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.
Janey, I’ve read your post 3 times. I’m quite interested in this because you are attempting to approach the topic objectively (as opposed to practicing Mormons who claim spiritual experiences to far too many things since that’s what the Church teaches them to believe). I want to make sure I understand you correctly. I think what you’re saying is:
1. Mental illness was a source of spiritual experiences for you.
2. Many of your spiritual experiences might simply be attributed to brain chemistry as opposed to an Otherworldy source.
3. You attribute a smaller number of your spiritual experiences to an Otherwordly source. You are especially able to do this when the experience connects directly to events in the real world.
4. It may not be possible for you to definitively say which of your spiritual experiences ought to be attributed to pure brain chemistry versus an Otherworldly source fi there is no connection to the real world.
Do I understand you correctly?
Your Joseph Smith question is interesting. I tend to go back and forth with thoughts on whether Joseph was intentionally deceiving people or whether he really felt he was receiving something from God. It seems like he was functioning at a high enough level that I don’t know that he would have subjected himself to anti-psychotic medication or that the law could have compelled him to be medicated. Perhaps his sexual involvement with underage girls would have put him in jail with the prospect of enough jail time for him to pursue a defense in court based on mental illness, and the court might have then had the power to compel him to be medicated?
An interesting follow on to the Joseph Smith question is if you think Joseph was experiencing mental illness and that his mental illness caused him to have his spiritual experiences, which, if any, of those spiritual experiences originated from an Otherwordly source versus just his brain chemistry?
My son saw demons and angels when he had his first psychotic break at age 19. We all caught on pretty quickly except for our home teacher. Seeing angels and demons fits within Mormon dogma and my son was such an outstanding young man up to that point the home teacher believed him. He acted confused when he found out that mental illness caused these visitations, not my son’s extreme spirituality. It probably was a shell item for him.
While most of my spiritual experiences happened to happen while I was possibly clinically depressed, I can’t say that I was always clinically depressed with those experiences. And one at least I know I was not depressed. But claiming I only head them when depressed would say that I spent the first 60 years of my life clinically depressed. There is also CPTSD but I see no connection there. I can’t really separate out the times I was depressed from “normal life”, so I can’t say on most of them.
The other thing is that zero of my spiritual experiences fit into Mormon definitions of spiritual experiences. I wasn’t your typical Mormon believer at my most believing times, so I am differing a bit from Janey’s experiences. They were not the kind of thing that gets recognized at church, but the kind of thing where people look at you funny.
I would say one “consciousness” not many as in the idea that there is one universal consciousness for the universe and everything, even rocks, are part of that consciousness. And it addresses me as someone else, using “you” for me and “I” for itself. Which just isn’t the way I think.
And I just don’t know about the idea between mental health and spirituality. I think Joseph Smith had a personality disorder—-which is different than mental illness. Jim Jones, David Koresh, same. Probably Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or Sociopathic Personality disorder, so totally not even in the same category as schizophrenia or depression of any mental illness. Personality disorder people are not the kind of people who see God, they are the kind of people who LIE about it. So, zero modern “prophets” fall into that category of seeing visions and hearing voices. They fall into the charismatic sociopath/narcissist category or like Trump before he started getting senile. I mean, Trump is saying he was chosen by God to lead blah blah blah. Lies and more lies, or delusions of grandeur. So, although Joseph Smith showed a few symptoms of depression once or twice, he showed symptoms of NPD many times. And the total picture of the money digging turned “gold plates” digging fits NPD much better than it fits schizophrenia or depression or any type of person who actually “hears voices” or has mental illness. I don’t think he was mentally ill at all, but he shows all kinds of signs of personality disorder.
Now a person can have both mental illness AND personality disorder, but I see no evidence that Joseph Smith had any mental illness. And people with personality disorders do not have hallucinations/visions/hear the voice of God type stuff.
But only someone with an education specifically in psychology or a really strong hobby in psychology is going to know mental illness versus personality disorder well enough to diagnose the difference. So I am not sure that many readers here are going to understand.
So, sorry, Janey, but I am going to disagree and say that religious leaders who collect a following and star a new religion like Joseph Smith, Jim Jones, David Koresh do not have mental health problems or even border on that. They have personality disorders that allow them to lie, cheat, con, and abuse girls sexually, and still claim to be chosen by God. And then I am going to throw our dear🤮President in with those guys. They are still in touch with reality, except for delusions of grandeur and delusions of being chosen by god. Their delusions still have some connection to reality. They know they are not Jesus.
