What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1601
This celebration of humanity comes, of course, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, published 400 years ago in 1601. It expresses the recurring theme in literature - religious and otherwise - that we - the human animal - fancy ourselves in relationship - often quite direct relationship - with the divine. And it is this alliance - perceived or imagined - that I want to meditate on with you today.
This past spring, Newsweek published an account of the work of a team of physicians working out of the University of Pennsylvania. Discussed in this article is research of the past quarter century that spans disciplines in religion and sciences, research focused on understanding the physiology - the physical and chemical structure - of spiritual experience. Thanks to advances in medical technology this team - and others - have been able to study the brain patterns of advanced practitioners of prayer and meditation in the midst of their religious practice - studied particularly were those trained in Tibetan Buddhism and Franciscan nuns. The objective of this research has been to shed some light on the mysterious connection between human consciousness and the persistent and peculiarly human longing to connect with something larger than ourselves. (Why God Won't Go Away, p. 2)
After years of research, this team - headed now by Andrew Newberg since the death of his colleague Eugene d'Aquili - concludes that these religious experiences are real and that they can be measured and verified by solid science. (p. 3) These solid scientific measurements take the form of CAT scans, SPECT scans, and MRIs. What they have measured is areas of increased - significantly increased - blood flow to certain regions of the brain, and decreased activity in others. Combining this research with imaging of ordinary and abnormal brain function, Newberg and d'Aquili have formulated a model of how the brain works during peak religious experience.
They suggest that certain areas of the brain that known to orient us to the "real" world - the concrete, the ordinary - are by-passed during meditation or prayer. Arising in its stead is an awareness of another reality. This alternative reality is consistently described - whatever the religious tradition - as being in a state of bliss, as an experience of the ever present ultimate truth, which is simply inaccessible during the course of our harried daily lives. What differs is the naming of this state, and the naming varies according to religious practice. For those whose experience has lead them to seek union with divinity - as for many in the Christian tradition - the ultimate reality is described as such and named God. For those practicing any of the Eastern traditions - where the promised goal is a release from the endless cycle of rebirth - they describe joyous union with an infinite emptiness.
Newberg and d'Aquili named this ultimate state - a state they speak of as an achievement - as Absolute Unitary Being, AUB, for short. "The achievement of Absolute Unitary Being is a rare event, but even those who fall short find themselves in spiritual states of inexpressible power and sublimity. We believe that all mystical experiences, from the mildest to the most intense, have their biological roots in the mind’s machinery of transcendence. To say this in a slightly more provocative way, if the brain were not assembled as it is, we would not be able to experience a higher reality, even if it did exist." (p. 123)
This statement brings us to the brink of the essential issues raised by this research. What are we, educated in the Darwinian metaphor of evolution that favors traits that result in survival, to make of the proposition that we are hard wired to experience AUB? How are we - in 2001 - to understand this experience? Is Absolute Unitary Being a phenomenon fabricated by our brain to help with the task of living or has our brain been fabricated to experience an ultimate transcendent being, essence, force?.
2001 - how extraordinary to have finally arrived at a date that seemed in the impossible future when Stanley Kublick's version of Arthur C. Clark's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. But the date in the book and film's title is uncannily fitting for us now as we revisit in memory the opening scene in which our nearest ancestors - primates of some genus - are depicted in the midst of an act of celestial worship. As Clark and Kublick suggest and now, Newberg and d'Aquili propose, the human animal is distinguished by this inclination to contemplate the meaning of life and to design ritual acts of reverence. We are, in Newberg and d'Aquili's words, "driven by biological compulsion" toward myth - storytelling that makes sense of the world - and toward ritual - the repetition of acts designed "to trigger unitary states." (p. 171)
What are we - ever sensible, sentient, reasonable, not to mention, reserved - Unitarian Universalists to do with all this evidence - scientific and cultural - that our species may be wired for God?
This is not - at least for me - merely an academic question. Let me explain, with a quick aside to a bit of biographical information that is, I believe, pertinent here. I am a birthright Unitarian - raised as some of you may know in Boston. I come from a family dedicated to no-nonsense science and attended the Arlington Street Church as a child, one of the denomination's strongholds of religious humanism/social action in the 1960s. I was quite unconsciously raised to believe that one's religious identity was a commitment to community service with like-minded others . Smells and bells had nothing to do with my religious upbringing.
