The Road Less Traveled - SECTION III - Growth And Religion - Episodes 5 - 7

 

Episode 5:        The Case of Theodore

Ted was thirty when he came to see me, and a hermit. For the preceding seven years he had lived in a small cabin deep in the woods. He had few friends and no one close. For three years he had not dated. Occasionally he performed minor carpentry jobs, but mostly he filled his days by fishing, reading, and spending endless time making unimportant decisions, such as what he would cook for dinner and how he might cook it or whether he could or could not afford to purchase an inexpensive tool. 

Actually, by virtue of an inheritance he was quite wealthy. He was also intellectually brilliant. And, as he said that first session, paralyzed. "I know I should be doing something more constructive and creative with my life," he complained, "but I can't even make the most minor decisions, much less big ones. I ought to have a career. I ought to go to graduate school and learn some kind of occupation, but I can't get enthusiastic about anything. I've thought of everything teaching, scholarly work, international relations, medicine, agriculture, ecology-but nothing turns me on. I may get interested in it for a day or two, but then every field seems to have insurmountable problems. Life seems to be an insurmountable problem."

His problem began, Ted said, when he was eighteen and entered college. Until then everything had been fine. He had had basically an ordinary childhood in a stable well-to-do home with two older brothers; parents who cared for him even if they didn't care much for each other; good grades and satisfactions in a private boarding school. Then-and perhaps this was crucial-came a passionate love affair with a woman who rejected him the week before he entered college.

Dejected, he had spent most of his freshman year drunk. Still, he maintained good grades. Then he had several other love affairs, each one more halfhearted and unsuccessful than the last. His grades began to slip. He could not decide what to write papers about. A close friend, Hank, was killed in an automobile accident in the middle of his junior year, but he'd gotten over it. He even stopped drinking that year. But the problem with decision-making became still worse. He simply could not choose a topic on which to write his senior thesis.

He finished his course work. He rented an off-campus room.

All he needed to graduate was to submit a short thesis, the kind of thing one could do in a month. It took him the following three years. Then, nothing. Seven years before, he had come here to the woods.

Ted felt certain that his problem was rooted in his sexuality.

After all, his difficulties had begun, had they not, with an unsuccessful love affair? Besides, he had read almost everything that Freud had ever written (and much more than I myself had read). So during the first six months of therapy we plumbed the depths of his childhood sexuality, getting nowhere in particular. But in that period several interesting facets of his personality did emerge. One was his total lack of enthusiasm. He might wish for good weather, but when it came he would shrug his shoulders and say, "It doesn't really make any difference. Basically, one day's just like the next."

Fishing in the lake, he caught an enormous pike, "But it was more than I could eat and I have no friends to share it with, so I threw it back."

Related to this lack of enthusiasm was a kind of global snobbishness as if he found the world and all that was in it to be in poor taste. His was the critic's eye. I came to suspect he employed this snobbishness to keep a kind of distance between himself and things that might otherwise affect him emotionally. Finally, Ted had an enormous penchant for secrecy, which made therapy very slow going indeed. The most important facts of any incident had to be pried out of him. He had a dream: "I was in a classroom. There was an object-I don't know what-which I had placed inside a box. I had built the box around the object so that no one could tell what was inside it. I had placed the box inside a dead tree, and with finely fashioned wooden screws had replaced the bark over the box. But sitting in the classroom

I suddenly remembered that I had not been certain to make the screws flush with the bark. I became quite anxious. So I rushed out to the woods and worked the screws so that no one could distinguish them from the bark. Then I felt better and came back to class." As with many people, class and classroom were symbols for therapy in Ted's dreams. It was clear he did not want me to find the core of his neurosis.

The first small chink in Ted's armor occurred during one session in the sixth month of therapy. He had spent the evening before at the house of an acquaintance. "It was a dreadful evening," Ted lamented. "He wanted me to listen to this new record he'd bought, Neil Diamond's sound track for the movie of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was excruciating. I do not understand how educated people can actually enjoy such putrid mucilage or even call it music."

