An Agnostic's Encounter With God

BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT

This personal story describes the gradual movement from religious faith to agnosticism to spiritual awareness.

Page Two of Two Pages — Page One

Who's That Knocking on My Floor?

In the years after I first learned about Psychosynthesis, I met many people of different faiths. For the most part I couldn't distinguish between them based on their outward appearance or behavior. Wonderfully kind and generous individuals were sincere athiests, questioning agnostics, and devote Christians, Jews, Muslims, and members of assorted other faiths and philosophies. Narcissistic, overbearing, unpleasant characters espoused a variety of religious beliefs, often fervently.

There was something, however, that struck me as perhaps an important distinction between people. Some people walked through life with an extra measure of grace, peace and calm. As I got to know them, I discovered their genuine love for others and sense of self-confidence arose from a connection with a "power" greater than themselves that they referred to by a variety of terms, but which essentially was "Spirit." It was a genuine connection that seemed to make a difference. "Belief" in a personal God — without the experience of that connection — wasn't enough. Yet even Buddists who claimed there was "nothing" out there seemed, to me, to be gently different because they were in touch with who they were at their core.

I realized that here was the expression of "self" and "Higher Self." It didn't seem to matter whether one interpreted his or her experience as coming from God or Allah or Nothingness or from simply deep in one's core. What seemed to matter was the experience, not the belief that arose from interpreting that experience.

So I began to meditate more frequently and, although I always felt better when I was through and often had interesting insights, I didn't feel particularly connected with a power greater than myself. I didn't feel "enlightened."

Then I began to experiment with various techniques for getting in touch with that "Spirit something."

I would imagine a stream of energy flowing down into my body, filling me with light. Nothing felt particularly different.

I would talk out loud, a method I often use when sitting alone and trying to figure something out, and would say something like, "God, Spirit, Higher Self, Intuition, Great Being, or Whatever you call yourself — that is, if there really is a Being out there somewhere — I want you to know I'm ready to get in touch with who or what you are. Let's just say I'm open and whenever you're ready to talk, I'm ready to listen." Sometimes I'd shorten the request to the single word "open." Nothing felt particularly different.

I added movement, holding my hands up in the air and saying, "Here I am. I'm open." Still I didn't have an awareness of anything outside of myself and there was no sense of a "spirit" moving inside.

Nevertheless, I remained patient and decided that IF there were a God and IF He-She-It wanted to get my attention, He-She-It would have to be the one to figure out how to do it.

It was about this time I began to notice something odd. Primarily during those times I would be meditating, I would hear sounds coming from the floor and doors as though a person were knocking. I didn't believe in ghosts and there wasn't anything I knew that could have made the sounds. I didn't have a clue what it was about.

Then one day I heard a crash in the bathroom. "Strange," I thought. "That sounds like a pinecone has just fallen." Checking it out, I discovered a large sugar pinecone (about a foot high and eight inches across) from the Sierra Nevada mountains, one that moments before had been sitting on the wide edge of the bathtub, now lay in the bathtub with many broken pieces. Weird. Maybe we had a little earthquake I hadn't felt and that's what caused the pinecone to roll off its perch. Maybe a bug came along and pushed it over.

However, there was a disquieting in my heart because I was afraid it had been thrown down by some mysterious force. And as much as I wanted to experience the "God" that others easily accepted, I wasn't ready for anything "weird" and had always dismissed such events as self-delusions when reported by others. Certainly this wasn't how the physical world was supposed to operate.

A day or two after that, I was alone in the house and working in my office when I heard a loud noise. It sounded like an object, such as a book, dropped on the floor. Checking it out, I discovered that, in fact, a book had mysteriously been taken off the shelf in the front room and deposited on the floor.

This was not something I could ignore.

