And then it pours out: Walking around the countryside of Davis, California, where he grew up. Roads at night under expansive skies. Storm systems coming in over that flat Central Valley farmland. Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School speech. And moments of awe that day: in prayer, surfing, riding his bike to Grace Cathedral, passages from the Bible, the form-shifting fog that embraces San Francisco in ever-changing geometries.
I ask Malcolm what it is like to work in a career whose bottom line is mystical awe. He has no real interest, he answers, in proof, dogma, definition, or debate over the semantics of terms—“Is there a God?” “Is there a soul?” “What is sin?” “What is the afterlife?” He points his finger outward to some sense of space around us:
I get to be with people in the most intimate moments in their lives. When someone dies. Or a baby is born. Or I am standing next to two people at the altar. I say this is God, right here, around us. . . .
My last sermon was on decolonizing the mind, in honor of the Kenyan writer Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o. We have histories of colonialism and slavery. Those histories are rooted in our minds. Gays have felt this self-condemnation for decades. Such shame. But there are no good or evil people. That is what history has given to us.
This Sunday after my talk, an eighty-year-old man came up to me and was crying. He hugged me.
That is awe.
In this moment from Malcolm’s life as a minister, we see decay (breaking down the legacy of colonialist and homophobic beliefs), distillation (the feeling that led the elderly man to break down in tears), and growth (that simplest expander of interconnectedness, the hug).
In high school and college, Malcolm carried William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience around with him, tucked under his arm, which (for good reason) provoked teasing from his friends. Malcolm Clemens Young was composting William James’s experiences of mystical awe from 120 years ago.
James was raised in a nineteenth-century New York family who had the means and free-spiritedness to wander and wonder. He went to experimental schools. He lived with his family in Europe when he was a child and then studied art when he was eighteen. Alongside these privileges, James suffered from anxiety of every kind. Panic. Self-doubt. Generalized anxiety. And a claustrophobia that led him to find window shutters unnerving unless they were opened to just the right degree. In his twenties, James was so beleaguered by severe depression that he contemplated suicide.
James would begin a lifelong search for what he would call the fundamental cosmical IT, or mystical awe:
But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.
For James, there is an experience to be had, one of mystical awe, that is wild and beyond the ideas of the default self and society’s status quo.
Seeking such “wild in the universe,” James listened to talks by itinerant spiritualists. He attended seances. Inspired by amateur philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, James experimented with nitrous oxide. This drug activates the opioid system, which produces feelings of merging, and GABA, a neurotransmitter that energizes thought. In a rush of nitrous oxide, James called out: Oh my god, oh god, oh god! The anxieties of his default self were decaying. With the “tattered fragments” of words he described what was distilling as “thought deeper than speech.” He had discovered mystical awe through a drug we get at a visit to our dentist today.
These experiences are what led James to gather and curate stories of awe. He compiled personal accounts of encounters with the Divine, so often stories of inexplicable and at times extraordinary experiences, from ministers, writers such as Tolstoy and Whitman, acquaintances, and ordinary citizens. He would present his thinking in the Gifford Lectures in 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and from these talks publish The Varieties of Religious Experience, the most revolutionary book on religion from the twentieth century and a touchstone for those who study religion today.
In this book, James defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of men in their solitude. So far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.” Religion is about our experience of relating to the Divine, which James describes as vast, primal, and enveloping. We can find these feelings, of bliss, oceanic love, grace, terror, despair, doubt, confusion, and mystical awe—in almost any context. In all religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Jainism, the many forms of Christianity, Islam, Sufism. In nature. In music. In ideas. And even in chemicals that we put into our bodies. His thesis is one of radical pluralism; the pathways to mystical awe are nearly infinite. Everyday mystical awe.
Just over a hundred years later, a new science of religion has concerned itself with this most complex cultural form, focusing on things like beliefs about God, ceremonies and ritual, dogma and explanation, and the historical evolution of religions. And William James’s focus and ours, mystical awe.
Mystical awe often originates in inexplicable experiences that transcend the expectations of the default self. Experiences like James’s with nitrous oxide or Reverend Jen’s upon first entering the sacred space of a church. Or for Mark Twain, a dream of his younger brother’s death; two weeks later his brother would die in a riverboat accident, and be buried in Twain’s suit as he had dreamed. Or inexplicable visions, such as those of Bernadette, a desperately poor girl living near Lourdes, France, in the nineteenth century, who had eighteen visions of the Virgin Mary in the darkness of a cave that led her to discover a spring whose waters had healing powers (today five million people make the pilgrimage to Lourdes each year to be healed by those waters). In survey research, most people report having had such inexplicable and extraordinary experiences: they have sensed the presence of God or spirits, or heard the voice of God, or felt that remarkable turns of fate are guided by Divine forces. On two different occasions in my early months of grief, I distinctly felt Rolf’s large hand on my back.
Mysterious experiences like these require explanation; our minds are impatient with the unexplained. This tendency to explain has given rise in different cultures to spiritual belief systems about illnesses, bodily sensations, sounds and sights, and mysterious forms of consciousness, like dreams or hallucinations. To pick one of many examples, the rich tradition of ghosts, demons, goblins, and spirits in Japan—known collectively as yōkai—offers ever-changing, very local explanations in supernatural forms that make sense of inexplicable sounds, lights, natural events, bodily states, or the feeling of being watched in darkness.
This thesis lies at the heart of the scientific study of religion and spirituality: that we rely on ancient cognitive systems to transform extraordinary experiences into beliefs, images, descriptions, and stories about the Divine. We attribute unusual experiences to the intentions and actions of an extraordinary actor, in this case a deity or deities. An earthquake becomes a god shaking the earth. Remission from cancer is the intervention of God. Moved by wild awe, ten-year-old Malcolm Clemens Young felt that God had given him the beauty of moonlight on a lake.
Our sensory systems shape inexplicable experiences into perceptible, supernatural forms. When we’re in the dark, or looking at clouds, or taking in the swirling lines of bark on trees, or marveling at the geological patterns in rocks, regions of our brains may lead us to perceive faces where they are not, and these we take to be images of God. Our deep-rooted tendency to hear the human voice may lead us to hear the Divine in an exceptional wind or an awesome thunderstorm. When alone in an eerie or strange place, most likely at dusk or in the dark, we may feel seen, or touched, or even embraced, by God—reflecting the activation of our ancient attachment-related tactile system. Out of mysterious experiences, our minds construct a sense of the Divine, an all-powerful being that is watching us, hearing us, speaking to us, and embracing us.