The intensity of his snobbish reaction caused me to pick up my ears. ''jonathan Livingston Seagull was a religious book," I commented. "Was the music also religious?"

"I suppose you could call it religious as much as you could call it music."

"Perhaps it was the religion that offended you," I suggested, "and not so much the music."

"Well, I certainly do find that kind of religion offensive," Ted replied.

"What kind of religion is that kind?"

"Sentimental. Mawkish." Ted almost spat the words out.

"What other kind of religion is there?" I asked.

Ted looked puzzled, disconcerted. "Not much, I guess. I guess I generally find religion unappealing."

"Has it always been that way?"

He laughed ruefully. "No, when I was a fuzzy-brained adolescent I was quite into religion. My senior year of boarding school I was even a deacon of the little church we had."

"Then what?"

"Then what what?"

"Well, what happened to your religion?" I asked.

"I just grew out of it, I guess."

"How did you grow out of it?"

"What do you mean, how did I grow out of it?" Ted was clearly becoming irritated now. "How does one grow out of anything? I just did, that's all."

"When did you grow out of it?"

"I don't know. It just happened. I told you. I never went to church in college."

"Never?"

"Never once."

"So your senior year of high school you're a deacon in the church," I commented. "Then that summer you have an unsuccessful love affair. And then you never go to church again.

It was an abrupt change. You don't suppose your girl friend's rejection had anything to do with it, do you?"

"I don't suppose anything. The same pattern was true of lots of my classmates. We were coming of age in a time when religion wasn't fashionable anyway. Maybe my girl friend had something to do with it, maybe she didn't. How should I know?

All I know is I just became uninterested in religion."

The next break came a month later. We had been focusing on Ted's notable lack of enthusiasm about anything, which he readily acknowledged. "The last time I can distinctly remember being enthusiastic," he said, "was ten years ago, in my junior year. It was over a paper I was writing at the end of a fall semester course in modern British poetry. "

"What was the paper about?" I asked.

"I really don't think I can remember, it was so long ago."

"Poppycock," I said. "You can remember if you want to."

"Well, I think it had to do with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He was one of the first of the truly modern poets. 'Pied Beauty' was probably the poem it centered on."

I left the office, went to my library, and came back with a dusty volume of British poetry from my college years. "Pied Beauty" was there on page 819. 1 read:

Glory be to God for dappled things-

For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-fire coal chestnut jails; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and

plow;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him.

Tears came to my eyes. "It is, itself, a poem about enthusiasm," I said.

"Yes. " "It's also a very religious poem."

"Yes. " "You wrote the paper on it at the end of the fall semester.

That would have been January?"

"Yes. "

"If I calculate correctly, it was in the next month, February, that your friend Hank died."

"Yes. "

I could feel an incredible tension growing. I was not sure what was the right thing to do. Hoping, I plowed ahead.

"So you were rejected by your first real girl friend at seventeen and you gave up your enthusiasm for the church. Three years later your best friend died and you gave up your enthusiasm for everything. "

"I didn't give it up, it was taken from me." Ted was almost shouting now, more emotional than I had ever seen him.

"God rejected you so you rejected God."

"Well, why shouldn't I ?" he demanded. "It's a shitty world. It's always been a shitty world."

"I thought your childhood was quite happy."

"No, that was shitty too."

And so it was. Underneath its calm exterior Ted's childhood home had been a continual bloody battleground for him.

His two older brothers had picked on him with unparalleled viciousness.

His parents, too involved in their own affairs and their hatred of each other to concern themselves with the seemingly minor problems of children had offered him, the smallest and the weakest, no protection.

Escape to the countryside for long, solitary walks was his greatest solace, and we were able to establish that his hermitlike pattern had its roots in the years before he was even ten.

Boarding school, with its minor cruelties, had been a relief.

