Review of Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder? by the Group for the
Advancement of Psychiatry.
by Arthur J. Deikman, M.D. (1976)1
The report by the Group for the Advancement of
Psychiatry entitled Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder? is
intended to supply the psychiatric profession with needed information on the
phenomena of mysticism, of which most psychiatrists have only a sketchy
knowledge. Certain of the sections, especially those on Christian and Hindu
mysticism, show an objectivity and scholarship that are quite commendable. As a
whole, however, the report displays extreme parochialism, a lack of
discrimination, and naive arrogance in its approach to the subject.
From the point of view of scholarship, the
basic error lies in the committee's ignoring the importance of the distinction
made by both Western and Eastern mystics between lower level sensory-emotional
experiences and those experiences that go beyond concepts, feelings, and
sensations. Repeatedly, the mystical literature stresses that sensate
experiences are not the goal of mysticism; rather, it is only when these are
transcended that one attains the aim of a direct (intuitive)
knowledge of fundamental reality. For example, Walter Hilton, an English
mystic from the 14th century, is quite explicit about this distinction:
St. John of the Cross, 18th century,
states:
A similar distinction between lower (sensate)
and higher (transcendent) contemplative states may be found in Yoga texts:
Western mysticism, from which the authors
derived most of their examples, constitutes only a minor segment of the
literature in the field of mysticism, and its basic contemplative tradition
actually derives from Eastern sources, as acknowledged in the report. Yet the
goal of Eastern (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Sufic) mysticism — "enlightenment" —
is not visions of angels or Buddhas but the awakening of an inherent capacity to
perceive the true nature of the self and the world. Over and over again, these
texts warn that the type of mystical experience on which the GAP report focuses
is not the goal of the mystical path. Such visionary experiences are regarded as
illusions and, at worst, snares for the poorly prepared or the ill guided. An
example from the Zen literature follows:
In the Sufi literature, we find many explicit
statements that Sufism is a science of knowing and is not a religion in the way
that term is ordinarily understood.
The Sufis regard most mystical experience as
being essentially emotional with little practical importance — except for the
harmful effect of causing people to believe they are being "spiritual" when they
are not:
Ibn Salim said, "What is this state?" Sahl said: "This was not, as you imagine, power entering me. It was, on the contrary, due to my own weakness." Others present remarked: "If that was weakness, what is power?" "Power" said Sahl, "is when something like this enters and the mind and body manifests nothing at all" (12, p. 182).
Despite these clear warnings in the mystical
literature, the GAP publication emphasizes lurid, visionary phenomena which lend
themselves readily to standard psychiatric interpretations. Because of this, the
authors have failed to come to grips with the fundamental claim of mystics: that
they acquire direct knowledge of reality. Furthermore, the authors follow
Freud's lead in defining the mystic perception of unity as a regression, an
escape, a projection upon the world of a primitive, infantile state. The fact
is, we know practically nothing about the actual experience of the infant,
except that whatever it is, it is not that of a small adult. No one who has read
carefully the accounts of "enlightenment" can accept this glib equation of
mystical = infantile. An infant mind could hardly have had the experience that
conveyed the following:
“"The physical world is an infinity of movement, of Time-Existence. But simultaneously it is an infinity of Silence and Voidness. Each object is thus transparent. Everything has its own special inner character. its own karma or 'life in time,' but at the same time there is no place where there is emptiness, where one object does not flow into another" (8, p. 268).
To confuse lower level sensory-emotional
experiences with the transcendent "Knowledge" that is the goal of mysticism
seriously limits the usefulness of the report and tends to perpetuate in the
reader the ignorant parochial position that was standard in most psychiatric
writings before the GAP publication and now, unfortunately, is likely to be
reinforced.
This naive reductionism is all the more
striking in the context of the numerous reports from physicists indicating that
the world is actually more like the one that the mystics describe than the one
on which psychology and psychoanalysis are based. Contemporary scientists have
ample evidence that the world of discrete objects is an illusion, a function of
the particular scale of our perception and time sense. For them, it is
commonplace that the phenomena of biology and physics point to a continuous
world of gradients, not a collection of objects. Percy Bridgman, Nobel Laureate
in physics, comments:
What is missing from the GAP report is any
acknowledgment that the mystic who has completed his or her development may have
access to an intuitive, immediate knowledge of reality. The authors assume that
the known sensate pathways are the only means to acquire knowledge of what is
real. In fact, studies of how scientific discoveries were actually made
show in almost every instance that this is not the case at all. Another Nobel
prize-winning physicist, Eugene Wigner, has remarked:
"Intuition" can be considered a lower order
example of the latent capacity to which mystics refer.
