maybe they will bring a measure of uplift to others.

Given that 1) writing about my breakthroughs graces me with faith; 2) the descriptions may enlighten others; and 3) more than one person has expressed interest, it seems reasonable to spend a few more posts writing about what happened.

I’ll end this entry by offering some context for what’s coming. The peak moments to be described (and those already presented) happened within a few weeks after March 19, 2000, and mostly within 72 hours. I had been discharged from my first psychiatric hospitalization five days earlier. The psychiatrist sent me home with a powerful new antidepressant, and a prescription for a valium-like drug that had been given to me around-the-clock during my stay. As a dutiful recovering alcoholic, I promptly threw out the sedative after leaving the hospital. So as of March 19 my system was adjusting to a new antidepressant, and withdrawing from a potent tranquilizer. Both factors promote mania in people with bipolar disorder. No doubt these chemical influences played into the psychosis/religious ecstasy that followed. But that does not alter the fact that the resulting experiences opened a lifelong atheist to belief in spiritual forces.

***Click here for the next entry in this series.

This post is one in a string of essays about spirituality. It may make sense to start with the first entry in the project. On the other hand, the writing gets easier to read, and the posts shorter, later in the series.

Looking at the wretched state of humanity, it can be hard to believe in a caring, guiding power. But one can remember that we often watch those we love come to harm, while we remain powerless to protect them. A God-like entity could be overflowing with affection, but lack the ability to guide us away from mishap or cruelty. Another objection to faith comes from the perception that scientific findings rule out mystical forces. But later posts will show that our understanding remains incomplete, with corners of mystery that might harbor a universal consciousness. Finally, if one remains locked in verbal mode, and never relaxes into wordless wonder, it can seem impossible that anything ‘mystical’ could exist. But sometimes it’s healthy to remain childlike, and open our hearts to magic.

Many of us have trouble healing because our ever-reasoning brains refuse to relax and let faith emerge. In discussing a possible universal consciousness, or BIOPE, these posts suggest ways that one can use established facts to overcome the logical mind’s resistance. In pursuit of this goal, everything has been kept as ‘rational’ as possible. Even so, the endeavor will help only those who want to believe. It is aimed at the seeker who has difficulty feeling comfortable with faith. Which convinces me it’s a mistake to bypass discussion of my personal spiritual experiences in the service of avoiding ‘irrational’ content. If it’s a given that readers are seeking transcendent support, why not share what seemed like messages from God? Those who would be alarmed by such material won’t read these posts anyway.

William James and many others have noted recurrent strains in religious experiences. The themes my visions shared with those of others included: 1) a feeling that the universe is filled with love; 2) an awareness of the unity of creation; 3) an understanding that all is somehow ‘right’ in the cosmos. As will be spelled out later, a few additional insights came my way. But for now, let’s stick with the basics, begining with universal love.

In the midst of my ecstasies, I felt the love of creation in much the same way one feels heat radiating from an open oven. The first time it swept over me, the vigor of God’s affection nearly knocked me down. It was the end of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and a surge of spiritual awareness had been building inside me for an hour. As we said the Lord’s Prayer in a circle, it felt like I was standing in the path of a breaking wave of love. My body and heart filled with warmth, and I knew with utter certainty that God loved me. Within moments, the relief of learning how much the universe cares about people reduced me to wordless weeping, much to the dismay of those present. As outlined elsewhere on this site, my childhood included maternal suicide and sadistic abuse at the hands of my stepmother. Until those moments in the AA meeting, love never felt real or trustworthy to me. Never before had it seemed like my welfare mattered much to anyone, and suddenly a force as powerful and vast as creation held me in its palm and said, “you are precious to me.” The words were not audible like speech, but they rang through my awareness like a bell on an open plain. A group of alarmed alcoholics huddled around me for several minutes as I crouched near the floor awash in tears. They thought something awful was wrong, but nothing had ever felt so right.

That the universe loved me, and everyone, seemed like the most obvious fact in the world. How could it have been missed for so long? It was as if my entire life had been lived in darkened rooms, and suddenly the curtains were opened to reveal the sun. The events of those days taught me that even though it remains unseen, God’s affection is as real as the air we breath, invisible but sustaining us every minute. It’s a lesson that is easy to forget or discount. But if you want to believe that what I experienced holds truth, then rest assured there is as much love in this universe as there is space and time.

