Mysticism in the Laboratory

THE saints of organized religion have lost influence in recent years, but the kind of religious experience usually associated with saints is being rediscovered in the laboratory. A husband-and-wife team of experimental psychologists in a New York City research center has concluded on the basis of hundreds of experiments with normal, healthy persons that "the brain-mind system has a built-in contact point with what is experienced as God, fundamental reality, or the profoundly sacred."

At their Foundation for Mind Research, a unique center devoted to the new "science of consciousness," Dr. Robert E. L. Masters, 40, and Dr. Jean Houston, 31, use a variety of nondrug* stimuli--guided meditation, multisensory sound-and-light environments, electrical stimulation of the brain--to induce "altered states of consciousness" in which religious and other psychical experiences are possible.

These experiences are accessible to many ordinary people, note Masters and Houston, but they do require an ability to relax one's everyday grip on externals and allow deep internal processes of the mind to surface. Recently TIME Religion Researcher Clare Mead visited the foundation. Without any stimulus except the direction of Dr. Houston, she underwent a half-hour-long "inner odyssey." Her account:

I began my journey by following Dr. Houston's instruction to imagine myself lying in a boat on a wonderfully hot, languid July afternoon, lazily floating past meadows lush with trees and flowers, the whole scene suffused with silence and peace and the prospect of wonderful things to come. I was completely conscious of the chair in which I sat, of the room and its surroundings and of Dr. Houston, but at the same time the experience of being in that boat was as vivid as if I were in a waking dream. Never at any time in the next half-hour did I feel any dulling of consciousness or free will.

Core of Life. After a few minutes, Dr. Houston said that my hands would begin to feel light and to rise. I was aware that I could easily resist this suggestion; yet, when I progressively "let go" of them, my hands did indeed become light and buoyant. At Dr. Houston's suggestion, I began "flying." Not literally, of course, but never except in dreams have I felt so ecstatically the sensation of flight--free, joyous, yet peaceful, ever deeper to the center of my being, until I was conscious of an indescribable unity within myself and with all things. Finally, I felt as if I had flown to the core of life itself.

Dr. Houston then asked me if there was anything I wanted to understand better while in this sacred place. I answered that the problem of injustice was to me the most difficult reality of life to accept. I recalled that as a child I became upset even at the make-believe injustices I saw in Lassie movies or read in Polly Pepper books. Then I had vivid mental images of real-life horrors throughout history, like the Inquisition and the Holocaust of the Jews during World War II. I saw the petty injustices that people commit against each other every day.

I saw New Yorkers choking in smog-filled streets or caged like cattle in screeching subways. I saw the poor strangling in the disease and dirty ugliness of the slums. It became acutely clear to me that no amount of legislation or education will ever dispel completely the force of ingrained racial prejudice and that no degree of virtue among the enlightened will extinguish the evil that breeds wars.

Stronger than Death. Dr. Houston then told me that I would spend some time contemplating this imagery and that I would understand, in a way that would be deep and permanent, something of the problem of injustice. What followed was ineffable, except to say that I became more and more sorrowful at what I envisaged (indeed, tears were streaming down my face); yet increasingly I could "see," in the most profound way I have ever known that the beauty of life far exceeds the sorrow, the injustice.

I was aware of my unity with all the people who have ever suffered, from the victims of petty lies to those killed by untold wars, persecutions and centuries of mistrust and hate. But simultaneously and paradoxically I understood quite vividly that life triumphs over all this misery even though it cannot erase it. Life is indeed "stronger than death"--not just in the religious sense, but quite literally stronger than death's ultimate absurdity. I was aware of smiling and crying at once. An immense resignation and peace flooded my entire being.

At this point Dr. Houston decided that I was able to undergo a psychological "death" and "rebirth." She began by asking me to find within myself the deepest possible self-symbol with which I could identify. I chose a star. My first mental image was of a very black sky with my single star in it, luminous and strong. Slowly it became smaller and smaller, dimmer and dimmer. I knew that it was not going to go out completely unless I allowed it to--and of course I didn't want it to. But Dr. Houston kept insisting, and gradually I was able to relinquish my hold as I watched it disappear, leaving only vast, empty blackness. I felt no panic. I was resigned, but enormously sad. The sorrow increased as I looked into the blackness, and I was aware of tears flowing hard. Eventually I had to restrain myself from sheer bawling. I knew objectively that I was sitting there alive and well in a room in Upper Manhattan, but subjectively the sensation of death was as vivid as if I were looking into my own coffin.

Then, still under Dr. Houston's direction, I made an enormous effort to revive my poor star. At first I thought to myself that this would probably occur as the gradual brightening of a star in the blackness. But instead, and all of a sudden, I saw the black sky suddenly flash into total, blinding white light. And in an inexplicable way I could see thousands of stars everywhere in the blazing whiteness. Quite unexpectedly, the black sky flashed again into my mind, eliminating the light, but the white sky quickly returned, and I was confident that it was going to win out. The struggle between them continued for a brief time, but finally there was just permanent, pure, white light, dense with blazing stars.

The resulting perception can only be understated in words: I knew with incredible clarity that life is the victor in the struggle against death, not in the sense of an afterlife in a faraway heaven, but in the certainty that life is eternal, despite death. I was overcome with the joy of this truth, and I wanted to run out on the street and shout it to the New Yorkers plodding homeward in the gray smog from their dull downtown offices, unaware that a sea of beauty, life and love surrounded and sustained them.

Dr. Houston then told me that I could return from my inner voyage when I wished, and I found myself immediately ready to do so, though the strength of what I had seen has remained with me ever since.

Survival of Religion. Such experiences are not exclusively "religious," say Drs. Masters and Houston, because they are also akin to artistic creativity and to the process by which the deep psyche creates symbols and myths. But it is precisely man's collective mythmaking that has supplied the symbols embodied in religious rituals. Religious institutions are now disintegrating, the two researchers believe, because religion has cut itself off from its "principal sources of nourishment--the soul, the symbolic and mythogenic process, the psychic energy resources." It is an irony of the past decade, they point out, that mystical experience has again become a beneficent, transforming reality for great numbers of people--but it has been happening outside the major religious institutions. The most potent new "religious" movements of the decade have been led not by clergymen, they say, but by psychologists and psychiatrists.

The psychedelic movement is discredited because of drug abuse, but the renewed interest in intensely personal religious experience accelerated by the drug culture is undiminished. Many churches are deeply and understandably suspicious of mystical experience, partly because they associate it with magic and witchcraft. But Drs. Masters and Houston believe that this attitude seriously impairs the survival of institutional religion: "The clergyman who dismisses all of this as primitive and regressive is seriously lacking in vision. He has not understood that profound mystical experience can open up energy sources to sustain a contemporary religion, and that the clergyman himself should be the guide for this spiritual journey."

* The team formerly studied the effects of LSD on human personality, described in their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966; Delta paperback, 1967).

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