A person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear…

That is a finding reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, by neuroscientist Liane Young and colleagues, showed that manipulating a specific part of the brain (the right temporoparietal junction) with a magnet can change how someone morally judges a situation. Mature humans have the inborn sense to “know” that a person who intends harm, even when no harm is done, is more “bad” than someone who accidentally causes harm without intention. In this experiment, the pulse literally switched this mechanism in normal human participants, so that when judging a story, they found greater fault with the person who did unintentional harm.

Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene told NPR, “Moral judgment is just a brain process… That’s precisely why it’s possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain… If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.”

This is quite an astounding thing. It certainly puts a large dent in the claim that morality derives from a non-brain source, such as God or a soul. Of course, evolutionary psychology is making great strides in explaining how morality developed via natural selection, but it is this kind of experiment that illustrates evolutionary theories so vividly. As with every other branch of study, science continues to naturalize the brain and human functioning; we are moral creatures because we have evolved to be.

This is also a bit frightening. The study suggests that our moral reasoning is something not completely under our conscious control. This makes perfect sense, since it can be reasonably argued that nothing about being human is completely under conscious control. But there is something about moral judgment that strikes deeper. Our ability to think in terms of right and wrong, and then to act on those judgments even when it involves self-sacrifice, is one of our core traits that allows us to think of ourselves as noble. As being more than “mere animals”. Our brains have developed the useful cognitive illusion that everything we think and do is grounded in free choice. Obviously this is not the case, even when it comes to fundamental ideas about morality.

None of this lessens our obligation to act as moral agents. What it does do is demand that we inquire further in order to gain more insight into how we work. It also means that we will be well-served to think clearly and critically about our own personal ethics, and not to take any moral assumption as a given. And, you know, not to stand too close to big magnets…

Where does the evil and good come from?

“Evil” and “Good” aren’t substances or states, but moral judgments on behaviors and ideas. All judgments are products of the human mind grounded in the evolutionary necessity of primates to live together in a reasonably harmonious way. We are beginning to find the basic building blocks of human ethics, which are related to such issues as fairness, resource/mate protection, incest avoidance, and reciprocal altruism (to name a few).

As in language, the moral building blocks have evolved into complex structures that are now largely culture-based. These structures form in every group (churches, schools, workplaces, clubs, and even whole cities and nations), and the majority of them are implicit, meaning they are unspoken mandates and rules of thumb that guide how group members behave and interact. When someone violates a rule, everyone knows it, even when that rule isn’t written down. Humans are simply wired this way.

Although the underlying purpose of morality is logical—the creation of social rules that allow humans to live together in groups—individual morals or moral sets are not always rational or even beneficial. At one time, for example, slavery was considered perfectly acceptable by many Americans and was even justified with the Bible. Many people would now consider slavery to be an unambiguous evil.

This is why there is a movement to push morals into a principle-based system rather than attempting a set of absolute rules. For example, increasing fairness and decreasing suffering are “good” principles, but what those look like will change along with a changing society, just as the acceptability of slavery changed with the Civil War. This is but one benefit of a non-theistic perspective—we can approach goodness from a reasonable and compassionate place rather than by attempting to fulfill rigid decrees, regardless of their relevance or logic.

Where does the “self” come from? And please don’t say the self is a set of neuronal connections…that is ridiculous and has not been proven.

The experience of self does indeed stem from complex neural nets in the brain, although the total self certainly includes the whole body. This might seem ridiculous to you, but there is a great deal of empirical evidence for it (and no evidence to the contrary). True, we learn more about the creation of self all the time as we learn more about the brain, but it isn’t the mystery you are making it out to be.

What we call the self is constructed from many psycho-neurological mechanisms, including temperament, emotions, personality (a la the Big Five), subjective perception and awareness, motivations and bodily needs, working memory and long-term memory, worldview and heuristic sets (e.g. social roles), and what you would call thinking. The self is an emergent phenomena that arises from the integration of all these functions, each of which are borne in the brain and derive from a combination of genetics and experience, and shifts according to environmental priming (a great example of this is an experiment with Chinese-Americans: one group was shown American symbols and the other Chinese symbols: each group then interpreted a single image, with the first group preferring a Western concept of individualism, with the other preferring an Eastern communal perspective. So based on how they were primed, different “selves” came to the fore).

To learn more, I strongly recommend “The Developing Mind” by Dan Siegel.

I’m afraid you might be falling for what our ancient ancestors fell for: the assumption that anything we don’t fully understand in nature must be due to a supernatural agent. It’s as if to say that if something in nature is amazing and beyond our comprehension, it couldn’t have “just happened”. But why not? There is no reason to think that anything in nature required an external agent, and the more we learn about the universe, the more we must conclude that indeed no agent could have caused any of it. Nature is self-sufficient; that is part of its majesty.

