Can you get into heaven by bathing your brain in a magnetic field, or sprinkling it with holy psychedelic tea? I don’t think so. But some people might, and I’m going to talk about the spiritual concepts and scientific findings they find so compelling. If you’re a Christian, as I am, you may find these ideas concerning, and possibly disturbing; and if you’re not, well, you might still want to hang around to find out what the future holds.
First, I’m going to dust off a mysterious Greek word that you’ll want to remember for later: philokalia. It means “love of the beautiful”. The word usually refers to the Philokalia, a collection of ancient Orthodox texts with instructions on prayer and reaching union with God. Why is a prayer book on God called “love of the beautiful?” Because it assumes the highest spiritual reality—the Creator—is beautiful, and that that is what human life is aiming for.
Here’s another word, which hasn’t even made it into the dictionary: neurokalia. I invented it, and it means “beautiful brain”. The brain, a three-pound lump of tangled cellular sausage, is miraculously the organ of human consciousness, and gives us the ability to think, feel, and act in the world.
What about our spiritual experiences? Does the brain—the neurokalia—produce these too? When religious or spiritual people see visions or angels or spirit guides, or experience their souls leaving their bodies, is it all in their heads, no more than a fully immersive hallucination? Or is something happening beyond the brain? Is the brain like an antenna or cell tower that can pick up real signals from the spiritual world? Or, to push the analogy further, is the brain a portal into the spiritual reality?
I won’t be focusing on these questions, but they’ll be hovering around us as we explore a more practical, and unsettling, question about harnessing and controlling spiritual experiences. What happens when a brain-based view of spirituality intersects with an increasingly technological world? There may be a coming technical triumph over spirituality—or what seems like spirituality—one that could send shock waves through religious communities and beyond. But to appreciate how and why, we need to dig a bit deeper into the experience of spirituality.
Maybe the most remarkable of all such experiences is “oneness”. According to many who’ve had it, the oneness experience (OE) isn’t simply an experience of some aspect of the spiritual world—like seeing an angel—but an experience of the whole of reality. During an OE, there is no more distinction between the “I” and other people or things. In a transcendent shift, individual consciousness merges into Absolute Being—which is referred to by various terms, like the “Divine” or the “Void”, or even “God”. There isn’t even a distinction between the self and “God”, for the self comes to the realization that the self is “God”.
I’m putting God in quotes, because I don’t think what’s being referred to here is really God—not in any traditional orthodox (or even Orthodox) Christian sense of God. Still, I’m trying to capture the basic idea, abstractly anyway. Not that one really can. OEs are impossible to fully describe in abstractions or words because they transcend abstractions and words. The oneness experience transcends everything because it includes everything. In many religious traditions—especially eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as others—OEs are considered the highest spiritual state attainable. There is nothing higher, nothing beyond. You’ve hit the ceiling. You’ve become the ceiling. You are one with the One. Or so we’re told. Here is an example:
I met a growing sense of peace…I felt enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria…I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace…My consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a “being at one” with the universe…I could no longer clearly discern the physical boundaries of where I began and where I ended...
What’s notable about this OE description is that it doesn’t come from a monk or guru. It was written by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, describing what she experienced during a severe stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. In most people, the left hemisphere plays a dominant role in language. The bursting of a blood vessel in that part of Taylor’s brain, and the resulting buildup of blood, disrupted her language functions, so that, during the four hours that the stroke developed, she mostly lost the ability to talk, read, and write. This disruption of the left hemisphere, in turn, appears to have triggered increased dominance of her right hemisphere, and catapulted her into the blissful experience of oneness:
As the dominating fibers of my left hemisphere shut down, they no longer inhibited my right hemisphere, and my perception was free to shift such that my consciousness could embody the tranquility of my right mind. Swathed in an enfolding sense of liberation and transformation, the essence of my consciousness shifted…I’m no authority, but I think the Buddhists would say I entered the mode of existence they call Nirvana.
