Sparks of Light : Faith, Hope and R.D. Laing

R.D. Laing was an iconic figure of the sixties. Unconventional, controversial, and undeniably brilliant, how people viewed him then— or remember him now — is itself a kind of historical rorschach test. Since his death, in 1989, he has been praised, plagiarized, imitated, vilified, and increasingly forgotten. Dan Burston, perhaps Laing’s most astute biographer, thinks it important that we remember him.

By Daniel Burston

 
            Though few of his readers were aware of it, R.D. Laing combined a rare appreciation of Asian wisdom with a heartfelt immersion in Christian spirituality—a trait that he shared with older contemporaries like E.Graham Howe and Alan Watts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in an interview he did with George Feuerstein, entitled “Sparks of Light”, which first appeared in 1983 in The Laughing Man magazine.  When William Stranger approached me to write something about R.D.Laing for Dharmacafé.com, I asked him to assist me by reproducing this interview, which is reprinted below. Why? So that readers can get a glimpse of Laing at his best, and gain a deeper insight into his religious and spiritual side. My initial plan was to write a series of brief reflections on various remarks made by Laing, and I myself was not prepared for the lengthy commentary that gradually unfolded as I reflected on the various things he said there. But the more I thought about them, the more fraught with significance his remarks became, and as a result, my commentary grew longer than the interview itself.

          Some people may feel that by going on at such length, I am trying to upstage the Master. If so, however, they are approaching this commentary in the wrong spirit. Commentaries on the Old and New Testament, the Yoga and Buddhist sutras, with which Laing was intimately familiar, often go on for pages about a single line of text. Such commentaries imply that the text is worthy of sustained reflection, not something to be read and passed over in a hurry. Does that mean that I approach Laing’s words as if they were “holy writ?” No, indeed. Like the spiritual traditions in which he was so deeply versed, Laing was full of contradictions, and bringing those contradictions to light is a perfectly legitimate and respectful undertaking if we use the awareness of them to reflect with greater depth and clarity on the issues at hand, rather than making them the basis for a hostile deconstruction of his work. I hope that this free flowing meditation on Laing’s interview with Feuerstein will help to consolidate Laing’s hold on posterity, and demonstrate his continuing relevance to spiritual seekers in our time. Let us begin with the interview itself.

While the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing has gained worldwide professional renown for his work with schizophrenia, he has also won popular regard for his vehement social criticism. He contends that society, in general, is founded on denial of self and experience, rather than the discovery of reality in its fullness and wholeness. He has strongly objected to the modern trend toward depersonalization, especially as it appears in psychiatry in the guise of scientific objectivism.

To Laing, schizophrenia is not a diagnosed condition, but a political label. A person branded “schizophrenic” is invalidated as a human being, and his or her experience is dismissed as “crazy.” However, from L.aing’s point of view, the regression accompanying a nervous break-down (or schizophrenic episode) is a healing process that if allowed to occur naturally will result in the reintegration of the personality. Many methods of so-called therapy actually interfere with or abort this natural healing process. Thus, Laing has proposed the method of “anti-psychiatry”, or the attempt to provide a situation where people can, under guidance, come to better understand themselves outside the “ceremony” of psychiatric treatment.

His exploration of the inner world of schizophrenics has led R. D. Laing to consider the similarity between certain kinds of apparent madness and valid spiritual experiences. In fact, he holds that schizophrenics, through their firsthand exploration of the “ inner world”, actually have more to teach psychiartrists than the reverse.  Consequently, he has conducted an ongoing investigation into the nature of spiritual experience both in himself and in his clients. This spiritual aspect of his experience and thought is explored in the following interview, conducted at The Ojai Foundation by Georg Feuerstein of The Laughing Man staff. Laing’s forthright and thoughtful observations are remarkable for their overtly religious (Christian) language.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, R. D. Laing was educated at the University of Glasgow, receiving his M.D. in 1951. He was director of the Langham Clinic in London from 1962-65, when he co-founded the Kingsley Hall Clinic, an experimental “anti-psychiatric” clinic for those under-going schizophrenic episodes. Among the books he has authored are The Divided Self (1960), The Self and Other (1961), The Politics of Experience (1967), and The Facts of Life: An Essay in Existential Biology (1976).

TLM: You have inspected your life perhaps more intensively and systematically than most people. What has been your most valuable discovery from this process of inspection?

LAING: That hope is justifiable. In Christian language, the highest values are faith, hope, and charity or love, and the most important of these is love. However, love can become darkened or disappear, and we may not always be aware of love in our hearts or believe that it exists in the world. How strange it seems that there should be love at all in this world. That love exists at all seems more a bonus than an essential feature of the universe.

But human life is only dust and ashes without love. If you investigate and inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is ac-cumulated and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.

When we start to doubt, hope is the anchor that binds our faith to love. I am speaking in the vocabulary of Christianity. It is a pity that this vocabulary is so degraded. The first English translation of what is now called “the holy ghost” was by John Wycliffe, who translated it as “our healthy spirit.” That is the manifestation of Divinity within and through our own nature.  All our natures, with this healthy spirit are sparks of light in the same fire. That immediately unites us. That companionability in the light of our healthy spirit—which is light and love and the way and truth and life—is what I have become less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years or so.

