Belief drives science to the next level and beyond. There is no progress in science without belief. Reason is a fundamental part of science, but the parent of reason is belief.

Heliocentrism, the astronomical model setting the sun at the center of our solar system, was first proposed in 9th or 8th century BC Sanskrit texts in India. Heliocentrism was again proposed in the 3rd century BC by a mathematician and astronomer from Ionia, a part of present-day Turkey. He added that the stars were distant suns. His beliefs were discarded as preposterous nonscience.

Heliocentrism came up a few more times, but in 1593, Nicolaus Copernicus published “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres,” the first scientific treatise to provide detailed scientific support for heliocentrism. It was received with lots of skepticism during his lifetime.

The next heliocentric believer was Johannes Kepler, who added that the orbit of the planets around the sun is elliptical. Then in 1633, Galileo Galilei was sentenced to prison by the Inquisition on a charge of heresy for advancing the Copernican model of planetary motion in his book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.”

Moving closer to acceptance, Sir Isaac Newton published “Principia Mathematica” describing the physical laws governing the motion of the planets. But it was not until 1757 that Pope Benedict XIV suspended the Catholic Church ban on works that support the heliocentric model.

A few years before that in 1738, Daniel Bernoulli published a book called “Hydrodynamical” with the idea that air flowing past the top surface of an aircraft wing is moving faster than the bottom side, and voila, you’ve got lift. At the time, who would have believed this? The first glider flight would not come until the 1890s by Otto Lilienthal, a German engineer. The world suspended its skepticism – If God wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings.” – on December 17, 1903, with the first successful flight in history of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft by the Wright brothers near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Religiosity

Belief is the foundation of AA’s Twelve-Step method. Five of the twelve steps directly mention God. One step refers to spiritual awakening and another to a Power with a capital “P” that is greater than ourselves.

Charles Duhigg in his book “The Power of Habit,” mentions a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study that found alcoholics who practiced habit replacement could stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives. But alcoholics who believed in some higher power could ride out those stressful times (Twelve-Step).

Albert Ellis might have called this a palliative ineloquent, irrational belief. From what we know from brain imaging studies, though, belief may not be rational or eloquent, but belief in something larger than ourselves can be an effective therapy, precisely because it targets the nonrational part of the brain that needs to be rewired.

Isolated and small, living with a lack of control in a world of unfairness and injustice, we need to know how to deal with and cope with our suffering. We need guidance, kindness, structure, and appreciation. Starting at an early age we need to learn about navigating this life. When we come face to face with mortality, we need something to lift us, to soothe our agitated soul, and calm it down.

Besides the comforting belief in something larger than ourselves, religion offers a sense of structure, with reminders from morning to night and throughout the calendar year for life events large and small. Religion ties learning to the calendar year, so we learn and are reminded to remember specific things at different times of the week, season, and year. This occurs year after year, so there is ongoing relearning throughout our lifetimes.

In school, we learn in a class lecture at 9 a.m. and by 3 p.m. we have forgotten ninety percent of the material we may never encounter again. Religion takes into account that we are forgetful creatures in need of constant relearning and reminders.

The Buddhist, the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew may all get answers to their prayers despite the enormous differences among their stated beliefs. There is some evidence that a higher level of spirituality and belief correlates with greater well being, physical and mental health, less substance abuse, more stable marriages, even better military performance. It is not because of the particular creed, religion, affiliation, ritual, ceremony, formula, liturgy, incantation, sacrifices, or offerings, but rather because of belief or mental acceptance and receptivity about that for which they pray.

Alain de Botton, the author of “Religion for Atheists: A Nonbelievers Guide to the Uses of Religion,” feels you can engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content. The focus instead can be on soul-related needs of community, festivity, renewal, even rituals. Nonbelievers can cherry-pick from Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the tens of other major (and minor) belief systems. You can be an atheist and be a spiritual person believing in something bigger than yourself.

We have a need for community offering us a sense of belonging. We may join a religious organization for companionship or the credentials of membership in a club or community organization. It may have nothing to do with rites and ceremonies, but more to do with an existential search for purpose in life.

