Positive and Negative Modes of Enlightenments

I was re-reading that Intellectual’s Masterpiece on Spirituality, “Varieties of Religious Experience”, by William James, who had been a Harvard Professor at the turn of the 20^th Century; one should read such a classic every 40 years or so just to stay current, anyway, I developed a few fresh insights that I think evaded me on my last read through.

 

Firstly, subjective Religious/Spiritual Enlightenment Experiences are presented by the Mind, if I may be permitted to explain the phenomena materialistically, in order to resolve serious or even potentially life threatening Nervous or Emotional Breakdowns.   These occur when the involved individuals have struck ‘rock bottom’, so to speak, and turn desperately to “a higher power”.   This accounts for such a high number of very sincere Religious Conversions among reformed drunks and, since the Eighties, former cocaine addicts.   But it is not entirely necessary to get to the depths of despair simply through an excess of bad habits, which destroy the health, finances and all of one’s important social and family supports; no, one can also reach the bottoms of despair by being, well, neurotically Ideal enough to experience a Crisis of Meaning of Life, that is, to see all the ordinary events and happenings of Life as petty, shallow or even kind of dirty, and then to be appalled by anything that that seems predatory or hurtful, and it all becomes so much worse when such Individuals see all such behaviors as having impulses within their own Selves.  It presents a crisis of Value, where one wonders where the strength to continue such a miserable and even negative existence should come from, when all reasonable or compelling arguments would favor either an active suicide, or to simply allow oneself to wither away… or to drown one’s sorrows in drink, or reach for the artificial Exaltation of the Cocaine Experience… but this is putting us in a circle. 

 

It can’t be understated how thorough such Religious/Spiritual Resolutions to these Nervous or Emotional Breakdowns are – the Subjective Certainty that one has been rescued and is now and forever under the Protection and Care of an All Powerful, or All Important Higher Power is unshakable.  These people do from the depths of despair to the Olympian summits of absolute Delight… one can hardly help to envy such wonderful experiences going to drunks and those low-life sleaze-ball cokeheads, but that is simply how the Psychological Math of such Metaphysical Geometries tend to work out.   Higher Resolution Events occur to those in Crisis.  If one is living well, or even just managing to cope, then, well, if there is no Real Problem, then there is required no very important Solution.

 

The sad thing about reading “Varieties of Religious Experience”, if one is a dedicated Religious Spiritualist, is that the background Materialism of it all is rather compelling, and that we find that while the core Experiences and and the basic shape of the Effects have a certain uniformity, the actual Details involved can cover a frightful range of Beliefs and subsequent Life Style Choices.   I was able to come to some understanding of this when I read Saint Teresa of Avila’s “Interior Castle”, a real Spiritual Classic, which presents Spiritual Enlightenment more in terms of Process then I have so far seen in William James, that while the initial ‘Conversion Experience’ may be exactly as powerful as mentioned above, still, the Person who receives such an Experience certainly hungers for more, for Repeat Performances.  The Initial Glow of the Conversion Experience recedes and Life becomes dull again, and so my guess is that the Convert gets a bit Superstitious and Obsessive about recreating the original conditions of the First Conversion Experience.  The Drunk may relapse simply to get back into Crisis Mode (which makes a lot of sense when one listens to more than a few Alcoholics Anonymous speeches, and how there is almost a positive pride in recounting how many times they have “fallen off the wagon” only to re-achieve their victories), and the Religious Fanatic goes back to more and more severe fasting, mortifications of the flesh, and renunciations of any of Life’s small pleasures, all in order to re-establish that Crisis Level of Despair that would Trigger the Intervention of God.   Again, we need to remind ourselves that in many such cases, these behaviors can actually be life threatening.  With the Drunks this is easy enough to intuit, but with the Religious Fanatic we must imagine how the fasting and depravations can slowly be escalated until the Health is run down to such a frail degree that it finally just snaps.  At this point one can’t help but to have something of a mixed appraisal of Spiritual Aspirations, where the Proven and Demonstrated Paths to Enlightenment seem to straddle the fence just on the edge of effective Suicide.

 

But then I remembered good old Swami Ramakrishna whose approach seemed to emphasize more of the Positive, and if I can put it into terms which we have now established, that the ‘crisis’ can be one of Unfulfilled Divine Love, that is, a kind of Higher Pining Away.  Where the Monastic Catholic focusses on his own Dispair at being a Low and Unworthy Worm, trapped in a Body prone to Sin, which does in fact create something of an effective Emotional Crisis, one such as Swami Ramakrishna looks more at the Greatness of God then at any exaggerated view of his own Inferiority.  It comes out seeming happier overall.

