How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [35]
In our online survey, 60 percent of the respondents felt that their family relationships improved as a result of their spiritual experiences, and 8 percent felt they got worse. This may reflect increased friction with parents who embrace stricter religious beliefs.
Fifty-three percent also felt that their health was enhanced, while only 3 percent felt their health declined. Interestingly, this suggests that individual spiritual pursuits may have similar health improvements as those found in people who regularly attend church. On a psychological level, 76 percent said they now felt less fear about death, while only 2 percent felt more. In general, other studies have found that religiosity lessens death anxiety, but often the correlation is weak.8 Thus, our finding suggests the possibility that spiritual experiences may be the key element that lessens a person's fear of death. This resonates to the Buddhist belief that meditative experiences can reduce one's anxiety about death.
Finally, I found confirmation that spiritual experiences alter one's sense of reality in a significant way. At the time of the experience, 63 percent said that it was more real than their normal experience of reality, and 7 percent said it felt less real. Looking back, only 46 percent said the experience felt more real. It appears that the impressions left by altered states of reality can dissipate over time. Unfortunately, since we did not ask our respondents for their definitions of reality, they may have answered our questions with something else in mind. This is an inherent problem associated with research questionnaires.
The sense of realness at the time of the experience and in retrospect broke down this way:
REAL AT TIME REAL LOOKING BACK
More real 63.2% 46.0%
Same 23.6 44.0
Less real 6.8 5.2
Still, I believe it's safe to assume that spiritual experiences have a unique quality that make them feel very different from our everyday sense of reality and that this is true for the majority of people who have them. Furthermore, it appears that some relatively universal sensory elements make these experiences what they are, even though they are described in vastly different ways. Cognitive processes turn God into an idea, but sensory processes turn God into a generalized feeling that changes the way we perceive the world.
IS GOD PRIMARILY A FEELING OR AN IDEA?
Returning to our analysis of the survey participants’ descriptions, we began to group different words into different types of categories. By far the largest category included words that reflected strong emotional content. Nearly a third described their experiences as being intense, using words like ecstatic, exciting, great, strong, powerful, exhilarating, and profound. Nearly one-half described their experiences using words that expressed calmness, serenity, and contentment. This correlates well with our neurological model suggesting that spiritual experiences simultaneously stimulate the sympathetic (arousing) and parasympathetic (calming) nervous systems. Generally speaking, it is rare that an experience both arouses and calms, which is one of the reasons why we think spiritual experiences stimulate the brain in a unique way.
Our data demonstrates that spiritual experiences, when they occur, are feeling states, not abstract forms of intellectualism. In fact, words like feel, felt, and feeling were used as often as words that referred to God. Does that mean that “God” is more of a feeling than an idea? Apparently not, because most of our respondents used the term in a historical, comparative, or philosophical context, as the following examples demonstrate:
“I do believe in Spinoza's God.”
“I don't believe in God in a traditional way.”
“God is too big to fit into one religion.”
“My thought is that God is the name of the collective unconscious.”
In fact, of the 1,000 references made about God, only 42 related to direct