The Beatrice Interview


Harry Moody

"Spiritual growth is...the ability to see yourself as 'no special person...'"

interviewed by Ron Hogan


In The Five Stages of the Soul, Dr. Harry Moody outlines, you guessed it, five stages of the spiritual path to wholeness and well-being: the Call, the Search, the Struggle, the Breakthrough, and the Return. These stages correspond to traditional perspectives of the spiritual journey (readers of Joseph Campbell will notice the similarites to the mythic journey outlined in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, but Moody describes the stages in ways that speak to our contemporary sensibilities, drawing upon interviews with people who have undergone these steps as part of their own spiritual path. The result is a compelling overview which provides a solid starting point for the growing number of Americans who are beginning to search for spiritual meaning in their lives without cramming any particular doctrine down readers' throats.

RH: How did you get started in this field of research?

HM: I direct a gerontology center in New York City, and have worked in this field for more than twenty years, so I've been interested in aging for a long time. But I've also been interested in spiritual subjects all my life. I did my philosophy dissertation at Columbia on Meister Eckhart and medieval mysticism, and I was studying psychedelics at Yale before that. This book puts together my interests in lifespan development and spiritual growth.

RH: One of the first things that jumps out at the reader is the notion that the spiritual journey is much different in the second half of life than it is in the first.

HM: I think there's some truth to that. In many ways, we build up our sense of self and mastery in the first half of life. In the second half, we ask some questions about parts of ourselves, perhaps shadow parts, that until then haven't been looked at in a clear light. Before you turned on the tape, we were talking about Jung; he was one of the first psychologists to understand the importance of the search for meaning in life and beyond. Many people are experiencing that search today.

RH: That seems especially true of the 'baby boomer' generation which, if I can generalize, rejected traditional spirituality in its youth and now, as it grows older, finds it necessary to take stock and ask itself, "Where do we go from here?"

HM: You've put your finger on one vital force in the growing interest in spirituality. Another important aspect of the general crisis in spirituality is that Americans are very religious people, but we're also very critical and skeptical of authority. It forces us to look for our own spiritual paths, which is good in many ways. The problem with it is that there are a bewildering number of paths to choose from, and one of the reasons I wrote The Five Stages of the Soul is because I felt it would be helpful to have a map of the terrain. There are other books that provide excellent resources for other aspects of aging, such as Dan Levinson's or Gail Sheehy's, but the spiritual dimensions have really not been mapped in this way.

RH: How does the spiritual journey start?

HM: Many of us are are going to go through life pursuing other things and then wake up one morning and ask themselves, "Wait a minute, is this all there is? Is there something more?" That moment is a very precious one, which I refer to as the Call, and it can take many different forms. It's the beginning of this whole process.

RH: And it doesn't necessarily have to be a negative or traumatic event.

HM: No, it doesn't. For some people it is, whether it's an illness, a divorce, or a downsizing that causes them to question everything they've been. Other people I interviewed for the book had won the lottery of life, so to speak, and asked themselves, "Ok, what now?" Whether our dreams come true, or we realize that they'll never come true, it can be an opportunity for us to hear the Call.

RH: How can we distinguish between the Search and the Struggle?

HM: At a certain point, once a person has the Call experience, he or she needs to understand that they are not alone. That's a very important point. They may ask themselves, "Why aren't I happy?" Their friends and relatives may not understand them, and they may worry that they're going crazy. The book's message is, "Look, you're at the beginning of a process." The next part of the process is the Search. You need to make contact with other people who are experiencing the same thing. Maybe you go back to church, maybe you go into therapy, maybe you buy self-help books -- but whatever you do, you're connecting yourself with a process that goes on in many people. It's a search for guidance, for people who can help you find your path. It doesn't necessarily result in peace of mind, though, and it won't necessarily answer all your questions. It may result in struggle.

RH: The search can be complicated by the low value that our society often places on older people, the way that it pushes them off to the side and ignores them.

HM: For the elders, that can be an opportunity. They can say to themselves, "If nobody wants to listen to me anymore, maybe I can go find a path for myself." In the traditional Hindu view of life, for example, once you had reached a certain stage, after you'd become a householder, you abandoned that and went into the forest to meditate. So for the elders, it isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for the young people who cast aside the elders, that could be a mistake because they may not have the role models and mentors that they'll need to take this journey.

RH: On the Breakthrough stage, you make some interesting distinctions between genuine breakthroughs that come during this process and false breakthroughs that come out of, say, psychedelic use.

HM: Well, I wouldn't refer to them as false breakthroughs; it might be better to think of them as incomplete. There are many moments in life when we have a glimpse of something higher. It can happen through a near-death experience, through drugs, through art...these 'peak experiences' come in many different forms. They aren't all the same. The point that I was trying to make about drugs is really not different from what Ram Dass had said: drug experiences are like a call on the phone. You take the call, get the message, and then hang up the phone. After that, you need to find out how to make that message a more permanent part of your daily life. The problem with drugs is that people can become addicted to having breakthrough experiences that way. I think it's similar to the reasons people pursue dangerous adventures such as mountain climbing or skydiving. You have an intense feeling of 'aliveness' during those moments, and you want to keep repeating that feeling, to live constantly in that moment.

It's not so much a 'false' breakthrough as a wrong attitude towards the breakthrough, an attempt to hang on to it. That's not what the breakthrough is about. The stage beyond Breakthough, the Return stage, is crucial.

Some people who have come back from near-death and similar experiences say that they look at the world around them and it seems like a cartoon. If you've really had a powerful experience, it's hard to take the conventional rat race of life seriously again, but at a certain point, you do need to integrate that experience into your daily life. There's an old saying: "Before englightenment, we chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, we chopped wood and carried water." It's true that, in a sense, things are not what they seem, but they aren't otherwise, either... I've found it very interesting to see how the people I interviewed for this book struggled with the issue of 'coming down from the mountaintop.'

RH: Particularly since America is, as you say, both so profoundly religious and so profoundly skeptical. We believe that it's good for you to be spiritual as long as we don't have to hear about it.

HM: One of the reasons I wrote this book is to get a framework out there for integrating the sacred and profane. My book isn't unique; Thomas Moore, for example, in The Care of The Soul, is also concerned with ordinary life and spirituality, and I think there are other people out there who are concerned with the same issues, and others who are looking for guidance. Although we need to make the connections between the mythic and the everyday, it's not just a matter of saying, "I'm living out a myth," or "I'm related to a myth." That can be a cause of spiritual inflation. Spiritual growth is just the opposite. It's the ability to see yourself as "no special person," as the Zen master D. T. Suzuki used to sign his letters.

RH: What's next for you?

HM: I do workshops and seminars based on the themes of this book, and I'm linked up with other people who are working in what we call "conscious aging," people like Ram Dass or Zalman Schachter. I do a lot of work with Elder Hostel. There's a lot of interest in this field, and I believe that interest will grow as the baby boomers continue to grow older. But I don't think this is limited to one particular age group. The Call doesn't come in a predictable way. It's not chronologically based; it can come at any time to anybody.

BEATRICE Suggested further reading
Elaine Pagels

All materials copyright © 1997 Ron Hogan