Inexplicably, however, I found myself drawn to ritual. It wasn't enough, for example, to merely bury the mice and birds that the cat brought home. I found myself leading services to honor their passing and to mark their graves. Sometimes - if I could coerce my brother and sister - I actually lead services in the woods. If no one was willing to join me, I performed the rituals alone. Over the Dixie-cup coffins, I wondered out loud about the meaning of life and death, and I often sang - a folk song like the Ash Grove - as I committed the creature to the earth.
It wasn't until years later that I began to wonder, "What in heaven's name was I - a born and bred humanist - thinking?" And what was the event that triggered this memory? An experience that was even more questionable! Well over a decade ago now, in the midst of a very complicated period in my family life, I awoke one night in an intensely agitated state, struggling with issues that couldn't be resolved on a conscious level alone. I pushed and I pushed against the discomfort and finally, was able to name the source of the pain, And when I did, I felt as if a dam burst within me. I was flooded - flooded! - with a profound sense of warmth and light. It was the middle of the night. I had been tossing and turning. I was exhausted - and then suddenly, the darkness, and the agitation, and the exhaustion - lifted. The experience of peace that followed lasted for hours, in fact, it continued, only slightly abated, throughout the next day. I felt as though I had been - how do I say this? - blessed. I knew that somehow I had earned this peace - I had admittedly been working very hard toward that end - but the feelings that followed transcended anything that I believed I'd earned. I did not feel ultimately responsible for the peace that I knew with every part of my being. Without a moment's hesitation - indeed, it surfaced as if fact - I felt that I had been given a divine gift.
The feeling gradually faded but the memory did not. For a time, I didn't know what to make of it. Cautiously , I began to think of my midnight awakening in spiritual terms. In spite of myself - all those years of humanist training - the possibility that my experience had been a gift beyond my own making was profoundly moving. My early movement toward ministry as a child was rekindled by this experience. The familiar peace I experienced in prayer and mediation took on a larger meaning. I even began to wonder if it might really be possible for mere humans - even me - to connect directly with the mysterious guiding forces of existence.
The law of primacy - a psychological explanation for the power of first experiences to embed themselves most deeply - meant that I never fully allowed myself to believe unequivocally that I had indeed experienced a divine presence. The abiding doubt has been refocused by reading Newberg and d'Aquili's research. Again, in spite of myself, rather than feeling reassured by the efforts of these scientists, I was strangely disquieted, even saddened. "You mean, my experience - my precious, sacred experience - is nothing but synapses turning on and off - nothing more than a neurological phenomenon?"
Startled by my own reaction, I found myself sympathetically connected with the larger religious community . If a humanist from way back is rocked by this research, how will those who have believed for millennia in the absolute veracity of religious experiences remembered in scripture absorb this announcement that experiencing the sacred is "a biological compulsion," a neurological event?
I have come to wonder if there may be a special role for those of us for whom understanding the sacred as "a biological compulsion" is not a total anathema. What contemporary research suggests is that the sacred - at least experiencing the sacred - is an essential part of being human. "The neurological roots of transcendence show that Absolute Unitary Being [as a state of being] is a plausible, even probable possibility. The realness of Absolute Unitary being is not conclusive proof that a higher God exists, but it makes a strong case that there is more to human existence than sheer material existence. Our minds are drawn by intuition to this deeper reality, this sense of oneness, where suffering vanishes and all desires are at peace." (p. 172)
The capacity to experience the sacred appears to be part of our biological wiring. How we understand and live with this information may be one of the great religious issues of our time. The research doesn't answer the "why" of the wiring. That questions is still ours to ponder.
We began with Hamlet's celebration of the human animal; let us end with an even more ancient musing. Psalm 8:
O Lord, our Sovereign,
How majestic is your name in all the earth!You have set your glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouths of babes and infants
You have founded a bulwark
Because of your foes,
To silence the enemy and the avenger.When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
Mortals that you care for them?Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
And crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your handsw;
You have put all things under their feet,
All sheep and oxen,
And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air, and the fish of the seas.O Lord, our Sovereign,
How majestic is your name in all the earth!
Bibliography:
Andrew Newberg and Eugene d'Aquili, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and
the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books), 2001.
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