In and Out of God - God and religious experiences

The Final Frontier


If you've been with me throughout this journey, this post is the penultimate of the "In and Out of God" series. My story of faith began with a religious experience and it is that experience that sustained my faith throughout the years of doubt and inner turmoil. As I stated in my last entry, God had receded beyond sight, but there remained this one thing, this one encounter that I had with Him which made me literally swoon, made me want to give all that I was to Him and Him alone. 

In 2005, a motley group of four young men all found one other in Presentation College San Fernando and formed a prayer group. Coincidentally, they had all come back to school with a new zeal for their faiths as a result of Confirmation classes and Life in the Spirit seminars. They started holding meetings in the chapel to read scripture, sing and pray. I was not in the least bit interested in the group until a friend of mine started attending their meetings. This came as a shock to me because he was notorious for his ease with obscenity and stories of sexual exploits.

One day, he asked me to come with him and I couldn't resist satisfying my curiosity. So there I was, standing in the second row, surrounded by no more than 8 young men, singing and clapping their hands in praise of Jesus Christ. Then, without any warning, they all stopped singing and started unmelodiously 'praising' God. This alone was too much to handle but they threw in some glossolalia to test my tenacity. What on earth was this madness? I wasn't a church-goer myself, but I had some respect for sacred things and I felt they were making a mockery of God. My friend saw the discomfort marked on my face and told me not to say anything. Let's just say, I didn't make the trek up to the chapel the next time around.
On another day, a friend and I were sitting beneath the covered-way near the football field and these two guys - one I knew from football, the other from being on stage to receive commendation prizes - were handing out fliers to everyone. Finally, they gave one to my friend and me and told us that we should attend a 'Youth Empowerment Day'. I looked at my friend and he said that we should go. I said cool. When the morning arrived, could you believe that my friend stood me up? I ended up going on my own.

I arrived just after Mass was celebrated in time for the feature speaker of the day. He was Fr Trevor Nathasingh and boy could he talk. He spoke about waking up in a drain one time after a night of drinking. Living a life of drunkenness and other unseemly activities finally reached a tipping point that led him to searching for God. Fr Trevor said he was invited to participate in a Life in the Spirit seminar. It is there that he encountered God in a similar, but more dramatic, way to my own experience and gave his life over to Jesus. After 8 years of running from the Lord, he finally accepted his vocation to the priesthood.

I was unsure about my faith before hearing this story, but afterward, I became momentarily open to God's existence and his intervention in human affairs. After Fr Trevor's talk, the bacchanal started. Chairs were moved to the side, drums were placed in front, the music started pounding and voices were lifted in praise. It was more than an awkward moment. Everyone around me was dancing and singing and I had no idea how to appropriately respond.

I eventually loosened up and mimicked what I was seeing, doing the church-boy two-step as inconspicuously as possible while clapping my hands to the beat. I actually enjoyed it and got slightly upset for what happened next. As swiftly as it started, the music was halted and people started doing that 'praising' thing again and I could hear a few talking in tongues. We were told to close our eyes, open our hands, and open our hearts to God. I did as I was told, although I wasn't quite sure how to go about opening my heart.

I was doing something right because not long afterward, I started feeling weak in the knees and my hands were shaking at my side. I felt something that I can only describe as a burning sensation in my chest area and frissons were running through my body in a way I'd never felt before. While this was occurring I could hear bodies falling hard on the rotting wooden floor all around me. I dared not open my eyes. The anxiety intensified as I tried to make sense of what was going on, feeling weaker by the second. "What is this?" I asked myself. Then I felt a hand gently rest on my right shoulder and somehow I knew that it was safe to give in. It was one of the prayer group's leaders. I let my body go and I fell into the person's hands who then laid me on the floor.

This looks so weird when it's not you down there.

I laid on the floor, consciously, thinking over the past 10 minutes of my life. What had just happened? I could never answer the question. But when I got up, I felt like a new man; I was a new man. I went home with an intense desire to read the Bible, pray, worship and tell people about my encounter with the Lord. I still credit this experience with my getting over my shyness. I became quite bold, especially for promulgating and defending my faith. This is where my journey began.

