How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [33]
So if you want to know what people believe, you have to ask the question in different ways. This is what Mark and I set out to do using several innovative approaches. We were interested in how people defined God and spirituality, and we were specifically interested to see if there was a difference between people's religious ideas and their personal spiritual experiences. When we integrated our findings with other polls conducted over the past two decades, we discovered that a gradual shift is taking place in America, where the importance of God's physical characteristics is declining, while an interest in spiritual values is increasing.
SURVEY OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES
In 2005, I created an online questionnaire called the Survey of Spiritual Experiences, collecting data on people's religious orientation and their belief systems.∗2 Specifically, I was interested in analyzing first-person descriptions of their spiritual experiences and relating them to people's social, religious, and personal backgrounds.
We chose to do our survey online because research has shown that respondents are more open, honest, and less biased when they are not confronted by an interviewer.5 By the end of 2007 we had gathered information from almost 1,000 people, of which over 300 have described specific spiritual experiences in detail. Most reside in the United States, but approximately 15 percent live abroad. Thus, we had representatives from Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, Nigeria, Brazil, Denmark, Qatar, Israel, Pakistan, India, Myanmar, Finland, and the Congo.
In our survey, we included several established questionnaires to measure religious background, spiritual activities, and the individual's degree of religiosity, particularly as it related to marriage, drug use, and psychological health. I also wanted to know how tolerant people were when they encountered individuals with different religious beliefs, and so we developed our own survey that we called the “Belief Acceptance Scale.” The results were surprising—and somewhat disheartening—because we discovered that nearly 30 percent of those queried had difficulty accepting others who held different religious beliefs. In fact, more people were willing to marry someone of a different race or ethnic background (85 percent) than someone with a different religious orientation (72 percent).
SEARCHING FOR THE REALITY OF GOD
It is easy to analyze facts about a person's religious beliefs and activities, but very difficult to gather data about experiences that have the capacity to transform an individual's perception of reality. This is why we encouraged online participants to describe, in their own words and in as much detail as possible, those experiences they believed had a profound and lasting effect on their lives. Even if they didn't have such an experience, we encouraged them to write about how their religious or spiritual perspectives had affected or changed their lives. Finally, we asked them the following two questions:
When you had the experience, how did it compare to your usual sense of reality?
In hindsight, how real does it seem now?
These questions were important to me because I have argued throughout my career that spiritual experiences neurologically alter one's perception of reality. However, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, it is very possible that our perceptual sense of reality is different from our conscious awareness of reality, since each type of reality is assembled through different neurological circuits that do not communicate with each other.6 We believe that consciousness represents a limited and somewhat fragmented view of reality that is discrepant from the holistic view generated by nonconscious processes in the brain. Perhaps this explains why people intuitively know that reality is more than what they consciously understand, and why some equate that reality with