Chapter 4: Mysticism
In which we journey into the mystic
This is the fourth chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.
If I matter to a person, then what I do affects them and they therefore care about me (whether for good or ill); if I matter in the grand scheme, then what I do affects whatever is of supreme value, or what the theologian Paul Tillich called the object of “ultimate concern.” This object of ultimate concern could be many things, such as world history, God, the cosmos or some other summum bonum, and it is the source of one’s sense of cosmic meaning or sacredness. The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley described religion as “a way of life which follows necessarily from a man holding certain things in reverence, from his feeling and believing them to be sacred.”1 While I disagree with Huxley that this is all there is to religion – namely, I believe that there is also the need for consolation about death, which ends up being more fundamental than the need for meaning – the need to feel that one matters in light of what one takes to be sacred is a critical part of many cataspects, especially of the outward-lensing variety.
This commonly felt need to feel that one matters in a cosmic sense derives from the same underlying psychological drive as the need for more prosaic social bonds, just at a higher level of abstraction. Instead of feeling as though one matters to the people in one’s immediate social context, one feels as though one matters sub specie aeternitatis or in the eyes of God. As the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explains, group rituals take advantage of the fact that the brain releases endorphins when humans engage in synchronous behavior, leading to “a sense of ‘thrill’ (the tingling down the spine sensation) that feeds into the sense of belonging – the very effects that Gregorian chant seems to be so successful at creating.”2 This type of group-level ritual experience, when the “volume” on the limited self is “turned down” and the sense of enmeshment in a greater whole is “turned up,” is what sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to as “collective effervescence.”
Making use of collective effervescence in generating a feeling of cosmic meaning is an example of humans repurposing a trait which evolved for one purpose – mundane tribal bonding – toward a different goal. This is a process called “exaptation,” in which a structure or process that evolved for one function, say, the tongue for tasting, comes to be used for something new, such as speech in humans. In the same way, just because a ritual may fulfill its original evolutionary function by bonding a congregation together does not mean that the ritual only has this function; it also clearly functions to give each participant an experience of the self opening up or dissolving into a divine substrate. If one approaches the ritual with a conceptual framework in which God, the ground of all being, is a person with whom one can have a relationship, collective effervescence can flesh out the abstract understanding with first-person experience.
The use of theory of mind modules to see God as a person represents a repurposing of evolved hardware similar to the use of collective effervescence to feel as though one matters in the grand scheme of things. Where such cosmic meaning comes from mattering to a personal God rather than, for instance, mattering in the struggle for proletarian liberation, repurposed theory of mind is a prerequisite to repurposed collective effervescence. Theory of mind is critical not only because one must impute mental states to God, but also because high levels of mentalizing are necessary to come to a broad agreement on theological concepts and practices among a group of coreligionists (e.g., “I know that you believe that God loves all humans equally”).3 In this vein, Dunbar points out that schizotypal thinking, which involves hyperactive agency detection, is linked to greater religiosity, while people with autism, which involves a lower capacity for theory of mind, are about 10% as likely to be religious as neurotypical people.4 Just as the evolved capacity for group bonding through synchronized activity has been repurposed toward generating a sense of self-transcendence, the evolved capacity for theory of mind has been repurposed toward recognizing personhood in superhuman entities.
It is important to note that, while a community is necessary for the development of a doctrinal, institutional religion, and while groups may help to trigger experiences of God through collective effervescence, it is possible to lens outward without the direct involvement of other people. That is, it’s easier for many people to see how they might have a connection with planet Earth, with God, with the progress of dialectical materialism or what have you if they engage in a group effort to court such feelings by way of rituals, but it is not required. Outward lenses allow humans to feel abstractly that they matter in a cosmic sense, even though they may never meet any human to whom they matter or any member of the collective of which they feel themselves to be a part. In this way, a monk living alone in a hermitage feels a one-to-one relationship between himself and God without the involvement of any humans at any step. Such private outward lenses rely on mystical experiences just like any other lens, but they must take advantage of more individualized forms, which they share with the inward lenses.
Collective effervescence is only one type of potentially mystical experience, by which I mean an experience of a reality that goes beyond one’s everyday experience and in so doing reveals a deeper truth. Dunbar identifies mysticism as the heart of all religious behavior, providing the strongly emotional, first-person experience of the transcendent that forms the “motor of religiosity.”5 There are two main ways in which such experiences can be understood to reveal truth: what I’ll call “realist mysticism” and “virtualist mysticism.” Realist mysticism is the idea that mystical experiences are evidence of the literal truth of one’s beliefs. For example, a congregant experiencing collective effervescence and interpreting it concretely would say that what she is feeling is literally the Holy Spirit coming into her. Virtualist mysticism is the more skeptical position, holding that mystical experiences have no evidentiary value, but that they provide the opportunity to experience something like what is actually true from a first-person point of view. An example of this would be the same congregant experiencing collective effervescence, only this time, interpreting it as the result of a bodily process that can give an imperfect sense of what it will actually feel like when one is united with God after death.
Mysticism is available to those who lens inward as well as those who lens outward. As just stated, the outward lensers often (but do not always) use social rituals to generate mystical experiences. Inward lensers don’t generally obtain mystical experiences through group rituals, but rather do so by privately using psychedelics, practicing meditation or engaging in ascetic practices. For instance, certain types of meditation disrupt the default mode network – the network of brain regions associated with the construction of the self as a being with specified dimensions in time and space – leading to a sense that the barriers dividing oneself from everything else fade away. Combined with a convincing theoretical framework explaining why, in fact, the self is ultimately just a small, relatively insubstantial part of a vast whole, this experience can be interpreted as a true representation of reality. The realist conception is that this is literally the experience of the no-self which can reach an absolute pinnacle in Enlightenment, in which the self is extinguished entirely; the virtualist conception is that this experience is not actually capable of completely extinguishing the self, but that it can provide a sense of what it will be like when the self is ultimately destroyed after death. An actual experience of anatta (the Buddhist doctrine of no-self), whether realist or virtualist, is far more convincing than the conceptual understanding alone. In the cases of both individual meditation and group ritual, humans have discovered how to repurpose evolved capacities for focused attention and group bonding toward engagement with abstract conceptions of reality and our place in it.
Religion Without Revelation. Royal Wave, 2023 (originally 1927), p. 32.
How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures. Penguin, 2023, p. 146.
ibid. 166.
ibid. 121.
ibid. 48.