Holy Experiences of God
"It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and the world of thought. He [the experiencer] looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single, significant whole" - Albert Einstein
Like millions of people around the world, I have had many “spiritual” experiences of God while I was a Christian. I have had the experience of just knowing that Jesus is right beside me in times of great trials. I have heard that still, small voice advising me about matters spiritual. I've had dreams that were convincingly real, featuring dead relatives, explaining convincingly that the spiritual path I was on was the right one, and to stay with it. I have had all the experiences that often convince people to change their lives, to take up spiritual paths, and that often change their very personalities. I have had life-changing spiritual experiences.
Then why, you ask, am I not a believer any more and why have I turned my back on Christianity and religion? I should be a deeply religious person, with an abiding conviction in the reality of the unseen, the infinity of God, and the spiritual unity of man with the universe. Nevertheless, as Einstein was not, I am not either.
I am not because I am also a rationalist. I believe in following the lines of reason and logic as a more sure way of coming to the truth than following an emotional reaction to an experience. Let us have a look at one of the reasons I have for not being a believer.
Origins
God is a result of Human desire, Human needs and Human projection and that these explain even the personal experience of God more rationally than the conclusion that God really exists.
What is interesting to realise is that NOT only Christian’s experience God’s presence and the assurance of his love for you, or the guidance you receive at times. In every religion this occurs. Christians is just arrogant enough to think that they are the only ones who truly experience God. Moreover, that the other religions are experiencing the devil, disguised as their God. The truth of the matter is that “spiritual” experiences happen in all religions around the world in a variety of ways.
The experience of the 'infinite sublimity' as Einstein described it, is an old one. Rock paintings in Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas show clearly that the shamanic experience of the mystical goes back to the earliest times in human history. Moreover, the experience of the mystical is a common one. Millions of people can describe spiritual or 'out-of-body' experiences, many more can describe 'near death' experiences. Many more can talk about how, in a blinding flash of an all-consuming experience, they have felt, even seen the presence of Jesus, the Virgin Mary or of any other particular religious personality. They talk about how, in minutes, hours, or even days, they had experiences that convinced them that God is real. That Jesus or whoever else is real and that there is no question but what there is a guiding presence in their lives. With all that testimony, the testimony of millions, how could science doubt the reality of the experience?
The Parent figure and Abstract Love
“We know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual's idea of God.” - Sigmund Freud
Parent figures experienced by children, those under the age of four, is quite different from how they experience them once they develop empathy. When they start realizing that their parents do not know everything, that they can hide things from their parents, and that their parents can hide things from each other, then the father becomes 'something lesser' than what he was before. Parents, before this stage, are considered omniscient and omnipotent by children. The child feels and acts as if the parent figures can do anything, solve any problem, know the child's own thoughts and know what the child is doing. After doing something that the child thinks will elicit a response from the parents, a child will expect his parents to act, punish and reward the child even if the parents were not actually present. This is the feeling of being continually and completely watched by an omniscient and ever present parent figures. This parent figure fades, in real life, when the child learns the reality of how its parents are limited, like the child itself, but the memory of this uber-parent remains. Moreover, the want and wish for such an uber-parent to exist remains in the subconscious memory of the child as they mature.
It is possible to create an abstract personality, based on abstract thought processes, like politics and religion, but based around a concept or idea. Frequently, the conclusion we feel when we do this is that we are looking at God himself.
Our need for unconditional love, our abstract philosophical minds and the way our very emotions and world view are led by our abstract representations of what we think is real can conspire to create in our minds an abstract source of love. Something we want and need since youth, and something that can frequently be lacking. The all-loving abstract God, the all-knowing and all-powerful being that we create in our minds matches all of those abstract ideas we attribute with our parents while young.
Love is the strongest emotion. Our will to love others, care for them and form long term relationships with them is evolutions biggest tool in the game of securing valid offspring. The longer the dependency of the child on the parent, the more advantageous it is for that species to feel love not only from parent to child, but from parent to parent.
Abstract thought allows us to take things to extremes. We can feel love for people who we have never seen based on their personality and communication alone. The communication medium is irrelevant. Due to our increasing capacity for empathy, we feel that others love us in return and feel we are in touch with their emotions. This is based on the feelings we have towards them, based on our own abstract thought and these are all in turn all based on our assumptions on the relationship between what is real and what is abstract.
