The possibility of a spiritual epiphany without God

It seems that a common aspiration in all spiritual traditions is self-transcendence. This is hardly surprising since much of religious doctrine is aimed motivating the individual to abandon self-centeredness as a moral imperative and to follow the paramount requirement to submit oneself to God. However, its clear from every spiritual tradition that some intense self-transcending practices can lead to what might be termed mystical or world-transcending experiences that provide, if only temporarily, a deep sense peace and joy and connection with the rest of creation.

Practices vary widely across all the great spiritual traditions and can involve, amongst many others, intense periods selfless prayer, group incantation, quiet meditative contemplation or even, in the case of Sufi Islam, swaying and whirling. What seems to be common is a relaxed form of deep concentration in which the sense of self, which is always most concrete when pondering the past or an imagined future, is temporarily suspended. At such times there is an acute but calm awareness, but not from the standpoint of the self, with its time-bounded obsessions of likes, dislikes, regrets, hopes and fears.

When the sense of self is overcome it is often replaced by what William James, the American philosopher called ‘cosmic consciousness’ – a sense of not being a separate entity observing the rest of reality, but of being an integral and inseparable part of all that is. There may well be physiological reasons why humans are capable of such experiences. In her well-known talk at one of the TED conferences, the neurophysiologist, Jill Bolte Taylor relates a powerful experience that she had when she suffered a huge stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Between periods of panic, during which she tried to overcome her impaired language and motor control in order to phone for help, she had experiences of great joy and expansiveness. During these periods she felt her body to be without boundaries and herself connected in a free exchange of energy with the whole of the rest of reality. This she attributes this experience to the suspension of those seemingly left-hemisphere functions that define our physical boundary and our sense of self as being locked in a continuum of time between past and future. Other neurological researches into mystical experiences seem to confirm that that there are indeed areas of the brain that control our sense of our body’s physical boundary and its place in space and when these are ‘switched off’ such powerful experiences can occur. Since, I take it as axiomatic that all mental processes are underpinned by physiological processes within the embodied brain (this, in my view, does not entail reductionism), I don’t think that physiological explanations of how such experiences might occur invalidate them. We know that some people taking ‘psychedelic’ drugs, such as LSD, have reported similar experiences. The point is that such experiences are very powerful, even transformative, and allow insights into the nature of existence that may well be just as valid as those everyday experiences more usually dominated by an overriding sense of a bounded, separate self navigating between past and future. Like any other experience of the world, the elapse of time, which is such a fundamental and yet such an utterly mysterious aspect of normal consciousness, is a brain-mediated. If it attenuated in any way this must lead to a profoundly different experience of reality.

Unfortunately, I have never had such a life-changing experience myself; at least not to the degree I believe some have genuinely experienced. Like almost everyone else, I have had moments of uplifting joy and, perhaps, fleeting moments of insight, usually when out walking and opening up to the beauty of the natural world or when listening to great music. A number of times I have had a delicious sensation of a lightness of being after spending a 45 minute train journey to London in a semi-meditative state cultivating goodwill towards my fellow passengers. However, I cannot claim that any of these individual experiences, all of which quickly faded, have been profoundly life changing. But I take it on trust that such epiphanies are possible and that it should be an essential part of any spiritual path to follow practices that open oneself up to the possibility of such transformative experiences occurring.

I also take it on trust that such spiritual illumination is possible without necessarily attaining sainthood or achieving perfect enlightenment in the Buddhist sense. I’m happy to be agnostic about how far any individual can approach a completely transformed state, let alone perfection, however that may be defined. But profound experiences that are blissful and that open one up to new dimensions of reality seem to be both attainable and highly desirable. However, from what I have learned in Buddhism, the pursuit of spiritual illumination as an end in itself may well be self-defeating, especially if such a quest were mainly self-serving. It seems that spiritual illumination is more likely to occur as a by-product, if we assiduously follow practices that engender selflessness, love, compassion, peace and acceptance for their own sake.

The core of any profound experience is ineffable – it that cannot be adequately explained in conceptual terms, which is perhaps why some of the very greatest artists have sought to convey their essence through the poetic and metaphorical language of the arts. However, given that such experiences are so powerful, its natural that people should want to communicate their impact and significance. This it seems to me is where the danger lies, because hitherto most attempts to explain such experiences have entailed using conceptual language drawn from the individual’s religious worldview. In so doing, they are drawn into making claims about the nature of the shared universe that can’t be justified in rational terms. Experiences of ‘cosmic consciousness’ might be explained as union with Christ, God or Allah or the liberation from the rounds of earthly rebirth or reincarnation or some other access to eternal life. Most of these claims must be mutually exclusive and so, if we’re not careful, we can slide back into the destructive cycle where our highest spiritual aspirations lead us to make exclusive claims of certainty about the world that cannot be verified and can lead to disunity at best and global conflict at worst.

The great challenge for the humanistic spirituality that the world so desperately needs as it enters the Global Age, is to discover a great new spiritual vision (a great dharma, to use a Buddhist term), partly inspired by the awesome panorama provided by science, of humanity’s place in nature. Such a dharma would allow us to see a connection between moments of epiphany and our everyday lives, without the need for unverifiable claims, but in a way that enlarges our capacity to live our lives joyfully and compassionately as gift to all beings and to this world, which is the realm of humanity’s shared existence, hopefully for millennia yet to come.