That evening when I went to bed I said, "Okay, Spirit Being, or whatever you are that can toss objects around, I'm going to close this medicine cabinet right now (it stays shut with a ball that snaps tightly into an opening). If you are something with non-physical properties that wants to make contact with me — but only if you are benevolent and work for the betterment of the world — open this door tonight. If it's open tomorrow morning, I will believe in the reality of a spiritual dimension."

As you may have guessed, the next morning the medicine cabinet door was open (my husband uses a different bathroom) and I was stuck with my agreement. I'd said I would believe and now I was being forced into it. However, since there wasn't a guidebook for this kind of experience, I'd have to figure out what all this means by myself.

I now put greater effort in the time I set aside for quiet and for meditating. No longer focused on whether or not there was "Spirit," I now focused on how I could respond to this call of the Spirit. I began to place more faith in the very still, very quiet voice of intuition I had first acknowledged years before. For example, now when during meditation I would often suddenly understand the meaning of an old hymn or a familiar bible verse.

And I finally experienced a profound sense of oneness with this Spirit, this transcendent dimension I had not known or acknowledged before. Eventually I decided the word "God" would work for me even if it might mean something different to other people.

Incidentally, if you think it would be great to have strange phenomena occur in your house and assume it would lead to great spiritual insights, let me disuade you of that opinion. There was a lot of frustration in all of this. I'd frequently say, "You know, I get a vague sense you've been waiting a long time for me to realize there's actually something to this spirit and soul business. I'll even agree that it maybe you've come to help me uncover a different my purpose for me life, because I gather you want me to understand something or you wouldn't have gone so far as to create these events, unless, of course, you simply have a strange sense of humor. It's as though you're running one software program and I'm running another. We need a better interface here, guy or guys or gals or whatever you are. A little handwriting on the wall would go a long way."

Unfortunately, no handwriting appeared. But off and on for about a year unusual things continued to happen. Pictures that had been hanging securely on the wall the day before would lie, glass unbroken, on the floor in the morning. And the knocks continued, although they diminished somewhat and are seldom heard anymore.

I'd like you to know that even though I said I accepted the reality of a spiritual dimension when the bathroom cabinet door was opened mysteriously, there were still times when I wondered if perhaps my husband HAD gone into the bathroom and used something in the medicine cabinet that night. I was 99 percent sure he hadn't, but maybe he did and I was basing my belief on false premises. So I could possibly dismiss the idea of spirit except for the little matter of the pinecone in the bathroom and the book in the living room.

Then one day I was in my office and saw a paperback book fly off the shelf, exactly the kind of unnatural phenomena I'd dismissed for years when reported by others. "Well," I said to myself, "of course it came off, I just put that book up there yesterday. I must not have set it on the shelf very carefully and it's gradually been sliding down until it just happened to fall today when I was here." I could have accepted that explanation EXCEPT that the very next day ANOTHER book, one which had been on the shelf for several years, also came flying off!

My intuition responded immediately with something like, "You're a hard nut to crack, Arlene. What more should the force behind the universe do? There IS a spiritual dimension to life and it's time you paid attention."

That event finally broke my last resistance. I couldn't avoid the reality of what I saw. How I interpreted it was up to me and it would take a very long time before I sorted it out enough to make a difference in my life.

Searching for the Meaning of My Experience

Shortly after the book was mysteriously dropped on the floor, I had an appointment with a wonderful therapist, Chris Varnes. Telling her about the experience, I told her I was sure there was a logical explanation I haven't yet thought of, for surely reason dictated I not accept this as a "sign" of a spirit. That would just be weird. (I had, and still do, an aversion to appearing "weird.")

Her response helped set me on the path to exploring these phenomena as "spiritual" events. She said, "Arlene, it's true that you could take two hours and give me every reason why you should dismiss these knocks and moved objects. But let's imagine they represent something to which you ARE supposed to pay attention. How would you go about exploring what it all means?"

