There is a place within atheism for mystical experience. By this I mean those sublime moments in which we feel a deep awe and a sense of connection to humanity and the universe. I’ve had a number of such instances throughout my life, and I treasure the lasting sense of inspiration, peace and sense of interconnectedness that they provide.
Romain Rolland, Nobel Laureate and a friend of Sigmund Freud’s called this sense of connection and awe an “oceanic feeling.” Freud summarizes Rolland’s concept of the oceanic and its relation to religion in the first few pages of Civilization and its Discontents:
…the true source of religious sentiments…consists of a particular feeling… which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of somthing limitless, unbounded-as it were, “oceanic.” This feeling, he adds, is purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them.
I like this quote because it both affirms the subjective nature of such experiences and points out how institutions can co-opt individual euphoria and manipulate their interpretation for their own ends. I was even an agent for such interpretation when I served as a missionary for the LDS Church sixteen years ago. We were taught to take almost any positive emotion potential converts felt when they came to religious meetings or prayed or read the scriptures and to attribute it to God. Negative feelings were dismissed or explained away (often pointing to Satan as their source).
There is always a space between the experience and its interpretation, and in this space we insert the explanation our context provides (if we can find one). The summer I left home for college, I had my first deeply euphoric experience. Although it is still difficult to describe how I felt, at the time I relied entirely on the metaphor of my newly adopted religion. I felt as though the “heavens had opened up” and “choirs of angels” were singing all around. At the time, I translated this as God’s attempt to communicate with me the truthfulness of Mormonism, since I was continually being reminded by my Mormon friends, Church leaders and holy writings that God would witness this to me.
I still pursue and occasionally am pleasantly surprised by such experiences (just so you know, they are never induced by ingesting foreign substances, unless you count listening to Bad Religion), but I no longer use religious imagery to describe them. When they do wash over me, I try to keep the interpretive layers as thin as possible–it is enough to immerse myself in their peaceful waters, and to float in a warm ocean of connectedness.
