The downside of anger

I’ve recently been forced to confront just how uptight I am all the time. This often translates into anger, but there’s always an anxious edge to it.

Recently I met a friend at a popular gallery in Melbourne’s green, hilly outer east. I got there almost exactly at the allotted time. In recent years, mainly because I hate the tension of driving along glancing at the clock every other second and feeling ridiculously guilty, I’ve become highly organised when meeting up with someone, ensuring I leave the house at a time that enables me to arrive at my destination neither early nor late.

Trouble is, my friends are often late. And increasingly I’m feeling an irrational amount of anger when this happens.

The friend I was meeting with at the gallery, D, isn’t always late; in fact, I can remember being a bit late when I met up with her a few months ago. Further back, I’ve been easily 10 or 15 minutes late and she’s always taken it calmly.

In this case, I realise it’s because of a growing neediness on my part. All my friends lead either busier or more emotionally fulfilling lives than I do (sometimes both). In the case of D, she often complains of being lonely and wanting a better social life as well as a partner, but her job as a primary teacher is hugely complex and involving. So I don’t see that much of her, and when she’s late I automatically take it as a sign of her low regard for me (I’ve just realised this, so perhaps I won’t react that way in future).

Ten minutes late, I know, is nothing. In fact it didn’t even inconvenience me; I didn’t even have to wait for her. I just paid, and went into the gallery, looking out for her at the entrance once in a while. No problem.

But I still – even though I tried not to – had a miffed edge to my voice when I greeted her. I apologised later on. But I can’t afford to alienate my friends; I don’t have that many! Why are my expectations of others so high when I frequently can’t live up to my expectations of myself?

D isn’t actually late all the time, but I have another friend, J, who is routinely late. Ten minutes after the agreed time is really pretty good for him. But he rides a bike and so I make allowances for him. I also think I understand his lateness – like me in the past, I reckon he is overly optimistic about the time it will take him to do whatever he has to do before leaving the house. I made these kind of miscalculations myself for years.

Given how reliable J is in his lateness, the simple thing to do would be to plan to turn up ten minutes past the time we’ve arranged. I tried to do this once and it didn’t work; there was so little traffic on the road and I still got there on time despite my best efforts. He was a good ten minutes late as usual, and I sat there reading the paper yet again (I’ve learned to take a newspaper along so at least I’ve got something to do).

I swear the episode at the gallery with D was meant to force me to a point of self-awareness about my anger. For another, small trigger occurred a couple of hours later when we queued for the cafe at the gallery premises. Recently renovated, it’s a stark modernist design in black, with sleek glass walls so you can see all the goings-on inside, and a paved outdoor area surrounded by a low wall. Lone cafes at recreational destinations are notorious for being poorly managed and ripping off their customers, and this one was a shining example. A good excuse for my underlying anger to come out and put on its own little show.

We joined the tiny queue, a patient young couple slouching resignedly in front of us. Glancing through the window, an empty table, and a few minutes later another two, became evident. The young waitress, who had kind, smiling eyes and was wearing a long butchers apron, patiently explained that the tables were being cleaned and they’d be ready any minute.

I moaned and groaned to D, admitting that I was becoming like the men in the TV show Grumpy Old Men (without the slightest bit of rancour, she agreed with me). The couple in front of us were stoically silent.

After the couple had been let in and more and more tables seemed to become empty while we continued to queue, I asked the waitress if we could go inside, and then I asked her if we could sit at the table before it was clean. Luckily for my sanity she agreed both times.

Despite my irrational response, it’s doubtless that these kinds of places are organised with the convenience of the staff in mind rather than the customers. D and I agreed that in the favourite inner city precincts we’re used to, as soon as you set foot in a place they rush you to a table, spirit a wettex out of thin air as they say brightly ‘are you eating today or just drinks?’, wipe down the table with slick efficiency and then before you can say Jack Sprat, park a bottle of tap water and two glasses in front of you.

Finally we were seated, table cleaned and orders taken, and the waiter managed to be overly generous with my mineral water (they’d run out of small bottles so he poured me two generous serves from a large one) and stingy with D’s cappuccino (served in a cup that was conspicuously smaller than a standard tea cup). But I’d confided to D that my anger – my inability not to take the world’s unending imperfections to heart – seemed to be getting worse and I wanted to do something about it.

Apart from my neediness, I think part of the source of my anger is a deep-seated anxiety, a sense that if I don’t get to do what I want when I want the world will collapse into chaos. Often as I’m preparing for some social event I’ll notice that my shoulders are hunched. It’s as if I’m unconsciously preparing for World War Three instead of meeting up with a few people. My brain’s on alert, expecting some social catastrophe to develop if I don’t steel myself.

