Summary
The conversation explores how the brain shapes our experience of reality and what mystical experiences may reveal about consciousness. It also examines whether science and spiritual traditions can complement each other in understanding mind, matter, and enlightenment.
Questions This Interview Explores
- How does the brain shape our perception of reality?
- Can mystical experiences provide insight into universal consciousness?
- What is the relationship between consciousness and matter?
- How can science and spirituality work together to investigate religious experience?
- Is questioning more valuable than finding definitive answers?
Key takeaways
- Human beings can never directly verify reality outside the limits of the brain.
- Mystical experiences may offer the clearest reported sense of transcending ordinary mental limits.
- Science explains much about experience but has not explained how consciousness arises from matter.
- Spiritual and material views may need to be studied together rather than treated as opposites.
- Deep doubt can become peaceful when it is no longer treated as a problem to eliminate.
- Persistent questioning can be a spiritual practice in its own right.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done hundreds of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to watch previous ones, please go to the Past Interviews menu on batgap.com, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways.
This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. If you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and even small contributions are significant if enough people make them.
My guest today is Andrew B. Newberg, MD, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’ve been reading Andrew’s books and listening to hours of his other recordings, interviews, and talks, and his whole area of expertise and study fascinates me.
I’m going to read his entire bio here, even though it’s a little long, because it’s substantive and it will give you a really good idea of who he is and what his credentials are. Andrew is currently the Associate Director in Charge of Research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He is also a professor in the departments of Emergency Medicine and Radiology at Thomas Jefferson University, and he is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
And now this next sentence tells you why I’m interviewing him: “Dr. Newberg has been particularly involved in the study of mystical and religious experiences, a field referred to as ‘neurotheology.’” He has also studied the more general mind-body relationship in both the clinical and research aspects of his career, including understanding the physiological correlates of acupuncture therapy, meditation, and other types of alternative therapies.
He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on brain function, brain imaging, and the study of religious and mystical experiences. He has written or co-written several books, about half a dozen, such as Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, and The Metaphysical Mind: Probing the Biology of Philosophical Thought. He also wrote Principles of Neurotheology.
He has also produced a 24-lecture video program entitled The Spiritual Brain for the Teaching Company. He has presented his work at scientific and religious meetings throughout the world and has appeared on Dr. Oz, Good Morning America, Nightline, 20/20, CNN, and ABC World News Tonight, as well as in the movies What the Bleep Do We Know, Bill Maher’s Religulous, and Awake: The Life of Yogananda.
His work has been featured in articles in Newsweek, Time, National Geographic, Discover, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The London Observer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Reader’s Digest. His website is andrewnewberg.com. I don’t usually read such a long bio, but I think that was worth reading.
Andrew: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Rick: So welcome, Andrew, and thanks.
Andrew: Thank you for having me on the program.
Rick: Yeah. Customarily, I start with just a little bit of the person’s background, and I recollect a few things from listening to other interviews you did about your childhood, how you were really an inquisitive kid. At a rather early age, you realized something that took me until about the age of 17 to realize—with the help of a little LSD—which was that everybody sees the world very differently, even though presumably there’s only one world out there, and you really puzzled over that. Do you want to comment on that a little bit?
Andrew: Sure, yeah. As you said, from the time I was a kid, I think I was just always asking questions, and I was very stymied by the fact that we seem to have all these different religious and spiritual beliefs. Different political beliefs, of course, are a very prominent topic in today’s world.
It was disturbing to me, I think. It really bothered me, and I remember many times lying awake at night long after I was supposed to be in bed and pondering these questions. Then I’d wander into my father’s office while he was doing some work there, and I’d say, “Dad, I don’t understand this. What is God? Tell me what’s going on.”
He was always incredibly supportive and usually would sort of throw the questions back to me. He didn’t give me an answer, which I really appreciated. We were not brought up in a particularly religious or spiritual household. I was born as a Reform Jew and got bar mitzvahed, but for the most part, it was a lot of questioning.
I guess I thought, “Well, somebody’s got to solve this problem.” So I started to think about this question. To me, the primary question is, “What is the nature of reality, and how do we as human beings know what that might be?”
I guess I thought, “Well, somebody’s got to solve this problem.” So I started to think about this question. To me, the primary question is, “What is the nature of reality, and how do we as human beings know what that might be?”
That started me on this path of trying to answer that question. I think my first thought was that it had to have something to do with the human brain. If the human brain is taking in all this information and helping us to construct our perspective on reality, then part of it has to do with what’s going on in the human brain.
As time went on, I realized that just looking at science and trying to look at things from this “objective” vantage point—and I’ve used “objective” in quotes—wasn’t quite enough. So I started to read about what other people had come to, and read Aristotle and Plato and Descartes, all the way up to the modern philosophers, phenomenology, and so forth.
That all started to happen probably around the time I was in high school and into college. In college, even though I was very interested in medicine as a career, I was fortunate to be able to take a lot of courses in Buddhist thought, Hindu thought, comparative religions, formal logic, as well as the science courses—chemistry, biology, and so forth.
All of this was really swirling around in my brain up until the point when I was in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. I wound up deciding to do this extra year, as they called it, and that was really a pivotal moment in my life. I wound up finding, amazingly, two incredible mentors to work with. Usually, most people are lucky to get one.
One of them was Dr. Alavi, who was one of the brain-imaging experts. He’s got a CV that spans about 45 pages or more, and he has 1,000 articles.
Rick: If I interview him, I won’t read the whole thing.
Andrew: Exactly. I mean, he’s just a world-renowned expert in imaging, and so I started to work with him. I had the fortune of meeting up with a psychiatrist named Eugene d’Aquili, who was a psychiatrist but also an anthropologist by training. He had a PhD in anthropology.
He had been asking some of the same questions that I had and thinking about the relationship between religious and spiritual ideas and the human brain as early as the 1970s. So when I connected with him, we started to work on ideas and questions.
At some point, I was thinking, “Well, gee, if I’m scanning the brain of somebody with Alzheimer’s or somebody with depression, why can’t I scan the brain of somebody who’s meditating or praying or feeling spiritual?” That was what really launched the whole aspect of neurotheology and trying to look at what’s going on in the brain and how that’s related to the religious and spiritual side of ourselves.
Rick: Did you yourself latch onto some spiritual practice or discipline at any point?
Andrew: Well, for me, it really has been this path. I do get that question a lot.
Rick: Yeah, like some meditative practice or something.
Andrew: Yeah, and people say, “Well, what do you do?” I don’t do one particular type. I suppose I’ve explored a few in my day, but it has really been a little bit of my own concoction of a kind of philosophical meditation.
I have actually spent a lot of time in that kind of meditative thought process. In fact, in How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, I talk a little bit about my personal experiences through that process, which in many ways had elements that seemed sort of mystical, or were very difficult to understand in terms of what they meant.
That also further fueled my interest in understanding what other people had felt, so that I could see where the similarities and differences were between their experiences and where I was going in my own thought processes.
Rick: You’re what they call a jnani, or a jnana yogi.
Andrew: Well, I don’t know if I would go that far.
Rick: It’s the path of knowledge.
Andrew: I was certainly looking for it, although, interestingly—and I don’t know if you were going to ask me specifically about this—it was actually between college and medical school when I thought, “I’m about to enter medical school. I’ve got to figure this out. I can’t just continue to have this incredibly disturbing angst in trying to understand it.”
I really took that summer off and spent a lot of time in this kind of deep contemplative state. At one point, in pursuing as much as I could the answer to these questions, my process was that if I wasn’t sure about something, I would say, “Well, I don’t know,” and so I would doubt it. I would say, “That goes into this ‘realm of doubt,’” but then I’d keep moving.
As I kept pursuing the questions, I eventually got to this point where I felt like I couldn’t go any further. I harkened back to something that one of my Hindu professors had talked about: You can strive for things, but sometimes you just have to let them come to you.
So I thought, “Well, I’m just going to wait and see what comes,” and had an experience that I’ve only been able to describe as infinite doubt. In that infinite-doubt experience, I realized that there was nothing I could ever know.
It’s not finding the answers; it’s asking the questions.
It was interesting that when I talked to my writing colleague, Mark Waldman, and explained this to him, he said, “Well, that must have been one of the worst experiences ever. I mean, here you are trying to find an answer, and you’ve come to the conclusion that there is no answer.”
I said, “But it was actually just the opposite. It was one of the most peaceful, blissful, calming experiences that I ever had. It put all of what I was doing in my own mind into perspective, and somehow also allowed me to continue to have the questioning, but to do it on a different kind of level that wasn’t disturbing anymore.”
It was sort of part of what the universe was all about for me, and I continue to do that to this day.
Rick: I’m sure you’ve heard the term “don’t-know mind” in Zen, you know? I think it was Ramana Maharshi or someone—or maybe Nisargadatta—who spoke of enlightenment as a state of perpetual freefall. He said, “The good thing is there’s no ground where you’re going to go splat.”