Now, religious nut cases who write a book and hear the voice of God and murder children are a different case. They are hallucinating. They out of touch with reality. Including their delusions. There is a difference between delusions and hallucinations. Schizophrenics have both delusions and hallucinations. The delusion is believing the child is possessed by a demon, the hallucination is the voice that told them the child was possessed. They are not always oriented to time and place.
Spiritual experiences can be in touch with reality and know real information that is true now, only no human can know it, kind of difference.
I don’t think there is a spectrum between “spiritual experiences” and mental illness. I think mental illness is experienced in religious ways. They have delusions of being Jesus, or hallucinations or hear voices that they interpret as being from God. It does not come from consciousness outside, but comes from their own head. Yes, mental illness can start small and build into Lori Daybell murdering her children. But they do not get those visions from anything “outside” their own head. Part of their mental illness is thinking it comes from outside.
I am not going to share my own experiences in a forum this public and besides, it would out me to the people I have shared with. So, readers here can toss me in with the mentally ill who only *think* the voice in their head comes from *outside* their own head, because I really don’t care. But no way did I already know on a subconscious level the things this voice told me. But to me, that is the difference between mental illness and real spiritual experiences. Real experiences come from something outside the person’s head. Mental illness is all inside the person’s malfunctioning brain.
So, ESP, there are examples I know of between identical twins that there is no way to explain. Out of body, when the person sees something that they physically cannot see. NDE when the person sees and remembers stuff that they physically could not see. Or being told something that fits reality that your own subconscious brain could not know. That kind of unexplainable stuff.
Not impressions that turned out years later to have been a good idea. That could be coincidence. Not something you might have picked up on subconsciously. Not warm fuzzy feelings. Things have to be separate from emotions and fit reality to fall in my category of real spiritual experiences.
I will give an example or two. A friend of mine with serious fertility problems was told the day of conception she would have a baby boy. And sure enough the fertility thermometer showed the dip, then two weeks later failed to go back down and still a few weeks later she got the first pregnancy symptom. Another friend was awakened during the night by his dead wife and told the house was on fire and get out. He got out, called the fire department and said he “smelled smoke” (he didn’t want to sound crazy) and could they check. Nothing, until they were packing up and an electrical fire broke out in a wall. The fireman said there was no way he smelled smoke, because of the location, so how did he know? And he tells them, “would you believe my dead wife told me? Didn’t think so.” Another friend with a NDE died having a baby when her uterus “exploded” (doctor’s word) the doctor actually checked his watch for time of death and closed her eyes. She says she was watching from the ceiling when her husband fainted, and a whole bunch of other facts that her physical eyes, that the doctor closed because she died, could not have seen or her known. Confirmed facts about what happened as they tried to bring her back, while doing a supper quick c-section to save the baby and her resisting because she didn’t want to come back. I have a couple of other close friends who had NDE or out of body experience with confirmed facts.
Some of what the person knew was not from their own head. It matched reality.
None of those people had any mental illness.
Anna
I have had zero spiritual experience, and have sat through enough fast and testimony meetings to become jaundiced. (maybe I need a new liver)
I personally (that’s me) think NDE are bogus. Now my wife who because of personal experience (before I met her) once led an NDE group. As I ever so rationally pointed out– being dead doesn’t count as empirical evidence.
I am a bit of a fan of Robert Sapolsky (his book Behave is excellent) He has a podcast with his daughter that I occasionally watch on YouTube. Someone asked him about NDE and he said he hoped no one would ask him. He then explained the vast majority of them. But there was small subset of them (to grossly paraphrase) that as a scientist and atheist freaked him out.
So I am curious as to what science will yet reveal.
.
I think the most important question here is not whether a spiritual experience is “real” or “imagined,” but what happens when we give that experience authority over our lives.
Throughout history, societies have called some unusual experiences revelation, prophecy, or spiritual insight, while others have called similar experiences madness. The boundary has never been as simple as we sometimes pretend. Culture, religion, psychology, and power all influence how an experience is interpreted.
What concerns me most is not spirituality itself, but what happens when certainty becomes stronger than evidence, and when a person begins to believe that every thought, coincidence, or inner voice carries unquestionable authority. At that point, the issue is no longer theology alone. It becomes a question of judgment, responsibility, and consequences.