At these times I consciously relax my shoulders and start telling myself that there’s no need to be tense. This helps a bit, but it’s a very strong habit. While social anxiety is different from the anxiety I felt waiting for a seat in the cafe (perhaps it would be hours before we got in ...) they’re both about wanting to maintain control of an outcome – a futile goal.

I think that lack of control is why I also have a problem with mobile phones. I hate it when my friends’ phones ring while I’m socialising with them (I get particularly angry when this happens while they’re at my place).

But I’ve devised a new strategy to deal with this – I hope it’s not passive aggressive, but the jury’s still out. From now on if a friend’s mobile rings I immediately busy myself doing something, whether it’s checking my own phone messages, reading the paper, or writing a list of some kind. If they’re visiting at my place and their phone rings, I can leave the room while they’re talking and clear dishes, or even hop on the computer if it’s already on and check my email. If I’ve run out of things to do, one option is to simply go to the loo and take a few deep breaths.

Anyway, whatever the causes of my anger, I don’t want to be that reactive. It doesn’t change the world issues that concern me so much, it doesn’t change my own situation and it doesn’t change the habits of my friends. It just makes me tense and unhappy. I need to learn to step out of my anger and back into the moment, however challenging and imperfect it is.

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A peaceful period?

the warts have gone (after months of basically digging them out of my heel with nothing but a small blade and a jar of salicylic acid)

the hives have gone (okay so I had to give up yet another food – tinned tuna)

the dermatitis has gone (thanks to nasty cortisone cream which is definitely not recommended, but where the dermatitis was it doesn’t matter!)

the neighbours with the constantly howling dog have gone (she had a good life but cried whenever they left her alone in the house – now my neighbours are spookily quiet, for the first time in decades)

the real estate sales manager who wanted to look through and value the flat has gone (he might come back but it’s only 15 per cent likely)

my walking-sister’s-dog-in-the-park arrangement has gone (this is sad for many reasons but also signals an end to the ongoing conflict with, and need to see on a regular basis, one of my difficult sisters)

the rats have gone (not completely but I haven’t seen or heard one in weeks, and there’s nothing for them to eat at my place anyway)

the cockroaches have not gone (and I can’t bring myself to kill them these days, I’ve become an involuntary Buddhist)

Barnaby Joyce has not gone (and sadly will be on the political scene for some time)

climate change has not gone (but I have with much difficulty resigned myself to its implications)

I seem to be moving into a peaceful period – but I’m almost too scared to write that. If this is just a lull in my ongoing struggle with the world, not to mention my own body, then so be it! I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Bottoms up! (Quaffs some mineral water and daringly eats some raw cashews.)

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In the land of Minor Mishaps

Recently I entered the land of the Minor Mishap. Those experiencing Minor Mishaps belong for a short time to a very unexclusive club.

A Minor Mishap doesn’t involve serious illness or death, and is not annoying enough to be soul destroying, but it usually requires that SOMETHING BE DONE. It demands to be given priority.

When you’re in the throes of a Minor Mishap you’re in a slightly different space from everyone else, floating a few inches above them. When you are speaking to anyone about the problem your voice carries urgency, purpose and a touch of desperation. You are driven by an overwhelming need to restore the world to exactly what it was once was. You no longer want a partner or more money or world peace. You just want what you had before – your version of normalcy, which, since it has been snatched from you, has suddenly become incredibly precious and sacred.

Minor Mishaps often involve parting with money that one would rather spend on fun and frivolity. Action is important, sometimes just for the sake of keeping the momentum going, even if it achieves next to nothing.

Minor Mishaps that can’t be fixed right away gradually stop being mishaps and become absorbed into normal life – in this case, the experience of ‘normal life’ changes to incorporate the Minor Mishap. I rent a crumbling semi-detached flat, so house-based Minor Mishaps in the form of needed repairs are incredibly frequent. If it’s not an electricity power point needing replacing it’s the hot water system in the roof calling it a day or the guttering on the garage detaching from the bricks and hanging down in a very undignified way.

But basically after I’ve reported the needed repair someone else has to sort it out. This doesn’t always happen straight away and if it drags on the Minor Mishap loses that urgent quality, and I stop noticing it.

A computer-based Minor Mishap is arguably worse than many others because sometimes, although you know something must be done, you don’t know exactly what. You’re like a detective hunting out the clues. You can call on experts but there’s no guarantee they will know either.

The Mishap strikes

One day last week at about 7 am, I turned on my right arm, I mean my computer. The green light went on but, apart from that, nothing happened. It was no longer a computer but a worthless box of tin. Or so it seemed.

