Can we know spiritual reality?

...Is such awareness possible...

...It requires investigators who practice the relevant forms of meditation or who are at least open to study testimonial material from those who do...

...Even more radically, when St...

...Or, less harshly, an empiricist can take up a form of relativistic Kantian perspective on beliefs and practices per- taining to spirit and spirits...

...And we should also realize that there are many levels of spiritual awareness, from the psychic, which is merely sensational and fascinating, to the sublimely loving, which is transforming...

...What the human mind brings to spiritual reality is not the whole story, for the human mind sometimes discerns spiritual reality, espe- cially during meditation...

...spiritual reality...

...Let us consider each of these briefly in turn...

...Or if they are not skeptical, they are puzzled and confused...

...Yet it provides the necessary though elemental basis for what can follow: the arduous process of radical transformation or trans- figuration in which we gradually uncover and surrender what- ever prevents our being lived by God...

...It tends to attribute all positive paranormal phenomena directly to God, provided that the ~'correct" doctrinal beliefs accompany them, and the rest to the devil...

...If so, I would simply assert that he is mistaken...

...This seemingly endless array of peccadillos, sweetheart deals, and improprieties touches officials as diverse as the counsel to the president, I I J. PATRICK DOBEL is assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan, Dear, born...

...In a review for Commonweal (July 15, 1983), I outlined her ingenious and insightful theories concerning why human be- ings have had beliefs and practices concerning spiritual reality...

...What we do bring varies from person to person and group to group, so our alleged knowing is relative to this...

...The main issue for me is whether a transfiguration can occur, as an Objective spiritual event which also involves surrender to the divine Spirit, not only for Jesus but also for us...

...This constriction is, in my view, a distortion of a legitimate pastoral caution which goes back to St...

...Concerning this, contempo- rary Christianity provides little counsel...

...but to regard these fantasies as realities is a reversion to a pre-enlightened, sub-human primitivism and superstition --so the empiricist assumes...

...DONALD EVANS A FEW YEARS AGO at a theological conference I heard a paper in which a scholar said something like this: "And St...

...As I heard these words I wanted to jump to my feet and protest: "Surely it's possible that St...

...Indeed, this perspective pervades academic thought in general today...

...Thus in various ways the intellectual climate of our age imposes severe intellectual constrictions on any Christian ex- ploration of spirit...

...But concerning spiritual reality Kantian and empiri- cist forget their quarrels and agree in rejecting any possibility that you and I can know directly, by experiencing or discerning what is there...

...Some epistemologies stress sociologi- cal influences, others select psychological influences or cultural-historical influences...

...And often the assumptions are unacknowledged...

...But there is a specifically Christian constric- tion as well, which emerged long before the Enlightenment...

...For others, it simply represents the prob- lems of individuals adjusting their business or entrepreneurial ethics to public office...

...How much more so for Jesus in prayer to God...

...Both existentialist theology and liberation theology are post-Enlightenment developments...

...When I asked a Benedictine monk and scholar why this is so, in contrast with, say, the tantric traditions of the East, his reply was that there has been a fear that Christians would become attached to the consolations of God at the expense of their focus on the God of consolations...

...Although individuals who join such groups and remain in them usually have non-spiritual motives which are open to investigation by secular psychology and sociology, the main explanation is often a satisfied search for spiritual reality...

...But we also cannot ignore the testimony concerning spirit from most human beings in human history prior to the so-called "enlightenment" in the West...

...Paul, whom I hear saying something like this: "Don't be egoistically preoccupied with spiritual phenomena such as visions or tongues or prophecies or ascents to the third heaven...

...The explanations are called in when someone claims to see a spook...

...But perhaps the disciples" report of this was amplified by them or by others so as to include talk about a change in Jesus's clothing...

...Nobody can discern such surrender and transparency unless he/she is at least beginning both spiritual awareness and personal surrender to the divine Spirit...

...This is an exciting and moment- ous discovery for most post-Enlightenment Westerners...