I don’t know whether Taylor really did reach a state of Nirvana—the Buddhist equivalent of spiritual oneness—but people who practice Buddhism and other meditative traditions will spend years, and even a lifetime, trying to catch a glimmer of what Taylor experienced in a matter of hours due to a neurological injury.
Scientists have been studying the connection between the brain and spirituality for a few decades, and there’s even a field called neurotheology. The findings are complex, with still many unknowns, so we’ll just focus on a couple of intriguing snippets. According to the research, intense meditation and prayer can affect various areas of the brain, including the parietal lobes—a key area when it comes to OEs. Normally, the parietal lobes help identify our personal physical boundaries. This is my own body, separate from you, that chair, those trees, and everything else around me.
However, intense prayer or meditation can alter parietal lobe functioning, and result in a loss of the sense of the physical boundaries of the body, as well as the loss of the distinction between the self and its surroundings. Subjectively, it can feel as if the self or “I” is merging into everything—a powerful, overwhelming feeling of having become unified with the entire universe.
The parietal lobes may also be involved in interpreting others’ intentions, so that changes in this part of the brain may result in a mistaken sense of somebody else being present when there isn’t. This feeling of a “presence” is a possible explanation for people seeming to encounter spiritual entities during OE-type events, or experiencing a connection or surrender to a revered deity.
By now you might be thinking I’m actually an atheist, trying to convince you “God is a hallucination”. But I’m not an atheist and that isn’t my purpose. Still, it’s understandable that some might feel discomfort or even defensiveness at what the brain theologians are suggesting. People who have had an OE or other transcendent-type experience may insist it was more than something “in the head”. They may insist the neuroscience isn’t the whole story.
Whatever we conclude, it’s undeniable the brain plays a role in OEs, and the science will only continue to develop, shedding new insights and suggesting new possibilities—which brings us back to our question. What happens when a brain-based view of spirituality intersects with an increasingly technological world? After all, if OEs and other in-the-head spiritual experiences can be mapped to certain brain functions, how long before technologically savvy people figure out a way to induce and control such experiences?
And in fact, they have, at least in basic ways. A few years ago, researchers increased feelings of religiousness and spirituality in participants by stimulating brain cells in the inferior parietal lobe through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The same stimulation, applied to another brain area—the frontal lobes—has also been shown to reduce belief in God (and, apparently, prejudice toward immigrants). TMS devices are non-invasive; no electrodes are implanted in the brain tissue. Imagine a cap or helmet over your head that transmits waves through your skull and into your brain, stimulating target areas. TMS is used in psychiatry for the treatment of depression and other conditions, but its ability to either increase or decrease spirituality/religiousness suggests its promise as future spiritual tech.
Another device, in development at the SEMA lab of the University of Arizona, uses transcranial ultrasound to “sonicate” the brain. The purpose isn’t to spark spiritual experiences—not yet anyway—but to improve people’s ability to meditate. According to the lab’s website,
We are aiming the ultrasound to a part of the brain that we think should help enhance the acquisition of meditation skills (like equanimity, concentration, and sensory clarity).
Other devices have been designed specifically for spiritual purposes, including a virtual reality technique—as in the 30-second video below—where a group meditation is carried out with VR goggles, inside of a church, to achieve mystical-like experiences.
Devices aren’t the only way to trigger spiritual experiences, or even the most potent way. Psychedelic substances can stimulate powerful OEs and otherworldly encounters. One substance, ayahuasca, has been traditionally used in shamanic rituals in South America. The effects are so extraordinary—transporting people into alien landscapes among elves and giant insects and other weird entities—that its primary chemical ingredient, DMT, has been called the spirit molecule.
Ayahuasca has gained increasing interest in North America in recent years. In the United States, a religious group known as União do Vegetal currently uses it ritually for “Communion” in a tea mixture, as shown below.
Ayahuasca was also recently decriminalized in Canada for use in religious ceremonies. Vice described one such place of worship, known as the The Centre for Universal Illumination Luz Divina, where on average,
ceremonies involving ayahuasca last six hours. There are two types of ceremonies. Concentrations—silent meditations combined with hymns and prayers—are shorter while Hinarios, involving singing and dancing in a formation on special festive days such as Christmas, may last longer.
