If you’ve never had a mystical, or flow, or peak, or unitary (among the many synonyms and near-synonyms available), AND you are not religious, it’s inevitable that the mystical experience will be discounted or ignored altogether, and issues of social pressure or family upbring will be seen as sufficient explanations for the existence of religion.

If you’re religious, such social explanations are rejected. God is the reason! End of discussion. (Please forgive this huge generalization.) The mystical experience may be ignored, accepted, perceived as crucial, or rejected as blasphemous.

Our current day is perfect for studying both religion and the mystical experience. We have the tools. We have the scientific outlook. We’re unlikely to be burned as witches (recent events in Kenya notwithstanding).

Newberg (and Waldman too, apparently) have gone a long way towards rooting out the source of the mystical experience. I am very grateful for their studies, and for the book itself, which brought me to a new understanding of my own mystical experiences.

As far as the social, as well as additional physiological factors that have brought about the existence of religion, I highly recommend Pascal Boyer’s “Religion Explained.”

But the state does not last. Thus, throughout the day, we are always altering our sense of reality to everything. It’s not delusional–it’s just a spectrum of self/object/thought/world emphasis. Can you get lost in the sense of God, or the transcendent? Yes, but the brain always returns to baseline. The real benefit of meditation lies in the permanent increased activity Newberg, Davidson, Benson, Kabat-Zinn and others are finding in the meditator’s frontal lobe, the anterior cingulate (social awareness), and the basal ganglia. The anterior cingulate and basal ganglia suppress activity in the amygdala and other parts of the brain that generate fear, anxiety, irritability, and the release of stress neurochemicals. Thus Newberg’s recent research has documented why meditation improves neurological health. His most recent study shows that meditation also enhances memory in people who have only practiced 12 minutes per day for 8 weeks. The findings will be published this fall, and reported in his next book, How God Changes Your Brain.

For the record, I’m sure I have a positive cognitive bias toward Newberg’s research since I am a co-researcher and co-author with him.

Sean (immediately above) suggests (using my words now, not his) the possibility that God exists in a higher dimension, from which vantage point our entire space-time continuum is spread out to His view, like a road map. He further suggests that this view could explain many interesting cutting-edge phenomena in Physics.

Good point. One I’ve pondered since reading “Flatland” at the age of 10. I’m sure many others have also.

The problems associated with John Bell’s theorem – quantum entanglement, action-at-a-distance – as well as newer problems such as string theory and brane intersection obviously can involve more dimensions than to which we have access. I think such dimensions probably exist, but as yet I haven’t seen any conclusive evidence for it nor has anyone (that I’ve heard of) yet devised a way to test this. Maybe the Large Hadron Collider, coming on line this year, will yield useful data along this line.

Even if these dimensions exist, there’s no reason to assume that they are occupied by sentient being(s) that were/are involved in our meager 4-dimensional space-time lives and universe.

At this juncture, I can only repeat that I remain convinced by my deconversion experience. Human brains, including mine, do funny things. When the Orientation Association Area stops receiving input (deafferation), the personal experience is that of the unification of all space & time & consciousness into a Unitary Whole, and the experiencer is perfectly joined in that unification. Hindu mysticism would express this as “Atman is Brahman” (the personal Soul is identical with the Cosmic Soul”. My additional conjecture is that the brain’s Reality Cognitive Center also “cuts out”, causing the experience to feel absolutely real; actually, if feels “Realer than Real.” It’s like that story about the Chinese sage who dreamed he was a butterfly. The dream was so intense that after awakening, he spent the rest of his life not knowing if he was a Chinese philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a Chinese philosopher.

My deconversion realization consisted of recognizing that both the Mystical Unitary Experience and the “Realer than Real” experience are misinterpretations of an unusual psychological experience caused by an unusual and temporary functioning of the brain. This was not a pleasant conclusion to reach, as it forced me to accept that one of the main goals of my life was a pointless exercise in futility. On the positive side, I feel that I’ve gained a certain insight because I’ve seen – as Joni Mitchell wrote decades ago – “Both Sides Now.”

Just imagine what would happen if a God did exist. For one thing he would exist one dimension higher than we do, since he literally looks across all time. And so because of that one can say that there are two different planes of reality. One, our reality, which is always confined to the present, and the other, his reality, that extends across all time. Events would occur at the point of intersection of these two planes of reality.

Now if this were true, all sorts of weird things would happen since an event at the point of intersection could be governed from either of the two planes of reality. The results of particle interactions would be different depending on which plane of reality is governing these interactions. In one case it would be a real time interaction, and from the other it would be circumstances that are present across a certain time period that would determine the outcome of the interaction. And so there would be two kinds of events. A Holistic ( cross time ) event, and a Relativistic ( real time ) event.

If there are two kinds of events, then this would lead to all sorts of things such a Particle/Wave behavior, Action at a Distance, Particle Entanglement, Collapse of a Quantum Wave, etc. Hmmmmm, I could swear I have heard of things somewhere already. In short, all the questions not yet answered in the field of physics would all be answered in a flash if God’s plane of reality was taken into account.

People might even begin to recognize this mysterious fellow.
See http://www.outersecrets.com/real/biblecode2.htm
See http://www.outersecrets.com/real/biblecode_shroud_turin.htm