Andrew: That’s a good, perfect analogy. One of the things I always talk about, hopefully in my life—and it’s part of what the mentors I found were so wonderful about—they really had this essence of what I call a passion for inquiry. They just love to ask the questions, and it’s actually the asking of the questions which is where it’s at. That’s the power of it.
It’s not finding the answers; it’s asking the questions. That was just, again, part of that whole process, and it continues to be.
Infinite doubt and practical knowledge
Rick: Yeah, I had your point about the sea of infinite doubt highlighted here, actually, because that was the next thing I was going to ask you. And one thing you said in that context was, “All beliefs were equal and none were better or worse or more right or wrong than others,” and in parentheses I put, “Really?” Because obviously, is the moon made of green cheese or is it made of rock? Okay, I think we’ll lean toward rock. It’s like in the scientific method, as I understand it, you form hypotheses, and those hypotheses either gain or lose credibility as evidence warrants.
Andrew: Right, exactly. And in that absolute infinite doubt, there really isn’t anything that is more knowable than anything else. However, as you mentioned, and actually something that was always instilled in me by my father, was sort of the practical side of things.
And so that’s also part of why, to me, science does continue to be of great value, because it does say, “Well, there’s a much higher likelihood that the moon is made of rock than it’s made of cheese, and we have a lot of evidence to support that. We can measure its mass, we can look at its gravity,” and so forth.
So yes, when we sort of bring everything back into the practical realm and we bring it into the world in which we live, then we bring in all of these probabilities, which have a huge emphasis and influence on the way we think about things.
But at some very fundamental level, we don’t really know what the universe is all about. And even from a scientific perspective, you think about what quantum mechanics is, and the atom is mostly nothing. How do we decide, is the moon really rock? It’s actually mostly nothing.
Rick: It’s true. And there’s always the chance that some astronaut will come back with a cheese sample.
Andrew: You never know.
Rick: You’re open to that possibility.
Andrew: They have a very nice Jarlsberg up there.
Neurotheology as experiential inquiry
Rick: Okay, now on this note, I like to think of everything every religion has ever said, or every mystic has ever talked about, as a hypothesis that could be explored. A lot of religion is all about belief, but in my opinion, it would be more sensible, more practical, more useful to approach everything that anybody has ever said—but religions in this context—as a hypothesis that we could explore experientially, at least theoretically or potentially. What do you say to that?
Andrew: Well, in many ways, it’s a perfect statement in the context of this field of neurotheology. I mean, that is, to me, what neurotheology is about in many ways, which is: How do we explore the experiences that we have? How do we explore our religious and spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences? And there are multiple levels at which that can happen.
So yes, I’ve scanned maybe 300 people’s brains while they’re doing different practices, and obviously we’ll talk about that later on. But there’s also just the idea of what do people actually think and feel? Can I explore what you’re feeling and thinking?
Surveying Common Features of Intense Spiritual Experiences
One of the things that we talked about in our book, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain, is the data from a survey where we asked people about their most intense experiences. And simply, what we’re saying is, let’s not rely on what Buddha said. Let’s not rely on what the great mystics have said. But let’s just ask people: What do they feel? What are they experiencing? What is it like for them? And are there commonalities? Are there similarities, differences, and so forth?
We can actually gain a lot of information about the investigation of those experiences. So I completely agree with you. I mean, to me, that really lies at the heart of neurotheology, which is that ability to explore, whether it’s biologically exploring, whether it’s looking at what other people are feeling and thinking based on how we ask them questions, or what we do personally.
And as I said, to me, it’s all going together. It’s not just me contemplating these questions for myself; it’s me asking you what was experienced in your own mind, and it’s saying, well, what else is going on at the level even of the human brain or our consciousness?
Rick: Yeah, in chapter one of your book, it’s entitled “The Happy Prison of the Brain,” and I think that can kind of relate to what we’re saying here. In other words, why don’t you explain the phrase rather than me?
Andrew: Sure. Well, I always say—and this was again part of the crux of my problem—well, how do we … we’re kind of trapped within our brain. We are looking out at the world around us and trying to make some sense out of it. So, to some degree, it is a prison.
All we ever know is what our brain informs us about the world. So everything that we see—when we see colors out in the world, when we see trees and animals, when we hear sounds of traffic or whatever—that’s all being processed by our brain.
And as long as we’re inside of our brain, which is basically where we are, we’re never totally sure if what we think on the inside works with regard to what is out there on the outside. We never know if it’s an absolute one-to-one correspondence.
And in fact, part of what we’ve looked at in some of our previous work is that our brain actually—I mean, it does a remarkable job on one hand, but it also makes a tremendous number of mistakes, both in our perceptions of the world and in the way we think about and believe in the world.
So it really is, in many ways, this prison that kind of traps us inside with no clear way of getting out. Now, part of why I call it a happy prison is that our brain basically keeps telling us that even though we are very limited in trying to understand what is essentially an infinite universe, we seem to be okay with that.
I mean, we don’t go through the world thinking, “Oh my gosh, the world is going to end because I have no idea what’s really going on out there.” Our brain keeps telling us, “You’ve got it all figured out. You understand the world, and when you get into the car and turn the key, the engine’s going to go on, and you know what streets to take to get to work,” or whatever.
So we kind of rely on all of that, and we go through life very blissfully happy with regard to most of that in general. And any time the brain makes a mistake, it usually just keeps right on going and never bothers to tell us.
So that’s why, to me, it really is this kind of prison that we’re all in. The question is, is there any way of ultimately escaping it? Do we need to escape it, and what would that ultimately do for us?
I mean, it gets back almost to the allegory of the cave in Plato, that you’re kind of trapped looking at things in one particular way, and then sometimes you have an opportunity to turn around. But how many times do you have to keep turning around or keep going to that next level? And as we were joking right before we went on, the next universe, the next dimension? Our brain is just right here, so it’s a real challenge.
Rick: Well, as you know, enlightenment is sometimes synonymous with the word “liberation,” and the idea there is that what we really are is not this little tiny meat puppet, but that we are eternal, unbounded, universal consciousness, which is not constrained by even the universe, much less a brain.
And that enlightenment is the shift to realization of our true identity as that. So, at that point, it would seem one has been released from the prison of the brain, and yet one is still functioning. That universality has come to a point where, in this body at least, it is able to function as a living reality through this particular instrument.
Andrew: Right.
Rick: Yeah.
Andrew: Well, what you said is very much something that I’ve said in a slightly different way. What I always say to people is that part of why I got into the study of spiritual experiences, and particularly the mystical ones, as you mentioned, is because those are the only examples of human experience that I’m aware of where the person does escape the brain, or at least reports that.
They hit some universal consciousness or universal mind or whatever it is, or some infinite oneness of the universe. That’s the only place where you ever actually hear of somebody theoretically doing it.
Those are the most important experiences for us to look at if we’re going to get to the answer to that question of what are we supposed to think about in our brain, in our mind, about the world?
So, to me, those are the most important experiences for us to look at if we’re going to get to the answer to that question of, well, what are we supposed to think about in our brain, in our mind, about the world? Because that may be the only avenue that we have out.
And again, I agree with you as well that part of where the neurotheology piece comes back into it is not just thinking about what that experience is—that infinite oneness or that infinite consciousness—but how does it then come back and relate to ourselves, to our brain?
Are we creating it in our brain? Are we receiving it in our brain? As you mentioned, is the brain just sort of an instrument through which these processes work? And what would all of that ultimately mean in terms of who we are as human beings, how we are to eventually understand the universe itself, our place within it, and what those kinds of mystical or enlightenment experiences actually are?
So I would wholeheartedly concur with that thought. And that, to me, is part of why I really have spent so much time trying to key in on what those experiences are and how we can understand them as part of the larger process.
✨ Consciousness, matter, and the brain
Rick: Yeah. I’m sure some skeptics would say, “Yeah, you are creating it with your brain. It’s ridiculous to suggest that you are some kind of universal consciousness; there is no such thing. Your brain is somehow tricking you into having this experience.”
But on the flip side, some ancient traditions would say, “Well, consciousness is really the foundation of it all, and everything that we see as apparently physical is in fact consciousness sort of interacting with itself and giving rise to the appearance of physicality. And that consciousness somehow has this agenda where it evolves more and more complex, sophisticated forms through which it can experience itself as a living reality in an embodied sense, and that enlightenment or liberation is a sort of end goal of that whole universal process. We finally come back home from whence we started,” to paraphrase T. S. Eliot.
Andrew: Right. An early article that I had written with Eugene D’Aquili addressed this very issue, where we were talking about consciousness and the brain, and I agree. To me, there are two very basic ways of looking at it. There are probably multiple ways, but to me there are two very basic ways of looking at it. One is the scientific way, which says the universe is matter, and out of that matter consciousness arises.