What used to be “occultists” are now called “scientists”. The essential shift happened with the humanistic discovery that gods and spirits are not necessary to explain the workings of the world. Similarly, the examination of humans moved away from souls and towards biology, sociology, and psychology. And as the scientific method improved, it was discovered that the universe was a vastly more complex and amazing place than any occultist could have predicted. And as science started peering into the very large, the very distant, and the very small, humans were truly exploring hidden domains utterly beyond the reach of normal modes of perception.

There is another element to this. Starting especially with the advent of books, all the various domains of technology and science became highly specialized, requiring a unique language for explaining things in shorthand for other experts. This has progressed to the point where not only are the concepts and skills in science incredibly complex, but even the scientific jargon itself lies far outside of everyday language. A casual glance at the language of neurology, genetics, biochemistry, or astrophysics leaves one baffled. It’s amazing that as much information as is openly available to the general public, so little of it is really understandable to the average person.

As I have mentioned, the desire to know—or more specifically, to experience a feeling of knowing—is an inherent human trait. As such, curiosity and an attraction for the novel is ever-present in us. But since science has become so, well, occult, many people look to simpler systems to help them try to grasp the workings of the world. And those systems, more often than not, are religious.

The mainstream religions are the most common, obviously. For those who are inspired to reject the mainstream—for whatever reason—there are plenty of alternatives, such as the numerous Neo-Pagan, New Age, and magick-based systems. But virtually all of them have at least one thing in common—they provide a relatively simplistic and static model of the world that is based on things other than physical, observable, or testable evidence (Buddhism and Taoism offer some interesting exceptions). This is a perfectly understandable thing to do; if all the various domains of science are too numerous and complex for anyone to grasp (which is undeniably true), then religion can act as an acceptable, even if non-veridical substitute. Easing existential anxiety does not strictly require knowing much, it only asks for the feeling of knowing, and nearly all religions are custom made for this.

For some folks, religion isn’t used to understand the natural world, but is rather intended as a method for understanding the self. I often wonder what people really mean by this. What kind of knowledge is it that people are seeking? Their traits, talents, values, beliefs, boundaries, strengths, weaknesses, or what? What’s interesting to me is that three hours of psychological testing can say more about individual differences than any religious tool. There are literally hundreds of such instruments, many of which have been shown to have an excellent degree of reliability and validity, that can test nearly every aspect of human activity and interest, and provide a vast array of accurate, detailed, and personalized data about a given individual. For anyone interested, affordable testing can likely be had at a local graduate psychology program.

But I would argue that such knowledge isn’t what spiritual seekers are really looking for. What people really want is to feel special. Understand, this is perfectly normal and natural; everyone wants to feel special, to believe that they have a purpose in life, that they matter. Science tells us that, in the grand scheme of things, we don’t actually matter; the universe does not care about us; we, as individuals, are not needed; there is no Plan for us. What religion can do is provide a way around this, either by inventing transcendent personalities that do care about us or by creating systems that allow one to rise in power and authority. Also, for those who believe that there exist hidden dimensions to reality that can be perceived via spiritual practices, resulting phenomena can produce both a feeling of knowing and a sense of specialness by dint of their profound “discoveries.”

This, then, is the challenge—to find effective ways to reduce existential anxiety, to gain a feeling of knowing about the world, and to have a sense of meaning and fulfillment without sacrificing curiosity, regard, and wonder about the veridical workings of the self and the universe. I strongly maintain that this is indeed possible. And more than possible—outright beneficial. This is what religious naturalism and Sacred River is all about, the development of such a system of spiritual thought and practice. Science might be the new occult, but together it is possible to pool enough knowledge resources to make our shared journey a meaningful, fulfilling, and joyous one.

A popular refrain states that science cannot answer all questions. That is undoubtedly true. Embedded within the universe are processes and events that will be forever beyond our ability to analyze, predict, or understand.

The part of us that desires to know things seduces us into thinking that there is a deeper level of reality that can be grasped by a special tuning process of the mind. After all, the brain is the only real mediator of experience (and therefore of all knowledge), so it must be possible to manipulate that tool to perceive and grasp this hidden reality that sits beyond the keen eye of scientific examination. An extension of this perspective argues that some people in the past have indeed achieved this and developed translation systems that allow every day people to have access to this hidden wisdom—astrology, tarot, gematria, Cabala, goat entrails, tea leaves, entheogenic ritual, bibliomancy, augury, palmistry, scrying, Ouija, runecasting, and any other number of countless methods.

Employing these practices can have numerous etiologies and consequences. As stated, the foundation of them all is certainly the desire to know things, which itself derives from our common need to seek safety and reduce existential anxiety. It matters not one whit if the “knowledge” they provide has any objective veridicality—all that is important is that they produce the feeling of knowing.

