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 BeckIf 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.
To me, this guy has decided to take an intellectual “stand”. Behind it I sense negativity. He for damn sure is not at peace with himself, and it shows.
I am fully aware of “evil” If you want want to pin that tail on the donkey. I’ve buried murdered loved ones, been conned, robbed, and laughed at behind my back for sincerely trying to help others. Most of all, I’m fully aware of the damage I myself have caused, and I’m sorry.
All of these so called “evil” behaviors abound in nature as a natural part of the process. Ambush predation, theft, you name it. It seems to be the way it was designed.
I accept that, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to perpetrate it with license to steal on the life around me. I enjoy being good to others. That’s why I do it. For me death is my bus ticket home. I hear it’s a short trip.
He did coin a great name for a punk rock group, The Grinning Sculls. Hey! that ranks right up there with the Puking Sculls, the Purifications, not to mention the “Squirming “Maggots”. He’s missing his calling.
There is one misspelled word it should be Putrifications. That punk rock group really stank.
Hey, Dave, William James was not *advocating* this point of view; here he’s simply observing that it exists.
🙂
Two African American ladies, Jehovah s Witnesses, rang my door yesterday, literature and Bible in hand. In explaining my views to them, they countered me with the Bible every time. My views were met with a silent “this is going to be a tough one to save”. And yet, they were sincere people trying to serve the good.
People in this raging storm of the life process we endure and hopefully learn from, lash themselves to the bible like a mast.
This is based on fear. They’re like a horse with side blinders on. Looking straight ahead. Fear keeps them rejecting any other source that could also add light and expand their understanding. Anything other than what they cling to is viewed as a threat.
Thank you so much for this post. It has given me much to ponder and to explore.
At the risk of oversimplifying it, the God-is-Love and wants us to love and forgive one another types are healthy minded, and the fundamentalist hell-fire Bible beaters are sick minded?
Well, but you’ll notice each view has an upside and a downside.
As Duke Ellington said, about concepts. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Everything in this “earth school system” we’re learning from has an upside and a downside. Neither one is meant to justify the other.
Rationalization, justification, and denial, thrown into the equation, really mess things up. They create a smoke screen that as it shifts, clears, and re generates creates confusion in finding your way to clarity.
Really I think at the root of these categories is optimism vs. pessimism. Anyone who has read any of the literature on positive psychology (alot of it very well backed by experiments), will know that pessimists do tend to be more in touch with reality, but optimists are happier, more successful, live longer, get depressed less, get sick less and recover quicker, etc. Further, pessimists can become optimists. I score very high on the pessimist scale but I recognize that it is important to try to be optimistic and that having any sort of faith at all – any sort of hope for things to come – really sits easier with optimism. The world may be full of horrors, but grounding our optimism is the fact that we will grow, we will evolve spiritually, we will learn to love more as time goes in, in our life and hopefully in the next.
And Rabbitdawg, this article has nothing to do with “God is Love” vs “Fire/Brimstone Fundies”. That is a bifurcation that you’re projecting entirely onto the piece, probably bc its an important schema in your life. Just like Nan responds with “each view has an upside and a downside”, projecting her own struggle to see the spiritually beneficial side of her negative experience (symbolized by the Yin & Yang in her NDE), onto your projection. It is her dualistic schema that caused her to recognize and post this article in the first place.
Bug again, read Seligman’s _Learned Optimism_ and come back and tell me that you still think pessimism and optimism are *equally* good and bad. As an almost life-long advocate for my own extreme pessimism, I can tell you I’ve had my own views completely overturned by the actual data.
Yes, I’m thinking. Thanks.
I don’t think it is as “either-or” as Rabbit Dawg suggests. I think Beck is saying that both the healthy-minded and the sick soul have their distortions. Maybe the healthy-minded has a problem explaining evil, and the sick soul has a problem explaining good.
Something I read recently in a book by Bro. David Steindl-Rast, on of my favorite authors, seems relevant. He is talking about the connection of art with the sacred, even when the art isn’t pretty, like Picasso’s Guernica, or T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” both of which speak about war:
“‘Little Gidding’ ….refers to the bombing of London, and was written during WWII. In these stanzas, Eliot makes the dive bombers transparent to the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit who sends fire from the sky at Pentecost………This does something to our concept of God, I hope. A Hasidic master once said: God is not an uncle. God is an eathquake! And that earthquake is not something that happened out there in 1937 in Spain or 1944 in London. It happened the last time we had some soul-shattering experience. It may happen whenever or wherever we hold still. And it will not only destroy but build up….” from Common Sense Spirituality.
What is a soul-shattering experience, if not an NDE?
I remember going back again and again to see Guernica at a major Picasso show at the Modern in NYC years ago. So powerful it knocked roomsful of people into shocked silence. Echoes of earthquake.
Thank you for these references. I’ve not read this Steindl-Rast.
Yes, you should check out Bro. David. He’s a Benedictine monk, but more universal than that. Check out “Belonging to the Universe”, which is a dialogue between Bro. David and Fritjof Capra about the new physics.
What a fascinating conversation on this blog!
🙂
War exists everywhere in nature Hyenas Vs. Lions, our antibody’s Vs. Viruses that invade us, goes on. This relates to survival, and resources.
The bats are now dying from white nose disease, and what did they do to deserve this, eat too many insects?
Climate change and natural disasters have terminated life forms throughout the history of the earth. What sin was committed, a Tyrannosaurus refused to go to church ?
To me, these processes seem to be impersonal. The Earth as a living entity is going own way doing it’s own thing.
Mankind, to the Earth is the worst case of planet mange that’s ever hit the galaxy. Its trees are falling out, it has oozing sores, bald spots, and the infection has gotten to its fluids, its blood supply.
But hey! God made man in his own image, and gave us dominion over the Earth and all the animals. We only have to answer to HIM. If. you don’t believe me, go to church…….they’ll tell yuh the same thing.
The best scientific theory we currently have is that the universe erupted out of nothingness in the Big Bang. An event of unimaginable destructiveness eventually gave rise to, as just one tiny example, the creative fecundity of life on planet Earth. Creation and destruction are intertwined at every level, right down to our small individual lives.
I think Jung, a very unorthodox Christian indeed, got it about right when he said that the central task in our lives lies in the reconciliation of opposites. From that perspective, finding a middle path – in which we can accept and manage as creatively as possible BOTH the shadow and the light aspects of personal and collective existence – seems a fruitful way to proceed. How can we possibly deal constructively in the long term with our darkness, our evil, our shadow ( choose your word!) by choosing its denial as a life position?
I think William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” is one of the truly great books. James’ eloquent, measured reasonableness as he explores deep, tempestuous and contentious spiritual territory is a fine example to all of us….
Brava!
I agree with Jung. Without the darkness we could not find the light. Only one thing shows the true path between the two, Love.
Denying an addict money for a fix, is Love.
Helping someone who truly needs it is Love.
I hear you Sandy.
Oh well, I did qualify my not-so-profound observation about fundamentalists and feel-good faith types with: “at the risk of oversimplifying”. Looking back, it was oversimplification indeed.
I was fishing for an insight that would capsulize Nancy’s post. You just did it in your last comment. Thanks!