...He himself suggests that probably Jesus's facial appearance did change as he prayed...

...F EW CHRISTIANS today are clearly aware of themselves as spirit...

...Since for her, as for most academics today, such beliefs are false, their explanation must be sought in how the human mind works...

...No such explanations are available and adequate with reference to telepathy, clairvoyance, spiritual healing, spiritualistic phenomena, or transfiguration...

...Is it all superstition, or at best a kind of "faith-healing" in which our beliefs can somehow help us to get well --the placebo effect...

...But how a veridical vision differs from a private fantasy he does not indicate...

...Concern- ing this publicly observable world, common-sense empiricism may be qualified by Kantian caution concerning claims to know what is really there...

...9 ~. .;'~ Can we know .9J ": 'i...

...partly because there was a prevalent traditional notion ,that such a change can affect the clothing...

...But most non-fundamentalist bib- lical scholars seem to be skeptical concerning spiritual reality in general and the transfiguration story in particular...

...Paul can be read as little more than a pious inspirational pep talk unless, at the very least, we are aware of ourselves as spirit in a spiritual realm...

...The right wing of the adminis- tration possesses no abiding sense of public service and the...

...He notes that St...

...In general, the story is not interpreted literally, that is, in terms of an objective spiritual reality which people can sometimes discern...

...I am thinking of existentialist theology and liberation theology...

...It would be a monumental task to document this sweeping claim, but 1 can at least illustrate it by considering as a repre- sentative example a book entitled Transfiguration by a rela- tively conservative Anglican theologian, J.W.C...

...Accordingly, it is sheer superstition, supposedly, for me to claim to experience myself as spirit, to discern loving life-energy around my heart, to detect harmful or helpful spiritual influences at work between people at a distance, to see auras or feel vibrations around other people, to contact discarnate spirits of the dead, or to become aware of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven...

...What is DONALD EVANS i8 a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto...

...Both tend to reject as sheer superstition any alleged spiritual awareness...

...To a common-sense empiricist the real world is the publicly observable world, plus, perhaps, the human mind or center of consciousness inside each human body...

...Kant and Marx and Freud and Langer and Wittgenstein cannot be ig- nored...

...And if a social scientist won't test my claim by taking up meditation himself, he should be more genuinely agnostic concerning such claims, never assuming that non-spiritual explanations are adequate in accounting for people's convictions concerning spiritual reality...

...The skeptical version, a "hermeneutics of suspicion," exposes ideology by means of insights drawn from Freud or Marx or the sociology of knowledge...

...Elsewhere I have argued that both of these have deeply biblical roots and emphasize important truths...

...This is a tragic error...

...What matters is your openness to the Holy Spirit of love, your being lived by God in Christ as you surrender your old self-centered self...

...So far from regarding them as helps to faith we drape them 'in the decent vestments of symbol and myth.' 'Losing the humble sense of wonder, we only find queerness in the phenomena which our conceptual systems refuse to accommodate.' The difficulty about these alleged experiences is that they are individually so difficult to prove, and that, even when accepted as proven, they are almost always capable of a 'naturalistic explanation.' " Wand does go on to say that it is by no means impossible that some such unusual experience may lie behind the narrative of the trans- figuration, but his comment about "naturalistic explanation" remains...

...But although I concede this is possible, for me the onus of proof is on those who hold that the story is not true as it stands...

...The variations in what we bring to our awareness of the world depend on a variety of factors, any one of which can be selected for emphasis...

...What distinguishes our path is the privilege of identifying with the risen Jesus Christ in his completed tranfiguration and thereby in his healing and liberat- ing identification with the sick and the poor and the oppressed --other dimensions of Christian life which I have neglected in this necessarily one-sided essay...

...Indeed for many people the initial process is relatively easy: becoming aware of the vari- ous energy-centers of the physical body, beginning to see or to feel other people's energy-fields or spiritual bodies, learning how to channel healing energies to others, getting into contact with discarnate spirits who can help us or whom we can help, discovering the blurred boundaries between self and others in the spiritual realm plus the blurred agencies ("I yet not I...

