I recently read this article that speculates as to how our world might end. In addition to the familiar threats of nuclear war and a rise of the machines was the idea, becoming ever more popular, that our reality is simply a computer simulation being run on an alien processor; that "God" could become bored with us at any time and end humanity with the flick of a power switch (Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom calculates the likelihood of this scenario at greater than 50%). Dovetailing nicely into this concept is Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir, Living with a Wild God, in which the author describes glimpses she has had of the matrix throughout her life.
Although Ehrenreich states a couple of times that this is not an autobiography as she has no intention of writing one, that's exactly what it is. After rediscovering her teenage journals -- which she kept specifically to investigate the meaning of life -- Ehrenreich was struck by a challenge from the person she was in 1958: "What have you learned since you wrote this?" And although Ehrenreich abandoned her enquiry as she left her teen years, as a 70-something-year-old investigative journalist suffering from Depression and Breast Cancer, she decided to take up the challenge again and try to make sense of the curious experiences of her youth.
Ehrenreich describes a terrible childhood with two alcoholic parents -- her father distant and her mother abusive -- who moved the family around often, attempting to claw their way up the social ladder from a white trash existence in Butte, Montana (the author's words) to the middle-class respectability of Southern California. Ehrenreich was raised as an atheist but allowed to explore the faiths and traditions of her friends, which only confirmed to her the non-existence of a deity. She read widely in science and philosophy and independently developed a solipsistic belief system (in which, as she couldn't prove the reality of others, Ehrenreich could assume that only she herself existed -- an adolescent fantasy to which I also subscribed). Throughout these years, however, every now and then Ehrenreich would lose her focus on reality and see objects as they "really" were. The pinnacle of these experiences took place on a ski trip when, physically exhausted and hungry (a state the author compares to the one induced by Natives who went on vision quests), Ehrenreich went for a walk:
In the next few minutes, on that empty street, I found whatever I had been looking for. Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words such as "ineffable" and "transcendent". For most of the intervening years, my general thought has been: if there are no words for it, then don't say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into "spirituality", which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.This is the central experience that Ehrenreich hints at throughout the early part of this book, and although I understand that it was "indescribable", three short paragraphs make for a slightly disappointing climax. The author is careful to never attribute her experiences to a "God encounter" but she did understand that it was outside the norm -- enough to have been scared that it was a sign of Schizophrenia or Dissociative Disorder. Her visions stopped when she went to university and studied the sciences (although if one wanted to invoke Jungian Synchronicity, it seems beyond coincidence that Ehrenreich was assigned to study silicon diodes that appeared to exhibit life-like behaviours -- a fact that would later be a base for Chaos Theory), and after a conversation with a fellow student who was afraid of being drafted in to the Vietnam War, Ehrenreich decided to finally abandon solipsism and embrace humanity as her species. She became an antiwar activist, a feminist, and an investigator into the dark underbelly of the American Dream.
But there is one image, handed down over the centuries, that seems to apply, and that is the image of fire, as in the "burning bush". At some point in my pre-dawn walk -- not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time -- the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with "the all", as promised by the eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze…
"Ecstasy" would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.
And then she hit her seventies and was confronted by the challenge from her teenage self -- "What have you learned since you wrote this?" -- and Ehrenreich finally decided to investigate the nature of her visions. She shares her research into the experiences of others (everyone from St. Paul's Damascene conversion to author Philip K. Dick's commitment to a mental hospital after "breaking through the veil") and comes to this conclusion:
Science fiction, like religious mythology, can only be a stimulant to the imagination, but it is worth considering the suggestion it offers, which is the possibility of a being (or beings) that in some sense 'feeds' off of human consciousness, a being no more visible to us than microbes were to Aristotle, that roams the universe seeking minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact. We are not talking about God, that great mash-up of human yearnings and projections, or about some eternal 'mystery' before which we can only bow down in awe.It's important to remember that Ehrenreich is not only an atheist but earned a PhD in Cellular Immunology -- she's a scientist at heart and searched for fact-based explanations for her experiences. That she couldn't find that explanation in the natural world doesn't mean that she developed a belief in the supernatural, only that the views of nature she observed require further investigation (and she also dismisses psychotropic visions as something else entirely). If these proposed beings that feed off of human experiences are her best guess, Ehrenreich hedges even about them:
Do I believe that there exist invisible beings capable of making mental contact with us to produce what humans call mystical experiences? No, I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion… But experience -- empirical experience -- requires me to keep an open mind.I was fascinated by Living with a Wild God, but then again, Ehrenreich wrote here about many topics that have long fascinated me. If the alien life form at the switch doesn't lose interest in us too soon, I will be happy to read some of her other (less esoteric) works.