The eclectic ignorance of the authors has led
them at one point to lump together Einstein, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln,
biofeedback, Vincent Van Gogh, and St. John of the Cross. Interestingly enough,
if the authors had pursued the case of Einstein alone, they might have come to
the epistemological issue that is the core of mysticism — and paid proper
attention to it; for Einstein's modern discoveries, as well as the discoveries
of natural philosophers thousands of years earlier, were based on an
intuitive perception of the way things are. Such perceptions are the source of
our greatest advances in science. Michael Polanyi, at one time Professor of
Physical Chemistry at the University of Manchester, made an extensive and
thorough study of the actual process of scientific discovery and found that the
revolutionary ideas of geniuses such as Einstein had "come to them" by some form
of direct intuition, often presented as imagery (10). Polanyi was led by his data to propose a theory
of knowledge and human consciousness that is clearly "mystical." Furthermore, at
least two books have been published recently documenting the strikingly close
correspondence between the scientific conceptions of physicists and the insights
of mystics (2, 9).
Thus, it is truly remarkable to have a group
of psychiatrists issue a report in 1976, in which the only comment they make on
the mystic perception of unity is that it represents a "reunion with parents."
Nowhere is the report do we find a discussion of the possibility that the
perception of unity occurring in the higher forms of mysticism may be correct
and that the ordinary perception of separateness and meaninglessness may be an
illusion, as mystics claim. Clearly, mystic perception could be true whether or
not a particular mystic might wish, in fantasy, to be reunited with his or her
mother.
The GAP report states:
How totally provincial our profession has
become if this is a summary statement from a group that claims W be devoted to
"advancing" psychiatry!
It is interesting that the only place in which
the authors are able to allow themselves to think in positive terms of mysticism
is when they discuss the concept of "creativity." Apparently, creativity is OK.
In this section of the report, the authors venture to speculate:
Unfortunately, that one sentence, like a
lonely ray of sunshine, is soon swallowed up by a return of the monotonous
clouds of reductionism. The very next chapter, entitled "Case Report," concerns
a woman in psychotherapy who reported having had the sort of low level, sensate
mystical experience on which the authors focus. The report provides the
following conclusion:
In the last paragraph it becomes even more
presumptuous and confused:
"The mystical state itself provided the
illusion of knowledge. But unlike many mystical states in which the search ends
with illusion, it stimulated her to seek further knowledge and led directly to
the disappearance of her inhibition to serious reading (!) This continued search
is characteristic of those in whom mystical states contribute towards creative
activity" (p. 807).
The authors of this report are intelligent,
educated, sincere men. It is hard to believe that they would display such
provincialism, carelessness, and bias if they were discussing schizophrenia.
Judging by this and other, similar psychiatric discussions, our profession, when
it comes to mysticism, does not feel the need to ask serious questions about its
own assumptions, nor to take the devil's advocate's position toward its too-easy
conclusions. Ironically, the authors are capable of painting out the problem in
others. In discussing "the naive Western observers of the Indian scene" they
say:
Exactly.
In trying to understand the phenomenon of the
GAP report itself, I am led to two principal considerations. First, in order to
understand and have some appreciation of "mysticism," it is necessary that
psychiatrists participate to some extent in the experience. When it comes to its
own discipline, the psychiatric profession is unwavering in its requirement that
one must "know" through experience, not just description. Who can really
understand "transference" without experiencing it? Actual experience is
necessary because the position of the outside observer has its limits,
particularly in areas not well adapted to language. I can give an example of the
necessity for participation from my own research on meditation and mysticism. In
surveying the literature, I had noticed that contemplation and renunciation were
the two basic processes specified for mystical development by almost all
mystical authors, East and West. I proceeded to study the effects of meditation
in the laboratory and, naively, assumed that renunciation meant giving up the
things of the world in a literal sense. It was only later, when I both studied
and participated in Soto Zen training, that I came to understand that
renunciation refers to an attitude, not to asceticism, per se. That
understanding enabled me to formulate the hypothesis of "bimodal consciousness,"
based on motivational considerations (4). The hypothesis, in turn, enabled me to
understand a wide variety of unusual states of consciousness.
