Neurotheology: Your Brain is Built for God

Have you ever had what might be called a “religious experience”? A profound experience that moved you to the very core of your being that you couldn’t quite explain and struggled to put into words?

After a religious or spiritual experience, you can never again see things in quite the same way. You no longer can accept yourself as just being your body, brain and nametag. You are something inexplicably more. In fact, that experience seems even more real than your everyday world.

You might be surprised that half the American public claims to have experienced something like this at least once in their lives. They consider that experience to be the most meaningful one they have ever had.

Breakthrough Insights on God Through Neuroscience

Neuroscience is exploding as a field due to ever-increasing refinement of high-technology, especially brain scanning, using fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging). fMRI allows researchers to observe their subject’s brains in real-time and capture their mental processes dynamically, more like a video than a snapshot.

Dr. Andrew Neuberg is a researcher and physician at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. One of the featured authorities in the hit documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know!? Dr. Neuberg introduced the world to a brand new field, Neurotheology, which studies the relationship between our Central Nervous System to our experience of God.

Dr. Neuberg revealed that when people experience God, or Enlightenment, that experience is always more “real” than reality. It is an experience that defines who we are. Rather than defining God in terms of us, we end up defining ourselves in terms of God. While people’s concepts about God range across the board, their direct experience of God is surprisingly similar with the same constants always appearing.

Doesn’t Every Religion See God Differently?

Throughout the world, we find hundreds, even thousands, of different religions and denominations. Even among the half-dozen great religious traditions, we face a sharp break between a personal and impersonal conception of God. The Abrahamic Tradition (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) theologically defines the creature in relation to the Creator. The Dharmic Tradition (Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism) theologically identifies the Creator as the true identity of the creature.

When anyone has a direct experience of God (or the Universe, if you have an impersonal perspective), they experience God as overwhelming Unity, Love, Peace and Clarity. This is true whether the person is religious or nonreligious. She might even be an atheist. This experience compels people to totally re-evaluate all their prior conceptions about spirituality.

Could it possibly be that, despite the many names for God (Allah, YHWH, Tao, Sunyata), all traditions are actually experiencing the same God from a different psychological and cultural perspective? If your God is personal, you pray. If He is primarily impersonal, you meditate. Could it possibly be that God is both personal and impersonal, or transpersonal, and we are all meditating and praying on the very same God?

How Can You Measure Subjective Experience?

You may maintain that God is pure subject, or spirit, that God is most definitely not a “thing.” You would be right. How, then, can intangible spirit be measured? How can we put God to the test, or test tube? Isn’t that absurd?

This won’t seem so crazy if you recognize correlations, that different experiences of God can correlate with different brain states. Those brain states can definitely be scientifically mapped in real-time.

Correlation is not causation. Correlation is the association between one phenomenon and another. We can say that certain things happen to the brain every time you experience God. It doesn’t mean the brain causes God, or God causes the brain. The two are simply associated with one another.

Dr. Neuberg has been gathering thousands of reports of life-changing religious experiences to discover patterns. He has also been able to take meditators, centering prayer practitioners and Zen contemplators and map them with fMRI at their peak states. One after another, they each registered similar patterns.

God Goes with the Brain

It is tempting to claim that, since brain patterns are constant for any given experience of God, you are simply imagining or making up God. God is not really “out there.” You simply imagine He is. Taken to an extreme, God, like a pair of crutches, is only for weak people.

This overlooks the possibility that God designed the brains as an instrument through which His creation could discover Him. For example, we find religious elements in burial rituals of all cultures from prehistory until today. Why? How can random chance design anything so intricate as the human brain? The interconnections of a single woman’s brain are vaster than the number of stars in the entire visible universe.

The most promising line of research is the supposition that the spiritual and the physical universe somehow interact, that God evokes a religious experience every bit as much as a brain triggers our own experience of God. The master yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, suggested that our very imagination is the image of God. As God created the Universe through imagination, so we create our own worlds through our inner vision.

What Can Possibly Be More “Real” Than Our Everyday Lives?

It seems counterintuitive that anything could be more “real” than our day-to-day experience. Each morning, we come back to the same, or very similar, circumstances. We wake up day after day to the same set of problems, or very similar ones. True, our daily life is intermittent. We tune out to fall asleep and dream. Nevertheless, the same soap opera is as predictable as death and taxes.

Nevertheless, for those who wake up, who have a huge satori where their orientation to life is totally zapped, things are never really the same. For those who have experienced superconsciousness, the ordinary conscious life is as much a dream as a sleeping dream is to the vast majority of people.

If the direct experience of God is more real, maybe it is actually a coming home to our own true Identity. Could it be that we are actually the Creator experiencing His creation through us? Could it be, as the inimitable Alan Watts suggested, that we are portals in the Universe out of which the Universe sees Itself?

If this be the case, we are never truly alienated, no matter how lonely or lost we feel. If God is our origin and destiny, then God is our true home. Even our very brains silently testify to this Ultimate Truth.

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