As he talked of these things, Ted's resentment of the world-or rather his ventilation of that resentment-gathered momentum.

In the months that followed he relived not only the pain of his childhood and the pain of Hank's death but also the pain of a thousand smaller deaths and rejections and losses. All of life seemed a maelstrom of death and suffering, danger and savagery.

After fifteen months of therapy there came a turning point.

Ted brought into his session a little book. "You're always talking about how secretive I am-and, of course, I am," he said. "Last night I was rummaging through some old stuff and I found this journal that I kept during my sophomore year at college. I haven't even looked at it to censor it. I thought perhaps you might like to read the unexpurgated me of a decade ago."

I said I would, and I did for the next two nights. Actually, it was hardly revelatory except to confirm that his pattern as a loner, isolated by a snobbishness born of hurt, was deeply entrenched even then. But one little vignette caught my eye.

He described how he had gone hiking alone on a Sunday in January and had been caught in a heavy snowstorm and had gotten back to his dormitory several hours after dark. "I felt a certain sense of exhilaration," he had written, "upon my return to the safety of my room, not unlike that which I experienced last summer when I came so near to death." The next day in our session I asked him to tell me how he had come near to death.

"Oh, I've told you about that," Ted said.

By this time I knew well that whenever Ted proclaimed he had already told me something, he was trying to hide it.

"You're being secretive again," I responded.

"Well, I'm sure I told you. I must have. Anyway, there wasn't all that much to it. You remember I worked in Florida that summer between my freshman and sophomore years.

There was a hurricane. I kind of like storms, you know. At the height of the storm I went out on a pier. A wave washed me off. Then another washed me back on. That was all there was to it. It was over very quickly."

"You went out to the end of a pier at the height of a hurricane?" I asked incredulously.

"I told you. I like storms. I wanted to be close to that elemental fury."

"I can understand that," I said. "We both like storms. But I don't know that I would have put myself in jeopardy like that."

"Well, you know I have a suicidal streak," Ted replied almost impishly. "And I was certainly feeling suicidal that summer. I've analyzed it. Frankly, I can't remember going out on the pier with any conscious suicidal intent. But I certainly didn't care much about life and I acknowledge the possibility that I was being suicidal. "

"You were washed off?"

"Yes. I hardly knew what was happening. There was so much spray you really couldn't see much of anything. I guess a particularly big wave came. I felt it slam into me, felt myself swept away, felt myself lost in the water. There was nothing I could do to save myself. I was certain I was going to die. I felt terrified. After about a minute I felt myself tossed backward by the water-it must have been some kind of backwash wave-and a second later I was slammed down against the concrete of the pier. I crawled to the side of the pier, gripped it, and hand over hand I crawled back to the land. I was a bit bruised. That was all."

"How do you feel about the experience?"

"What do you mean, how do I feel about it?" Ted asked in his resisting way.

"Just what I asked. How do you feel about it?"

"You mean about being saved?" he queried.

"Yes."

"Well, I guess I feel I was fortunate."

"Fortunate?" I queried. "Just an unusual coincidence, that backwash wave?"

"Yes, that's all."

"Some might call it miraculous," I commented.

"I guess I was lucky."

"You guess you were lucky," I repeated, goading him.

"Yes, goddammit, I guess I was lucky."

"It's interesting, Ted," I said, "that whenever something significantly painful happens to you, you rail against God, you rail against what a shitty, terrible world it is. But when something good happens to you, you guess you're lucky. A minor tragedy and it's God's fault. A miraculous blessing and it's a bit lucky. What do you make of that?"

Confronted with the inconsistency of his attitude toward good and bad fortune, Ted began to focus more and more on things that were right with the world, on the sweet as well as the sour, the dazzle as well as the dim. Having worked through the pain of Hank's death and the other deaths he had experienced, he began to examine the other side of the coin of life. He came to accept the necessity of suffering and to embrace the paradoxical nature of existence, the "dappled things." This acceptance occurred, of course, in the context of a warm, loving and increasingly pleasurable relationship between us. He began to move out. Very tentatively, he started dating again. He began to express faint enthusiasm.

