Recently we pointed to the debate generated by Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent memoir, Living with a Wild God, about a powerful, mystical experience she had at 18 and how she believes scientists could do a better job of understanding such brushes with the numinous. Reviewing the book, A.C. Grayling expresses disappointment at Ehrenreich’s edging away from the view that “it is the brain, and nothing mysterious outside it, that produces these experiences”:
It is well known and richly recorded that such episodes can be induced by dancing or repetitive whirling, as with the Sufi Dervishes; by starvation, fever, alcohol, hallucinogenic mushrooms, sexual activity, and much besides. Religious people, of course, attribute them to encounters with the divine, and it may well be that experiences caused in these ways lie at the root of humankind’s impulse to create religion. But the fact that empirical science today so well explains the causes and nature of these disturbances of normal neurological function is reason to guard against the supernaturalistic attempts at explanation, which were once the only resource our forebears had.
But alas, as her book approaches its end, Ehrenreich departs from rational ways of understanding her own experiences, and begins to sketch a view to the effect that there is indeed Something — she calls it the Other.
Why he believes such experiences shouldn’t change our view of reality:
No doubt having such experiences powerfully inclines one to project their cause to something outside the mind. We do not tolerate anomaly very well and need to give it a name and an explanation in order to cope. But the merest respect for economy of explanation should be a bulwark against externalizing the source of anomalous experiences before all the more likely explanations are exhausted. We should always remember that the mind is a great player of tricks: one can induce Ehrenreich-type experiences in the lab, or by popping certain kinds of pills, no Other and no Mystery required. It is accordingly a surprise and — let it be confessed — a disappointment to find so doughty a heroine of her causes sliding away from Athens to — well, if not to Jerusalem than to some other Eastern locus of the ineffable, the unnamable, and the smoky.
I repeat: it is a disappointment when a rational person’s thinking about the unusual, the unexpected, the extraordinary, the amazing experiences of transcendence and unity that many of us have at heightened moments of life, suffers a declension into quasi-religious or supernaturalistic vagueness. The human brain is complicated enough to produce all these experiences from its own resources; we need no fairies in the garden to explain how roses bloom.
The Dish 