Most people, for now, might be leery about taking mind-altering drugs. I’m one of them. The possibility for spiritual or psychological harm is far too great. In Rod Dreher’s words, “I do not not not recommend going down this road for anybody”. But I know people who’d be open to jumping into that kaleidoscopic rabbit hole—and even for those who are as-yet uncertain, attitudes can change. Research on the use of psychedelics for mental illness looks promising, at least on the surface. If psychedelics turn out to be effective therapy for depression, anxiety, and PTSD, how long before these substances slip into mainstream culture? How long before religious communities turn to them as a kind of spiritual therapy? Will the churches of the future offer a pill to their congregations as routinely as they now offer the bread and wine of Christ’s body? How many will take it?
In the end it may be a combination of techniques that help induce powerful and controllable spiritual experiences—like a micro-dose of drugs to open up the mind, brain-ultrasound to enhance concentration, and virtual reality goggles to set the mood with colourful energy essences.
Either way, the intersection of brain-based spirituality and technology is inevitable, and will turn spiritual experiences into a commodity, a regulated service, or both. Some might welcome this technical harnessing of the “spiritual”. Wouldn’t it be nice to have instant access to life-changing spiritual experiences without the baggage of religious mythology and morality? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to say, as Jill Bolte Taylor did, that we’re grateful for a certain part of our brain which is “completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world”?
But the rise of spiritual technology won’t be good news for everybody. In the Christian worldview, spiritual tech is tantamount to magic—a method for controlling spiritual forces, with all the risks and dangers that entails. Spiritual tech that specifically produces oneness-type experiences—even if these experiences seem benign or benevolent—would also have massive implications for doctrine. In the Christian faith, there is a clear distinction between human and God. Humans worship God, and have a relationship with God, and might one day be transformed into higher (spiritual) beings in another dimension of reality; but humans are not God and will never fully merge with God. At least according to traditional historical theology. What will happen to Christians who, after repeated tastes of the OE, become convinced they really have experienced merging with God and becoming God? The collapse of a clear distinction between human and God could lead many of the faithful to abandon basic traditional doctrines, and accelerate the decline of Christianity in the West. I’ve focused on the Christian faith here, but similar concerns could arise in other monotheistic religions, such as Islam or Judaism.
At first glance, it might seem that Buddhism and other eastern religions that define the ultimate reality as “one” won’t be impacted by any doctrinal change. Still, it’s possible people will stop showing up at temples to engage in the rigors of meditation when they can instead tap into Nirvana or the Void by gently zapping their parietal lobes from the comfort of a living room couch.
It will be the same couch, of course, from which the same people might play video games, watch Netflix and internet porn, or strap headsets onto their faces to enter virtual worlds in the metaverse. And why not? If we can binge on games and movies, why not binge on transcendence and heaven? And even if spiritual tech increases feelings of compassion for the world, why will it matter if that world is increasingly virtual? Why will it matter, if the “real world” close to us—our physical families, physical friends, physical neighbours, and the natural environment—become paradoxically less real, and even intrusions on our growing absorption in the “oneness” and other in-the-head realities?
Interestingly, the oneness experience and virtual reality fit well with the ancient esoteric belief in Gnosticism, which is that the material world is intrinsically flawed or evil—basically undesirable—and that we must escape it by reaching a non-physical spiritual reality. Disembodiment is liberation, as noted by Mary Harrington. Spiritual tech will move us further in that direction.
Atheists may chuckle to themselves, thinking they’re safe from all this nonsense. After all, for atheists, spiritual experiences go no further than the brain. They’re a fabulous hallucination, maybe the most fabulous of all, but in the end nothing more than neurochemicals dancing an ecstatic dance. It’s all neurokalia—a beautiful brain doing wondrous things. Perhaps, feeling secure in their atheist beliefs, some atheists might even try spiritual tech out of curiosity. If that sounds like you, beware: you might end up believing things you didn’t intend, as in this study where more than half of the participants who identified as atheists before taking the psychedelic DMT no longer identified as atheists afterward.
