"I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came — arising I know not from where — the current which I dare to call my life."
-- Pierre Tielhard de Ghardin, The Divine Milieu, Part Two, 2. The Passivities of Growth and the Two Hands of God, pg. 77
I recently reread Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya. It's even more wondrous and amazing than I remember from when it was a middle-school reading assignment. The main character, Antonio, a seven-year-old boy growing up in southeast New Mexico during World War II, struggles to reconcile the divergent ways of understanding the world that are pressed on him by his elders with those he discovers on his own. Mystical, magical, horrifying, and inspiring, his experiences are grist for the mill of his young mind sorting the paradoxes of being human. The story resonates with me because Antonio's confusion and drive to understand his world describe my own lifelong experience of wonder, fear, and hunger for certainty.
Some of my earliest memories of my childhood are of moments of what I now call the numinous: standing on the brick porch entry of my family's Upper Michigan Air Force Base quadruplex apartment -- as mundane a place as any -- and having an intense experience of being ready to die, expecting to be "taken up," even spreading my arms and looking skyward toward ascension. I was probably four. At age 10, playing in a stream in the North Carolina backyard of my best friend Beth, I remember a certainty that there was something magical about the place, that we were part of and witness to something bigger than us, something immense and incomprehensible. As a young man watching the sunrise and writing in my journal as I dangled my legs off the edge of a lava flow atop Albuquerque's West Mesa, I surprised a wandering coyote who didn't see me sitting there until he was just a few dozen yards away; the moments we gazed at each other before he trotted off felt both matter-of-fact and transcendent, a magical space that would endure in my mind for the rest of my life, yet passed as quickly as a sandgrain meteor. These, for me, are incontrovertible experiences of the numinous.
Today, I hunger for that numinosity as much as I did as a child and youth, but an entire other self has developed, too. My father had no room for mysticism, disdaining anything that smacked of magic or even the impractical, so I was taught early on that such ideas were for fools and, thus, if I wished to be anything other than a fool, I needed to eject these notions at their first showing. Was it provable? Demonstrable? Repeatable? If so, it might have merit; beyond that, it belonged in the trash bin of the gullible. My father was not harsh, but he had a way of conveying disappointment that made clear my childhood fascination with ESP and spells and hexes was worthy of shame. The most devastating blow to my obsession came in sixth grade, when a group of classmates conspired to convince me that one of them was brilliantly clairvoyant and the teacher, rather than interrupt their cruel joke and admonish the conspirators, simply rolled her eyes at me and let them play it out until I was utterly humiliated. After that, I basically exiled my numinous and mystical self.
Instead, I came to worship the empirical. Without knowing it for what it was at the time, I took up the skeptics' great question: how can we know what we know? What can we learn with our imperfect and incomplete senses? How can we augment our senses or account for their imperfections? Given that, even with such augmentations or accounting, we nonetheless process all information with limited minds, how can we know if there is even anything "out there?" Am I the only being in the world, the rest an illusion (the solipsist's conclusion)? This makes no intuitive sense, but then can I trust my intuition?
After years of such wandering, rejecting the numinous yet being unsatisfied with the empirical alone, my undergraduate studies in epistemology and skepticism helped me find a happy, workable (while still imperfect) solution: there is a world "out there" and, although we cannot know it perfectly, we can know enough about it to operate effectively in it. Indeed, there are ways that we can work to make our knowledge ever less imperfect and these ways are called science.
Today, I am a trained scientist, an empiricist, materialist, and practical skeptic. I do not believe in the existence of god(s), the spirit or soul, nor, by extension, ghosts (spirits with no body) or zombies (bodies with no spirits) and their ilk. At the same time, it feels wrong to invalidate and shame others who do believe. Moreover, how do I reconcile my own experiences of the numinous? Again, my father, unwittingly perhaps, pointed me in a useful direction: wonder. As an engineer and a true geek's geek, my father had that childlike, "gee-whiz" excitement when it came to the sciences he studied and the gadgets he built. His commitment to the empirical was not absent of wonder and, indeed, wonder drove all of his passions, whether flying airplanes, studying advanced mathematics, building race cars or personal computers (before they were a thing), or touring the Great Parks of North America in a 1961 Greyhound bus he converted himself. Perhaps wonder is sibling to the numinous.
Even after being shamed and argued into rejecting the mystical, I never stopped having mystical experiences. In my late 20s, after I broke up with a woman I thought was my One Great Chance at True Love, I spent a (completely sober) day and night filled with music and visions, following a call that ultimately led me crashing nude into midnight ocean waves on an empty city beach, feeling that an old skin was being beaten off of me. In my late 30s, following the birth of my daughter, I went through a period of introspection and transformation that changed the course of my life, a deep dive into religion and art that ultimately led me to becoming a psychologist. Change and clarity arising from I know not where have punctuated my life, leaving me convinced in the moment that I am a mere vessel or conduit for some greater power.
In studying the human brain, I've come to understand that such incongruous experiences have their origins in the fact that the conscious mind is but the thinnest of veneers over the vastness of the psyche: the consciousness that the brain produces is but a fraction of its output and its greatest products appear to be outside conscious reach -- perception, identity, meaning, even decision-making. Thus, what some people call God or spirit -- the experiences I call numinous -- likely, in my empirical cosmology, arise from these deep workings of the mind and brain. Yet, that explanation of their origin does not make them less wondrous -- or numinous.
Now as ever, I strive to stay in touch with the numinous in my life. The breathtaking spectacle of the sugar maple in my autumnal backyard, the shivering insight that melts from a patient's face down through their body, the bottomless space beyond the planets on a moonless night, the derealized moment when a tarot card reveals its meaning, the joy and wonder in the eyes of loved ones, the sudden Knowing of a personal Truth, all these are part of it. The numinous is a human birthright, from wherever it springs. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Wicca, spirituality, science, all of these are ways of explaining the how of our experience, but the what cannot be denied.
I honor your numinosity as I honor my own and I wish for all humans to be in touch with theirs, however that may occur.
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