The Unresolved Origin of Consciousness
The problem, of course, with that is we have no explanation as to how consciousness would arise out of matter. To my knowledge, even though there have been books written called Consciousness Explained or whatever, no one has really put together how that would actually happen. So to me, that’s a limitation of what science can say. Now, maybe science will figure it out someday, but at the moment we seem to have this pretty fundamental limitation.
The problem, of course, with that is we have no explanation as to how consciousness would arise out of matter. To my knowledge, even though there have been books written called Consciousness Explained or whatever, no one has really put together how that would actually happen. So to me, that’s a limitation of what science can say. Now, maybe science will figure it out someday, but at the moment we seem to have this pretty fundamental limitation.
On the other hand, as you mentioned, there’s the alternative where we say, “Well, the universe is consciousness, and somehow the material world arises out of that,” whatever that means. We struggle to understand how that would happen. What is that? Everything that you said—that consciousness ultimately kind of manifests itself into a physical universe—but how does that happen? And why would there be a speed of light? Why would all of these things happen in a very physical kind of way?
So it seems to me that at the moment, whether one takes a totally spiritual path or a totally material path, neither of them quite gets us all the way there. And to me, again, this is where I find some value in the idea of neurotheology as a way of saying, “Let’s take both paths together and see where they ultimately meet in the middle.”
I’ve always said, I’m not sure if it’s 50/50 or 90/10 or whatever, but somehow we need to understand what those different sides of the coin are. And maybe that’s just it. Sometimes I’ve even mused over the possibility that consciousness and matter are basically two ways of looking at the same thing.
In an analogous way—not to invoke quantum mechanics per se—when we look at an electron as either a particle or a wave, for example, it depends on how you measure it, how you look at it. It may relate to the entire universe: if we look at it from the perspective of consciousness, we find consciousness, and if we look at it from the perspective of measurement, we find the material world. I don’t know, but again, those are, to me, the questions that need to be explored as part of this process.
Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting to note that many enlightened people have said, “Well, when I look at the world, I see myself. I’m seeing that same stuff of consciousness, as it were, that I had known myself to be at some point earlier on.” Maybe initially there was some glimpse of pure awareness, but the world seemed separate and concrete still. Eventually, even the appreciation of the world is in terms of the self, and so that’s a kind of a unity state in which there’s really only one thing, and that’s consciousness.
Andrew: Right, right. And again, it gets back to your point about how this can be investigated, and there can be some very creative ways. There’s a very large literature out there of people looking at how consciousness can manipulate matter, and at a distance—whatever that means—but at least from a physical perspective, it looks like it’s at a distance.
There have been some very creative approaches to that. The data has been very compelling, obviously controversial as well, because it ultimately entails a pretty substantial paradigm shift in terms of how we understand our mind and our brain.
There’s even a very interesting study that a colleague of mine has been working on, looking at near-death experiences. Part of what happens in a near-death experience is this experience where you rise out of your body, kind of float up to the top of the ceiling, and look down on things.
He had this very clever idea that if you could go to trauma bays where it’s likely that somebody’s going to die and have a near-death experience, you could put a shelf above somebody’s head and put some picture on the opposite side of it, like the Eiffel Tower or something like that. Then, if somebody has a near-death experience and you come back and talk to them about what they saw and what they felt, if they say, “Yeah, I floated up to the room, and it was the strangest thing, but suddenly I saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower,” that would have some huge implications as to whether their brain really is able to separate from, or, the other way around, whether consciousness is able to separate from the brain.
So there are ways of looking at these kinds of questions both in a very personal, reflective way—which goes back to what the mystics would say about their own experiences—and by also being able to apply a bit of a scientific perspective that might actually bring some very exciting results. We have a lot to look forward to, I hope, but it’ll be very interesting to see whether we’re able to explore those issues and find some information that will radically change the way we think about our world.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard you say that neurotheology is kind of in its infancy and there’s a huge range of potential progress for it to make over the coming years, decades, and centuries.
Andrew: Sure, I hope so.
Rick: Yeah, and I love the whole science-spirituality interface, even though I have no scientific training, but I really feel like spirituality can benefit tremendously from the sort of empirical rigor of a scientific approach, in which we don’t get all caught up in moods and imaginations and God knows what, but we’re able to proceed in a careful, verifiable, experiential manner.
There have been some spiritual teachers who’ve talked that way. I think the Buddha kind of did. He didn’t want people to get all caught up in fancies; he wanted them to have direct experience. He said, “Don’t even believe what I say. Prove it in your own experience.”
Andrew: Exactly, exactly. I completely concur with that idea of trying to understand. I think there’s huge value in each of us working within that prison of our brain to explore the questions for ourselves.
Part of what I talk about in my book, Principles of Neurotheology, is some of the aspects that we need to think about methodologically. It gets back to what you were just saying, which is part of what I think science can help us understand a little bit: the biases and the beliefs that we have, and how we invoke them in different ways.
When I talk about these topics, and you mentioned an atheist, for example, who might come at this in a different way, what are the beliefs that any given individual has? How are they using those beliefs? How does it change the way they think about and address these kinds of questions? I think sometimes being able to demonstrate that for people can be very valuable.
Whether it’s a survey of people’s beliefs, so often we just inherently assume that we know what somebody believes because they call themselves a Buddhist, or because they call themselves Catholic, or whatever, as opposed to actually asking them the questions, asking them what they really feel, and trying to understand how they’re defining something, whether it’s the same way that we’re defining it.
We’ve already, in this interview, talked about a variety of terms like consciousness and spirituality. What do they mean? What is consciousness?
Rick: Yeah, I think we really should nail all that down somehow.
Andrew: Right. My very first principle of neurotheology is the principle of definitions. While it’s always going to be a challenge to truly come to a universally accepted definition of virtually any of these terms, we should at least start with that. When I say “consciousness,” what do I mean? What do you mean when you say “consciousness”? Can we use that information so that at least we know what we’re talking about, and then walk from there?
But definitions also have some very interesting issues. What’s the source of a definition? Let’s talk about consciousness. Should the definition of consciousness come from Buddhism? Should it come from a monotheistic tradition? I’m a doctor, so when I say somebody’s conscious, that really just means they’re awake. That doesn’t refer to the consciousness that we talk of in terms of self-reflective consciousness, and it certainly doesn’t refer to any kind of universal consciousness.
People have looked at the relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics, so there’s a physics element to it, and there’s a philosophical element. In all of those, how do we then begin to craft what consciousness may be, so that we can better understand what we mean when we talk about it and help us to better understand it?
Rick: Yeah, I think an underlying point to the point you just made, and which we discussed earlier, is that regardless of our understandings, attitudes, opinions, perceptions, and so on, there must be some kind of actual reality out there that is not subservient to our understanding.
A stop sign is a stop sign, and if some people see it as a giraffe or something, that’s not the stop sign’s problem. What we’re all trying to do is the old blind man and the elephant metaphor: feeling different parts of the elephant and coming up with completely different descriptions.
What we’re trying to do, if we really want to understand what’s what, is arrive at a congruence between our perception and understanding and the actual reality of things—and ideally, a collective one, where we’re all sort of on the same page. We’re far from that, but that should be a goal, maybe.
Andrew: Well, absolutely, and that is very much so. I mean, part of what I see as the value of neurotheology is helping people to understand the differences that we have in terms of our beliefs and the biases and so forth that we each hold, but also, again, coming back and saying, “But you know what?” Part of the thing is that we each have a frontal lobe, we each have a temporal lobe in our brain, and so all of those different parts of our brain for each one of us are looking at the world and interpreting the world.
And so we bring in our genetics, how we were raised, what sacred texts we may have read when we were a child. We all had different teachers and different life experiences. Maybe some of us lost a parent or a sibling; maybe some of us had very happy childhoods or very sad childhoods. All of this brings us to wherever we are in the moment as we now look at the world and try to make some sense out of it.
So I think that, again, trying to do that in a very systematic way and in a way that can try to bring in not just what the spiritual side says and not just what science says, but to bring them together in a way that hopefully helps to inform both sides, as well as ultimately helps to inform us.
In fact, part of why I also enjoy the field of neurotheology is that when I go and give a talk or do an interview, it’s exciting to me because each person, each group, can take different things from it. So my discussions with a group of psychiatrists, where we might get into, “Well, is a mystical experience a psychotic delusion or not?” That’s an interesting, fascinating discussion for a psychiatrist to have.
That’s not necessarily the kind of conversation you’re going to have with a group of people in a church or a synagogue, or a group of mystics who might hold those experiences as the highest type of experiences we can have. It might be interesting for them to know that sometimes people think that they’re psychotic, but also, why are they not psychotic? What are the reasons why it isn’t that way? And how do we build all of that information together?
