When we start to think about enlightenment
we try to divide it into two basic ideas about
enlightenment.
And one is what I usually refer to as the
small E enlightenment experiences and these
are the kind of experiences that people have
a number of times through their life.
It may be kind of the sudden epiphany about
how to resolve some problem at work or solve
an issue with a relationship.
Some issue you’ve been working on for a
long time and you suddenly figure it out and
you kind of understand things in a different
way for the first time.
But that’s the little E experience.
And the big E experiences are usually those
experiences that are kind of are life changing.
They’re mind blowing.
They change everything about the way you think,
about the world, about life, about death,
about spirituality.
Whatever it is it changes everything about
who you are.
For example one of the experiences that people
often have is a very profound sense of an
intensity of the experience.
The experience is the most powerful experience
they have ever had.
And if there’s specific elements within
it, if it’s something that they’ve seen,
if it’s some vision of light or something
like that - it’s the most beautiful light
that they’ve ever seen.
It’s the most beautiful music they’ve
ever seen.
It’s the most intense feeling of love that
they’ve ever seen.
So whatever it is it’s this very, very powerfully
intense experience.
We can look at the areas of the brain that
help us to determine which things in our lives
are particularly important, are particularly
intense to us.
This usually occurs within an area of our
brain called the limbic system, which is the
emotional areas of our brain - particularly
areas such as the amygdala and the hippocampus
- which light up.
They go crazy when something really important
happens in our life.
The limbic system also helps to write things
into our memory.
So when something happens in our life and
thousands of things happen to us every day
we don’t remember most of them because they
don’t trigger that kind of a response.
But if we get into a fight with somebody we’ll
remember that for a while because it was very
emotional to us.
So when people have these intense enlightenment
kinds of experiences not only do they feel
incredibly real at the moment but they are
remembered almost for the entire lifetime
of the person that they keep coming back to
that experience and they always remember this
experience as being that life changing moment
that from that point forward everything was
different.
Another core element of these experiences
for example is a feeling of unity, connectedness,
oneness.
So the people will often say, “I felt connected
with everything in the universe.
I felt one with God.”
There’s an area of our brain, a parietal
lobe which is in the back of our brain and
this normally takes all of our sensory information
and helps us to reconstruct a sense of ourself
and how that self relates to the world in
some kind of spatial way.
Well we found that this area of the brain
in particular starts to quiet down when people
have these profound experiences of oneness
or unity.
Now this makes a lot of sense.
If it’s trying to create your sense of self
and your sense of space if it starts to shut
down well you lose your sense of self.
You lose your sense of space.
And I suppose ultimately one of the most important
aspects of the enlightenment experience is
its permanence is that it rearranges the way
our brain works for the rest of our lives.
So when people have that experience and they
suddenly now realize what their beliefs are
in spirituality or their beliefs are about
life or death or whatever there’s some incredible
change that occurs perhaps in many different
areas of our brain that really rearranges
the way the person thinks, the way they feel,
the way they behave in life.
And one of the real key areas, one last area
I’ll mention at the moment is one of the
key areas that seems to be involved in that
is a very central structure called the thalamus.
And this is located deep inside the brain.
Some people think that the thalamus is actually
the seat of consciousness and it actually
takes a lot of our sensory information and
sends it to the different parts of our brain
and it helps different areas of our brain
communicate with each other.
Well this is an area that seems to be dramatically
changed by these kinds of practices and experiences.
So if you think about it if the thalamus is
changed it’s really changing a person’s
overall perceptions of reality, the way they
think about reality, the way they sense reality
and ultimately the way their brain interacts
with that reality.
These are not experiences that are happening
only to the Mother Teresa’s of the world
and the Buddha’s of the world.
These are experiences that are happening to
everyone.
These are just regular people.
These are people who go to church.
They’re people who are religious, people
who are not religious, people who are agnostic,
people who had a drug- induced experience,
people who were meditating.
And my favorite some of them were just people
basically walking down the street or driving
their car down the street and the experience
just hit them.