His religious nature blossomed. Everywhere he looked he saw the mystery of life and death, of creation and decay and regeneration.

He read theology. He listened to Jesus Christ, Superstar, to Godspell, and even bought his own copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

After two years of therapy Ted announced one morning that the time had come for him to get on with it. "I've been thinking about applying to a graduate school in psychology," he said. "I know you're going to say that I'm just imitating you, but I've looked at that and I don't think that's it."

"Go on," I requested.

"Well, in thinking about this it seemed to me I ought to try to do what is most important. If I am going back to school 1 want to study the most important things."

"Goon."

"So I decided that the human mind is important. And doing therapy is important."

"The human mind and psychotherapy, that's the most important thing?" I queried.

"Well, I suppose God is the most important thing."

"So why don't you study God?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"If God is the most important thing, why don't you study God?"

"I'm sorry. I simply don't understand you," Ted said.

"That's because you're blocking yourself from understanding," I replied.

"Really, I don't understand. How can one study God?"

"One studies psychology in a school. One studies God in a school," I  answered.

"You mean theology school?"

"Yes. "

"You mean, become a Minister?"

"Yes."

"Oh, no, I couldn't do that." Ted was aghast.

"Why not?"

Ted became shifty. "There isn't necessarily any difference between a psychotherapist and a Minister. I mean, Ministers do lots of therapy. And doing psychotherapy, well, it's like a Ministry."

"So why couldn't you become a Minister?"

"You're pressuring me," Ted fumed. "A career is my personal decision. It's up to me to go into the career I want.

Therapists aren't supposed to direct patients. It's not your role to make choices for me. I'll make my own choices."

"Look," I said, "I am not making any choice for you. I am in this instance being purely analytical. I am analyzing the alternatives open to you. You are the one who for some reason does not want to look at one of those alternatives. You are the one who wants to do the most important thing. You are the one who feels that God is the most important thing. Yet when I drag you to finally look at the alternative of a career in God, you exclude it. You say you couldn't do it. Fine if you can't do it. But it is my province to be interested in why you feel you can't do it, why you exclude it as an alternative."

"I just couldn't be a Minister," Ted said lamely.

"Why not?"

"Because . . . because to be a Minister one is publicly a man of God. I mean, I'd have to go public with my belief in God. I'd have to be publicly enthusiastic about it. I just couldn't do that."

"No, you've got to be secret, don't you?" I said. "That's your neurosis and you've got to keep it. You can't be publicly enthusiastic. You've got to keep your enthusiasm in the closet, - don't you?"

"Look," Ted wailed, "you don't know what it's like for me.

You don't know what it's like to be me. Every time I opened my mouth to be enthusiastic about something my brothers would tease me for it."

"So I guess you're still ten years old," I remarked, "and your brothers are still around."

Ted was actually crying now with frustration at me.

"That's not all," he said, weeping. "That's how my parents punished me. Whenever I did something wrong they took what I loved away from me. 'Let's see, what is it that Ted's most enthusiastic about? Oh, yes, the trip to his aunt's next week. He's really excited about that. So we'll tell him that because he's been bad he can't go see his aunt. That's it. Then there's his bow and arrows. He really loves his bow and arrows. So we'll take that away.' Simple. Simple system.

Everything I was enthusiastic about they took away. Everything I loved I lost. "

And so we arrived at the deepest core of Ted's neurosis.

Gradually, by act of will, continually having to remind himself that he was not still ten, that he was not still under the thumb of his parents or within striking distance of his brothers, bit by bit he forced himself to communicate his enthusiasm, his love of life and his love of God. He did decide to go on to divinity school.

