First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
“Neurotheology: The Urge to Believe”
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore October 22,
2006
Let us
turn inward
And become aware of our bodies
Doing a quick scan of our
aches and pains
Taking in a deeper breath than
normal
And releasing it
Releasing with it, for the
next few moments,
our concern about our
dissatisfactions
Our fears of the future, and
our regrets about the past.
Right now, let us just rest
for a moment.
In the peacefulness of this
sanctuary we are warm and safe.
No matter what storms await us
outside these walls,
Right now, we can be at ease
and relax.
As we relax into this moment,
May our hearts open a little
wider.
May we feel gratitude for the
good fortune of our birth.
That a woman was willing to
bring us into the world.
Gratitude we have clean water,
heat, a roof over our heads,
And access to good food to eat
to nourish our bodies
Each day we have the health
and strength to get out of bed
Is potentially a day of
celebration.
As
our hearts open wider
May we allow a little of the
suffering and trouble around us
To touch us.
Maybe something you brought
in,
Maybe something you’ve heard
this morning.
Just hold it, the way you
might hold a sick child,
Stroking his hair, or kissing
her cheek
Breathing in the pain, and
breathing out love.
Suffering transformed in the
alchemy of the heart.
The healing power of our ears
and touch
So easy to forget,
As easy to offer …
as a smile.
Bringing our awareness home
again,
Let us praise the heart of
this community.
Embodying a love much greater
than any one of us
That extends far beyond us
into the web of life itself.
Let us praise the heart of
this community
That can help guide us to our humanity.
As a
way to explore the possibility of an urge to believe being designed into our
brains, I’d like to share three personal experiences this morning. Without these experiences, I never would
have considered becoming a minister.
They continue to be enigmas, even as my religious faith is anchored in
them.
The
first experience happened at the Unitarian Universalist Camp and Conference
Center Murray Grove during a junior high summer program in 1970. At the tender age of 13, I was experiencing
my first lustful feelings and directed them toward … Tammy. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. So I wrote her a romantic poem, put it on
her pillow and waited with great anxiety and excitement hoping she felt the
same way toward me.
She
read the poem and the next morning asked if we could go someplace private to
talk. I suggested the belfry of the old
brick church (which has since burned down).
After we climbed the ladder into the belfry, she told me she wasn’t
ready to develop a serious relationship with me. I was devastated in the way only possible when you are entering
your teenage years and your hormones are raging. Several minutes into the depths of my despair and tears,
something happened inside me. A
powerful insight broke through my unrequited love. “I can still love her and any other girl at the camp without
having to own or possess their affection exclusively,” I thought. In that moment, my heart soared out of my
grief and into an explosion of joy.
Being a
good atheistic humanist at the time, I wouldn’t have called this a religious
experience, more an adaptive, compensatory response to intense emotional
pain. But as I reflect on my path into
the ministry, this was the first planting of the seed of big love.
The
second key experience was playing a game of chess in February of 1980 at an
emotionally vulnerable time in my life.
Several months before the game, I was diagnosed with a non-union of my
right tibia. Over two years before, a
speeding car hit me while riding a moped and badly broke that leg. Now there was the possibility of having to
have a bone marrow transplant to get the leg to heal. If that didn’t work, I might have to have it amputated.
In high
school, I played fifth board on the chess team. Practically every day, I’d stop at my best friend Nick Seidel’s
house (who played second board) to play chess after school. We were good and won just about all our
matches. I was an average player then
who won and lost many games over the years … but I hadn’t played much after
high school.
One of
the very few female classmates in my UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science program (who I was taking an interest in) suggested we meet to
play chess at a weekly tournament held at the Berkeley YMCA. She was a better rated player so I looked
forward to a good game … but she stood me up.
I was matched with another player far stronger than I. Given my lack of practice and the rating of
my opponent, I figured I’d get badly beaten.
So I just relaxed, let go and decided to play as if we were solving a
chess problem together.
The
subjective experience of the game was like none I have ever played before or
since. The game felt effortless; the
moves just appearing in my mind, almost as if I was being guided. I won handily in 26 moves. We analyzed the game and my opponent agreed
it had been a strong one. The carnation
I had brought for my engineering classmate, I gave to my opponent, who happened
to be a woman.
Walking
out of the YMCA, I felt bathed in a feeling of universal love for all beings. Somewhere in this experience I felt I had
been given the key to a profound truth and meaning beyond anything I had known
up to that moment. I could barely sleep
for the next several days I was so full of energy and excitement.