In his introduction to “Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences,” Abraham Maslow divides organized religion into two extreme camps, the mystical versus the organizational. Most partake in the organizational and organized religion is largely a set of habits, dogmas, and forms, at times even the anti-religious antagonist of spiritual experience.

Spirituality & the Brain

Very few university professors in the science fields dedicate their research to spirituality and survive. Andrew Newberg, Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College is board-certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine. He put his reputation on the line, devoting his research to the interface of neuroscience, religion, and meditation. He uses the methodology of scientific research to delve into what happens to us when we are religious and spiritual. He is the author of several books including “God and the Brain: The Physiology of Spiritual Experience.”

Newberg explores religious, spiritual, and meditative practices to find contemplative exercises to strengthen neurological circuits involved with consciousness, empathy, and social awareness. He looks for ways of optimizing spiritual, religious, and meditative practices to lead us into a more compassionate approach to our lives.

Newberg found the longer we engage in spiritual practice, the more control we gain over mind and body. And not unexpectedly, he found that brain responses of religious experiences lie along a continuum just as with secular experiences. A specific experience for some will be intense. The same experience for others barely elicits a neuropsychological response.

For meditation or prayer to change the brain’s circuitry, it must be longer than just a few minutes. The longer the period of meditation or prayer, the greater the change in the brain. When meditation is practiced within the context of regular religious activity, health benefits accrue, even extending the length of life. Different parts of the brain are affected at different points of the meditative session. Toward the end of a twelve-minute session, there is decreased activity of the parietal lobe.

Parietal Lobe

The parietal lobe is the cortical part of the brain associated with constructing a sense of self. One of the goals of meditating is to move from a sense of self to a unified state of oneness. The nuns in Newberg’s study reported coming closer to God toward the end of a session.

After eight weeks of twelve-minute basic daily meditation, brain scans showed decreased activity in the parietal lobe and a significant increase of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex behind the forehead, the cognitive and executive part of the brain. The prefrontal cortex strengthens selective attention and the ability to focus on goals and involves some memory functions.

ACC

Eight weeks of meditating produce a significant increase of neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the small structure sitting at the center of the communication junction between the frontal lobe which initiates thoughts and behaviors, and the limbic system which processes a wide range of feelings and emotions. The ACC integrates messages from the limbic system below and the cortex above. It monitors attention. The neurological heart of compassion appears to be in the ACC, It is a quantum multi portal.

Activation in the prefrontal cortex and ACC can improve memory and cognition and counter the effects of depression. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s patients show reduced metabolic activity in the ACC and Newberg concludes that meditation should slow down the deterioration caused by these diseases.

The ACC is more activated with novice than advanced meditators, apparently because beginners have more conflict with distracting events and thoughts and feelings. When the ACC activates and strengthens, this gives beginners more power to resolve conflict by focusing attention away from emotional and external distractions.

Mystical Experience

Newberg and others have found that people who have had mystical experiences often report them as more real than reality. They perceive the experience to represent a more fundamental reality than the everyday material reality we inhabit. One of the descriptions people give to the experience is a reality existing prior to subjective even objective sense of reality, meaning it existed before we as human beings apply our mental processes to it if ever we perceive it. It is boundless, even of time.

During mystic experiences, people report the material world is no longer there. Newberg questions whether it is possible that through spiritual experiences we gain access to some level of reality that we normally don’t have access to. We don’t know what is out there, what is outside of our brains. The eyes send ten million bits/second to the brain every second versus the 40 bits/second we consciously perceive. To know the reality, we would need to find some way to get outside of our brains to see what is out there.

For several moments I experience a happiness that is impossible under ordinary circumstances, and of which most people have no comprehension. I feel a complete harmony within myself and in the whole world, and this feeling is so strong and affords so much pleasure that one could give up ten years of one’s life for several seconds of that ecstasy, perhaps one’s whole life.

Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience, by Malcolm Jones (Page 75-6)

Who can say that beyond this world a super-world does not exist? Just as the animal can scarcely reach out of his environment to understand the superior world of man, so perhaps man can scarcely ever grasp the super-world, though he can reach out toward it in religion, or perhaps encounter it in revelation. A domestic animal does not understand the purposes for which man employs it. How then could man know what “final” purpose his life has; what “super-meaning” the universe has.