A few weeks before he left I received a check from him for the previous month's sessions. Something about it caught my eye. His signature seemed longer. I looked at it closely. Previously he had always signed his name "Ted." Now it was "Theodore." I called his attention to the change.

"I was hoping you would notice it," he said. "I guess in a way I'm still keeping secrets, aren't I? When I was very young my Aunt told me that I should be proud of the name Theodore because it means 'lover of God.' I was proud. So I told my brothers about it. Christ, did they make fun of me. They called me a sissy in ten different ways. 'Sissy choir boy. Why don't you go kiss the altar? Why don't you go kiss the choirmaster?'

" Ted smiled. "You know the whole routine. So I became embarrassed by the name. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was no longer embarrassed.

So I decided it was all right to use my full name now.

After all, I am a lover of God, aren't I?"

 Episode 6:     The Baby and the Bath Water

The foregoing case histories were offered in response to a question:

Is the belief in God a form of psychopathology? 

If we are to rise out of the mire of childhood teaching, local tradition and superstition, it is a question that must be asked. But these case histories indicate that the answer is not a simple one.

The answer sometimes is yes. Kathy's unquestioning belief in the God her church and mother taught clearly retarded her growth and poisoned her spirit. Only by questioning and discarding her belief was she able to venture forth into a wider, more satisfying, more productive life. Only then was she free to grow.

But the answer also is sometimes no. As Marcia grew out of the cold microcosm of her childhood into a larger, warmer world, a belief in God also grew within her, quietly and naturally. And Ted's forsaken belief in God had to be resurrected as an essential part of the liberation and resurrection of his spirit.

What are we to do with this yes-and-no answer?

Scientists are dedicated to asking questions in the search for truth. But they too are human, and like all humans, they would like their answers to be clean and clear and easy.

In their desire for simple solutions, scientists are prone to fall into two traps as they question the reality of God.

The first is to throw the baby out with the bath water.

And the second is tunnel vision.

There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God.

Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless.

But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God?

It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic.

Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic?

Anyone who has known a died-in-the-wool atheist will know that such an individual can be as dogmatic about unbelief as any believer can be about belief.

Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?

Another reason that scientists are so prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is that science itself, as I have suggested, is a religion.

The neophyte scientist, recently come or converted to the world view of science, can be every bit as fanatical as a Christian crusader or a soldier of Allah.

This is particularly the case when we have come to science from a culture and home in which belief in God is firmly associated with ignorance, superstition, rigidity and hypocrisy.

Then we have emotional as well as intellectual motives to smash the idols of primitive faith.

A mark of maturity in scientists, however, is their awareness that science may be as subject to dogmatism as any other religion.

I have firmly stated that it is essential to our spiritual growth for us to become scientists who are skeptical of what we have been taught-that is, the common notions and assumptions of our culture.

But the notions of science themselves often become cultural idols, and it is necessary that we become skeptical of these as well. It is indeed possible for us to mature out of a belief in God.

What I would now like to suggest is that it is also possible to mature into a belief in God.

A skeptical atheism or agnosticism is not necessarily the highest state of understanding at which human beings can arrive.

On the contrary, there is reason to believe that behind spurious notions and false concepts of God there lies a reality that is God.

This is what Paul Tillich meant when he referred to the "god beyond God" and why some sophisticated Christians used to proclaim joyfully, "God is dead. Long live God." Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth leads first out of superstition into agnosticism and then out of agnosticism toward an accurate knowledge of God?

It was of this path that the Sufi Aba Said ibn Abi-I-Khair was speaking more than nine hundred years ago when he said:

Until college and minaret have crumbled

This holy work of ours will not be done.

Until faith becomes rejection, and rejection becomes belief

There will be no true Muslim.

Whether or not the path of spiritual growth necessarily leads from a skeptical atheism or agnosticism toward an accurate belief in God, the fact of the matter is that some intellectually sophisticated and skeptical people, such as Marcia and Ted, do seem to grow in the direction of belief. And it should be noted that this belief into which they grew was not at all like that out of which Kathy evolved.

