The Preacher Warned Me

The preacher warned me that if I kept going to college (Georgia State at night) it would change me. He meant for the worse as far as my belief in Baptist doctrine. And he was right. But I was already changing.

I attended Georgia State for six years -- five of them at night. During that time I held various jobs (driving a cookie truck around Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee; running a check sorter for a bank; psychiatric aide in a mental ward of a hospital; community coordinator for Head Start; teaching martial arts). My wife at the time was also working to help support us.

At Georgia State, I formed a close relationship with Drs. Irma Shepherd and Joen Fagan -- two strong good folk, both clinical psychologists, who had a light of awareness in their eyes, an open inclusive nonjudgmental manner, and an inner strength which made up a triple combo I had not previously seen in a human. I signed up for an Individual Research course with Joen which led to a couple of publications.

At age 12, I had a powerful mystical experience and seemed to have an awareness after that that others did not. The Baptist Church was my life -- we were there every time the doors were open and they were open a lot! -- but I noticed that no one ever spoke of such experiences. Irma and Joen were both acquainted with Abraham Maslow, so through them I became aware of Maslow's work on peak experiences -- which sounded suspiciously like the experience I had and continued to have at varying degrees of intensity. Voila! I had my two variables for my research: peak experiences and degree of belief in fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

My hypothesis was a simple one. It seemed to me that having a consciousness that was locked into one single way of seeing the world and no other was incompatible with having a consciousness that was boundless and oceanic.

First, Joen and I developed a religious dogmatism scale (Fagan, Joen and Breed, George. A Good, Short Measure of Religious Dogmatism. Psychological Reports, 1970, 26, 533–534) which was able to distinguish among religious affiliations -- Baptists and Catholics were highest scorers, Episcopal and No Affiliation were lowest scorers. Then I gave the scale along with a request for the reporting of peak experiences to 110 folk.

My suspicions were confirmed. Persons with low adherence to conventional religious beliefs were more likely to experience peak moments than persons with moderate or high adherence (Breed, George and Fagan, Joen. Religious Dogmatism and Peak Experiences. Psychological Reports, 1972, 31, 866).

This is where my concern with belief systems as virtual reality helmets began. And where I determined to ride through life as helmet-free as possible.