Lifting the veil of mystery from Mysticism

Had an extremely busy two days: plenty of letters, pleadings, statements from the moment I stepped into the office until I dragged myself away almost half asleep at the end of the day and had to do some breathing exercises with my eyes half-closed whilst walking along the streets. But  unfortunately last week, I promised the organizer of a liberal religious organization to talk a little at their meeting last night about how the brain may be hardwired for something constantly on the lips of the followers of New Age movement: "spirituality". I had already read quite a bit on this problem and had already formed certain preliminary ideas about how the physiology of the brain may be linked to spirituality. So even though I hadn't got the time to write out some notes as I half promised, I was able to keep those present at the talk from yawning for about two hours. It was a pleasant experience. What follows is an expanded summary of what I talked about. The advertised title of the talk was "The Religious Brain."

I started the talk by telling those present what my talk would not cover. I was not going to talk about how our brain may react to what many people regard as a public "religious" experience like going to church, undergoing conversion, baptism, saying prayers, singing hymns, attending masses, receiving holy communcion, talking in tongues, making offerings and worshipping God, the bodhisattavas and all kinds of nature gods and spirits. I would restrict myself to a very narrow type of private and personal experience which produces the deepest religious feelings or one which may completely and most radically transform a person's life and the way he or she may look at it forever afterwards. In short, I would confine myself to what many has called a "mystical experience".

What is mysticism? Many people has written about this. The first one who has done so systemmatically is Henry James, who wrote "Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902). The second is Evelyn Underhill who wrote the classic study "Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness" (1911) and then there is W. T. Stace "The Teachings of the Mystics"(1960)  and "Mysticism and Philosophy" (1960). 

William James, a pragmatist introspective psychological philosopher, has written, "the study of the mystics,..keeping company however humbly with their minds, brings with it as music or poetry does--but in a far greater degree, a strange exhilaration, as if we were brought near to some mighty source of Being, were at last on the verge of the secret which all seek. The symbols displayed, the actual words employed, when we analyze them, are not enough to account for such effect. It is rather that these messages from the waking transcendental self of another, stir our own deeper selves in their sleep". James said that the word "mysticism" is one of the most abused words applied to "any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and without a base in either facts or logic." And to Underhill, it has been used as "an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or esthetic sentimentality and bad metaphysics...freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have criticized these things."

To W. T. Stace, the word "mysticism" is derived from a Greek word muo, meaning to conceal. Mist conceals because it limits vision. Serious mystics explores levels of consciousness concealed from everyday life and mystical experiences "involve the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One to which neither the senses nor the reasons can penetrate". In other words, it entirely transcends our sensory intellectual consciousness, different from e.g. telepathy or telekinsesis and the occult. He thinks that we may divide mysticism into monistic ( the feeling that the created universe revolves around a centre from which everything issues), pantheistic (the feeling that the entire world is the ultimate power and our experience of it form part of that unity) and theistic mysticism ( where we feel the presence of God or a power above and beyond the universe).

To Underhill, mysticism is "not an opinion, it is not a philosophy. It has nothing in common with the pursuit of occult knowledge. On the one hand, it is not merely the power of contemplating Eternity: On the other hand, it is not to be identified with any kind of religious queerness. It is the name of that organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the love of God: the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man. or ...the art of establishing his conscious relation with the Absolute." Mystics are often motivated by love, not only an intellectual curiosity. She says, "there is a sense in which it can be said that the desire for love is merely a part of the desire for perfect knowledge: for that strictly intellectual ambition includes no adoration, no self-spending, no reciprocity of feeling between Knower and Known. Mere knowledge, taken alone, is a matter of receiving, not of acting: of eyes, not wings: a dead alive business at the best." 

Emile Durkheim, a pioneer in the sociology of religion thinks that the function of religion is to stabilzie the social order: "Essentially, it is nothing other than a body of collective beliefs and practices endowed with a certain authority" but the focus of such study is the practices of institutional religion and not spiritual experience as such. Peter Berger, another sociologist, thinks that "modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion, both in society and in the minds of individuals.". In a recent paper, by S Arzy et al "Why Revelations Have Occured on Mountians? Linking Mystical Experiences and Cognitive Neuroscience" in Medical Hypothesis 654 (2005), it was argued  that mystical experiences tend to occur in high mountains because of shortage of oxygen and social isolation. 

One mystics has thus described his experience : " In this ecstasy of mine, God had neither form, color, odor nor taste; morever, that the feeling of his presence was accompanied with no determinate localization. It was rather as if my personality had been transformed by the presence of a spiritual spirit. But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. At bottom, the expression most apt to render what I felt is this: God was present though invisible; he fell under no one of one my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him."

