Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences of God (from my 2019 book)

(from pp. 205-207 of my Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present [Bloomsbury Academic, 2019]) 

Chapter 9. Ordinary and Extraordinary Experiences of God

 

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This is the common air that bathes the globe. 

This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour,

This is the tasteless water of souls …. this is the true sustenance. 

                        Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” sec. 17

 

 

            I’ve shown how Plato lays the foundation for the sort of philosophy that, in Hegel and other modern thinkers, resolves perennial issues about “inner” and “outer,” mind and body, freedom and nature, ethics and rational self-government, value and fact, and religion and science. I hope I’ve made their invaluable work more accessible than it may have been previously. 

            In this final chapter, I want to say some more about how Plato and the others interpret, in particular, what we call “religious experience.” And thus to contribute something to the discussion that William James set in motion with his rich lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).  

 

—Our Everyday Experiences of God—

 

I’ve been suggesting that our discoveries of inner freedom are experiences of God. For through freedom, love, and forgiveness, we and the world become more self-determining, more ourselves, and thus more fully real; and this fuller reality is God. 

The dramatic experiences of liberation that we occasionally have can help us to recognize and appreciate the many smaller experiences of liberation that we have practically every day. And thus to realize that we experience God practically every day, though we may not realize that God is what we’re experiencing. This is what the poets of love, from Rumi through Wordsworth, Whitman, and Mary Oliver, have been trying to help us to realize. When Whitman writes of the “common air that bathes the globe” and that provides “the true sustenance” for souls, he’s evoking the experience, which we have practically every day, of God as freedom and love. 

This is why, in my comments about “mysticism,” I haven’t focused on any of the supposedly definitive singular experiences that various mystical traditions describe or allude to. I have focused instead on the more familiar multiple experiences of inner freedom, free inquiry, forgiveness, and love. With the help of teachers like Plato, Hegel, and the mystical poets, experiences of this kind can lead to the kind of understanding of mysticism that I have been advocating in this book. What’s more, however, they seem to me to be more definitive, more conclusive, than the extraordinary experiences that we hear about. 

I’ve explained why I think it makes sense to call experiences of liberation and love, experiences of God. They constitute something that’s more self-determining and in that sense more fully real than our merely “mechanical” responses to the external world. But if inner freedom, forgiveness, open-minded thought, and love are what God is, we experience God whenever we experience them.[i] Some of us less often and some of us more often, we all have these experiences, which give us direct access to God.[ii]

Extraordinary “mystical experiences” may well be absolutely conclusive for the people who experience them. But it’s always open to bystanders to ask why they should be convinced by an experience that they themselves haven’t had. Indeed, the person who has had the experience might still wonder, when she’s no longer immediately “in its grip,” what exactly she is justified in concluding on the basis of the experience. 

By contrast, the common experiences of inner freedom, forgiveness, and so forth don’t convince us by sheer power, and they don’t go away and stay away for long periods, as extraordinary experiences tend to do. Instead, the common experiences convince us by presenting something that we can see is always available to us, whenever we open our minds and hearts. That’s why I call these common experiences more definitive than the extraordinary ones. 

It‘s certainly true that most of us don’t realize that these common experiences give us access to God. Western cultures tend to dismiss the idea that ordinary people can experience God. We’re told either that there is no God, or that God is a separate being whom most people can know only through faith, and not through personal experience. 

In fact, even most of what we read about “mysticism” has the (probably unintended) effect of reinforcing, through its emphasis on extraordinary experiences, the assumption that most people don’t and won’t experience God. Teaching like that of Plato, Hegel, Rumi, or Walt Whitman, which might overcome these unfortunate influences by showing us the great significance of our everyday experiences, isn’t available to everyone, everywhere. 

Against the assumption that most people don’t and won’t experience God, Eckhart Tolle writes that “I don’t call it finding God, because how can you find that which was never lost, the very life that you are? … There can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you and God. God-realization is the most natural thing there is.”[iii] And he describes this God-realization as the result of “surrender to what is.”[iv]

I would add that this “very life that you are,” or this “what is”—that is, what really is, in you—is your everyday dreams of and efforts toward inner freedom and love. These dreams and efforts are the presence within you of something that’s higher, more self-determining, and thus more fully real than your everyday self-importance, desires, suffering, and so forth. Because you are already intimately familiar with these dreams and efforts, you are already intimately familiar with something that’s higher, more self-determining, and more fully real—that is, you are already intimately familiar with God. 