The “feeling of knowing” is a somewhat poorly understood psychological phenomenon. In general, it is hypothesized to be a function of the familiarity process in memory. Key components include cues and target familiarity, which would perhaps explain why working within certain memorized systems (e.g. the Tree of Life or Tarot) might produce such strong feelings of knowing, because they provide numerous cues for highly familiar symbols. The key here is that such methods are closed systems—the data that they produce are only relevant to the system itself, and to nothing else in any objective sense.

But this is all academic. Nothing can explain away the intense desire people have to know things. On top of this, believing that one has an inside track to the secrets of existence can lead to feelings of pride and exceptionality. If one harbors deep doubts about one’s self worth, then indulging in such systems can also provide profound relief. Likewise, if one has developed inadequate skills for dealing with every day life—especially in regards to predicting consequences and developing the necessary resources to thrive—then retreating into an occult world with relatively easy-to-follow rules might seem like a better choice.

Of course, this is certainly not true of everyone who is involved with occult/supernatural systems of knowing. Some simply have wonderful imaginations and take great pleasure in believing they live in a world described by mystics and prophets. These are the romantics, and I was certainly counted among their number at one time.

I must make something very clear here—there is infinite room in our lives for symbols and metaphors, for tools that inspire and focus. Life is hard and if a charm, horoscope, or ritual helps one to find greater meaning, fulfillment, and joy, then that is a good thing. A love amulet can help keep a mind open to potential partners; a prayer for employment might influence a person to keep looking when despair is near; a baptism often helps people to feel emotionally integrated into a new community. The allegorical perspective recognizes that symbols are doorways to emotional depths that are otherwise difficult to access, and as such, they have a vital role to play in our lives.

But there will always be things that are beyond knowing. This is not because there is a hidden world, mysterious powers, or unseen intelligences that care about our individual lives and manipulate events for some Grand Purpose. Mystery is simply intrinsic to reality. The emergent nature of the universe is such that a certain amount of randomness is inherent to existence. This is what gives things the wiggle room needed to change and produce variety. If randomness didn’t exist, we would not have galaxies, planets, or people, only a homogeneous cloud of elementary particles.

All knowledge is provisional. But this is not because all theories have equal value. When something is thought to be known, it takes a great deal of evidence to supplant it with new understanding. As things stand, we now know a great deal about the origins, functions, and workings of nature. As new information comes in, what we now know will change or disappear. This is philosophy of science 101.

But supernatural systems don’t follow the same rules. They do not allow for better ways of seeing things. They demand a static view of the world. If science is brought in, it is twisted to try to confirm existing conclusions. This is what makes supernatural systems completely inadequate as tools for exploring and understanding the natural world.

At some point, we need to accept the fact that there will be things we will never know. In some cases, that will be because they are beyond our ability to examine (e.g. what happens after death?). In other cases, it is simply because there are no Answers. Is there a Grand Purpose to Life? Not only is there no answer to that, it is the wrong question. Instead, try asking: how do we make life more meaningful, more fulfilling, and more joyous? Part of the answer to that is to make peace with Mystery, to realize that there will be some things we can know and other things we can’t, and to be okay with that. What will the next moment bring? Who knows.

In some (not all) immanent systems of thought, the divine can be seen as something injected into or living within the stuff of the universe. In these cases, even though there is a strong relationship between matter and the divine, the two are nevertheless separate “substances”. It is even possible to see sacredness as a kind of material property.

There exists, of course, countless argument and conceptions of the divine and its relationship to humans. But I would like to offer a completely different view of divinity (of which I certainly do not claim ownership). If you, like me, accept that spirituality is a biopsychosocial phenomenon, then perhaps you might agree that sacredness can be defined, not as a property (whether transcendent or immanent), but as a lived experience. In other words, something becomes divine because one experiences it as divine.

In this view, the source of divinity is us. As such, sacredness does not require a force or transcendent personality. Neither does the process of sacralization change the nature or essence of an object (even when that object is the self). Rather, what changes is the relationship between the person and the object. My primary area of interest in all this is in the nature of that relationship—its causes, consequences, scope, sensations, and meaning. These are things I hope to explore for, well, the rest of my life, not just intellectually, but personally.

This is the grand adventure of spirituality. There is no end goal out there, no Ultimate Truth to ascertain, no perfected state of being to accomplish. There is only the creative, dynamic flow of life, each person being an integrated part of the Universal All, unique and yet one with everything. In the religious naturalism, pantheistic view, being spiritual doesn’t mean altering one’s essential self, it means developing an ever more complex, mature relationship with the self and the world in a way that is highly meaningful, fulfilling, and joyous. This is the divine journey and what it means to swim the Sacred River.

Religion

Another major product of our neocortex is religion. It is arguable that religion was really just the earliest form of natural science, using available data and human reason to explain and predict various phenomena, such as seasonal changes or various illnesses. It has been a long strange trip from that point to modern religion. Although some religious movements still try to explain the physical world (such as the many Christians who use the Bible to determine the age of the Earth), most have moved into the more abstract domains, such as morality, transcendence, and the afterlife.