...I totally agree with this, but a distorted outcome of this has been that there is little practical or theoretical teaching concerning the human spirit and the spiritual realm in Western Christianity...

...Luke emphasizes the trance-like sleepiness of the disciples, so probably the event was not physical but only mental...

...In such a process we Christians can draw on resources of spiritual wisdom from both our own heritage and non-Christian traditions...

...Similarly, problems of scriptural exegesis raised by biblical stories of allegedly objective spiritual healing raise issues concerning the possible reality of such healing for us...

...Such an empiricist has no resort to neo-K.antian explanations when someone claims to see a stone...

...In my asso- ciation with some of these groups I have often observed people becoming aware of themselves and others as spirit, perhaps for the first time in their lives...

...But for Langer the spirit-world is always and entirely a human creation, a fantastic delusion...

...Langer's account of the human mind resembles Kant's in that at its core it is a claim concerning how the human mind must work...

...After all, a person's face can "'light up," as we say, on seeing his beloved...

...The skeptic refuses to do so, the fideist opts for a framework, and the conservative does not question his or her framework...

...My own first impulse to inter- pret it literally was evoked thirty years ago when I first saw a fresco of the transfiguration by the great Florentine artist Fra Angelico...

...To be a Christian means to opt for Christian words and symbols...

...Paul tells us in Romans 8.16: "The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God," is he assuming that we are aware of our spirit...

...Why are all such spiritual claims so obviously false and fantastic for most con- temporary intellectuals, including theologians...

...For example, a person might believe that he felt a spirit of love in his heart because that's what the religious tradition taught, or because he was deprived of love in infancy and needed to believe this...

...It's a literal truth...

...In Volume III of her trilogy on the origins of the human mind (Mind: An Essay on Feeling), she explains the evolutionary origins of human belief in a spirit-world: gods and goddesses, devils and angels, souls of dead people and animals, spirits inhabiting not only persons but also animals and trees...

...The mind sometimes imaginatively creates fantasies of spiritual entities during abnormal states of consciousness such as dreams, reveries, trances, and meditations...

...In this book, published in 1967, he draws on many biblical scholars, comparing and appraising their accounts...

...Does the political misuse of a truth make it false...

...We should realize, of course, that spiritual awareness, especially at the lowest or purely psychic level, is no more intrinsically religious than awareness of physical body or emo- tions or mind...

...The central issue was why people join these move- ments and remain in them...

...Paul's caution against a sinful stance towards spiritual phenomena has become, in practice, an effective caution against the phenomena them- selves...

...For many people, the" sleaze factor" simply confirms what they always suspected about the greed which lies at the heart of any Repub- lican administration...

...But these words of St...

...Spiritual self-awareness is an essential part of the process by which eventually a person surrenders the whole self to the divine Source, so that he or she becomes a transparent channel for the divine Spirit, a luminous human being outshone by the divine Light...

...If he means an explanation which requires no reference to special divine intervention, I would agree with him...

...rather, they reflect something far more disturbing...

...We only know reality on our terms, and what these terms are we can deduce in a "transcen- dental" way...

...Even Jesus was tempted in the wilderness after the splendors of his baptismal experience, which could have twisted into an egoistic power-trip and even a pact with the devil...

...WHEN THERE IS NO SENSE OF THE PUBLIC REALM The political philosophy of sleaze I I I I III J. PATRICK DOBEL W lHAT PUNDITS and Democrats have labeled the "sleaze factor" will probably harrow the Reagan administra- tion for the rest of its tenure...

...Paul spoke of a spirit of love dwelling in the heart because that's where he experienced it --as countless others have in many different religious traditions, and as I have myself, especially during meditation, and as people have in secular psychotherapies such as bioenergetics...

...But existentialist theology tends to exclude, or at best blur, spiritual awareness, because it pro- poses only two metaphysical and epistemological pigeonholes: scientific investigation, and personal discovery, or creation, of meaning...

