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Unio Mystica
Jul. 1st, 2004 04:00 pmI'm not what people would call a religious person. I don't subscribe to any belief system which gets mentioned in The Idiot's Guide to World Religions. I find myself agreeing with some of the thought behind Zen Buddhism, as well as most of Taoism, at least the Taoism that is expressed in the major texts (Daodejing, Zhuangzi, Yuan Dao, etc.). I'm not too interested in a bunch of the subsequent ritualism and mythology. I think that modern physics and complex systems theory have a lot to say about questions that have traditionally been considered to be religious in nature.
I also think that biology has some relevant insights. In particular, neurology is starting to answer questions about where in the brain religious experiences occur, and what forms they take.
It's well known that certain drugs and some migraines are sometimes accompanied by a feeling of closeness to divine power or spiritual connection to the universe. I'm not going to claim that all religious experiences are artificially induced. I have nothing to say about the question of validity or authenticity of spiritual awakenings. The only questions neuroscience can answer are about brain function, and most of those questions remain unanswered. But there is progress.
Mario Beauregard, at the University of Montreal, attached electrodes to the scalps of seven Carmelite nuns. He's also scanning their brains with PET and functional MRI. Then he asks them to remember the Unio Mystica, their experience of a mystical union with God. Apparently it doesn't typically happen very often, maybe once or twice in your whole life, and usually when you're in your 20s. The nuns can't be one with the universe on command; all they can do is try to concentrate really hard on what it was like. We have plenty of prior experiments to indicate that remembering intense experiences tends to show up in the same parts of the brain as the actual experience did, but who knows if that would work the same for dissolving the distinction between the self and the Almighty?
Andrew Newberg at UPenn has done some of the same brain imaging on Buddhists and Franciscan nuns meditating or praying. At the points where they reported a sense of stronger connection with everything, their parietal lobes are very active. Olaf Blanke at the University Hospital of Geneva did some study of some people with brain damage at the junction between their temporal and parietal lobes who have phantom limbs, i.e., imaginary bodily appendages. Apparently people with imaginary parts of their bodies often have temporal-lobe epilepsy. Temporal-lobe epilepsy is well known to coincide with an excess of religious experiences. The parietal lobe is used to locate yourself in time and space. So you're connected with the universe when your sense of location in space-time comes unglued?
Another thing Olaf Blanke did some experiments on was out-of-body experiences. He took this woman with epilepsy, and zapped her in the right angular gyrus (about an inch above and slightly behind the right ear, just inside the skull). She felt like she was travelling outside her body. She was sinking into the bed, and when she looked at them, her legs and an arm were growing shorter. When she looked away, she saw herself lying in bed (not sinking any more, I guess) from two meters up.
I also think that biology has some relevant insights. In particular, neurology is starting to answer questions about where in the brain religious experiences occur, and what forms they take.
It's well known that certain drugs and some migraines are sometimes accompanied by a feeling of closeness to divine power or spiritual connection to the universe. I'm not going to claim that all religious experiences are artificially induced. I have nothing to say about the question of validity or authenticity of spiritual awakenings. The only questions neuroscience can answer are about brain function, and most of those questions remain unanswered. But there is progress.
Mario Beauregard, at the University of Montreal, attached electrodes to the scalps of seven Carmelite nuns. He's also scanning their brains with PET and functional MRI. Then he asks them to remember the Unio Mystica, their experience of a mystical union with God. Apparently it doesn't typically happen very often, maybe once or twice in your whole life, and usually when you're in your 20s. The nuns can't be one with the universe on command; all they can do is try to concentrate really hard on what it was like. We have plenty of prior experiments to indicate that remembering intense experiences tends to show up in the same parts of the brain as the actual experience did, but who knows if that would work the same for dissolving the distinction between the self and the Almighty?
Andrew Newberg at UPenn has done some of the same brain imaging on Buddhists and Franciscan nuns meditating or praying. At the points where they reported a sense of stronger connection with everything, their parietal lobes are very active. Olaf Blanke at the University Hospital of Geneva did some study of some people with brain damage at the junction between their temporal and parietal lobes who have phantom limbs, i.e., imaginary bodily appendages. Apparently people with imaginary parts of their bodies often have temporal-lobe epilepsy. Temporal-lobe epilepsy is well known to coincide with an excess of religious experiences. The parietal lobe is used to locate yourself in time and space. So you're connected with the universe when your sense of location in space-time comes unglued?
Another thing Olaf Blanke did some experiments on was out-of-body experiences. He took this woman with epilepsy, and zapped her in the right angular gyrus (about an inch above and slightly behind the right ear, just inside the skull). She felt like she was travelling outside her body. She was sinking into the bed, and when she looked at them, her legs and an arm were growing shorter. When she looked away, she saw herself lying in bed (not sinking any more, I guess) from two meters up.
