Self-Transcendence

Isaiah 6:1-9

by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones

First Central Congregational Church

17 November 2024

            In their book The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, the scientists David Yaden and Andrew Newberg describe the Awe Experience Scale which is used to measure spiritual experiences.  These experiences are measured according to these six different aspects:

• Vastness—the feeling that we are in the presence of something grand
• Accommodation—we struggle to take it all in
• Time—which feels like it is slowing down
• A feeling that the sense of self has diminished
• Feeling connected to everything, and finally
• The physiological responses like goosebumps and chills

I’m going to venture a guess that probably none of us sitting here have had the type of mystical vision described by the prophet Isaiah?  But I am guessing that we have had spiritual experiences that check all the criteria on that scale.  What are your most profound, moving, and memorable spiritual experiences?

The next wonder of life in our autumn series is mystical awe.  We’ve talked about various other types of awe—arising from nature, music, art, and the beauty of moral character.  And while each of those has had what we might call a spiritual component, we haven’t explicitly gotten to spiritual and religious experiences until today. 

Religion has another connection with awe.  As Dacher Keltner points out, our religious and spiritual teachings and practices themselves arose from some person’s awe experience.  Our beliefs and rituals are themselves archives of ancient experiences of awe.

Yaden and Newberg identify that these religious experiences generally contain a feeling of unity with God, nature, the universe, or other people.  And some sense of transcending or losing the self, the ego.

Mystical experiences are the most extreme version of what are a variety of self-transcendent experiences.  Psychologists also list mindfulness, flow, awe, and peak experiences as other common human moments of self-transcendence that fall short of the most vivid mystical experiences.

In his classic study of mysticism, the father of American psychology William James, described them has having four qualities—ineffable (that we can’t adequately describe our experience to others), a noetic quality (meaning that we’ve gained some sort of knowledge or revelation—like Isaiah and his vision), third, that these experiences are transient, not lasting long, and finally that we are passive in these moments, that they come upon us from the outside.

More recent empirical studies have revealed similar but differing qualities.  A 2015 study of mystical experiences, for instance, found that they include a feeling of unity with ultimate reality, being overwhelmed with positive emotions in a form of ecstasy, losing our sense of space and time, and, finally, James’s idea that we cannot adequately describe the experience.

But even if these experiences are difficult to describe to others, that generally hasn’t stopped people from trying.  Prophets, poets, and all sorts of religious practitioners have talked about and written about these types of experiences.

For example, the journalist Michael Pollan in his book on psychedelics—How to Change Your Mind—describes the loss of the ego he experienced on one of his trips:  Read excerpt from pages 263-4.

Pollan, who is not a religious person, takes this loss of the ego as the defining characteristic of the spiritual.  That spiritual experiences are precisely those that “arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced.” 

And this, he takes, is a good thing.  The ego so often gets in our way with its negative self-talk and its limited perspective on the world—what he calls “a measly trickle of consciousness.”  Spirituality is what opens us up to see and feel and experience more than what our ego limits us to.

And the neuroscience seems to back that up.  MRI studies have demonstrated that when a spiritual experience is being had, the brain’s default mode network (the source of our ego and sense of self) is quiet.  Leading Pollan to conclude that “the mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network.”

The psychologist Mark Leary reports more of what neuroscience has taught us about religious experiences.  He writes, Read excerpt from page 160.

So the latest science affirms what religions have long taught—that the ego gets in the way of us achieving enlightenment and experiencing the fullness of God.  Western religions have traditionally focused on how we can control and change the self, while Eastern religions have focused more on quieting or losing the self.  A great example of the latter is Zen Buddhism where the goal is go to through every moment of life, no matter what we are doing “with full and complete attention and no self-commentary.”

Mark Leary, in his book The Curse of the Self, explores all the ways that our egos hold us back and limit us.  So religions have devised ways to control, overcome, and quiet the self.  Regarding mystics, he writes that they “aim to obtain direct knowledge or first-hand experience of reality without the use of thoughts or reasoning.”  And they do that by turning of self-reflection.  When they do, “they experience a world that is somewhat different from the one they experience in their ordinary state of consciousness.”

What do mystics report?  That they experience the universe as a unified whole.  Often they feel that they have merged with God.  Time becomes irrelevant, as if one has escaped from it.  They are usually flooded with positive emotions, reporting feeling peace, love, and joy. 

So, the pay off to these spiritual experiences, to these moments of awe is the loss of personal identity, the ego, the sense of self.  Mark Leary describes the “nonegoic person.”  Read excerpt from 196-7.

That sounds to me like the best description of the kind of spiritual growth and development we ought aspire to.  Leary is quick to admit that none of us, even the most spiritually mature, function at that level of well-being at all times in every moment.  But it remains the ideal, the inspiration, the goal of our spiritual lives.

This wonder of life, mystical awe, provides us insight on how to transcend our self, quiet our ego, and grow in spiritual and emotional maturity.  Most of us are unlikely to have a profound mystical vision like the prophet Isaiah, but we can cultivate the daily spiritual, religious, and emotional practices that open us to awe and help us to transcend the self.

And the easiest way to start is to pay attention.  Which is a point I’ve made every single Sunday.  Learning to live with more attention to ourselves and each other and the wonders of the world around us is maybe the easiest and most important spiritual practice we can engage in.  Cassidy Hall, in her new book Queering Contemplation writes that “Attention is the undistracted self, willing to truly look, deeply understand, and release attachment to moments before or after what is present.”

This week I can’t give you the assignment to go out and have a mystical vision. (But if you do, please tell me about it!)  But I can encourage you to pay attention, to cultivate you awareness.  And thereby to quiet the ego and begin to transcend the self.