Just then my eyes caught the title of a book in her bookcase, Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis edited by Stanislav and Christina Grof. When I asked what it was, she was glad I'd noticed it because she needed to return it to a student who'd loaned it to her. Looking through the book, I saw Ram Dass (a guru!) had written a chapter. Before I could give the book back with a "Thank you but no thank you," I noticed two of the chapters were written by people I admired. One by was by Roberto Assogioli, MD, PhD, who, as I mentioned, is the founder of Psychosynthesis. He is someone who I believed had his feet planted firmly on the ground. The other was Anne Armstrong, with whom I'd had a workshop on intuition. Although she feels she is "psychic" (a classification of individuals about whom I am even more skeptical than I am of gurus), she is one of the most ego-less persons I've met. She, too, seems to have her feet planted firmly on the ground.

So I bought the book. Then I started reading other writings, including a whole book by Ram Dass, on topics relating to spiritual development. No matter what the theoretical or religious perspective, I began to see that all of them were saying the same thing. They were just using different terms in their attempt to explain the inexplicable.

Let me tell you why this made a lot of sense to me. Perhaps ten years before the uncommon (to say the least) events in my house, I had the great good fortune of spending three days at a workshop with Joseph Campbell on "The Mystery of the Essence of Life." Something he said rang so true that I've used it in working with many clients who were struggling with their faith or having conflicts between what they had been taught by their religion when they children and what they now believed, although at the time I hadn't yet had my own spiritual awakening.

In a nutshell, this is what Campbell said:

The most important thing about any spiritual or peak experience is the experience itself.

The second most important thing is what we tell ourselves the experience means and how we fit it into our beliefs and past experiences.

The third most important thing is how we explain our experience to others. (View Explaining a Spiritual Experience.)

Once you have had a deep meditative experience (physical and paranormal phenomena are NOT required), you come away with a profound sense of having had an encounter with the essence of life. You know you've been touched by "something." You know this is a mystery. But how in the world do you make a mystery clear? You don't. If you could, it would no longer be a mystery.

Trying to translate the experience of one person to another so he or she will understand it accurately is like trying to explain what something tastes like. Imagine someone creates an entirely new fruit. With your first bite you know this will be the next food sensation and you want your friends to try it. "What does it taste like?" they ask. "Well," you start to say, "it looks a little like a banana, but it doesn't taste at all like a banana. It has the texture of a peach, the tanginess of a raspberry and the sweetness of a mango and . . . well, you'll just have to try it yourself. I sure can't describe it."

Attempting to explain a spiritual experience is not far removed from that kind of exercise.

In this article I've tried to give you some idea of how I came to develop my perspective on God or Spirit. I am no longer jealous of those who are sure of their faith because I have faith in my own experience. Now I know what Sam Keen meant when he wrote in Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening The Spirit In Everyday Life that:

God is not a problem to be solved by human intelligence, but is the ground beneath our capacity to understand anything, the totality within which we live, move and have our being. It is the water in which the fish swim without knowing they are in it.

I now use the word "God" quite freely. It's a shortcut that works for me. In using the word God and other words that express abstract concepts — spirit, soul, sacred, holy, forgive, compassion, grace, wonder, evil, hope, truth — I am aware that the meaning I give to these words may be different for me than it is for other people. However, because of my years of doubt, exploration and opening to spirit, I know we're all doing the best we can.

One final point. It's not easy to walk the path of a solitary spiritual seeker. You don't have to listen for knocks and wait for books to fall off shelves before connecting with your spiritual center. In fact, no one I've met has ever had my experiences and I'm sure that joining a church or group of believers is much simpler than going through the process I went through. It often works out well to accept the experience and teachings of others. Besides, most of us start out that way.

If that is the route you choose, I would only suggest you not leave your reasoning power at the doorstep. You may even believe that hell is a real and essential structure of the universe. Just be sure that once-in-awhile you apply some logic when given explanation for sacred texts.

In other articles I've written for this section of Support4Change you may recognize how my experiences have influenced how I view the world and how I approach the topic of God, Spirit and transcendence.

© 2003 Arlene Harder, MA, MFT