Still, the fundamental needs behind these abstract domains predate the neocortex—such as the desire for safety, social affiliation and competence. While the afterlife is a relatively new concept, for example, fear of death is primordial. Religion also serves to order society and provide guidelines for behavior, both of which address affiliation and the basic mechanisms that deal with social hierarchy (which themselves relate to resource, mating and kin dynamics). But the neocortex allows us to manifest complex abstract structures using the power of the intentional mind. As such, we have the ability, and I would argue the obligation, to continually question and reconstruct our models of value and meaning.

Intentionality as a Value

Emerson once wrote, “The education of the will is the object of our existence.” I take this to mean that the highest human virtue is our own intentionality, that it is our sacred duty both to become more aware of our power to choose and to act, and to make sure those choices and actions are well-informed. After all, intentionality is the key to a power of transformation more potent than any on this planet in four billion years—we are altering the global environment that keeps us alive while reaching into the genetic code that determines our very being. It is in this ability to imagine, reason, and direct our actions that we are become as gods and demons, and with this awesome power comes great responsibility.

There is also a less ponderous side to intentionality, which is the ability to transform our communities and ourselves so to attain greater meaning, fulfillment, and joy. There are several streams of life where one can point their intention and connect with the larger world, realize one’s potential, and experience wonder, harmony, and love. While easier said than done, the rewards are certainly profound.

Outline of Intentionality

There is a very large literature on the nature of human intentionality. Although there are other far more sophisticated models of intentionality, or will, than I might create, I would nevertheless like to offer my own conceptualization. For those philosophy fans out there, my view on intentionality draws upon the compatibilist position, which says that determinism is compatible with free will. I also recommend the works of existential psychologist Rollo May, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli (visit the wiki based on his work, WillProject). This is a bare bones model, and certainly open to change, but it gives an outline of my basic view.

1) Agency

I break intentionality into three broad, interrelated categories: agency, drive, and expression. Agency, the first category, can be defined as the capacity to make choices and to engage with the world based on those choices. Agency emerges from the interplay between skill and limitations. Skill is the what and how in agency—what needs to be done and how to do it—composed of knowledge (an emergent property of awareness, reason, and declarative or explicit memory) and ability (primarily arising from procedural or implicit memory, although what we call “talent” is often involved as well). Behavior requires a frame within which to act, and the boundaries of a given situation will largely determine what can and cannot be accomplished. Limitations, in this case, are both subjective (e.g. a lack of data, an injury) and objective (e.g. environmental conditions, available tools).

2) Drive

The second category of intentionality is drive, which is the emotional component of intentionality. Within this model, I am limiting drive to affective states that impel action—such as fear, desire, hunger, disgust, curiosity, excitement, anger, and sadness. Drive fuels action, although such feelings do not have to be arousing. For example, think of a chilly Saturday morning without any pressing need to get out of a warm bed—at some point, you will decide to brave the cold and throw the covers aside. You might have been saying to yourself for 20 minutes, “I should get up. I’m getting up now.” But it took that small bit of drive to push you past the threshold into action (more on action thresholds a bit later). Drive is influenced by many things, including temperament, personality, health & diet, rearing, and past trauma.

3) Expression

Both agency and drive are interrelated with the third component of intentionality, which I refer to as expression. Expression is the why of intention, and is far and away the most complex of the three. What is being expressed via intentionality are all the various elements that make up the self, including basic needs, instincts, desires, values, and, for lack of a better word, destiny.

At the bottom of the pile are the adaptive psychological components derived from the core drives of survival and reproduction, as well as the basic instincts of approaching pleasure and retreating from pain. These represent the earliest human and pre-human needs, influencing everything from the bottom up. As the brain evolved from the brain stem to the prefrontal cortex, it developed increasingly complex motivations and instincts (that are nevertheless built upon and influenced by those more primitive functions). There is a huge range of such psychological influencers, dealing with mating, child rearing, and social dynamics, through to more modern motivations built upon values and principles, and finally ending with transpersonal experiences, including the desire for personal growth, peak experiences, and communion with Nature/Universe/Deity (the latter of which, it must be noted, are in themselves optional choices rather than adaptive needs, and are, therefore, uniquely human).

Tied into all this is what I call destiny. I myself do not believe in predestination, but rather see existence as a constantly created emergent phenomenon arising out of the dynamic interplay of complex systems (that’s the Sacred River). That said, for any given person, conditions arise to produce a fully unique individual, with a singular genetic code, born into a particular circumstance during a given period of history, all interacting with a series of life experiences that literally shape the brain and the view of the self and the world. Intentionality is, in large part, an expression of this unique self, the gestalt or totality of being constantly manifested as one swims the Sacred River of existence. Remember, “the education of the will is the object of our existence”—by becoming better “swimmers”, we become ever more human, more genuine, more true to who we really are.

