Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

You are here: Home / Archives for William James

William James

Two Families of God, continued, and an NDE ball is thrown out to readers

By 8 Comments

Those of you with memories that go a couple of posts back may recall that I had embarked on a discussion of what William James called the “healthy minded” and “sick soul” approaches to religion and life. My blog post was based on an article by experimental psychologist Richard Beck, “The Two Families of God,” and I confidently promised to come back and lay out my own views on the subject.

James, you remember, described healthy-mindedness as producing happiness that rests on an optimistic ignoring of evil and the dark side of existence.” The approach, James said, manifests a “blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance.” In Beck’s words, “This protection is accomplished through repression and denial. It is an intentional form of blindness in the face of life to produce positive affect and existential equanimity.”

In other words, the sunny, happy results of healthy mindedness depend on denial of evil and suffering.

By contrast, what James called “sick souls” remain existentially aware, individuals “who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil…and are fated to suffer from its presence.” As Beck puts it, “James describes the sick soul as more profound than healthy-mindedness; the sick soul experience is ‘a more complicated key’ to the meaning of pain, fear and human helplessness.”

James said of the existential resiliency of the two types:

“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. . . . But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; as even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

It will probably come as no surprise that what struck me so sharply about Beck’s article is the apparent similarity of James’s healthy-mindedness to the principles of the Law of Attraction, which has overflowed its original New Thought banks, spilled into Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” and Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, to become an immensely popular new parallel to contemporary religion.

And that is where I—or more specifically this blog post–got bogged down. The more I have tried to analyze the response of Law of Attraction thinking to distressing near-death experiences, the more difficult I have found it to talk about it all coherently. Maybe I’m simply too close to the subject. Maybe I’m just bored by the ideology.

I am certainly  aware of the aura of disapproval and fear, along with a kind of moral condescension, projected by Law of Attraction followers toward the whole subject of these types of experience and the people who report them. Ironically, I do not for a moment deny the utility of much LoA psychology nor the possibility that some of its scientific claims are plausible. (I have in fact bent a couple of spoons without physical force; I have a cellular memory of that “action at a distance.”)

What bogs me down is akin to theologian Walter Brueggemann’s claim that “we have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith.” It is the same model, says Beck, “that creates the sense that James’s sick soul or the experience of Mother Teresa is paradoxical. In the bipolar model, faith and complaint exist at the expense of the other. They cannot occupy the same experiential space. However, as we have seen in the psalms and in the empirical psychological literature regarding relationship with God, it appears that high complaint can coexist with faith.”

Similarly, I contend, acceptance of the existential burden of recognizing the dark side of existence, whether physical or spiritual, is not necessarily negativity as the Law of Attraction would have it. It can coexist with joy and success, and with a deep spirituality.

So, I am throwing this discussion out to you all. You’ve had some great comments about the former post. Do you think distressing NDEs can be accommodated within Law of Attraction thought? What are your thoughts about LoA thinking and human suffering on a global scale? (But please do not tell me that very young children attract their leukemias and blastomas to themselves, nor that the millions of individuals who died in the Holocaust invited the experience; that would be ideology talking, not common sense.) Is LoA simply a different kind of fundamentalism, brooking no disagreement?

The Two Families of God and Near-Death Experience

By 21 Comments

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up here on some earlier discussion about attitudes and their relationship with distressing NDEs, so I jumped when the ideal opening came along a few days ago.  Today’s post, which introduces our reopened discussion, comes from one of my favorite blog authors, with help from William James and Sigmund Freud. My comments will come along next week, and I’ll be looking forward to yours both now and then. (And as usual, if you don’t care for God-talk, just plunge in anyway; this time it’s only in the title, because William James put it there.)

Richard Beck, PhD is an experimental psychologist, author of two books, the mind behind the surprising and enlightening blog Experimental Theology, and in his day job chair of the Psychology Department of Abilene Christian University. He is emphatically not what most people expect. What follows is reposted here with his gracious permission.

