Varieties of religious experience and the potential they bring for personal

CHAPTER 2: DOESN’T EVERYBODY Varieties of religious experience and the potential they bring for personal change are embedded in and perturbative of our unique and common personalities. The obsessive compulsive may have an easier time with the rigid restrictions of Fundamentalism or be more resistant to the flagrancy of none rational mystical experience. The hysteric may find subjective evidence for the Holy Ghost more accessible and rules of behavior beside the point. The potential for double-jointed multiplicity in personal styles and quick transitions between them characterize what is called the borderline personality. |It is in these ways that temporary and permanent brain styles in us and important others supply much of the ground for the possibility of spiritual transformation and the often attendant alterations in personality. How can we think about this facilitator and source of resistance to new spiritual practice? A skinny, knobby kneed, small breasted, mousy haired, bright-eyed psychotherapy patient of mine at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute Outpatient Clinic was among the highest priced Santa Monica call girls serving Beverly Hills. Answering my unaskable question about her thousand-dollar fee, she explained that she was living proof that, in her profession, what was more important than physical beauty was “griv sense.” She explained that by her middle twenties, she had 22 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013522