How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [80]
Since religion is central to many of the world's conflicts, we need to create empathic communication strategies to bridge spiritual differences. Unfortunately, communication skills are rarely taught in schools or in religious groups. To address this issue, we have taken the principles of meditation and adapted them to create a unique dialogue experience that you can do with anyone: with your partner, kids, friends, business associates, or even a complete stranger. It will create deep intimacy between any two people in less than fifteen minutes, and it only takes a few minutes to learn. We'll teach you how to practice Compassionate Communication in Chapter 10, but first, it's time to share with you the most essential component for maintaining a healthy brain.
THE NUMBER ONE BEST WAY TO EXERCISE YOUR BRAIN
Faith. No matter what choice we make concerning our physical, emotional, and spiritual health, we'll never know for certain if we are absolutely correct in our beliefs. We can make educated guesses about the world, but some degree of uncertainty will always remain. This is true for medicine and science, and it's certainly true when it comes to our religious beliefs.
Still, we have to trust our beliefs, and this is a matter of faith. But it's always unsettling to realize that we can't be a hundred percent sure about anything. We can't even trust our eyes when it comes to something as obvious as color, because color doesn't exist in the world. Light waves exist, but we can't see them at all. We only know they exist through the instruments we construct and the mathematical formulas that underpin our experiments. Color is a product of our imagination, and so is our perception of the world.
The same can be said about God. We can take surveys, or scan people's brains as they contemplate God, but this will tell us more about the brain and nothing about the true nature of the universe.
To be spiritually inclined, you have to rely on faith. Those who don't believe in such realms will use different criteria to govern their decisions and ideas, but they too must rely upon their intuition and faith to guide them through the unknown aspects of life. None of us can be certain if we've made the “right” decision, especially when it comes to dealing with abstract concepts like justice, fairness, or moral ideals. If we don't have faith that we're making the best decision we can, then we will be swallowed up in doubt. And doubt, at least as far as your brain is concerned, is a precarious state in which to live.
Faith is equivalent with hope, optimism, and the belief that a positive future awaits us. Faith can also be defined as the ability to trust our beliefs, even when we have no proof that such beliefs are accurate or true. The psychiatrist Vicktor Frankl, who was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp until the end of World War II, said that the single most important thing that kept a survivor alive was faith. If a prisoner lost faith in the future, he was doomed, because the will to live seldom returned.102
Similarly, Mark and I are convinced that for many people, if their faith in God was weakened, they could suffer deeply. Clearly this happened to many Jews, who came away from the Holocaust with the nearly unbearable question, “God, how could you let such a tragedy occur?” Many abandoned their faith in God, but they maintained their faith in humanity, and in their cultural heritage as Jews. More important, many chose to fight for the religious and civil rights of others.
To me, it doesn't matter if God is an illusion or fact, because even as a metaphor, God represents all we are capable of becoming, an ideal that offers hope to millions of people throughout the world, especially for those who may have little to fall back on other