How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [36]
Based upon what we know about the brain's processing of sensations and the conscious recognition of experiences, we believe that a person's spiritual experience (such as being born again) precedes cognitive awareness by approximately a half second. Then, to translate that awareness into language, the brain must engage in dozens of unrelated activities to turn that experience into words. This takes additional neurological time, so the gap widens between the actual experience and the expression of it through language. The experience may be common to many people, but the words used to describe it will inevitably vary from person to person. Thus, it is possible that different spiritual texts are describing a universal experience but using language that is idiosyncratic to the culture and denomination in which it was written.
For the person who has not had some level of a spiritual experience, God will remain an intellectual idea—a promise or a possibility of something that may or may not exist. For these people, faith becomes the essential key for maintaining religious beliefs. But for the person who has had a powerful spiritual experience, God is both a feeling and an idea. And as far as the brain is concerned, if you give an experience a label (in this case, “God”) and imbue it with meaning, it will be perceived as something that actually exists in the world.
So why do people call this experience “God”? For the simple reason that the brain must affix a name onto anything it experiences in order to file it into memory. Vague experiences stimulate many parts of the brain, generating uncertainty and anxiety, and so for survival reasons the brain will consolidate and reduce a feeling into an identifiable category. If you consciously interrupt the labeling process that naturally occurs in your frontal lobe, you will interfere with your ability to communicate the experience to others. Religious practitioners who do this are often considered mystics because they refuse to define their experiences in unambiguous ways.
GOD FEELS LIKE LOVE AND EVOKES PEACE
Our content analysis showed that most people who have had spiritual experiences will talk about God in the context of a positive_felt experience. The two words used most often to describe the experience and its aftereffects were love and peace, and for most people, love was often associated with God. Here's how one respondent put it:
The experience changed my life. Over time, old feelings have been wiped clean from me and I no longer react or behave the way I used to. I see life from a much clearer perspective based on love. But even the word “love” doesn't really convey the magnitude of which I speak. I'm speaking about the kind of self-love and acceptance that the energy of God recognizes in all of us.
For many of our respondents, God became a symbol for love and peace. For others, God symbolized light or truth. Many people also experienced God as a way of connecting to the universe, to nature, and with others. Overall, they saw their spiritual experiences as learning experiences, but not on a mundane level of day-to-day living. For example, few people said that their experiences touched upon issues like work, vacation plans, or what things they need to shop for. Their experiences were almost always associated with deep philosophical and fundamental issues.
RELEASING THE DEMONS
Spiritual experiences aren't always positive, and nearly 10 percent of our respondents said that they experienced negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, and fear. The reasons could include: discomfort with having old beliefs shattered, concern about how friends and family members might react, and the fact that spiritual awakenings may occasionally unleash disturbing unconscious material,