Perhaps the wiser position is to leave room for mystery without surrendering our critical faculties. We can respect a person’s spiritual experience without automatically declaring its interpretation to be true. And we can recognize the possibility of psychological mechanisms without assuming that everything meaningful is therefore meaningless.
In the end, the real test may not be how extraordinary someone’s spiritual experiences are, but what those experiences produce: greater humility, compassion, stability, and responsibility—or fear, isolation, certainty, and harm.
That distinction matters far beyond religion. It is also a lesson about how human beings make sense of experiences they cannot fully explain.
Wahidullah Noorzai – I would give your comment a second thumbs up if I could. This is exactly what I was trying to explain in my post. The boundaries between a genuine spiritual experience and madness are not brightly drawn, and the important thing is to keep our ability to evaluate our own experiences against reality. The fact that science is beginning to understand brain chemistry better doesn’t make emotions and experiences meaningless, it just explains what’s happening. These experiences have been around as long as humanity has existed, and societies have found different ways to react. The USA has a highly regimented medical view.
To give an example that is outside the realm of mental illness — the hormone oxytocin is the love hormone that helps with bonding and falling in love. The fact that science found a hormone doesn’t change the experience. I like the way you said it: explaining the psychological mechanism doesn’t make the event meaningless. It just means we understand the physical basis for an emotional or spiritual experience.
Anna – I’m not trying to diagnose Joseph Smith, or figure out if he had a mental illness or a personality disorder. His visions sound like religious delusions to me. And like I said, it’s fine to disagree with me. If this thought experiment doesn’t resonate with you, then it doesn’t. In my opinion, psychiatry provides a diagnosis so it can settle on treatment. The behaviors that are symptoms of a mental illness or personality disorder were around long before psychiatry started grouping symptoms together and naming them. Not everyone who has a symptom is well-defined enough to get a diagnosis. My own psych eval came up with four different areas where I had symptoms but nothing that reached the level of a diagnosis. I’m not diagnosing Joseph Smith; I’m looking at some of his traits through the lens of the psychology I’ve picked up while dealing with my own issues.
Lonicera – exactly that. There is overlap between spiritual experiences and mental health issues. I spent a couple years believing that Satan was attacking me. Eventually I found out about sleep hallucinations and sleep paralysis. It was a relief to find out I was just having a wild reaction to extreme stress, not wrestling the devil.
mountainclimber – yes, that’s the gist of it. I’ve got more posts coming. This post is a general overview and it’s a lot of my conclusions. Perhaps my ideas will make more sense after you’ve read more of this series? I am trying to be objective about a very subjective topic. I’m not willing to say every Otherworldly experience was just my brain making things up; I’m also not willing to believe God is speaking to me. It’s closer to what Wahidullah Noorzai said — evaluate the experiences against reason and reality. Be cautious about being too certain about spiritual experiences.
josh h – agreed. Spirituality is different from leadership which is different from emotional intelligence which is different from compassion.
“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.”
That seems perhaps a little oversimplified. Since we’re talking about otherworldly beings here, I’m not sure why you would assume they are better at finding car keys than preventing atrocities. I suspect the more likely explanation is that the Being of Lost Car Keys is happy to help anytime, and has lots of other Beings who will volunteer to fill in whenever the Being needs to do whatever otherworldly beings do for a break, whereas the Being of Preventing Atrocities is an assignment akin to being a social media content moderator who spends their whole day screening for violence/porn/etc. So it’s a tough job to keep filled, and every so often when the latest Being of Preventing Atrocities has had to leave on account of PTSD, the world experiences a surge of atrocities until the post can be filled again.
For some reason, “otherworldly” links to sci-fi and fantasy in my mind. I’ll use the word “divine” instead. But I stand with those who experience the Divine as “many” and not “one.”
Some “rules” I have developed is that divine beings have rules and limits. Like the “many,” this flies in the face of the traditional Deity in the Abrahamic faiths, but there are things that cannot be done, interventions that are not possible. My mind can’t let go of the concept of loving Divine beings. But there seems to be limitations on what they will do. So intecessory prayer works… sometimes.
