by Steve Volk
(...) Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.
Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.
Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.
Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.
Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”
In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?
Read more:
(...) Robert’s goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of every body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.
Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he’d won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert’s brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.
Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.
Newberg didn’t know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert’s brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we’re still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.
Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in Why God Won’t Go Away, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”
In short, the world’s mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?
Read more:
