In my own mind at least, I have written these four chapters as serious engagements with the anomalous if not toward the next big thing, then certainly toward a more adequate theory of religion. The bald truth is that it is still very difficult to advance a truly adequate theory of religion. As I explained in chapter 4, we have theories about religion that attempt, and more or less succeed, to explain the encounter with the sacred, which lies almost entirely outside our rational grasp, in terms of something else, which is relatively within our rational grasp: society, psyche, body, politics, brain, and so on. The last forty years of theory have in many ways been very much about a quick retreat from any real encounter with the sacred as sacred.
Indeed, the sacred as sacred—or what we have encountered here as the psychical and the paranormal as the experiential core of comparative folklore, mysticism, and mythology—is precisely what has been eclipsed in the contemporary study of religion. The field has denied, in principle, what Jacques Vallee so clearly saw with respect to the impossible within mathematical theory and the ufological material, namely, that the phenomenon can only be understood on its own level and on its own terms, and that, moreover, it can only be misunderstood if reduced, without remainder, to our physics, our psychology, our cultures, our ethnicities, our materialism, our politics, our ethics, or whatever.
One of many features I find confusing about this categorical rejection of the sacred as a “thing to itself” (other than the assumed omniscience of Immanuel Kant and the almost total erasure of Buddhist and Hindu epistemologies, many of which hold that one really can know reality-in-itself directly and immediately) is the odd conflation of the sui generis nature of the sacred and the believer’s perspective, as if they were somehow the same thing, as if taking the sacred seriously is equivalent to surrendering one’s intellect and critical faculties to the faith-claims of the religious traditions. This is simply not true. The sacred is a critical category that can seldom be fit into the categories of faith and piety. It offends the epistemology of faith as commonly as it offends the epistemology of reason. Very much like the paranormal, it is a third thing. Hence my historical and theoretical reflections on the sacred as the paranormal in the present book. But it is just this kind of reductive materialism, usually joined to some retooled form of Marxism (it’s all economics and oppression) or Foucauldianism (it’s all discourse and power), that now defines so much of the study of religion. By so doing, the field has, in effect, denied its own subject matter, much as the fields of psychology and neuroscience have done with respect to the psyche and the mind, which they now more or less (mostly more) deny even exist.
We can trace the latter eclipses back to two different points in the twentieth century. The first, 1913, was the year J. B. Watson proclaimed a new behaviorism, a completely natural science that focused only on observable objective behaviors and from which subjective words like “consciousness” and “mind” were quite literally banned. The second historical point, the decade of the 1950s, was when functionalism, the logical theories of Turing machines, and early digital computer modeling began to take over experimental psychology, leading the field to the useful but dubious conclusion that computation is the same thing as consciousness. Edward Kelly has described the latter developments as “the continuing failure of scientific psychology to come fully to grips with the inescapably dual nature of its subject matter—in short, with the mind-brain problem that lies at the heart of our discipline.”1
I would suggest that these two eclipses within contemporary intellectual life, of the sacred and of the psyche, are fundamentally related, for whatever the sacred is or is not, it is intimately tied to the deepest structures of the human psyche. To erase one is to erase the other. Mircea Eliade, then, had it exactly right when he wrote that, “the ‘sacred’ is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.”2 Put more bluntly in the form of my own paraphrase: “We cannot, as a species, ‘outgrow’ the sense of the sacred and become purely secular, and this for one simple reason; we are that sense of the sacred.” This is why the comparative study of religion really does belong in the research university and at the very heart of any truly serious humanistic, philosophical, or scientific inquiry into the nature of human being. The sacred and the human are two sides of the same coin.
Obviously, there are real problems with such a position. For one thing, the religious nature of the human being and its universe are inherently ambiguous. It is indeed true that our world can be lived and understood, extremely well, it turns out, without any reference to the sacred at all. The coin, then, need not be flipped. It also works lying on one or the other side.
Until, of course, it “flips” again.
Consciousness, Culture, and Cognition: The Fantastic Structure of the Mind-Brain
It turns out that there is a good neuroanatomical reason why we have no theory of religion, but only theories about religion. It is the same reason, moreover, why the universe can be experienced in purely materialist terms or in deeply religious terms. It goes something like this . . .
If the nature of the sacred is intimately tied to the nature of human consciousness, it follows that the sacred is in turn intimately involved with the human brain. Accordingly, in order to begin to understand all of this, we need to propose methodologies that can integrate the humanities and the sciences, that is, that can integrate what I have earlier called the dialectic of consciousness and culture with what the neuroscientists now call cognition. What would such a method look like?
As a thought experiment, I would propose a dual approach through contemporary neuroscience and psychical research, that is, a double-method that can embrace both brain and Mind without naively conflating the two. I would also propose putting both neuroscience and psychical research in turn in deep dialogue with the history of religions and literary theory, that is, with the textual or hermeneutical components of paranormal experience—in short, with the fantastic, or what I have called the impossible.3
We have already had many occasions to consider what has come down to us as the filter or transmission thesis. Although it appears in different forms, this bimodal psychology or rationalized form of the old mystical doctrine of the Human as Two was first proposed, as we saw in chapter 1, in the nineteenth century by individuals like Frederic Myers and William James in order to explain the supernormal data of psychical research. It was then taken up in the twentieth century and developed further by thinkers like Henri Bergson, C. D. Broad, Aldous Huxley, and Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who felt it was the only adequate explanation for the astonishing phenomenology of altered states of consciousness triggered by his new chemical catalyst. We encountered it again in chapter 3 with Jacques Vallee’s stained-glass windows filtering an ever-shifting cosmic light. And again in chapter 4 with Bertrand Méheust, who underestimated, in his own words, “the work of the successive filters through which the real passes before it appears to us.”
For anyone who attempts to take seriously the data of both the natural sciences and the history of religions, such a conclusion, it seems to me, is nearly inescapable. Mind is not the brain, but Mind is indeed filtered through the brain with all its mindboggling evolutionary, neurological, cultural, linguistic, emotional, and historical complexities.4 We are both. The Human is Two.
Obviously, we need a new metaphor here. Unfortunately, there are problems in every direction we turn. The analogies of the filter or a transmission, for example, are clearly crude ones, and they almost certainly mislead with all of their dualistic assumptions. My own intuitive sense is that paranormal phenomena are expressions of a deeper nondual reality that possesses both “mental” and “material” qualities that manifest according to the subjective or objective structure of an experience or experiment. In the mystical terms of Méheust, the real possesses two faces: a public face involving cause and matter, and an esoteric face involving meaning and mind. I also suspect, with thinkers like Vallee, that the common absur
dities of paranormal phenomena are functions of this same nonduality and, as such, are designed to pop us out of our dualistic, either-or ways of thinking about the world (or just really, really confuse us). This is yet another reason why the paranormal and the mystical should not be separated, why we cannot study the one without the other: both forms of experience are pointing to or expressing this nondual or both- and level of the real.5
Edward Kelly has highlighted another problem inherent in the transmission metaphor: it can imply a more or less perfect one-to-one communication, as in a television reception. This is certainly not what Myers had in mind, or James, or Huxley. Here the metaphors of the filter or reducing valve are much more appropriate, as they imply a selection, a narrowing, and a loss of an original More. For these reasons, Kelly prefers the metaphor of “permission” over that of “transmission.”6 I could not agree more. And I would take Kelly’s metaphorical re-visioning one step further and suggest a complimentary metaphor that is already implied in the literature but not, in my opinion, emphasized nearly enough: the metaphor of “translation.” What is permitted to cross the threshold, after all, is not only filtered, selected, and narrowed. It also comes through in a different form, whether this is a dream, a vision, a symbol, a text, or a drawing. In a word, it is translated. But this implies that, if we wish to understand something about the communication’s source, we must translate it back, that is, we must interpret it. This, of course, has been my basic point throughout these chapters, and it remains my final point here at the end. Psychical and paranormal phenomena are hermeneutical realities. They work like texts and stories. They are about meaning as much as they are about matter. There is always a gap. The fisherman cannot talk to the fish without using symbols and signs (or just a hook).
Many other metaphors have been proposed over the centuries. In the ancient world, we encounter images like Plato’s Cave with its primitive, projective “movie technology” (a background fire casting shadows of objects on a cave wall, distracting chained prisoners from the transcendent Sun completely outside the cave), the Upanishadic passage on the atman or transcendent Self and the ego as two birds sitting on the same tree, or the gnostic teaching of the syzygos or angelic Twin. In the modern world, we have models like Abbot’s nineteenth-century Flatland, Fort’s projecting Martian X, and Philip K. Dick’s Valis.
Personally speaking now, I find Plato’s Cave, Abbot’s Flatland, Fort’s X, and Dick’s Valis far more “accurate” descriptions of what consciousness and the human brain are up to in a real-world mystical event than some of the present talk of task-oriented modules, cognitive templates, attribution theory, folk theories, and domain specificity, not because the former are literally true (they are not) or because the latter are false (they no doubt capture something important), but because the theological, mystical, and literary metaphors deliver far more imaginative impact. They are closer to the lived experience of things. They capture something of the wonder, awe, and sheer terror of a real-world psychical or paranormal event, when Mind beams through the brain with a force and power that can only be approximated by ecstatic, mystical, or sci-fi language.
