Materialism and Spiritual Depression

As an undergraduate, and again as a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University, I sometimes found myself oppressed by a peculiar mental climate. It was influenced by scientific materialism and by an exclusive emphasis on analytic thought. Some ruling assumptions in the air were: Nothing exists but atoms and the void, consciousness is a puzzling but pointless brain-glow, God is dead, life is absurd, and, in general, meaning is reduced to what can be verified through the sieve of sense observation.

           Without realizing it, I drifted into spiritual depression periodically punctuated by manic nihilism. Despite Carl Sagan's expansive talk of "billions and billions of galaxies," the universe of meaning I seemed to inhabit felt claustrophobic. The wonderland of experience that first dawned before the eye of my naïve imagination was now everywhere cluttered with signs that read "invalid," "null and void," "retrograde," "illusory," "forbidden," "dangerous and illegal," and so forth.

           I recall telling a fellow student how one day as a nine-year-old boy I had a horrible toothache, and how I said a prayer to the Virgin Mary and the pain vanished instantly. "Autosuggestion," said my comrade. I told another tale of a dream that helped me solve a problem I was working on: "Read Malcolm," I was told, "nobody dreams." Later, plucking up my courage, I uttered a more extreme heresy to a teacher about one of my telepathic experiences. "Impossible," pronounced my Scientistic Inquisitor, "that would imply dualism." And so it went-prayer, dreams, and the soul-expelled to the limbo of impossibility.

           Before long I learned to trust my own experiences instead of accepting the dogmas of the age. Following my inner compass, I spent my time exploring subjects that lay outside the mainstream of scientific materialism: shamanism and mysticism, parapsychology and transpersonal psychology, radical psychoanalysis and archetypal psychology, gradually rebuilding my worldview and trying to shore up the lost enchantment of my youth.

           I was particularly drawn to the shamanic quest, for I found that philosophy-that marvelous invention of the ancient Greeks-was rooted in a tradition of ancient sages steeped in shamanic lore. I also saw that the Greek philosophers, almost without exception, were concerned with the practical and healing arts. From Empedocles to Plotinus, from the Platonists to the Skeptics and the Stoics, philosophy was practiced as a discipline meant to care for the soul and as medicine for the unhappy consciousness.

           As a teacher and a writer, my passion remained the same: to use the tools of my trade, whether critical or intuitive, to offer first aid to victims of spiritual depression, to point toward wider perspectives and neglected possibilities, and to do this with unpretentious practicality and frank humanity. So I was heartened when I gradually learned that during the last twenty or so years philosophers, beginning in Europe and then in America, have been busy reviving the ancient Greek spirit of applied philosophy and addressing the "everyday" problems of human existence-of ethics, vocation, relationships, creativity, the meaning of life and death, and much more.

           This is not a monolithic movement, however. Nor is it a novelty. Philosophy played a part in the origins of psychoanalysis, was an inspiration to the existential therapy of Laing and Sartre, and is a rich element in the work of Carl Jung, Roberto Assagioli, Victor Frankl, Albert Ellis, James Hillman, Robert Sardello, Larry Dossey, Stanley Krippner, Ken Wilber, and many others who range in the camp of spiritual psychotherapy.

           Although there are many schools of thought, every act of therapeutic philosophy has an improvisational element to it, and I think that soul-healing is more like jazz than engineering. The key question is whether tending to the other helps or harms, gives a moment of support, widens or sharpens the sense of direction, prods with good will and compassion, and so on; there are many ways to nudge a confused or ailing spirit forward, and pragmatic pluralism is the order of the day.

           With regard to the question of depressing materialism, I recently gave an invited talk (June 3rd, 2001) at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The theme of this international medical conference was memory and consciousness, and I was given the opportunity to speak on the topic of deathbed visions. This may not be a widely known phenomenon, but it has implications for memory and possibly for the wider status of consciousness in nature. It is a well-documented fact that dying people sometimes sense the presence of God, see transcendent visions, and undergo remarkable spiritual transformations.

