In my post two weeks ago, I told my story about my spirituality and the connection it might have to mental illness symptoms. In this post, I’m going to throw out some thoughts about spiritual experiences, brain chemistry, and when it gets dysfunctional.
Theology vs. Evidence
When I was fresh out of law school, I had a mentor who had me work on a big case. As the associate, I did all the document review and I knew the facts backwards and forwards. He was the experienced lawyer who designed the legal strategy and arguments. Time and time again, I would have to get insistent that the facts didn’t support the arguments he wanted to make. (We had sucky facts; our client had screwed up.) He would sigh and say, “it’s too bad when the facts get in the way of a good argument.” He was joking. With legal cases, you have to respect the facts. You can’t just brush them aside and make a legal argument that is untethered to the facts.
Why doesn’t theology work the same way? No theologian or religious leader ever says, “it’s too bad when the facts get in the way of established theology; let’s adapt our theology to fit the facts.” No, that’s not how it goes. Theologians and religious leaders assure us that it doesn’t matter if the facts line up with what they teach about God; any gaps are because we just don’t understand.” I accepted that rationalization for a while, but not it strikes me as a cop-out. We understand enough.
I concluded that what I had been taught about God was simply wrong. Then I decided to base my own personal theology on actual evidence. I include my own personal experiences in my evidence. Obviously, you just have to take my word for what happened in my personal spiritual experiences. Your personal experiences are different; your personal theology is different. I don’t intend to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong; I just want to discuss some ideas. (One of my conclusions is that belief in God is personal. Trying to standardize God so he can be worshipped methodically in a church only works up to a point.)
- Spiritual Experiences are Brain Chemistry, Not Righteousness.
My foundational assumption is that my spiritual experiences are similar to the type of experiences that Joseph Smith had, and Nephi. I’ve never had a vision, but I have had “pure intelligence” flow into my mind; I’ve had revelations about theology; I’ve gotten personal direction that tied into the real world; I’ve felt the “peace that passeth all understanding” and the “fruits of the spirit” identified in Galatians 5:22-23. Whatever the prophets have taught about seeking personal revelation and identifying it when it comes has worked for me. Conclusion: I’ve connected to the same entity/being/intelligence that the prophets are. I need a broader term than “God” so I’m going to call the source Otherworldly.
Remember back when society started to recognize depression as a mental illness that could be treated? Before then, if someone was drowning in despair, it was a sign of sin. “Despair cometh because of iniquity” (Moroni 10:22). With the advent of antidepressant medication and advances in brain chemistry research, we learned that (commonly but not always) despair cometh because of mental illness.
Mental illnesses are all in your head. Obviously. That’s where your brain is located, so if your brain chemistry is causing a mental illness, it’s all in your head. Your personality, hopes, dreams, fears, trauma, grief, joy, memories, and thoughts are also all in your head. If someone tries to be dismissive about something being “all in your head,” then they’re being kinda dumb. What’s in your head is really important and it affects the way you interact with everyone and everything around you.
There is a connection between your genetics, your environment, your experiences, and your brain chemistry. Sometimes this mixture creates depression and despair. Sometimes this mixture creates euphoria, mania, revelations, spiritual experiences, insights, and inspiration.
Altered states of consciousness can also be created through our own actions. For example, not eating of drinking for 24 hours can induce a spiritual experience. Meditation produces peace and calm — emotions we typically associate with the spirit. Drugs, both legal and illegal, medication, sleep deprivation, extreme stress and/or fear can also affect how your mind works and produce an experience that is best explained as spiritual, evil, paranormal, or just plain unexplainable.
None of this has much to do with righteousness, as The Church of Jesus Christ defines righteousness. The Otherworldly source that produces spiritual experiences also produces some of the symptoms of mental illness. It’s a spectrum. Once someone passes a certain point on the spectrum, the spiritual experiences turn into religious delusions.
- An Otherworldly Source of Experiences Actually Exists (But We’ll Never Prove It)
Pretty much every society on earth has a religion, stories about deities, miracles, a belief in a power that is more than just human community. Every society has some version of a prophet, a shaman, a mystic. Enough people connect with that Otherwordly source that religious beliefs of some sort have been part of most (all?) human civilizations throughout time.
If you are raised religious, then revelations, spiritual experiences, insights, and inspiration are a positive thing (up to a point), not symptoms to be treated. Mental health professionals don’t really understand religious belief from the inside. For example – bipolar disorder first presents symptoms in teens and young adults. I did not have a classic manic episode as a teen or young adult. But the diagnostic questions didn’t ask me when I started believing that I had a special connection to God in prayer. I wasn’t hearing voices; I was having promptings and understandings in answer to my prayers. Those were Good Things, not an indicator of a mental health problem. Right?? Church wanted me to have those experiences. I was praised for my spiritual sensitivity. Joseph Smith saw God and an angel as a teenager. I got a revelation about a summer job and a deep assurance of God’s love for me.
I’ll share some of my experiences in future posts. In combing back over my life and all the spiritual experiences and emotional turmoil, there were a lot of things that I could explain away as the product of my own unpredictable brain, or wishful thinking, or confirmation bias. Psychiatry doesn’t have an answer for the experiences in which I was prompted to do or not do something, and then hours, months, or even years later, the obedience to that prompting connected to real life in such a profound way that I have to believe that I connected with something outside of my own brain.