It was difficult for me to reassess this experience and view it from a new perspective. It was the strangest yet most profound experience I've ever had. I felt that looking at it differently was somewhat of a betrayal to the experience itself and even to my past self. But I was forced to do it, because I had nothing left. There was nothing left of God for me to hold on to but this singular experience. It was more probable, then, that my understanding of the experience was wrong and needed modifying as opposed to my understanding being correct. I thought that it was my encounter that set a foundation for all my other theistic beliefs but it wasn't, because even after taking them away my experience still stood independently.

My search led me to William James, an early 20th century Protestant philosopher-psychologist and his book "A Variety of Religious Experiences." He introduced his book by clearing the earth about two different perspectives we take for any phenomenon. The first is asking what the phenomenon 'is'. What is the nature of this thing in my hand? The second perspective is about the phenomenon's 'significance' or importance. What does this mean to me, you, us the world? How does this affect us? These two perspectives will guide us from here. They are two distinct classes of questions but knowing the nature of a thing can, and often does, affect it's perceived significance.

Michael Jackson and the nature of Religious Experiences

You can still feel his energy.

When Michael died (as is usually the case when a famous person dies) I scoured youtube for videos of his performances. I came across a video entitled "Michael Jackson Fans (R.I.P. The King of Music) and I was amused, horrified, and finally, left in contemplation. People, mostly women, were falling all over the place, swooning as though in a trance. It was difficult to distinguish between what I was used to seeing in Charismatic rallies and what I was seeing happening in Jackson's concerts. It is said that over 3000 people would faint in his live performances.

I couldn't find the video where Bobby McFerrin was talking about the birth of his love for music; he said that he went to a concert and had a 'spiritual experience' that made him fall in love with music. If you've ever listened to Bobby's music, you would not need to have ever heard him speak to know that he is a very 'spiritual' person. How is it that these men were able to have the same experiences as me and not be in love with Jesus? As my mind grew some inches to incorporate these stories, William James made it grow a bit more.

James related stories of men and women who had religious encounters. One man said that he was sitting in his room and felt a 'presence' in the room that filled him with immense joy. He went on to call this presence the 'Infinite'. Some people felt fear, others love, others absolute despair. The experiences were many, but they were similar, according to James, in the following areas:

1) Ineffability - it "defies expression". Words are never able to do justice to the experience yet we wish we could find some way of sharing the actual experience with other people.

2) Noetic quality - a person feels as though they have encountered some truth, some eternal knowledge and even though they cannot articulate it, they carry an innate sense of authority; the authority one feels when one knows something that others don't.

3) Transiency - They cannot be sustained for long periods of time.

4) Passivity - It is possible to auto-induce a mystical state through meditation and focus or even with the use of entheogens, however, when that state is reached, there seems to be an abdication of will. The person's will is subjected to the will of the 'Infinite' or whatever superior power has drawn her into that state.

Reading this made me excited. This was exactly what happened to me! It's also what happened to alot of people I know, not all of them Christians. Wait. If he could write a book and document so many experiences that he could find characteristics for them, my experience wasn't that unique. It was disappointing to read that other people had similar experiences but did not ascribe their experiences to Jesus Christ.

What tended to happen was that people ascribed their experiences to the religion that was nearest to them. Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is overshadowing them. The less religiously inclined make up their own names of the experience like the 'Infinite' or the 'All'. Then there are the few who do not ascribe any supernatural origin to it but see it as a purely natural phenomena that can be self-induced. Sam Harris is a notorious atheist who spent 11 years Asia learning about meditation from Hindu and Buddhist monks and was so influenced that he gives advice on the practice.

This Youtuber had various 'numinous' experiences while he tried out different belief systems from Christianity, to Buddhism to Taoism. We came to the similar conclusion that the only underlying thread that tied all these experiences together was our brains. The most telling piece of information in the video was an excerpt from a TED Talk given by by Jill Bolte Taylor who described what most would call a religious experience. It just so happens that she was actually describing her experience of a stroke. A stroke occurs when there are disturbances in the flow of blood to a person's brain. Bolte went on to explain what about our brains causes such 'religious' experiences to occur.