As a quick review, here is a rough outline of what we’ve just covered:

I) Agency
A) Skill
1) Knowledge
a) Awareness
b) Reason
c) Declarative memory
2) Ability
a) Procedural Memory
b) Talent
B) Limitations
1) Subjective
2) Objective
II) Drive
A) Temperment
B) Personality
C) Past experiences
III) Expression
A) Primitive needs
B) Values and principles
C) Transpersonal motivations

Passive and Active Intentionality

There are two phases of intentionality, the passive and the active. The passive includes things like imagination, evaluation, deliberation, and planning, but also includes drive, the emotional aspect of intention, often experienced as anxiety or anticipation. Passive intentionality represents a potential for action, which is often nonconscious and other times in full awareness (in the form of thinking). The active phase is much more immediate as it drives potential into action (although there is always some form of passive intentionality going on behind the scenes). Each phase has a range of mindfulness, from deeply nonconscious to full, immediate awareness. In the active phase, this range can take the form of thoughtless habit on the one end through to the state called flow on the other (which anyone who has experienced being “in the zone” can recognize).

Moving from passive to active intentionality requires overcoming what I call the action threshold. This threshold is created in the dynamic interaction between drive and resistance. Stated simply, intended action cannot occur until motivation (the drive to act) overcomes inertia (the drive not to act). Part of educating the will—of becoming a better “swimmer”—involves developing skills and traits that help one overcome difficult action thresholds in service to genuine expression.

Conclusion

Once again, this has been the most basic treatment of a complex topic. As I have tried to illustrate, intentionality is not an isolated construct—it is deeply interwoven into the fabric of both one’s being and surrounding conditions. These are both emergent phenomena, and so intentionality will always be in flux to some degree—as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” That said, effective intentionality is in alignment with both the deepest self and the demands in the environment, with adequate drive and the agency to be successful. To say this requires a lot of work is an understatement. It is, in effect, the work of being human. But, as with all honest work, this labor has a great payoff—a life of profound meaning, fulfillment, and joy.

Defining Experience, Religion, and Spirituality

First we have the difficult task of definition. David Yamane (2000) defines experience as “an ongoing temporal flow of reality received by consciousness, where consciousness is understood more broadly than simply as cognition” that also includes “feelings, expectations, and bodily states.” I agree with his insistence that a distinction be made between subjective experience and the interpretation of experience—”existing social or cultural structures predispose us to experience certain emotions, sensations, and bodily states in particular, culturally inscribed ways…there is no such thing as an unmediated experience. All experience is always already shot through with interpretation.” This will come into play a bit later in the essay.

Religion can be defined as “a covenant faith community with teachings and narratives that enhance the search for the sacred and encourage morality” (Dollahite, 1998). Another take says that religions “are rooted in authoritative spiritual traditions that transcend the person and point to larger realities within which the person is embedded,” whereas spirituality involves “inner, contemplative practices” dealing with things like transcendence and meaningfulness, with the search for the sacred being the link between the two (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). Other theorists describe spirituality not in terms of the sacred but as human characteristics, such as the development of insight, the awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, the experience of awe and mystery, an attitude of compassion and gratitude, and the “expression to the being that is in us; it has to do with feelings, with the power that comes from within, with knowing our deepest selves” (Beck, 1992). It also goes without saying that religions include non-sacred functions, such as social affiliation and self-identity, but these aspects aren’t as relevant within this discussion, so I shall leave them aside for now.

Defining the Religious Experience

And so, we come to defining religious or spiritual experience. It should come as no surprise that there is little consensus as to what is and is not a genuine religious experience. A broad definition might include all experiences subjectively interpreted as religiously important whereas a more narrow one might include only dramatic encounters with God, spirit, or ultimate reality. Perhaps a more sophisticated definition of religious experience involves “a continuing feeling of transcendental reality or of a divine presence,” not simply dramatic experiences, but also “seemingly more ordinary but deeply felt experiences” (Hardy, in Yamane, 2000).

After reading many definitions (and having such experiences myself) I shall use the following for the sake of this essay: a religious experience is one that results in a profound and meaningful shift in perspective—whether of time, space, function, relation, or state of being—involving an embodied sensation and a resultant interpretation that is explicitly religious in nature. While this can often involve the sensation of a paranormal presence, this is not absolutely necessary. For example, one might look at a blooming flower and be overcome with awe. On the flipside, sensing the presence of a disembodied being in a creaky old house might result in a strong emotional state, but wouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as a religious experience (although it might).

