The subtleties of the inner life
When psychologists discuss consciousness, they’re looking at a wide variety of experiences of mental life. What if our spiritual lives are just as diverse?
Psychologists have a complicated relationship with consciousness. At one end of the spectrum are behaviourists, such as B. F. Skinner, who ignore consciousness and only study observable behaviour. At the other end of the spectrum are the psychoanalytic approaches of Freud and Jung, who give the unconscious a prominent role in their systems. Along the middle of the spectrum are various approaches that span cognitive psychology, drawing conclusions about internal mental processes such as perception, memory and thinking. These schools (and many others) try to get a handle on how our internal life relates to the world. But consciousness remains slippery, and the subject continues to fascinate not only psychologists but many others, from philosophers to neuroscientists.
Subtle differences
One question that arises in discussing consciousness is how people’s internal worlds differ. We can see that people have different abilities. Some are good at mathematics, while others always win at Scrabble. Some people are musically gifted, while others are amazing athletes. Some can build beautiful furniture, and others should not be allowed near any tool with a sharp edge.
But there are subtler differences in people’s mental lives that we are still coming to understand. Some individuals, for example, seem unable to make mental images. Most people, when asked to imagine an apple, form a mental image that matches an apple seen in the real world. Some people even seem to call up images that are hyperreal, with a three-dimensional quality and a photographic reality. Yet, for some people, the prompt to imagine an apple brings no mental image to life at all. These are individuals who function normally but have what has come to be called aphantasia, the inability to voluntarily create mental images.
Another difference in people’s mental worlds is that, for some, stimuli in one modality can elicit an involuntary response in another. Musical notes, for example, can bring to mind specific colours associated with them, or a particular date elicits a precise location in space. There are several types of this synesthesia, and around four percent of the population experiences some form of this mental linking.
Taking it to the pews
The variety of our mental lives leads me to ask how our religious or spiritual lives differ. How various are the spiritual lives of the people who sit around us in the church pews?
I’m not thinking about our theology or doctrines (though these may be part of it), but rather about our experience in meeting God and being part of the Christian family. Some of us have experienced a vivid meeting with Christ, or a sense of being drawn up into the third heaven (like Paul in 2 Cor. 12:2). For others, faith is a trust that nevertheless walks in darkness, never experiencing the clear voice of our Lord.
Our Creator gives each of us a different mental reality in our walk with Christ. The rich variety in our mental relationships with our Lord should teach us to be humble with our fellow believers, accepting that we all relate to God differently, and that none of us has a claim to full knowledge of our God – at least, not yet.
