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?
Laws? forget all that. You are trying to impose a preconceived framework over what you’re trying to understand. And why, do you feel guilty if you abandon these things.
I will say this, your peers who cling to these things out of fear will more than likely jump all over you for disregarding them, or argue about your labels. So what.
Don’t limit your search to the human condition alone. Expand it to include all life. All life on the planet exists by three basic laws: survive, get what you need to survive, and reproduce.
Suffering, what did I do to deserve this? pervade the existence of all life from the simplest to the most complex. We are not God’s chosen life form, and all worthwhile understanding does not revolve around us. Forget all that too.
Physical existence is less that the blink of an eye, no matter how important we think we are, or how long we maintain it. A child born, and dying with a terminal defect, got what they came for and left.
Dave, I don’t see this discussion as trying to impose a framework; what I have in mind is exploring the idea of James’s “two families” framework, and then seeing how that works alongside the very popular “Law of Attraction” belief. Like a nature hike through some ideas. Not mine to impose who thinks which way, but it seems worth looking at. Being jumped all over won’t be a new experience! I totally agree we need to expand our exploration to the entire living community–what is our relationship to the animals suffering in industrial agriculture, and did they attract their misery?–and stop thinking ourselves the be-all-end-all of the universe.
Yeah, I hear you Nan. My style is just to look at what is, and just draw my ever evolving conclusions from that. Everything has a right and a purpose to be here, otherwise it wouldn’t be here.
I see the same parallels of intent through the simplest forms of life into the most complex. Pardon my “stone age” style.
Great Topic! First, I don’t think we can truly know as – clearly – there are sufficient evidences (and skeptics) for every belief, position, philosophy and practice. However, over a lifetime of experience and contemplation it seems to me that, at this stage of my journey, it all seems to be about gifts; individual and cultural.
No one (individual, species or culture) gets through this life unscathed. I have had my share of distressing, shattering and devastating experiences and after the fact I find that I am, surprisingly, better for the worst of it. And, in retrospect, count them as blessings and would not undo a thing. Characters are forged and shaped by minor and major trials and ordeals and not by sunny days of abundance and the best of times. There is something about paradigm and ego exploding experiences that create amazing opportunities for growth and transformation. The strength, brilliance and multifaceted clarity of the diamond is formed from immense heat and pressure and, I think, so too are people.
No one seems to engage the Law of Attraction model with the goal of attracting paradigm exploding, ego shattering experiences but where would we be without them? No one thanks God when tragedy befalls them…. until much later 🙂
Kathy, I really like what you say here, and very much agree. As I think I said in a previous post, the dialectic of destruction/creativity at every level from the vast to the tiny, has been with us since the Big Bang ( yes, I do accept that it is only our best theory thus far regarding our universe’s origins). We are challenged throughout our lives with this dialectic.
My own view – in no way unique – is that we are here to learn, to grow, to become reconciled to our tiny place in a vast order which is ultimately a mystery, to attempt to make sense of both our own lives with their challenging paradoxes, and the lives of others.
I have seen first hand in both my family and my professional experience how damaging to human happiness and creativity denial as a life position can be. And there are implacable dimensions of pain to life on earth which no amount of positive thinking can shift.
I reserve my greatest dislike for that New Age mantra “We are only given what we can bear.” The evidence of human history on the grand and the small scale offers massive refutation of that.
Great post!
The Yogis say….. hammering splatters putty, and hardens steel. Which are you?
I have seen first hand in both my family and my professional experience how damaging to human happiness and creativity denial as a life position can be. (quoting Ann).
Actually there are three; rationalization, justification, and denial.
“I’ve thought it over and, they deserved what they got”. “What ever it was, it’s got nothing to do with me”.
And yet, like a stone tossed into a pool of water, the ripple effect through the infinite energy field that’s us, and everything else, effects us all.
For sure.