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46 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
ally. Patients have talked about a mystical experience and as they described it, I felt it also to a small extent. But it wasn’t put in such elaborate and farfetched terms.
S: Is it possible to consider this hypothetical situation at all— accepting that it’s highly unlikely? What do you think would be your response if you met a great teacher with boundless knowledge and unlimited powers—who said that spirituality is very much related to psychiatry?
Dr. A: We are already in trouble—because it is inconceivable to me that a great teacher with boundless knowledge could exist.
S: Why do you suppose you have such resistance at this point? Granted, this is certainly out of the ordinary, but why are you unable to even conjure up fantasies and thoughts about the possibility?
Dr. A: When such people have supposedly appeared on earth, their disciples couldn’t recognize them, and if they couldn’t—people who lived and worked with them daily—how on earth am I to assume that I could?
S: Have there been such people on earth—people whom others have recognized as having great wisdom and power?
Dr. A: No, I don’t think there really have been such people. S: Let’s say Jesus Christ.
Dr. A: Jesus’ disciples didn’t recognize him for what we would
recognize him for. Judas couldn’t see him at all and he was there all the time.
S: Didn’t Peter recognize him?
Dr. A: Sort of.
S: Who do you think had a better vision of Christ, the disciples
who were there with him daily, or we, today?
Dr. A: Apparently we do, but I don’t know.
S: Didn’t the disciples have to see something grand to follow
Christ through thick and thin?
Dr. A: Eleven men followed him through thick and thin. One
didn’t even know what was going on; he followed him fairly well and then finally decided he had better get this guy stopped. But the record— inadequate as it is, being two millennia old—doesn’t show that they really recognized who he was. He had to tell them, “I am the way,” and this sort of thing. There is no real evidence that they could understand