Lecture | George Graham | Self, Schizophrenia, and the Unwholly Spirit: A Pathway to Ecumenical Naturalism
Normal self-consciousness typically includes the compelling sense that my own experiences belong to me – one person, one whole and unified center of consciousness. That common and compelling feature of wholeness and distinctness often is lost or broken in certain experiences in schizophrenia as well as in mystical or religious experiences. The experience of self-consciousness or self-awareness in schizophrenia often is constituted by dramatic breakdowns in the experience of the self or “I”. Many so-called mystical or religious experiences include similar breakdowns. Such similarities have long been recognized in the literatures on mental illness and mysticism. The question is, ‘What to do about them?’ It would be a mistake to equate mysticism with psychosis but helpful to examine whether the two sorts of experiences are similar in their cognitive foundations. Ecumenical Naturalism (EN) claims that experiences of self in schizophrenia and in mysticism share some of the same cognitive foundations. Various religious social contexts and practices elicit, engage and manipulate those psychological systems in ways that yield thoughts and experiences that are quite similar to those associated with mental disorders like schizophrenia. EN aims to identify those foundations and to compare and contrast the differences in consequences between relevant illnesses and mystical experiences (when not signs of illness). My talk will describe EN, one of its essential assumptions, which is derived from some recent work in the cognitive science of religion, and illustrate its method. The relevant assumption is that religious experiences are sustained by a whole variety of cognitive systems, which are part of our regular psychological equipment, mystical experiences or no mystical experiences, schizophrenia or no schizophrenia. (November 19, 2015)