TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Jeff Davis

“Woodstock is where the consciousness revolution began, man,” Michael, the lanky guy next to me, said to the group, “and I was right here when it happened in 1969.” The actor’s voice, along with the two lavender plumes tucked in his headband, quivered as he spoke

Twenty-six writers and artists had packed into a small bookstore’s “sacred space” for a workshop. Lloyd, the middle-aged contractor who sat arms folded on my other side, shook his head and rolled his eyes as Michael spoke.

“I’m of the school that we’ll be judged in the end,” Lloyd said, “not for our groovy visions but for our good acts. What good are all of these visions if we’re not doing something to help others?”

Although the workshop description promised we’d explore how to communicate transpersonal experiences in stories and paintings, the workshop leader forfeited trying to espouse any wisdom for writers and artists and instead opted to let a dialogue unfold.

The dialogue made me, gray-haired and bespectacled, wonder where I sit — between Michael, the zealous optimist of all-things visionary, and Lloyd, the practical skeptic who sees promise in taking action to help the poor and destitute. Where do the Michaels and Lloyds converge?

There’s a growing number of us — in our 20s to 50s and even older — who recognize the value of such extraordinary experiences, not just for ourselves, but also for our families, our communities, the planet. Call us the transpersonal poly-generation. Forewarned by the ’60s’ dangers of visionaries’ self-delusion and self-indulgence, we sense, I think, that mysticism doesn’t have to be something “other,” outside of our everyday waking experience or apart from social activism.

Is there room for a respectable, dare I say, middle-aged and mainstream mysticism or spirituality that is integrative, that includes the ecstatic as well as the everyday, that includes beatific vision and progressive action? If so, what holds back some of the Lloyds among us from understanding and embracing such a way?

Poets and mystics from St. Francis to Blake describe those moments when, if for three-and-a-half seconds or four hours, the ego self vanishes and physical boundaries seem to dissolve, allowing for a glimpse into something more, something grander. Unity with all that is. Call it Godhead. Jack Kerouac’s It. Higher Self. Wakan-Tanka.

Whatever you name it, two-thirds of Americans in 1993 claimed to have had at least one such experience. That, according to The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s national survey.

Two-thirds? 66 percent is a marked jump from the consistent 40-55 percent reported by Gallup polls since the 1960s. Dr. Jeff Levin, who writes about faith’s role in physical healing, suggests that with every generation, we Americans become increasingly more interested in such matters.

In 1902, William James rallied for his fellow psychologists to take seriously what he called “religious experiences.” Thanks to Abraham Maslow’s later humanistic focus on “peak experiences” and Stanislav Grof’s founding of transpersonal psychology, by the 1960s, kissing God or death merited study as much as, say, dreams about cigars in Fidel Castro’s mouth or obsessively cleaning the kitchen sink.

In 2007, college students now can become transpersonal psychologists who study subjective experiences, biogenetic structuralists who examine how genetics and environment shape altered states of consciousness, or transpersonal anthropologists who explore the ways in which cultural signs and norms influence our mystical flashes. They can even join the new wave of “neurotheologists” who try to find the “God spot” in the brain.

Yet many of us — whether inside or outside that “two-thirds” statistic — either don’t value such experiences or may not recognize how mystical our lives might already be. Part of the hang-up may lie in how we define “transpersonal” and “mystical” experiences.

This ecstatic otherworld tenor may be part of mysticism’s bad rap. Those vision-seekers lured by nirvana’s song can grow attached to the ecstasy and suffer miserably otherwise as the rest of life just doesn’t measure up. We can become spiritually arrogant, imagining we have a high priest’s access to the spirit world among minions. Practical skeptics such as Lloyd, then, might think that transpersonal experiences are reserved for raving poets, beachside ravers and privileged gray-haired adolescents chasing after glimpses of God on the peaks of Tibet. Mystics drop out of society, we may think, and skeptics check out of mysticism.

“Ecstasy” means to “step out of what is.” Hence, one common definition of a transpersonal experience is one in which you feel “out” of yourself, “out” of the world, “out” of conventional time and space. But there’s more to mysticism than ecstasis. Gary Snyder’s poem “What a Poet Needs” suggests we need “the wild freedom of the dance extasy” and the “silent solitary illumination enstasy.” Enstasy moves us deep within the subtle body instead of out of it. What a poet needs, perhaps, so too an active visionary.

Labels similarly limit our perception. Psychologist Rhea White suggests that since we in Western culture typically view these experiences as “anomalous” or “non-ordinary,” then many of us won’t take them seriously in our daily lives. Instead White refers to them as “exceptional human experiences,” in order not to marginalize them.

Maybe these tastes of deep connection are simply another variety of potentially ordinary experiences. Transpersonal might refer to, then, not moving out of one’s self but rather expanding one’s sense of self.

Bliss is not exclusive. According to transpersonal psychologist William Braud, repeated and consistent evidence bears out that these experiences cut across class, race, as well as religious beliefs and practices.

