Part of an ongoing series on belief.
David Brooks generated a lot of discussion with his column in May on “The Neural Buddhists“:
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.
I got into this kind of thing when I stumbled on a book called Destructive Emotions, which was an account of a series of dialogues between scientists like Daniel Goleman (who edited the book) and Richard Davidson (who studied meditative brain activity using fMRI), with the Dalai Lama and some other science-inclined Buddhists.
Later I became absorbed by the positive psychology movement/sub-discipline initiated by Martin Seligman (who practices meditation himself), which is based on the premise that professional psychology had been too focused on illness and dysfunction, and ought to be more concerned with understanding how healthy brains function.
Brooks’s claim that this new attitude combines science and spirituality is two-thirds correct. The new attitude also includes (or ought to include) consideration of ancient wisdom — or the history of philosophy in general. Ancient philosophical traditions, in the Upanishads, which formed the basis for Hinduism and subsequently Buddhism, were largely oriented through theories of the mind and knowledge.
Closer to our own age, William James and Charles Peirce are the leading exemplars of the fusion of the three domains. The first lecture of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, is titled “Religion and Neurology” and he’s comfortable talking about Spinoza and Kant… As an empirical psychologist he was committed to studying all possible phenomena — including the parapsychological and apparently transcendental, which the other researchers dismissed as unscientific, but James argued (rightly) that to dismiss the spiritual and enigmatic is even more unscientific because it is an arbitrary choice to ignore apparent phenomena.
So professional psychology moved away from James and didn’t gravitate back towards concern for spiritual experiences until Abraham Maslow and humanist psychology around the 1960′s, via concepts like “peak experiences”…
Now we’re gettting just about back to where James left off — finally. We’re once again appreciating that (summarized by Brooks),
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.
From here there are two directions I need to explore (the only two directions there are): inward and outward. The “neural Buddhist” attitude compels one develop a personal, spiritual/religious practice — cultivating good, healthy habits of mind that make one’s existence more effective, generative, and gratifying.
And then there is the more social aspect — which neural Buddhism perhaps isn’t best suited to address. For that I look to Confucianism…