I had reason to be devastated. A similar incident had occurred when I first moved into the place I’m in now, five and a half years ago. Back then, when I first set my computer up and switched it on, a flame briefly leered from the top back section where the fan is, and my computer died in a puff of smoke. I still have the disk drive, but such was the damage that it wasn’t apparent whether or not the files were retrievable – a specialised company charging a megafortune would have billed me for even investigating the drive to see if they could retrieve the files, and I wasn’t going to risk it. So when this second computer malfunction happened, I assumed at first that computer Armageddon had occurred for a second time.

Because I knew the nearest library had plenty of computers for public use and I had a file to send to a client (luckily saved onto a USB key), I planned to go there tout suite. But the library didn’t open till 10. In the meantime, I went to mum and dad’s, where my technologically challenged father, currently using a hard drive so ancient it is a priceless antique, has had a slightly newer hard drive sitting in his ‘study’ (storeroom) for a year waiting to be connected. My brother-in-law got it free from his work when they were upgrading. None of us had a clue what state it was in.

(As a bonus, I saw my recently born nephew Billy, as my sister from the country was staying with my parents. Last time I saw Billy he was too new to make eye contact: this time the bald-headed angel looked straight at me with friendly curiosity before his face crumpled as if he was about to burst into wails.)

I lugged Dad’s heavy hard drive to my place and set it up, hoping I could use it to send my work file. The screen came to life in a blaze of incomprehensible text. In my Windows-primed brain, I had simply assumed that I would see the familiar aqua screen with the reassuring software logos on it, good old Explorer and Word. Nothing of the sort. It was speaking to me in computer language I didn’t understand. At least I now knew that the problem with my own computer had nothing to do with the monitor, seemingly nothing to do with the external electricals, and was almost certainly in the hard drive.

In pouring rain, feeling alone and sorry for myself, I managed to get to the library and send the work file with a great deal of fuss and panic; so scrambled was my brain I had to make two trips because I’d left the email address at home.

Luckily my dad knew a computer man in a cheap part of town who’d sold him a monitor and also did repairs. It turned out to be one of those reassuring small shopfronts with disembowelled computers and equipment strewn all over table tops and the floor, a bit like body parts in an operating theatre. The very nice man, Mark, told me it was a simple electrical part in the hard drive that had died and he could fix it in ten minutes for only $75 – he actually showed me my computer firing up using his own electrical equipment: my files were safe! Normalcy, sweet normalcy, beckoned.

But then. When I took the hard drive home after Mark had fixed it, it did exactly the same thing as before. I rang Mark back, carefully presenting the scenario as an incomprehensible problem and not his fault. He told me to bring it back and he would test it again.

He tested the drive twice while I watched, using his own monitor, and it fired up beautifully. He was genuinely bamboozled. The plot had thickened.

Luckily, waiting to be served in the shop was a tall, solidly built man wearing an old blue singlet and shorts, with greying hair skirting his shoulders and the intense but calm gaze of the computer literate – the sort of man that you just know loves both computer games and a beer. He could hardly ignore the desperation in my voice as I spoke to Mark and to the concerned woman who I think was Mark’s wife. I can’t remember who said it first, but either he or Mark said something like ‘Have you got surge protection?’ The penny dropped. I did have surge protection – a power board that would presumably cut out in a storm surge. For some reason, it must have decided the power from my computer was a threat, and shut off the electricity to it while allowing power to the other components.

‘Just get a normal power board’, the blue-singleted man said. ‘You don’t even need surge protection unless you live out of town or in the hills.’

I thanked them all profusely and took my now rather scratched hard drive home again. This time I didn’t actually believe it would fire up – and it did. I’m now typing on it, but I’ve noted something else about a Minor Mishap – when normalcy returns, it takes a while to actually feel normal. My whole world had swayed and threatened to collapse. Without my computer, I now realise, I don’t feel quite whole – and I’m still recovering from the shock. Sad but true.

(I’m fine about spending the $75 – the part Mark replaced was five years old and usually dies after two, and he kindly removed all the dust from the insides as well – and there was a lot.)

Throughout my semi-ordeal my friend Simon was a calm voice on the other end of the phone – I rang him at least four times. He kept directing me to find out what the problem was rather than assuming I had entered the computer stone age. I think he has missed his vocation – with his sane, logical approach he should definitely go into counselling (he can practise on me any time!).

The other thing I learned from this experience, as I contemplated the possible need to get a new computer, is that I am a hopeless Windows junkie. No matter how alluringly the Apple shop beckons, with its blue-T-shirted, smiling dudes coolly offering me their insanely customer-focused tuition and support options, their impeccable and reasonably priced back-up software, and no matter how the pearly surfaces of the iMacs gleam as they power silently and wirelessly through their beautifully constructed programs, I cannot change, not yet anyway. I am yours, Windows. Another unavoidable if regrettable truth.

