Since the rise of neuroscience, various studies have sought the connection, if any, between the brain and spiritual experience. Sometimes the news headline reads “God spot found in brain”, and sometimes “Whoops, no God spot”. Sometimes it is located in right hemisphere, sometimes the left, sometimes nowhere in particular. The conclusion seems to be that studies are inconclusive and that we need more studies.

And now another disclaimer. Among the many things that I am not, I am not a neuroscientist and have no pretensions about even understanding their language. However, every so often a new study is intriguing and calls for a second look. With that word of caution, an article in Quartz, an online news web site, from May of this year reported the following.

Utilizing fMRI technology, seven scientists from Columbia and Yale (published in Cerebral Cortex, May 29, 2018) have located in the brain the region where spiritual experience is registered.

“Spiritual experience” is defined as human experience in which one feels a sense of wholeness, of being at one with the “other”, a sense of the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, and a sense of union with something larger than oneself. Although they don’t argue that everyone has such experience, they are arguing that for those people who do, there is a place in the brain that registers these experiences, and that this place is the same for all.

The subjects chosen for the study had had spiritual experiences that, although they included religious ceremony, also went beyond religion, and included such triggers as walks in the woods, watching sports events, playing sports, sudden realizations, meditation, etc. The researchers recognized the fact that the triggers of the spiritual experiences were highly individualistic and included a great variety of personal events. Having identified the trigger for an individual, the researchers used guided imagery to help the participant recreate a spiritual experience while they were undergoing an fMRI.

The discovery was that every spiritual experience, regardless of the source, had the same effect on the brain, and the essence of this effect was reduced activity in the left inferior parietal lobe. Reduced activity in this lobe helps overcome the boundaries between the self and the other, and thereby mitigates the effects of being centered around the boundaries of oneself.

So, if I read this article accurately: 1. “spiritual” experience comes in a variety of forms, religious and non-religious, 2. it always diminishes the role of the same lobe in the brain, and 3 this is a lobe that focuses on the self.

One of the reasons that I found this study so interesting is that these findings relate directly to concepts that I have described in various articles, and also in my book, The Void and the Vision. These concepts are moments, worlds, the void, and community.

Moments. The spiritual experiences described by the researchers are what I have called moments. We all experience those brief and passing times when we are one with our environment. There is no reflection or analysis, only the direct experience of being totally caught up in what is happening, of being in the zone. The study shows that there is no distinction between religious and non-religious spiritual experience. It also shows that there is a type of experience that can be labelled spiritual, that everyone is capable of having such experience, and that these moments are unique to the individual.

Worlds. This same brain that experiences the moment has also created a view of reality unique to itself. Except for the moments, this brain is egocentric. It has fabricated a world that does not fully correspond to reality. There is a great deal of evidence that shows just how much our brain utilizes sensory input to create the world we believe we experience. In the moment, this world is temporarily dismantled and one is now experiencing a reality that transcends our private world. According to this study, the left inferior parietal lobe is the place in the brain where egocentrism is suspended in the moment of spiritual experience, and we feel at one with all. Without this suspension of the brain’s power to create reality, a person is locked into their own little world and divorced from reality.

Void. By definition, the sense of wholeness and connection is missing apart from these transcendental states. We feel something is missing, and it is. The sense of wholeness is missing. Our brain has created a view of reality that is significantly inaccurate and distorted, and time between the moments is time in the void, unless and until that time is encompassed in community.

Community. We need community to overcome our sense of the void, and in this task community performs two functions. First, people help keep our moments honest. If a person has a spiritual experience, the interpretation of it can be commandeered by the ego and a person can be led to wrong conclusions enveloped in a dangerous mantle of self-importance and self-delusion. It happens all the time. There must be critique, and there must be openness to hearing the voice of others.

Second, there is that time to fill between moments, and belonging to a community provides that continuity. The present is nourished by memory of the past and the anticipation of being together in the future.

There is a danger, of course. Just as an individual can succumb to egocentrism, so also can a community become demonic, self-centered and self-serving. The key here is that no community, just as no individual, should ever assume that its view is the only valid view. There must be a community of communities, if you will, wherein each is kept honest by the others.

The conjoining of scientific and theological concepts both opens and requires new perspective. Gone are the days when we thought that spiritual experience had to be of a religious nature. We now see that there is no biological distinction between a “god experience” and a “secular experience”, provided that they both take us out of self-created reality and lead into new awareness of our oneness with the other.

Gone also are the days when we thought we had to choose between a human nature that was good and one that was bad. The terms good and bad, or sinful and saved, are not helpful, especially given the long and painful history associated with these words. Each individual human brain creates its own reality and automatically assumes that others either see the world the same way, or ought to. This egocentrism is well documented. And now we understand also that all that work of the brain is suspended in certain moments, when our self-centeredness becomes immobilized in the experience of transcendence.

Gone also are the days when we had to choose whether the will was free or not. Will is a process, not a possession, a process that moves between bondage in our self-created world and freedom in the moment. The question thus becomes, not whether an individual has the power within to change for the better, but whether an individual is open to moments that are initiated in encounter with the other. We are not self-contained. We require an other to activate the liberated dimensions of our humanity.

More and more, it seems, new discoveries reveal over and over again, that there exists a commonality shared by all. One dimension of this oneness apparently is that we all have, or can have, spiritual experiences that can be pinpointed in the brain. A corollary is that without these experiences and a community that supports them (this community need not be religious), we are blind to our own blindness.

We need not to reject science, but to embrace it, learn from it, and also to share with it that which lies beyond its scope.