“Wait a minute! It was just a spasm of brain cells!” the atheist in me says. He chalks it up to “an abnormal release of neurotransmitters; maybe a flood of dopamine in my nucleus accumbens. It was a psychosis brought on by acute distress, and aided by changes in psychiatric medications. Nothing but an emotional hallucination.”

Should that skeptical voice be handed the reins? Is it be better to be ‘realistic’, and believe the universe has no heart? Or does the wise person suspend judgment, and accept love?

***Click here for the next entry in this series.

This post is one in a string of essays about spirituality. It may make sense to start with the first entry in the project. On the other hand, the writing gets easier to read, and the posts shorter, later in the series.

A blog-friend questioned why many posts on this site claim to be spiritual, but none detail my most powerful transcendent experiences. She makes a good point. Metaphysical development occurs primarily in the heart. Years spent pondering metaphysics lead slowly to higher understanding, but a ‘peak’ moment grants immediate grasp of spiritual truths. Logic and facts do not convey what it’s like to be embraced by the Source (a.k.a. the Tao, the One, ‘presence’, ‘being’, God, and BIOPE). So why has my epoch of breakthroughs remained in the background?

Countless seekers have described how religious awakenings sear the soul. In poems, lyrical prose, paintings, song, and even movies, one can find examples of peak experiences. My greatest moments occurred in March 2000. Whatever it was that touched me, it left a permanent mark. My most recent ‘About‘ essay (quoted below) came pretty close to capturing one episode in a string of ‘ecstasies’:

A point of crimson light burst outward, revealing in an instant the full sweep of time, space, and matter; it was a replica of the Big Bang. I stood at a locus from which I viewed creation arising from subatomic scales to fill the entire span of the modern universe, in a near-instantaneous ‘vision.’ As I saw these things, I inhaled the atmosphere of all-encompassing love and ‘rightness’ that animates everything. I heard a chorus of celestial voices, and felt myself basking in a divine affection that erased all doubt that God existed, that life had meaning, and that I mattered.

This was just one piece of a week-long spiritual awakening. The first 72 hours were the most intense, with wave after wave of euphoria washing over me, often accompanied by strange sights, or even stranger interactions with others. Take it from me, spiritual breakthroughs happen to more-or-less ordinary people. The experience of God is real.

And yes, that’s the second of my ‘Keys to Faith‘, if anyone is counting.

You don’t need my story to know that people experience something that feels like God, of course. The best source of anecdotes is William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. James lists a gamut of spiritual feelings, from simple ‘Healthy Mindedness’ all the way to florid psychotic breaks like mine.

The problem with transcendent breakthroughs is that they could mean nothing. The most striking thing about my experiences was that they happened during waking hours, in the course of a bright spring day. Dreams of greater strangeness and complexity occur commonly, and if my visions had come during sleep they’d have left a weaker impression. Hallucinogenic drugs generate related phenomena. Tasting such agents as a youth led me to weird and synthetic feelings of a spiritual flavor, without the balanced, focused, and radiant love I felt in 2000. Even so, everyone knows the brain has the capacity to enter odd states, so one cannot conclude that ‘God’ is necessarily involved. In the months following March 2000 many people indulged my babbling about the visions. My experiences left me feeling an imperative to persuade others that they should have faith. Some even seemed to buy into my beliefs, delivered as they were with such passion. But most people edged away.

The only audience that believes another person’s spiritual visions is one already inclined toward faith. Such experiences can teach about God, but they don’t open the door for skeptics. The resistant mind can write them off as craziness or lies. That is why I do not lean on my transcendent breakthroughs in this project. Even though I still work to persuade others about faith, I now recognize that my subjective experiences don’t do the job.

On the other hand, there is no question that such things happen. And if God does exist, then It would have to reach us somehow. God’s presence in our brain might look exactly like hallucination, even if one came equipped with MR scanners and EEG machines. Andrew Newberg has demonstrated that during some peak experiences those parts of the brain that give us our sense of boundaries go silent. Which may explain why people feel so ‘at one’ with the universe. Does that mean something like ‘God’ reaches in and turns off those clusters of nerve cells? It is unlikely to be so simple, but who knows? The point is that although transcendent awakenings do not prove the existence of a larger realm, no one can prove they are meaningless, either. A brain scan simply shows that the brain has altered, which is not the same as saying ‘it’s all in your head’. If you want to bolster faith you already possess, then feel free to be moved by any of the countless personal accounts of enlightenment; they might, indeed, be showing us a higher plane.

***Click here for the next entry in this series.