Part 1: From Religious to Spiritual

There is an awful lot of books written about, or intimately related to spiritual experiences. You can find them in places ranging from the most ‘esoteric’ of bookshops to the most academic of libraries, and a considerable number of them trickles down to mainstream attention. Some of them become genuine bestsellers, magnetizing a large audience for a brief space of time, whereas others have been reprinted from times immemorial and count as classics in a religious or literary tradition.

The book that will be the focus of this presentation is a recent issue which focuses on empirical science. The full title is The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives. It was written by  David B. Yaden and Andrew B. Newberg and it was published in 2022. Though this work has an interdisciplinary atmosphere, offering many excursion into literature, religion, philosophy and anthropology, I would say it mainly tries to contribute to the science of human experience, that is to say to psychology. ¹

What I will try to explain here is why the subject matter of this book is relevant to mimetic theory and why mimetic theory is relevant to the subject matter of this book. But before delving into the spiritual experiences themselves I would like to remark that Yaden & Newberg’s book is a study in which a model, or an exemplum, is explicitly honored. It is truly an example of mimetic generosity. For the true genius behind the book, the one who created the fertile methodological framework for approaching spiritual experiences in an empirical way, is the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910).

It is no exaggeration to say that The Varieties of Spiritual Experience is an update – or maybe an even better word would be: a sequel. A sequel that is, to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, the series of Gifford Lectures James delivered at the University of Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902. Basically, Yaden & Newberg want to undertake in the beginning of the 21^st century, what James undertook so successfully at the onset of the 20^th century – present religious experiences as an object for scientific study. The book begins with an extensive description of its honored predecessor – the Ur-Varieties, so to say – together with a short biography of its author and his intellectual milieu.² In the ongoing chapters we find William James everywhere around and in the many examples Yaden & Newberg offer, some of the examples James provided himself still figure. Also fragments from James’s views on the reports he collected are frequently quoted, as if he is still the president of the advisory board as to how to decouple sheer experience from theological and ideological considerations. James is, among other things, praised for his openness of mind, for his critical judgments and for his intellectual curiosity. He has, Yaden & Newberg say without restraint, written a wonderful book which up till the present day is read by many people all around the world. But the core of the admiration to James’s method lies in the way he managed to shift theology and metaphysics aside:

The many written accounts of extraordinary religious and spiritual experiences that James includes in The Varieties likely accounts for much of the continued fascination surrounding the book; it can feel like a voyeuristic journey into the psyche of people in the midst of some of their most meaningful moments. But its true brilliance comes from James’s method. James approached spiritual experience from the standpoint of empirical science, while putting aside metaphysical and theological questions surrounding these experiences. This is to say, he recorded and cataloged religious/spiritual experiences and described their psychological and physiological aspects largely without speculating about whether or not they actually pointed to some religious/spiritual reality.³ (bold emphasis added)

One of the outcomes of this approach is that the relationship between spiritual experiences and spiritual traditions becomes more complicated. There proves to be a certain experiential area in which the same things or similar things happen. To this experiential area religious traditions can be said to have a syncretic relationship.⁴ What adjective should be used to denominate this experiential area is always criticizable, but it is certain that a word pertaining to a specific religious tradition will not do. And even the word William James himself used – ‘religious’ – does not always mark out the experiential area under examination.

Yaden & Newberg opted for the word ‘spiritual’ instead of ‘religious’. In making this choice, no ideological concerns are involved, as far as I can see, but the word ‘spiritual’ seems to be more proper because it more aptly designates the scope of their study.  Let me here fully quote Yaden & Newberg’s motivation for making this choice:

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James hoped to inspire future scientific work on ‘religious’ experiences – an initiative he called the ‘science of religion’. Due to the broad and nondogmatic way James handled these experiences, modern scholars have suggested that if James were to rewrite the Varieties today, he would opt for the more expansive title, The Varieties of Spiritual Experience […]. We agree and have named the present work accordingly.

Religious experiences generally refer only to those experiences that involve content explicitly derived from a particular religious tradition. However, for our purposes, we would like to use ‘spiritual’ to refer to not only religious experiences, such as a Christian seeing Christ, but also experiences that are not specifically religious in nature, such as feeling at one with all things. We are aware that some people and scholars may not agree with this usage, but we feel that ‘spiritual experience’ can include all religious experience as well as the large variety of other experiences that may be referred to in religious, spiritual, or even secular terms. We will see that a number of agnostics and atheists, such as Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich, have had experiences that they refer to as ‘spiritual’ or ‘mystical’ despite their lack of supernatural beliefs.5

So within this approach, moving into experiential space goes together with moving out of metaphysical or theological space. We are entering a realm where, to a certain extent things ‘just happen’ in the way they happen, or where consciousness appears to itself in the way it does – what also can be called ‘phenomenal consciousness’.6 The question whether there is a universal psychological substratum to this area, is both valid and difficult to answer. In a more Girardian context one would rather approach the same question in terms of an anthropological substratum, or the way in which anthropological questions and psychological questions meet.

As the word ‘phenomenal’ used by Yaden and Newberg indicates, we are also entering a realm that is linked to phenomenology. And one of the questions that could be pursued is how the ‘raw material’ compiled in The Varieties relates to the philosophically informed investigations of human experience and which branch of phenomenology best does justice to the peculiar nature of these experiences. In the wake of the works of the first great phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, we have witnessed quite a number of phenomenological investigations branching off in domains such as religion and psychiatry. So here, in a similar broadening movement, we could aim at a phenomenology of spiritual experience in which specific religions, or even religiosity at all, could be separared from experiences which also in a partly secularized world keep on occurring in people’s lives.

It is also in this same ‘phenomenal’ area that the distinction between false and genuine spiritual experiences disappears. Retributing spiritual experiences to a certain spot in religious space, is similar to retributing these experiences on a scale between healthy and unhealthy. There is no such thing as false spiritual experience, but it is always possible to fake experiences and to become a false prophet for the sake of social, psychological or sexual purposes. If people who have undergone psychosis resonate with stories about spiritual experiences this only because they have vibrated in the same frequencies. The idea that mad religious feelings are utterly different from the religious feelings reported by people judged as being sane, the binary distinction between ‘mad’ and ‘real’ religious feelings is wholly ideological pregiven. Before language, before classification, before interpretation and judgment, in the glimmering phenomenal dawn, there are differences but the phenomenal differences themselves.

It are these differences Yaden & Newberg attempt to categorize into a more or less complete list. It is a list which can be very useful for coloring psychotic experiences. In the next chapter we will use this list to give more color to René Girard’s spiritual experience.