Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 43, No. 3, Fall 2004 (Ó 2004)
Spirituality and the Self JEFFREY B. RUBIN ABSTRACT: Spirituality and the Self explores how a mystical experience playing basketball led to a metamorphosis that transformed, expanded and unbound the author’s sense of self. KEY WORDS: spirituality; mysticism; metamorphosis; passion; vision; discipline.
It’s Sunday February 29th, 2004, and I am not a happy camper. I’ve spent the weekend futilely trying to write an essay on metamorphosis which is due tomorrow and the well of creativity is completely dry. Reading in Ovid’s Metamorphosis that metamorphosis, ‘‘things that change, new being/Out of old,’’ is a very condition of the soul does not prime the creative pumps. Nor does reading in Goethe (1815) that ‘‘Everything in life is metamorphosis, in plants and in animals, up to and including mankind as well’’ (quoted in Grant, 1962, p. 331). There’s no metamorphosis today for me, only crumpled paper and computer files with essays I eventually delete. My Taoist faith that you can’t force or hurry creativity, but must await it, provides brief solace, but is being mightily challenged. Before I fall asleep I unsuccessfully try to select a topic out of several I have been contemplating. I reflect on experiences that have triggered or facilitated metamorphosis—the insight, empathy or wisdom of a therapist, spiritual teacher, friend or lover; mystical moments on the basketball court and on the meditation cushion; self-disgust; practicing psychoanalysis; relationships with animals; and stillness and serenity in nature. Nothing inspires me. I fall asleep slightly dejected. I wake up startled, several hours later, hardly able to breathe. Like I’ve been underwater without any oxygen. It’s a sickening feeling, one that grabs my attention. I get out of bed and slowly walk around in the dark, eyes closed, trying to not wake myself up. I do some yogic breathing. I stand still and begin
Jeffrey B. Rubin, Ph.D., practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-informed psychotherapy in New York City and Bedford Hills, NY. He is on the faculty of The Harlem Family Institute and is a Visiting Lecturer at Union Theological Seminary and has taught at various psychoanalytic institutes and universities including the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, The C. G. Jung Foundation of NY, The Object Relations Institute and Yeshiva University. Dr. Rubin is the author of Psychotherapy and Buddhism; A Psychoanalysis for Our Time: Exploring the Blindness of the Seeing I; The Good Life: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Love, Ethics, Creativity and Spirituality and the forthcoming The Mystic in Sneakers: Playing and Living with Heart and Soul. 217
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wondering if the struggle for air is like a dream—not unreal—but the answer to the question I was pondering the previous evening before I fell asleep. Breathe and spirit are the associations that immediately come to mind about the body-dream. Then spiritus—being moved by something larger than us that moves through us, in us. I remember a time when I was 18 when the spirit first moved through me and I changed form. The memory remains vivid more than three decades later. February 1971. Riverdale, New York. My high school basketball team was playing on the road against The Fieldston School, a team we were favored to beat. In order to remain in contention for the league title, we had to win. It was a hotly contested, heart-throbbing, roller-coaster battle. When we scored with ten seconds left our one-point lead appeared, like our youth, to be invincible. Victory was sealed. But with six seconds to go, they scored. Suddenly we were down by one. My teammates looked devastated, shell-shocked. Suddenly, a great calm descended upon me, and I called time out. Five seconds remained on the clock. My teammates’ faces showed panic as we huddled closely, sweat dripping, wrung out. I could see that they had given up. In their minds the game was over. I pushed through to my coach and put my hand on his shoulder. ‘‘Tell them to stay calm and get me the ball.’’ ‘‘Spread the floor, move without the ball and let Jeffrey take the last shot,’’ he said. ‘‘If Jeffrey is double-teamed, be ready for a pass from him.’’ Look at your watch. Count out five seconds. It is not a lot of time. We took the ball out underneath our own basket, 94 feet from our goal. The other team lined up down the court near the foul line. They were playing in a box-and-one: four of their players playing zone defense, guarding the specific area they were assigned, and one of them, at 6’ 2" a good 7 inches taller than I was, prepared to shadow me. A teammate rolled the ball to me near mid-court—the clock wouldn’t start until I touched it. I am sure there was noise, but when I dribbled up the left side of the court, the gym was a monastery. I didn’t hear the crowd, the squeaking of sneakers or the thumping of the basketball. I was in a cocoon of concentration—alert, focused, undistracted, fully and effortlessly in the present with no thoughts or feelings. My mind was Grand Canyon quiet. And clear like the open sky. Time seemed to slow down and elongate. I floated upcourt with no sense of exertion. I felt no pressure, no fear. The hope of victory, the dread of losing, did not exist. My opponent didn’t faze me. There wasn’t really any opponent. Oh, there was someone guarding me, but he had no impact, a card-board cut-out of a defender standing between me and what I wanted to do. There was just me, the ball, and the basket. And we were one. I felt harmonized with the game. If maintaining that state of grace meant giving up everything I owned, I wouldn’t have hesitated. As I approached the top of the key, my defender picked me up. I sensed it was time to shoot. I wrapped my left hand around the middle of the ball, my
