<font size=3>Into the Mystic</font>
Bruce Bower

After spending 8 years training in the meditative practices of Zen Buddhism, neurologist James H. Austin spent a sabbatical year from 1981 to 1982 at the London Zen Center. On a pleasant March morning, while waiting for a subway train on a surface platform and idly glancing down the tracks toward the Thames River, Austin got his first taste of spiritual enlightenment.

Instantly, the panorama of sky, buildings, and water acquired a sense of what he calls "absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection." He suddenly shed his formerly unshakable assumption that he was an individual, separated from the rest of the world by a skin suit. The sky and river remained just as blue, the buildings just as gray and dingy, yet the loss of an "I-me-mine" perspective imbued the view with an extraordinary emptiness, he says.

Within seconds, other insights dawned. These included the notion that Austin had experienced an eternal state of affairs, had nothing more to fear, couldn't possibly articulate what had happened, and felt a rush of mental release that impelled him to take himself less seriously.

In Zen and the Brain (1998, MIT Press), Austin described how this brief experience spurred him to investigate brain processes that underlie spiritual or mystical encounters.

Austin's fellow neurologists haven't taken his approach either to heart or to brain. The harsh reality of science is that those who study mysticism and meditation rarely hear the sound of even one hand clapping among their colleagues, to paraphrase a Zen saying.

Austin's Zen instructor told him that although many people attain what she called "moments of no-I," such experiences seem incomprehensible to those who haven't had them. For scientists, creatures of the rational thinking embraced by the 17th-century Enlightenment, claims of mystical enlightenment have long smacked of self-deception, gullibility, mental disorder, charlatanism, or all of the above.

However, a small band of researchers has begun to probe the nature of mystical experiences and other extraordinary psychological happenings. They've issued a manifesto of sorts in Varieties of Anomalous Experience (2000, American Psychological Association). The book explores scientific evidence on altered states of consciousness associated with mystical experiences, near-death incidents, alien-abduction reports, and other so-called anomalous events.

... the three academics want to launch a science to study the characteristics of human consciousness that make mystical experience possible. Their focus on a spectrum of conscious states defies the mainstream-neuroscience notion that there's a single type of awareness, which is either on or off, as if controlled by a light switch. Conscious experience instead comes with a dimmer switch that varies in sweep and intensity from one person to another and gets wired up mainly by cultural forces, in their view.

Mystical experiences
Although mystical experiences can't easily be diced up and quantified, they affect a surprisingly large number of people. National surveys in the United States and England find that roughly one-third of adults say that they've had, for example, a moment of sudden religious awakening or felt close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift them out of themselves.

Such experiences may extend far back into human prehistory. According to archaeologists, cave and rock art from Africa to Australia depicts shamans' supernatural encounters, which occurred during conscious states achieved through chanting, dancing, hallucinogenic drugs, or other means (SN: 10/5/96, p. 216). In traditional societies, shamans act as spiritual leaders and healers.

"Mystical experiences occur on a continuum," says psychologist David M. Wulff of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. "Even if they're not religiously inspired, they can be striking, such as the transcendent feelings musicians sometimes get while they perform. I have colleagues who say they've had mystical experiences, although they have various ways of explaining them."

In Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Wulff reviews current scientific evidence and theories about mystical experience. He defines such events as those that deviate sharply from a person's ordinary state of awareness and leave the person with an impression of having encountered a higher reality. Mystical encounters are rare and fleeting, yet they stand out as defining moments in the lives of those who have them, Wulff says.

They can include a sense of existing in a unitary place outside of space and time or feeling immersed in a kind of objective or ultimate reality that eludes verbal description. For many people having mystical experiences, physical objects recede from view in the wake of feelings of peace, joy, and having encountered the sacred or divine, Wulff reports.

[...]

In the past 20 years, investigations of epilepsy patients have linked reports of mystical and paranormal experience and religious preoccupation to bursts of electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobes. A novel written by Mark Salzman, Lying Awake (2000, Knopf), revolves around a nun who fears that medical treatment for her temporal lobe epilepsy will also wipe out her vivid religious visions.

In How We Believe (2000, W.H. Freeman and Co.), Michael Shermer of Occidental College in Los Angeles speculates that many religious visionaries and founders of major religions may have had temporal-lobe seizures that jump-started their mystical journeys.

Whatever happened inside the skulls of the ancient mystics, most people today who report mystical and so-called peak experiences don't have brain or mental ailments, Austin says.

Some people consider the hallucinations and altered thinking of schizophrenia as akin to mystical visions. But this mental disorder exhibits only a superficial similarity to mystical experiences, Austin contends. ...

Neither schizophrenia nor mystical experience has been comprehensively explained, Wulff maintains, although theories abound. Sigmund Freud viewed mystical reports as a sign of a person's regression to an earlier stage of development. Freud's psychoanalytic disciple Carl Jung described mystical experience as a positive process springing from a shared, unconscious reservoir of human experiences and themes.

In the 1960s, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of "self-actualization" that was topped off by having peak experiences of ecstatic fusion with the world. Lower in the hierarchy are experiences that psychologists now refer to as "flow" and attribute to creativity.

[...]

Dismissing the mystical
Cognitive and brain scientists appear more inclined to dismiss the mystical realm than to study it. "There's nothing in our conception of what a human is that allows this stuff to fit in," comments psychologist Eleanor Rosch of the University of California, Berkeley.

Austin suspects that a better understanding of brain areas that contribute to the individual notion of self will lead to insights about spiritual enlightenment. Parts of the cortex and the inner brain, including the thalamus and the amygdala, work together to generate each person's sense of "I-me-mine," he theorizes. During mystical or spiritual episodes, transmission of chemical messengers, including consciousness-altering opioids, within this brain system might undergo dramatic changes.

[...]

Still, even far less provocative approaches to mystical experience draw blank stares from many scientists, Wulff notes. "I don't think this is likely to become a popular area of research," he says.

Seeds of mystical research, however, may flower as researchers increasingly turn to examine positive aspects of mental life, such as the nature of happiness, Cardeña remarks.

"Psychologists haven't really entered into the study of mystical experience, but they're parked just outside the door," he says.

Source: Into the Mystic