TLM: Would you say that psychiatry is suffering in its models, approaches, and overall ethos from the ill effects of a materialist ideology?

LAING: Yes, very fundamentally. It even includes a schizoid spiritual materialism. Many psychiatrists think they fervently believe in God, yet hold the theory that thoughts are epiphenomena of the brain. Of course, how we articulate the nature of the brain’s relationship to our spirit is a very deep problem of language and insight. But by and large, we have a materialistic psychiatry and a materialistic humanism rather than cosmic consciousness. In the end, psychiatrists cannot even be humane unless they see Man’s place in the whole scheme of things.

TLM: Apart from writing books or giving lectures that challenge the scientistic ideology that obviously rules our civilization, what do you propose as reasonable counter-measures for yourself and other people like yourself?

LAING: Prayer is very important. I think the most important prayer is a prayerful waiting or attentiveness that doesn’t specifically ask for anything. Mother Teresa recommends what I imagine is the most useful prayer. It consists of simply listening to the silence of ones own heart. I don’t think one can do any better than that.

One can serve the world and humanity by stopping what one realizes one should not be doing, even if one can’t think of anything else to do. Many people say, “If we stop this, what will we do?” We simply don’t know what we will do. If we arc lost in a dark wood, we never discover where we are until we realize we are lost. What do we do, when we don’t know what to do?

TLM: Do you feel that prayer is effective because you transform yourself by praying, or do you have a sense that prayer can actually affect the world?

LAING: Yes, I believe that the material world is contained within the world of the Spirit, which has final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times. I don’t think anything happens to materials except what Spirit allows.

TLM: What, then, do you feel is the highest potential of Man?

LAING: The highest human potential is to glorify the Spirit, for the Spirit to manifest itself through us. I think that comes by the grace of the Spirit. The very cooperation of Man with God is God-given. The end of life is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The token of that perfect accomplishment is beatitude.

I don’t like to go so far as to talk of actual union with God or becoming God. Such expressions tend to encourage Man’s vanity and spiritual ambitions. You find people saying, “What’s the point of being a bank manager if, through meditation techniques, you can become God in less time than it takes to get through business school’?” I would much rather speak of being a slave of God, in whose service is perfect freedom.

TLM: You wrote in The Politics of Experience that in order to adapt to the world the child abdicates its ecstasy. Master Da Free John argues that ecstasy is our native condition, out of which we project our sense of human dilemma.

LAING: Yes, I think ecstasy is the native condition of ordinary mind. Our conditional mind has covered it over. What we take to be our ordinary mind is an aberration. The whole world is magical. Every child is aware of that until persuaded otherwise.

TLM: Would you say this loss of ecstasy is inevitable?

LAING: No, I don’t at all think it’s inevitable. I think it’s an aberration of our civilization.

TLM: Do you feel that there have been civilizations before ours where people actually maintained this state of ecstasy from childhood through adulthood?

LAING: Without any doubt, our civilization is unusual in its manner of culturing out everything transpersonal, along with all the fairies and spirits and so forth. But you have to go back to Aeschylus and the Greek tragedians, where you find a sense of the time before history was written down. You have to go back to Homer, and Homer just gives us the transition from all that went before. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes points out that in the Old Testament and in Homer practically all the major figures heard voices and saw visions as well as dreamed.

TLM: Experience figures very large in your work and presumably in your life. But experience presupposes an experiencing subject, or the ego. Therefore, no experience can be truly transcendental, since the ego is still in place. What is your view on that?

LAING: I don’t think that such a thing as the ego exists. The ego is a cultural hallucination. The “ego” is a name for a coherent set of mental operations that enable us to function in our society. We draw a circle around those operations and think it is a thing with which to identify ourselves. We must disidentify ourselves from the ego and see it as a process, a systematic, reasonably coherent set of operations. What we caII our ego we know to be always changing, impermanent, transient, but still we persist in this hallucination. The transcendental perspective is both immanent and transcendental. So one must simultaneously get into oneself and out of one’s ego. It is a return to ordinariness, as in the ox-herding cycle of Japanese Zen Buddhism. A mountain finally becomes a mountain again, a tree a tree, a river a river.

TLM: In that “experience” of enlightenment, is the ego still in place somewhere? Are people functioning on the egoic level?

LAING: Yes, it is a residue.

TLM: Consider an alternative to your definition of the ego. Master Da Free John defines the ego as the mechanism of identification with the body-mind, rather than as something essential to functioning. That opens the possibility that this mechanism comes to an end. One can still function in the world, but be identified with the All-Identity of everything. Do you concede that possibility?

LAING: Absolutely. What I am saying is not an objection to what you are saying, but simply a discussion of how we use words. I am inclined to reserve the word “ego” for a product of that process of identification. You would use the word ego for the process of identification itself.