Loving
A parental figure that gives us pure love, that we yearn for; when we were looked after and unconditionally loved... that figure is sometimes not there in our lives, or in most people's lives, that figure quickly fades away leaving only a memory. Searching for it, we can find such a figure in philosophy. Abstract thought and ideas lead us to believe, through projection, that an all-loving over-looker is there for us.
All-Knowing
Abstract thoughts bring with it the most essential element of doubt. Where we learn not to assume we know everything and that we can always learn more. We want to learn everything, to get everything right. Moreover, we presume that this is possible. We are aiming and striving to be like an omniscient being that we can only imagine exists. However... our imagination can quietly be abstracted into things we think are real.
Combined with our need for unconditional love, even in an abstract sense, an Ultimate can form in our minds. Something we want, yearn for and desire with all our emotion. Through our amazing capacity for love and empathy, both driven by our ability to think abstractly, we are able to feel such a being is there for us.
Our very emotions and feelings, our determination and emotional well-being are based on our ability to associate emotions with abstract thought. Our emotions and feelings can become associated with abstract symbols of love that do not necessarily represent something that really exists. God can become a requirement in our hearts and minds, whether or not it exists.
This, it seems, is the most natural course of behaviour for species whose emotions are caught up with abstraction. For a species where love, controlling our emotions and minds, can be associated with symbols and ideas we are capable of putting our emotional stability on a concept, an idea.
The Ego
Our ego makes us want to feel special, wanted, watched and observed. We want to be punished when we do wrong, because we like to feel that our actions count. God provides an imaginary fulfilment of the role required by our ego; the position of a being that ratifies our importance in the world. The less important we feel ourselves to be, the more this God can assert itself. In angst and powerlessness, people find comfort in a personal "realisation" that actually everything is ok, they are not worthless, because God cares for them. Our ego can only suffer so much, through societal guilt or insecurity, before we make ourselves feel important no matter the reality of the situation. People turn to God, into a hole created in our emotional brains by our ego wanting to fill us with self-importance.
The search is on
For many scientists, the whole question of the "God experience" was a matter they did not want to undertake, not because they feared the outcome, but because they feared the difficulty of undertaking the research. With a reductionism view, trying to explain an experience that was not reproducible in the laboratory made the whole investigation of the spiritual experience to be one that was far too difficult to research, and one that was unlikely to be reproducible to the extent that research could be published and verified. In recent years, all that has changed.
Interest in the science of the mystical experience began with the observation that many of the aspects of mystical experiences are a constant part of the everyday experience of the world by persons with certain brain dysfunctions.
Author Jack Hitte reported that: "In his controversial 1976 book, 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,' Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, argued that the brain activity of ancient people, those living roughly 3,500 years ago, prior to early evidence of consciousness such as logic, reason, and ethics, would have resembled that of modern schizophrenics. Jaynes maintained that, like schizophrenics, the ancients heard voices, summoned up visions, and lacked the sense of metaphor and individual identity that characterizes a more advanced mind. He said that some of these ancestral synaptic leftovers are buried deep in the modern brain, which would explain many of our present-day sensations of God or spirituality."
Author Curtis Peters explains the dynamics by which a brain might create a God experience: "There are two temporal lobes in the brain, one on each side. They are in constant communication with each other. The lobe on the right controls our sense of self. When communication between the lobes is interrupted, during an epileptic seizure for example, the result is a separate sense of self on the right side, to that of the left. Because of this, there is a sense of presence. The feeling is usually undeniable and unexplainable."
» Gregory Holmes, a paediatric neurologist at Dartmouth Medical School, has noted that Ellen White suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. She was the principal founder of the Seventh-day Adventist religious movement, and was viewed as divinely inspired because of her religious visions.
Author Scott Bidstrup writes: "those persons when the foci are destroyed surgically, the seizures and the mystical experiences associated with them, go away. It was also observed that persons whose parietal superior lobes were damaged or destroyed, suffer an agonizing disability, in that they experience great difficulty in distinguishing between themselves and the rest of the world. This condition makes it difficult, for example, for the patient to walk, because he's unsure of where the floor ends and his foot begins, or even to sit down, because he doesn't know where his body ends and the chair begins. This is not unlike the mystical experience that is reported by deep mediators, of being 'at one' with the universe. For these patients, being 'at one' with the universe is such a constant experience, performing tasks that require the simple differentiation between 'self' and 'world' become extraordinarily difficult."