Spiritual technology may also get entangled with political aims, especially if it promotes individual docility and makes society more manageable. The possibility has already been imagined by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where citizens are regularly rewarded with soma, a drug that wipes away all cares and transports users into happy head-trips.
And notice this: the spiritual experience of oneness, in particular, is a form of absolutism. It encompasses all of reality, which makes it the highest authority for everything. You can’t argue with it because you can’t use words. You can’t criticize or deconstruct it because it’s beyond ideas. It just is. The technical triumph over this experience—if it ever happens—might blend nicely, and horribly, into totalitarian narratives that demand rigid social unity and stifling conformity. If oneness is true of the universe, then it must be true of society. Therefore, we, the authorities, are justified in our policies. It’s sloppy reasoning, but when did that ever stop a dictator?
Karl Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the masses”, a premise which is debatable. My own experience is that faith is mostly sobering, and sometimes hard, requiring discipline and self-sacrifice. I have experienced quiet joy, but not sedation or intoxication. Spiritual technologies, on the other hand, seem closer to Marx’s “opiate”, as they will provide easy access to euphoric G-O-D (God-on-Demand) experiences, with minimal effort on the part of the user. And what an irony it would be, especially if spiritual tech ever gains mastery over the oneness experience. The OE is considered the great mystical achievement of many of the world’s oldest religions: the highest spiritual height that can be attained, a union with the ultimate source of everything. That we might one day be able to harness this “experience” or something close to it, and perhaps abuse its use, seems to contradict the very premise of the experience. How can the absolute, the infinite reality, be enslaved to a finite reality…like a toy in a child’s hands?
And yet, the instinct for trying to access the divine reality by effort, and even to take control of that reality, is a natural one. Not a good one, but natural. In C.S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters, a senior devil gives instruction to a junior devil on how to deceive followers of God during their prayers. With the keenest insight, the senior devil advises:
Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself [God] we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling…
Replace the “desired feeling” with the “oneness feeling” or “spiritual experience”, and the meaning of the passage remains true. Our genuine desire to come into contact with the deepest reality, the Source of All, can lead us, instead, merely deeper into ourselves, toward the very ego and self-centredness we had hoped to transcend. Maybe even into spiritual delusion. For those who define “spiritual” as something that goes on mostly in our heads—in our inner experiences—it might be time to reconsider whether this definition isn’t, perhaps, dangerously narrow.
We’re still some ways from the powerful, controllable, easy-access spiritual technologies I’ve imagined above. It’s hard to know how long before it will be possible to download free “heaven apps” off the internet, or how long before churches dole out spiritual pills and offer seating equipped with TMS neuro-caps that claim to enhance a feeling of oneness with God.
Whatever way these technologies come, they will come. As the neurotheology continues to progress, the practical applications of the science will follow, whether in the form of devices, refined psychedelics, or a combination of these. If you’re an atheist, or if you believe spirituality is mostly a personal subjective experience and the brain a trustworthy gateway into this experience, then it’s neurokalia. You’ll be happy to dabble in the new tech, even to strap on the goggles and dive deep for an adventure.
For many Christians, and perhaps others, the brain is certainly remarkable, even beautiful, in its function and complexity; and the subjective experiences that arise from it are a vital and beautiful part of what it means to be human. But the objective brain is a physical organ prone to error and ultimately to decay, and our subjective experiences, being firmly rooted in our ego and our intractable imperfections, are not reliable indicators of absolute truth. The truth in its highest form—God—is always beyond us. We can turn in that ultimate direction, and imperfectly strive to keep on the path—the path of philokalia, a love of the Beautiful. But we cannot merge with God. We cannot control God’s presence. We cannot know Absolute Reality.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we can never catch a glimmer of the real Beauty. But if we do, then it wasn’t by our own power or effort. It was by grace.