How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [62]
Social interaction strengthens the anterior cingulate's ability to respond to others with less stress,30 and so we encourage you to interact with as many different people as you can. Attend social events that include different cultures and ethnicities, and visit different churches. Experiment with unfamiliar forms of meditation and prayer, and share your experiences with others who are on a spiritual path.
THE ELUSIVE MYSTICAL GOD
It is easy to embrace the notion of a benevolent God, but far more difficult to experience the qualities associated with mysticism. As our Survey of Spiritual Experiences showed, unitary experiences that transform God into a virtually indescribable sensation appear to happen spontaneously. This is true for advanced meditators as well. Nearly everyone will feel more peaceful and relaxed as they experience deeper levels of awareness, but only a small percentage will report intense altered states of consciousness that rapidly transform their spiritual beliefs. Time and the length of practice clearly influence one's ability to experience mystical states, but as many Eastern teachers have said, there is no promise of enlightenment.
If you consciously want to explore mystical spirituality, our research suggests that you may need to engage in a daily practice that lasts from twenty minutes to an hour. In Chapter 9 we'll take you through the basic steps of setting up a meditation practice. You might not reach enlightenment, but you will find yourself in a more peaceful and happy frame of mind.
Practitioners from every religious tradition have succeeded in reaching mystical states, but they all seem to concur on one point: God can never be fully known by the mind. The experience is simply too grand, too awesome, and too profound to describe with pictures or words. God becomes the totality of life, and a force that is absolutely and irreducibly real. But it is a God that does not fit neatly into the tenets of traditional religious beliefs. Einstein called it a “cosmic religious feeling,” and he considered it to be “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”31
Intense meditation appears to be the most direct route to experiencing mystical states. Are there any side effects? During meditation, activity in the amygdala temporarily declines, but we found that the brains of advanced meditators had mildly higher amygdala activity when they were resting. One would expect the opposite, so what might this mean? Is a mystical God frightening? In a certain sense, yes, because many parts of the brain want to clearly identify and label anything it perceives. Your brain just doesn't like mysteries, and people who are overly sensitive to uncertainty might prefer to embrace a more traditional notion of God.
It is also possible that those who are attracted to meditation may have higher initial levels of anxiety, compared to the general population. Therefore, they meditate because it is an effective way to become more serene. However, if meditation makes them more sensitive and aware, it may also make them more emotionally vulnerable when they are around others who are anxious or mad.
Overall, however, the benefits of intense meditation outweigh the risks. For example, in one recent study, advanced meditators were shown to have superior skills at discerning subtle changes in the environment,32 which, from an evolutionary perspective, has significant survival value. The majority of studies also have found that even brief periods of meditation significantly improve your ability to cope with a wide variety of psychological problems and physical disease. Perhaps this explains why the practice of meditation has increased in popularity in recent years. In 1993, five million people said they meditated. By 2003, the numbers soared to ten