by Tom Endress
March 15, 2015
Readings:
Transcendentalism- Webster’s New World College Dictionary- 1) any of various philosophies that propose to discover the nature of reality by investigating the process of thought rather than the objects of sense experience. 2) by extension, the philosophical ideas of Emerson and some other 19th century New Englanders, based on a search for reality though spiritual intuition.
Listen and see if you can guess who wrote the following:
“One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.†From….William James and his 1898 experiment with nitrous oxide recorded in his The Varieties of Religious Experience
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Talk
Good morning! I am so excited to be here. I have been piecing together this particular talk on neuroscience for the better part of a year. It hasn’t been easy because there is so much material that has been coming out within the last decade on the relationship between brain activity and mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences.
But first a disclaimer. I am neither a neurologist nor a neuroscientist by any means. Just interested in neuroscience, especially as it applies to mysticism and spiritual experience. Although retired for over a decade now I was trained as a clinical psychologist.
I received a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. This was an experimental program designed by the state to see if clinical psychologists could be adequately trained in a two year master’s degree program plus a one year internship rather than going the full 4 or 5 years for the PhD. After subsequently working for 7 years in mental health clinics in Ohio and Indiana I went on to obtain my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in Human Development… as I was interested in child development. Here we were trained to evaluate children in terms of their biological, familial, educational, and social backgrounds. Lending itself to public schools I also became licensed at this time in school psychology. I continued my interest at Maryland in brain functioning and developed my doctoral research around lateral brain differences in right and left-handed school children. Having learned of my interest in neurology, my physiology professor at Maryland, who was an MD, loaned me a cadaver brain he had obtained from a nearby medical school. I was allowed to take it home for several days to study. My kids still remember my storing it in the kitchen fridge. The brain had been slightly dissected so it was easy for me to pull it apart in spots to study the inner parts of the brain without having to destroy any more of it myself. I still remember the awe inspiring appearance of that most unique of human organs. It seemed to me to be the most marvelous object in the universe. I suspect my kids thought differently.
Okay!……..Do you know you have 4 brains in your head rather than just one? To demonstrate the first three of these brains I am going to have you do a little exercise here.
Now I need several people with strong lungs to blow up these balloons.
[Pass out Balloons]
Blow them up slowly please! I don’t want anyone getting light headed and passing out.
Okay I can see you are about ready. Grasping your balloons at the bottom hold them up high. That’s it. Now at the count of three let them loose. READY! 1…….2…….3. Let them loose!!
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Okay let’s talk about what just happened in terms of your experience. Did you notice any tension rising as the balloons were being blown up either by you or someone else? Were you in suspense regarding what was going to happen? That is…….would the people be able to blow them all the way up? Would some burst in the process?
And how about the end? Did you experience any release of tension at the end….. such as with the laughter? Now………. Was that YOU who was laughing? You know, the personality that was formed through conditioning by your parents and society? No! It was a neural-chemical reaction. Oh…. how you laughed was instilled by conditioning. But not the act of laughter. Let’s look at the schematic that you have as a handout.
#1, The Brain Stem was the part that controlled your breathing while you blew up the balloon. This is often called the reptilian brain. It evolved 500 million years ago. #2 The Cerebellum evolved 400 million years ago. It controlled your posture and balance as you fought to blow up the balloon. However I want to focus mostly on the Limbic System which is #3 on your sheet.
This part of your brain evolved 300 to 200 million years ago and is thought to have developed after the reptilian brain – hence the common title of “mammalian brainâ€. This “mid brainâ€, as it is also often called, is located between the brain stem and upper brain. It regulates blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, blood sugar levels and so forth. One area of the mid brain, called the hippocampus, governs our gross navigational skills as we weave through life. Emotional memories of life experiences as well as short and long-term memory are stored in this part of the limbic system. And it is also importantly responsible for our survival emotions associated with sexual desire as well as fear and anxiety to keep us out of danger.
So when I asked you to blow up the balloon, your hippocampus did a Google search for any past memories related to the act of blowing up balloons. However this part of our brain is not as sophisticated as the Cerebrum, that is, number 4 on your schematic. It is incapable of conscious thought, but as our conscious brains are so closely linked to the limbic system our ability to think and problem solve are heavily influenced by it.