Still a
hard-core atheist, this experience didn’t fit any of my intellectual categories
of real human experience. Only after
talking with Starr King Student Brendan Hadash who led our campus student
group, did I begin to frame this as a religious experience. My spiritual journey began with that chess
game. The seed planted ten years before
began sprouting.
The
last experience I’d like to describe happened at a Buddhist meditation retreat
in 1987 while I was attending Starr King School myself. It happened toward the end of a nine-day
silent retreat at a Catholic monastery in Santa Rosa, California. I was struggling with a lot of pain in my
body. I was pushing hard, sitting and
walking from early in the morning till late at night. On that next to last night of the retreat, I wanted to stay up
all night hoping to leap to awakening through my intense effort.
It was
about 1:00am in the morning. I sat by
myself in the meditation hall with a painful knot in my shoulder. No matter how I adjusted my posture, I
couldn’t make it go away. The pain was
interfering with watching my breath moment to moment. The pain was also draining my energy and resolve. Exhausted and defeated by my body, I was on
the verge of giving up.
Then
the thought came to me, “Remember how the Buddha sat down under the Bodhi tree
and resolved not to arise until he was fully awakened? Allow yourself to die into the
practice. Start all over and do the
practice EXACTLY as it has been taught to you.
Allow your will to yield to the teaching, to the Dhamma.”
I began
again to practice, exactly as I could, as I had been instructed so many
times. I let go of all hope and
expectation, returning again and again to my breath. Slowly, the knot in my shoulder began to dissolve and move to
another place in my body. Tears came to
my eyes as I began to watch “the practice working me” rather than “me working
the practice.” And suddenly, I touched
deeply again into that vast reservoir of love I had known first with Tammy and
then playing chess. This love was not
some anomaly. It was a human experience
that could be cultivated and invited.
These
experiences are challenging for me to discuss in a way everyone can
appreciate. These formative events in
my life may not be accessible to some of you because you can’t step into my
brain, and feel what I’ve felt.
Up
until the 1970’s, there was no analytic way to look inside someone’s head. Today, with the advent of computed
tomography, positron emission tomography, single photon emission computed
tomography, electro-encepha-log-ra-phy, and functional magnetic resonance
imaging machines, we can begin to open up our brains and analyze them with
great precision. When people speak of
being filled with the holy spirit or being transported by some religious
experience, now we can roll them into one of these machines and try to see what
it is happening in their brains.
This is
just what scientists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Acquili have done. (as a sidebar, Andrew Newberg is Lee
Newberg’s cousin) They’d been curious
about what is going on in the minds of masters of meditation and prayer. Working with Catholic nuns and Buddhist
monks, they set up this experiment. The
master was given a private space to settle into their spiritual practice and
gradually move into the altered state such as a state of bliss, oneness, or
unity with God. When they felt they had
arrived at that state, they pulled gently on a string to alert the
researchers.
The
researchers remotely injected a special imaging fluid into their veins. That fluid deposited quickly where there was
blood flowing in the brain, allowing the researchers to detect the level of
activity throughout the brain. The
deposits stayed long enough for the subject to be strapped into the fMRI machine
and have their brains scanned.
What
surprised the researchers was seeing that the brains of these Buddhist and
Catholic monastics both didn’t look normal and did look similar. The practice of concentrating the mind
intensely both calms and arouses areas specific areas of the brain. It also alters the temporal and parietal
lobes of the brain we use to orient ourselves in space and time. (I’m sure many of us have had that
experience of intense focus that narrows our perception and blots out everything
else but what we are concentrating on.)
Their research suggests the combination of simultaneous brain
simulation, calming and changes in the orientation areas cascade in ways to
significantly alter brain function facilitating these powerful religious experiences. The non-theistic Buddhist experience of
extinction and the Catholic experience of oneness with God may actually have a
common foundation in brain anatomy and chemistry!
Newberg
and D’Acquili ask why. Why might our
brains have evolved this ability? They
wonder if this unusual capacity for transcendence might be an adaptation of
more primitive brain functioning. What
survival value might there have been to have these transporting ecstatic
experiences?
They speculate that our capacity for
mystical experience may be rooted in sexual arousal and mating urges.
Think
about it! Think about the intense
concentration and focus that happens during sexual attraction. The repetitive stimulation of sexual
activity, the sensation of letting go, the losing control into sexual climax,
the sense of merging with one’s partner.
