A disorienting feature of Abraham Maslow’s classic essay, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, is that it begins in medias res. Maslow writes about “peak-experience”—a term he coined—as if we already know what it means.
The characteristics of peak-experience are described, eventually, in Appendix A: it’s an experience of reality as an integrated whole, independent of us, universal and eternal, intrinsically and perfectly good; in peak-experience, one transcends the ego in acceptance of, and reverence for, what objectively is.
Was it in the wake of peak-experience that Maslow wrote his book, transcending the dichotomies of past and future, self and other? That might explain why he wrote it backwards, as if we already knew his mind.
Maslow’s theory is that religions flow from the peak-experience of individual mystics, suppressed and then contained by fearful “non-peakers,” the bureaucrats of organized religion. Thus, religions come to suffocate the true religious impulse—the profound awareness of cosmic value—that is their source.
Religious experience doesn’t play a direct role in the account of religion and life’s meaning sketched in Life is Hard and elaborated here, in which religions offer metaphysics that make sense of human history, reconciling us to suffering and injustice. But they are not incompatible: what Maslow describes is the direct experience of a world in which the problem of evil has been solved.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had a peak-experience, myself. The closest I’ve come is taking mushrooms and LSD in college. I remember lying on the ground, staring at the night sky: black paper dotted with pinpricks and a standing lamp behind it. I felt myself hanging from the underside of the Earth, gravity reversed, the grass like Velcro suspending me over the cosmic scrim. I remember walking, laughing, as the sky above Sainsbury’s pulsed an ecstatic blue.
A pale imitation, you’ll agree, of the peak-experiences intimated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics”:
I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’ I will mention another experience which I also know … it is, what one might call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens’.
But however exalted, Wittgenstein’s descriptions are indirect. Nor does he believe that literal description is possible: the revelation of value in life, as in peak-experience, can only be shown, not said.
Jon Fosse’s novella, A Shining, makes the case for saying, not showing. It aims to communicate a mystical experience. Fosse’s first-person narrator is a lonely man, driving without direction, whose car gets stuck on a narrow forest road; he wanders into the woods, becoming frightened that he will freeze to death, only to see a shining white figure who holds him gently, telling him “I’m here, I’m here always, I’m always here …. I am who I am”—as apparitions of his bickering parents come to enfold him, too.
The sentences are short and simple, flecked with “yes” and “no” like a raw transcript of inner speech, addressing its own uncertainties. There are no questions marks and the tense shifts freely from past to narrative present, sometimes in the midst of a single sentence. The narrator has lived through this experience, or will, we sense: but the feeling of safety is non-diegetic. The story is not told in literal retrospect but with temporal indeterminacy. And yet it wants to be entirely literal:
Deep in the dark woods, under the dark sky. I stand still. I listen to the nothing. But that’s probably just a figure of speech. And if there’s one thing I need to avoid now, it’s figures of speech.
Later: “It’s beyond my understanding, as people like to say. Figure of speech, figure of speech.”
And now the whole presence is shining. No, I don’t understand this. It’s not something that can be understood either, it’s something else, maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening. Everything you experience, yes, is real in a way, yes, and you probably understand it too, in a way.
Fosse’s narrator asks, and then half-answers, half-rejects, the urgent question: is peak-experience veridical? Does it tell us something true about the world? Maslow, too, equivocates:
Practically everything … characteristic of the religious experience—the holy; the sacred; … the sense of the divine, the ineffable; … the awareness of limits and even of powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense of the eternal and of fusion with the whole of the universe; even the experience of heaven and hell—all of these experiences can be accepted as real by clergymen and atheists alike.
But it’s one thing to say that these experiences are real phenomena, apt for scientific study—another to say that the phenomena they represent are real.
The study of mystical experience is a respectable enterprise. William James took it seriously, as did later philosophers and psychologists, including W. T Stace, the teacher of John Rawls, who taught Tom Nagel. (Apparently, mysticism skips a generation.) Studies of LSD and psilocybin sometimes use the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, inspired by Stace. A strong predictor of long-term benefits from psychedelic use, statisticians have found, is whether one has something like an experience of God—though it remains unclear whether this is correlation or causation. Perhaps both peak-experience and long-term mood improvement are effects of a common cause: the neural plasticity psychedelic drugs inspire.
Even if they are psychologically real, and psychologically beneficial, though, peak-experiences may not be veridical. My pale approximation wasn’t: it represented a force pulling me into space, my legs dangling in the void—but gravity was not, in fact, reversed.
What about the more abstract content of full-fledged peak-experience: reality as an integrated whole, independent of us, and perfectly good? That this experience is, in Maslow’s words, “self-validating,” that it feels as true as the perception of one’s hand in front of one’s face, proves nothing. Still, there’s reason to be empiricist: to take experience at face value, in the absence of grounds for doubt. This is the attitude James, and perhaps Maslow, brings to peak-experience. Maybe we should think of reality as an integrated whole, independent of us—unless there’s reason to think otherwise.
The problem is with the ethical content of peak-experience: the sense that nothing truly bad can happen, that the problem of suffering and injustice has, somehow, been solved. It’s not that one could not experience this—perhaps one can—but that the experience has no more weight than my experience of gravity reversed. Which is to say: whatever weight it has is outweighed by evidence to the contrary. Life is hard.
Though perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, I’ve confessed that I have no first-hand knowledge of peak-experience: I don’t really know what it’s like. If I did, I might be able see directly how it answers the problem of evil—even if the answer cannot be expressed in words. We might then say of peak-experience what Wittgenstein says of all intrinsic value:
I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor that, if a man could write a book on ethics which really was a book on ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.
"The problem is with the ethical content of peak-experience: the sense that nothing truly bad can happen, that the problem of suffering and injustice has, somehow, been solved." Precisely, and particularly from Wm James's perspective: "I cannot bring myself to blink the evil out of sight." Or mystify or peak it out.
It seems that one of the common effects of mystical experience is to sweep away the categories of good and evil, justice and injustice, pleasure and suffering. Would Candide ever have been written if Voltaire had had such an experience?
One of Barbara Ehrenreich’s last books, Living with a Wild God, is about this very topic — reconciling her mystical experience with atheism, skepticism, rationality, and a passionate commitment to justice on the terrestrial plane. She also conducts a pretty thorough review of the literature on the topic.