The God Experiments Options

[Hey Hey]

In a recent discussion with Joesus on a related topic, I mentioned an article originating from the Dawkin's website. I can't remember if it's been discussed specifically on this board, so I've posted it and a URl below. If you've seen it before, please ignore at your leisure.


http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/god-experiments/?page=1
The God Experiments
Five researchers take science where it's never gone before.
by John Horgan


Three years ago, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a guinea pig in an experiment. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger claimed he had induced religious experiences in subjects by stimulating specific regions of their brains with electromagnetic pulses. Dawkins, renowned for his biological theories as well as for his criticism of religion, volunteered to test Persinger's electromagnetic device�the "God machine," as some journalists dubbed it. "I've always been curious to know what it would be like to have a mystical experience," Dawkins said shortly before the experiment. Afterward, he admitted on BBC that he was "very disappointed" that he did not experience "communion with the universe" or some other spiritual sensation.


Neurobiologist Michael Persinger has devised a wired helmet that he says induces religious experiences in those who wear it.

Courtesy of Vivien Hoang, Laurentian University Neuroscience Research Group

Many researchers, like Persinger, view the brain as the key to understanding religion. Others focus on psychological, genetic, and biochemical origins. The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence.
The endeavor is controversial, stretching science to its limits. Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.

"Even when the neural basis of religion has been identified, it remains a plausible interpretation of any conceivable neuropsychological facts that there is a genuine experience of God," notes Fraser Watts, a psychologist and theologian at the University of Cambridge and an Anglican vicar. A major funder of research on religion is the John Templeton Foundation, started in 1987 by the Christian financier John Templeton to promote "collaboration" between science and religion.

The theories described below illustrate the diversity of scientific approaches to understanding religion. All these theories are tentative at best, and some will almost certainly turn out to be wrong. The field suffers from vague terminology, disagreement about what exactly "religion" is, and which of its aspects are most important. Does religion consist primarily of behaviors, such as attending church or following certain moral precepts? Or does it consist of beliefs�in God or in an afterlife? Is religion best studied as a set of experiences, such as the inchoate feelings of connection to the rest of nature that can occur during prayer or meditation? Comparing studies is often an exercise in comparing apples and oranges. Nonetheless, the science merits close attention.

Inventing God

Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York, is in the explain-it-away camp of researchers. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, many with minds and emotions similar to our own, Guthrie argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds.

Anthropomorphism is an adaptive trait that enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival, he adds. If a Neanderthal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for a human assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences beyond a moment's panic. If the Neanderthal made the opposite error�mistaking an assailant for a tree�the consequences might have been dire. In other words, better safe than sorry. Over millennia, as natural selection bolstered our unconscious anthropomorphic tendencies, they reached beyond specific objects and events to encompass all of nature, goes Guthrie's theory, until we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist."



Humans are not alone in this trait. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted that many "higher mammals" share the human propensity "to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences." As an example, he recalled watching his dog growl at a parasol lifted off the ground by a gust of wind.

Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and "oneness." These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes. To test his theory, Newberg has scanned the brains of more than 20 adherents of spiritual practices, including Christian prayer and Tibetan Buddhist meditation. He uses a technique called single- photon-emission-computed tomography, or SPECT, a variant of the better-known positron-emission tomography, PET.

The chief advantage of SPECT is that it can capture the brains of meditators in a relatively natural setting. The subject meditates not in the SPECT chamber itself but in a separate room. When a subject�a Franciscan nun, in one case�feels her ordinary self "dissolving into Christ consciousness," as she describes it, a radioactive fluid is injected into her body through an intravenous tube; the fluid travels to her brain and becomes trapped in nerve cells there. The nun then goes to the SPECT chamber, where a computer-controlled camera scans her brain. The resulting image reveals levels of neural activity in the moment immediately after she received the radioactive fluid, when she presumably was still immersed in contemplation.

[Joesus]

I'd like to hear more about the profound religious visions/experiences that people might have on a regular basis

What defines an experience as religious rather than physiologically and psychologically normal?

Have you ever dropped a single stone into a quiet pond? What happens? Perfectly concentric ripples spread across the water. This is like having one thought only moving through the mind. The mind is coherent, it is orderly, and it is powerful. What happens when you drop several stones, a whole handful into the water? The waves become very choppy. Some troughs end up on tops of crests, many get cancelled out. This is like the mind when it is caught by those continually running internal programs. It just keeps going and going and going and nothing comes of it.