In the etymological sense, Nirvana is sometimes delineated as “nir” being “no” and “vana” being “spinning.” Thus, Nirvana is the end of the spinning and weaving of this product by turning mental and physical processes into a sort of web with which one identifies oneself. Another way of expressing that transcendental-immanent experience of oneself is the metaphor of the circle whose perimeter is infinite and whose center is nowhere.

Some people might first discover this by sitting cross-legged for a long, long time until this identification with the body and with what we call our mind evaporates. Then everything is as it was before, but without that identification.

TLM: Here is a quote from Master Da Free John’s Work: “Heartfelt release of fear is the secret of passing through the spiritual process without going mad.“1 What is your feeling about that? Fear is a major theme in psychiatry, as well as being a major theme in all kinds of spiritual testing.

LAING: Temptation has not so much to do with being drawn into all sorts of bad thoughts as it does with being intimidated by the worst sort of terrors and demons that can be presented to oneself. In the Buddha’s last meditation before he achieved enlightenment, he was beset by demons and his only response was to touch the Earth. That fearlessness is the final release from anything that can be thrown at one. It goes beyond the need to be courageous.

I still get frightened myself. I cannot claim that I am not afraid of anything, but I am in the next best position: I am not afraid of being afraid.

TLM: That quote continues, “You will find no peace until you have realized love, sacrifice, and self-surrender. You must surrender to God literally and release your fear. Such surrender is the foundation of religious life and spiritual practice.” 2

LAING: Absolutely.

TLM: “Surrender is the mechanism of transformation, heartfelt surrender to God, and the great Mechanism in Nature that quickens the surrender of human beings is a human individual who can act as Spiritual Master, an individual who is transparent to the Life of God and who can enter into relations with devotees.” 3 What is your feeling here?

LAING: If one is surrendered completely to God, then one has no fear of death, no fear of what anyone can throw at one, and that is tantamount to peace. Again, in the English translation of the Greek New Testament we find, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In the original it reads “Blessed are the spiritual beggars,” those who are completely empty-handed. That emptiness is synonymous with surrender. In surrender, you lose everything. If one is surrendered to God, one cannot find any consolation or satisfaction in anything else but God. That brings complete peace, complete emptiness, and total service. All these words — peace, love, blessedness, fearlessness — are simply different facets of the same diamond.

TLM: One last quote: “The first obstacle, and the primary obstacle, to spiritual life is the relationship to the Spiritual Master. It is also the fundamental condition, content, and source of spiritual or real life.”  What is your response to that?

LAING: This is a paradox. Spiritual teachers are a God-given grace in this world. All spiritual teachers tell their students, “Don’t cling to me.” When a woman put her hand out to touch Jesus’ robes, his response is often translated “Don’t touch me,” but the original meaning is “Don’t cling to me.” There is also the metaphor of the good shepherd. But the whole point of the shepherd is to help the sheep to realize that they are not sheep. Attachment to a teacher is one of the more subtle obstacles in spiritual life.5

TLM: In another sense, the guru could also he an obstacle insofar as there is misunderstanding of what surrender to the Spiritual Master means. Therefore, there is an immediate reaction to the idea of Spiritual Masters. The ego by nature does not want to surrender to anything, least of all another seemingly human being, God-Realized or not.

LAING: I wouldn’t regard anyone as a true spiritual master who non-paradoxically demands of disciples that they surrender to him. One can get a touch of something one had not glimpsed from the presence of another person who is further advanced in the spiritual path than oneself. It has always been recommended to spend time with spiritually awake people.

TLM: What do you feel is the reason for that?

LAING: Once again, to put this in Christian terms, Jesus says, “When two or three are gathered together in my name,” not in the name of Jesus but in the name of Christ, “then there I am.” There seems to be a sort of spiritual force field, like a magnetic field, that is set up.

TLM: Would you say, then, that a Spiritual Master can serve a genuine function for people who have a spiritual appreciation?

LAING: Oh, yes.

TLM: Did you ever have any association of this kind?

LAING: I have associated with a number of holy men. It is impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like without meeting and spending quite a lot of time in the company of such people. But I have never felt any inner impulsion to surrender myself to a guru. However, if some people feel they need to do that, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to do so. A genuine spiritual master would not be able to exploit that for his own egoic advantage. It has been said that if you go to a guru with a pure heart, that purity of heart will protect you, even if the guru turns out to be an impostor. It will do the guru harm, not the disciple.

TLM: Do you feel there are people around now who actually have Realized God and are empowered to lead other people to the same Realization?

LAING: I have not personally met any such one. I have met a number of people I would regard as servants of God.

TLM: You are saying you have not actually met somebody whom you felt was God-Realized. Is that, perhaps, the reason you did not have that impulsion to surrender to a guru? If you had met Jesus, would you have followed him? As he said, “Follow me.”

LAING: (pause) I hope so. Yes, definitely.

TLM: That is an honest answer.

