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50 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
and the feeling that I was changed permanently, and then a great positive lift and the feeling that I had kind of seen through to another level, or whatever you want to call it. Then after I had decided I really hadn’t come to pieces, I wanted to repeat it—but the repetition didn’t come. Then the feeling that I had been permanently changed slowly quieted and I kind of came back to baseline in a couple of months or so. I wasn’t able to repeat it.
S: What happened?
Dr. A: Well, I was sitting in the Riverside Church in New York with my wife, and during a service I looked up at the cross—which is a big one, about life-size. I don’t know if you know Riverside Church but it’s enormous—built by Rockefeller—and it must be four stories high. It is a huge replica of a French Gothic cathedral, a magnificent building. And I had the idea that I could understand why Jesus had to go to the cross in order to express his love for man—because to me that doesn’t make sense at all. But somehow at that moment this illogical— totally illogical as far as I’m concerned—phenomenon made sense.
It made kind of a universally important sense and I felt a feeling of love myself, and a kind of warm glow came over me. It lasted about half a minute and the immediate assumption I had was that I had gone crazy. And I was surprised that I had gone crazy, especially in a religious way—I hadn’t expected it to occur that way.
But that is what happened. And it has not happened again—just the one time. It did, however, increase my interest in religion. I have since found out from patients that these experiences are not common but they are also not rare. It was a positive experience.
S: Did it make you more or less interested in religion?
Dr. A: More, much more. I always had been. I had been a practicing Christian essentially all my life, but I had difficulty with the irrationality of religion and the fact that I somehow had to suppress my own critical faculties in order to continue—because, you know, a lot of this stuff doesn’t make sense. But at that moment it didn’t matter—I had faith. I suppose I might have called it a conversion experience in a way. But it wasn’t, because it didn’t change anything I thought about religion. It did increase my interest and my feeling that “there is something there”—although I know we are loaded up with all kinds of garbage and projecting all over the place, so that in fact the perception might have been 90% wrong. Still, I felt there was something there.