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'God, the universe and everything': Part 3

In my last entry I looked at the reasons why I disagree with Richard Dawkins’ dismissal of the existence of some version of a non-scripture-based God that can co-exist alongside Darwinian evolution. In this entry I’ll talk further about my experiences, and detail my problems with Dawkins’ critique of the spiritual marketplace.

Introduction

Years ago, long after they had originally parted company, religion and science were able to exist quite comfortably side by side. Each more or less kept out of each other’s realm. Then Creationism began advancing like a cancerous growth, attacking science on its own territory. Scientists rightly felt that they could no longer simply defend their territory, but had to attack the very heart of the enemy, its truthfulness. Hence, Dawkins led the charge with his masterpiece of reasoned argument, The God Delusion.

Yet there were people who, while in favour of science, acknowledged a layer of experience that seemed to supplement the known material world. These people were willing to live with uncertainty about what that extra layer consisted of, given the limited scientific knowledge we currently have about how the material world actually works. Many of them retained from their religious upbringings the idea of a higher intelligence that was a force for good in the world, but, sometimes through studies of Eastern religions and practices, were able to experience this force rather than merely believe in it intellectually. When scientists began attacking the values of these people, and telling them their precious layer of experience was purely a product of their imaginations, they had gone too far, way beyond their authority and expertise.

Such scientists also failed to acknowledge that the demand by feminists and civil rights activists that doctors take account of human rights, agency and subjectivity had improved the practice of medicine, while their own protocols had also benefited from this demand.

Experiences of the spiritual in a 12-step program

One way in which I’ve experienced some kind of spiritual force at work is through membership of a 12-step program.

Most people will have heard of 12-step programs. They seek to help members beat various addictions by using the 12 steps originally created by Alcoholics Anonymous. Members supposedly gain freedom from addiction by undertaking various tasks and practices as they work through the steps.

Although 12-step programs aren’t religious, they are usually spiritual, as the second step indicates: ‘Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity’. The process of letting go control to harness a Higher Power is seen as a necessity for beating the addiction; the belief that willpower alone is not enough is an important aspect of this process. (Atheists can also benefit, as there is no restriction regarding what one’s Higher Power actually consists of – some believe it is a kind of higher self. And an atheist might view the letting go process as acceding to, say, the healing abilities of one’s unconscious mind.)

I was in a 12-step program for about six years. I don’t believe these programs are perfect, nor that they’re suitable for everybody – there are many aspects of my former program I’m now critical of, and perhaps I’ll detail them in a future blog entry. But for those who can ‘take what they want and leave the rest’ (as the programs themselves advise) they do provide a structure for developing a spirituality that is neither captive to the materialism and positive thinking of some of the new age spiritualities, or dependent on belief in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

Many people in my program developed their spirituality very consciously; a few went on to join Christian churches while others embraced or flirted with Eastern religions. It was common for members who ‘shared’ (spoke to the meeting about their ‘experience strength and hope’ with the program) to relate some of their spiritual experiences.

As I said, my 12-step program was far from perfect. But the meeting I mainly attended was in the inner city, and there were plenty of creative types who, while they took the program seriously, didn’t get religious or overly hung up about it. They were trying to let go of ‘self-will’, which led them not only to a compulsion for the addictive substance but to behaving in ways that were generally harmful. Letting go of self-will meant, for these people, finding a kind of authentic path that was a mixture of their own deepest desires and the will of this Higher Self or Higher Power.

I know it sounds kooky, but for people who really grappled with it, this process seemed to result in an ever-increasing experience of their humanity. I saw men and women who’d never had relationships get married and have kids, I saw the career-focused get promotions, the work of the artistic types flourish, and throughout this the grappling and the letting go continued but the joy also increased. Of course I saw much failure and many setbacks as well (mine included) – I hope I’m not glossing this. And the program says you need to stay in it forever to avoid the addiction, but eventually many people seem to simply grow out of it.

Members of the program seemed to be helped along by some of these spiritual experiences I’ve been talking about, particularly synchronicity. One of them put it this way: ‘There are subtle energies …’ I think I know what she meant.

I wonder if, for some members, being sensitive to the feelings of others and the suffering of the world in general helped to fuel their addiction in the first place. I recently heard a writer on the radio referring to such people as ‘empaths’ – those with a surfeit of empathy with the world and a high degree of sensitivity to others. When you drop the addictive behaviour, you return once more to a sometimes painful openness to the world, and you have to learn to deal with it. You may then start to experience the kinds of uncanny connections that I discussed in the previous post.