           It is also reported that patients at the moment of death sometimes recover mental and physical faculties thought to be lost if not extinct for years. Reports show that patients with dementia who have lost crucial personal memories may at the moment of death recover them. This raises interesting questions about memory and the brain, suggesting that such memories haven't been destroyed but must still exist, however barred from conscious recall. I said this in my talk, but there was something else I felt a stronger need to say, something that goes to the core of the problem of spiritual depression. Studies since the late 1990s have begun to make clear two important ideas: 1) that the public perceives end of life care as less than optimal and 2) that religion and spirituality may be good for one's health and longevity.

           Both of these concerns are related to deathbed visions, a phenomenon neglected by medical professionals who must daily contend with the challenges of end of life care. End of life patients frequently suffer feelings of depression and hopelessness that lead to suicidal ideation. End of life depression is associated, as chief psychiatrist of Sloan-Kettering William Breitbart stated, with a "pessimistic cognitive style." Breitbart argues, rightly in my opinion, that it's not physical pain that is depressing but the failure to see positive meaning in the pain. To paraphrase Nietzsche: I can stand anything that happens to me as long as I can see some meaning to it.

           Unfortunately, the sense of meaninglessness, the depressing cognitive style pervades the medical paradigm, thanks to the narrow materialistic premises that circumscribe it. For under those premises end of life can only signify end of consciousness, and therefore the end of all memory and meaning-certainly for the dying person. The point I made was simple: deathbed visions-and other so-called "anomalous" psychophysical phenomena-are important for two good reasons.

           First, unlike the prevailing paradigm of medical materialism, they suggest a model in which consciousness isn't obliterated at death but transformed, elevated in mood, and even possibly freed from the constraints of bodily life. Second, deathbed visions have positive spiritual and religious significance. The world and forms that appear in these visions irradiate peace and love. The effects on patient and observer alike are typically quite stunning.

           Deathbed visions deserve scientific attention. For one thing, they offer medical professionals empirical data for developing a revised, expanded, and more optimistic end of life cognitive style. They expand the possibilities of meaning in the end of life situation. Under medical materialism, the range of meaning shrinks to nothing at death's approach, a shrinkage that makes it bleak for all participants in the end of life drama.

           It is true, of course, that end of life can, as described in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom or Dying Well by Ira Byock, be an occasion for unexpected personal growth, and for discovering new meanings and learning priceless wisdom lessons. Moreover, much has been done to improve end of life care by means of the hospice movement, devoted to crafting socially supportive and minimally painful environments for dying patients.

           Nevertheless, according to the prevailing scientific-medical worldview, the end itself entails the extinction of personal consciousness. So the effort toward a more comprehensive synthesis must go further. It's true that we can and must make meaning from our experience of this world, but there are also levels of meaning that point beyond the often grim confines of the here and now, the perennial wisdom of the human race as we find it in myth, sacred scripture, and traditional lore. I agree with Jung that to sever oneself from all this would be a mistake. But it's just this wider world of meaning that scientific materialism reduces to subjective puffery.

           Medical science needs to reintegrate the transcendent dimensions of meaning, if it hopes to respond to the need for more optimal end of life care. But this is a need felt not just at the end but also during life. It is a need that one-dimensional materialism ignores or flattens to irrelevance. Deathbed visions points to a way of coping with the depressing cognitive style that undergirds the entire culture.

           What would be useful is an enlarged sense of what is possible, a shift from the idea of death as terminal to one that is transitional. The great question is about what a human being is: A chance byproduct of the mindless evolution of matter or a crossroads between many realities? This question is at the root of the spiritual depression that warps our consumer-frantic Western consciousness. According to Ernest Becker, this points to the Phobia of phobias, the "worm," as William James put it, at the center of the apple of our existence: none other than the undigested idea of our mortality-the bitter root of all disenchantment.

           Let's recall an important fact: the prevaling viewpoint is a cultural conceit, an interpretation of the world based on a myopic view of the data. We call it materialism, the tyrannically monistic belief that everything in the universe is reducible to one kind of stuff, one story, one reality. What could be more depressing?

           I believe that medical professionals, so amply endowed and progressive in their mastery of the biochemistry of human suffering, should direct their attention to a wide range of neglected phenomena, "anomalies," if you like, that are in fact well established and well reported.¹ Confronting these phenomena medical science can learn to build a more complete vision of reality for victims of spiritual depression. Given the breadth and wonder of the universe we inhabit, elation, not just depression, deserves a prominent place in our cognitive style.