All these activities parallel language mystics use to describe union
with God. The Sufi mystic Rumi is
famous for his erotic language describing the ecstatic connection with God as
he sings:
I swear, since seeing Your
face,
the whole world is fraud and fantasy
The garden is bewildered as to what is leaf
or blossom. The distracted birds
can't distinguish the birdseed from the snare.
A house of love with no limits,
a presence more beautiful than venus or the moon,
a beauty whose image fills the mirror of the heart.
Some
speculate recent advances in understanding the brain’s architecture and its
capacity for these powerful experiences imply the existence of
God. It’s almost as if our brains have
a special keyhole. Our capacity to
imagine and experience a relationship with God suggests a divine being ready to
insert that key (for Rumi, the face of the Beloved) and unlock our hearts.
Divine
key or not, no one will dispute the fact that we can insert a human key in that
keyhole. The religious ideation of
paranoid schizophrenics is famously delusional and often terrifying to
them. Even so-called normal people can
catch themselves fabricating a divine voice to talk to themselves. I fear there is an uncertainty factor here
that I doubt can be removed.
This is
why traditional religionists cling so tightly to revelation such as the Bible
and Quran. Scripture gives the believer
a reference point, a master key if you will, to compare with what they are
experiencing in their heads. If God is
communicating something that is inconsistent with the spirit of scripture, then
it can be recognized as a delusion. But
most scriptures say many, many things, some of which are incompatible with
other parts of scripture. Thus,
interpretation is required.
And interpretation can be tailored to what
one wants to read and understand.
Little in scripture is black and white.
And if God is still speaking, as the United Church of Christ says in their
advertising, then God could say something today that seems inconsistent to
correct an erroneous understanding of previous revelation.
While
none of my experiences had any overt theistic content, I’ve often felt a
subjective resonance with theistic believers describing their conversion and
religious experiences. For example,
hearing Catholic sisters describe their feeling of the Holy Spirit guiding them
can feel emotionally familiar to me even if the words, symbols and images they
use are quite different from mine.
Reading stories of prophetic and saintly people, my heart is often
touched and drawn to them as if we were connected by our common experience and
wordless wisdom.
This
resonance with others describing their mystical experiences suggests to me the
same areas of our brains were being engaged.
The exterior form and content of the mystical experience could be quite
different but the brain changes may be very similar, as Newberg and D’Aquili’s
work suggest.
If
true, this is a powerful validation of our Unitarian Universalist approach to
religion. If the experience of
transcendence is ruled by brain anatomy and chemistry, process trumps
content. Creedal formulas and theological
and philosophical tracts do not hold the key to the life of the spirit. Spiritual practices, however, do. Experience matters more than mental
formulations.
Today,
Unitarian Universalists are well positioned to take advantage of this brain
research, using it to appreciate other religious traditions, and forge a wider
approach that will satisfy people who want an open and affirming religious
path. We can also use this research to
quarantine aspects of these traditions such as literalism, magical thinking and
religious hysteria that are not compatible with our way of doing religion.
The
potential genius of Unitarian Universalism is recognizing this as a human
biologically driven process, without settling on an exclusive answer and
leaving room for the variation of individual experience. This open way to do religion is not going to
be a popular approach because it requires a high level of emotional and
intellectual maturity that seems sadly absent in the greater population
today.
However,
for those who are already shaped this way by their biology and their
conditioning, we potentially have a profound way to bring people who require
the use of their minds as part of their spiritual path, to awakening and
liberation, even salvation.
What
this requires of us as individual Unitarian Universalists is to look behind the
religious language, image and symbol seeking a common human experience that can
unite us. Can we pray fervently with
Jews, Christians and Muslims finding in our brains an affirming human resonance
within their words? Can we chant with
the Hindus and meditate with the Buddhists and feel uplifted? And finally, can we study human experience
through science, literature and history and find the Spirit of Life and Love
speaking through them the same way it continues to speak through us today?
If so, we will have found:
A house of love with no limits,
a presence more beautiful than venus or the moon,
a beauty whose image fills the mirror of the heart.
I close with another short Rumi
poem
The
beauty of the heart
is the lasting beauty:
its lips give to drink
of
the water of life.
Truly it is the water,
that
which pours,
and
the one who drinks.
All three become one when
your
talisman is shattered.
That oneness you can't know
by
reasoning.
Mystery, Mystery, Life is a riddle and a mystery.
May we be open to experience mystery,
Letting
the mystery pour through us … like
water.
Go in peace. Make peace.
Be at Peace.
Copyright © 2006 by Rev. Samuel
A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.