In a talk bearing
the same title as his recently published book (New York: Ballantine, 2001),
University of Pennsylvania radiologist Andrew Newberg argues
that, whether God creates minds or minds create God, the human brain is "naturally
calibrated" to spirituality.
In the spirit of an anecdote in which a Buddhist
spiritual leader advises his novices that it is neither flag nor wind that
moves, but only the mind, Newberg sets forth his central inquiry: how does
the mind move us to be spiritual? He and his colleagues have sought to identify
the mechanistic functions of the brain that explain spiritual experiences
across cultures and history.
Against all expectations that God would, in
fact, eventually "go away," religion—as
Newberg observes—has continued to thrive well into the era of empirical
scientificity. On the side of science itself, new fields are beginning
to bridge the scientific-religious
divide, such as cosmology and quantum
mechanics, which investigate the nature
of the universe, and neurobiology, which brings questions of spirituality
under the helm of "hard" science. Newberg, who believes that
the social, psychological, and spiritual are all interrelated and should
be scientifically
examined as such, proceeds methodologically in his experimental work by isolating
the mind (defined as the functions of the brain) as the source of thinking
and believing.
Newberg departs from the premise of the cognitive imperative;
that is, the automatic functioning of the brain, which is forced to
use its cognitive
abilities to process
myth, broadly understood from the academic perspective as a story with
authority that provides an explanation of reality. Myth operates through
binary oppositions
(God vs. human beings, good vs. bad, right vs. wrong) that help us to resolve
those issues in a cognitive process that involves functions of both cerebral
hemispheres. Ritual constitutes an "acting out" of myth that engages
multiple sensory systems and produces a visceral feeling, fusing the cognitive
with the experiential. A morally neutral technology, ritual may only be evaluated
through a perspectival view: it decreases aggression within a single group,
but increases aggression between groups; it leads to unitary experience,
but that
unitary experience is not necessarily perceived as universal.
To explore the physiology of these issues in a quantifiable
way, Newberg conducted a study of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns,
groups whose ability, respectively, to meditate and pray on command made
them ideal candidates for measurement in a lab situation.
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Both sets of
subjects describe meditation and prayer in similar terms, as a diminishment
of the sense of self that awakens an oceanic feeling of quiescence and
leads ultimately, amid moments of ecstasy, to a sensation of complete unity.
SPECT
(Single photon emission computed tomography) imaging was taken of the
subjects' brains,
first in a state of "everyday" conscious attention and then
in a deeply meditative state. In both groups, these scans revealed that
frontal lobe activity—in the attention center—increased during
meditation, whereas parietal lobe activity—in the center responsible
for orientation
in time and space—decreased dramatically. Newberg was able to chart
the path to "absolute unitary being" as a process of neurotransmission,
yielding a neurobiological counterpart to the narrative description of
heightened awareness and spatial-temporal fluidity as conditions of "oneness" with
the universe. The furthest reaching implication of Newberg's findings
is that there is a physiological drive in humans to traverse the continuum
from everyday attention toward the
spiritual state of "absolute unitary being." Religion, then, would
be properly understood as a formal system that renders intelligible on a collective
level the individual process of making that inner journey. This drive may stem
from the positive impact of spirituality on health and well-being: blood pressure
and heart rate drop in the state of "absolute unitary being," just
as anxiety and depression have been found to be lower in members of spiritual
communities.
For the moment, however, Newberg prudently refrains
from making such sweeping assertions, insisting on the need for further
research. Perhaps
relying on the written word to convey in an instant what science cannot without
systematic proofs, Newberg suggestively commingles his caveat with powerful
reference to diverse religious leaders and scientific thinkers (8th-century
Taoist poet
Li
Po, Jewish Kabbalist Rabbi Eleazar, medieval German mystic Meister
Eckhart, 20th-century physicist Albert Einstein), whose philosophical
teachings coincide
in signaling "absolute unitary being" as the pinnacle of human
spirituality and existence.
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