Perhaps a sustainable mysticism or spirituality of visionary be-ers and doers is integrative and inclusive. Some of us may continue to seek peak experience after peak experience, while others may cultivate a continuous, integrated feeling of joy, well-being and connectedness, what Abraham Maslow described as a “plateau experience.”

A transpersonal life might focus less on getting “out” of one’s self and perhaps more on expanding one’s sense of self. Encounters with those we regard as others — the disgruntled neighbor with opposing political views, the manager of Office Depot, or your lover — become opportunities for connection. We might find ways to connect with food, with plants, with animals.

I think of the poet Lucille Clifton, who while cutting collards and kale in her kitchen, suddenly and unexpectedly tastes in her “natural appetite/the bond of live things everywhere.” I think of autistic author Temple Grandin’s heightened sensory perceptions that allow her to feel what cows and sheep feel.

A transpersonal life might consist of translating visions into action. Huichol shaman and author of Plant Spirit Medicine Elliot Cowan hears how plants vibrate and sing, and he communicates with their spirits; his experiences have helped uncover ancient ways to heal people’s maladies.

Grandin’s intuitive experiences with farm animals led her to design special handling facilities enjoyed now by a third of U.S. cattle. Long-time business consultant Gay Hendricks suggests that many CEOs are “corporate mystics” who approach business solutions with states of consciousness radically different from the consciousness that created the problems.

Aware of what ails the planet — from suffering local economies to dying bees and frogs to strained human relationships — these transpersonal visionaries, I suspect, hunger to tune in, turn on, and drop deeply, actively, consciously in.

Living this way, as with any practice, is not easy. There are no 7 steps or 9 principles that will guarantee that this transpersonal momentum will continue or manifest into any kind of quantum global awakening by 2012 — or 2112.

After all, of the 79 percent (256 participants) in one study who said they had had a peak experience, half of them said they had been reluctant to tell anyone. The reason? Fear (of course) muted these daily mystics, according to the study published in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1991. These days, discussing such experiences may not get us branded as an exiled heretic, as happened to 18th-century scientist-turned-prophetic mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But you might be safer, after all, to bore your friends with your weirdest dream than to divulge that you actually saw Joan of Arc this morning on your subway commute.

The Woodstock group at times did feel like a “Mystics Anonymous Meeting.” Hi, I’m Ivan. I’ve been talking with spirits for thirty years in my bathroom. On the other hand, I felt at home in this room of odd ducks who talked about everything from embodying Christ in the Garden of Gethsamene to seeing angels in tall grasses.

We conversed. And to “converse,” after all, suggests a “turning with.” One turns with the other. Although conversation likely once referred to a monastic mode of life devoted to conversations with God, out of the monastery our daily conversations can let us hear how “all that is” speaks through strangers and lovers. “The yogi’s everyday speech becomes a mantra,” so claims a passage from the Shiva-Sutras, a text that describes ways to be with all that is.

To further our journey toward a life that couples vision and progressive action, some of us can practice hearing the languages of pizza twirlers and grandfathers, of stones and sidewalks, and letting these multiple tongues enfold into us, and us into them.

“Voices. Voices,” Rilke writes, “Listen, my heart, as only/saints have listened” (trans. Stephen Mitchell). The wandering poet spent a lifetime trying to do so. Maybe some active visionaries have a head start.

Jeff Davis, author of The Journey from the Center to the Page (Penguin), teaches the discipline of yoga with writing around the U.S. He is converting his farmhouse and barn near Woodstock, NY, into a simple place where active visionaries can gather.

Labels: Americans, bliss, God gene, Jeff Davis, mystical experience, neurotheology, skeptic, spirituality, Temple Grandin, transpersonal, visionary, Woodstock

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

Spirit Tech

How to wire your brain for religious ecstasy.
By John Horgan

Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 7:19 AM ET

Eight years ago, I flew to Laurentian University in Midwestern Canada to test a gadget that some journalists called the "God machine." The device consisted of computer-controlled solenoids that fit over the skull and stimulate the brain with electromagnetic pulses. Its inventor, neuroscientist Michael Persinger, claimed that it could induce mystical experiences, including, as Wired magazine put it, visions of "Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit."

Persinger is one of the more colorful characters in the fast-growing, flakey field of neurotheology, which studies what is arguably the most complex manifestation—spirituality—of the most complex phenomenon—the human brain—known to science. Given that brain researchers have no idea how I conceived and typed this sentence, I doubt they will ever account for religious experiences in all their vast diversity and subtlety. Nor will they solve the riddle of whether God actually exists or is a figment of our evolved imaginations, like unicorns or superstrings. Neurotheology may nonetheless have a profound social impact, by yielding more potent, reliable methods of inducing spiritual experiences.

Surveys suggest that only about one in three people has ever had a mystical experience, defined by one poll as the sensation of "a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself."