...In so far as contemporary theology is governed by this neo-Kantian relativism, we have a variety of approaches to epistemological questions, but they all agree in assuming that we can only study the human conceptual or linguistic framework which is brought to an alleged reality, not the reality itself, for it can only be discerned through the framework...

...BREAKING THE CONSTRICTIONS ON CHRISTIAN AWARENESS .9...

...He is convinced that the transfiguration narrative has a core of historicity, and that something significant happened...

...I I I really out there we cannot know...

...In depicting the change in the appearance of Jesus's face and clothing, Fra Angelico painted a literal oval-shaped aura which is analogous to those which 1 now realize is dis- cerned by people whom we today call psychics...

...Instead, we have "naturalis- tic" assumptions which rule out various paranormal events...

...The most that a typical social scientist can assume here is that one important motive may be a person's conviction that he or she has found spiritual reality...

...What if she is mistaken in this...

...I quote:"Such alleged inciddnts are generally viewed with dislike by minds trained only in the exact sciences...

...My own view is that such awareness is not only possible but necessary for an adequate awareness of the divine Spirit...

...Because their perspective combines what I will call a relativistic Kantianism and a common-sense empiricism...

...For Christians, this transfiguration happens through contemplative identification with Christ: "All of us, gazing on the Lord's glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed from glory to glory into his very image by the Lord who is the Spirit...

...Discernment of objective spiritual reality fits neither of these...

...Paul, following the traditional metaphor already used by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, spoke of a spirit of love dwel- ling in the heart...

...In reality, few of the incidents on the sleaze list represent either overt venality or personal corruption...

...Usually, however, empiricism and Kantianism are in conflict concerning knowledge of physical reality...

...Their origins can be explained sociologically, psychologically, or in terms of historical- cultural influences...

...What all these perspectives have in common is a rejection of any allegedly direct way of knowing reality...

...I should also note, briefly, two other features of the intellectual climate which have deeply influenced Christian theology, and which also impede awareness of oneself as spirit...

...Rather I have no initial reason to disbelieve the story because of the assumption that such things can't or don't happen...

...And a genuine surrender of the whole self to God, amply evidenced not only by positive paranormal phenomena but also by an abundance of the fruits of the Spirit is dismissed, or the ultimate blasphemy --it is attributed to Beelzebub, because the correct Christian beliefs are absent...

...For God," who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness' has shone in our hearts, that we in turn might make known the glory of God shining on the face of Christ...

...But liberal New Testament scholars today typically don't believe in auras...

...In relation to spiritual reality, relativistic Kantianism is often accompanied by a common-sense empiricism...

...Knowledge-claims are thus radically undermined...

...A wide variety of psychological and sociological explanations were proposed, but one kind of explanation which seems to me at least equally relevant was almost totally ov.erlooked: a spiritual explanation...

...If the stance is fideistic, the theologian makes an explicit leap of faith, putting his/her trust in a particular conceptual framework or "language-game" as the authoritative vehicle through which to know and by which to live...

...If Christians are to learn how to surrender the whole self to GOd, to be lived by God, they must have an awareness of self as spirit or spiritual body in complex interdependence with self as physical body, emotions, and mind...

...But I suspect that what he means by a "naturalistic explanation" is a non- spiritual explanation, for example, one in physical and/or psychological terms...

...Thus far we have looked at theological and social scientific assumptions concerning the question, "What can I know about spiritual reality...

...This relativism may be either skeptical, fideistic, or conservative...

...Hence many ex- periences of human spirit are misinterpreted as divine or diabolical intrusions...

...Charismatic Christianity, too, is partly post-Enlightenment --not concerning God, but concerning spirit, and in a different way...

...I F THEOLOGIANS are reluctant to accept any knowledge- claims concerning spiritual reality, it is not surprising to find that social scientists are also reluctant...

...These must be retained in spite of anything I say here...