From Hinduism, I borrow and modify the concept of “karma.” It seems there is a cause and effect system in the physical world and something similar is at work in the psychological and/or spiritual realms. I also question the necessity of and the trustworthiness of an institutional church. Absolute, unquestioned power is problematic everywhere. I doubt that very many individuals tell the truth in testimony meetings. It seems to a version of show-and-tell, but one in which there is little to show and much to tell.
Wahidullah
“I think the most important question here is not whether a spiritual experience is “real” or “imagined,” but what happens when we give that experience authority over our lives.”
That is incredibly profound. Your whole comment is profound. Thank you. That has given me a tremendous amount to think about.
Wahidullah,
Your whole comment is concise, brilliant, and contains enough to write an entire book about.
You said, “In the end, the real test may not be how extraordinary someone’s spiritual experiences are, but what those experiences produce: greater humility, compassion, stability, and responsibility—or fear, isolation, certainty, and harm.”
This sentence, though, is precisely the one the masses revolted against in Lawrence Corbridge’s recent video, “You Will Stay.” He begins by describing a Church experience straight from hell—if your bishop is Darth Vader, or the culture is like Alcatraz—and then says that if you know the Church is true, you will stay.
If I remember correctly, Jesus explicitly gave us the example that a good tree does not produce bad fruit. This test has two ends to the stick, and both must be picked up, or the test becomes completely invalid. He, I, Jack, or anyone else cannot test a claim, the truth, or the value of something by examining only one end of the stick. To separate the product from its source is to ignore the very point.
Dave Brisbin writes, “The quality of the means we use always matches the quality of the ends we produce.” The test of an exercise book is not the book itself, someone telling me it is true, or even some miraculous spiritual manifestation of its truth. The test is whether I use it—and whether, in using it, I am transformed.
By Corbridge’s logic, which I think is largely shared by the orthodox position, the truth of the Book is something independent of its product. In other words, even if I use the book and it does not improve my health, the book is still true. Even if the relational environment it produces becomes toxic or harmful to one’s well-being, that does not alter the fact that its teachings are correct, right, and true.
But that seems to separate the tree from its fruit in precisely the way Jesus’ teaching does not. If the fruit is consistently bad, we cannot simply declare the tree good and dismiss the fruit as irrelevant. The product is not an incidental feature of the source; it is evidence about the source. And there is another distinction worth making. Producing a good product was never intended to establish something’s historical validity in the first place. A good life cannot, by itself, prove that a book is historically authentic, just as a bad life cannot, by itself, disprove it.
Likewise, to use spiritual experience as an objective epistemological tool—to say, “I felt the Spirit, therefore this historical or institutional claim is true”—is to misplace its purpose entirely. Spiritual experience may tell us something about what an experience produces in us, but it does not necessarily establish the historical or factual truth of the thing that produced it.
Those are different questions, and conflating them is what makes the whole test so muddled.
I remember on my mission in Brazil about how we encountered a “golden contact.” We gave her the first discussion and then scheduled a time to go back for a second. On the second discussion she revealed to us that she had had a vision that our church was true and decided to be baptized. Not long after she stopped coming to church. We went to visit her. She let us and told us that she had had a vision that the Universal Church (one of the many Pentecostal churches in Brazil) was true and that she was going there. What had happened, I thought? After talking with some members, we found that she was trying to get financial assistance and trying to give a narrative that might convince leaders to dole out help. I don’t blame her. She had had her first child when she was 13. As a missionary, though, all I cared about was her going to the Mormon church and staying active in it. I cared about my numbers and how these reflected my worth as a missionary.
“If Joseph Smith started talking about his visions today, do you think he would be hailed as a prophet or given anti-psychotic medication?”
One more comment, this question intrigued me. Joseph Smith was both delusional and a massive fraud. Sounds harsh, but I can’t see it any other way. There would have to be something seriously wrong with your brain to forge a fairly long book that looked like the Bible, claim it to be scripture on par with the Bible, and that ancient Americans wrote it. But the people around him at the time held a magical worldview. Today’s movies about Joseph Smith history portray Smith and his followers like many of the people we see around us today in white suburban communities. Educated, middle-class, rational-thinking people. Smith was a madman. His followers were deeply superstitious and many of them quite delusional themselves. They were survivalists living on in the wild west on the frontiers.