St. John of the Cross, a Carmelite mystic (1542-91) whose Spiritual Canticles are amongst the most beautiful songs ever written in the Spanish language and one of the reasons which inspired me to learn Spanish, has written: "All things I then forgot,/My cheek on Him who for my coming came,/All ceased, and I was not,/Leaving my cares and shame/Among the lilies, and forgetting them." He also coined the term, "the dark night of the soul" to describe the sense of abandonment mystics sometimes feel when contemplation does not produce the kind mystic consciousness they seek. But in a mystical union (unio mystica) the mystic feels that he is merged with God or the Absolute in Love. The German mystic John Tauler said that the mystic's soul became "sunk and lost in the Abyss of the Deity, and loses consciousness of all creature distinctions. All things are gathered in one with the divine sweetness, and the man's being is so penetrated with the divine substance that he loses himself therein, as a drop of water is lost in cask of strong wine".A Sufi master Hallaj Husain ibn Mansur in medieval Iraq, described his experience thus: "I am he Whom I love, and he whom I love is I:/We are two spirits dwelling in one body./If thou seest me, thou seest Him,/And if thou seest Him, thou seest both". Meister Eckhart, another Medieval Catholic mystic, said "How then am I to love the Godhead? Thou shalt not love him as he is: not as a God, not as a spirit, not as a Person, not as an image, but as sheer pure One. And into this One we are to sink from nothing to nothing, so help us God." Laotzu also said, "ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe." Almost all mystical traditions seek some sense of union with the absolute as the ultimate spiritual goal.

In 1997, Jeffrey Save & John Rabin, two neurological scientists wrote a paper in which they found that the mystical experiences are often characterised by strong contradictory emotions e.g terrifying fear with overpowering joy. Time and space are experienced as non-existent and normal rational thought processes give way to more intuitive way of understanding and the mystics often say that they feel the presence of the sacred or the holy and as entering into an esctatic or rapturous state which some described as "an interior illumination of reality that results in ultimate freedom." The primordial longing for this absolute union and the transcendental experience some say they felt run through the descriptions of the mystics whether in the East or in the West.

I told those present that if they are really interested in exploring this question, they may like to refer one or more of the following texts:

V. S. Ramachandran & Sandra Blakeslee              Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Mind (1998) Quill NY
Andrew Newberg & Eugene D'Aquili  The Mystical Mind: probing the Biology of Religious Experience, (1999) Fortress Press, Minneapolis                                                                                                                             Eugene D'Aquili, Andrew Newberg & Vance Rause  Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief (01) Ballantine Books NY 
Andrew Newberg & Mark Robert Waldman  God, Science & the Origin of Ordinary & Extraordinary Beliefs (06) Free Press NY London
Mario Beauregard & Denys O'Leary   The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul (07) HarperOne  NY                                                                                                                                          Matthew Alper The God Part of the Brain: a Scientific Interpretation of Human Spirituality and  God (06.08) Sourcebooks Inc. Naperville Illinois

I told them that I would base my talk on the materials I found in Newberg and d'Aguili and that in Alper but that to understand a little how spirituality may be linked to the activities of the brain, we need first of all a basic understanding of the architecture of the brain which weighs just about 3 lb, consists mostly of fat and which needs the right kind of fats for efficient functioning e.g. Eicosapentanenoic acid (EPA) found in fish oils and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)( people suffering from depression, ADHD and even Alsheimer's disease have low concentration of O3 fatty acids in their blood), has about 100 billion nerve cells each fitted with dendrites with between 10 to several thousand connections with other dendrites and consumes nearly one quarter of all the oxygen that we breathe in. We have what is called a triarchic brain: a most primitive part or the reptilian brain( the spinal cord plus the brain stem, the medulla knob helps us to breathe, walk, sleep and keeps the heart pumping or cerebellum, responsible for bodily coordination, control of posture, maintenance of equilibrium  ), the mid-brain (the amygdala, responsible for triggering the friend/foe, fight/flight response and regulates aggression, eating, drinking, and sexual instincts) the thalamus (responsible for processing information between the spinal cord  and  cerebrum and determines whether sensory information is friendly or hostile information and then sends the relevant messages to the cortex for further fine-grained analysis) , hypothalamus (the size of a pearl which regulates our cicada cycle, blood glucose, salt level, blood pressure and hormone secretion or the endocrine systems, gets the adrenaline flowing, controlling chemicals which make us feel angry, exhilarated, unhappy and is connected to both the central and autonomic nervous systems ) , the pons which helps us to dream and wake up whilst the hippocampus is responsible for emotions (a physiologically pre-action state of the body) , learnign and memory and finally the cortex (the outermost layer of the brain about 3.4 mm thick and which comprises 85% of the brain) which consists of the frontal lobe or the cerebrum,(which comprises 41% of the brain and which enables us to do fine-grained logical analysis, to recognize our friends, read books, play games, plan, set goals, connect the present to the future ), the parietal lobe (which comprises 19% of the brain and is responsible for perception of taste, aroma and texture of food and spatial interpretation ) and temporal lobe (which comprises 22% of the brain and is responsible for auditory perception, language comprehension, visual recognition and memories and language comprehension) and occipital lobes (which comprises 18% of the brain and is responsible for processing images from the eyes and linking that to memory ) and further divided into left brain ( responsible for abstract logical and linear analysis and which has about 186,000 more neurons than the right brain) and right brain (responsible for taking a holistic view) joined in the middle by the corpus callosum (a bundle of nerves serving to allow the left brain and the right brain to communicate,an information highway which is thicker in women than in men, thicker in musicians than non-musician and about 1/10th larger in left-handed than in right-handed people) The signals sent to the cerebral cortex helps in keeping the organism stimulated and alert whilst sleeping is taken care of by the reticular formation.

