How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [44]
In the tenets of Religious Science International (another of several institutes based on the principles established by Ernest Holmes), an emphasis is also placed on the value found in other religious traditions and sects:
Religious Scientists believe, very simply, that the Universe is fundamentally spiritual—it has intelligence, purpose, beauty and order. Whether we call it God, spirit, energy, or Universal Intelligence, every person, place and thing emanates from this spiritual universe. We believe this Universal Intelligence is within us, as well as around us, and that we are conscious of it. Our beliefs are in harmony with the basic tenets of all the world's great religions.18
As a group, I have found these congregations to be particularly optimistic about life, and they place great emphasis on the power of positive thinking to bring both spiritual and material prosperity into one's life. In addition to embracing contemporary psychological principles, they also attempt to integrate modern science and physics into their principles and beliefs.
As part of a workshop program that we have been introducing to religious institutes and public schools, we handed out a survey form on which we asked them to draw a picture of God. As we expected, faces and people appeared only 14 percent of the time, which was even less than the 20 percent found in Hanisch's religious sixteen-year-olds. This suggested to us that old anthropomorphic images continue to be neurologically revised as a person's religious involvement continues. Eighty-six percent drew a wide range of abstract designs, which, factoring out the gender differences, was nearly the same as Hanisch's group. Similar to the findings in all of the other studies, nearly half of the abstract drawings were composed of suns, spirals, and radiating light. Approximately 10 percent drew nature scenes, 10 percent drew clouds, and 6 percent drew hearts, themes that were also common among the children of the earlier research studies. Unlike the children, there wasn't a single representation of a biblical theme, perhaps reflecting the nonbiblical theology of the church.
Drawing from a twenty-two-year-old Religious Science woman who was raised Catholic (left), and a seventy-two-year-old man (right) who had been affiliated with Religious Science for forty years.
There was also a greater variety and complexity of abstract representations. Some people mixed animals with stars and crosses and suns, some drew arrows pointing in different directions, and a few represented God by drawing the symbol for infinity or an atom, with electrons spinning around its core. Several members drew mirrors to capture the notion that God and self were reflections of each other, a belief integral to the teachings of Religious Science.
The words chosen to describe their pictures represented highly positive abstract concepts that few children used. For these people, God was energy, peace, freedom, and awareness—a blend of intellectual concepts and experiential senses similar to the descriptions we found in our online Survey of Spiritual Experiences.
Another unique quality of “drawing” was captured, for 8 percent of the participants handed in pages that were left completely blank. Often they would add a comment stating that their picture symbolized “all,” “everything,” or “pure spirit.” With the exception of a few eighteen-year-olds, no children, to my knowledge, deliberately left their picture blank, nor did any child refer to God in similar abstract terms. These findings support our hypothesis that as the brain matures, the more abstract and mysterious one's concept of God becomes.
For these members of the Church of Religious Science, God is a symbol for a transcendent level of consciousness. When this occurs, both words and pictures fail to capture the quality of the experience. The “reality