The Two Families of God

by Richard Beck 

If you are a regular reader you know I’m a huge fan of the American psychologist and philosopher William James. In fact, James’s most famous work–The Varieties of Religious Experience–plays a key role in my most recent book, The Authenticity of Faith.

The part of The Varieties that captivated me so many years ago is James’s descriptions of what he calls “the two families of God”–two distinct religious experiences James called the “healthy-minded” and “sick soul” experiences.

James begins his analysis in The Varieties with the healthy-minded experience. According to James the healthy-minded believer is positive and optimistic, willfully even intentionally so. The healthy-minded believer actively ignores or represses experiences that are morbid, dark or disturbing. As James describes it: “[W]e give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good.”

James goes on to distinguish between two different origins of healthy-mindedness. The first is a dispositional, trait-like healthy-mindedness, an optimism and positive affectivity that is rooted in a person’s innate psychological wiring–the sort of congenial good-cheer many people seem to have. By contrast, there is also a more decisional sort of healthy-mindedness, an active choice to see the world as good where, according to James, a person “deliberately excludes evil from [the] field of vision.” This isn’t as easy as it sounds. As James notes, an extreme healthy-minded stance may be “a difficult feat to perform for one who is intellectually sincere with himself and honest about facts.”

Why, then, do people indulge in this experience? According to James, people might opt for healthy-mindedness because it is an “instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance.” James summarizes how this works:

[Healthy-minded] religion directs [the believer] to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.

According to James this tendency toward “deliberately minimizing evil” can become almost delusional where “in some individuals optimism can become quasi-pathological.” James suggests that healthy-mindedness can appear to be “a kind of congenital anesthesia.”

In contrast to the experience of healthy-mindedness James goes on in The Varieties to describe the second of the “two families of God”–the experience of the sick soul.

If the healthy-minded experience is typified by a “blindness” that seeks to minimize evil, the sick soul is a religious type involved in “maximizing evil.” According to James, the sick soul is driven “by the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.” Sick souls are those “who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil.” Consequently, sick souls are “fated to suffer from [evil’s] presence.”

Of great interest to me in The Authenticity of Faith, James describes the sick soul as being very preoccupied with death awareness. According to James the sick soul lives with a regular awareness of death, that at the “back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all encompassing blackness.” In light of this death awareness the sick soul knows that “all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction” because “the breath of the sepulcher surrounds it.”

For James, this death awareness seems to be a key difference between the healthy-minded and the sick soul:

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

The sick soul does not seem to be engaged in a denial of death, to use Ernest Becker’s phrase. And because of this, despite the apparent “sickness” of the sick soul, James suggests that the experience of the sick soul provides a “profounder view” of life. More, the sick soul confers a degree of resiliency in the face of tragedy, setback and pain. Critical to the argument I make in The Authenticity of Faith is James’s summary assessment comparing the two types:

The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work…But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

 

Making sense of an NDE, distressing or otherwise

By 7 Comments

A reader asks, “How do you make sense of these experiences?”  Ken Ring asked me that question once, and it seemed so totally unanswerable that I gave him a flip retort and absented myself from the conversation. I’ve felt bad about that for years, so, Ken, if by chance you’re reading this, here’s a more careful response (noting that it’s taken another twenty years to get here).

First, this is one of those questions with no single answer. Like learning to swim, making sense of these experiences is something we have to do for ourselves. Secondly, it strikes me that there’s less an “answer” than a chain of realizations. However, not to sound cryptic, let me just wander through some of my observations.

To be analytical, whatever sense is made of any NDE seems to depend initially on whatever vocabulary is available to the experiencer’s thinking. This is most easily explained if we think of an NDE not as a quasi-physical event but as an event in consciousness; from that perspective, what one encounters in an NDE is a series of concepts, to which we fit whatever identities we know of.

