How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [50]
ENVISIONING TRANSCENDENCE
For the genuine mystic, God transcends every concept the brain can possibly generate. But what happens in such a brain? What happens when you go against your biological propensity to turn God into an image? At first your brain rebels. It doesn't like uncertainty, and when it encounters a problem that appears to be impossible to solve, it releases a lot of neurotransmitters, which put you on alert. You'll feel an odd combination of anxiety, curiosity, irritability, frustration, and excitement—feelings that stress chemicals trigger in your brain. And if you don't find a solution, you could easily end up depressed. In religious circles this is called the dark night of the soul.
Yet those who embrace a mystical vision of God rarely suffer psychological angst for extended periods of time. Instead, they find new ways to make sense out of the unimaginable realms to which they feel drawn. This indeed is a creative process, which means they have interrupted habitual patterns of thinking. Like children, they allow their minds to fantasize and speculate, and in the process new neural connections are made that allow them to integrate old and new perspectives. Artists, inventors, and theoretical scientists do this all the time, and so do theologians. And for these people, there is nothing more gratifying than looking at the world with new eyes. New images are formed, and if they prove useful in life, the old images will be dismissed.
Based upon the research we have accumulated, we believe that the more you examine your spiritual beliefs, the more your experience of God will change. And if you cannot change your image of God, you may have trouble tolerating people who hold different images of God, and that may threaten our planet's survival. In the words of the religious philosopher Martin Buber:
Time after time, the images must be broken … [for it] is the human soul which rebels against having an image that can no longer be believed in, elevated above the heads of humanity as a thing that demands to be worshipped. In our longing for a god, we try again and again to set up a greater, more genuine and more just image, which is intended to be more glorious than the last and only proves more unsatisfactory. The commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee an image,” means at the same time, “Thou canst not make an image.” This does not, of course, refer merely to sculptured or painted images, but to our fantasy, to all the power of our imagination as well. But we are forced time and again to make images and forced to destroy them when we realize that we have not succeeded. The images topple, but the voice is never silenced.36
From a neurological perspective, images of God are unavoidable, but from many theological perspectives, there is no true image of God. Thus, if you cling to your childhood perceptions, you will limit your perception of truth. This is the drawback to any religion that insists upon a literal, biblical image of God. If you limit your vision, you might feel threatened by those who are driven to explore new spiritual values and truths—people who one day might turn out to be our future leaders and saints.
THE SELF-EVOLVING BRAIN
The neural evolution of God is unavoidable in most human beings, but not in the Darwinian sense of the word. Human beliefs are not tied to the principles that govern genetic evolution,37 and thus we are free to reinvent ourselves, and our spirituality, with every new generation.
What makes human beings unique is the extraordinary impermanence of their ideas, and this impermanence is reflected in our extraordinary neuroplasticity. Neurons do not have