I associate this presence of God within us with the Buddhist doctrine that Buddha-nature is always present in everything—that (as I gather that some say) “everything is a Buddha.” (And likewise with the Vedanta doctrine that Atman is Brahman.) We have only to realize what we have always been. I do think it’s helpful, for this purpose, to spell out in ordinary language how these things are true, as I have tried to do in this book.

But even a person who has received the teaching of someone like Plato, Hegel, Rumi, or Whitman may be reluctant to abandon the comfort of assumptions that they’ve been used to all their lives. This is why the extraordinary experiences that “mystics” report often have a major impact on the people who have them. They break through the assumptions that most of us have lived with for most of our lives—that God can’t be experienced directly, but is only an object of “faith” and may not even exist, so that a person who claims to have experienced God is not making sense and may be just plain crazy.  ... 

---

[i] No doubt people also experience God in contemplative prayer, as David Bentley Hart maintains in chapter 6 of his (2013). But I think it’s a mistake to suppose that prayer that we intend as such is the only or even the primary way in which we experience God. 

[ii] When I speak of us as having “direct access to God,” as our own inner freedom, forgiveness, and so forth, readers who are familiar with Hegel may wonder: Doesn’t Hegel say that “There is nothing in heaven or in nature or mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation” (HSL p. 68, SuW 5:66, GW 21:54), so that the notion of “direct” (that is, presumably, immediate) “access” is perhaps questioned by Hegel? Indeed it is, and I must admit that the “direct” access that I describe is also indirect, inasmuch as to understand what we have access to, through it, we need a great deal of additional information and thought. What these experiences are experiences of (whether it’s “freedom,” “forgiveness,” “God,” or anything else) isn’t written on their foreheads; like everything important, these concepts are sophisticated, as well as simple. It’s nevertheless true, though, that the access that we have to God through these experiences is much more direct than the access that we might have to some object that’s “outside” our world. It’s direct inasmuch as freedom, forgiveness and God (according to Hegel’s account) are in us in a way that external objects aren’t. 

[iii] Eckhart Tolle (1999), p. 187; first emphasis added.

[iv] Eckhart Tolle (1999), p. 191.

The Plato/Hegel God and Our Supposedly "Secular Age" (from my 2019 book)

(from pp. 99-101 of my Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) 

How the Plato/Hegel God Fulfills Martin Heidegger’s Requirements

 

In a much-quoted passage, Martin Heidegger stated without argument that “one can neither pray nor sacrifice to this [god of philosophy]. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (Identity and Difference [1969], p. 72). But we do in fact pray and sacrifice to the Plato/Hegel God, inasmuch as we seek its guidance and the resulting peace of mind, and we give up our selfish and self-important schemes. And quantities of awe and music and dance are in fact addressed to this God, both outside institutionalized religion and within it. For whenever we celebrate the infinite power and authority of inner freedom, love, forgiveness, or beauty, we celebrate this God. The “insect” (Edward Young) that we can feel ourselves to be, in comparison to this power, can and does fall to its knees in awe.

Heidegger was understandably impressed by the apparently un-spiritual character of modern science and technology, and by the apparent decline, in modern times, of traditional forms of worship and religious doctrine—the decline that Nietzsche heralded with his pronouncement that “God is dead.” These are undoubtedly among the major reasons for Heidegger’s failure to see how deeply and ubiquitously we are involved, in modern times as much as in other times, with the Plato/Hegel God, and it with us. 

 

Are We Really In a “Secular Age”?

 

It seems to me that a major part of what’s going on in the world of “religion” and “spirituality,” in our time, is a sorting out of the issue of what is genuinely transcendent. Much conventional religion seems to be stuck in the habit of conceiving of God as a separate being, despite the fact that when it’s carefully examined, such a being would be finite and thus wouldn’t really transcend the world at all. Plus, it’s hard to know how we would know anything about such a being, which is defined as being both separate from us and inaccessible to our physical senses. In response to these difficulties, more or less clearly understood, many people have ceased to believe in such a being, and ceased to support whole-heartedly the institutions that appear to preach such a being. Thus we have the apparent “secularization” of major parts of (at least) European and North American societies. 

