Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [202]
Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause conclude their book, Why God Won’t Go Away, by positing that feelings of mystic unity are a characteristic of the brain in some of its rarest operations. Among other things, these rare states involve deafferentation or disinhibition, two names for a misfunction in the brain when nerve fibers fire erratically and stop sending meaningful signals to the central nervous system. This state is detectable by means of a variety of brain-imaging techniques (CAT, SPECT, or MRI).16 When this happens, subjects report unusual experiences that can be interpreted religiously, if the context is right.
In a unitary mystical experience, in which Newberg, D’Aquili and Rause are particularly interested, both left and right parietal lobes are neutralized. The right lobe is very important to the way we experience physical space. It is in charge of proprioception, the body’s knowledge of where its appendages are in space-a neurological process that, though important, normally goes on without conscious intervention. The left parietal lobe, conversely, seems to be quite important to the generation of the subjective sense of self. When both centers experience deafferentation, which essentially means “quieting” the specific lobes of the brain, either through mystical meditation or through wild and uncontrolled overstimulation, making the brain unable to decode its messages, the result may be a unitive mystical experience.17
But these unitive experiences have quite a different etiology than the shamanistic experience on the heavenly journey. Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rauss are interested in the disinhibition of both right and left parietal lobes, which cover various aspects of the body’s sense that we exist in specific points in space and time.18 The result may be a unitary, mystical experience. But when only the right center is involved, we can posit a different experience.19 When the proprioception center is quiet (as determined by CAT scans, MRIs, SPECTs and other medical diagnostic means), subjects report that they can no longer perceive their bodily location, but have a distinct feeling of bodiless motion in space.
Some people are able to achieve these states spontaneously; others train to achieve the state in meditation; still others report the state after disease, trauma, or under the effects of various drugs. The drug Ketamine, known as “Special K” in the club circuit, is known often to produce out-of-body experiences in its abusers.20
These out-of-body experiences have been studied and normally differ quite markedly from shamanistic or heavenly journeys produced in religious contexts. But these drug experiences occur in quite different circumstances than shamanistic ones. There has been considerable study of the conditions that might predispose people to have out-of-body experiences, the aftereffects, and their relationship to other predispositions like epilepsy, seizures, hypnotizability, and a variety of other personality and neurological factors.21 By no means are these mechanisms well understood or entirely mapped.22 But it seems clear that there is, at the least, a physiological component of RISC and also culturally available narratives as explanations of it. It is reasonable to suppose that expectations and context count for a great deal in predisposing the content of the experience, especially where a religion provides detailed instruction through texts and lessons on how to achieve these states.
In other words, deafferentation or disinhibition experiences may be the physiological root of the experience,