Your Brain on Religion

Can the same basic brain circuitry produce Mother Teresa and Osama bin Laden?

At the University of Utah, neuroscientists Julie Kornberg and Jeff Anderson are studying the activity of the human brain during deep religious experience.

"It amazes me how one of the most profound influences on human behavior is virtually completely unstudied," Anderson said. "We think about how much this drives people's behavior, and yet we don't know the first thing about where in the brain that's even registered."

They're currently studying the neurological activity of Mormons during prayer.

"There are plenty who would relish any data that support the idea that God is all in the mind. But Korenberg and Anderson aren't looking for how people come to believe in a supernatural being. They want to know what happens once they do believe.

"I think we're trying to do something much more simple, and that is look at private religious practice," said Korenberg, who is Jewish, was raised in a Catholic neighborhood in Natick, Mass., and sings in a Christian chorale. "I think that what we're expecting to find here is that Mormons aren't really going to be that different from Jews or Muslims."

Spiritual experience, mystical experience, sacred experience, peak experience—all are names for that inner experience of infinity encountered during deep meditation or contemplative prayer. But does that subjective experience by itself necessarily lead to positive action? A basic idea explored in THE ASSASSIN LOTUS is the way in which a zealot's warped religious understanding distorts or misinterprets that profound inner experience, leading to very unholy behavior. 

Liberte'

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” 
~G.K. Chesterton

Roma Yoga

"Withdraw to the untroubled quietude deep within the soul, and refresh yourself."

— Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), Stoic philosopher and Emperor of Rome 

"Marcus Aurelius' Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict..."

Seeing

"Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing...to try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence. And thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition."

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon

An Unformed, Inarticulated Hunger

Rembrandt

"...the spiritual longing that doesn't know how to express itself." 
"...being governed by fear and not love..." 
"...to sacrifice to others, to be obedient to a transcendent truth." 

There are several themes in NY TIMES columnist David Brook's address to the Christian philanthropic group, The Gathering, that seem to echo directly themes explored in The Assassin Lotus. For readers who've enjoyed the novel--particularly fellow Christian readers--I urge you to find half an hour in the next few days to read the transcript or hear the podcast of Brook's fine talk HERE.

"Everyone is born with that moral imagination. The heart flies upward, even if you don’t know the categories, even if you’ve never been to church, you’ve never read the Bible, and you don’t exactly know the forms of it. You feel the hunger. And so to me, that is what is out there in the secular culture. An unformed, inarticulated hunger. And so when I turn to the topic of what, how do you be religious in the public sector…in the public world, the question then turns into, “How does the Christian world engage the secular world?”"

The Lost Kingdom of Innocence

In his deeply-researched and enlightening book, The Way to Shambhala, Edwin Bernbaum examines at length the meaning of the mythical Tibetan kingdom known in the West as Shangri-La. His keen insights were an inspiration to me in writing The Assassin Lotus. 

"Myths of hidden places like Shambhala help to remind us, if only subconsciously, that there is much more to the world than we imagine. We need such a reminder to counteract the tendency of the surface consciousness to cut us off from immediate experience and lock us up in the illusions of the ego.

 

"Rather than being just a form of escape, our interest in Shambhala actually reflects a deep longing to experience reality itself. We might say that the kingdom represents the place in each of our lives where we make contact with the world in which we really live.

"...When this awareness appears. it brings back the forgotten memories of childhood experience. It reminds us of a time when we did not know what the world was like, when everything seemed as unknown and mysterious as Shambhala. At that age, we had no preconceptions to cover up and dull our perceptions. Rather than fitting things into fixed ideas of how they should be, we experienced them directly, with all the sense of awe and wonder they inspired. As a result, the world around us had the fresh and magical quality of a hidden kingdom.

"...In taking the inner journey to Shambhala, we strive to regain this direct awareness of a child with all its sense of wonder and awe. But we cannot do so by retreating into the past and attempting to become children again. We have lost the innocence to experience the world directly. [...] Only by becoming aware of our illusions and how we cling to them can we free ourselves from their power and awaken a fresh and direct awareness of the world around us. Rather than go back, we have to go forward to a new and wiser innocence--one that combines the wonder of a child with the wisdom of a sage."  

East Meets West

In her piece for The Spectator, "The Cult of Mindfulness," Melanie McDonagh makes a number of assertions I don't necessarily agree with, e.g., that mindfulness is a form of selfishness, that it's "Mostly About Me," and that "it's non-doctrinal, non-prescriptive, non-demanding in terms of conduct apart from an insistence on not being judgmental." Her criticisms are apparently based on a week's worth of superficial experience. There are many different kinds of mindfulness and meditation practice, but a primary purpose in all of them is to first become aware and begin to make peace with one's own self before trying to change others and bring peace into the world. To borrow from Matthew, "First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." 

I do, however, largely agree with another point she makes: 

"Taking an established religion--Buddhism in this case--and picking bits from it piecemeal can be a more dangerous business than it might seem. However much people may dislike the idea, the major world religions have developed incrementally over time to be a comfort and support for humans in their quest for meaning. Even the seemingly eccentric bits can serve a vital purpose, hidden from non-believers. One rejects 'the boring bits' of an established religion at one's own peril."

Religious leaders have been critical of foreign meditation practices, which they often see as intruding on their sacred, doctrinal turf. But I have also noticed an hostility toward organized religion from those who proudly proclaim themselves "spiritual but not religious." This mutual animosity is unnecessary and to my mind counterproductive. I think yoga, mindfulness, and meditation practice are flourishing in the West because they attempt to bring back the mystical experience that lies at the root of religion and has partially been lost or forgotten. That ineffable experience has been described as the inner experience of the divine, what the Bible calls "the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding." All the major religions have some form of this mystical tradition, including Christianity, but for many it has been reduced to little more than supplicatory prayer. It seems to me the inner experience is at least as important--and perhaps a necessary antecedent--to the communal experience of churchgoing, the development of virtue, and the doing of good works. One does not preclude the other; rather, they reinforce each other. As the Hindus say, "nirvana is in samsara." The inner life and the outer life entwine and grow together. As East meets West, it may be there is simply a re-balancing going on. A replenishing of the root.