Rick: Yeah, a thought that occurs to me is that if you had a large collection of people that had “attained enlightenment” and had broken out of the happy prison of the brain and had realized their true nature as universal awareness, that is not to say that they’re still not going to have different perceptions, attitudes, and opinions as individuals.
I know people who probably fit that description who are all across the political spectrum, who have different attitudes about this and that. I mean, Papaji, for instance, a famous sage in Lucknow, hated Pakistan because he had grown up there and his family was kicked out when India was divided. He used to be screaming his head off during India-Pakistan soccer matches, rooting for India.
And so that was his attitude. There could be some enlightened guy in Pakistan who had the exact opposite attitude. So this universality we’re talking about doesn’t necessarily totally infuse into individuality.
Andrew: Exactly, and some of the things, as I mentioned when we were talking earlier about my background and training, I was very struck by when reading the Bhagavad Gita—the idea that you could attain enlightenment, but sometimes you still have to go to battle.
Sometimes you still have to live and do certain things because of the way our body manifests. Now, I don’t know; maybe someday we will achieve some new evolutionary enlightenment and no longer need a physical body or whatever. But there will always be certain elements of whatever the universe is that we have to contend with, even though we may understand it fully.
There’s a similar parallelism to science. We may be able to understand the nature of the atom or what quantum mechanics is, but at the end of the day, we’re still going to put the glass on the table or fill up our tank of gas in our car so that we can go somewhere.
We understand that even though we might look at some incredible aspects of the world, what do they ultimately mean on a very practical level? And even though we may understand the dynamics of airspeed and all that, we may still want our football team to win, or we might still want our soccer team to win. And that’s a different kind of experience for people.
But I do think that—and this is part of what has come out of some of our surveys—there are certain elements, and perhaps a way of saying it is appreciations or compassion, that help us to understand that even though I may not like Pakistan, I understand what a Pakistani person is and that they’re part of this universe.
So I can say, “I want my team to win,” or “I want this to happen,” but you kind of operate on another level as well. I think that’s part of what those experiences are about. Again, I think that’s part of what we see when people report back from having these experiences: They do have a new appreciation and an understanding for other people, and a compassion for the idea that people have different viewpoints.
Rick: Yeah, certainly universal love and compassion are kind of traditional characteristics of enlightened beings.
Andrew: Exactly.
Rick: You know, saintliness, that kind of thing. So I didn’t mean to malign Papaji there; it was just a personal point.
Andrew: We’ll let him slide on this.
Rick: Yeah. One little wrap-up point from 10 minutes ago I just wanted to say: It always puzzles me that a person could call themselves both an atheist and a scientist. You can call yourself an agnostic and a scientist, but an atheist? Because again, you’re being rigid about a hypothesis that you can’t really disprove.
Andrew: Right. Well, yes, I mean, I’ve always tried to make the argument that, again, we are all trapped within our brain—the atheist as much as the religious and spiritual person. So when a scientist says, “This universe is measurable; it is something that we can observe; it operates based on certain rules and things that are observable to me and measurable,” those are assumptions. Those are theories, ideas, and assumptions that are made. Ultimately, they are beliefs.
They’re good beliefs, I mean, they work and they can be very helpful, and they help us to explore the world around us in a materialistic way. But I certainly know a number of atheists who have said to me, “I don’t have any beliefs. Everything that I know, I know.” And I’m saying, “But look at the data. Look at the data that shows…”
Rick: It seems so arrogant.
Andrew: Right, and the data is just the opposite. No matter what any of us think about the world, we are ultimately—we talk about the prison of the brain—all I know right now is what’s going on in my room.
I’m assuming that the electrons and so forth that are connecting me to you are doing it in a way that makes sense. Hopefully, I’m answering questions that are being asked and interpreting what you’re trying to do in an appropriate way. But I’m just aware of what’s happening right around me, and everyone is.
So for anyone to come to some conclusion that they absolutely get it and understand the world to the exclusion of other ideas, it goes back to your analogy, which I also use a lot: the blind man with the elephant. We have an infinite universe, so for any of us to think that somehow we’re even close to understanding what the world is about seems, as you said, very arrogant and not really aware of our own biases and the issues that our brain brings to us.
Rick: And the history of science is littered with people who were adamant like that and then were later proven wrong.
Andrew: Absolutely.
Rick: So then there’s a whole… Go ahead.
Andrew: Whenever anybody says to me, “Well, science is going to lead to the moral way of thinking about things in the right way,” I say, “But how many scientists do you know?” I mean, scientists have been pretty nasty to each other over the years.
As bad as the church was to Galileo, anytime somebody comes up with a new idea, whether it’s quantum mechanics or any variety of new ideas that come about, a lot of times the scientific community not only disagrees but goes out of its way to ridicule and destroy people’s careers and things like that. They’re human beings too, and we’re all in that same boat.
Rick: I remember hearing—I don’t know if this is true or not—that surgeons used to, not routinely but on occasion, scrape a scalpel on their shoe before doing surgery, just to ridicule Louis Pasteur.
Andrew: Well, right. It’s always amazing to me just how strongly scientists adhere to their own ideas and beliefs about the world, whether it’s health or something else.
The example I give a lot is when I was going through medical school, everyone believed that if you got a stomach ulcer, it was because you had too much acid in your stomach. Then somebody had the crazy idea that it was an infection.
I remember reviewing the articles, and everybody said, “Oh, the articles are terrible and they’re poorly done, and these people don’t know what they’re talking about. How crazy is that?” Today, we treat people with antibiotics.
Rick:H. pylori, right?
Andrew:H. pylori, exactly. On and on it goes.
Rick: Anybody who’s interested in this particular topic would do well to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I believe that was the title of the book where he talks about the whole idea of paradigms and resistance to the change of paradigms, and then anomalies that bring it to the point where the paradigm has to shift, and how everybody gets dragged, kicking and screaming, into the next way of seeing things.
Someone else said, “Science progresses by a series of funerals.”
Andrew: Funerals, right. One funeral at a time. Now, again, here is where neurotheology has an opportunity to come in and say, “Okay, what goes on in your brain as a belief changes?” Take somebody who goes through an enlightenment experience. Why does that experience change the person? What is it about that experience that is unique, that is different from all the other experiences that we have?
Let’s say somebody is listening to us right now. Maybe I say something that they’ve never heard before. Their brain has several options. They can either say, “Well, yeah, this guy has written a bunch of papers, but I don’t know who he is,” and blow off whatever I say. Maybe they will look into a book that I’ve written or some articles that somebody else has written and say, “Oh, okay, well, there is some information here, but it still doesn’t totally make sense.” Or maybe they’ll say, “Gee, that’s incredible. That’s a whole new way of thinking that I never thought about.”
What does go on in our brain that helps us to evaluate an idea, a particular belief, a particular fact, whatever term one wants to use? How much information, how much data, for each one of us do we need in order to convince us to think about things in a different way?
We’ve talked about atheists a few times. One of my very good friends, who’s a very, very staunch atheist, said to me one time, “Well, look, if there’s really a God, why doesn’t God just come down here, shake my hand, and say, ‘Here I am,’ and from then on I will absolutely believe in God?”
I said, “No, you won’t. You’ll check yourself into a mental institution because you think that you’ve now had a psychotic break, that you’re now seeing God.” If his initial belief is such that he’s never going to believe that God exists, then no matter how much data you bring—at some point, there’s going to be enough data, theoretically, that would change somebody’s way of thinking. But exactly how much, and of what type, and how do we think about that? These are the questions that remain for us to look at.
Rick: Yeah. Some people think Jesus was God or the Son of God, and look what happened to him.
Andrew: Right. It brings us back to movies like Oh, God! and…
Rick: Right. Morgan Freeman.
Or Bruce Almighty .
Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. How much do you need to be convinced that the world is different? The other movie that I always thought really captured it very well was Contact, the one that was written by Carl Sagan. It ultimately brings you to the peak moment where the Jodie Foster character, who is a pure scientist and does not believe in anything spiritual, has this unbelievable experience. She has no proof about it, and yet she feels that she needs to argue that it is the true experience of the universe.
It’s a very touching moment where the person who is the spiritual person in her life says, “Our goals are one and the same,” which is basically the exploration of truth.
🕊️ Science and spirituality as complementary methods
Rick: Yeah, that leads me into something I wanted to talk about with you. We were talking a few minutes ago about how a scientific approach could be really good for spirituality. I think that spirituality perhaps even has more to offer science than vice versa, because spirituality explores realms of reality and has the means to do so, at least ideally, which scientific instruments cannot explore.
I often like to think of the human nervous system as the ultimate scientific instrument—you probably thought that too—which, if used in the right way, can open us up to realms of experience that no Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider could ever touch. And it can be used in a nice, rigorous, systematic way.