We also need an understanding of the functioning of those chemicals produced by our endocrine system called hormones and the associated neurotransmitters which either activate(e.g. acetylcholine)  or inhibit action ( gama-aminobutyric acid or GABA which controls  muscle, visual system ) and serotonin (which constricts blood vessels and brings on sleep, regulate temperature) and dopamine (which controls moods and complex muscular activity) or activate the inhibitors ( e.g.norepinephrine and  epinephrine  which governs the fight or flight respons, directly increasing heart rate, triggering the release of glucose from our energy stores, and increasing blood flow to our skeletal muscles and norepinephrine can also suppress enuroinflammation when released diffusely in the brain from the locus ceruleus) in complex interacitve feedback loops depending upon the physical contexts in which the relevant hormones find themelves in particular parts of the human body. We also need an understanding of the importance of what has been called the "visual orientation area" of the parietal lobe in helping ourselves in gaining knowledge of where we are in the physical world (spatial orientation) and the unusual firing patterns of neurons at the temporal lobes which may sometimes occur in epileptic patients and also the importance of the amygdala in our decision making process or will power and in thus helping to create a sense of agency or of our "self".

I said that in all mystical traditions, there are two ways of training for attaining a mystical state which both involves being relaxed and falling into a quiescent mind state: the active (eg. by certain rhythmic and repetitive sets of motions, like swinging and swirling as done by the Sufi dervishes, dancing, running ( some marathon runners reporting deep religious feelings during their rhythmic runs), regular deep breathing, even having sex) and the passive (e.g by fasting, then sitting down in some secluded spot to do contemplation or meditation, transcendental or otherwise, by staring at an object e.g a holy picture, a crucifix, reciting repetitive prayer or mantra, undergoing certain rhythmic but slow breathing etc). But whether we reach the goal by passive or active means, certain of the traits of mysticism are readily observable: there is a sense of ineffability (it defies expression into words), a certain noetic quality (in addition to having certain feelings, the mystic also claims to have a kind of more intuitive, direct apprehension or knowledge of reality), transcience( such experiences can rarely be sustained for any period of time) passivity (the mystic may feel that his own will has ceased to exercise any influence on him or that his own will has been seized by another power greater than him and the One is felt not as another but as the reality within which we exist) but Underhill thinks that true mysticism is active and practical and involves a holistic, organic life process implicating the whole of the "self" and not merely something over which the intellect holds an opinion or merely intellectual and that its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual and not just confined to exploring, rearranging or improving anything in the physical world. The One is for the mystic not merely the Reality of all that is, but is also a living and personal Object of Love ( not just an object for exploration) and that union with this One is a definite state or form of an enhanced life.To Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) who wrote the classic, "The Idea of the Holy", coined the term the "numinous" to signify the mystical experience or a sense of the presence much greater than oneself, something Wholly Other, which creates awe( not the same as fear) which we objectify or rationalize in myths, cults and dogma and which lies at the core of all religious experience. But Stace classifies mysticism as either extrovertive (like the experience of being suddenly overwhelmed and inspired by awe at Nature or by music, art or something huge, grand) or introvertive (where the One is found at the bottom of the self or of the human personality and as escaping altogether the limitations of our senses).

I had wanted to talk a little more about how religion might arise to satisfy with the need of the brain for belief. But it was already time because some time has been spent by various members asking questions. The hypno-therapist also said that he was surprised to learn how similar the mystical state was to the state of being hypnotized and the need to be relaxed and the abandonment of the human will and its surrender to something or someone else. Another member surprised me when he commented jokingly that he found me speaking like I were the host in a midnight radio show! This was not the first time someone said something similar. I remember at least two female clients had made this comment when I spoke to them on the telephone. Whatever truth there is in that comment, it was decided that I would continue my talk on the topic which they found interesting but in another session.