Shorto's big-fat-book reading led in time to Gospel Truth, an in-depth study of the diverse band of scholar-polemicists who are wielding the arcane tools of philology and historiography to wrest Jesus from the crushing grip of fundamentalist orthodoxy. It was at a convention of such students that he met a woman who was both Biblical scholar and psychologist, whose special field of interest was the Gospel narratives of Jesus' "miraculous" cures.
Through her he discovered a loose network of psychologists, therapists, and ministers, rabbis, priests, and nuns, their one point of agreement a conviction that, illusion or not, the religious impulse is not going to just wither away beneath the glaring sun of science. It represents, on the contrary, one aspect of an ineradicable reality, a basic element in the construction of the human psyche.
Rick Dahms
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack says his science concludes that alien abduction is real.
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Saints and Madmen is in the main the story of therapists who draw no sharp line between experiences conventionally categorized as "lunatic" and others perceived as "rational." Nor do they distinguish between experiences secular and sacred or normal and pathological. (Shorto cites approvingly R.D. Liang's dictum that schizophrenics can be mad without being ill.) Although John Mack's work with saucer abductees has nothing to do with religion on the surface, its methodology is in harmony with that of the people Shorto describes, looking for a middle way that honors the infinite quirkiness and endless fluidity of individual beliefs while recognizing that without the tethers of shared convictions and perceptions the individual is lost.
This unconventional approach to therapy—treating patients' values and experiences as essential data, not merely as symptoms—is as applicable to people troubled by other kinds of encounters with nonstandard realities as those with conventionally religious overtones. Such patients are less likely to get a sympathetic hearing; if you're going to have a spiritual crisis, you're better off having one with a socially sanctioned label. Even convinced Freudians may sometimes refer a patient with "religious problems" to authorities accustomed to dealing with same, while they would consider referring "alien abductees" to a therapist such as Mack tantamount to compounding their delusions.
The intellectual exclusivity of the scientific mainstream—the assertion that science is the one style of cognition with any claim to truth or value—is probably the biggest force driving curious, questing, troubled individuals into the trackless New Age hinterlands, where an explorer needs the suspicious eye and cool head encouraged by a scientific attitude more than ever. The audience for the Prophets weekend at Port Townsend nodded and murmured as approvingly over the mushy scientific metaphor-mongering of astronaut Edgar Mitchell as it did when John Mack tried to bring the abduction experience out of the shadows into the light of reason. Materialist scientists reject a vast spectrum of human experience as unworthy of attention. Does that stop us from wanting and needing answers? No: It just leaves us on our own in a field where we need the assistance of the skeptical scientific eye more than ever to help us distinguish psychological truth from neurotic defense construction, wishful thinking, deliberate deceit.
And the most annoying aspect of that rejection is its complete lack of intellectual justification. Forty-five years ago, Carl Jung said it better than anyone, in a reply, it just so happens, to a Swiss newspaper editor's query about his opinion on "flying saucers." Jung was and remained until his death in 1961 resolutely agnostic about the airborne discs that had haunted world consciousness for a decade. But "I cannot refrain from remarking," Jung added, "that the whole collective psychological problem that has been opened up by the Saucer epidemic stands in compensatory antithesis to our scientific picture of the world. In the United States this picture has if possible an even greater dominance than with us [Europeans]. It consists, as you know, very largely of statistical or 'average' truths. These exclude all rare borderline cases, which scientists fight shy of anyway because they cannot understand them. The consequence is a view of the world consisting entirely of normal cases. Like the 'normal' man, they are essentially fictions, and particularly in psychology fictions can lead to disastrous errors. . . ."
Wow. Couldn't have put it better myself. The kind of "Science" Jung's talking about here, claiming exclusive access to truth, is the reverse of skeptical. It's just another dogma, the protective mental armor of another priestly class with turf to protect. In his 1954 letter to Die Weltwoche, Jung continues: "Since it can be said with little exaggeration that reality consists mainly of exceptions to the rule, which the intellect then reduces to the norm, instead of a brightly colored picture of the real world [this kind of science] gives us a bleak, shallow rationalism that offers stones instead of bread to the emotional and spiritual hungers of the world. The logical result is an insatiable hunger for anything extraordinary."
That hunger is what this conference at Port Townsend is about. But flying saucers aren't the only thing you can call extraordinary. People aren't only hungry for signs and wonders: They also thirst for wisdom. While inside the balloon hangar Edgar Mitchell rambles on about "Evolution's Rosetta Stone" and "The Quantum Hologram," out on the grand lawn within its circle of solemn cedars, a little group of truants clusters round the picnic table where Robert Anton Wilson, refreshed by a nap and looking very much like the Ancient of Days in a rare good mood, is patiently waiting for his call to deliver the last talk of the afternoon. It's called "There's a Seeker Born Every Minute."