Dr. Michael Persinger, working at Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has wondered whether religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences had a natural rather than a supernatural source. He speculates that we are somehow programmed so that they can generate religious experiences via our brain's internal processes. He had noted that there were many points of similarity between seizures experienced by some individuals who suffered from epilepsy, and the types of mental and spiritual experiences that St. Paul, Moses, and many religious mystics had reported. Persinger wondered if visions, a sense of the immediate presence of God, and other mystical experiences could be artificially created in the laboratory by magnetically inducing changes in the temporal lobes of a person's brain. He notes that "The deep structures of the temporal lobe are electrically unstable and sensitive to all sorts of things, including the biochemistry of stress, psychological distress, insufficient oxygen, and fasting. That could explain why, when mystics go through self-induced stressful rituals and yogis go to high mountaintops and fast, they report transcendental events." The use of fasting to induce mystical experiences is found in many spiritual disciplines throughout the world, in Native American religion, Shamanism, Christianity, etc.
Author Jack Hitte describes Persinger's theory as follows: "'having a religious experience' is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a 'sensed presence.' "
Without drugs, herbs, hypnosis or invasive surgery, Persinger can quite literally flip a switch and induce the experience of "God." Using an ordinary striped yellow motorcycle helmet purchased at a sporting goods store, which he has modified with electromagnetic coils, he place the helmet on your head. Then he connects the wires to a device he has constructed that generates the proper signals. When the magnetic fields (produced by the coils) penetrate the skull and into the temporal lobes of the brain, the result is the stimulation of those lobes and a religious experience results.
In common with the Hindu view that a confrontation with God is a confrontation with the self, the nine-hundred plus people who have undertaken the experience produced by Dr. Persinger's helmet have had some very profound experiences. Four out of five say that they have had experiences so profound they would be life changing had they not understood the mechanistic underpinnings of what they had experienced.
What is it all about?
The helmet works by inducing very small electrical signals with tiny magnetically induced mechanical vibrations in the brain cells of the temporal lobes and other selected areas of the brain, located in the skull just above and forward of the ears. These lobes are the portions of the brain that produce the "Forty Hertz Component" of the brainwaves detected in electroencephalograms. These mysterious "forty hertz components" are present whenever you are awake or when you are in REM sleep. They are absent during deep, dreamless sleep. What the "forty hertz component" does is not well understood, but we know that it is always present during the experience of "self." We cannot have a "me" experience without the forty-hertz component being present.
What this means is that the forty-hertz component is essential to our experience of self. We cannot experience our sense of individuality without it. It makes sense, then, that if the forty-hertz component could somehow be suppressed, the sense of individuality would be suppressed with it, and indeed, this is what Dr. Persinger's helmet does. It turns off the forty-hertz component and with it the sense of individuality, which your brain uses to define "self" as opposed to "rest of the world." When the brain is deprived of the self stimulation and sensory input that is required for it to define itself as being distinct from the rest of the world, the brain 'defaults' to a sense of infinity. The sense of self expands to fill whatever the brain can sense, and what it senses is the world, so the experience of the self simply expands to fill the perception of the world itself. One experiences becoming "one with the universe."
There are two temporal lobes in the brain, one on each side. The one on the left, in most people, is the dominant one, responsible for language, which becomes dominant when we first learn language as children. The one on the right, non-dominant contributes to the sense of self with constant communication with its opposite colleague. However, being on the far side of the brain, sometimes the communications get “out of whack”, often because of stress or disease, and the forty-hertz component falls out of sync. When this happens, the result is that the normally silent right-hand sense of self becomes experienced as a separate presence by the left-hand sense of self. This is the experience of the God presence. There is an overwhelming sense of presence, an inescapable feeling that someone is there. But when the forty-hertz component is deeply attenuated or entirely absent from, say, the left side, and there's no "self" experience occurring, the feeling of unity with infinity is occurring with a sense of an overwhelming presence resulting from the continued operation of the right hand side. There is no way to describe it other than feeling that one has experienced the "infinite presence." Hence, the “God” experience.
By 2002, Dr. Persinger had performed the experiment on over 1,000 volunteers. 80% had some sort of supernatural experience. Many say that their experiences were "so profound they would be life-changing had they not understood the mechanistic underpinnings of what they had experienced." About one in every 15 subjects reports an intensely meaningful experience. Of the experiences reported: Visions of Jesus Christ, Elijah, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed or a Sky Spirit. [This depended on their cultural background and current believes.] Some have reported out-of-body experiences, a sensation of floating, and a sensation of "great meaningfulness."
