Page 10 - SPRING 2024 News and Views

A Review of ‘The Varieties of Spiritual Experience’ Submitted by David Brown

David B Yaden and Andrew B. Newberg. Oxford, 2022

I was delighted to come across this book recently because it shows that academic psychology is finally

examining spirituality. Psychology’s behaviourist beginnings prevented it from exploring consciousness or
spirituality, which was left more to the ‘unacademic’ field of psychotherapy.

First the book explores the various words that are used to describe spirituality from the overtly religious
such as the experience of God or the Divine or Unity to the more psychological terms such as the
Transcendent or the Numinous or Peak Experiences. Not everybody experiences these states and not all
of those who do choose to call such experiences spiritual.

Freud was not able to experience what he called ‘the oceanic experience’ although he realised many

people did. He felt unable to include the transcendent in his map of the psyche, unlike other
psychotherapists such as Maslow, Jung and Assagioli. The Jungian claim for example is that
psychotherapy is an essentially spiritual discipline, that psychotherapy can be seen as ‘soul work.’

What triggers such experiences in people? There are very many triggers including Prayer, Nature, Grief,
Meditation, Music, drugs, sex and rituals. Perhaps for you dear reader, Meeting for Worship or the
Experiment with Light might be in this list.

The book then goes on to look at the different kinds of spiritual experience and lists them as follows:

Numinous: Feeling the Divine or the Sacred. More commonly experienced, according to surveys, by
some nationalities than others, for example Indians more than Chinese. Cultural factors clearly
play a part.

Revelatory: These include visions and the hearing of voices, much rarer than the numinous. Can
sometimes be psychotic such as in schizophrenia. How to tell the difference? By the fruits?

10