1. Da Free John, Compulsory Dancing (The Dawn Horse Press), 1980) p.91.
2. Ibid., p. 92
3. Ibid., p. 28
4. Bubba [Da]  Free John, 71 The Method of the Siddhas, rev. ed. (The Dawn Horse Press, 1978), p. 240.
5. The spiritual relationship between Adept and disciple is a paradoxical one. To relate to the Adept as a parent figure, cultic idol, or Gocl-substitute only undermines the spiritual process, depriving the disciple of responsibility. Rather, the Adept must be recognized as the transparent Agency of the Being-Consciousness that is the true identity of all beings and things, including the disciple. In that case, the disciple’s surrender to the Adept provides the spiritual connection to the Iiving Force of Consciousness that directly instructs the disciple and quickens his Awakening.

[This article originally appeared in The Laughing Man magazine, vol. 5, #12, pp. 19-21. It is used by permission of The Dawn Horse Press. All rights reserved.]

    Before we comment on the interview itself, it may be helpful to know the following. A year or so before his death in August 1989, R.D. Laing was living quietly in Going, Austria, when he confided the following dream to his friend and follower, Theodor Itten. He dreamt he was “in” a soccer match, but that he was “both sides.” In other words, he did not identify with any individual player or team member, i.e. a captain or a goalkeeper. Nor did he adopt a corporate identity, becoming one team as opposed to the other. Instead, his description conveys the impression that in some sense he was everybody, on both sides, if not implicated in the action, the game itself (i.e. the offensive and defensive maneuvers from both sides of the field).

      Unfortunately, Laing said no more about this intriguing oneiric interlude. Beyond identifying it as a football (soccer) match, he did not describe the visual palette of the dream, nor report on the affect that accompanied it. Finally, he left no “free associations” by means of which we could interpret it, nor resolve the questions it begs—“If you are both sides, then the whole notion of winning becomes moot, doesn’t it? If you are both sides, then no one wins or everyone wins—correct?”

      Even in the absence of such information, however, several interpretations are possible. As I pointed out in The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing, books like Sanity, Madness and the Family, The Politics of Experience and The Politics of The Family were filled with scathing critiques of the nuclear family, giving rise to the widespread impression that Laing was basically opposed to the family. Nevertheless, beginning in 1972, Laing, denounced revolutionaries who neglected their wives and children in the interests of building “the revolution”, and defended the family against the growing tide of counter-cultural and ideologically inflected contempt for family life, baffling and antagonizing many former friends and supporters in the process.

        A similar reversal took place with respect to his stance on psychiatric drugs. Laing’s first book, The Divided Self, published in 1960, was a sustained attempt to make the process of going mad “intelligible” to ordinary, educated people. It was mercifully free of the jargon of mainstream psychiatry, psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the dominant approaches in the mental health field at the time, because Laing felt that reliance on such language gets in the way of understanding patients as suffering human beings, rather than deepening our understanding of them. As the sixties unfolded, Laing’s broadened his critique of mainstream psychiatry well beyond its theoretical models, to include various involuntary “treatments”, like drugs and electroshock, and became so vehement that he was often accused of being an “anti-psychiatrist”–a label he always rejected, by the way. But toward the middle and end of the eighties, Laing’s stance, though still critical, became more conciliatory, and he reached out again to many old psychiatric colleagues in an effort to engage them in dialogue. Perhaps inevitably, as he did this with increasing frequency, certain inconsistencies between his earlier and later positions came to light, disconcerting some of his followers from previous decades, who wondered where he really stood on the issues, and why he no longer opposed the (voluntary) use of psychotropic medication, provided patients were fully informed of the risks entailed in this approach to treatment.

          Thomas Szasz, whose reputation as “the gadfly of psychiatry” during the 1960’s was gradually eclipsed by Laing’s, remained remarkably consistent in all his basic positions as the decades unfolded, and would no doubt interpret Laing’s dream as an endopsychic perception–or a spontaneous symbolic self-representation—of Laing’s muddle-headedness and opportunism, of his tendency to embrace or espouse both sides of an issue; in other words, to equivocate, or to revel in ambiguity when it suited his purposes. After all, by Szasz’s account, Laing is everywhere–and nowhere–and does not have to commit himself to a position or to “take a side”. While Szasz’s appraisal of Laing is exceedingly harsh, any reasonably alert person can find some evidence of this tendency in his writings and public pronouncements. Consistency was not his strong suit.

        A Freudian might say that Laing’s dream represents the fulfillment of a childhood wish – perhaps the desire to see two adversarial parents (and their respective families) reconciled; a wish that is eminently understandable, once you delve into Laing’s family history. Alternatively, for a Freudian, it might represent Laing’s wish to finally overcome his own intensely competitive nature. After all, whatever else he was, Laing was nothing if not competitive. A few months after he reported this dream, he died on a tennis court, playing vigorously against Robert Firestone, a much younger man, in 105 degree heat — and beating him soundly, too! Several months before the dream in question, Laing told Theo Itten that he was engaged in planning an international “Olympics of the mind.” Sadly, nothing came of it, although Laing invested considerable energy in this project. The point here, however, is that the “Olympics” metaphor implies that someone who achieved international stature in the fields of philosophy, science, etc., must have undergone rigorous training and expect to meet his or her peers in a competitive arena.

