My last essay described how one can find reassurance in any situation by developing the right attitude toward life. It gave the impression, perhaps, that I believe spiritual pursuits unnecessary. However, that’s not my stance. Transcendent development is important. The problems arise when people hold fixed beliefs about the nature of reality.

Because we can’t know ultimate truth, any idea or theory is provisional. New data could appear at any moment to undermine conviction. If one believes, for instance, that God works in mysterious ways for our own welfare, one can too easily end up bargaining with the cosmos: “I’ll be happy if there is an all-powerful deity who decides what’s best for me.”

Such specificity in belief is precarious. If too much hardship accumulates, one begins to doubt God’s beneficence. The traditional religious solution to such wavering is to cleave even more tightly to ‘faith’ in a particular kind of God. This hardening of ideology in the face of contradiction underlies many religious and philosophical battles, sometimes with lethal results.

So it is important to find a foundational belief system that relies as little as possible on blind faith, and as much as possible on incontrovertible fact. That all life is interdependent can hardly be questioned. That we are reliant on others is obvious. Taking such evident truths and using them to conclude that what matters is the whole collective of life and not our personal stories offers a stable system for making sense out of hardship and tragedy.

One could go the next step and believe that humans are interconnected on a non-material plane through subtle influences in the ground substance of reality. This might seem to provide a stronger basis for insisting on the sanctity of all. However, such a putative matrix of universal awareness, while possible, cannot at present be proven. So it serves as a poor platform for stable contentment.

This does not mean, however, that mystical awareness should be ignored or discounted. True spirituality is not based on belief, but on direct and nonverbal experience. Transcendent states can be described by the rational, verbal mind, but they can’t be entered through it. Through meditation, or contact with nature, or after reversals of fortune, one can discover immanence. The nature of radiant consciousness is such that words become inadequate, and the unity, rightness, and encompassing love of the cosmos feel immediately present and beyond question.

Left to its own devices, the mind quickly begins to conceptualize such experiences. A Christian might believe the spirit of Christ has embraced her. A Buddhist might believe he has gained direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality. A Pagan might interpret the radiance as the collective energy of nature. But the experience itself belies such categorization. It simply is.

A habitual atheist would perhaps explain a similar state in synaptic terms, ascribing the numinous feelings to atypical neurotransmitter balance. This is nothing more than yet another metaphysical stance, albeit one reliant on scientific study. Despite the tremendous progress in neuroscience, we cannot even begin to explain states of mind in terms of cellular activity. The belief that the transcendent experience is potentially explainable in purely material terms is just that: a belief. In any event, if the altered state was exceptionally powerful, it might alter the atheist’s worldview, (as happened in my own case).

The belief system can also affect the unfolding of the transcendent state. I suspect that if visual phenomena arose, a Roman Catholic would be more likely to see luminous forms suggestive of biblical angels, whereas a Tibetan Buddhist would perhaps observe lights tracing the shape of a mandala, as described in some texts of that tradition.

No matter its form, and regardless of how it’s interpreted, mystical awareness has tremendous transformative potential. It reforms a neurotic life into a numinous one. At first, such improvements last only a short time, perhaps a few days. But as we gain confidence in the significance and reality of direct realization, our neurosis becomes less solid and destructive, while peace gains ground.

The best approach, I believe, is to experience mystical awakening without demanding anything of it. The verbal mind wants to organize and explain what happened, but that leads to unstable belief systems that require defense. Better to simply remain open to the flow of sensation and realization, and not place constraints on it.

Mystical experiences feel weightier than ordinary states of mind; they resist reduction to simple neurologic description. They engender a profound sense of connection with forces much larger and more distributed than the individual personality. Even so, there is no way to prove that any objective reality underlies the subjective sense that transpersonal currents are at play.

True, many writers have described how contemporary physical theories are consistent with the existence of distributed consciousness in the cosmos. But even though I personally believe such cosmic presence to be real, it remains a belief with all the problems described earlier in this post. Ideas and theories are not stable enough to serve as a nucleus for inner peace; one needs a foundation based on fairly certain facts in order to sidestep doubt and the tendency to fossilize opinions.

Spiritual growth is important. Whether or not there are mysterious forces outside the individual mind, it is unarguable that human beings contend with powerful and untamed energies within. Reconciling these qualities, befriending them, and making them work for us is important. At the very least, humans are spirited in the secular sense of the word, so ‘spiritual’ practice makes sense if we want satisfying and meaningful lives. But we need to keep our rational minds open to all possibilities and not concretize a universe far too complex and subtle for full and final description in verbal terms.

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    Last reviewed: 1 Aug 2011