So when it could find no exact memory, except perhaps only of balloons exploding loudly, it triggered the outer edge of the hypothalamus to get into action to prepare us for the possible consequences of the balloons being inflated. It sent signals to the adrenal glands, which lie at the top of our kidneys, to secrete epinephrine and nor epinephrine, or adrenaline, into the bloodstream to increase blood pressure, rapid heart rate, etc. to prepare for increased activity or an emergency. Conversely, within seconds of the emergency being perceived as over, the action shifted to the inner part of our hypothalamus. And this signaled the release of the hormones dopamine and serotonin which helped us to relax again and feel GOOD. But in this environment this morning with all the friends about you another hormone was released at the same time….. Oxytocin. Oxytocin is known as the “love hormone†and helps us feel happy, loved and accepted by others around us. YES…….. there is a lot of that floating around here this morning!
I have talked to several people who have been in life threatening situations, such as a car accident. To their surprise…….when the emergency was over they felt themselves to be in what they described as an expansive, serene state such as never experienced before in their lives. Many describe this moment as a mystical state. Imagine how much more their hypothalamuses were stimulated than was yours in here this morning!
But before we get too far away from the hypothalamus there is another unique situation. This is where both the inner and outer parts of the hypothalamus fire up at the same time dumping all sorts of mixtures of hormones into one’s system. This is described by many as a “hyperarousal†state whereby the outer part of the hypothalamus becomes so charged up that there is the immediate spillover of energy into the inner part. The result is that the individual is both highly charged up and blissful at the same time. For many, seeking this “high†is worth risking one’s life. A prime example is extreme skiing. Such noted figures as Glen Plake, who received much notoriety for his film “Blizzard of Ahhsâ€, are willing to ski down normally inaccessible mountain slopes at great danger to their lives. In fact a significant portion of extreme skiers are killed each year but they consider the danger worth the risk for the absolute high they get.
Now this little area, the third brain or limbic system is known as “the brain of our brainâ€. It more or less directs what goes on in the rest of the brain. But it also does something else. You have seen where the hypothalamus is at that does all this hormonal stuff. You can see on your illustration that directly above it is the thalamus. What a tricky little organism this is. With 100,000 miles of myelinated nerve fibers traveling vertically up into and through the brain and billions of synapses between these nerve fibers, the thalamus acts like a traffic cop directing traffic. In ways still little understood, it decides which set of nerve fibers it will allow neural impulses to travel over and which to stop.
To illustrated how this affects our brain functioning let me tell you a story.
Shortly before the death of my aging parents in the 1980s I drove back to Indiana from Maryland, where we were living at the time, to visit my parents. In the evening after supper we had just sat down in the living room of my parents’ farm house to relax after the meal. My mother quickly turned to my father and said, “Now Charles……. tell Tom about your experiences.†It turned out there were about 12 significant experiences he had had in his life but because he was an extremely private individual he had never told anyone about them except my mother…. and she wanted him to share them while he still had time.
I turns out that during the 1920s when machinist unions were striking all over the country he became feed up with having to go to work at his Pennsylvania Railroad workshop. To protect himself he carried a hidden revolver and was careful to dodge the company thugs waiting at the shop entrances with their clubs. As he had become a journeyman machinist and could travel to another job he decide to go further West from Indianapolis where he was working and seek work either at the Pullman factory in the Chicago suburbs or travel further to the West coast. But he had no money to buy train or bus tickets for the trip. So he became a hobo and road the rails under freight trains. On one particular evening, as it was cold, he decided to seek shelter inside one of the box cars he assumed was ahead of him on the train. It was almost pitch dark as he walked carefully along the length of the flat car he was on as it lurched from side to side. Spotting what he thought was the shape of another flat car directly ahead he raced along the flat bed with the intention of leaping over the coupling between the cars onto the bed of the next car.
Unfortunately the next car was not a flat car but a box car. Dashing at a full speed he jumped over the chasm between the two train cars. However, instead of landing on another flat car he rammed squarely into the end of the box car and was knocked unconscious. Coming too he was surprised to look down and see himself lying, still unconscious, straddling the coupling sideways on his stomach. His head and feet dangled scant inches from the rails zipping by underneath. He was perfectly balanced on the coupling which had kept him from falling to his death beneath the moving train. However, the scene did not produce any fear. Instead he felt immersed in a serenity that enveloped him.