I often like to think of the human nervous system as the ultimate scientific instrument—you probably thought that too—which, if used in the right way, can open us up to realms of experience that no Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider could ever touch. And it can be used in a nice, rigorous, systematic way.
Andrew: Right. In terms of my own approach to these questions, I again wholeheartedly agree with that point. If I were to just look at any of these questions from an externalized kind of scientific perspective, I would learn things. But to me, the far more important aspect, in many ways, is the personal contemplative aspect of what I do, which I feel is, in many ways, an experiment—a scientific approach to trying to do something very systematically to understand the world around us.
So I also agree with what you were saying, that spirituality has a lot to offer what science can say about the world. I think science also has things to offer to the spiritual realm as well.
But I think that there are these aspects of the world—I mean, you mentioned the Hubble Telescope. Ultimately, when we see that incredible picture of these billions of galaxies that are millions and billions of light-years away, that’s still ultimately an experience that we’re having. Whatever is captured on that film is just what that instrument does, but it’s the human person who is now saying, “Oh my gosh, that’s a galaxy,” or, “That’s gravity at work. That’s Einstein,” or whatever.
And so it still is, no matter how good the science is, really in many ways meaningless unless there’s that human person, that human consciousness, that can understand it a little bit more. But again, as you mentioned earlier, whatever the external world is, there’s that thing that’s out there that we keep trying to chip away at in one way or another and trying to figure it out.
And again, I would agree that without that spiritual piece to it, I think we’re really going to fall short of the mark of trying to understand what the universe is all about.
Rick: Yeah. Now, as a neurophysiologist, I imagine you could hook people up to the appropriate instruments—EEG and whatnot—put them in a separate room, and you could be in the other room looking at monitors. You could tell whether they were awake or asleep or dreaming, right?
Andrew: To a large extent, yes.
Rick: To a pretty great extent, but you’d have a hard time telling what they were thinking in their waking state or what they were dreaming about in their dreaming state and so on. The instrumentality can’t really detect that kind of thing. Go ahead—you wanted to say something to that?
Well, right. I teach a course at the University of Pennsylvania called Human Brain Imaging, and one of the things I really emphasize to people is that, as great as these scanners are at looking at blood flow and all these changes in the brain, if I don’t know what the person is actually thinking and feeling, all of those changes become irrelevant.
Andrew: Well, right. I teach a course at the University of Pennsylvania called Human Brain Imaging, and one of the things I really emphasize to people is that, as great as these scanners are at looking at blood flow and all these changes in the brain, if I don’t know what the person is actually thinking and feeling, all of those changes become irrelevant.
So you need to have some subjective measure, whether you ask them, watch what they’re doing, or observe something that’s going on, so that you have some inkling as to what’s going on within their brain.
Now, interestingly, apropos of your question or your point, there was a study that was done where they had people think about two different things, and they scanned their brains when they said, “Think about thing A,” and, “Think about thing B.” Then, when they could say, “Okay, now you think about whichever one you want,” they could actually determine whether they were thinking about A or B with about 80 percent, I think, accuracy.
So you can start to tell what’s going on in a person’s mind a little bit, but you still don’t know for sure until you ask them. Even on a very practical level, again, I teach a lot in terms of psychiatry and so forth, and I say to people, “Look, if I were to do a brain scan of you and it looked like somebody who had depression”—it had the characteristic findings of depression—and I went to the person and said, “Your brain looks like you have depression. Do you feel depressed?” If they said to me, “No, I feel great,” I’m not going to treat them. I mean, I’m not going to start giving them an antidepressant.
And conversely, if I have somebody who comes in and I do a scan of their brain and it looks totally normal, and they say, “I’m ready to kill myself. I feel so depressed,” I’m absolutely obligated to treat that person, even though I’m looking at a “normal brain.”
So whatever we see on a brain scan, you have to know what’s going on within the person themselves, whether it’s a spiritual issue or something clinical.
Rick: So based on what you just said, do you feel that the shortcoming is really with the technology? That if the technology were infinitely sophisticated, there would be a correlation between what you were detecting with it and what the person was experiencing?
Andrew: Well, one of the things that I talk about in Principles of Neurotheology is that I realize there’s a bit of an uncertainty idea. Just like we have the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, there’s sort of a neurotheology uncertainty principle as well.
I actually think that it is not a limit. There are limitations in how good we can get at this point. Certainly, when I talk about a brain scan and say, “This area of the brain lit up; it got more active,” there could be 20 neurons in there, there could be 100 neurons, there could be a million neurons. I don’t know exactly what’s going on.
So certainly we should theoretically be able to get better and better along those lines. That is part of the process. But I think at some fundamental level, the neuron itself—whether it’s something going on within a neuron, the complexity of neurons, or whatever—is where the thought arises.
In fact, again, this is another point that I bring up with my students. I say, “Well, look, you’ve got neurons that are all interconnected with each other. You’ve got blood flow that goes into them. There’s an electrical signal that conducts down the length of the neuron to the next neuron. There are neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin that are released when they get there. There’s metabolic activity. There’s mitochondrial activity. There are all these things going on. Where in all of that is the actual thought itself? Where is consciousness itself?”
And again, I personally think that we might do better and better at figuring out where it is. We might be able to exclude certain things, for example, but I think that we may ultimately run into an impossible gap that we can never truly bridge.
Much like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—for those who aren’t familiar with it—it basically says that it’s not our instruments. The closer we get to being able to measure something, ultimately we wind up affecting it in and of itself. So we never truly know what it is.
And I think, to a certain extent, that if you could change what somebody’s neuron is doing so that you can know what it’s doing, well, now you’re changing what the thought is. You don’t know what the person is actually thinking about in that moment.
And even if they’re telling you what’s happening, they’re still telling you several seconds after whatever has happened has happened. So you never truly know. I think it may always be a bit of an impossibility to get all the way there.
And again, it gets back to your larger point: This is why you need the spiritual. This is why you need that contemplative part, because that’s part of what that is. That’s the experience, that’s the thing that we ultimately need to find.
Higher States Beyond Waking, Dreaming, and Sleeping
Rick: One point that’s been in the back of my mind for a while, as we’ve been speaking, is why I brought up that thing about waking, dreaming, and sleeping, being able to tell what state you’re in. Many spiritual authorities speak of higher states of consciousness as being distinct, unique states of consciousness, as different from waking, dreaming, and sleeping as they are from each other, both subjectively and physiologically. They say that we have the potential to experience these states, not only temporarily but in an abiding way, but we just haven’t unfolded that potential.
Much of the stuff you study might be considered to be variations of the waking state, where a person is having a particular experience of this, that, or the other type, and then they continue on in the waking state after they’ve had that experience.
Whereas it might also be an interesting field of study, and maybe you’ve done this to some extent, to study people who report being in a completely different state of consciousness. For instance, one characteristic of such a state, which I have pages of notes on from various people who have reported it, is maintaining pure awareness throughout waking, dreaming, and sleeping, even possibly during anesthesia. Not awareness of anything—not that your senses are functioning—but that awareness itself is awake to itself, even when the senses are shut down.
So that would be an interesting thing to study. Who knows what other higher states there may be? You kind of want to parse out what those states are, as opposed to speaking in tongues or things that might just be variations or aberrations of the waking state.
Andrew: Right, and so there are some very interesting points you raise there. Now, we’ve touched on this in our work in several different ways. On a more philosophical level, I suppose, we talk about epistemic states, that each of these states are different ways of knowing the universe, essentially, and that they are, as you were saying, what the mystics might say are fundamentally distinct states.
In our model of these different epistemic states, we talk about the everyday reality state. That is a state in which we look at the world, perceive objects in the world, and see how they interact with each other in certain ways. Maybe we use science or whatever, but that is very distinct from a mystical state, where we look at the world in a completely different way.
What’s also interesting about these epistemic states is that we tend to look at people who are in the other state, from wherever we are now, as being in a less-real state or a state that is an illusion. People use different terms to talk about it, but it’s not the same kind of state.
Again, that’s part of where my profound interest in studying mystical experience comes from, because when we’re in a dream, when we’re dreaming and we wake up, for the average person, you’re in a dream. It can feel incredibly real, and your brain is responding as if that is the true reality. Then you wake up. If somebody’s chasing you in the dream, you’re out of breath, you’re scared.
Rick: Yeah, and probably your actual heart is pounding.
Andrew: And your heart is pounding, right. You wake up, and for a split second you’re still scared and running in your brain. But the moment that you wake up, then you say, “Oh, that was just a dream.” You relegate it to an inferior aspect of reality.
Now, when people have the mystical experience, the same thing happens again, where you now look back on everyday reality and say, “That was the dream,” or “That was the less-real state, and now I’m in the real one.” But what’s also unique about the mystical state is that if people come out of that state, they still perceive that state to be more fundamentally real than the everyday reality experience. Then, as you said, some people will stay in that state.