As a neuroscientist if you look at everybody’s
brain we all have a lot of the same basic
structures in the same basic ways.
We have our frontal lobes and our temporal
lobes and our limbic system.
And even when you look at brain scans usually
we’re not more than five or ten percent
different from each other.
So we all have kind of the same basic circuitry,
which makes me think that the ability to have
these kinds of experiences is within all of
us.
It’s just a matter of how one activates
it and whether one activates it through a
very traditional religious path or some other
more unusual path.
When you start to think about how to induce
these kinds of experiences one of the things
that to me is very interesting is that we
tend to look at kind of the more modern technologies
and there’s a device called transcranial
magnetic stimulation which sends magnetic
waves into different parts of the brain.
There’s been some work by other investigators
who have tried to see if different electromagnetic
waves into areas like the temporal lobe along
the side of the brain help to induce these
kinds of experiences.
But for thousands of years people have found
ways of inducing these experiences.
And you go back, you know, into the shamanic
traditions and people using mushrooms and
peyote and ayahuasca and all these other kind
of pharmacological, if you will, substances.
And people have induced various physiological
changes in their body by not eating for a
period of time, not sleeping for a period
of time, going into some kind of cave or doing
some sort of sleep deprivation process, or
sensory deprivation process.
And it’s interesting because in our kind
of Western modern way of thinking about things
we do tend to think about this as, you know,
you push a button or that this is some sort
of artificial stimulation of these experiences.
For example a shaman who takes some mushrooms
to get into a spiritual state, that shaman
doesn’t look at that whole process as being
artificial.
That shaman basically looks at it as, “This
is what I need to do to get my brain to another
level so that I can interact with the spiritual
world.”
And part of the way I always think about it
as a guy who wears glasses and doesn’t see
very well.
When I wake up in the morning the world’s
a very blurry place.
I put my glasses on and the world becomes
clear.
So what if it is that transcranial magnetic
stimulation or drugs or, you know, meditation.
What are these are like basically putting
on glasses for your brain to see the world
in a clearer way, in a different way but that
really was always there in the first place?
So there’s some very interesting and important
epistemological questions about the realness
of these experiences irrespective of how they
actually wind up getting started and how they
become induced in that particular individual.
But it also raises another kind of larger
picture question and I challenge my own students
a lot about this which is where do all of
our experiences come from when you think about
it from the perspective of the human brain?
And what I mean by that is is that if you
look at what’s really going on and what’s
going on whether or not I’ve got a drug
in my brain or not.
For a neuron to fire at all sodium and potassium
ions are crossing back and forth across the
membrane and it depolarizes the neuron and
it fires.
So there’s these ions that are moving across
a membrane.
They cause electrical activity which can be
measured.
That causes the neuron to turn on its metabolic
interface so we can see increases in metabolic
activity and how it’s using energy.
And then there’s the release of all different
kinds of neurotransmitters and serotonin and
dopamine that move across this little synaptic
cleft and activate another neuron.
So where in all of this does the thought occur?
You know where is our thought?
Where is our experience of the world?
When we say we see something, we feel something,
we think something where in all of that is
that really happening?
And so if I give a person a drug or if a person
meditates or whatever it is they’re doing,
you know, how do I ultimately link that back
to what’s going on in the brain itself and
how reductionistic can we ultimately be?
Or is it possible that our brain is merely
just kind of receiving all of this information
and certainly, you know, if you go through
a kind of Buddhist or Hindu perspective on
a lot of this, consciousness is all around
us and our brain is more like a radio receiver
that taps into this universal consciousness
for a period of time while we’re here on
earth and then goes back to that universal
consciousness when we go away.
So we don’t know and the bottom line is
is that neuroscience is going to have a lot
of difficulty ultimately being able to isolate
exactly where these experiences are and how
drugs or whatever it is that a person is using
or doing to induce some kind of experience
how that really is having an effect and where
those experiences truly come from.
