The Science of Religions
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part Six
If reality is made by consciousness, as the last part argued, then the obvious question is who is doing the observing. This is the part of the story where a handful of people, most of them scientists, spent their careers trying to answer exactly that, and quietly built a bridge between science and spirit that we’re still walking across.
Modern research has even claimed a biological footprint for it. Newberg and d’Aquili used single-photon-emission computed tomography on a Buddhist monk during a religious experience and found a decrease in activity in the orientation association area of the brain, which could lead to a feeling of boundlessness.¹ Interesting, though far from conclusive, because it doesn’t touch the association with divinity that these experiences create.
It helps to remember how young psychology actually is. Many people are surprised to hear that the scientific field of psychology only began in 1879, in Leipzig, with Wilhelm Wundt. Since then it has taken huge leaps, many of which left the profession deeply fragmented, especially over the question at the centre of all this: what to do with the parts of human experience that can’t be measured.
William James and the field
The psychologist William James spent much of his time researching what he called The Field, and the stream of consciousness, and would speak about it non-stop. James noticed that the gap in our consciousness was not a passive, boring place of nothingness, but an active place full of dynamic information. He spent a lot of time trying to contact that intelligence. Many of the psychological dynamos of the era, Freud, Frederic Myers, Pierre Janet, used automatic writing as a psychoanalytical tool; James saw it instead as a way to access the field of consciousness. At the time this was really out there and experimental. James wrote, in an essay called The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, that it produced some “really supernormal knowledge.” He also felt that social constraints stopped many psychologists from ever discussing the mystical side of what they experienced in their research.
Intuition was something the ancient mystics, Plato, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, relied on heavily. Could the secret of their deep thinking be that they were connected to non-local knowledge, the universal consciousness that transpersonal psychologists like James later wrote about?
At this time there was a religious movement sweeping into America from the East, and James felt it was opening the door for the creation of a Science of Religions. He believed that through the study of religion we could uncover the core of our being, where we came from in a metaphysical sense, and our ultimate destiny. He became a champion of the human soul and dedicated much of his career to proving, scientifically and through human experience, that God exists, presenting this for the first time in 1898 as a Lecturer at Edinburgh University.
He was heavily influenced by Swami Vivekananda, who left Bombay in 1893 for America, set up the Vedanta Centre in San Francisco, and introduced the Vedic teachings to much of the West. The core of the Vedic teaching is that real knowledge is Self-Knowledge, which fit rather neatly with James’s understanding of the subconscious self.
Jung, and a very good sleepover
Jung met James in 1909, around the time he published Conclusions to a Pluralistic Universe. In 1909 Jung, Freud and the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi were asked to lecture at Clark University, and for seven weeks beforehand they analysed each other’s dreams in Boston. Imagine that sleepover. Around the same time, James had a mystical experience brought about by an earthquake, in which the secrets of the continuum of consciousness were revealed to him. Everything led James toward a new “pluralistic, pan-psychic view of the universe,” the belief that The Absolute is in all things.
Jung, meanwhile, started reflecting the Upanishads in his own work, mainly in The Red Book. He brought science and religion together in a non-dualistic fashion, relating everything back to Brahman, the absolute force in everything. In his 1925 Psychological Types he called the “Brahmanic Conception” one of unity and opposites, “The Uniting Symbol as The Principle of Dynamic Regulation.” These sections are pivotal to Jung’s formation of the transpersonal: through what he called Deliverance, or the transcendent function, we can be freed from suffering, achieved through the practice of active imagination.
In 1932 Jung began giving seminars on Kundalini Yoga, exploring the chakra system. He argued that the two higher chakras, the ones to do with transcendence, were not relevant for the West, because the higher levels of transpersonal consciousness, beginning with Ajna, the third eye, require the dissolution of the ego, and Jung felt the Cosmic Consciousness he wrote about was for future humanities. I guess Instagram would indicate there’s a little too much ego knocking around for that just yet.
Vivekananda disagreed. He believed his process of Raja Yoga, and the study of the Superconscious as if it were a science, would open the door to the transcendent for everyone. He held that the path to Samadhi was scientifically explorable, but had become complicated by the search for only one model, and that a transcendent life has four paths: work, love, psychology and knowledge.
The cat, the peaks and the split
The Upanishads, the inspirational teachings on self-mastery and the anatomy of the mind, influenced everybody. Even Erwin Schrodinger, most commonly known for declaring that the cat in his experimental box was both dead and alive, was inspired by them. In his books he spoke of a collective consciousness that transcended our understanding of individual selves, and felt that our sense of separation comes from a kind of collective trance that society puts us in.
Meanwhile, rumblings were starting in the psychological community as the traditional behaviourists began to think these new introspectionists were totally lame. Abraham Maslow was investigating Peak Experiences and their frequent occurrence in self-actualised people, and the Jonah Complex, which he detailed in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, asking why people denied reaching their calling. Roberto Assagioli, a trained psychiatrist, met Jung, shared his feeling that psychology was incomplete, and developed his own theory, Psychosynthesis.
The genuinely interesting thing about all of these pioneers is that they had mystical experiences personally. These can be explored in many ways: some are woven into the everyday lives of the masses, like yoga and meditation; some are more exotic, like shamanism and psychedelics. Jung postulated that mystical experiences occur in our daily lives, namely through the strange world of our dreams, and that with the right awareness and training we could even explore our archetypes and engage with our transpersonal selves.
Which raises the next question, and it’s a practical one: if consciousness isn’t produced by the brain, then what is the brain actually doing, and where in the body does any of this live? That’s where we go next: to holograms, the pineal gland, and the possibility that consciousness is less like a factory and more like a radio.
Notes
A note on neurotheology. The Newberg and d’Aquili brain-imaging work on meditating monks and praying nuns is real, genuinely interesting, and often over-claimed, including sometimes by me. What the scans show is that deep contemplative states correlate with measurable changes in brain activity, for instance in the areas involved in orienting the body in space. What they do not show, and cannot, is that the experience was “of” God, or that the brain was contacting anything beyond itself. Correlation of a state with brain activity is exactly what you’d expect whether the experience is purely neural or genuinely transcendent, so it can’t settle the question either way. I include it because it’s a real finding worth knowing, not because it proves the mystical reading.