Rick: Some people don’t come out of it.
Andrew: Exactly. And now it gets back to what you were also talking about. Again, here’s where neurotheology, I think, could come in, because we could hook up somebody to—and we haven’t, but you mentioned it would be great to be able to bring in somebody who…
Rick: I can refer you to some people.
Andrew: That would be wonderful. I would love that. It would be great to be able to look at what’s going on in that person’s brain and how that is relative to, how that relates to, a different person’s brain.
Now, we may not be able to find a distinction that’s valuable, in part because of the limitations of our science. But there may ultimately be—as I’ve often said to people—in some senses, the most incredible finding I might ever have on one of my brain-scan studies is that somebody has this incredible mystical experience and nothing changes in their brain. Maybe I would have actually captured something that wasn’t biological, but was that consciousness, that spiritual piece that didn’t specifically have anything to do with the biology of who we are.
Rick: Maybe, but isn’t there always a correlation between mind and body? Any thought we think, anything we experience, there must be something going on in the brain.
Andrew: There should be, there should be, yes. The point is how much of it is truly biological versus how much of it may actually be something beyond that. But yes, ultimately there could always be some biological signature.
The other analogy that I sometimes make is that some of what we’re trying to do is trying to understand a boat by studying its wake. You can kind of see—you get a sense that it’s a big boat or a little boat, or it’s fast or slow or whatever—but you don’t know a whole lot. There’s still a lot that you’re not going to get from studying the wake.
Rick: Yeah, one thing, when I think of your field, there’s a maddeningly vast array of variables. It must be almost impossible to proceed with as much scientific rigor as scientists ordinarily like to.
As you were speaking just then, I was thinking, “Okay, yeah, there’s the subtle body, though. There’s the kundalini, there’s the chakras, there’s the nadis, there’s all this subtle stuff going on that could account for spiritual experiences that wouldn’t necessarily show up in the gross body.”
And then, of course, you have hundreds and thousands of different techniques. Even if everybody’s practicing the same technique, they all have different nervous systems, different backgrounds, different conditionings, and so on. So it really seems like it’s going to have to be a mix of hard and very soft science for a long time. It’s hard to pin it all down.
Andrew: Yeah, and one of the things that I do say to a lot of my scientific colleagues is how this whole field may actually benefit science, because you’re right. We’re trying to study something which is not easy to study. We’re trying to study something which is subjective. We’re trying to study something which has a very individualized aspect to it.
Trying to figure out, if you lined up 10 mystics and they all felt oneness, did they all feel it the same way? Going back to the work that we did with our spiritual survey, our survey of spiritual experiences, some people said that when they had the experience, they felt oneness. Some people said they felt a force. Some people felt God. Some people felt an energy.
Is that all the same experience that is then described differently based on how we use our language, or are they fundamentally different experiences?
And again, I think you’re also touching on what we talked about earlier: neurotheology, in many ways, is in its infancy because there are so many huge questions and so many variables that if you had a billion dollars and you could study all thousands of techniques, experiences, and individuals, then maybe you could start to say something a little bit more definitive about it.
But you still have the experience itself, that consciousness itself, which may always be something that is a little bit beyond whatever our brain scans can show.
Rick: Yeah, and even if you had a billion dollars, I don’t think this is the kind of problem that you can just throw money at. I think it’s going to take decades, generations, for this whole science to evolve.
Maybe there will eventually be some highly advanced society which understands the spiritual dimensions and all the potentials of human experience as rigorously as we now understand Newtonian physics or something. But boy, it’s going to be a while.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely.
Testing extraordinary experiences
Rick: Okay, a couple of questions came in, let me ask them. This is from Francois in Glastonbury, UK. He says, “Can we explain experiences in the light of neuroscience? Experiences such as out-of-body experiences, premonitions, visions, near-death experiences, having our awareness move out of our being into something or someone else, et cetera. Experiences of oneness and bliss seem to be explained as a brain state, as in the case of Jill Bolte Taylor. How do we know there is a higher purpose underlying this?”
Andrew: Well, I think it touches on some of the things that we’ve been talking about. On the one hand, there are certain types of experiences that we do a little bit better at, in terms of trying to isolate. There have certainly been a lot of studies of different emotional responses, and we know that if somebody feels love or if somebody feels compassion, then that is something that we might be able to show has something to do with the limbic system, for example.
On the other hand, with some of the more ethereal, nonmaterial types of experiences, whether it’s something like a psychic phenomenon, premonitions, or out-of-body experiences, we can potentially offer some ideas as to how that type of thing could happen.
For example, we might postulate—and I know we’ve done this when we wrote an article on near-death experiences—that, when people talk about the out-of-body experience component, there is a sensorial representation of the body in the brain. Perhaps, because of some neuronal shift, that sensory representation of the body can somehow be perceived as shifting outside. And so we now feel our body, but not in ourselves; we feel it outside.
Rick: Yeah, but then you see something that was on a ledge outside the hospital window that you couldn’t possibly have seen, and that kind of thing.
Andrew: Right. Well, and that gets back to the study I was talking about earlier, which is that theoretically, then, we should be able to find ways of… Theoretically, there are ways of testing those kinds of phenomena, and then, if we can demonstrate that those phenomena do occur, we can still look at what’s going on in the brain.
So again, an interesting study that we did was a study of Brazilian mediums. We had a bunch of people come up from Brazil who did a specific kind of practice called psychography, where they got into a trance state and wrote down what they thought the spirits were telling them to write down.
Now, this is perhaps another really important point about neurotheology: we always have to be very careful about whatever conclusions we draw. We saw changes in their brains, and one of the things that we saw, for example, is that their frontal lobes, which are located right behind your forehead, tended to quiet down.
The frontal lobes normally help us think purposely about the world and figure out where we are in the world and what we’re doing in the world. So the idea that they may shut down to allow things to come to us more easily may make some sense.
Now again, when I show that the frontal lobe changes in this person who is experiencing the spirits, that just tells me what’s going on in their brain when they have that experience. It doesn’t prove to me that the spirits are floating around in the world or communicating with them. It doesn’t prove that they’re not.
It just proves what’s going on in the brain when they have the experience. Again, that comes back to the fact that we need that spiritual side to understand what that experience truly is, but we also may be able to find ways of trying to prove certain things.
We may be able to identify something that theoretically this individual would never have known. Like you said, somebody feels that they’ve wandered down the hall and they see a patient in another room with red hair. We might be able to show or prove that. There are things that we might be able to prove, and there are also certainly limitations that we’ll have to deal with.
Rick: Yeah, and of course, repeatability is part of the scientific method.
Andrew: Which is hard.
Rick: Pardon?
Andrew: Which is hard in this instance.
Rick: Hard in this instance, yeah. Ordinarily, you read a scientific paper and they mention the exact kind of equipment they used and everything else, so somebody else could try to do the same thing and replicate it.
With this, theoretically, those Brazilian mediums could teach somebody else to be a medium in the same way, and potentially they could end up having the same experience. But then again, there are all kinds of questions about whether they’d be capable of it and whether they’re wired properly for that kind of thing.
Then again, everybody’s not wired to be a nuclear physicist, and some experiments take decades before they yield results. So the whole spiritual experiment—maybe some people are more suited for it than others, they progress more rapidly, and maybe even so, it might take them 10, 20, 30, or 40 years before they reach such and such a state that the Buddha described or something.
Andrew: Exactly. Now again, you could theoretically try to do studies to look at that. You could go to a Buddhist monastery in Tibet or something, scan all of the novices today, and then go back 30 years from now and find out who got enlightened and who didn’t.
But even there, this raises a whole other interesting point, which some of my colleagues and I have talked about: let’s take the specific point of enlightenment. Who makes that determination?
Rick: Yeah, good point. In some traditions, the master has to kind of confirm it.
Andrew: Exactly, and we’ve often thought about having not only the subjective measure of the individual, but also some external person being able to decide.
Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know that the master says, “Guy number 1, 7, and 9—I don’t think I’ve hit it yet”? On the other hand, you may have number 3 who says, “Oh, I’ve been enlightened for years.”
Rick: And again, you do fMRI and EEG on them, and sure enough, 1, 7, and 9 have it.
Andrew: Exactly, whatever that means.
Rick: You know, I’m in Fairfield, Iowa. I used to be in the TM movement, and Maharishi had this idea that students should ideally attain higher states of consciousness as they went through their academic program. Part of the testing should be some kind of neurophysiological thing where you certify that they have not only learned something about literature or physics, but that they have actually attained such and such a level of consciousness.
That never really panned out, but it’s an interesting idea.
Andrew: Well, I think part of the problem, again, also goes into trying to understand what enlightenment is. Is there a singular path? At least, again, our data suggests that there clearly is not.
