My Wife's Christian Co-worker

[Angrboda]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...=110997741

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"Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a book entitled, “How God Changes Your Brain” has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than ten years. Newberg One of Newberg’s test subjects was Michael Baime, a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Tibetan Buddhist who has meditated at least an hour a day forthe past40 years. Baime told Newberg that during a peak meditative experience, “he feels oneness with the universe, and time slips away.†“It’s as if the present moment expands to fill all of eternity,” he explains, “that there has never been anything but this eternal now.”

While Newberg scanned Baime’s brain, the Buddhist meditated, and his brain mirrored those feelings.As was expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen because meditation is sheer concentration. But what Newberg found most interesting was that Baime’s parietal lobes went dark.

“This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves, and orient that self in the world,” he explains. “When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area.”

Newberg achieved the same results with other monks he scanned. Itwas the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying andSikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience. “There is no Christian, there is noJewish,there is noMuslim, it’s just all one,” Newberg says.



Therefore ALL of them are correct in their god claim, or all of them are experiencing the same physiological process.

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The more I read, the more I am coming to conclude that meditation is primarily geared toward getting the brain to learn to focus in specific ways that are essentially unnatural. Surprisingly, my group therapy focuses on similar things, and mindfulness has taken center stage in many psychological therapies. Of what benefit training my mind to do these things will ultimately be, I don't know. But the research seems to indicate that, while it may not be anything metaphysical, something unusual is going on in the brain of the experienced meditator. I myself have experienced the sense of timelessness, though not the sense of oneness. I suspect I would interpret the same sensations differently given my skeptical outlook.