Visions & other gifts: how can you tell if they are real?

What are we to make of modern religious visions and intense experiences - mine, yours, Mother Angelica's? Such episodes produce conflicts for me as an intellectual Christian believer and devotee of scientific psychology.

To get down to specifics, I'll take my own case. While intensely praying at Mass I often cry (surreptiously pretending to have a cold) and feel waves of joy, love, and peace well up. When I read that the disciples on the road to Emmaus recalled that their "hearts burned within them," I recognize the condition. Surely, too, those "consolations," and "the gift of tears" that Saint Ignatius writes about, must be similar sensations.

So far so good. I can intellectually comprehend that intense emotional arousal and imagery will produce bodily symptoms. More disturbing, however, have been several experiences of Jesus' actual presence while in private prayer. These moments took place decades ago in my youth, but I can still remember how intensely intimidating or awe-inspiring these perceptions were.

Even more puzzling was a visionary encounter with Mary who in a midlife health crisis calmed my desparate prayers by telling me that my lung disease (potentially fatal) was going to be all right. Mary did not seem to be as physically present to me as another human person in the room, but I beheld her image and felt the comfort of her message.

The next day when I went for a second lung x-ray I expected to be cured; but no, the ominous dark spots were still all over my lungs. Ah well, I thought, I must have been hallucinating, and tried to gather courage to undergo a surgical lung biopsy that might mean death at the age of forty.

Since I am now sixty-five I obviously didn't die. While I didn't have cancer my physicians and their consultants could never figure out what the mysterious "grit" all over my lungs could be. My outlook for the future was not great (you'll be an invalid for life), but in the next year's x-ray the grit had not spread and I'd taken up tennis and a regime of exercises. Then, surprise, surprise, the following year's x-ray revealed my lungs to be amazingly clear of whatever the infection had been.

A spontaneous remission of a stress-related parasitical infection? The fruit of will and exercise? And what of Mary? I've thought of the vision thing as a mini-miracle, a post-traumatic stress reaction, an intuitive read-out in imagery of the basically healthy state of my organism - or some combination of the above.

As a Christian and psychologist, however, I want to know more. Scientific psychology requires rigor, doubt, and a skeptical, testing attitude. Two great assaults upon the integrity of religious experience confront the skeptical inquirer. One reductive explanation is that human beings have been behaviorally conditioned to believe; the other is that our nonconscious mental processes create experiential phenomena that fulfill our wishes or needs.

I am always shaken by evidence that shows how much a human organism can be conditioned, with or without awareness. Stimuli, cues, and responses operate to shape both our internal and external behavior. Our autonomic nervous system, and maybe even the immune system, can be affected by subtle forms of reward and punishment. Human thoughts and verbal behavior can be conditioned; after all, cults and brainwashing programs have always operated on these principles. Internal assent to Maoist dogma increases if your inquisitors take away a painful punishment and thereby reward you each time you agree with them. Much to the chagrin of the police, people under interrogation confess to crimes they did not commit, and sometimes continue to believe their own made-up stories. Human beings can construct mental narratives that with the passage of time seem real. Ergo, people aren't necessarily lying or psychotic when they claim to remember being abducted by UFOs.

Then, too, unusual emotional states are not so rare. Hypnotic-trance behaviors and altered states of consciousness are part of the human repertoire and are found in many cultures. Spirit possessions of various kinds show up among normally functioning folk, and hallucinations do not always signal psychotic breakdowns. Human beings seem to be able to recreate dream states while awake - given enough stress, arousal, or emotional fervor.

When the brain/mind is chemically overdosed or deprived, or injured or diseased, other visions can appear. Many observers (including me) think near-death experiences are images produced in response to the brain's loss of oxygen coupled with cultural beliefs about heaven. In mania, probably caused by the brain's biochemical imbalance, persons often experience religious highs and grandiose delusions of special divine revelations. So why couldn't all these tricks of the mind and emotions apply to my religious experiences? Did I really see Mary? Do I really experience Christ and the Holy Spirit?

As I struggle to understand these things, I try to obtain some coherence in my belief system. To me it looks virtually certain that God has created a freely operating natural world of independent secondary causes open to rigorous scientific inquiry and discovery. But at the same time this world and the people in it live and move and have their being in God. The universe as we know it must be completely natural and completely God-saturated at the same time.

This interpenetration of the divine and natural can be realized or sensed by some persons more than others, but religious experience seems intrinsic and natural to the human species - just as language is. Only secularized modern types achieve religious tone-deafness and thereby manage to confine their intense experiences to sex, violence, art, or creative work.

So when you or I or mystics or little ladies in Bayside have visions of Mary or religious consolations, we are doing what comes naturally. Our only problem is to discern the quality of these normally occurring experiences of what William James called the "More." Sound is all around us in the air but all radio antennae are not equally, or as accurately, tuned. Some signals are mixed, or merely chaotic noise; other static is a sign that the vacuum tube is burning out.

The newest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association, distinguishes between mental disorders and manifestations of religious and spiritual problems (what some have called "spiritual emergencies"). In the DSM-IV some religious problems can be diagnosed as overlapping with mental disorders, but the two categories are not the same.

Prudential judgments are required in the psychiatric practice of differential diagnosis, just as they are in the traditional practice of discernment of spirits. What is the meaning of a particular religious experience and by what criteria do we judge it? The spiritual tradition insists that "by their fruits you shall know them." If consolations (or visions) help you to be more loving and just, much less heal your disease, then be grateful to accept the lift from the rising tide. I end up trusting my religious experiences because they have buoyed me up and helped me to love and endure.

But if the tide begins to ebb and we grow numb and cold, let's not blame God. Mild depressions and decaying brain synapses are marks of our fallen world. Better to hunker down and plod on in hope. God's largesse will eventually bring renewals of youthful joy and more than a glimpse of heaven.