When we did this survey, we had about 2,000 people who provided narratives and information. Some of them had experiences through drug-induced states, some of them had near-death experiences, some of them through meditation, and even through different types of meditation and things like that.
To take it to a very practical level, there’s a lot of ways of being a really good tennis player. You can be left-handed, you can be right-handed, you can have a one-handed backhand, or a two-handed backhand. It’s winning in the end that matters, and it doesn’t matter exactly how you get there as long as you get there.
With enlightenment, it’s an interesting question to say, “Well, if somebody takes psilocybin or LSD and has an incredible spiritual experience, or maybe even feels enlightened, are they? Is that a justifiable, legitimate way of doing it compared to the monk who spends 40 years in the monastery?” I don’t know.
But when we looked at the survey, for example, the people who did it through “natural” means versus those people who did it through drug-induced means, at least descriptively, the experience seemed extremely similar.
Rick: Yeah, but were the drug-induced people still in that state?
Andrew: No, no, exactly.
Rick: As the woman I interviewed last week said—she was a lama, an American female lama—“It’s like taking psychedelic drugs. It’s kind of like climbing a tree in the forest, and you suddenly get the panorama of the forest from a different perspective, but you still have to come back down the tree and keep on walking through the forest.” So maybe it gives you a glimpse of something, but you’re not there yet.
Andrew: Yeah, although again, when we ask people about those experiences, there are some people who are transformed by them. They may not necessarily continue to be in this state, which is a different kind of thing, but yes, absolutely.
Rick: Well, this kind of leads back to something we were talking about toward the beginning, which is common terminology: what are we talking about when we use a word like enlightenment? Also, something we’ve been talking about all along is how reliably that can be defined and how much the definition can be standardized, in terms of not only the words we use to describe it, but also the physiology of it.
Otherwise, all kinds of… You were mentioning in your notes to me earlier something like “big E” and “little e” enlightenment. I’m hesitant to even use the word “enlightenment” because it has this sort of superlative, final, static connotation, and you don’t see any real examples of that.
Andrew: Right, and again, people have used many different descriptors to describe enlightenment, wisdom, and knowledge, but also compassion, oneness, and unity. These are very distinctive kinds of statements and terms, so how do we decide on what some common theme or common description is of that kind of experience?
Again, you raise other aspects of it: the idea that there could be some experiences that are very small and some experiences that are very large. In and of itself, from a neurophysiological perspective as well as from a qualitative perspective, one thing I’m fascinated by is what my colleague and I used to talk about as a continuum of experience.
On one hand, for the individual who attains that spiritual moment or enlightenment—whatever we want to call it—there seems to be a jump. There seems to be something very distinctive that happens. But if you actually get the descriptions of these experiences and line them up, it’s hard to find the actual jump.
There are some people who, again, if you talk about the unity aspect of it, feel that everything is one. Then there are some people who feel everything is one in God, and there are other people who feel all humanity is one. Where are they? There are different degrees to which it happens.
So on one hand, it’s hard to find the jump, but on the other hand, for the person who gets it, there seems to be that jump that happens.
Rick: Yeah, one metaphor that comes to mind with this is that when Lewis and Clark went across the country, they had a very fuzzy idea of what was actually out there, and the maps they came up with after their trip were still very crude and approximate compared to what we know now.
Now we have the whole thing mapped out with satellites, probably down to the square foot, and GPS knows exactly where you are and everything. So I think we’re still at the Lewis and Clark stage in terms of understanding everything we’ve been talking about here.
There may come a time when it’s like it is now with our understanding of the topography of the country. You might be able to, 500 years from now—or whatever it would take—have a person describe their experience, hook them up to certain instruments, and tell precisely where they are on the map in terms of all the potential levels, realms, and varieties of spiritual experience.
Andrew: Right. Not to take this to a whole other level, but the more and more we develop computers and electronics, and with people already implanting certain computers into their brains, is it possible that we could find ways of achieving these different states in radically different ways than have typically been done?
And then again, are they true experiences of enlightenment? Are they different? Is it ethical to do? There are all kinds of really fascinating questions.
Rick: Yeah, I interviewed Shinzen Young, and he’s hoping to come up with some kind of contraption like that that would jumpstart enlightenment.
Andrew: Right. Well, I mean, there have been people who have already started to do that in some ways. There have been a couple of people who have used things like transcranial magnetic stimulation and different electromagnetic waves to try to turn certain parts of the brain on and off.
I think one question that you had read mentioned Jill Bolte Taylor, who had that unusual mystical experience because of a stroke in her brain.
Rick: Which we wouldn’t want to make a standardized spiritual technique.
Andrew: Exactly, so it gets very interesting.
Rick: Yeah, it does. My suspicion about these contraptions to accelerate enlightenment, or whatever—and there have been things around like that for decades, biofeedback and all this—is that they certainly can be helpful.
I just have a feeling that there’s a lot that has to be… It’s like a drug. You’re not going to work out all of your deep impressions, or vasanas, as they call them, by popping some pill. It’s going to be more of a long-term process.
I mean, I guess neuroplasticity doesn’t happen radically overnight, right? It’s something that takes time to happen incrementally.
Andrew: Right, well, there were two things I was thinking about. Let me address that first. That’s another reason why these experiences, to me, are very fascinating, because there seems to be something different about how they change the brain, which is very different from the way we normally think about the brain working.
We learn math by learning addition in first grade, subtraction in second grade, and division in third grade, and then we work up to algebra and calculus and blah, blah, blah. We develop the connections in our brain to support that over time. These experiences seem to radically change a whole person’s way of thinking about things in a moment. So how does that happen? We don’t really have a good model by which we understand how that may happen, or how we may be able to change our brain that quickly.
Rick: True, and some of these people have been doing spiritual practices for many, many years, and others have done nothing. They’re tying their shoes one morning and all of a sudden, boom, big shift.
Andrew: Exactly, exactly. And even going back to what we were just talking about, we were also drawing a very distinctive line when we talk about a drug-induced state, for example. Somebody, a college student, decides to do LSD or something like that. Maybe they have an experience, but what would happen if we gave LSD to that monk who had been in the monastery for 40 years? Would that be a different kind of kickstart to the experience because of the background and the context and everything, and would that make more sense? I don’t know.
Rick: Did you ever hear the story of Ram Dass coming to Neem Karoli Baba, who was his guru, and Neem Karoli says, “Well, where are the pills?” Ram Dass takes out a little palmful of acid tabs, and Neem Karoli drops them all, and nothing happens to him.
Andrew: Right, right, exactly. I mean, you could already be in that state, or your brain may be such that it doesn’t change things very much. So, absolutely fascinating issues.
Rick: One thing I want to talk with you about before we run out of time is free will. You’ve devoted a chapter of your book to it, and there are a number of spiritual teachers and thinkers who insist that we don’t have any. Sam Harris is one of them. He’s not really a spiritual teacher, but he’s an articulate, intelligent guy, and I forget the other guy’s name. Anyway, the number of gurus and teachers who say, “Not only do we not have free will, but there is actually no self, and the sense that we have either is some kind of illusion or delusion.” So, from your perspective as a neurophysiologist, what do you think about those points?
Andrew: So, the idea of free will—and part of why I wanted to address it in the Neurotheology book—is that, as with everything that we’ve been talking about, it’s a lot more complicated than being able to say, “Yes, we do,” or, “No, we don’t.” A lot of people who talk about the neuroscience of free will refer to a very limited set of studies in a very small number of people that basically showed that milliseconds before we make a conscious decision, or before we’re consciously aware of the decision, we actually see changes going on in the brain. The argument then is that it wasn’t our conscious choice to make that decision, but it was something that welled up from our subconscious, and that’s what it was.
Part of it is that we need a lot more data before we can even start to use that information to inform us about what free will is, or if we have it. But it also gets back to our point that we talked about earlier, which is definitions.
Part of what somebody like Sam Harris will say, or somebody who will look at that study and say, “Well, here’s this activity”—let’s just say for a moment that that study was perfectly done and it’s absolutely 100 percent right—is this: If there’s neural activity that occurs before we consciously make a decision, does that count as will?
Because what people who say we don’t have free will are basically saying is that somewhere inside of us is a little person who decides to make the thing happen, who decides to raise my arm or whatever. There’s another way of defining free will, which is that free will comes from all of me. It comes not just from my conscious brain, but also from my unconscious or subconscious brain. Altogether, that’s part of where my willfulness comes from. So that’s another way of looking at it.
And then you mentioned this: Is free will something that doesn’t actually exist on the human level, on the human ego level, because that sense of self is really just more of an illusory type of idea? But there is some kind of universal consciousness and a universal free will that we are able to tap into.