There are a wide range of events that can evoke experiences that people interpret as religious—ceremonial rituals, ecstatic dancing, prayer, transcendental meditation, chanting, musical performance, vision quests, conversion experiences, psychic communication, tantric love making, communion with nature, entheogen consumption, communal worship, almsgiving, lectio divina, fasting, sensory deprivation, and on and on. I think it is safe to say that the various experiences that each of these would evoke would all be quite different from one another. Before we talk about the differences, though, let’s explore what holds them together. On a basic level, there are three components that can lead to the type of religious experience defined in the preceding paragraph—(1) priming, (2) sensation, and (3) interpretation.

Priming

Priming is a well-established effect within psychology. It is the activation of certain pre-existing conceptual schemas, whether conceptual or perceptual. Priming evokes certain ideas, memories, and expectations, so that proceeding events will be largely framed within those constructs. For example, walking into a church will evoke far different schemas than walking into a bar, shaping the interpretations of otherwise similar experiences within them.

Psychologists Granqvist and Larsson (2006) write, “through the use of religious schemas, a religious individual may be predisposed to interpret a somatosensory sensation coupled with a sensed presence as the presence of God. A nonreligious individual may interpret the same sensation in anatomical or secular terms and may even seek medical help on the assumption that it is a hallucination.” Said simply, people are socialized to religion, and the existence of certain notions in the mind about religion are one vital component of the phenomenon (although I note that the next component, sensation, can itself be the priming agent). David Yamane (2000) agrees—”We know that existing social or cultural structures predispose us to experience certain emotions, sensations, and bodily states in particular, culturally inscribed ways…There is no such thing as an unmediated experience.”

Sensation

The next component is sensation. Although the sensation of perception is common (i.e. the feeling that one is receiving information via one or more of the five senses), at the core of a religious experience is emotion. “The connection between religion and emotion,” writes Emmons and Paloutzian, “is a long and intimate one. Religion has always been a source of profound emotional experience, traditionally love, gratitude, and thankful joy.” In general, there are two branches of emotional experience within religion: the charismatic and the contemplative. Fraser Watts (1996) explains that the “charismatic movement stresses the cultivation of intense positive emotions…whereas the contemplative tradition stresses a calming of the passions and the development of emotional quietude,” while a third, less common tradition involves the disciplined, creative expression of emotion.

But even when emotions are not being deliberately manipulated, they nevertheless play a central role. This is because emotions provide a sense of realness to an experience. Even William James acknowledged the legitimizing effects of emotions, and modern research further suggests that they “can play an important role in revealing the world rather than merely obfuscating our intellectualization of things” (Ratcliffe, 2003). Ethnologist Raymond Firth (1996) explains that it is the “element of emotion in whatever kind of experience that gives the basis to the belief [and] provides it with a strong flavour of reality”…Ultimately, “it is not intellectual or moral proofs for belief, or religious concepts that provide validity; it is the emotional proofs.”

Interpretation

The final component to the religious experience is interpretation. An event cannot be religious unless it is given meaning as such, plain and simple. Yamane (2000) maintains that there is no such thing as a religious experience “in-and-of itself. There are simply experiences which are made meaningful after the fact, often in terms of narratives furnished by certain religious groups.” It is not uncommon for an event to be considered highly religious at one time only to be seen in a completely different light after a change of perspective. An example might be certain experiences during hallucinogenic drug use interpreted as religious while in one’s teens, only to be seen merely as weird, chemically induced illusions as an older adult. Similarly, it might take the wisdom of age to perceive the profound spiritual beauty in a sunset, which was long overlooked as a youngster. Such an event in itself remains unchanged, but the perspective applied to it can change the meaning completely.

These three components—priming, sensation, and interpretation—weave a complex tapestry. Indeed, they each feed and are fed by the others. Pre-existing beliefs or schemas can be primed for or by a specific type of somato-emotional event which can then be interpreted as religious. However, interpreted experiences can also transform beliefs leading to new schema for priming. In talking about ritual, Dornan writes, “Ritual can both channel experience based on belief, and alter belief in accordance with experience…ritual performance is more than representation or symbolic expression of belief—it is the actual practice of ritual that both instantiates, reinforces, and authenticates belief though subjective experience.” Essentially, the same could be said of any religious practice.

To summarize: a religious experience is one that involves some shift in perspective (one might say a change in consciousness) related to an embodied sensation that is interpreted to be religiously meaningful. Such an experience involves (1) pre-existing beliefs or schemas, (2) a somato-emotional event, and (3) an interpretation involving religious concepts. Such a shift might be dramatic or it might be gentle, ongoing or fleeting, (seemingly) metaphysical or tellurian. And, as a general rule, religious experiences occur within the context of some established model of belief and practice, while each experience is yet unique and individual.

Categories of Religious Experience

So far we’ve established a broad, but I think well-defined outline of religious experience. Although the list of religious activities (prayer, meditation, ritual, etc.) is a very long one, I have not been able to find any established taxonomy for religious experiences themselves. Below I will describe various categories that are listed in the literature, and others that conform to my own experiences and observations.