Scientists have actually measured this. Hooking electroencephalographic leads onto the brain, onto the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes of the left and right hemispheres, they find that the measurement of the surface thinking level of the mind looks very much like a chaotic pond: the measurements show many different frequencies in the brain waves, very little coherence.
This kind of chaotic, disordered thinking is the way most adults think, but not everyone. There has been a lot of research about the Peak Experience and what has been found is that the human mind can become completely coherent.
Do you know what Peak Experiences are? The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was a pioneer in studying the positive aspects of human psychology, defined them. He wrote, "These moments were of pure, positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses were left behind.
Now self-consciousness was lost.
All separateness and distance from the world disappeared..."
These experiences are rare, but can come at any unpredictable time and completely transform life. People have adopted whole new belief systems from one single taste beyond the veil of the senses. These experiences have a curative power.
This kind of perfect harmony in brain wave patterns is also found in small infants when they are nursing, in pets when they are being petted and in adults when they are experiencing expansion of consciousness. What is being measured is a mind that is still, a mind that is in the present moment, not caught by regret for the past or worry for the future.
A mind that is working like this is creating a healthy body. Your body is already spewing out millions of chemical reactions every second. When your mind is tense, anxious, nervous, your body responds by producing tense, anxious, nervous molecules like adrenaline and noradrenaline. When your mind is calm and peaceful, your body produces calm and peaceful molecules like Valium. Your body is already producing chemicals similar to any that your friendly neighborhood pharmacist will give you, but without the side effects. When your body produces Valium, it makes you feel tranquil but without also making you feel like a zombie. When your body produces anti-cancer drugs or anti-bacteria drugs, these drugs have no side effects. The body does this absolutely naturally, in the right amount at the right time, ideally suited for the correct target organ, and all the instructions are included in the packaging. Your body does this completely spontaneously for you when it is not stressed.
How do we unstress the body? How do we keep new stresses from accumulating? How do we learn to maintain inner peace and tranquility in the face of the hectic pace of the modern world? How do we learn to stop undermining ourselves with destructive internal programs? How do we learn to expand our minds to our full potential? This is the purpose of spiritual insight and focus.

During the process of meditation these conditions that show up in the brainwave patters during a peak experience can be repeated.
I taught a course in Washington D.C. and one of the participants was a neurologist. When I spoke of the curative powers of the mind when it is orderly he insisted in recreating the experiment in the hospital where he worked.
He hooked another teacher and myself to an EEG and measured brainwave patterns during different phases of the mechanical techniques of meditation. With eyes open the change in brain wave coherency was clearly measurable when the mind begins to move toward stillness in applying the techniques.
Then there was another measurable difference with eyes closed as the mind stilled and the coherence of patterns showed a drop in the section of the mind where thoughts are normally seen as active brain wave patterns of a normal waking person.
Then what was also interesting to him was the section of the brain which becomes active during dreaming and those sections normally noted as being most active during intuitive processing (mostly quiet during intense activity) became more active.
The neurologist did some more experiments with others using the same process of meditation including himself and found similar results.

When the mind is stilled from its activity of thinking random and meaningless thoughts its capacity for expanded awareness is sharpened rather than distracted as it normally is during the stress of the active day.

In Expanded states of awareness a stillness begins to permeate all aspects of perception and experience.
The mind and body become more centered and the objective and subjective experience of life begin to change from being separate from ones self to being connected at subtle levels of thought and intention.

Another interest the neurologist had was the brain wave activity found in long term meditators was more coherent during normal waking states without the mechanical process of meditation than those who did not meditate showing that the process made a permanent impression to the patterns of thinking of the individual who made a regular practice of meditation.

(On Side note which I'm sure will fascinate you HH is that when the neurologist showed my brain scan to his colleague he insisted that my brain functions were evident of some physical damage because it didn't show the normal chaotic activity that he was used to seeing as a baseline for normal people.)

This perpetual coherence is the beginning of spiritual awakening and basis of all spiritual teachings and the offshoots that have become religions due to the ignorance of spiritual sciences and belief in separation from the things in the manifest world.
Religions have become alters to the messengers of human reality rather than educational doorways to the inner potential of the human condition.

There are no human conditions other than those that are self imposed.