However, the question is would Smith be hailed as a prophet today? Given that we have Trump as president, it is quite apparent that delusion persists. It is a widespread human condition. If Smith were unsuccessful today, it wouldn’t be because time has done away with human delusion and superstition.
OK, I wasn’t really clear about the “consciousness” being one or many because it is both. It is made up of many. But it can unite and be one, because it is all the same. I connect to it by joining….sort of. Or you can connect to one friendly being who can suggest you look in the glove box for your car keys. You all are expecting me to explain what you wouldn’t believe even if I had the words, so why am I bothering? Or you can connect to Mount Timpanogus only it doesn’t think in words, so how would you know you connected? Except you feel one with the mountain.
And I agree with Janey and disagree that mental illness is somehow connected, but I think there is a difference, but I don’t know how to explain that difference. Except one connects to confusion and the other connects to reality.
And Suzanne, it is those few NDE that freak the scientists out that I am talking about. I am as cynical as those scientists about 99% of the crap you hear in fast and testimony meeting because it is the warm fuzzy feelings and finding car keys and that kind of stuff. But I CANNOT explain some of my freaky experiences. So, what am I left with when there is no god damn explanation that scientists can give me that fit the evidence. Yes, scientists can blah blah blah blah, but that is NOT what happened.
And this consciousness is as helpless as we are against major disasters. It cannot manipulate reality. No physical miracles. You have cancer or you don’t. Reality. The consciousness cannot change reality. It can only tell you. So, yes, it can help you find car keys if you are desperate or traumatized enough to connect. It is NOT easy to connect to this universal consciousness, or leave your body, or die for crying out loud.
I have only connected or left my body in traumatic situations, desperate life and death kind of situations, so no wonder most of you don’t have these kind of experiences. Your brain is not under enough stress to …. Whatever the hell it is.
Yes, some gurus can sometimes will themselves into … whatever. I know one guy who can once in a while leave his body when he goes into a kind of trance. And what he reported freaked all the listeners out. My friend who died and described what she saw freaked everybody out. One friend read some stuff that was way out of what she could see, only she couldn’t see, cause her eyes weren’t even open.
The thing is, when people are “out” like that, they do not have good control. So, telling the patient “if you die on the operating table, I want you to go in the next room, and up on top of this cupboard there is a paper with a set of numbers, read those number and be ready to report when you wake up.” It can’t be done. So those experiments are going to fail because the scientists don’t know what they are doing. It is like telling someone who sleep walks that you want them to go in the specific room and do some specific thing. Well, they can’t do that while sleep walking. The person whose consciousness gets thrown out of their body is not “aware” in a normal sense. Imagine waking up in some weird state that you can’t even figure out why you are looking down on your body. Are you going to remember a set of instructions the doctor gave you “in case you die”? Or are you going to be confused about why you are looking down on your body and the doctors are panicking?
The scientists who are studying physics are the ones coming closest and they are starting to say that there is a universal consciousness. I am not into physics, so when I read about their theories, I am so lost that I cannot explain here what they are finding. I don’t understand the basics or the words they are using, so how can I understand their advanced theories. But I read their conclusions and say, yeah, I thought so.
And yes, it is important that you connect to reality and not confusion, because you want to keep you sanity. So it does matter greatly if it is “real”. But don’t ask me to explain what “it” is.
Michael Snow – I detect a hint of humor in your comment and it made me smile. Comparing the Being Who Prevents Atrocities to the poor folks who have to review social media to get rid of the worst of the worst is clever.
Old Man – “Divine” is also a good word. I used Otherworldly so I could encompass experiences that weren’t overtly religious. I had to leave out a lot to get this short enough for a blog post, but I have also felt such overwhelming compassion and love that I believe that some of what’s out there is loving. Limited power, but still loving. I appreciate all the commenters who are pointing out the need to check these types of experiences — giving them unquestioned authority over our lives is when the problems start.
Brad D – comparing Joseph Smith’s abilities to get followers to Trump’s abilities to get followers is truly … *trying to think of a word* … thought-provoking. As you point out, superstition was a guiding force in Smith’s time. Many followers of Trump reject science. Science is rational and evidence-based and willing to be wrong. Some people would rather simply pin all their beliefs to an individual.
Anna – this sentence of yours: “Except one connects to confusion and the other connects to reality.” Yes, this. How do we tell the difference? Does it feel any different to the person who is making the connection? I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
I hope Wahidullah comes back and comments again.
