How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [37]
In one dramatic case, reported in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,9 a young professional woman had been attending a kundalini meditation group when, without warning, she began to wildly hallucinate. She tore off her clothes, ran from the ashram, and admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital, where she was sedated for several days. Afterward, she had dreams in which she found herself in hell, having sexual relations with her father. In therapy, she recalled numerous incidents of emotional abuse, memories she had tried to suppress for decades. With the aid of her therapist, she came to understand how certain types of meditation can break down psychological resistance, leaving a person vulnerable to extraordinary feelings and thoughts. She later became involved in the Catholic tradition of her youth, where she found tranquility and a deeper purpose to life.
Such occurrences, though uncommon, are now acknowledged by the American Psychiatric Association as a temporary state of crisis involving a “loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of other spiritual values which may not necessarily be related to an organized church or religious institution.”10 As more Americans experiment with different religious values, health-care professionals need to become aware of this type of psychospiritual problem.
SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES ADD NEW DIMENSIONS TO LIFE
Of the more than three hundred respondents to our survey who described their spiritual experiences in detail, 80 percent said that they had some form of sensory, visual, or auditory experience. People described seeing light, colors, or auras; hearing sounds like humming or ringing; or hearing voices. These sensations greatly enhanced the power and meaning of their experience. Interestingly, such experiences translated into more permanent perceptual abilities. Some people said that their everyday senses were heightened, and 60 percent felt they actually developed new abilities that allowed them to interpret information in different and more meaningful ways. One person stated that “God gave me a vision of who I am.” Another found that she could, at times, “hear angelic music and see shadows or people who would speak to me.” For one scientist, his experience led him to accept the reality, validity, and utility of intuitional insight:
I have been meditating for several years on and off, but one day, while not involved in any formal meditation, everything in life seemed to click. I had this clarity and it was as if I was looking at life from the inside out. It was almost as if my intuition from somewhere “deeper” had offered some sort of direct experience that validated my scientific need for proof. It is actually hard to put into words because it was not merely a “logical” linear experience and many common words cannot really do it the justice it deserves.
Again we see the difficulty people have when describing spiritual experiences. But even when the experience defies description, many people felt that it transformed their orientation to life. As one respondent wrote, “The world became more three-dimensional. More rich, intense, and pleasurable.” Spiritual experiences also have the power to alter one's sense of self, as seen in the following dramatic descriptions:
I felt my “self (as a process, not a thing) go quiet, and became aware of an implicit silence, darkness, and emptiness within me and surrounding me. Within this silence, I felt an abyss or void full of possibilities, hope, creativity. It also seemed a lot like a mirror—that is, that my consciousness was “pure” consciousness without subject or object, that Reality was myself in macrocosm and that I was Reality in microcosm. I also felt an openness, positive feeling, gratitude, unconditional regard, etc., for all things and people. As though I encountered the Golden Rule, love of neighbor as myself, concretely within this moment. These feelings or instances of awareness