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“Absolutely,” he assured me. “I would say the likelihood is that you are already changing your brain, be it very modestly, in ways we may or may not be able to measure.”

I shuddered inwardly.

Davidson smiled. “Keep practicing,” he said.

The Mind and the Brain

In the scores of interviews for this book, I noticed a predictable chasm between people who had experienced transcendence and those who had not. Both would burn at the stake for their positions.

On the one side marches the well-armed, highly trained, battle-tested brigade of scientists who insist that everything is caused by material processes. These scientists—and they are the vast majority of the academic community—believe that thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions arise from the interaction of brain chemicals and electricity. They arrive at this conclusion through observation, using material instruments to measure a material brain. They echo the assertion of Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA with James Watson. In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis13 he stated, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

On the other side of the debate is a small, underfed, and under-armed guerrilla force lobbing single grenades from the bushes. These scientists insist that cells and molecules do not determine all of human existence. They claim that molecules do not explain love, or willpower, or the occasional glimpse into spiritual dimensions. Significantly, I noticed that scientists who had themselves waded into spiritual waters—through prayer, meditation, or a near-death experience—always fall into the spiritual camp. Their personal experience trumps the assumptions of modern science.

That is what made Richard Davidson such an enigma. Despite being steeped in meditative practice for thirty years, despite his close friendship with the Dalai Lama, he remains certain that everything boils down to material stuff. Meditation trains the mind to appreciate “the interconnectedness, the sense of there being a larger purpose,” he told me. But in the end, he said, it is nothing more than brain activity.

Okay, now I was really confused. Interconnectedness and larger purpose sound like pretty metaphysical concepts to me. Forget about the “spiritual” realm, I said. Let’s ratchet it down a level: Can one’s thoughts—mind states—affect one’s brain states? Can thought affect matter? Wasn’t that the take-away from the studies on Buddhist meditators and even the biotech employees—that their meditative thoughts affected their material brains?

Apparently not, according to Davidson. “When you say mind states affect brain states, what we’re really talking about is how certain parameters of the brain can affect other parameters of the brain,” he said coolly. “When we engage in the process of training our mind, what we’re engaging in is the process of using our brain to change our brain.”

A few days later I called Davidson and asked him to elaborate. I could not quite grasp how the three-pound mass called my brain dictated everything I felt, thought, or did.

“Let me give you a simple example,” I said. “I wanted to call you to ask you some follow-up questions. Can you explain how my brain state caused me to pick up the phone and dial your number? Where did that intention, the desire, arise from in the first place?”

“It’s fully explainable, based upon the prior conditions and circumstances to which an individual is exposed.” Davidson sighed, for surely I was the dimmest of students. “In the case of the phone call, you have reminders that you’re supposed to make this phone call, you have a calendar, you see these cues, those cues elicit the intention. There’s nothing magical about it.”

Afterward, I kept thinking, I’m just not smart enough to understand that we are wholly material