            Unlike Freudians, who focus on early childhood experiences and internal conflicts, Jungians examine the dreams of middle-aged and elderly people looking for evidence of personal integration as the maturing psyche prepares for eventual death. That being so, a Jungian would probably say that the overt lack of an egoic identification and the rejection of any corporate identity suggest that this dream is really about the process of individuation , one in which the self becomes integrated through a conjunctio oppositorum , which, in Laing’s case, is represented idiosyncratically through the interplay of two opposing (male) teams, rather than the more conventional archetypal symbolism of male/female intercourse.

            Which interpretation is correct? Perhaps all—or none! People who have studied Laing’s life and thought in depth will be hard pressed to embrace or repudiate any single interpretation unreservedly, because they all fit certain aspects of his protean personality. But by the same token, none of them really do him justice, or capture all the facets of his mercurial temperament, his fierce competitiveness, his subtle and sophisticated mind, and, finally, his desire to transcend his internal conflicts, including the conflicts between individualism and collectivism, competition and co-operation that the dream fragment he shared with Itten probably calls attention to. Quite apart from any interpretation we may offer, the dream itself does not do Laing justice, because while it sheds light on his internal conflicts, it does not adequately reflect either his loving or truth-loving dispositions, both of which were deeply embedded in his psyche, and as much a part of his personal Gestalt as his other traits and vulnerabilities.

          By contrast, thankfully, “Sparks of Light” reflects Laing at his best, and contains many of his most profound reflections on spirituality and love. But as the editor of the interview points out in the preamble, this is not what his readers had come to expect, nor was it delivered in his usual style. Had Laing quoted a Vedanta sage, a Buddhist preceptor or William Blake, no one would have blinked an eye. But the surprise—indeed, astonishment –that most readers felt when Laing gave voice to an explicitly Christian religious sensibility calls for explanation, and the dream of the soccer match is really very illuminating in this regard.

        Readers of The Wing of Madness already know that Laing’s life and character were a study in contrasts. Depending on circumstances, and his frame of mind at the time, Laing could be disciplined or debauched, cruel or kind, courteous or rude, aristocratic or a man of the people. He also oscillated, at various times, between extremes of optimism and pessimism, diffidence (or reticence) and lurid exhibitionism, leading many people to conclude—quite mistakenly—that Laing was merely manic depressive, or “bi-polar.” Bi-polar? Not on your life, though the term “polypolar”, which I just invented for the occasion, would furnish a fair description of his complex personality. While I do not deny the existence of bi-polar disorder, nor underestimate the damage it can do, the term “bipolar” has become too popular, too diffuse and too clichéd in psychiatric discourse and contemporary culture. Besides, the effort to reduce the various contradictions in Laing’s life and work to the manifold expressions of a single (biological) substrate betrays a deeply impoverished (and/or overly inclusive) view of creative and unconventional people, and the role which tensions and polarities (of various kinds) play in potentiating creative intellectual and spiritual work.

        In any case, if you survey his life as a whole you will find that at various times, and in various ways, Laing straddled the boundaries between psychiatrists and mental patients, between radicals and conservatives, and between modern and postmodern epistemologies. But he also straddled the often adversarial boundaries between theists and atheists, mystics and scientists—a fact that is reflected in the disparate appraisals one gleans from his intimate friends an co-workers.  Some of his oldest and closest friends, including his adolescent chum John Duffy, whom I met in Glasgow in 1992, knew Laing only as an outspoken atheist—a man of the Left who was smitten with Sartre, and had nothing but contempt for pious souls and their self-deluding notions. Duffy, who met Laing at age 16, dismissed his religious utterances in later life as being a kind of poetry at best, hinting obliquely that Laing’s lapses into religious rhetoric might have been opportunistic or insincere, or possibly expressions of a passing weakness.

      Sydney Briskin, a social worker who helped found the Philadelphia Association, and who personally helped to negotiate the lease of the famous (and infamous) Kingsley Hall, saw Laing precisely the same way as Duffy–as an atheist, and a man of the Left. Briskin was stunned when Laing used the public auditorium at Kingsley Hall in the Fall of 1964 to deliver a thundering sermon in the old Calvinist style –and without a trace of irony, either. During the late 1970’s , having long since left Kingsley Hall,  Laing occasionally delivered sermons in his neighborhood Church, usually with great vigor and conviction.

      How to explain this seeming anomaly? Well, first let us note that Laing’s interests and activities in the Christian sphere were not known to the majority of his readers, and that Laing himself acknowledges the comparative oddity of his religious musings by admitting that he was finally expressing himself in a Christian idiom that he had become “. . . less embarrassed about affirming in the course of the last thirty years or so.”