I see the difference between spirituality and being religious this way: life is suffering, but it can also hold joy. Learning how to deal with the former and grappling with faults in order to reach more of one’s potential and experience more of the latter are worthwhile human projects. Some version of God and a spiritual ‘layer’ over everything is helpful for some people in this process.

What religion does, in contrast, is acknowledge that life is suffering and promise the seeker some kind of refuge from it. But in doing so, it imposes a whole extra layer of suffering by placing bans on perfectly normal human behaviour, mainly relating to sex and reproduction. It then offers the ‘carrot’ of salvation for bearing this extra burden of suffering. Meanwhile, the person’s original faults and difficulties are still not attended to, or not in a way that’s always helpful or realistic, and they will probably develop additional faults while trying to stick to the bans.

Dawkins debunks the spiritual

When the spiritual aspects of life are mixed up with making money, there is the capacity to mislead, and I can understand Dawkins getting angry about psychics and spiritual practitioners who do so. In his television series The Enemies of Reason, he sets out to mock and dismantle what he sees as outrageous claims of psychic abilities by self-styled mediums and mystics and of healing by alternative health practitioners. He believes that this sector has become popular because people have been dumbed down and have no idea of the important role of science and medicine in maintaining health and technological process. Yet he makes his point in a peculiarly disingenuous way.

Anyone with any interest in this topic would assume that, with the resources of a network at his disposal, Dawkins would go straight to the top, interviewing internationally successful mediums like Alison DuBois and John Edwards and paranormal researchers like Rupert Sheldrake and Gary Schwartz (Dawkins did interview Sheldrake at some point, but, according to the latter, dismissed his evidence without being willing to discuss it).

Instead, Dawkins is shown popping along to a psychic fair and choosing the first person he sees to give him a reading. The male ‘medium’ uses tarot cards to direct his intimations. He proceeds to state a number of propositions about dead relatives of Dawkins, none of which appear to be even remotely accurate.

It would be clear to an amoeba that the guy was giving what’s known as a cold reading – fishing about for information or presenting information so general it could apply to almost anyone. You didn’t have to be psychic or even particularly intelligent to work that out. Later in the program, Dawkins visits a whacky woman who waves her arms in the air and tells him she has healed his damaged DNA.

Of course, the point he’s making is that the selling of such ‘services’ is totally unregulated. And yes, much of it is a sham. Homeopathy is just water. Chinese medicine is a fascinating area worthy of exploration (it’s based on herbal medicine after all) but much of what is taught may not have kept up with medicine’s ever-increasing knowledge of bodily processes, and needs to be much more integrated with this knowledge.

Positive thinking, meanwhile, has been shown to be damaging. (However, more and more personal growth teachers seem to be ditching positive thinking and embracing mindfulness, while mainstream psychology is also embracing mindfulness as a treatment for anxiety, depression and chronic pain – a fascinating convergence of the alternative and mainstream.)

When people are making money out of this realm it’s quite proper to start asking questions. But fully qualified doctors aren’t pilloried because of the existence of quacks. More disturbingly, as a side issue, there seems to be an astonishing lack of regulation when it comes to conventional over-the-counter medicines. Many of them seem to provide the most superficial short term relief with dangerous side effects if taken in the long term; synthetic antihistamines, and nose drops containing cortisone, are just two examples. Yet Dawkins isn’t at all interested in the shortcomings of conventional medicine – shortcomings that are responsible for people seeking out alternatives in the first place.

When it comes to regulating mediums, the answer is simple: establish a registration process that is overseen by a peak body. The registration process would include completion of an accredited course that culminates in an exam. However, I can’t see Dawkins advocating something like this. If phenomena such as mediumship and psychic healing are in all cases a sham, then there is no point in regulating them – thus creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. The genuine seeker can’t win in Dawkins’ universe.

Sadly, in this television program, Dawkins makes the same mistake that he accuses the subjects of the program of making. While complaining about dumbing down, he dumbs down his own message, oversimplifying the issues that surround the spiritual marketplace and public attitudes towards science and the medical profession.

Some problems with Dawkins’ brand of scepticism

Something I find particularly annoying is the intellectual inconsistency of scientists working in this area. For example, scientists are constantly discovering neuroscientific explanations for formally inexplicable phenomena, even the grief-stricken receiving visitations from the dead. In such cases, when scientists think they can explain it as a product of the known universe, in many cases the brain, they will listen to and respect the truthfulness of such anecdotes. However, when they can’t, they will simply ridicule such evidence.