For instance, a person who has never heard of Hinduism or its content will not awaken thinking, “Omigosh, there was an elephant in the experience—Ganesha!”  On the other hand, a non-Christian living in a Judeo-Christian culture and perceiving a loving, male-seeming. robed guide might at least wonder if the presence was Jesus, simply because the concept of a loving Jesus is so familiar within the wider culture. Likewise, people in heavily infrastructured societies report tunnels; people with no such engineered environment report similarly shaped long-necked gourds or hollow reeds. In short, step one is the hunt for descriptively appropriate labels; this may be virtually instantaneous or it may continue well into awakening. Without labels, there can be no meaning.

Once labels have been found to describe the first impression, I think temperament comes into play. Psychological testing has shown again and again that a considerable chunk of the human population operates most comfortably with definite answers to life’s questions (not a chain of realizations, but answers). They look for certainty, and if that security is not evident, they may invent it.  It appears to me that this is where ideological precepts—whether religious doctrines or secular principles—serve as answers to “what was that?” So, depending on the person’s customary belief system, whether the labels applied to a distressing NDE describe it as a warning of hellfire or dismiss it as a hallucination, if the need for certainty is sufficiently strong that interpretation will harden like concrete.

Then come all the “buts.” But, not everyone wakes up with the NDE’s parts labeled. But, not everyone demands absolute certainty. But, what if the NDE and the description provided by my ideology/religion don’t fit? But, what if the explanation given by my belief system scares the wits out of me—what then?  But, what if the labels are wrong? But, how do we know any of this? But, (fill in your own question). This is the part that takes a long time.

It is well known in near-death circles that most people’s visual descriptions of their NDEs are almost invariable over time; their accounts of sequence and impressions do not waver. However, except in those cases of rock-hard ideological certainty, interpretation of an NDE—especially a distressing NDE—is likely to develop and mature over time as new information and insights become available, and as integration progresses. This is not to suggest that they necessarily begin “making things up,” as the actual description of the NDE does not change; only its possible meanings shift.

[Note: In cases where recollections of the experience re-emerge over time, discernment will be important, testing the new memory for its validity as part of the NDE rather than a conscious add-on or “false memory.” I believe this is a particular hazard with the NDEs of children whose impressed adults press for more and more information until there remains a kernel of NDE surrounded by sincere embroideries.]

With distressing NDEs, a maturation of understanding can happen provided that the person has not fallen into an irreversible conviction of doom. In my case, what saved me from that was the innate stubbornness that has also been the bane of my life. However real that first interpretation seemed, as years went by I flatly refused to accept it as final; it was not fair, it did not fit, and there must, somewhere, be a better answer.

Others may have different trajectories; but for me,  making sense not only of my own NDE but of others, once I knew about them, has gone through a whole range of stages. First, the immediate theological labeling, then terror, then repression, depression, and a great blank of many years. And then came the studying. That was like placer mining, sifting and sifting endless buckets of information for tiny glints of gold. (The list of references in the book Dancing Past the Dark takes up sixteen pages and is incomplete.)

The first inklings came with reading William James, then Arthur Koestler, Laurence LeShan, The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Then learning of Stanislav Grof’s work with the unconscious, and stumbling through the writings of Christian and Jewish mystics. Eventually, psychotherapist Alex Lukeman’s work on dreams. Intensive historical-critical study of scripture. Still later, it was a pastor saying to me, “You do know that for many seekers the Void is the ultimate spiritual experience, don’t you?” (That was a revelation!) As was bending spoons.

And then came a primary conceptual influence: photos from the Hubble telescope. I know, the photos are objective; but my subjective response was to see that the entire universe is made up of glorious light to deepest darkness, peace to unimaginable violence, sudden bursting events and unfathomable time spans. Just like our NDEs. The elements out there are the same as the elements in us. (Astrophysically speaking, we are made of stardust.) Whether one chooses to see this as the work of some natural process or the design of a Creator, the result is the same: This is where we live and the way it’s built, and the way it works is the way it works. Whether or not we have managed to describe those workings, we and our conceptions are drawn from an infinitesimally small pinprick corner of the whole—and that reality is way bigger than our intellectual abstractions.