Victor Frankl’s “The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy”

Dostoevsky and Frankl describe an experience I had. It was like stepping from the third dimension out into the bright clarity of a higher dimension. What I was seeing was out there, what had already been out there before I perceived it, not something in my head.

My brain stopped filtering, allowing me to perceive a suddenly revealed external reality. This happened more than forty years ago and I have never shared it, because it is like describing being abducted by aliens. Had I heard it from anyone else, I would doubt their credibility. Yet it was the most significant event of my life.  And now I learn it is not so uncommon.

During the school year of 1967-1968, I was a high school dormitory counselor on an army post in Pusan, Korea. My job was virtually stress-free since I could relate to the kids as a counselor rather than as a teacher or parent. And since I was dorm counselor, I had my days free while they were in class.

Most days were spent wandering about the local village snapping photos and developing and printing black and white blow-ups in the photo lab back on the army post. An ideal life for me. One day I wandered out the back instead of the front gate and in a matter of minutes, I was out in the open countryside. After a short walk, a curtain opened and closed in my mind and I found myself on the other side. It was unlike anything I had known. No words to describe it. The Narrator was absent without a trace.

I had never known the world from this perspective. It was clear, vivid, pellucid. This was the true world that had been hidden from view. Truth existed everywhere on this side of the curtain. How could this truth exist so clearly and yet be hidden? All around in the hills, rocks and trees, fields, everywhere, there was what I can only put into words as a spiritual presence. I saw this with crystalline lucidity. No doubt what I was seeing. Not to be able to see this world is blindness. I remember thinking I could give up all my possessions. I needed nothing.

How could truth be all around and I could not get a glimpse of it before this? And how can I be like a blind man now back on this side of the curtain? How could I return to a material life where everything is a noisy story; thoughts and thoughts about thoughts. Devoid of reality; devoid of truth.

Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes; I had no idea of time; yet the most memorial, influential event of my life.

Do not keep saying to yourself if you can possibly avoid it, but how can it be like that? Because you will get down the drain into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. (Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist)

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Albert Einstein)

For centuries, mystics and philosophers have speculated about other worlds in higher dimensions. An ant has no cognizance of the world all about and we may not be aware of higher dimensions existing around us. This is not farfetched mysticism or science fiction. Superstring theory predicts the number of dimensions to be ten. There is a growing acknowledgment among physicists worldwide that dimensions exist beyond the commonly accepted space and time. Thousands of research papers relating to hyperspace have been published in scientific journals by modern physicists. Michio Kaku attempts to make this knowledge base of theoretical physics accessible to the lay audience in his books, including his 1995 book “Hyperspace.”

Out of the millions of bits of information, our brains process each second, 45 bits give or take a few are devoted to conscious thought. We can give our total conscious attention to around one-millionth or 0.000001 of the sensory input available to our brain.

Objective reality is the reality we all agree upon that enables us to communicate with each other. Apart from this subjective and objective reality, there is a third reality with a capital R. This is the Reality that is out there whether or not it is perceived.

Most of the reports by those who have had mystical experiences say it is as if the brain opens up and the other ninety-nine percent suddenly comes online. It is like stepping out from a two-dimensional picture book into the world of three dimensions.

Stroke of Insight

In “My Stroke of Insight,” Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist describes what she experienced when she suffered a stroke caused by a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. She describes it as an awakening to space outside of her conscious mind and body. Her cognitive mind had shifted away from her normal perception of reality to this altered higher-level state of consciousness.

She describes the experience of floating in one moment from space A to space B with no connection between; being in the clarity of the present moment and at one with all that is. Everything including herself radiated energy and all was connected. She spoke of being entranced by the feelings of tranquility, safety, blessedness, euphoria, and omniscience. Nirvana.

The Marsh Chapel Experiment

The Marsh Chapel Experiment took place in 1962 on Good Friday at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School designed an experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary. He wanted to see if psilocybin mushrooms could induce a religious or peak experience. He felt that “to use your head you had to go out of your mind.”

