By Peter Versteeg –
“It’s just a chemical reaction,” was the response of a fellow student, a psychologist. I had just presented my “spiritual biography,” a part of the master’s in spiritual care I was pursuing. A prominent feature in my story was an experience of deep meaninglessness that I encountered at sixteen. I often jokingly said that my only religious experience was a “negative” one. Not negative in the sense of something “unfavorable,” but more as an “absence.” In the experience there was absolutely nothing—perhaps even not that. As a Protestant teenager, who may have been hoping for a divine revelation, this was a deeply unsettling event.
So what exactly had happened? Or at least, how did I remember it? It was a Friday afternoon after school when I got on my bike and rode through the polders of Eemland. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a deep, abysmal sense of emptiness. In that moment, I realized: The universe is empty, everything within it lacks meaning, and nothing can be done about it. It didn’t just let go of me easily—I carried it with me for a whole day. Later, while walking through the city one evening amidst people, the feeling briefly returned. After that, it never came back. I experienced it as something entirely new, a terrifying glimpse into a reality I had not yet known.
Biochemical explanations for transcendent experiences were familiar to an anthropological researcher of religious experience, but they had never particularly interested me. Imagine: you’re researching an incredibly complex and fascinating form of possession, and then someone says, “Did you know it’s all caused by a chemical?” It sounds like the reductionist attitude of researchers who don’t know how to look properly and are talking about something else or want to.
You could, of course, say that my experience of meaninglessness was a response to a chemical reaction: a physiological process occurs (in my brain, I assume), and I attach meaning to it. From that physiological perspective, the meaning isn’t relevant, as chemistry probably doesn’t generate meanings. Meaning is, from that viewpoint, extra.
This physiological view reveals several assumptions. First, it assumes the causality of physiological processes: your body does something, and you then respond with a feeling. Second, it places a strong emphasis on human meaning-making—there is a demonstrable, impressive experience that people then explain in various non-scientific ways.
However, if we approach it from a more ontological perspective, the religious experience itself becomes important. It cannot be reduced to a possible cause—we might say that, ontologically speaking, the latter is extra. The “cause” does not belong to the network of meaning (a world of interactions) within which the experience occurs. The statement “It’s a chemical in your brain” is foreign to this network. The experience is a moment where existing (biographical) meanings interweave in a new context (e.g., God, abandonment, despair, meaning, and meaninglessness). This is reminiscent of what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the “event.” The “event” is an experience that stands alone and is independent of any causes that could explain the occurrence. In the “event,” meaning-making doesn’t play a decisive role because it’s precisely about the collapse of meaning-making and the breaking through of the ambiguity of reality beyond available language and interpretation. The “event” resembles a mystical experience that explains itself. The “event” is something that happens to us, something thrown at us, something that wasn’t there before but suddenly is. Meaning-making, such as a response to a physical sensation, involves us consciously or subconsciously assigning meaning to something. The “event,” the mystical occurrence, stands in stark contrast to this. It opens up perceptions of reality that we never thought possible. Interestingly enough, the “event” also excludes many (older) anthropological approaches in which the meaning-making of phenomena is usually central, rather than our perception of them. Meaning-making generally involves interpretation through “thick description”: the interlocutor provides an interpretation, and then the researcher interprets this to eventually translate it into scientifically plausible language. The experience thus becomes part of a semiotic game, a shuffling of symbols.
However, it is the event, the experience itself, that holds meaning: a sense that is not given but found, an actuality that presents itself. To understand this, we must find a place in the language of the “event.” It’s not a secret language, and it’s not just for the initiated. I believe many are familiar with these kinds of moments. And people are often able to put a few words to it. They may acknowledge the chemical reaction as background information. They may listen politely to thick descriptive stories, knowing that these will not open a door to perception, but rather serve as an escape from what we do not (wish) to understand.
A clichéd conclusion would be that, beyond the scientific perspective, the mystical experience offers different knowledge. Our challenge as anthropologists, however, is to walk through the door and understand the language of the experience from within, bringing it out in polyphony.
Peter Versteeg teaches anthropology. He recently graduated with a Master’s in Spiritual Care.