Human beings are material objects, and in this way we are connected to everything around us. The sense of self that we have - the knowledge of what we are and what we are not; that you are you and not me or not the air around you - is largely dependent on the anterior temporal and pre-frontal cortex of the brain. Neuroimaging has shown that people whose prefrontal cortex have been damaged experience increased awareness of their environments and sometimes become over-stimulated. Another important area of the brain - and probably more relevant - is the parietal lobe which integrates sensory information from various parts of the body and is involved in visuospacial processing. This part of the brain runs cold, shuts down, when a person has a 'religious experience'. A combination of these and other neuro-phenomena lead to different types of experiences that are indistinguishable from those deemed religious. Read here and here for more information, but I strongly recommend the book "The Neuroscience of Religious Experiences."

To be honest, an experience like this never leaves one's memory. It is for this reason, I think, that I am more open to the possibility of a world that exists outside of our five senses than some are. However, I do not believe in such a world, because as it stands, I have no reason to. The experiences I have had are explained by the misfiring of neurons in my brain. I can cause this to happen by practicing meditation or sucking on some LSD. Very unromantic, I know, but it is all that we can safely assert with intellectual honesty.

It is possible that the science is wrong on this topic, or on any topic for that matter. Kant spoke about a world split in two - the noumenon and the phenomenon. The noumenon is the world as it exists independent of human observation; it's what exists when you close your eyes. The phenomenon is the world we all experience through our five senses. It's not beyond possibility that there is a part of the world that we have no access to because of our inaccurate senses which affect us in ways we do not understand and cannot understand with the scientific method. For now, we only have access to our own, phenomenological world. However, this doesn't mean that this other world actually exists. It just means it -might- exist.

Because we are unable to know whether this other world exists or what it is like, however, it is unlikely that any one person can claim knowledge of it and expect the rest of us, with no reference point to see if he is telling the truth, to believe him. If God wants to test our faith, this is a horrible way to do it. I favour a naturalistic explanation because I have no other firm ground upon which to make the claim that it was Jesus who made me weak on that Saturday morning and not 'The Infinite' or Allah or Ahura Mazda. Some venture to say they're all the same guy, but these guys resemble more of us than we do of them. We created the gods and are afraid to destroy them.

On the first day, man created God.

Conclusion

I want to make it clear that this was not a choice. You can choose to -attempt- to believe or retain a belief. You can choose to put yourself in the environment where this belief may be fostered or destroyed. You can choose to publicly deny or profess a belief. You cannot choose to believe or disbelieve. Both happen in spite of yourself. Both are the result of inner turnings that occur regardless of your will, turned according to the information that you allow into your mind.

It's like hearing stories of a cheating lover. No one 'chooses' to believe that their lover is a cheat. Most of us would try to find counter-arguments to salvage a good image of our lovers. If the stories keep coming, however, and they are compelling, and the evidence piles up, you'd find yourself believing it even though you don't want to, watching your lover more closely, asking them searching questions. Information, evidence and people affect our beliefs. When the info, evidence, people, are more convincing than what you once believed, you'll find yourself believing them even though you may not want to. You'll find yourself sitting at the edge of your bed, wiping tears off your cheeks. I never wanted to be a 'non-believer'. It just happened. The ground or my belief was slowly weathered and now I stand on reason and an acknowledgement of its limitations.

My religious experience, although quite profound and still a significant checkpoint in my personal development, doesn't seem to have been anything divinely special. The Bible advises us to 'test every spirit' but never gave us any reliable criteria by which to do so other than itself. Go figure. Science has filled that gap and I am left to see my experience as a natural thing, and what a beautiful thing it is.
 
I went through each stage that I can remember in my deconversion story and I ended just where I started. This final frontier was the most depressing period of my journey, because it ate away at the core of who I had become. I pushed through those dark knights in tears, prayers and silence. It was my hope to come back out on the side of the theist, holding an epic story in my hand to inspire others to have more faith. But here I am. I'm left with no good reason to believe that my old God or the Gods proposed by religions exist. I do not believe anymore. I'm an atheist.

Look out for my last post of this series - How I try to live as an atheist. It will be the shortest of all.