        Why embarrassed? Well, to give Laing the benefit of the doubt, it is true that during the Cold War era, when Laing rose to prominence, people tended to regard anyone who spoke often and earnestly of their faith outside of their immediate circle as being somewhat odd and ill-educated. That is no longer the case, at least in the USA. However, whatever prevailing attitudes were at the time, the fact remains that this statement also conveys the misleading impressions that though his reluctance to speak about it had diminished in the last few decades, for reasons that are not given, his faith had been constant throughout. This is simply not so, and is belied by many other things he said, both before and after this interview was given. Indeed, reviewing all his pronouncements on spiritual and theological questions over he years, the cumulative impression one gets is that he spent most of his adolescence and adult life as a reluctant and sometimes deeply anguished agnostic who longed for the consolations of faith, but could not overcome his doubts and misgivings sufficiently to affirm what he desired, sometimes ambivalently, sometimes whole-heartedly. This is probably the real source of his “embarrassment.”

          What kind of Christian was Laing when he was not overwhelmed by doubt? Before answering that question, it is instructive to note that as a teenager, Laing was exposed to two different kinds of Christianity–the Evangelical-cum-fundamentalist variety of Calvinism, and the older “Celtic Christianity” that arrived in Scotland with Brendan the Navigator (484-578 C.E.) and St. Columba (521-597 C.E.), both of whom had a role in the building of Iona Abbey on the Isle Iona, in the Lower Hebrides.  By the age of 14, Laing claimed, he had emphatically rejected the former, Evangelical form of Christianity in favor of the latter, Celtic variety, at least for a time. This claim is born out by his on again/off again relationship with the Very Reverend George MacLeod (1895-1991 C.E.), who like Laing, incidentally, was a native of Glasgow who rose to the rank of Captain in the British Army. McLeod was the founder of The Iona Christian Community, which is an ecumenical Christian community based on the Isle of Iona in the Lower Hebrides and dedicated to the preservation of Celtic Christianity and the erasure of world hunger and poverty. Though few people outside of Scotland are aware of it, Laing spent many days there over the course of his career. Indeed, in the early 1980’s, Laing pondered the possibility of situating a foundation to be called St. Oran’s Trust on this fair island.

      Laing’s embrace of Celtic Christianity is also evidenced his insistence in his remark that we are all one in the Universal Fire. Indeed, he says, our individual souls are nothing but “sparks” emanating from this universal fire. Classicists contend that the idea that the soul is a “spark” of a Divine Fire probably originates in the Orphic religion, but gets taken up by Plato in the 4th century B.C.E., and subsequently, by the Stoics and neo-Platonists in the Hellenistic-Roman era. While originally a school of pagan philosophy, Neo-Platonism and the emanationist approach to theology later took on Jewish, Christian and Islamic forms, and, as we survey the history of Western spirituality, we find the imagery of the soul as a Divine spark as a common idiom for mystics of all three traditions.

        Another striking feature of his talk with Feuerstein, is that when asked to share the fruits of a lifetime of introspection, Laing responded that he discovered “that hope is justifiable.” The term “hope” does not surface often in Laing’s work, and though he vigorously repudiated the suggestion, many reader—friends and critics alike—found The Politics of Experience to be an angry and eloquent expression of overwhelming despair. If so, of course, Laing had clearly recovered some of his optimism in the interim. Meanwhile, the suggestion that hope is justifiable, and that this represents a hard won discovery on his part, says a great deal about him personally.

        That being so, it is also instructive to note that Laing tries here—and not for the first time—to link the idea of love to the project of scientific inquiry. Laing often despaired of getting psychiatrists to see that viewing their patients primarily or exclusively through the lenses of the natural scientific attitude is profoundly dehumanizing. The idea that science is (or ought) to be informed by a loving, reverential attitude toward nature was self-evident to someone like Einstein, but is odd and incongruous to most scientists, so Laing justified this linkage by pointing to the destructive potential of scientific research that lacks this basis. He said:

      If you investigate and inquire into the world without love, you don’t find anything worthwhile. If you look at a tree or a frog or anything at all without the eyes of love, then you obtain only loveless, heartless knowledge. When such knowledge is accumulated and applied to practices of scientific technology, it becomes the most destructive form of knowledge ever discovered. Even the worst black magic cannot vie with the
destructive capacity of science. Its very method is to destroy what it looks at in order to discover its elements.

      Though Laing’s readers often found these remarks strikingly original, the fact remains that they are a close paraphrase of ideas expressed by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in the 1930’s. Laing was introduced to Buber’s critique of scientism by his mentor, neurologist Joseph Schorstein in 1949. But Laing was evidently determined to co-ordinate Buber’s critique of loveless science into a specifically Christian message, which emphasizes the centrality of prayer and service. Admittedly, these are also Jewish values, and Buber also anticipates the reservations Laing expressed about certain features of mystical theology. Laing said here,  for example, that

I don’t like to go so far as to talk of actual union with God or becoming God. Such expressions tend to encourage Man’s vanity and spiritual ambitions. You find people saying, “What’s the point of being a bank manager if, through meditation techniques, you can become God in less time than it takes to get through business school?” I would much rather speak of being a slave of God, in whose service is perfect freedom.

