Book Review: Living with a Wild God
by Richard Grooms, Fiction Department, Central Library
Living with a Wild God
Barbara Ehrenreich
Cultural and political commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, a self-professed atheist who was raised by atheists, started having what could be called mystical experiences as a teenager. This book is an account of her life focusing on those experiences: what led up to them, how they changed her and how she’s dealt with similar experiences ever since.
As a teen, Ehrenreich was unusually bright. She read heavily in science, philosophy, and religion. Eventually she came to become a solipsist, a strict scientific materialist and an extreme skeptic. This more or less led her to the conclusion that life had no meaning, that the universe was indifferent to her, that other people were not truly real. Not unsurprisingly, she came to feel there was no reason to go on living. But on a trip to Lone Pine, California, something highly unusual happened. As she was standing outdoors alone “the world flamed into life…Something poured into me and I poured into it…It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once…one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.” What happened? Was she psychotic? Was this brought on by low blood sugar or lack of sleep? Ehrenreich, ever the skeptic, asks herself these and many other questions, working from the journals she kept as an adolescent. She didn’t want to “risk slopping into ‘spirituality,’ which is… a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.” If that were true, this book wouldn’t have become a bestseller. Not to mention that the common core of the world’s religions is compassion, not delusion, at least according to numerous scholars. Here as in many places throughout the book, the author demonstrates only a conventional wisdom understanding of religions (when she isn’t knocking religions as a whole). This leads her to make statements such as the notion of the “merger with the ALL” is the exclusive province of the East (which would come to as a surprise to scores of Western mystics down through the millennia). At other times, she admits her lack of expertise, stating that she doesn’t have a comprehensive knowledge of mysticism, and concludes that most mystical experiences are uncomfortable and unpleasant. Like Ehrenreich, I’m not an expert on mysticism (though I have read dozens of books on the subject). In my experience, the scholarly consensus is that the majority of such experiences can be described as mostly in the beneficial-to-ecstatic range. I think Ehrenreich’s bias against religion steers her to her negative characterization of mystical consensus. But, the thing is, Ehrenreich is such a skeptic that she often comes to disagree with herself, so she keeps her skepticism but stays aware of the limitations of same. This is why I don’t mind disagreeing with her. I know that, in time, she’ll probably disagree with herself. In my heavily-marked copy, my margin arguments sometimes prefigure author comments.
A sizeable chunk of the book has to do with Ehrenreich’s time spent in social justice and labor organizing. Her contributions here are admirable. Similarly, she recounts her early years training and practicing as a chemist. The author admits that these careers ultimately didn’t give her life enough meaning. Both sections, however, demonstrate her allegiance to the grounded, the practical, and the this-world. Therefore when she tackles anew the numinous, you realize just how much her unexplainable mystical encounters are firmly a part of her non-nonsense world. Science has taught her that there are no “powerful nonhuman Others,” but as she encounters anomalies in her experiments, the rising scientific acceptance of animal minds and the limitations of science itself, she opens herself to the possibility of things she’d never considered before. In doing this, she finds that our definitions of science and religion (in fact, science and religion themselves) are too narrow and that there is much more fluidity between them than we suppose. Very good for her, she’s preaching to my choir here. At book’s end, I realize just how much she’s given my intellect and my faith a run for their money. I’m thankful for that. She’s stretched me, challenged me, given me many new perspectives, floored me. She reminds me of the Flammarion engraving’s medieval man who’s just stuck his head through the opaque celestial dome. He can now see hitherto unimagined things in the firmaments above. He reels back. He’s onto something good. So is Ehrenreich.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Cultural and political commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, a self-professed atheist who was raised by atheists, started having what could be called mystical experiences as a teenager. This book is an account of her life focusing on those experiences: what led up to them, how they changed her and how she’s dealt with similar experiences ever since.
As a teen, Ehrenreich was unusually bright. She read heavily in science, philosophy, and religion. Eventually she came to become a solipsist, a strict scientific materialist and an extreme skeptic. This more or less led her to the conclusion that life had no meaning, that the universe was indifferent to her, that other people were not truly real. Not unsurprisingly, she came to feel there was no reason to go on living. But on a trip to Lone Pine, California, something highly unusual happened. As she was standing outdoors alone “the world flamed into life…Something poured into me and I poured into it…It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once…one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it.” What happened? Was she psychotic? Was this brought on by low blood sugar or lack of sleep? Ehrenreich, ever the skeptic, asks herself these and many other questions, working from the journals she kept as an adolescent. She didn’t want to “risk slopping into ‘spirituality,’ which is… a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.” If that were true, this book wouldn’t have become a bestseller. Not to mention that the common core of the world’s religions is compassion, not delusion, at least according to numerous scholars. Here as in many places throughout the book, the author demonstrates only a conventional wisdom understanding of religions (when she isn’t knocking religions as a whole). This leads her to make statements such as the notion of the “merger with the ALL” is the exclusive province of the East (which would come to as a surprise to scores of Western mystics down through the millennia). At other times, she admits her lack of expertise, stating that she doesn’t have a comprehensive knowledge of mysticism, and concludes that most mystical experiences are uncomfortable and unpleasant. Like Ehrenreich, I’m not an expert on mysticism (though I have read dozens of books on the subject). In my experience, the scholarly consensus is that the majority of such experiences can be described as mostly in the beneficial-to-ecstatic range. I think Ehrenreich’s bias against religion steers her to her negative characterization of mystical consensus. But, the thing is, Ehrenreich is such a skeptic that she often comes to disagree with herself, so she keeps her skepticism but stays aware of the limitations of same. This is why I don’t mind disagreeing with her. I know that, in time, she’ll probably disagree with herself. In my heavily-marked copy, my margin arguments sometimes prefigure author comments.
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| Flammarion engraving, 1888 |
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