How to tell the difference? I don’t know for sure because the honestly crazy people do not seem to realize they are crazy. When your brain is malfunctioning, it screws up your thinking to the point that people go over the edge and seem to no longer be able to tell.
I am thinking of the woman in the news so much lately who killed her three children due to postpartum psychosis. She knew her thoughts about killing herself were coming from the crazy. She tried to get help over and over. Then she went over the edge and couldn’t seem to make that judgement. Why could she tell the thoughts were “crazy” enough to ask for help, then reached a point where she could no longer tell?
I have no idea and my experience and knowledge of psychology does not go that far.
The closest I have come to “crazy” is sleep deprivation or sleep paralysis where you are dreaming while anwake or intrusive thoughts after the birth of at least one child. One thing I read said that about 80% of women have intrusive thoughts after birth. So, postpartum most women get intrusive thoughts, often about harming the child. I recognized the thoughts as something I shouldn’t do. Yes, those kinds of thoughts are scary because what causes them and why? I could tell such things were not real. It was always very very different than this consciousness that seems to come from some intelligence that can communicate with us. The “spiritual experience” voice was always very different than the “crazy” voice.
But for the insane, that “crazy voice” is very real.
So, the big question is why sometimes do people go from that kind of intrusive thoughts to acting on those thoughts?
What is the difference between the kind of suicidal thinking of the depressed, to the psychotic thinking of killing your children and yourself?
The human brain is a lot more complicated than we can even begin to understand.
To me, the “crazy” voice was always very much “all in my head” while this “spiritual experience” voice was like someone else talking to me. But for some people, the crazy voice is like someone else talking to them. So, we are right back to “what is the difference?”
My kid brother who had medication resistant depression that caused hallucinations seemed to know when it was the crazies and when it was reality, except he was terrified of doing something like assuming a child in the road while he was driving was a hallucination and not stopping. So, he recognized there were times when he didn’t have time or could not risk not knowing the difference.
This is something that puzzles me, because he is one who has never had any semblance of “spiritual experience” and totally dismisses all religion, all paranormal, all weird stuff as crazy. So, um, yeah, I don’t talk to him about my crazy, because he doesn’t believe in any of that stuff.
Other than double checking things like “does it match with external reality?” I am not sure how you check. My brother’s hallucinations/voices never matched up with external reality. Mine did. What is the difference between crazy and reality?
Mine always ended up fitting reality. If the consciousness told me things that seemed to contradict, then I felt kind of crazy, but then things quickly worked out that the “voice” was correct. I will use a false example, because I am not going to share some stuff, but say the voice says, “you have just won the Idaho lottery.” Then it was something that had already happened, and I just was in no position to know it had happened, but soon would find out.
I never got warm fuzzies or things that were hard to figure out, but got words. Sometimes I didn’t know how to apply the words, but the words were clear.
I have talked with others who have this same kind of experience, but it is extremely rare. And I have never had any ability to control it
I have been out of body and yes, scientists can “create” an out of body type experience with cameras, vision goggles, and kind of trick a person into “feeling” like they are out of body. But being out of body does not have cameras and technological tricks, so how do scientists explain the experience of seeing stuff from a perspective that is different than what your eyes could physically pick up?
Yes, the “tunnel” experience of Near Death experiences and meeting your dead relatives can be explained by “dying brain” and lack of oxygen, so that could be an “in your head” kind of thing. But the out of body aspects of NDE are trickier. How do they explain the person seeing things when there is no way they could actually have seen those things?
Some things do not fit with the “all in your head” because they match up with external reality.
@Anna
I had a close family member who had intrusive thoughts, so I read a book on them by someone who studies them. It turns out that psychotic thoughts and intrusive thoughts are superficially similar, they’re caused by different neural mechanisms and people who have intrusive thoughts about something are less likely to do the thing in the long run than the general population.
They think what happens with intrusive thoughts is that the amigdala overreacts in some potentially hazardous situation, and so instead of thinking “I need to be careful with this baby” the person thinks “I could easily kill this baby and nothing can stop me” when really the person has no violent disposition whatsoever. It’s really the same thought when you think about it, just with more intensity.
Your comparison of your spiritual experiences vs your brother reminds me of how I have a relative when describes herself as an atheist who prays, gets answers, and then does whatever the answer she gets says because it’s generally good advice.