The most common category written about involves mystical experience. There is no hard and fast definition, but I will say that, at the least, it involves a loss of ego or sense of isolated self, which is often a peak or ecstatic event (but not always). Normally called transcendence, this can involve, say, achieving a non-dual state with ultimate reality or God, where one can see “a fundamental unity underlying the diverse strivings of nature” (Emmons & Paloutzian, 2003). But in my definition, mystical experience can also include entering fully into a state of flow, where all awareness is swept up fully into the activity at hand.

Another category involves what is called psychism, defined simply as sensory intrusions within the stream of consciousness. These intrusions usually involve sounds, images, or a sense of presence, which can be experienced as originating from outside of the self. Such events can interrupt what is known as the “natural attitude”, and so they can be given a special status—since they do not easily conform to empirical constructions of the world, they can engender a new belief system if the “intrusions are intense enough, the interpretations are plausible enough, and the identity commitments are either weak enough to be abandoned or are strong enough to survive a change” (Laubach, 2004). If supernatural beliefs are already held, then psychic events can further intensify those beliefs. It is also not uncommon for those who interpret such intrusions as religiously veridical to feel special or privileged themselves, and research suggests that such folks often develop “privatized” religious practices and beliefs that support and legitimize their unique experiences.

Similar to psychism but of a different category is portaling, which, as the name suggests, involves the experience of out-of-body consciousness. Traditionally, this practice was mostly familiar to shamanistic traditions, but is now common in New Age movements that promote the idea of astral travel. Portaling is a cross-cultural phenomenon that has been studied in detail, seen by neuropsychologists as a “radical re-entrainment of the neurological systems mediating experience in the brain” (Dornan, 2004).

Affiliative connectivity is yet another broad category of religious experience. I include two sub-sets of experience—communal and individual. Communal affiliative connectivity involves profound religious feelings arising from group activity, most often in the form of worship or ceremony. The other subset, individual affiliative connectivity, primarily involves a personal sense of connection, which can include a deity, nature, or humankind as a whole. It is of a kind as the mystical union given above, but is generally not a peak experience involving ego-loss or attaining a non-dual state. Rather, it reflects profound religious feelings involving a sense of relationship, of being a part of or connected to something beyond the individual self. Although these two subsets have unique characteristics, obviously they can work in concert.

Many people are also drawn to the occult. For these folks, the true nature of things is seen as concealed from normal reality, and so the religious experience is typified by a sense of mystery and exploration. Meaning is found within models used to decipher the code of existence, which can involve the Hebrew Tree of Life, numerology, Tarot cards, astrology, and similar tools used to divine hidden truth.

Spiritual transformation can also be a profound experience. This term is most often applied to conversion experiences, also known as quantum change, which can be a sudden or gradual event. I myself include any religious experience, not just conversions, that involves a meaningful sense of change (which can happen during change-of-state rituals, such as baptisms or initiations). Interestingly, research suggests that such change has minimal effect on basic personality (i.e. the Big Five), but can lead to major differences in things like goals, attitudes, and behaviors. Indeed, Emmons and Paloutzian (2003) explain that “self-defining personality functions (such as identity, life meaning) do change dramatically after a spiritual transformation.”

One other possible category is tranquility, which is common in contemplative traditions. Here, profound spiritual meaning is found by achieving a deep sense of peace and harmony. This experience is unlike those outlined above in that it involves a state of being rather than a discrete event. Tranquility describes a way of being that is applied to all events, and so this category exists somewhat outside the scope of the others. Since tranquility doesn’t fit perfectly under my definition of a religious experience, either it isn’t one or my definition needs refinement.

The Experience Grid

The image above offers a simplistic model for organizing various religious experiences. One axis is the emotional, with the other representing the empirical orientation. Barring any changes, this is the model I will be using to organize both experience and eventually praxis. It isn’t too hard to figure out which quadrant various experiences fit. For example, contemplative meditation might result in a #1 experience whereas speaking in tongues might fit in #4. Being overcome by a sense of wonder of the natural world might belong in quadrant #2, and a #3 experience might involve a nurturing spirit encountered during astral travel. This model will be developed further in future posts.

In Closing

This brief foray into the realm of religious experience has only barely touched the surface. There is so much else to cover, including the possible nature of these experiences, the effects they can have on one’s life, how to know which are healthy and effective for any given individual, and the possible range of intentions, motivations, and aims related to each. This will certainly involve a long, ongoing discussion, and I look forward to your participation.

Before moving on to Part II, I will give you a teaser. In that upcoming essay, I will be addressing the two following assertions:

1) All sensory experiences involve a physical process within the brain and so must be caused and mediated by physical objects and processes. As such, all metaphysical or supernatural sources or states are considered non-veridical.

2) Religious experiences, regardless of the veridicality of the interpreted source or medium, certainly do occur phenomenologically and can lead to increased well-being. As such, they possess great potential value.

My task will be to find a way to square these two statements.