Humans have long sought such experiences through meditation, yoga, prayer, guru-worship, fasting, and flagellation, but these methods are unreliable, notes James Austin, author of Zen and the Brain, one of the best books on neurotheology. Austin hopes that neurotheology will eventually yield much more potent, precise methods of inducing transcendent experiences, from fleeting feelings of connectedness all the way up to "the full moon of enlightenment."

Persinger's God machine may not have done much for me, but here's a brief status report on four mystical technologies with potential:

Mystical Brain Chips

In the 1950s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, while preparing epileptic patients for surgery, stimulated their exposed brains with electrodes. Some patients heard voices or music and saw apparitions when their temporal lobes were stimulated. Upon learning about Penfield's experiments, Aldous Huxley wrote: "Is there, one wonders, some area in the brain from which the probing electrode could elicit Blake's Cherubim?"

One still wonders. A Swiss team recently induced out-of-body experiences in an epileptic patient about to undergo surgery by stimulating her right angular gyrus, which underpins spatial awareness. Other groups have shown that implanted electrodes can trigger euphoria, and in fact they are now being tested as treatments for severe depression (as well as paralysis, tremors, and epilepsy). In principle, implants would provide the most precise, powerful means of inducing religious ecstasy. Indeed, self-described "Wireheads" look forward to the day when these devices will vanquish mental suffering and deliver ecstasy on demand. But for now, this technology—which requires inserting wires into the brain through holes drilled in the skull—remains too risky for all but the most desperate patients.

Magic Wands

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is noninvasive and hence safer and easier to test than implants. Researchers have reported success in treating depression and other disorders with this method, which often employs electromagnetic "wands" as well as headsets. Persinger insists that TMS, properly used, can also induce intense mystical experiences.

A group at Uppsala University has tried and failed to replicate Persinger's results in a controlled, double-blind experiment. Todd Murphy, a neuroscientist who has worked with Persinger, is nonetheless marketing a version of the God machine called the "Shakti" (a Hindu term for divinity), which according to Murphy's Web site "uses magnetic fields to create altered states."

Tweaking the God Gene

The work of Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, raises the prospect of genetically engineered mystics. Hamer claims to have found a gene associated with "self-transcendence" or "spirituality" in a group of 1,000 subjects who filled out surveys that probed their beliefs in God, ESP, and so on. Hamer calls this gene "the spiritual allele" or, even more dramatically, the "God gene"—which is also the title of the popular book in which he describes his research. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, has called Hamer's claim "wildly overstated."

Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, suggests focusing on genes associated with dimethyltryptamine, the only psychedelic known to occur naturally in the human brain. In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman presents evidence that endogenous DMT underpins mystical visions, psychotic hallucinations, alien-abduction experiences, near-death experiences, and other exotic cognitive phenomena.

Our natural mystical capacity, Strassman speculates, might be enhanced with genetic modifications that boost the production of DMT or of the enzymes that catalyze its effects. A clever, unscrupulous geneticist might even transform us all into mystics without our consent. "I can envision a situation where a cold virus is tinkered with to turn on our methylating enzymes," Strassman says, "spreads around the world in a couple of years, and there you have it."

Good Old Psychedelics

Psychedelic (or entheogenic, literally God-containing) compounds such as LSD and psilocybin represent by far the most mature mystical technology available. Legal research into the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of psychedelics collapsed in the late 1960s after the drugs were outlawed but is now undergoing a renaissance.

Reseachers at UCLA, the University of Arizona, Harvard, and other institutions are treating post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety with psilocybin and MDMA (aka Ecstasy). Last year, a team at Johns Hopkins University reported that psilocybin had triggered profound spiritual experiences in two-thirds of a group of 36 subjects. "Psilocybin, the active ingredient of 'magic mushrooms,' expands the mind," the Washington Post noted drily. "After a thousand years of use, that's now scientifically official."

Independent chemist Alexander Shulgin has identified more than 200 psychotropic compounds that have potential as therapeutic and spiritual catalysts.

Our current mystical technologies are primitive, but one day, neurotheologians may find a technology that gives us permanent, blissful self-transcendence with no side effects. Should we really welcome such a development? Recall that in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA funded research on psychedelics because of their potential as brainwashing agents and truth serums.

Even setting aside the issue of control, mystical technologies raise troubling philosophical issues. Shulgin, the psychedelic chemist, once wrote that a perfect mystical technology would bring about "the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of the human experiment." When I asked Shulgin to elaborate, he said that if we achieve permanent mystical bliss, there would be "no motivation, no urge to change anything, no creativity." Both science and religion aim to eliminate suffering. But if a mystical technology makes us immune to anxiety, grief, and heartache, are we still fully human? Have we gained something or lost something? In short, would a truly effective mystical technology—a God machine that works—save us, or doom us?

Labels: brain, dimethyltryptamine, ecstasy, God, God gene, magnetism, mystical experience, neurotheology, psychedelics, spirituality, transcranial magnetic stimulation