The God that comes before skepticism may bear little resemblance to the God that comes after.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, there is no single, monolithic religion.

There are many religions, and perhaps many levels to belief. Some religions may be unhealthy for some people; others may be healthy.

All this is of particular import for those scientists who are psychiatrists or psychotherapists. Dealing so directly with the growth process, they more than anyone else are called upon to make judgments as to the healthiness of an individual's belief system. Because psychotherapists generally belong to a skeptical if not strictly Freudian tradition, there is a tendency for them to consider any passionate belief in God to be pathological.

Upon occasion, this tendency may go over the line into frank bias and prejudice. Not long ago I met a college senior who was giving serious consideration to the possibility of entering a monastery a few years hence.

He had been in psychotherapy for the preceding year and was continuing. "But I have not been able to tell my therapist about the monastery or the depth of my religious belief," he confided. "I don't think he would understand." I did not begin to know this young man well enough to assess the meaning that the monastery held for him or whether his desire to join it was neurotically determined. I very much would have liked to say to him: "You really ought to tell your therapist about it. It is essential for your therapy that you be open about everything, particularly a serious matter such as this. You should trust your therapist to be objective." But I did not. For I was not at all sure that his therapist would be objective, that he would understand, in the true meaning of the word.

Psychiatrists and psychotherapists who have simplistic attitudes toward religion are likely to do a disservice to some of their patients. This will be true if they regard all religions as good or healthy. It will also be true if they throw out the baby with the bath water and regard all religion as sickness or the Enemy.

And, finally, it will be true if in the face of the complexity of the matter they withdraw themselves from dealing at all with the religious issues of their patients, hiding behind a cloak of such total objectivity that they do not consider it to be their role to be, themselves, in any way spiritually or religiously involved. For their patients often need their involvement. I do not mean to imply that they should forsake their objectivity, or that balancing their objectivity with their own spirituality is an easy matter. It is not. To the contrary, my plea would be that psychotherapists of all kinds should push themselves to become not less involved but rather more sophisticated in religious matters than they frequently are.

 Episode 7:     Scientific Tunnel Vision

Occasionally psychiatrists encounter patients with a strange disturbance of vision; these patients are able to see only a very narrow area directly in front of them. They cannot see anything to the left or to the right, above or below their narrow focus. They cannot see two objects adjacent to each other at the same time, they can see only one thing at a time and must turn their heads if they are to see another. They liken this symptom to looking down a tunnel, being able to see only a small circle of light and clarity at the end. No physical disturbance in their visual system can be found to account for the symptom. It is as if for some reason they do not want to see more than immediately meets the eye, more than what they choose to focus their attention upon.

Another major reason that scientists are prone to throw the baby out with the bath water is that they do not see the baby.

Many scientists simply do not look at the evidence of the reality of God.

They suffer from a kind of tunnel vision, a psychologically self-imposed psychological set of blinders which prevents them from turning their attention to the realm of the spirit.

Among the causes of this scientific tunnel vision I would like to discuss two that result from the nature of scientific tradition.

The first of these is an issue of methodology.

In its laudable insistence upon experience, accurate observation and verifiability, science has placed great emphasis upon measurement.

To measure something is to experience it in a certain dimension, a dimension in which we can make observations of great accuracy which are repeatable by others. The use of measurement has enabled science to make enormous strides in the understanding of the material universe.

But by virtue of its success, measurement has become a kind of scientific idol. The result is an attitude on the part of many scientists of not only skepticism but outright rejection of what cannot be measured. It is as if they were to say, "What we cannot measure, we cannot know; there is no point in worrying about what we cannot know; therefore, what cannot be measured is unimportant and unworthy of our observation."

Because of this attitude many scientists exclude from their serious consideration all matters that are-or seem to be-intangible. Including, of course, the matter of God.