He gave 10 students psilocybin and 10 students niacin. Niacin is called an active placebo since it has the immediate effect of flushing, so some of these students thought they had ingested the magic mushroom.

Reverend Mike Young was one of the grad students who was given the mushroom. Fifty years after the experiment, he said this was one of the most significant experiences of his life. Before this, he had doubts that he wanted to go into the ministry. He said he is a Unitarian Universalist minister at least in part due to that experience. All but one of the ten graduate students who took psilocybin became ministers. None of the graduate students who took the placebo became ministers.

Roland Griffiths, a psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, repeated this psilocybin experiment with double-blind controls. The results were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2008. Fourteen months after the experiment, over half of the participants rated the experience one of the most meaningful of their entire lives.

Griffiths went back to Pahnke’s study and other studies to find the basic ingredients common to each person’s experience. He came up with a list of 6 key factors:

1. A feeling of awe and wonder.

2. Transcendence of time and space.

3. Feelings of peace and joy.

4. Unity – A sense of cosmic oneness; a connection to everything that is, every blade of grass and grain of sand.

5. Ineffability – Can’t be described in words; nonverbal; indescribable.

6. An intuitive belief that the experience is a source of objective truth about the nature of reality.

Unseen World

William James (1842-1910), psychologist and philosopher, was trained as a medical doctor. He gained widespread attention and recognition with the publication of his two-volume, twelve hundred pages “Principles of Psychology.”

James collected first-hand reports of mystical experiences and although he never had a mystical experience himself, he experimented with nitrous oxide and reported that when sufficiently diluted with air, nitrous oxide stimulates a mystical consciousness. In this state he experienced what he called a “depth upon depth of truth,” a truth he said had never been shaken. He said that our normal, rational consciousness is but one type of consciousness while all about it and separated with a filmy screen lie potential forms of consciousness that are entirely different.

In “The Will to Believe,” copyright 1896, (available online at no cost as a Project Gutenberg EBook), James writes:

Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain—that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea.

He illustrates this with an anecdote of his terrier who bites a teasing boy. The father of the boy demands damages. Though the dog may be present at every step of the negotiations and sees the money paid, he has no awareness of what this all means and without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him.

Just as we encompass our world and the dog’s world within it, encompassing both these worlds may be a still wider world as unseen by us as our world is unseen by the dog, and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform.

By belief in that world, James does not imply religion, not religion as many think of it. He distinguishes between personal religion and institutional religion. The institutional religion of churches, he said, is second hand and experienced through rituals, deities, and ideas. In contrast, the founders of the religion experienced a deep experience with the primordial source.

James believed the men who do not go to church or have any religious convictions are the best. Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious. They teach us to rely on some supernatural power when we ought to rely on ourselves.

Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, where he heads USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, often credits the work of William James when dealing with the conscious mind, emotion, and feeling. He considers James’s thinking as a precursor to current studies of cognitive neuroscience.

In an interview at the NYC Public Library in 2010, Damasio discussed what may be going on in deep states of meditation and what may be blocking us from this sought-after state. In deep meditation, it is possible to go behind the screen and enter into a deep state of primordial being and experience the cells and tissues and systems that make up our body.

In this state, there is a representation of a presence of life itself without the narrative. This presence gets to be represented in the structures of the brain stem that has been with us in evolution for a very long time. This is the place in the brain where you have a fusion of mind and body. Deep inside, you find extremely important realities that can enlighten and have therapeutic effects.

But our complex brains store huge banks of memories about ourselves, of others we have interacted with, of books we have read, movies we have seen, and the world around us. Memories built upon memories and verbiage to describe them, serve to set up an opaque screen, blocking us from the great world of biology and reality within us. All we are aware of is the discursive brain chatter defining the world and who we are.

If someone were to ask me, is this all there is, I would answer this is a but a shallow facade. And because of this truth, I keep on working to open up more and more of my mind. I may never get back to where I was for that short space of time in Korea, but I know there is infinitely more to work toward.

Self-help books that help:

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body