        Jews and Christians both stress God’s transcendence. But where Buber (and Jews generally) differ from Laing (and most Christians) is in the use of the idiom of slavery. Jews speak of being God’s servant, or alternatively, his willing and active collaborator in the work of Tikkun Olam—the repair or restoration of the world through acts of love and justice. The eventual consummation of this holy mission (in the Messianic time) is often depicted by Jewish mystics as the eventual return of the Holy Sparks to the Primordial Fire. But in the meantime, from the Jewish perspective, God liberated the Jews from slavery in Egypt precisely in order to serve him, and permitted a whole generation of former slaves to perish in the wilderness because the slave mentality is inimical to the worship of God. Service to the Lord is essentially the act of a free man or woman, so the notion of being “a slave of God” is somewhat incongruous to the Jewish mind. The Hebrew Bible (and accompanying commentaries) leave no room for doubt on this score. God does not want slaves, whose work is—by definition—coerced. Besides, even the most intimate I-Thou relationship does not preclude conflict, and Jacob famously wrestles with the angel, refusing to surrender, before finally being accepted by God and embracing his personal destiny. He was thenceforth known as Israel, which means “he wrestled with God”—which is evidently what Laing did for much of his adult life.

          Having said that, however, Laing’s reluctance to speak of “becoming God” prompts us to reflect that in Western religious traditions, the condition of religious (and of interpersonal) communion in love—or indeed of any kind of genuine intimacy—is the inexorable separateness and singularity of selves; a theme that Laing broached in existential and phenomenological terms many times. In Self and Others, for example, Laing spoke with great eloquence about the sense of unqualified privacy and the incommensurability of one’s personal being that accompanies the experience of one’s being-for-oneself, citing the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to underscore his point. In The Politics of Experience, Laing continued in this vein by emphasizing that although people experience one another as experiencing the world or themselves in certain ways, no one has direct access to the experience of another person. Conversely, he maintained my self is my experience, and my experience, in the final analysis, is myself.

        George Feuerstein was alert to the apparent paradox of discussing certain kinds of mystical experiences and practices from the standpoint of the separateness and singularity of the self, and raised the issue indirectly as follows:

FEUERSTEIN: But experience presupposes an experiencing subject, or the ego. Therefore, no experience can be truly transcendental, since the ego is still in place. What is your view on that?

Significantly, Laing replied:

LAING: I don’t think that such a thing as the ego exists. The ego is a cultural hallucination. The “ego” is a name for a coherent set of mental operations that enable us to function in our society. We draw a circle around those operations and think it is a thing with which to identify ourselves. We must disidentify ourselves from the ego and see it as a process, a systematic, reasonably coherent set of operations. What we call our ego we know to be always changing, impermanent, transient, but still we persist in this hallucination. The transcendental perspective is both immanent and transcendental. So one must simultaneously get into oneself and out of one’s ego. It is a return to ordinariness, as in the ox-herding cycle of Japanese Zen Buddhism. A mountain finally becomes a mountain again, a tree a tree, a river a river.

      Laing’s words here are quite illuminating. Whereas Feuerstein equates the experiencing subject with the “ego”, as many philosophers do, Laing speaks of “disidentifying ourselves” from the ego, which implies that ultimately we have—or more precisely, that we are –selves that are separate from our egos. Similarly, he speaks of the need to “get into oneself and out of one’s ego”, implying that the less self-estranged we are, the less caught up we are in “cultural hallucinations.” And though he does not say so in quite so many words, it follows from this that the self and the ego are not two different terms for the same entity, as many of us imagine, but fundamentally different entities, the ego being a “cultural hallucination”, the self being our authentic ground of experience.

        In stressing the difference between the self and the ego, Laing was joining with a small but important group of psychoanalytic thinkers for whom the distinction between the self and the ego is pivotal to understanding transcendental and psychotherapeutic experience - C.G. Jung, D.W. Winnicott, E.Graham Howe, and oddly enough, Erik Erikson, who is still widely misinterpreted as an “ego psychologist.” In this sense, perhaps, Laing and Feuerstein were on different wavelengths and talking past one another, since Feuerstein seemed to assume that the ego and the self are synonyms through out this brief exchange.

      The interview between Laing and Feuerstein ended on an odd note, too. Feuerstein inquired whether, or to what extent, Laing’s personal contact with “holy men” had motivated him to surrender himself completely to a spiritual teacher or guru. Laing responded by saying that

LAING: I have associated with a number of holy men. It is impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like without meeting and spending quite a lot of time in the company of such people. But I have never felt any inner impulsion to surrender myself to a guru. However, if some people feel they need to do that, then I think it is perfectly appropriate for them to do so. A genuine spiritual master would not be able to exploit that for his own egoic advantage. It has been said that if you go to a guru with a pure heart, that purity of heart will protect you, even if the guru turns out to be an impostor. It will do the guru harm, not the disciple.
FEUERSTEIN: Do you feel there are people around now who actually have Realized God and are empowered to lead other people to the same Realization?
LAING: I have not personally met any such one. I have met a number of people I would regard as servants of God.
FEUERSTEIN: You are saying you have not actually met somebody whom you felt was God-Realized. Is that, perhaps, the reason you did not have that impulsion to surrender to a guru? If you had met Jesus, would you have followed him? As he said, “Follow me.”
LAING: (pause) I hope so. Yes, definitely.
FEUERSTEIN: That is an honest answer.

