An Atheist’s Perspective on
“Divine-like” Experiences and
Adult Development
Part 1 of 3: Connection
Introduction
Many years ago, I took a workshop with Dr Letitia Nieto. The workshop was an introduction to the psychology of oppression, which culminated (in my mind) with a section on personal development. Describing the skill sets people develop as they move along a spectrum. The most advance being “access to source”, which she admitted to being a spiritual aspect. In all the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) work and research I have been involved in, I’ve rarely come across personal development, and even less of spiritual development.
I remembering thinking, “wow, we’re going to be focusing on personal development. There’s a path all laid out and everything.” 15 years later, fallowing my own leading, I feel I have finally gotten a sense of what “source” might be. I’m an atheist and so I have had perhaps a longer road than some, certainly uncharted. Maybe it is always uncharted; on our own because we are the only expert on ourselves.
Following is an examination of divine-like experiences I have had throughout my life. experiences that seem to be similar to spiritual or religious experiences I have heard others relate. While I can never know if the experiences are equivocal, I hope you will see they share many characteristics.
Somatic Experience of Divine-like Feelings
In my early twenties I had two experiences where I felt the presence of, or connection to something greater than myself. I am strictly speaking only about my subjective experience. It could be walking with goats in a national forest and having my sense of time expand to that of the goats’ time: walk, forage, drink, sleep, wake-repeat. On another occasion, during a finance committee meeting, when faced with a particularly vexing financial challenge, a solution emerged at the end of our time and I had felt as if there was an additional entity guiding our way through us.
Both of these experiences were unintentional, that is I did not set out to have an divine-like experience. On the first I was a winter caretaker on a farm, on the second I was volunteering for my Quaker meeting managing practical matters. Both shared very similar subjective feelings, and this is what I am interested in, to define what I mean when I speak about divine-like experiences. First there’s a sense of expansion. With the goats it was time, and with the Quakers it was-for lack of a better term- ego: the three of us became part of a much greater fourth. In both of these experiences there was also a sense of safety, of belonging, of being held and supported in the vastness. Other terms I would be comfortable using to describe the experience are warmth, light, love, joy, all extraordinary in their all at once feeling.
Had I been raised within a stronger religious tradition; I might have had a ready at hand model to explain my experience or at least have language to express it with others with a similar language. My own upbringing while nominally Christian, was limited to biblical stories, and not so much metaphysics. The stories were not relayed as fact, but stories like fables, or myths.
Older now, I have certainly heard people talk about experiencing the light, inner Christ, Divine presence, etc. and while I can only speak for my own experience, I feel comfortable using Christocentric language to convey my own experience to Christocentric people.
I have resisted writing about these experiences in Christocentric terms, because I firmly believe that these kinds of experiences are based on the same biological processes and then colored by cultural perspectives (likewise culture can prime you for these experiences, to expect them). I hope that those of many faiths can see the similarities in simple descriptions of my experiences. In particular, I am interested in reaching the “spiritual, but not religious” people.
Another reason I have resisted faith-based descriptors is I am conscious of a subtle “pressure” that comes when I use such a language. Somehow, I feel the experiences are grander, and part of a long tradition of prophetic revelation. It’s as if the collective meaning of the terms themselves evoke in me a fervor. A fervor I am uncomfortable with. I currently suspect that this fervor, takes me out of my somatic experience of emotions by using my mind to flood my emotional system with purpose and meaning.
There was though one other series of experiences that I want to add to these. It’s a bit different particularly in that it was intentional.
When I was a young adult, I learned a simple practice to generate my own joy. Closing my eyes, I would imagine my best friend’s face smiling. The longer I held the image the loopier and giddier I got. Now I had experienced joy in the world either through beauty of nature, the arts, or in relationship, but this was the first time I had made myself feel this way. Naturally I discontinue the practice, I had little interest in becoming a “bliss ninny”. How would I ever get anything done?
The practice never went totally away, it would become a tool I kept in my back pocket, occasionally bringing it out to play with. It was always there and it always worked. If anything at the time it gave me a sense that joy was available, and relatively simple.
While this intentional experience, as joy filled as it was, didn’t have the same sense of expansion and connection to a greater. And that may be entirely due to social construction.
So, I’ve got these two kinds of expansive experiences, one spontaneous and one intentional. The spontaneous ones I have spent more time reflecting on to try to understand them. Expansion of time, ego or agency.
My Current Explorations of Divine-like Experiences
I’ve been volunteering with SeekHealing for about 6 months, and participating for about a year in their Connection Practice (CP) service. CP is a simple format with the intention of developing our skills at connecting. That’s the intent, and for me the ongoing question is do I feel emotionally connected with others? if so, why? if not, why? For me it’s a practice of being emotionally aware of myself and others in real time.