Defining Free Will Through Science and Spirituality
So there are a lot of very interesting variations on this theme. Obviously, we don’t have time to go into everything, but I think the short answer ultimately is that we need more data to look at these things. We need to have better definitions of what free will is. The definitions of free will have to include what we know scientifically, as well as what we know from a religious or spiritual perspective. Then we can try to put all of that together to hopefully have some maybe even testable hypotheses, which we could then look at and try to better figure out whether we really have free will, what it means to have it, how that relates to our brain, and how it relates to our consciousness.
Rick: Yeah, there’s one issue that sheds light on it, I think, which is that knowledge and experience are different in different states of consciousness. So what you might perceive as free will in one state of consciousness, you might later recognize wasn’t your own individual will. It’s the will of God, it’s the three gunas, or whatever.
But really, you can’t apply the rules or principles of one state to another state. That’s a kind of confusion of levels. As long as you perceive yourself as having free will, you need to exercise it responsibly and accordingly. If you reach a point at which it’s all God doing everything, then fine, but don’t pretend to have reached that if you haven’t.
Andrew: Right, right. One of the points that my late colleague Eugene d’Aquili and I talked about at one point was that when people have that mystical experience, what’s kind of interesting about it is that as our ego goes away, we sort of give our ego sense of will away, which is a scary thing to do.
Rick: Yeah, surrender.
Andrew: Yeah, and that’s surrender. But as you surrender, you get to this universal consciousness and this universal free will, however you want to define that. Even though you’ve lost it on the ego level, as you said, you gain it on a different level, and that is ultimately a very, very powerful kind of experience.
Even though you’ve lost it on the ego level, you gain it on a different level.
Rick: Yeah, I like your use of the phrase “free won’t”: You might have thoughts and impulses bubble up, and you don’t know where they came from, but there does seem to be a sort of gatekeeper who can say, “Yeah, not that one. Okay, this one’s all right.” There seems to be some kind of choice in terms of whether or not we act on things, unless—it depends on to what extent one is occluded or conditioned.
Some people just can’t help but murder the guy; they’re so driven by their vasanas, their tendencies, their conditionings. Other people think, “I’d like to punch that guy, but I won’t do it. It’s going to get me in trouble.”
Andrew: Right, right. Again, you can look at changes in the brain that might lead to that. There have been studies of violent criminals, and we see how people can regulate their emotional responses, how much they can regulate them, and how much they can’t regulate them. There are some interesting issues that come up with that.
It’s good that you bring that up, because there are some fascinating legal consequences. It ranges from the very esoteric—“Well, if you take a Christian perspective of original sin, we have to have free will”—all the way to, “Was the guy who killed that person insane, or was he moral?”
Rick: Whenever I hear that argument, I say, “Of course he was insane; he killed somebody.”
Andrew: Exactly, exactly. Like, why did you—right, exactly. But it does raise a lot of very interesting issues and problems and questions for us. This is again where I feel like neurotheology has an opportunity to be able to say, “Well, let’s look at the brain. When we make a moral decision, what are we doing? Are we using our thoughts? Are we using our emotions? Are we using certain parts of the brain to turn on or turn off?”
If there are one or two areas of our brain that are particularly relevant to moral decision-making, are they abnormal in people who have violent tendencies? Can we use that information practically in some way? Can we treat them? Can we at least make sure that we don’t let them out because they’re going to do something again, versus the person about whom we say, “No, maybe we can let them out because we know that their brain has changed,” or something like that?
Rick: Or they’ve rehabilitated, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly.
Rick: One interesting thing—I’ll let you go in a minute—but one interesting thing on this whole issue that I’ve heard is that as we evolve spiritually, we sort of work our way back to a more and more causal or fundamental level of the thought process until eventually we’re actually sitting at the switchboard, at the point from which thoughts initially sprout. From there, we do have sort of complete choice as to what’s going to bubble up or not.
But if we’re far from that, if we’re way down—it’s like a river, you know. If you’re sitting at the source of the river, maybe you could redirect it in a completely different direction quite easily. But if you’re way down at the mouth of the Ganges, where it’s pouring into the ocean, you can’t have any effect on the whole river.
Like that, somebody who’s heavily conditioned, who hasn’t gone through this whole spiritual process, is at the mercy of whatever comes up and has very little choice in the matter. But spiritual development can be thought of as traversing the river back to its source and then eventually living at the source.
Andrew: Right, right. Absolutely. Again, it gets down to, as you were saying, the different levels at which we see it. One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind at times is that I tend to—at least in my own personal belief, I feel like we probably have free will, again depending on how we wind up defining it—but I do think that whenever we try to find it, it’s a challenge to find it, because we can always ask, “Well, how were we raised? What’s in our genes? How much dopamine is circulating in our brain at that moment?”
You can figure out exactly how that theoretical process occurred, but again, that’s where the spiritual part comes back in. Can we go back to that original source and maybe know or understand what free will is, starting from that point?
Conclusion
Rick: Yeah. Okay, well, this has been a sampling of Andrew Newberg. I’m sure he and I could go on for many more hours. I could read all of his books.
Andrew: I’m sure we could.
Rick: I wish I had time to read all your books, and maybe we’ll do another one of these one of these days. We’ll come up with a whole new batch of points to discuss.
Andrew: That sounds good.
Rick: Yeah, but before we wrap it up, is there anything you would like to say in conclusion that somehow you want to leave people with?
Andrew: It probably goes back a little bit. I think what I would ultimately want to say to people goes back to some of the things that we talked about early on in the discussion, which is that I think everyone needs to continue to search these questions for themselves.
Another part of what I like about neurotheology is that I think sometimes it gives people a new language or a new perspective to bring to the table. It doesn’t eliminate the spiritual, it doesn’t eliminate consciousness, and it doesn’t eliminate meditation, but it just helps us to understand things from a new perspective that we haven’t had before.
By continuing to explore our world and to use that kind of explorative process—whether it’s personal insight, using an fMRI machine, asking people about their own ideas, or reading what other people have had to say—all of those are wonderful ways of exploring these questions and exploring that big question that we started with: What is reality, and how do we understand it?
It’s just so fascinating to think about the complexities of it and, to some degree, to be humble in the face of the immensity of the challenge and the infiniteness of the universe.
It’s just so fascinating to think about the complexities of it and, to some degree, to be humble in the face of the immensity of the challenge and the infiniteness of the universe. So that’s part of what I think all of this can lead us towards.
Rick: It really is, and I still want you to have the last word, but another important thought came to mind, which is just that I think what you’re doing is so cutting-edge and so important. We’ve talked about how powerful science is and how much it has impacted our world, but it could be argued that it’s brought us to the verge of extinction. The oceans are full of plastic, the air is being polluted, and the CO2 is rising, and all this can be attributed to science.
So what is science missing that has allowed this to happen? I think what science is missing is the dimension that spirituality brings in its pure form, and that you are a guy who is helping to marry science and spirituality. We could end up with something that is as beneficial as science has been, but benign at the same time, devoid of all the deleterious effects that science has given us.
Andrew: Sure, and I absolutely agree with that. I do hope that that’s where we can go in the future, which is understanding both sides of that process of what makes us human beings and trying to use the wonders of science with the incredible aspects of compassion and love and stewardship of the earth and the universe, and of each other.
I think it’s something that the spiritual or the religious does have an opportunity to bring to us. And again, not to go off on another tangent, but that’s part of what neurotheology also can help us with, which is what happens when spirituality goes well and what happens when it doesn’t go well.
There are certainly plenty of times when religious beliefs do not go in good directions, and certainly the atheists point them out all the time. So how do we foster the positive side of ourselves, the positive side of our spiritual aspects, and how do we use the best of the spiritual and the best of the scientific to hopefully move humanity to a new enlightenment as a species and as individuals?
Rick: Yeah, which opens up a whole other point that we could talk about next time, and that is: Can the founders of the various religions really be held accountable for what’s been done in their names? How far have the teachings of various religions drifted from what the founder actually was experiencing and teaching?
Andrew: Right. Well, yes, that will be part two.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, well, thanks, Andrew. I’ve really appreciated having this discussion with you and preparing for it as well. So I’ll be putting up a page for Andrew on batgap.com, as I always do, and I’ll have links to all of his books.
If people find this sort of thing interesting, most of your books are written for the layman, at least the ones you sent me, and so they’re easy to understand and really thought-provoking. I think people who have enjoyed this conversation will enjoy those as well.
Andrew: Well, thank you.
Rick: Yeah, so thanks for listening or watching, everybody. Thank you again, Andrew. Next week I’ll be interviewing a fellow named Terry Patton, who’s read another interesting book.
Next week I have this 400-page book I’d like to really read. I never get through it all, and it’s like, “Oh God!” His book looks fascinating too, and it’s just such a blessing to be able to have these conversations with people like you. I’m really honored to be able to do it.
Andrew: Well, thank you for having me on your program. It was a pleasure.
Rick: You’re welcome.
[Music]
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