 

Yes, Ramakrishna too was a ‘Chain Experiencer’, seeking for repetitions of this Peak Experience, but he would achieve his ends through, well, serial ‘Love Affairs’ with various Names, Forms and Aspects of God; and in India, there are plenty to choose from.   Not that Ramakrishna did not also have his ‘Superstitions’ – he could rant about ‘Women and Money’ as even the strictest Saint Francis, but at the end of the day, he had a woman doing his cooking and cleaning, and, well, he lived in Bombay and his rent money was coming from somewhere and wasn’t being tossed away.   It all seemed like his more positive Fanaticism was easier to moderate then the Negative Crisis Mode which really does seem to require Monastic Supervision for it not to be entirely too self-destructive.

 

Oh, the good news, from Saint Teresa of Avila is that the Repetitions of Crisis can eventually result in a Permanent Union with the Divine.  When Teresa arrived at this point herself, she became a bit more practical regarding the risks of extreme fasting and mortifications of the flesh, not wishing her subordinate nuns to go overboard in such practices, but still, it was unavoidable that she would still see the Path that worked for herself was indeed a viable and even exemplary Path.   Her emphasis was to see God as the Highest and Humanity as the Lowest, and such tension would bring on an inevitable Spiritual Crisis and God would inevitably come to the rescue.  

 

Ramakrishna’s Methodology, while seeming more wholesome, lighter and brighter, well, suffers from practical problems concerning execution, that is, how one is supposed to Love a God that is primarily an abstraction, that is, an Abstraction for one that has not had the God Experience yet.  It is all quite like falling in love with a girl that one has never met.  One may very strongly wish to fall in love, but that is not nearly the same thing as finally catching the eye of a girl we actually ‘do’ fall in love with.   Here, I think the feeling of Emptiness would come into play, as opposed to the Catholic focus on Human Inferiority and Worthlessness.  But here the problem arises with the natural tendency for Humans to ‘cope’ with their problems.  One can learn to ‘cope’ with the feeling of Emptiness by, well, resorting to the pleasures of “money and women”, where the Catholic Methodologies are structurally better suited to forestall any attempts for their Spiritual Aspirants to ‘cope’ with their impending crisis conditions.

 

Oh, back to William James and “Varieties of Religious Experience”.  It seems that back in his day, just over a hundred years ago, the New Age Movement was just beginning to get on its feet – he refers to it as the “Mind Heal Movement”, which he sees as a happy, optimistic and positive Movement for people who are basically happy, optimistic and positive already, and that all of its methods and aims are toward what we would see in our larger view as ‘coping’ mechanisms that do not lead to Spiritual Crisis, but rather forestall any possible chance of at a real Higher Integration of the Personality.    So it is that the New Age avoids Moral Conflicts and Crisis, and tells us to simply feel good about ourselves.  To Experience God we only need to understand God is in and around us already… and so there is nothing really wrong with Child Labor to make us our cool leisure shoes or paying our maidsfrom Central America less than minimum wage because they are ‘illegal’ and can go nowhere to complain.    When everything is already so Great, why would one ever want to have a Spiritual Crisis?   So the New Age comes off seeing the Old Styles of Religion and Spirituality as largely Negative, but the Religions bulk at the New Age Movement’s amoralism, inherent hedonism, naiveté and moral and intellectual shallowness.

 

Of course the New Age is not really new.  One can look at many Ancient Philosophical Systems and what even passes for Ancient Religion and see what are plainly just ‘Coping Mechanisms’ – ideas for accepting Life just as it is found.  I would site examples, but people are so easily offended, and so I would rather people arrive at these truths under their own steam, so to speak.

 

But the New Age has been gathering momentum.  Nobody really wants to engineer an intentional Crisis in their lives, even if it would give them God, if they can be made to believe that God is really there already… people being ready to accept a pure Imagination instead of the Real Thing.  But what I wonder is that the New Age was a Child of the Twentieth Century and its Prosperity and Optimism, but that the 21^st Century with its impending Climate and Economic and perhaps even Military Crisis’s will not instigate millions or even billions of Personal Individual Crisis’s of the Spirit.  With the Sea a boiling pot of carbolic acid, with sandy dry plains producing only Famine, and with a Mechanized Capitalism achieving an effective divorce from Labor presenting an almost Universal State of Unemployment, well, I can guess that it will become easier and easier to arrive at these episodes of Nervous and Emotional Breakdown, and that Spiritual Crisis might become rather more common than what we would really hope for, considering all of the other circumstances.