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Psychiatry’s Resistance, An Interview 51
S: Did you want to repeat the experience?
Dr. A: Yes, but it didn’t happen. I understand now that this is often the case with mystical experiences. There is a great effort to repeat it and the experience may not happen again. I can remember in college reading Saint Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind to God, which as I recall, was a kind of recipe on how to have a mystical experience. It involved fasting and standing out in the rain and cold, and all kinds of things such as not sleeping and running oneself down physically. It seems that he put himself in what amounts to a toxic psychosis in order to create this experience. Maybe that worked for him. It certainly showed how much he wanted to repeat the experience: to subject himself to these tortures to get it again. I didn’t do that; I just waited. It didn’t happen. And thinking about it now, I’m not sure—I’m ambivalent—about wanting it to happen again.
S: Why?
Dr. A: Because I am sure I would think the same thing I did the first time. I’d think that I probably had gone to pieces.
S: When faced with a profoundly moving mystical experience, the most appropriate response might be devotion. Could it be that you fear being devotional because it would mean giving up your scientific, rational approach to reality? Do you feel that being devotional is dangerous?
Dr. A: Not dangerous—uncomfortable. I don’t know as I would damage myself in that sense, but I would discomfort myself.
S: If by being devotional you opened yourself to a profound feeling of love—a love that brought great strength and courage— would that feel uncomfortable? Suppose you knew that this experience was something given out of love as a gift of grace by divinity. If you were filled with bliss and love—with appreciation, gratitude and devotion toward God—wouldn’t you like that?
Dr. A: I am rather sure that I wouldn’t.
S: I’m surprised. Because if that’s so, then I see you resisting achieving and realizing the highest state of consciousness described by man.
Dr. A: I keep coming back to the same thing. I wouldn’t trust the experience. Point one, I think that it is not possible for anyone to enter a state of prolonged bliss; I don’t think that is within one’s mental capacity. And point two, I would be sure that I had gone into some kind of ecstatic psychosis.