With one test involving sixteen subjects, six of the eight subjects who had previously experienced above average numbers of complex partial epileptic-like experiences sensed the presence of a sentient being during stimulation of their brain's right-hemisphere. A very weak, 1 μT (microTesla) frequency-modulated magnetic field was used. A microTesla is equal to about 2% of the Earth's magnetic field. Five of the eight noted a presence during bilateral stimulation. None of the eight subjects, who had below average scores, had this type of experience.
All of this has been verified not only experimentally with Dr. Persinger's helmet, but by use of high-tech brain scanning machines similar to the CAT and MRI scanners that many of us have experienced.
Many deeply experienced meditators feel, when deep in meditation, an experience of transcendence of the here and now. They feel a sense of being outside of time and space. How is this experience produced?
Two researchers, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, have taken a particular interest in these experiences. With a brain-scanning technique called SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography), they have determined how these experiences arise. The researchers have produced images of the brains of Tibetan Buddhists who undergo deep, profound meditative experiences as the result of years of practice. They have done the same with a Catholic Franciscan nun, who, after 45 minutes of deep prayer, had her brain scanned to determine what centres were active and what centres were not.
The results show that in both cases, the pre-frontal cortex, which controls attention, is highly stimulated. This is not surprising; meditation requires a great deal of concentration. The subjects are clearly deeply attentive to their task. Nevertheless, the superior parietal lobe, the centre that processes information about space, time and the orientation of the body in space, is suppressed, and is almost completely quiet. The result is that any sense of time, space or being in the world is suppressed along with the activity in the superior parietal lobe. Moreover, not feeling "in the world" leads to an "other-worldly" experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that those who have this experience describe it as being in the "spiritual realm." Persinger has been able to reproduce this by electrically suppressing activity in the superior parietal lobe using his helmet and when he performs this experiment on Tibetan monks and the Franciscan nun, they all report that the experience is identical to what they experience in their own meditative practice.
The near-death experiences that are described by many patients who have been revived from life-threatening events contain elements of all of these and a few more. We have seen how the presence of the "God" feeling arises from the result of the shutting down of communications between the temporal lobes. And we have seen how the sense of timelessness and infinite space arise through the suppression of activity in the superior parietal lobe. However, what about the vision of the tunnel with the light at the end? Moreover, the sense of rising out of the body?
The sense of orientation is lost when the superior parietal lobe shuts down. The 'self' no longer feels anchored to the body, because the sense of self-being in the body is lost, and one often seems to be rising to 'heaven.' We now know that the visual cortex, which is being disconnected from sensory input and beginning to shut down, produces the vision of the tunnel. Same with the light at the end of the tunnel, which is an artefact of the brain's visual cortex 'looking' for sensory input it cannot 'see.' The visions of a beautiful summer garden or lovely mountain landscapes are the result of the memory centres acting on the centres of the brain that organize visual input into things we recognize, which is operating in the near-total absence of sensory input. All of these brain activities together produce the familiar being of light at the end of a tunnel, and the entrance into the beautiful summer garden.
These experiences have a deep, even profound feeling of reality to them. This is simply because the centres of the brain that are producing the experience are cut completely off from sensory that would dilute the 'realness' of the experience. Those centres that analyse experience for us in real time and allow us to evaluate it for its correspondence to reality, in other words, the centres of the brain that enable us to discern the difference between dreaming and wakefulness, real versus imagined. Hence, the subjects who report these experiences describe them as being so real they were not at all like a dream. Indeed, they were not, they were dreams undiluted from sensory reality checks and the evaluation of sensory data for its validity.
What is now understood is that these phenomena can occur with very minute amounts of electrical activity in the brain. Most of the brain can be shut down and these phenomena are still possible, with electrical activity so small, it is not possible to measure it through external devices. Remember, our brains do not come with "diagnostic ports" like a modern automobile's engine computer, what we measure with our electroencephalograms is the "leakage". It’s like trying to discern what's happening inside a computer by listening to the static it creates in a radio sitting next to it. A lot can be happening without making enough noise to hear it on the "radio."
It is clear that the meaning of the understanding of these phenomena is easily explained in detail through well-understood neurological processes in the brain. The material, the mundane, can easily explain what are widely regarded as evidence for the existence of a spiritual realm. So in the light of that reality, what does the religionist have to say?
For those who stay unconvinced must realise that your most powerful, persuasive evidence, namely your own powerful, personal experience, can now be easily and rationally explained, in all its features. No metaphysical explanation is necessary. Because no metaphysical explanation is required to explain your experience, your "evidence" is no longer evidence of anything metaphysical.