The Third Man phenomenon is a good example of this. A recently published book by John Geiger details this fascinating experience, which is now recognised by scientists. As mountain climbers toil up a slope in freezing storms, as lone sailors stare death in the face in raging seas, or single pilots lose sight of the horizon in the pure white of a snow storm, they often see and feel a calm, wise, loving presence close by them. Sometimes the presence is just there to offer a sense of reassurance, while in other instances it steers the ship or plane in a storm and holds course, sometimes almost miraculously.

This very common experience suggests that a kind of ‘higher self’ actually manifests as a separate entity in situations of extreme danger. The book includes many, largely consistent, examples of this ‘third man’ (the experiencers were usually men) feeling and seeing this loving, guiding presence.

Neuroscientists now believe that this phenomenon is purely a function of the brain, and that it’s a marvellous survival mechanism. If so, that raises the question of the kind of feats of knowledge the brain might be capable of. How does this presence know how to lead these adventurers out of danger? If it’s a hallucination, why is it always so reassuring and kind? I don’t dispute that the Third Man seems to be a kind of brain projection; but it certainly raises questions about the kinds of knowledge and guidance that the human brain has access to. Again, it confounds the dichotomy between the inside and the outside of the self.

In the case of the Third Man Factor, a large number of anecdotes were eventually treated as data by scientists. But what about the kind of anecdote in which the subject senses a loved one is going to be badly injured or die before they hear the bad news, or actually sees an apparition of a person they thought was alive, only to hear a few hours later that they’re dead; or has a disturbing, very emotional dream of the loved one’s death or injury?

This is an incredibly common experience, yet because there’s no way scientists can explain this experience in terms of existing knowledge about how the brain works, they simply dismiss it as coincidence: a certain percentage of people will think about a loved one on any particular day; a certain percentage of those loved ones will happen to die on that day. This response ignores the subjective power, the emotional quality, the sense of presence that characterise these experiences.

This is part of the cause of the problem that Dawkins’ television program, The Enemies of Reason, compounds – if we ridicule everyday experiences of the unknown, then those who experience the world in this way will simply turn away from science because it is not interested in their reality. They will turn to the world of the occult and the new age because this area seems to be willing to countenance a wider definition of what it actually means to be human.

There’s one more thing I need to say about this before the end of the post. Of all the abilities that rationalists like Dawkins dispute, the one that surprises me most is telepathy.

Non-human mammals can communicate using noise but they can’t express ideas in words like humans can, nor do they have the technology to communicate when they’re a long way away from other members of their clan or pack. It seems that some kind of basic telepathy within a clan or pack would be incredibly useful for evolutionary purposes. One of Sheldrake’s areas of research interest is the seeming ability of some domestic cats and dogs to know when their owners are on the phone or about to come home (excluding other factors, such as routine, that might alert them).

It would seem logical, too, that if humans had once had this capacity they would quickly lose touch with it once the written word, and later communications technology, could do the job so much better.

Anyway, these three blog entries have detailed some of my thoughts on a huge topic and I’m quite happy for readers to disagree with anything I’ve said. Most importantly I now have Richard Dawkins out of my system – for the time being!

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'God, the universe and everything': part 2

In my last entry I looked at Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a stunningly effective attack on the evils of organised religion. In this post I’ll try to explain why I disagree with Dawkins’s accompanying dismissal of the existence of some version of God.

(I'm a bit worried about revealing my views on spirituality as blatantly as I do in this entry -- I'm concerned that some readers will judge those views as, well, very nutty! So be it. I welcome comments, although I'm having a bit of trouble with comments being only partly legible at the moment, and am trying to sort this out. )

As outlined in my last post, I share many of Dawkins’s concerns about religion, and, given the rise of the Religious Right and creationism, I have a huge amount of sympathy with his fears for the future of Enlightenment thinking.

What I don’t agree with is his complete dismissal of a non-denominational belief in some kind of divine intelligence, or at least a spirituality that can encompass human capabilities that scientists are yet to explain.

The central problem with Dawkins’s stance is that he mishandles the very thing that is most oppressed, enslaved and exploited by religion – humanity’s capacity for spirituality. Dawkins ends up doing exactly the same injustice to spirituality as religion does. (Admittedly, the same accusation can’t be levelled at all atheists.)

In this regard, the devil is in the detail, so to speak.

The God of Dawkins

Part of the problem with Dawkins’s broad approach is that the God he grapples with is always, within human culture, first and foremost a set of conflicting concepts rather than a being. Whether or not you believe in a divine intelligence that’s exterior to the human brain, an invocation of God can enable access to one’s most altruistic, positive aspects; it could also be an incitement to feel hatred and do evil. Even prior to the question of his or her independent existence, the God Dawkins seeks to pin down is a moving target.