But at the same time, people’s desire to identify and relate to something that’s truly transcendent seems to be as strong as it has ever been. This could hardly not be the case if, as I’ve been suggesting, transcendence is an inherent (though often unrecognized) feature of human thought, freedom, and love, as such. One of the current manifestations of this perennial interest in transcendence is the proliferation, in the West, of non-traditional religious or spiritual organizations and movements, including Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, shamanism, Wicca, mysticism, “New Age” and Jungian ideas, Romantic poetry and nature writing, and so forth.[i]

For those of us who wonder what’s really going on here, it’s very helpful to know that an important part of the western spiritual tradition was never, in fact, committed to the problematic notion of God as a separate being. Plato, Plotinus, St Paul, St Athanasius, St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Hegel, Emerson, Whitman, Whitehead, Tillich, Rahner, and many other poets and thinkers in all phases of the western tradition have thought, instead, of something like the “God within us” that I’ve been outlining here. The notion of God as a separate being has, of course, been highly visible in public discourse, but if it’s less widely accepted today, that’s no reason to think that transcendence as such is losing importance for people. For the non-traditional movements that I mentioned all embrace transcendence in some form (though not always, of course, by that name). 

Equally important is the seldom-recognized fact that science itself constitutes a form of transcendence, inasmuch as a person who seeks knowledge seeks, in doing so, to rise above the sort of existence in which she would be governed merely by her preexisting appetites and opinions. Thus the age of science is an age that seeks, as much as any other age does, to transcend. Of course this raises the important question of how different forms of “transcendence” relate to one another. But at least it makes it clear that the modern period is as much involved in transcendence, in general, as any other age has been. 

So we don’t have to picture what’s happening in the west as a relentless process of “secularization,” by which “transcendence” is gradually or rapidly being replaced by “immanence.” Transcendence has been a feature of every phase of western thought and experience, and it’s just as manifest in the current period as it has ever been. What’s different is simply that some of its more familiar and institutionalized advocates appear to be losing influence, partly (I suspect) because the separate being that they seem to identify with transcendence is rationally inaccessible and can’t truly transcend.[ii]

Regarding our supposedly “secular age,” Charles Taylor’s influential book, A Secular Age (2007), seems to me to be excessively preoccupied with the fortunes of Christian “belief” (as Taylor calls it), as distinct from transcendence in general, as, for example, Plato explains it. A decline in “belief” need not entail a reduced interest in transcendence as such. Taylor seems insufficiently aware of the critique of the conception of God as a “separate being,” which is also a critique of much conventional Christian “belief” and which was already implicit in Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, and Meister Eckhart and is explicit in Hegel. Overlooking this Platonic critique of conventional “belief” and overlooking the alternative conception of transcendence that Plato and Hegel develop, Taylor grants more credibility than I would grant to the claims of what he calls “immanent humanism” to function without any appeal to transcendence. [iii]

---

[i] In his classic study, Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), M. H. Abrams takes it that the Romantic poets’ “natural supernaturalism” (p. 68) breaks with the outright supernaturalism and outright transcendence that were postulated by pre-modern theology (“displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference” [p. 13]). My thesis in this book is that sophisticated pre-modern religious thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine located God “within us” and thus within nature as well as “beyond us” and beyond nature, so that the Romantics’ “natural supernaturalism” in fact continued, rather than breaking with, the most sophisticated pre-modern tradition (the one that understood what true transcendence must be like). 

[ii] I should add that some institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church impart a sophisticated Augustinian philosophical theology, and thus a conception of transcendence that doesn’t make it in principle “separate,” to their more intellectually inclined members. 

[iii] My disagreement with Charles Taylor about God, “belief,” and “transcendence” or “immanence” begins with his stimulating book, Hegel (1975), in which I think he failed to understand Hegel’s critique, in his Science of Logic, of the conventional conception of transcendence (which Hegel calls the “spurious infinity”). I explain Hegel’s critique of the conventional conception of transcendence, and I discuss Taylor’s interpretation of Hegel, in Chapter 3 of Wallace (2005).