What has been consistent so far is that by the end of a CP session if not long before, I have a warm feeling of connection, safety, gratitude, and something larger. Like the goodness of people, the hope for growth and learning, and also my amazement of humans, enchantment of a sort. Humans are amazing beautiful, glorious even.
What’s more is having experienced what connection feels like on a regular basis, I’ve become more aware of when it is absent. In my own relationships I can now sense when it goes away, and ask what just happened. I can also sense when I need it, and it’s not there, and sometimes I can be courageous enough to ask for it.
Where I have found that feeling of connection lacking sadly is in communities who specifically tout support and relationship: my spiritual community and a social justice organization I participated with a while back. There is something poetic here. CP was designed to support people on the edge of society – the “self-destructive”- those of us bonded to substances or behaviors instead of other people; to treat isolation with connection. SeekHealing has developed a process which brings me closer to my own self, which helps me be closer to the ones I love and those I hardly know.
Self-hypnosis
This is a bit of a side note but I feel it is pertinent. I want to talk about self-hypnosis. I believe there’s something about intentional religious practices that can induce divine-like experiences. Group meditation, chanting, singing, dancing, prayer, involve the expectation of something greater. Just like when I meditate on my friend’s face, these exercises can create extra ordinary states. In the case of religious practices, the heightened states are given a spiritual contexts.
My experience in Quaker meeting is an example. There is something beautiful about people gathered in anticipation of inner change, of sitting in uncertainty, of meditating on the larger wisdom of our community. So, there is a camaraderie that I can feel in a group of people who don’t have answers, but are instead listening. It warms my heart. However, this is what I think people are doing, and perhaps so is everyone else. It seems a bit like imagining a smiling face.
I do a similar thing in improvisation dance. When I feel uninspired by what is happening on the dance floor, instead of packing up and heading home early, I have learned to imagine a downward flowing funnel, halfway inside my chest, that flows down into the earth across the floor and up into the other dancers; into all living things. Soon I am back on the dance floor connected to all the dancers again. Again, this feels like self-hypnosis to me. I am indebted to it, but it is a trick.
This brings me back to connection. What if the biology that rewards authentic connection between humans with all the feelgood expansive safety, what if it’s the same system that engages in religious, or spiritual divine like experiences? And that religions have evolved culturally to bootstrap off the human-to-human connection phenomenon to reinforce group cohesion. I think it far easier to hypnotize ourselves into the divine than it is to actually navigate human relations. It’s almost as if we imagined an ideal other to feel connected to instead of theses messy humans.
Adult development
I’d like to finish up this first section talking about Intentional adult development. There are many models of adult development, the one though that comes to mind in this situation is the subjective/objective scale. Which asks how much of an individual’s inner experience is subjective or objective. The idea is that people who can be objective about their inner life (I am feeling anger; I grew up seeing the world like this) have a greater capacity for negotiating relationships, than those who experience their inner world as subjective (I am Angry; that’s the way the world is).
The challenge is there are few places to practice being objective about your inner experience. Various forms of meditation are a good start, but the rubber hits the road in relationship. Things tend to speed up to habitual levels, and we’ve lost control then.
A controlled space such as CP not only allows us to slow way down, but also put very specific limitations on our action. The limits are in the form of public agreements that help to create the space:
- Confidentiality
- No advising, fixing, or changing another person
And then there are three basic tools:
- Reflecting back as accurately as you can what you herd
- Sharing emotional impact
- Curious questions
These 5 basic elements, and a facilitator to coach folx in abiding by them, add up to consistent experiences of connection, and self-learning. There’s a lot more subtlety here too, such as how facilitators lead by vulnerable example; not with a practiced story but what is alive for them in the moment, which is full of messiness and uncertainty.
All of this helps us to stay focused on listening to what is, rather than what should, or ought to be; to keep us in our hearts and bodies, and let the mind serve them for a short period. I realize this sounds paradoxical (its more my laziness in the moment not wanting to untie this not). How is it that being in the moment with what is alive between us is more objective? “It just is”, says my brain with an exasperated pouty face.
(Post script: OK, here’s my take on sleepy brains apparent paradox. It’s that when we are in our minds trying to get to a future state through, helping, advising, relieving, etc., we are living in our subjective needs: our need to help, advise, or relieve and not in the present with ours and another’s experience.)
As I started this post reflecting back on those years of DEI trainings, I am left to wonder, what might the effect had been if instead of taking an educational approach, a developmental and/or spiritual approach was used. Working with what’s alive in the room, instead of trying to change people intentionally. I am happy to relate that this is the current practice some DEI practitioners are engaged in. And I am inspired that I am finding this pattern in so many corners.
In part 2, I will examine conflict with this frame of connection and how conflict is a path for adult development.