Nevertheless, Dawkins makes very clear from the get-go the kind of God he is disputing:

An atheist …is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to … embrace it within the natural. (p. 14)

Elsewhere, Dawkins defines the God he is critiquing as ‘a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us’ (p 31).

Dawkins bases his non-belief in this kind of God on probability theory. He asserts that, although we can’t actually prove that there is no God at this point (and an extremely unlikely proposition shouldn’t have to be proven anyway), we can be almost certain there isn’t.

I don’t argue with Dawkins’s insistence that it’s absurd to have an abstract belief in God without any evidence. But personal experience, for the average person, does itself constitute a kind of evidence.

So it’s tempting for me to pore over the above quotes like a progressive biblical scholar trying to give a challenging scriptural passage the interpretation that favours my view of the world, and try to find an opening for a belief in a layer of spiritual experience that could perhaps encompass some notion of God. That’s not impossible to do: the qualification ‘except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand’ seems to leave the way open for scientists to validate everyday ‘spiritual’ experiences that are yet imperfectly understood.

Further, Dawkins does not dismiss transcendental experience, only what he sees as the false premises it is often based on. He wants readers to discover an awe and excitement in the universe that science is revealing to us. He describes his unending wonder at this universe and nature in general as ‘a quasi-mystical response’ that is ‘common among scientists and rationalists’ (p 11). He believes that humans can feel a transformative wonder simply by observing the accidental beauty of the world.

So perhaps Dawkins is, after all, cautiously open to the idea that humans may possess spiritual capabilities yet to be discovered by science? Perhaps he can validate the aspects of lived experience that materialists so often dismiss? Perhaps we’re simply talking about a different level of materialism?

Unfortunately, Dawkins soon puts the lid on this possibility. Of personal experience as an argument for belief, he’s disappointingly cliched and reductionist. Think you hear an inner guiding voice? Check into the nearest psychiatric facility.

Dawkins sees no difference between a religious delusion (Bush thinking the Old Testament God is telling him to bomb Iraq) and the painstaking task of uncovering and starting to listen to one’s innate inner guidance. (Is a strong inner force pushing you away from a particular job, relationship or trip, despite the urgings of your rational mind or the insistence of a loved one? Better ignore it.) It’s no surprise that ‘spirituality’, ‘non-denominational spirituality’ and ‘near-death experiences’ aren’t included in the book’s substantial index.

These are bleak alternatives indeed: a purely materialistic universe that abhors any aspect of human experience that cannot yet be explained by science; or a rigid, judgemental god who hates the erotic urges of the human body. In both cases, some aspect of the human is being repudiated. Although I disagree with those critics who accuse Dawkins of being religious about atheism, I can’t help seeing a connection between the different ways that both science and religion deny aspects of human experience. In both cases, they are telling us we can’t trust ourselves.

Evidence for God?

Given that there’s so much still to discover about the material world, it seems an odd time to be totally dismissing some version of God, and particular human capabilities often associated with such a belief. How can we, at this early stage of our knowledge, claim that we know enough to dismiss a dimension of the body and the mind that is only termed ‘spiritual’ because we haven’t yet pinpointed how it operates?

New findings in physics continue to upend accepted ideas about how the world works. We now know that energy and matter are interchangeable – scientists can turn energy into matter and the other way round. Furthermore, some kinds of subatomic particles that have once been linked together continue to act as if they are still linked, even when they’re separated; this is one of the mysteries of quantum mechanics. It’s a mainstream scientific fact, but it raises many basic questions about how legitimate it is to assume that, in the absence of technology, communication can only take place between living creatures if they’re in actual physical proximity to each other.

Physics also shows us that the very idea of objectivity is flawed. A number of experiments have demonstrated that particles behave differently depending on how they are being observed. In other words, subjectivity is built into the operations of matter on a quantum level (this is not to denigrate scientific attempts at objectivity).

Since the nineteenth century, parapsychologists have been investigating layers of experience that appear to defy scientific understandings of the material world. These researchers seek to ‘investigate the existence and causes of psychic abilities and life after death using the scientific method'.

What they are investigating are the scientifically inexplicable experiences of hundreds of thousands of people throughout human history. These include telepathy, premonitions, serendipity, apparitions and intuition. These experiences and skills don’t actually require a belief in a supreme being, but they’re often associated with a non-denominational version of God, and placed under the umbrella term ‘spiritual’. The consensus in most scientific circles is that they are either a load of hogwash, or emanate purely from the brain.