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fingertips touching its seams, my right hand cradling the top right of the ball the way I had practiced for thousands of solitary hours since the fifth grade until it was grooved into my soul. I squared my shoulders to the basket, bent my knees and jumped in the air. My opponent jumped toward me. I scanned the basket like an archer measuring the target, then shot the ball. My defender’s arms enveloped me and blocked my vision. I couldn’t see the rim. My left arm was extended, right through the fingertips, straight and true. My left palm waved to the rim and then faced downward the way Nat Holman, Clair Bee, Bill Bradley and countless old-school coaches and players had instructed before the game went airborne and lost touch with the fundamental ground from which it was born. As my feet returned to the wooden gym floor, there was a cathedral silence. I looked at the basket and saw the net raised skyward, the way it does when a high-arching shot drops cleanly through the net. I looked at the scoreboard and saw that my shot had gone in. We had won. A teammate recently told me my left hand punched the air downward like I had beaten death. A deafening roar broke my spell as our fans mobbed the court. The locker room was noisy—players, coaches and parents shouting and pounding me on the back—but I was strangely quiet. I wasn’t numb. Nor was I indifferent to winning; as a highly competitive teenage athlete, victory was very important to me. No, I was unemotional about our comeback because victory paled compared to what I had experienced. I stood alone and completely motionless in the locker room after my teammates had showered and dressed, replaying my epiphany: the heightened attentiveness, focus and clarity; the way time seemed to expand; the absence of thought, pressure and fear; the ecstasy and serenity more joyous than victory or acclaim. Before the last five seconds of this game, I would have called my childhood—which was devoid of religious training or spiritual experiences—non-religious. But now I had entered a realm I can only call the sacred. ‘‘There is another world and it is in this one,’’ writes the surrealist poet Paul Eluard. While my teammates were celebrating our narrow victory, I was preoccupied with the tantalizing glimpse I’d had of another dimension of being, what I would later term spirituality and the mystical, in which one is open to the moment without a sense of time, unself-conscious but acutely aware, highly focused and engaged yet relaxed and without fear. This was a defining moment in my life. If I hadn’t glimpsed that other world, my life would have been greatly diminished. I don’t know if astrophysicists feel a radical transformation of their own world when they discover alternative universes. I do know that after that game, I knew directly and viscerally that there was a radically different way of experiencing myself and relating to the world than I had previously been exposed to. Something in me—call it Western male conditioning—died; something in me and my relation to the world was born.
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The vice grip of ambition, competitiveness and victory—the divinities I had worshiped—was loosened. Suddenly, I saw them as false idols. While winning still felt better than losing, the joy of just playing the game became as important as victory. As an American man I had been taught that willful effort was one of the highest virtues. I still valued focus and determination. But what I experienced at the end of that game showed me that self-forgetfulness, as well as selfassertion, is crucial to a human life. She plays the piano best who is not concentrating on her fingers, Kohut somewhere writes. In that state of grace you respond wholeheartedly without thinking. It became clear to me that surrendering to and flowing with life was no less important than planning and directing it. The form I manifested in the world—the boundaries and contours of my self—was forever altered and a new relation to the world was born. Most men in the West are acculturated into believing that the self is a bounded, autonomous entity. They then operate like isolated minds in aggressive relation to an outer world they feel alienated from. After that game in the Fieldston gym I knew that the self doesn’t end with itself—that it is always more than itself—and that Freud and his successors drastically underestimated human possibilities when they interpreted this more only in terms of the pathological unconscious. That’s only part of the story of what it means to be a person. Freed from the shackles of a semi-incarcerated and insulated view of itself, one is released into the awesome majesty of the boundlessly generous and ever-nurturing and sustaining all. New potentials of the human spirit become an ordinary miracle as the open-ended self breathes in the emotional/ spiritual oxygen of spirit, people, dreams, nature, symbols, symptoms—all potentially the transcendent in its immanent guise. If I had to piggy-back on my experience of metamorphosis and speculate how it happened, what I’d stress is that I think we invite it, but can never hasten it, when we pursue our passion with discipline, which cultivates mastery of the medium we are playing/creating in, which encourages the emergence of our unique vision. And then if we are immersed in the activity we love and surrender to the winds of spirituality—letting go of concern for results—a space for grace may be created and the sails of the self may be blown we know not where.
References Grant, M. (1962). Myths of the Greeks and Romans. NY: New American Library. Ovid ([AD8]1958). Metamorphosis. Trans. Horace Gregory. NY: Viking Press. Rubin, J.B. (ND). The Mystic in Sneakers: Playing and Living with Heart and Soul.