References

Angel, Leonard. (2002). Mystical naturalism. Religious Studies, 38(3), 317-338.
Besk, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.
Dollahite, David. (1998). Fathering, faith, and spirituality. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 7(1), 3-15.
Dornan, Jennifer. (2004). Beyond Belief: Religious Experience, Ritual, and Cultural Neuro-phenomenology in the Interpretation of Past Religious Systems. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 14(1), 25–36.
Emmons, Robert & Paloutzian, Raymond. (2003). The psychology of religion. Annual Review of Psychology, (54), 377-403.
Firth, Raymond. (1996). Religion: a Humanist Interpretation. London: Routledge
Granqvist, Pehr and Larsson, Marcus. (2006). Contribution of Religiousness in the Prediction and Interpretation of Mystical Experiences in a Sensory Deprivation Context: Activation of Religious Schemas. The Journal of Psychology, 140(4), 319-328.
Hardy, A. 1979. The spiritual nature of man: A study of contemporary religious experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kozart, M., Saver, J., Rabin, J. (1998). Religious experience was not correctly defined. The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 10(4), 475-477.
Laubach, Marty. (2004). The Social Effects of Psychism: Spiritual Experience and the Construction of Privatized Religion. Sociology of Religion, 65(3), 239-264.
Ratcliffe, Matthew. (2003). Scienti?c naturalism and the neurology of religious experience. Religious Studies 39, 323–345.
Watts, Fraser. (1996). Psychological and religious perspectives on emotion. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 6(2), 71-87.
Yamane, David. (2000). Narrative and religious experience. Sociology of Religion, 61(2), 171-190.
Zangwill, Nick. (2004). The myth of religious experience. Religious Studies 40, 1–22.

There are many ways to gauge if working within such a context is successful. I have suggested that one model of success is if spiritual efforts result in increased joy, meaning, and fulfillment. As a reminder, this generally means that one feels such things as gratitude, pleasure, harmony, wonder, and humor; that one has a sense of being connected to something larger than the self while also developing one’s own system of values and purpose in life; and that one has an increasing sense of genuineness and integrity, of moving ever closer to one’s deepest, most ideal self.

There are, of course, many other motivating factors for spiritual pursuits. These can include (but are not limited to) the desire for an increased feeling of safety or control; ego gratification from feeling spiritually superior to others; relief from anxiety or suffering; pleasure derived from consciousness-altering experiences; or to conform with social or familial expectations (or to fulfill the affiliative instinct). It is important to note that, in any given case, any of these can be mixed in with the three items I mentioned above. It is valuable to explore one’s own motivations that underlie their spiritual lives.

The reason for this is simple—if one really understands what they are trying to accomplish, they might find better ways to accomplish it. One example of this, which I have briefly covered, is spiritual bypassing, the engaging in spiritual pursuits for the purpose of avoiding dealing with personal or psychological problems. A simplistic example: a person who prays to God for relief from tooth pain instead of seeking medical help because he is afraid of dentists. In more realistic cases, spiritual bypassing usually involves problems that are either misunderstood, very complex, seemingly intractable, or otherwise too unpalatable to face. While religious practices might offer an affective band aid for their problems, they will nevertheless persist until they are directly dealt with, generally with secular solutions (e.g. employment, education, psychotherapy, exercise, diet, social skills, etc).

A simple way of looking at this is that spiritual motivations can be split into two basic categories: those that are expansive and those that are relieving. Expansive motivations seek to add to one’s life, to improve the self and/or society, to make life more worthwhile. Relieving motivations seek to address life’s natural anxieties and pains, such as fear of death, emotional problems, discrimination, poverty, powerlessness, ignorance, disease, et cetera. One is not inherently better than the other, although it can be said that the former is representative of greater maturity than the latter. It is important to know which are at play in a person’s life, especially when secular solutions would be more effective, either in conjunction with or replacement of the spiritual. There is also a way to bridge these two categories—some people might have an expansive motivation to help those who are at a relieving motive stage or state of being. For example, it is possible to affect things like poverty and ignorance, and by reducing those conditions, more people might be able to adopt expansive motivations. In fact, this can be seen as one of the central components of progressive thinking.

What lies at the foundation of all of this is the human power of intention. When we are motivated by things we do not see or understand (and this is, to some degree, true of all of us), then our intentions become less effective, more out of focus. We think and act in ways that are not in alignment with our deeper needs; we have less integrity. The key is self knowledge, accompanied by the willingness to look at and attend to our less attractive issues. I have a lot to say about human intention, and I will continue this conversation in a future post. For now, I will leave you with this food for thought. What motivates you to pursue a spiritual path? Which motivations are expansive and which are relieving? Might there be areas where you are spiritually bypassing? How do you know if your intentions are in alignment with your deeper self? ‘Til the next post, I bid you clarity and the courage to explore your inner world.