So, first, I see enormity.  And this enormity makes me think of the work of people like James Fowler, whose life work has been to study stages of faith, and Lawrence Kohlberg and his work on stages of moral development, and Jean Piaget and the many others who charted the stages of our cognitive and psychological development. And always, always, human development is discovered to move from the narrowest of views (centered on self) to broader ones (to include, sequentially, parent, family, school, church or other group, community, country, world). Whether involved with religious or secular faith, the path to maturity always broadens. What is restricted becomes stunted.

In other words, when confronted by a mystery vaster than our own understanding, we are challenged to give up accustomed ways of thinking and discover more comprehensive ones, to widen the view. This kind of stretching is always difficult, even when it happens naturally as part of moving, say, from being a child into being a teen, or whenever the first questions come to test authority and one’s basic beliefs.

In situations of trauma, which includes events such as natural catastrophe or an NDE, the slow, natural stretching of the developmental process jerks with shocking suddenness. Alex Lukeman has described this type of “instant revelation” as bringing “the destruction of traditional and habitual patterns of perception and understanding, including religious belief structures and socially accepted concepts of the nature of human existence and behavior.” There is nothing to do but rebuild. If the challenge is obstructed—when questioning is discouraged or doubt forbidden—growth stops; the person stays a conceptual 8-year-old or 12-year-old forever.

Yet as Fowler and others discovered, properly understood, giving up the convictions of one life phase, while it may be painful, is not loss of faith but its transformation; it is a process that leads to growth and deepening of faith, the leaving of childhood for maturity and, perhaps, wisdom. It is like climbing a mountain and seeing the horizon expand: what is invisible from the valley will open to view as the climb progresses. For those who believe that all of truth resides only in the laws of the valley, this can terrify.

For a person with a strongly materialist bent, the challenge may be to begin taking seriously all the inexplicable things that hang over the edges of the box of physical explanations—the “paranormal” that may turn out to be entirely normal but is not yet understood, the unseen workings of spirit that cannot be measured or replicated. For a person from a bounded religious tradition, the challenge will almost surely be to see beyond the edges of any single doctrinal position, to where a larger community of trust and faith waits.

The reader who asked about making sense of distressing NDEs also wrote, “In one of your articles, you write about “finding the gift in the dark”. What was that gift for you? I’m trying to hold on to my deepest experience/intuition that love is at the heart of things.”

I’m so glad she asked, because it has led me to the discovery that this entire process, this series of realizations, has been the gift. It is a destination that would almost certainly never have been reached in my life without that NDE.

A recent observation by the Rev. William C. Green may be appropriate here:

When my son turned fourteen he was puzzled by his inability to enjoy the amusement park where we’d passed many summer days. He kept going on the same roller coasters that had thrilled him. He kept riding the bumper cars he once loved. He again threw balls at moving targets to win the toys he’d been drawn to collecting. But the harder he tried to enjoy himself the more disappointed he felt. Something was wrong. Something had changed. It was time to move on.

One writer said, “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another”… God, help us to let go of belief we have outgrown. May we move with you into the new life you have in store for us. Amen.

Shalom.

Two voices for existential truth

By 5 Comments

Much of contemporary talk about spirituality is taken up with the importance–even the essentialness–of positive thinking, of accepting only the light and believing we can refuse pain and difficulty. It is easy to forget that there may be something to be said for a more existentially open view. In the weekend marking the Christian observance of the brutal death of Jesus, here are the great psychologist William James and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann:

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, casts his lot with existential honesty:

“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work…But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes. [T]here is no doubt that healthy mindedness is inadequate…because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”


Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Message of the Psalms, sees purpose in those that are cries of anguish (emphasis in original):

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…