The cognitive scientific computer metaphors appear much too abstract and “dry” in comparison. They also happen to be unbelievably boring, a fact that, all humor aside, carries real philosophical weight for me. In other words, I find the cognitive scientific models incredibly useful and even convincing as explanatory models for the commonplace (boring) functioning of the brain and the social construction and stabilization of the ego, that is, of the normal sense of self and identity, including and especially religious identity.7 But I find these models virtually useless when it comes to admitting, much less understanding and explaining, the wilder data of comparative mystical literature with which I am the most familiar. They just don’t work.
Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists do not have to be this boring. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, for example, anthologized portions of a beautiful little book entitled On Having No Head by D. E. Harding in their classic volume The Mind’s I. The essay treats the day, Harding explains, “when I found I had no head.” “This,” he insists with complete clarity, “is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.”8 How did he come to this impossible conclusion? Harding was trekking in the Himalayas when he suddenly discovered that he was not at all who he thought he was. He explains:
Somehow or other I had vaguely thought of myself as inhabiting this house which is my body, and looking out through its two round windows at the world. Now I find it isn’t like that at all. . . . Victim of a prolonged fit of madness, of a lifelong hallucination. . . . I had invariably seen myself as pretty much like other men, and certainly never as a decapitated but still living biped. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed—to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is—rather than contains—all things.9
Now staring into a mirror, he puzzles again at the sheer lunacy of confusing consciousness with the brain, the ego, or the body:
In my saner moments I see the man over there [in the mirror] . . . as the opposite in every way of my real Self here. I have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid, and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here and now and forever!10
Similar insights into the nature of the Human as Two have recently come from a Harvard-trained brain anatomist by the name of Jill Bolte Taylor. On the morning of December 10, 1996, Taylor experienced a massive stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. As a neuroanatomist, she knew exactly what was happening as it happened. She watched her linguistic, memory, and identity processing disappear like cotton candy on a tongue. Deprived of its neurological base, it just all melted away. But as these cognitive capacities blipped out, something else blipped in, something stunning. In my own terms now, she knew consciousness as consciousness instead of as culture. In her own neuroanatomical (and religious) language, as her left side gradually came back online over the next eight months, Taylor found herself alternating “between two distinct and opposite realities: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain.”11 Consciousness and culture were gradually coming back together, and with them, her sense of social reality and personal identity.
This still sounds more than a bit like the reduction of Mind to brain, even if it is to two brains now. But there was more, and Taylor seems to find religious language the only really adequate means to express it. “By the end of that morning, my consciousness shifted into a perception that I was at one with the universe. Since that time, I have come to understand how it is that we are capable of having a ‘mystical’ or ‘metaphysical’ experience—relative to our brain anatomy.”12 Obviously, her language is very careful here: “a perception,” “relative to our brain anatomy,” and those scare quotes around “mystical” and “metaphysical” are guarded and ambiguous. But then there is that italicized word: “I was at one with the universe.” Like her double-sided brain, Jill Bolte Taylor is alternating between two different worlds of meaning, two different possibilities, and exactly like a good fantastic author, an author of the impossible, she cannot decide which is the real.
Or can she? The human being now appeared to her as “an electrical being; an apparition of energy smoldering around an organic lump.”13 She entered the space of the fantastic, that is, she felt “bizarre, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space.”14 She was “comforted by an expanding sense of grace.” She was in “a void of higher cognition.” She “soared into an all-knowingness.”15 More stunning still, she now knew the brain-body as a k
ind of UFO window, “a portal through which the energy of who I am can be beamed into a three-dimensional external space.” The body now revealed itself for what it is, “a marvelous temporary home.” She marveled at how she could have spent so many years unaware of this, never really understanding “that I was just visiting there.”16 Like an alien.
We are not who we think we are, she concluded:
I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each a part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe? How could I fit in with our society when I walk the earth with no fear?17
Evolutionary biology now took on a whole new light too: “At the level of our DNA, we are related to the birds, reptiles, amphibians, other mammals, and even the plant life. From a purely biological perspective, we human beings are our own species-specific mutation of earth’s genetic possibility.”18 In short, Taylor realized that we are all transhuman: “What a bizarre living being I am. Life! I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch . . . I am cellular life, no—I am molecular life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind!”19
Being in one’s “right mind” also took on new meaning. To our right mind, Taylor explains, “the moment of now is timeless and abundant.” Time, history, and the clock are no more. Our right mind, moreover, is “free to think intuitively outside the box.” It is “spontaneous, carefree, and imaginative.” It is also the source of some of our deepest ethical sensibilities and political dreams. One might even say that it is the ultimate source of democracy itself: “The present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family.”20
Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Page 36