- Whatever is Out There is Not the LDS/Christian God
Like anyone raised Christian, I was taught to believe in one all-powerful, all-loving God who had a plan for my life and who counted sparrows and all the hairs on my head. This belief was the framework I had to use to interpret the scriptures. If the scriptures told a story that didn’t reflect the correct belief in God, then that was just a misunderstanding on my part. “All truth can be circumscribed into one great whole.” Everything is consistent once you understand everything.
I was also supposed to use this framework to make sense of my own life. It didn’t work. I could not fit my life into the LDS framework, and many of you couldn’t either. That’s where we get nuanced believers, and people who rewrite all their beliefs after a trust crisis or a faith crisis. If you’ve lost trust that Church leaders actually speak for God, you start to adapt your understanding of God into something you actually want to worship. I’ve read enough comments from the W&T community over the years to know that a lot of us reject a God we don’t consider to be worthy of worship.
I’ve concluded that there is not one, singular, embodied, all-powerful, and all-loving Being who responds to all prayers and is consistent and unchanging. My preferred explanation right now is that there are lots of different Beings. The Being in charge of helping people find their car keys is a lot better at their job than the Being in charge of preventing atrocities. I also don’t believe that the Beings have that much power over our world. They can offer wisdom, guidance, love, and help from time to time. But they can’t stop earthquakes or strike blasphemous sinners with lightning. This isn’t actually polytheism because I don’t believe I need to worship them. They aren’t gods; they’re just whatever is out there.
- The Connection Gets Unstable/Dangerous (Psychosis)
Psychologists evaluate symptoms (such as religious delusions) from the outside looking in. They observe the patient’s symptoms with special attention for the most dysfunctional aspects of the patient’s experiences. What is causing the most harm? The harm is called a “negative externality.”
The vast majority of spiritual experiences have no negative externalities. Feeling answers to your prayers, feeling happy at church, believing you know what to expect after death, trusting God to carry you through difficult times — these spiritual experiences make us resilient. Most spiritual experiences make life better; they create positive externalities.
But for someone whose brain chemistry allows for that Otherworldly connection, leaning into that connection can cause a lot of problems. Again, we’re looking for negative externalities before we call a spiritual experience a problem. Common religious beliefs and ordinary spiritual experiences are NOT considered a symptom or a religious delusion.
To be classified as a religious delusion, the belief must be idiosyncratic, rather than accepted within a particular culture or subculture [7]. Strongly held beliefs that are shared within an existing religious or spiritual context would not, therefore, be considered to be religious delusions, irrespective of co-occurring psychosis. For example, believing oneself to be able to hear the voice of Jesus is not uncommon in a Christian society and thus would not in itself be classified as a religious delusion. In contrast, believing oneself to be inhabited by the warring spirits of multiple interspatial deities, would be considered to be a religious delusion. Culturally acceptable religious beliefs are cited as an important coping strategy for many people with schizophrenia, and may contribute to lower symptom severity in both severe and enduring mental illnesses [8, 9] and common mental disorders [10, 11] [source] (bolding added by me)
The most extreme examples of harm from religious delusions are people like Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell and Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Religious delusions led them to commit murder. Let’s take a few steps back from that, though, and talk about less drastic, and more common, negative externalities from religious experiences.
There was a recent convert on my mission who was about ten years older than our mission president, and he thought the world of her. He spoke frequently about the strength of her testimony and held her up as an example of a golden convert whose heart had been prepared by the Lord. She read the Book of Mormon over and over. And then she tipped over a line and started to believe that she was a Nephite. She started wearing a headband like the warriors in the Arnold Friberg painting. She could talk endlessly about what life was like as a Nephite. The mission president stopped holding her up as an example.
If you’re TOO spiritual, you’re weird and off-putting. I bet you know someone offline who is so spiritual that people kind of avoid them, or perhaps charitably tolerate them, but no one actually respects them or wants to follow their example.
Sometimes I wonder if being a priesthood holder is the reason my father’s mental health got so bad. People saw him as a spiritual leader, and that fed into his … issues. I had no chance at that role so it was easier for me to give up the idea that God was talking to me. That was still a horribly painful and humiliating hit to my self-image; I can see why my father could never willingly accept that his spirituality was probably a mental illness. He eventually lost his temple recommend when his revelations started to contradict Church doctrine and he refused to stop teaching his own beliefs. I mean, all his life he’d been praised and honored for his spirituality, and now it was a bad thing?
At times, I’ve read some posts expressing anger or disappointment that the Church leaders don’t actually have profound spiritual experiences like visions; they don’t talk to Christ. But if they did … if they did, I bet it would be off-putting.
Questions:
- Do you know someone who is “too” spiritual? Are there negative externalities, such as strained relationships or lost jobs?
- Do you know someone who is deeply spiritual who is a joy to be around? Do you see positive externalities in someone who has frequent and profound spiritual experiences?
- What do you think of my blasphemous idea that, instead of God, there’s a bunch of Beings who don’t have much power? That the same source that produces prophetic visions also produces religious psychosis?
- If Joseph Smith started talking about his visions today, do you think he would be hailed as a prophet or given anti-psychotic medication?
Wheat & Tares 
I used to believe that Church leaders (bishops…stake presidents…General Authorities…Q15…Prophet) were the most “spiritual” members. I know that sounds simplistic but I just assumed that spirituality corresponded to the importance of the calling (by the way I felt the same about the Relief Society president at the ward, stake, and General level).
What I figured out a long time ago is that some of these folks are probably spiritually oriented, some not so much. Leadership in the Church is based on all kinds of worldly factors like charisma, connections, competency, etc.
I guess my point is that some people are spiritual or at least seem that way (i.e., emotional) and some aren’t. And we can’t confuse leadership with spirituality.