    What neither Laing nor Feuerstein stated, at this point, is that from a Christian perspective, Jesus was not just some “God Realized” holy man, or a particularly potent and charismatic guru, but God incarnate. But by the same token, surrendering to God is entirely in keeping with the Christian ethos, so Laing could not possibly have answered “no” to this question without nullifying everything he said prior to that point in this same interview. Meanwhile, without actually saying so, Feuerstein himself appeared to be hinting that Jesus was merely a supremely gifted “spiritual master”—a stark difference in perspective they politely agreed not to broach here. So the real point of this exchange, perhaps, is that while dancing around this controversial issue, Laing was politely expressing some reservations about the potential pitfalls of personal charisma among gurus of one sort and another, hinting at the potential dangers of egoism and exploitation (on the part of the guru) and eventual disappointment (on the part of his followers.)

      Nevertheless, Laing and Feuerstein were on exactly the same wavelength when it came to decrying the dangers of scientism and materialism in contemporary culture. In this context, Feuerstein extracted a rather stark and startling statement of faith from Laing, as follows.

LAING:. . . the material world is contained within the world of the Spirit, which has final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times. I don’t think anything happens to materials except what Spirit allows.

    This statement can be interpreted in various ways—theologically, philosophically and metaphysically. At the very least, it represents a clear and resounding repudiation of the materialist interpretation of history and of human affairs that many of Laing’s erstwhile friends and followers continued to cling to. But a statement like this also lends itself to a psychological interpretation. Among other things, perhaps, Laing’s emphasis on the Spirit’s “final, triumphal mastery of the situation at all times” is an expression of resurgent optimism, and a vivid expression of what Erikson called basic trust—an affirmation of the basic goodness and trustworthiness of the cosmos, in spite of the manifold horrors and privations we undergo individually at the “material” level. Statements of this kind do not always have this meaning, of course. Depending on circumstances, the statement that everything that happens is allowed by the Spirit - presumably in the service of our ultimate redemption—can be plausibly construed as a call for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of (possibly preventable, and certainly horrific) events. Ever since the Holocaust, for example, Jews, and increasing numbers of Christians, wonder how God could have let this catastrophe happen, and point out that saying it happened with God’s full knowledge and consent are making God complicit in unspeakable depravity. Similarly, saying that hurricane Katrina was “permitted” by God because of the sinfulness of New Orleans’ residents—a la televangelist Pat Robertson—is a travesty of what Laing was trying to say. So, however people are tempted to interpret this statement of on a philosophical or spiritual plane, experience compels the conclusion that, odd as it sounds, a statement of faith like this can be an affirmation of faith, a technique for blaming (and perhaps vilifying) the victim, or a thinly disguised wish fulfillment fantasy that covers up an underlying hostility or intolerance.

      Having said that, it is clear from context that Laing was not calling for resignation, indifference or complacency in the face of evil, because he begins his remarks with the observation “that hope is justifiable,” and goes on to emphasize the importance of love, prayer and service. And though Laing would have rued the comparison, given his distaste for American “ego psychology”, his musings on this point are entirely in keeping with Erikson’s claim that hope is the virtue characteristic of “basic trust”. As Erikson often pointed out, hope is the foundation of all other “virtues.” Sociability, self-esteem and self-discipline seldom flourish in a climate of pervasive mistrust, which distort human development and human relationships in myriad ways. And though he couched them in the language of existential phenomenology, Laing addressed similar kinds of issues when he talked about ontological security and insecurity and the schizoid patient’s fear of authentic self-disclosure in The Divided Self.

    That being so, it is important to point out that Laing’s childhood was fraught with experiences that provoked a profound sense of mistrust, especially in relation to his mother. As a result, perhaps, in adult life, he was seldom as certain of the presence of some sort of Providence or Divine oversight at work in the course of unfolding events as he appears to be here. Had his childhood been less harrowing, and his adult life less fraught with conflict, controversy and the blandishments of fame, Laing might have been able to cultivate a steadier, more consistent faith, and would probably have lived a longer, more temperate and more fulfilling life as a consequence. But by the same token, if he had done those things, he might never have had those remarkable insights into the minds of the mad that riveted the world’s attention on him for a brief but memorable span of time.

Daniel Burston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology who holds doctorates in Psychology (1989) and in Social and Political Thought (1985) from York University in Toronto. He is also an Associate of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and on the Advisory Board of the C. G. Jung Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh, the Advisory Board of Janus Head, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis. His books have been reviewed in numerous journals and newspapers, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Economist, The New Statesman, and many other magazines.

He is the author of The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D.Laing, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy, and Psychotherapy as a Human Science. Dr. Burston’s most recent book is Erik Erikson and the American Psyche: Ego, Ethics and Evolution.