Perhaps by stating that I have, myself,
practiced meditation, I will automatically disqualify myself in the eyes of some
readers as having any credibility in these matters. I refer those readers to the
paper by Charles Tart, wherein he presents a compelling case for the development
of "state-specific sciences" — sciences whose mode of investigation is
specifically adapted to the area it is investigating (13). Indeed, participation
by scientists in these areas of mysticism would result in an understanding that
is less exotic and less religious — and would help rid ourselves of the
clap-trap associated with mysticism that constitutes a burden to scientist and
mystic alike.
Unfortunately, such participation is not
likely to occur because of the other basic problem confronting psychiatrists
when they approach this field: arrogance — reflecting the arrogance of Western
civilization. In this connection, it is interesting that the fundamental
requirement for participating in any of the mystical traditions has been, and
still is, humility. This is so, not because humility is a virtue, something that
earns one credit in a heavenly bank account, but because humility is
instrumental — it is the attitude required for learning. Humility is the
acceptance of the possibility that someone else or something else has something
to teach you which you do not already know. In crucial sections of the GAP
report, there is no sign of humility. It seems to me that in our profession we
display the arrogance of the legendary British Colonial who lived for 30 years
in India without bothering to learn the language of the inhabitants, because he
considered them to be inferior. Perhaps medicine's long battle to free itself
from religious control, from demonology and "divine authority," has left us with
an automatic and costly reaction against anything that bears the outward signs
of religion. In point of fact, mystics outside the Western tradition tend to
share our suspicion and describe their disciplines as a science of
development-not a religion, as ordinarily understood.
The authors of the GAP report have selectively
ignored the central issues of mysticism and have made traditional
interpretations of the secondary phenomena. If our profession is to advance, we
must recognize our defenses against ideas that would change our assumptions.
Mysticism, studied seriously, challenges basic tenets of Western
cultures: a) the primacy of reason and intellect; b) the separate,
individual nature of man; c) the linear organization of time. Great mystics,
like our own great scientists, envision the world as being larger than those
tenets, as transcending our traditional views. By not recognizing our
defensiveness and by permitting our vision to be narrowed so as to exclude the
unfamiliar, we betray our integrity as psychiatrists, showing no more capacity
for freedom from prejudice than persons totally ignorant of psychodynamics —
perhaps less.
Psychiatry's aversion to things ecclesiastical
should not blind the profession to the possibility that "real gold exists, even
though false coin abounds." It is unfortunate that the GAP report carries us
little further toward gaining for ourselves that wider base for human
fulfillment that we need. The attitude reflected in the report is myopic
and unnecessarily fearful of an avenue of human endeavor, aspiration, and
discovery thousands of years old-one productive of outstanding achievements in
science and literature that we are only now beginning to recognize. Yet, if we
learn nothing more from mystics than the need far humility, they will have
contributed greatly to Western culture in general and to the profession of
psychiatry in particular.
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Bibliography
1 Bridgman,
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1964.
2 Capra, F. The Tao of Physics. Shambala, Berkeley, 1975.
3 The Complete Works of St. John of the Cross, Vol. 1, Newman Press, Westminister, 1953.
4.Deikman, A. Bimodal consciousness. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry, 25: 481-489, 1971.
5 Goddard, D., Ed. A Buddhist Bible.Dwight Goddard, Thetford, Vermont, 1938.
6 Greene, M., Ed. Toward a Unity of Knowledge. (Psychol. Issues, 22: 45, 1969.) International Univerfsities Press, New York, 1969.
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13 Tart, C. States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176\: 1203-1218, 1972.
2 Capra, F. The Tao of Physics. Shambala, Berkeley, 1975.
3 The Complete Works of St. John of the Cross, Vol. 1, Newman Press, Westminister, 1953.
4.Deikman, A. Bimodal consciousness. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry, 25: 481-489, 1971.
5 Goddard, D., Ed. A Buddhist Bible.Dwight Goddard, Thetford, Vermont, 1938.
6 Greene, M., Ed. Toward a Unity of Knowledge. (Psychol. Issues, 22: 45, 1969.) International Univerfsities Press, New York, 1969.
7 Hilton, W. The Scale of Perfection. Burns & Oats, London, 1953.
8 Kapleau, P. The Three Pillars of Zen. Beacon Press, Boston, 1967.
9 LeShan, L. The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist. Viking Press, New York, 1974.
10 Polanyi, M. Personal Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958.
11 Shah, I. The Sufis. Anchor Books (Doubleday & Co., Inc.) Garden City, N.Y., 1971.
12 Shah, I. The Way of the Sufi. E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1970.
13 Tart, C. States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176\: 1203-1218, 1972.
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