This strange but remarkably common assumption that things that are not easy to study do not merit study is beginning to be challenged by several relatively recent developments within science itself.

One is the development of increasingly sophisticated methods of study.

Through the use of hardware such as electron microscopes, spectrophotometers and computers, and software such as statistical techniques we are now able to make measurements of increasingly complex phenomena which a few decades ago were un-measurable.

The range of scientific vision is consequently expanding.

As it continues to expand, perhaps we shall soon be able to say: "There is nothing beyond the limits of our vision. If we decide to study something, we can always find the methodology with which to do it."

The other development that is assisting us to escape from scientific tunnel vision is the relatively recent discovery by science of the reality of paradox. A hundred years ago paradox meant error to the scientific mind. But exploring such phenomena as the nature of light, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and relativity theory, physical science has matured over the past century to the point where it is increasingly recognized that at a certain level reality is paradoxical. Thus J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote:

To what appears to be the simplest questions, we will tend to give either no answer or an answer which will, at first sight, be reminiscent more of a strange catechism than of the straightforward affirmatives of physical science. If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say "no"; if we ask whether the electron's position changes with time, we must say "no"; 

if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say "no"; 

if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say "no."

The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the conditions of a man's self after his death; but they are not the familiar answers for the tradition of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science.

Mystics have spoken to us through the ages in terms of paradox. Is it possible that we are beginning to see a meeting ground between science and religion?

When we are able to say that "a human is both mortal and eternal at the same time" and "light is both a wave and a particle at the same time," we have begun to speak the same language. Is it possible that the path of spiritual growth that proceeds from religious superstition to scientific skepticism may indeed ultimately lead us to a genuine religious reality?

This beginning possibility of unification of religion and science is the most significant and exciting happening in our intellectual life today. But it is only just beginning. For the most part both the religious and the scientific remain in self-imposed narrow frames of reference, each still largely blinded by its own particular type of tunnel vision. Examine, for instance, the behavior of both in regard to the question of miracles.

Even the idea of a miracle is anathema to most scientists. Over the past four hundred years or so science has elucidated a number of "natural laws," such as "Two objects attract each other in proportion to their mass and in inverse proportion to the distance between them" or "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed." But having been successful in discovering natural laws, scientists in their world view have made an idol out of the concept of natural law, just as they made an idol out of the notion of measurement.

The result is that any event that cannot be explained by currently understood natural law is assumed to be unreal by the scientific establishment. In regard to methodology, science has tended to say, "What is very difficult to study doesn't merit study." And in regard to natural law, science tends to say, "What is very difficult to understand doesn't exist. "

The church has been a bit more broad-minded. To the religious establishment what cannot be understood in terms of known natural law is a miracle, and miracles do exist.

But beyond authenticating their existence, the church has not been anxious to look at miracles very closely. "Miracles need not be scientifically examined" has been the prevailing religious attitude. "They should simply be accepted as acts of God." The religious have not wanted their religion shaken by science, just as the scientific have not wanted their science to be shaken by religion. .

Events of miraculous healing, for instance, have been used by the Catholic Church to authenticate its saints, and they are almost standard fare for many Protestant denominations. Yet the churches have never said to physicians, "Would you join with us to study these most fascinating phenomena?" Nor have physicians said, "May we get together with you to examine scientifically these occurrences which should be of such interest to our profession?" Instead the attitude of the medical profession has been that miracle cures are nonexistent, that the disease of which a person was cured did not exist in the first place, either because it was an imaginary disorder, such as a hysterical conversion reaction, or else because it was a misdiagnosis.

Fortunately, however, a few serious scientists, physicians and religious truth-seekers are currently in the process of beginning to examine the nature of such phenomena as spontaneous remissions in cancer patients and apparently successful examples of psychic healing.

Fifteen years ago, when I graduated from medical school, I was certain that there were no miracles. Today I am certain that miracles abound. This change in my consciousness has been the result of two factors working hand in hand. 