Ultimately he returned to his body and carefully extracted himself from the coupling. While he had no explanation for the experience…. he did not even know what to call it… the experience profoundly changed his life. Ultimately he came to believe it represented the existence of a reality we know little about but is religious in nature.
I also had absolutely no explanation to offer him. That was the first time I had ever talked to anyone who had had an “OBEâ€â€¦â€¦. that is….an “out of body†experience. However, since then I have been fortunate to talk with several people who have had OBEs…. Not the least of whom was Raymond Moody, a psychologist and physician many of you have no doubt heard about, who has done much research on OBEers and those with Near Death Experiences. I was privileged to meet with him and his group of fellow psychologist OBEers at various American Psychology Association conventions around the country and listen with interest to their stories and research. Unfortunately their efforts to obtain any recognized standing in the APA have been firmly thwarted by conventional Christian psychologists.
So what is going on here? Do OBEers actually travel outside their bodies during out of body experiences? Or does such an act represent a psychologically abnormal, delusional experience? Perhaps a benignly abnormal one?
SORRY! I don’t – have – an – answer.
What I do have are the correlates between various brain functions during spiritual experiences. Specifically I want to summarize the research of Mario Beauregard in Montreal at McGill University on Carmelite nuns during their experience of “God Union†and the research of Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg on the mystical mind including OBEs. A fabulous video of Beauregard and other neuropsychological research on spirituality and mysticism can found at the Isabelle Raynauld link on the bibliography I provided. Links to d’Aquile and Newberg’s research can also be found in my bibliography.
Briefly what these people have found is that during our typical interactions with the environment, afferent nerve impulses from our visual, auditory, smell, and proprioceptive sense organs moving up the spine and brain stem towards our cerebrum are examine by this traffic cop, the thalamus. From here they are channeled up into the processing areas of the cerebrum, brain #4 of your sheet. Regarding visual information it enters first in the Occipital Lobe at the back of the cerebrum. From there it is sent to the Visual Association area of the lower Temporal Lobe area. You will see it as “VA†in the Temporal Lobe on your diagram. Very basic rudimentary nerve impulse information is collected in this area regarding where it comes from as well as its quality and quantity as impulses. Next it is sent to the Orientation Association area at the back of the parietal lobe. Here images are made of the visual data and it is oriented into a three dimensional spatial image of the object. Keep this in mind when I get to the “out of body experiencesâ€. Finally these images are sent to the Associate Area, marked AA in the Frontal lobe where complex associations are made with other images and memories. Actually it is processed right at the very front of the frontal lobe in an area designated as the “prefrontal cortexâ€.
When skilled meditators have their blood flow monitored via magnetic imaging, it is found that the deeper they get into meditation, especially at the “God union†point of contemplation for the Carmelite nuns, something unique happens. The brain activity is seen to focus first in the Orientation Association area then move dramatically to the Association Area of the prefrontal area where it lights up brightly across both the right and left hemispheres showing that a playful, highly integrated processing of the material is taking place. This moment of altered consciousness also indicates that less information is being received from outside. In essence it has become an internal processing event cut off from the outside. To the participants it is a moment of total unity, serenity, and oneness. Attempting to avoid the use of the word “God†d’Aquili and Newberg speak of this as being, for some subjects, a moment of “AUB†or “absolute unitary being†during which the individual feels “presenceâ€.
Unable to have OBE subjects in their magnetic imaging laboratory during their OBE experiences, d’Aquili and Newberg speculate that the brain activity during OBE experiences is similar to but different than that of the meditators. They speculate that due to the individual’s highly emotionally charged moment, the thalamus cuts off the flow of neural information travelling from the Visual Association area to the Orientation Area in the parietal lobe. The individual is thereby forming very distinctive three dimensional images of him or herself that can be viewed from all sides and are seen as alive and moving. However, information from the external senses has been cut off. Remember that thalamus traffic cop? Such access to information from the senses would normally help the individual to determine the origin of these images. That is, is he/she seeing something in the environment or is it a product of his/her imagination. Without this feedback it is assumed by the individual that this image of him or herself is actually being observed apart from their body. Not coming from the inside. An analogy would be a very vivid dream that seems real to the individual who does not realize he/she is asleep.