...And liberation theology, while rightly recalling Christian thought and practice to the com- munal justice-commitment of the Hebrew prophets, some-times rejects all concern with the spiritual as an escapist sanctioning of the oppressive status quo: "You may be en- slaved and hungry now, but there is pie in the sky by and by...

...For St...

...But what if there is such pie in the sky, spiritual consolation in both this life and the next...

...Nor are they at ease in interpreting what happened when Moses and Elijah allegedly appeared as two discarnate spirits com- municating with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration...

...But whether one is skeptical, fideistic, or conservative, the common assumption is that I cannot directly know reality --especially spiritual ~, ~ issue is whether to trust any conceptual or sym- bolic framework which includes spiritual terms...

...In such a very typical combination of relativistic Kantianism and common-sense empiricism Kant's own agnosticism concerning physical reality is forgotten and is confined to spiritual reality...

...It is these assumptions which dictate the conclusions, not only for secular thinkers but also for many Christian theologians...

...The spiritual realm has its own "natural" structure and characteristics...

...It's no metaphor...

...She is amazed that human beings who are intelligent enough to carry on the practical affairs of life can possibly have imagined such absurdities and asserted them as facts...

...How can we begin to have such an awareness...

...There are various reasons for this...

...Here I resemble a fundamentalist, but not because I believe in the literal iner- rancy of scripture...

...None of this by itself leads to God, and all of this, like any human endeavor, can be perverted into a mere ego trip...

...Nevertheless I concede the remote historical possibility that the transfiguration of Jesus may not have happened at all, or that we may have only a simple story about a happy face in prayer which was amplified into a fantastic piece of religious propaganda...

...Wand does briefly consider an approach which might have led him in this direction, viewing the transfiguration as a "mystical phenomenon" alongside other alleged paranormal events in the lives of both Christian and non-Christian holy persons: clairvoyance, levitation, telepathy, etc...

...partly because the Hebrew concept of "glory," linked with the transfiguration by Luke, includes the notion of a shining, ganr~nt-like substance...

...Wand also notes that early Christian apologists arguing with the Jews could have been moved to depict Jesus as a new Moses being transfigured on a mountaintop and as a fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets who conversed there with Moses and Elijah...

...What if human discoveries of super-sensible realities are mixed in with the imaginative projections which she astutely describes...

...This perspective excludes the possibility of any direct awareness of spiritual reality...

...I have stressed the intellectual climate of our age, with its combination of Kantian agnosticism and common-sense empiricism...

...It may even be mistaken for an experience of God...

...Wand is not entirely skeptical...

...They share with neo-Kantian relativism and common-sense empiricism a rejection of pre-Enlightenment spiritual awareness as "superstition...

...Paul located a spirit of love in the heart, a group of social scientists' non-spiritual account of why people join new religious movements, and a philosopher's non-spiritual account of why most human beings in the past have believed in spirits...

...Being a Ch0stian means thinking as a member of a reliable historical-traditional community: "If Jeremiah and Ezekiel and then Paul spoke of a spirit of love dwelling in the heart, that is what I will think, too...

...His articles have appeared in Commonweal, Dissent, The American Political Science Review and The South Atlantic Quarterly...

...But a transfiguring surrender of the whole self can only occur if we are aware of our whole self, which includes our self as spiritual body...

...Such an event would be entirely intelligible and unsurprising to modern spiritualists and to participants in various non-Christian meditative paths...

...I readily concede that various non-spiritual explanations are still relevant...

...Since Kant, many diverse thinkers have fol- lowed him in emphasizing what the human mind brings to our awareness of the world, but differing from him in focusing, not on what we must bring to this awareness, but on what we do bring...

...There may be other reasons to disbelieve the story, or to see it as a composite, a kernel of truth plus a subsequent elaboration...

...Wand...

...What I would insist, however, is that there is a spiritual realm and that some forms of meditation enable a person to become aware of this realm...