I think that the way these experiences are represented in the media is part of the problem. For example, in popular culture telepathy is as an ability of some superheroes. (Ironically, some prominent sceptics mistakenly use telepathy as an explanation for the power of mediums – they find it a more ‘rational’ explanation than communication with the dead.) Meanwhile, the US army has received funding to develop a kind of synthetic telepathy, although it’s quite different in kind from the one I’m talking about.

Unlike popular culture representations, my experiences of the 'uncanny' are always very subtle and always tied up with relationships. For example, I only experience some version of telepathy once in a blue moon, and with someone I’m connected to in some way; it’s not that I’m constantly picking up on other people’s thoughts. Similarly, the only premonitions I've had are very occasional strong images of some emotional or physical state being experienced by someone I’m close to; feeling inexplicably sad before receiving very bad news; or having a strong sense that a particular outcome that a friend was hoping for wasn't going to happen -- all very subjective, of course.

For me these experiences are short flashes; I don’t at all see myself as particularly psychically gifted. This presents a central problem for science: none of my experiences would be remotely testable in a laboratory.

Intuition, similarly, is an inner guiding force that I’d be lost without. It was there all the time, but I’ve had to gradually uncover it and to some extent I’ve learned to trust it. Usually it’s a feeling or intimation within, but seems to come from a deeper place than everyday emotions. I’ve learned through painful experience to follow my intuition – and I would like to think that I’d do so without hesitation if I was about to walk down the ‘wrong’ dark street, catch the ‘wrong’ plane etc.

For most people, the experiences I’ve described are never going to constitute a gift that they can make a living out of. They’re simply a utilisation of part of the brain that was ignored or closed down in the past, often simply through a conventional upbringing and education.

However, scientists like Dawkins ignore the fact that an openness to non-rational aspects of the world is not always voluntary, but may be a byproduct of an adverse event like an addiction or even a near-death experience. When we discover new aspects of ourselves we encounter the world in ways that are sometimes deeply uncomfortable.

When Dawkins tries to tell me that these experiences are bulldust, it’s a bit like him telling me that he can't see, and therefore the belief that I can is simply an illusion; and that he won't rest until I’m walking around with my eyes closed, bumping into things that I would otherwise see coming and be able to avoid.

Certainly science needs to avoid strenuously a belief in ‘common sense’; but that’s quite different from dismissing the lived experiences of millions of people – in fact, common sense might be the unacknowledged basis of the excessive scepticism of some scientists in this area.

Parapsychologists are not the only scientists who swim against the tide. A minority of scientists in a variety of fields have rebelled against a scientific establishment made up of what they call ‘pseudosceptics’ rather than the open-minded sceptic that a true scientist needs to be. These maverick scientists claim that, in debunking any human capability that threatens their worldview, such as telepathy, pseudosceptics fall back on grossly inadequate evidence and faulty logic.

Rupert Sheldrake, for example, has developed a theory of morphogenetic fields and of morphic fields to explain respectively the growth of plants and animals, and mental abilities like telepathy (interestingly, his theory does not rely on, and appears to be uninterested in, a belief in God).

Further evidence – near death experiences

Of course, the weirdness of physics and unexplained psychic experiences isn’t in itself evidence of God. However, evidence for the existence of some kind of non-denominational higher intelligence can be found in the extensive field of near-death studies, which is a subject of interest not only to neuroscience but also to sociology, psychology and philosophy as well as theology.

One of the most common experiences in a typical near-death experience (NDE) is an encounter with an energy that seems to radiate infinite love, security and compassion on a scale not experienced in normal life and not easily described. Neuroscientists have been quick to offer brain-related explanations for this experience, in particular the ‘dying brain hypothesis’ developed by Susan Blackmore and others, which suggests that hallucinations occur at the time of death.

However, a huge array of anecdotal evidence, including reports of NDEs resulting from car accidents, suggests that some experiencers are able to witness the events that take place immediately after their supposed deaths. Also, many subjects come away from such experiences profoundly emotionally and spiritually changed and with a more accepting, loving and grateful approach to life – a transformation that would seem beyond the ability of a mere hallucination to produce. Many of those who experience NDEs were not interested in spirituality beforehand; yet some seem to have emerged with healing or psychic abilities they did not have previously.

But a belief in God shouldn’t rely solely on abstract evidence. Either you experience a sense of something larger, something both in and outside of yourself, or you don’t. The evidence above would hardly impress Dawkins, but it merely confirms something I’ve experienced. Like Dawkins I abhor the idea of ‘faith’, because it asks people to suspend their thinking abilities and also leaves them open to manipulation. If you haven’t experienced a sense of a force for good, then there is no reason for you to develop a cognitive belief in such a force.

In my next entry I’ll talk about my experience of this force for good. I’ll also return to Dawkins and a more detailed attempt that he’s made to debunk the spiritual.

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