Of course many OBEers maintain that the experiences are real in the sense that they ARE observing themselves outside their own body. Many argue that we do not truly know where consciousness actually resides even IF the brain back in our body is monitoring that consciousness.
So now you have had a short 101 course in neuroscientific theory about what goes on during mystical and out of body experiences.
[Closing]
So!! What to do? In the end have not we all been touched by these invigorating, refreshing, re-vitalizing— what shall we call them— all right “altered states of consciousness. Generally we do not attribute these moments as neurophysiological interactions between our brain and the rest of our body….. right? You know— the release of hormones into our blood stream as I have described or the total firing up of our brain. We typically attribute our wonderful states of mind or emotions to some particular experience…. such as place we have visited while on vacation, a special place in nature where we routinely hike, a sublime piece of music, or even a passage in a favorite book written by a particularly wise person who INSPIRES us. Such moments give us hope that we have caught a glimpse of the meaning of life—and helps us to put all this human and natural drama going on about us into some intuited perspective. Thus, we assume something else outside of us caused it—be it natural or supernatural.
That is a mistake. Well, certainly me and my little brain had SOMETHING to do with it….. as has been discussed this morning. But so too is it a mistake to assume that we cause such neurological events ourselves by our own knowledge and volition. That would be to go the other direction into egotism. So what do we do??!!
Here I believe Unitarian-Universalism has something to say. In the front of your songbook you can find the seven UU principles. The Seventh UU principle states: “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.†This “respect†is further elaborated below it in the first of the UUA’s 6 Sources for supporting the seven principles. It implies this “Respect†comes from… “the direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold lifeâ€.
Nancy McDonald Ladd- senior minister of River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Bethesda, Maryland adds to this “direct experience†by bringing in the Universalist aspect of our Unitarian-Universalism. She says……. “Universalism: (is) the unyielding belief that each and every person is endowed with an original blessing that calls them and claims them regardless of circumstances or even of worthiness.â€
In neuroscience terms, this holistic, integrating function has been with us since birth and before the development of our personality. It calls us to perceive the wholeness in ourselves and the world around us and of the interdependence of these two aspects. As humans it is one of our deepest motivators. To feel whole we need to harken to this transcendent call and pursue it…. [pause]…. or search for it if it has become dulled by conflicting preoccupations.
Finally, I believe it helps if we share these transcendental experiences with one other. There is so much hurt in the world and it is often because we reject the words and concepts through which people try to express this wholeness they intuit inwardly. We need to learn to see the beauty in each other’s experiences……. even if the other seems to be speaking a different philosophical language than ours. After all, I suspect none us knows, as old Will James said, what ultimate reality is.
At hand holding:
Lisa Boncheck Adams, an inspiring blogger to many women on surviving breast cancer died on March 6. Here are her words……â€Find a bit of beauty in the world today—share it—if you can’t find it create it—some days this may be hard to do—persevere!â€
Books and articles used in this talk:
Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg. The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience. Fortress Press, Minneapolis. 1999
Sam Harris. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon & Schuster, New York. 2014
Sam Harris. Waking Up Science, Skepticism, Spirituality (Free Will As An Illusion). June 15, 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85027636&x-yt-ts=1422503916&v=bWtRpkt-BNg
Hunt Henion. Neurotheology: “The Crucible of Religionâ€. Noetic Now; Issue Twenty-Two, May 2012. http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-twenty-two-may/neurotheology-the-crucible-of-religion/ (Excellent summary of various neurological studies on spiritual experience.)
Steve Kotler. The Neurology of Spiritual Experience. http://hplusmagazine/2009/09/16/neurology-spiritual-experience/
Andrew Newberg & D’Aquali. Wired for the Ultimate Reality: The Neuropsychology of Religious Experience. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/newberg.html (Summary of their major investigation of the “causal†and “holistic†operators, the latter sometime experience as Absolute Unitary Being.)
Isabelle Raynauld. Mystical Brain. National Board of Canada. University of Montreal. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/mystical-brain/ (video)
Carl Zimmer. “The New Science of the Brainâ€. (Secrets of the Brain). Natpional Geographic, February, 2014, pp. 28-56