...It just seems obvious that some non-spiritual explanations must be possible and that the onus of proof is entirely on the person who makes a claim concerning spiritual reality to show that every possible non-spiritual explanation has been ruled out...

...But that is a different kind of issue...

...Matthew refers to the event as a "vision" and that St...

...Several years ago I attended a conference in Berkeley on new religious move- ments...

...The conviction itself has to be explained by reference to nonspiritual factors...

...Kant's agnosticism concerning reality, including spiritual reality, is well known.9 All we can know, according to Kant, is how the human mind must shape sense-experience: the forms of space and time and the very general concepts or categories such as cause and substance which we humans impose on sense-experience, giving it an intelligible structure...

...Maybe, for example, a story about a resurrection-appearance was somehow transferred back into the earthly life of Jesus...

...What does he mean by this expression...

...Where the stance is an unreflective conservatism, there is no sense of choice in the matter...

...But for Wand this mental status does not make the event unreal...

...Then, although her explanations are still relevant, they are inadequate...

...Atypical philosophical approach can be seen in a recent book by the distinguished philosopher, Susanne Langer...

...Since Langer's claims arise from reflections on biology and evolution, we could call it an "evolutionarytranscendental" deduction...

...My own personal conviction is that the transfiguration of Jesus did take place and that it involved both what we now call "paranormal" changes discernible to psychics and also, more importantly, a total surrender and transparency of a human being in body, passions, mind, and spirit to the divine Spirit...

...This caution arises from a realistic sense of the subtlety and strength and pervasiveness of human narcissism, which can pervert all advances in spiritual awareness...

...Indeed he ends by calling the transfiguration a "veridical vision" which Jesus somehow shared with his disciples...

...Today, however, most Christians avoid spiritual pride in the same way that a pauper avoids material pride, by having little in which to be proud about...

...director of the CIA, head of the EPA, and various cabinet officers, not to mention many low-level appointees...

...Yet if we draw on some of the largely-lost resources within our Christian tradi- tion and if we have the humility to sit at the feet of teachers from non-Christian traditions who do provide wise counsel, we can readily come to know in our own experience a great deal concerning spiritual reality...

...The speaker at the theological conference exemplified an epistemological perspective which I discerned in nearly every paper I heard at that conference...

...And spiritual self- awareness has a special importance in all this because a mini- mal element of it seems to be necessary if we are to experience what surrender means in any of our aspects, not only the spiritual but also the physical, emotional, and mental...

...The whole investigation becomes much more complex...

...Often people continue in the new religious movement mainly because there they know they can continue this awareness of spirit, whereas outside --they assume or are taught --it is unavailable...

...Her explanations are very illuminating in accounting for why the spirit-world alleged by various individuals and com-munities differ, and in understanding some of the motivations of people both past and present who have come to believe in spirits and in life after death...

...What I mean by this is simply the assumption that experience is limited to sense-experience and that sense-experience of any alleged objective reality is limited to the publicly observable world --which is accessible to virtually everyone...

...And some epistemologies, fol- lowing Wittgenstein, depict our knowing as shaped by linguis- tic practices within a social "form of life...

...Now I am going to question some accounts provided by non-fundamentalist biblical scholars and theologians for the New Testament story concerning the trans- figuration of Jesus...

...Thus far I have questioned a theologian's non-spiritual account of why St...

...A person's new and exhilarating experi- ence of him/herself as spirit is often mistakenly assumed to be a visitation by the Holy Spirit, and an eruption from the emotional unconscious or a psychic invasion from another human being is mistakenly seen as a visitation by the devil...

...What Wand lacks is a metaphysical and epistemological framework in which one can distinguish between (1) publicly observable physical events, (2) private fantasies, and (3) ob- jective spiritual events which are partly discerned through what we today often call "psychic" awareness...

...Partly because hints of the miraculous tend to be exaggerated as a story is passed along...

...Such a spiritual explanation, however, is alien to social science, for it presupposes that there really is a spiritual realm which people sometimes discover...