Lifting the veil of mystery from Mysticism.2

To E. O. Wilson, an evolutionary socio-biologist, "Religious belief is one one of the universals of human behavior, taking recognizable form in every society from hunter gatherer bands to socialist republics. Its rudiments go back, at least, to the bone altars and funerary rites of Neanderthal man." and thus may serve as evidence that beliefs in some kind or other of being more powerful than man and governing him may be an innate instinct. According to Mircea Eliade, every world culture from the dawn of our species has maintained a dualistic interpretation of reality: the physical (tangible, corporeal, something which can be seen, tasted, smelled, heard or felt, subject to birth, growth, decay and death, subject to constant change, flux and transience) and spiritual (immune to the laws of change, flux, permanent, eternal, indestructible, everlasting but invisible, intangible).

If we do really have an evolutionarily based religious instinct, where is the site of such religious beliefs? To Freud, our primal but hidden or repressed drives or instinct, its personality components, the memories of our early childhood together with all hidden conflicts reside within our personal unconscious.but to Jung, who studied the  myths, fables, legends, mythologies of various cultures,beneath that personal unconscious, there is an even deeper layer of the unconscious which forms the foundation of the personal unconscious: the collective unconscious. He found that the collective unconscious, which expresses itself in what he calls archetypes, common to and identical in and shared by all humanity from the remotest times and which embodies their social and spiritual norms in their rites, customs and moral standards. evidenced in such books as Old and New Testaments, Zaroastrian Avestas, the Norse Eddas, the Icelandic Sagas, Urartian (Armenian) cuneiform, Islamic Koran, the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Celtic Sagas, the Japanese Kojiki (records of ancient masters) and Nihongo (Japanese Chronicles) Babylonian tales, the Ugaritic myths of Palestine and Syria, the Chinese Shan Hoi Ching, the Hindu Rig Veda, Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Theravada Buddhist Vinanatthu, and the myths of Africa, Polynesia, South and Central Americas, the manuscripts of the Medieval Alchemists. 

Man expresses this collective unconscious in their rites, performed at special sites and places of worship eg. Catholic and Protestant churches, Jesish syangogues, Islamic mosques, Buddhist and Taoist temples, Shinto shrine, Babylonian ziggurat , ancient Aztez, Greek or Egyptian temples built specially for offering sacrifices, prayers to invisible gods. Part and parcel of such belief in supernatural, transcendental, spiritual beings and its corollary is our belief that in some way, we too are possessed of a soul and because the supreme being is eternal, we think that if we do certain things, comply with certain rules, our souls too may share in that permanence, that eternity and that immortality. We believe that death is not the end but the beginning of another lease of life in a kind of transformed existence. Hence we bury our dead in special ways and perform special rites to speed them on their way to that other world. At important stages of our lives, we have special rites performed eg. baptism at birth, initiation rites or confirmation upon adolescence, matrimonial rites at weddings, funeral rites upon death. All the socio-historical, anthropological and sociological studies point to the expressed need of all humanity for some form of religion, for some form of worship, dedication and surrender to something higher, bigger, more transcendental which they believe will bring them luck, fortune and may offer them guidance and assistance and may require some form or other of atonement and punishment for our failings. All such practices are predicated upon certain beliefs in the existence of a spiritual realm, some kind of god or God, the human soul and the possibility of a life after death. Why?  Is it possible that our concepts of God, gods, human soul, afterlife etc are merely products not of the implantation of such ideas into our brains by God or of their objective existence but the products of the particular way our brain processes certain information and interpret certain features of our external and internal reality?

However, here we must be careful to distinguish between two different kinds of impulses, one of religiosity and the other of spirituality. The religious impulse may drive us tp participate in certain shared ritualistic behavior such as attending churches, adhering to certain behavioral and moral codes and customs. This serves to provide and reinforce certain common mores, beliefs, values, motivations and thus builds up group unity and promotes social and cultural cohesion and is thus evolutionarily beneficial in that it helps us to stay together as a community and to take advantage of our strength in numbers and the relevant economies of scale and provides an individual with a sense of common purpose. The impulse towards spirituality is one which drives us to achieve an altered state of consciousness, one which evokes feelings of awe, serenity, ecstasy. The two are closely inter-related because certain religions encourage contemplation, chant, prayer and performance of certain rituals to help us along the path of communication with their god or God in such spiritual experience. But it is as likely for someone to be completely religious and yet aspiritual as for another to be highly spiritual without being at all religious.

In the same manner that language is found so universally amongst people of different races and cultures and in different historical periods that scientists posit the existence of a language instinct in man, Alper thinks that we may posit the existence of a religious instinct in mankind because we have found extensive evidence of people of differnet cultural levels at all historical periods engaging in pratices which are not explicable except on the basis of certain beliefs in a supernatural world of spirit, of gods, of soul, of afterlife. In addition, he thinks that in the same way that there exists linguistic or musical aphasia as a result of accidental or disease originated damage to certain parts of our brain, it is possible too that damage to certain parts of our brain may cause loss of the ability of a person to experience himself as a self and of his ability to believe in the presence of a protective spiritual force or entity e.g a priest suffering from Alzheimer may thus lose his ability to be conscious of the presence of God along with the loss of his other sensibilities, his ability to pray or preach the gospel with lucidity. Thus spiritual consciousness may be just as integrally linked to our neuro-physiological makeup as is any of our other cognitive capacities.

Michael Persinger, a Canadain psychologist of Canada and Dr. Arnold Sadwin of the U of Pennsylvannia have found that people with head injuries may change from being extremely religious before the injury to being indfferent to religion after such injury. Dr. Sadwin has also found that as a result of head injury, some people may become hyper-religious. This suggests that "God  doesn't exsit as something 'out there', beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists exclusively within the human brain....that there is no actual spiritual reality, no God or gods, no soul or afterlife" and that such spiritual concepts can be explained as "manifestations of the particular manner that our species has been 'hardwired' to perceive reality. Consequently, human kind can no longer be viewed as a product of God but rather God must be viewed as a product of human cognition.".

Alper thinks that just as Kant suggested that we are born with spatial and temporal modes of perception, two means through which our species is "wired" to perceive reality, spirituality represents yet another one of these inherent modes of perception and that consequently, our spiritual perceptions do not represent any absolute truth but exist solely as a consequence of the manner our species is programmed to interpret reality! If so, our spiritual perceptions and beliefs must originate not from information acquired from external sources via our physical senses but from information generated from within our own brain! In other words, all our spiritual "cognitions, perceptions, sensations and behaviors" must be the manifestations of inherited impulses generated from neural connections in the brain and thereforre not indicative of any actual spiritual reality.

What is surprising is that this spiritual function not only transform our perception of reality, it appears to be able to override our capacity for critical reasoning: though there is no physical evidence to support the existence of any spiritual reality in that we cannot see, feel, taste, smell or touch God or gods or spirits, every culture has believed in their existence! Yet each society will develop its own set of holy people, gods, its own unique religious places, objects, customs, rites, religious language, its own unique mysthologies in accordance with its own peculiar geographical, environmental and historical circumstances and religions are merely the social medium through which our spiritual and religious impulses are given form and expressions.