Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [81]
As the Christian nuns focused on God—on a word like Jesus or Elohim that helped them connect to the divine—their frontal lobes shifted into overdrive. Similarly, as the Buddhist monks meditated on an image that allowed them to connect with the ground of being, their scans showed their frontal lobes as a red glow of activity.
Newberg found another peculiar similarity.With both the nuns and the monks, the parietal lobes went dark during deep prayer and meditation. Newberg calls this the “orientation area” because it orients you in space and time: those lobes tell you where your body ends and the rest of the world begins. That is why Sister Celeste (and countless other mystics) described a unity with God, or as she put it, God “permeating my being.” It was the neurological reason that Michael Baine felt “a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.” And, I might add, it was what those who enjoyed psychedelic drugs and natural mystical experiences reported.
Newberg theorizes that when the nuns and monks focused on their mantra or image, their brain simply screened out other information. You’re watching Casablanca and the oven timer goes off, or you’re gazing rapturously at your beloved and the phone rings—you don’t notice. Increase that a hundredfold and you would lose your sense of time and space. It is not that the orientation area of the brain is not working. Rather, the frontal lobes are physically blocking all the information going to the orientation area—the sounds, the sights, the dog at the door or the timer in the kitchen, the things that would normally create a picture of the world around you.
And yet the orientation area, conscientious beaver that it is, is still trying to do its job. “It’s still trying to create for you a sense of yourself and a spatial relation between you and the rest of the world,” Newberg says, “but it has been deprived of the information that it normally has to do that, so you wind up with this sense of no self, no space, no time.”5
Newberg’s description reminded me of the way psychedelic drugs may behave in a brain to create hallucinations. Some pharmacologists believe that drugs like psilocybin block out external sensory information, allowing you to create your own, transcendent, reality. Chemicals are quicker, but it may be that prayer and meditation accomplish the same high—without the potential for a bad trip or ending up in handcuffs.
For me personally, Newberg’s brain scans are theological dynamite. They boil down to this: a mystical state is a mystical state. The closer one draws to a transcendent state—or, as Newberg calls it, “absolute unitary being”—the more the descriptions merge. Christian mystics sound like Sufi mystics, who sound like Jewish mystics, who sound like Buddhists. And from the brain’s point of view, this makes perfect sense.
“Buddhists and Hindus and Christians and Jews who have had mystical states tend to describe the states as ‘everything becomes one.’The same terms keep cropping up over and over again,” Newberg told me. “When we look at the physiology of the brains, the most unitary state is one in which we completely deprive the orientation parts of the brain of information. So, physiologically it should be very similar. And philosophically it should also be similar. If you have a totally undifferentiated experience, it’s undifferentiated. It really has to be the same regardless of where you’re coming from.”
It doesn’t matter if you scale the spiritual peak using Christian centering prayer, Buddhist meditation, or Sikh chanting. The destination is the same. Or as Sophy Burnham might tell you: You must choose a spoke to get to the center of the wheel, but any spoke will do.
Newberg’s research throws