Neural Buddhists

[Lightkeeper]

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The Neural Buddhists
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By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 13, 2008
In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.

To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and “the soul is dead.” He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html

Are science and mysticism joining hands and reinforcing each other. Will theology disappear or will the stories continue to be pointers?

[Travis Clementsmith]

Originally Posted by Lightkeeper

Are science and mysticism joining hands and reinforcing each other. Will theology disappear or will the stories continue to be pointers?

Well, I've been saying for quite some time, arguing against literalist/mythical conceptions of "God" is an easy argument, but that the concepts really associated with mystical insight are the areas that need to be studied, and it is the fact that both atheists and traditional theists love the mythical expression, is the only real reason there is a perceived "conflict" at all.

That said, I've always thought of mysticism as a type of science, not a separate discipline. Science is a method which can be applied to different categories (i.e., empirical, psychological, contemplative), but, unfortunately, is too often thought of as "materialism", and any science that is not materialist is not science. Where does theology fit in? I'd place that study between psychology and mysticism, in much the same manner I would place biology between physics and psychology. Meaning, theology is the study of the relationship between the temporal and the eternal, whereas mysticism is the direct experience of the eternal. So as long as we attempt to explain the contemplative realm, we have a theology of some type. This is different from unmediated experience of mysticism.

I'm reading a book titled, The Spiritual Brain. Its co-authored by a PhD neuroscientist who describes himself as a "nonmaterialist". Its a bit too one sided for my tastes (I'm an integralist), but offers some compelling counter arguments to the materialist claims of "god switches, god regions, god helmets, and so on and so forth". I'll comment more on that when I have finished it.

-TC

[Lightkeeper]

If Joseph Campbell was correct is saying myths are created by the interactions and confilicts of our organs and glands, then maybe the bottom line of spirituality is going with and surrendering to the changes, balances and imbalances in our bodies. Maybe surrendering to these things allows transcendence. Maybe in contemplating tee myths we learn to surrender to these inner changes, imbalances, conflicts, etc.

[Travis Clementsmith]

I think its more of an occasion where we learn to limit one type of sensory information to focus on another and then enhance the ability to do so with practice. Like if you had the TV, the stereo, the air conditioner, a ceiling fan, and kids playing all in the same room. Chances are, you can't here the motor of the ceiling fan, but if you got rid of the other sensory items, you could pick it out quite clearly. I think that is why focus s so important in mystical practices, by focusing on an image, a sound (or lack thereof), a mantra, and so forth, it effectively limits all the other sensory distractors. Once you understand what you are looking for, then you develop tools to find it more quickly, which has the correlation of the brain "reconnecting itself" to facilitate the desired outcome in a more expeditious manner.

-TC