One factor is a whole variety of experiences I have had as a psychiatrist which initially seemed quite commonplace but which, when I thought about them more deeply, seemed to indicate that my work with patients toward their growth was being remarkably assisted in ways for which I had no logical explanation- that is, ways that were miraculous. These experiences, some of which I shall be recounting, led me to question my previous assumption that miraculous occurrences were impossible. Once I questioned this assumption I became open to the possible existence of the miraculous.

This openness, which was the second factor causing my change in consciousness, then allowed me to begin routinely looking at ordinary existence with an eye for the miraculous. The more I looked, the more I found. If there were but one thing I could hope for from the reader of the remainder of this book, it would be that he or she possesses the capacity to perceive the miraculous.

Of this capacity it has recently been written:

Self-realization is born and matures in a distinctive kind of awareness, an awareness that has been described in many different ways by many different people.

The mystics, for example, have spoken of it as the perception of the divinity and perfection of the world. Richard Bucke referred to it as cosmic consciousness;

Buber described it in terms of the I - Thou relationship;

and Maslow gave it the label "Beingcognition."

We shall use Ouspensky's term and call it the perception of the miraculous.

"Miraculous" here refers not only to extraordinary phenomena but also to the commonplace, for absolutely anything can evoke this special awareness provided that close enough attention is paid to it. Once perception is disengaged from the domination of preconception and personal interest, it is free to experience the world as it is in itself and to behold its inherent magnificence

Perception of the miraculous requires no faith or assumptions.

It is simply a matter of paying full and close attention to the givens of life, i. e., to what is so ever-present that it is usually taken for granted.

The true wonder of the world is available everywhere, in the minutest parts of our bodies, in the vast expanses of the cosmos, and in the intimate interconnectedness of these and all things .... We are part of a finely balanced ecosystem in which interdependency goes hand-in-hand with individuation.

We are all individuals, but we are also parts of a greater whole, united in something vast and beautiful beyond description. Perception of the miraculous is the subjective essence of self realization, the root from which man's highest features and experiences grow.

In thinking about miracles, I believe that our frame of reference has been too dramatic. We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead, we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.

This is what I shall be doing in the next section as I examine ordinary occurrences in the practice of psychiatry which have led me to an understanding of the extraordinary phenomenon of grace.

But I would like to conclude on another note of caution. This interface between science and religion can be shaky, dangerous ground.

We shall be dealing with extrasensory perception and "psychic" or "paranormal" phenomena as well as other varieties of the miraculous.

It is essential that we keep our wits about us. I recently attended a conference on the subject of faith healing at which a number of well-educated speakers presented anecdotal evidence to indicate that they or others were possessors of healing power in such a manner as to suggest their evidence to be rigorous and scientific when it was not. If a healer lays hands on a patient's inflamed joint and the next day the joint is no longer inflamed, this does not mean that the patient has been healed by the healer. Inflamed joints usually become un-inflamed sooner or later, slowly or suddenly, no matter what is done unto them. The fact that two events occur together in time does not necessarily mean that they are causally related. Because this whole area is so murky and ambiguous, it is all the more important that we approach it with healthy skepticism lest we mislead ourselves and others.

Among the ways that others may be misled, for instance, is by perceiving the lack of skepticism and rigorous reality-testing so often present in those individuals who are public proponents of the reality of psychic phenomena. Such individuals give the field a bad name. Because the field of psychic phenomena attracts so many people with poor reality testing,

it is tempting for more realistic observers to conclude that psychic phenomena themselves are unreal although such is not the case. There are many who attempt to find simple answers to hard questions, marrying popular scientific and religious concepts with high hopes but little thought. 

The fact that many such marriages fail should not be taken to mean that marriage is either impossible or inadvisable. 

But just as it is essential that our sight not be crippled by scientific tunnel vision, so also is it essential that our critical faculties and capacity for skepticism not be blinded by the brilliant beauty of the spiritual realm.