How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [34]
But how do you analyze personal narrative descriptions of spiritual experience? The technique we used is called “content analysis,” which categorizes how often certain words or groups of words are used. For example, if I wanted to know how many people experienced a feeling of unity with God or the universe, then words such as unity, oneness, or wholeness could be grouped together and then compared to other people's words such as separate, distant, or alone to describe their spiritual experiences. Basically, we were searching for the commonalities of religious and spiritual experience. In fact, we didn't find any, which was a very significant discovery.
PERSONAL VARIETIES OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Of the nearly 5,500 words that people used to describe their experiences, no common terminology emerged.∗3 Even the words experience and spirituality, which you would expect to be high in a survey that specifically addressed spiritual experiences, logged in at only 23 and 17 percent, respectively. God was only mentioned 18 percent of the time, and Jesus less than 4 percent. Barely 10 percent of the respondents mentioned love, and only 6 percent talked about peace. Less than 5 percent referred to faith, consciousness, or truth—words that I expected would be used far more often when describing spiritual and religious experiences. Here are the top six words, and the approximate percentage of people who used them:
Experience 23.0%
God 18.0
Feeling 17.0 (includes feels, feelings, and felt)
Spirituality 16.7 (includes spiritual)
Life 14.9
Belief 13.8 (includes believe and beliefs)
To give you a clearer picture of the commonality—or lack—of usage, when we printed the entire list of words used by our participants, we ended up with a hundred pages, with 57 words per page. The words on page 2 were used, on average, 6 percent of the time, page 3 dropped to 5 percent, page 10 was below 2 percent, and every word on the remaining eighty pages was used less than 1 percent of the time. In essence, hardly anyone used the same words, phrases, or expressions to describe his or her personal encounter with the divine. Truly religious and spiritual experiences are unique, at least when it comes to our ability to describe them in words.
This is astonishing, especially since many researchers in psychology and religion have argued for the universal nature of spiritual phenomena—the “perennial philosophy,” as it has been called.7 The only common denominator we found was not in the description, but in the positive effect that such experiences had on the participants’ lives. In fact, 89 percent of the respondents felt a deeper sense of spirituality. Only 10 percent felt that their spirituality was unchanged by their experiences, while 1 percent said their sense of spirituality was adversely affected by their experience. Even more important, 79 percent said they felt more purpose in their lives, compared to 4 percent who felt less purpose.
When we asked our participants about how spiritual experiences affected their religiosity, we kept the definition of that term purposely vague to see how they would answer without any prompting. About half said they felt more religious, a third said their religiosity didn't change, and 11 percent said they felt less religious. Numerous respondents said that their spiritual experiences were not adequately addressed by religions in which they were raised, and so they turned away from them to engage in more individualized pursuits. In a new survey we have just begun, we are finding that college students express very strong interests in Eastern spiritual philosophies, especially when compared to Western religious traditions. These results support the idea that America is gradually becoming less religious but more spiritual and