Transcription
[Music] Across time and cultures, humanity has been captivated by an inescapable urge: the desire to transcend. This seemingly universal drive to connect with something larger than ourselves has shaped our art, our rituals, and our search for meaning. But transcendence is no longer confined to the rarified musings of sages or the cloistered practices of mystics. Science has stepped forward, wielding its tools to study and illuminate the pathways to the profound.
In this discussion with three eminent researchers, thinkers, and practitioners, we explore how science has probed the mysteries of transcendent states, including groundbreaking studies of master meditators who have spent more than 34,000 hours in practice. These Olympians of the mind have allowed researchers to peer into their brains, uncovering remarkable insights about how contemplative practices reshaped the mind’s structure and function—from heightened gamma oscillations to enduring states of compassion and open awareness. Science is beginning to map the terrain of what was once deemed ineffable.
But the story doesn’t end there. Technology is now creating tools that might one day help ordinary minds mirror the brain states of these master practitioners. Through neurofeedback and targeted brain stimulation, we are inching closer to democratizing transcendence, offering more people access to the deep states of presence, awe, and connection that have traditionally required years of dedication. Yet, as we navigate this brave new frontier, questions abound. Can shortcuts truly replicate the journey? And what happens when technology meets the sacred?
Our discussion also turns to a reimagining of religion—not as a system of rigid beliefs, but as a living practice of rituals and relationships. Such practices, deeply embodied and often communal, offer pathways to transcendence, grounding us in our shared humanity while opening a window to the beyond. And in today’s rapidly evolving world, some of these practices are being reshaped. Virtual sacred spaces and digital technologies now blur the line between the material and the spiritual, creating new opportunities and challenges for the human quest to connect with the transcendent.
Amidst these sweeping changes, it’s vital to emphasize that transcendence is not a luxury or an abstract ideal. It is a fundamental part of what makes us human. Whether through immersion in nature, collective rituals, or solitary meditation, the urge to go beyond ourselves calls us to explore the cosmos, both within and without. And so this conversation invites you to join a journey that spans the ancient and the modern, the mystical and the empirical. With our guests, we will explore the newly emerging connections between science, spirituality, and technology—a communion that may ultimately redefine what it means to be human.
Our first guest is Professor Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He joins us from Madison, Wisconsin. Welcome, Richie.
Our next guest is Karen Armstrong, one of the world’s foremost experts on religion. She’s the author of numerous bestselling books that have been translated into over 45 different languages, including *The Case for God* and her newest book, *Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World*. Ms. Armstrong is currently an ambassador for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and she joins us from London, England. Welcome, Karen.
Finally, we have Kate Stockley, who is an academic researcher at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston. Her work focuses on the scientific study of religion and on biocultural theories of religious ritual. She is a co-author of the book *High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America* and *Spirit Tech: The Brave New World of Consciousness Hacking and Enlightenment Engineering*. She joins us from Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome, Kate. And welcome to you all.
I want to begin our conversation back in the 1990s. Stephen Jay Gould put forward what he described as a potential way of setting the basis for a truce between science and religion. He described them as two non-overlapping magisteria—sort of two non-overlapping realms—with science focused upon the factual understanding of the world and religion or spirituality focused on the things that matter to us as human beings: purpose and meaning and value. So he advocated kind of setting them apart. Now, Richie, you have spent a significant part of your professional life crossing over that boundary. So I gather this is a view that you don’t hold. So can you just give us a sense of why do you think it’s fruitful to bring these worlds together, at least in the way that you have done in your professional work?
Yeah, so, uh, thank you for the question and thank you for this dialogue. And, uh, uh, I, uh, have great respect for Stephen Jay Gould, but, uh, on this particular matter, I do disagree with him. I believe that it is within each human being’s capacity to, to, uh, experience something larger than themselves, uh, to have a sense of transcendence, uh, to go beyond themselves in a way which, uh, can be empirically captured. And and science, I think, can accommodate, uh, these experiences. And these are experiences which, uh, provide people with a, a deep sense of purpose. And you know, we know, uh, that, uh, a sense of purpose, actually among, um, people in their sixth, seventh, and eighth decades of life, uh, having a strong sense of purpose is actually, uh, the strongest psychological predictor of longevity. So it clearly gets under the skin and matters in ways biologically, uh, and so I believe that it is quite possible to bring these magisteria together, and, uh, I don’t believe they, they are quite as, um, separate, uh, as Stephen Jay Gould invited us to believe.
And Kate, I, I gather you hold a similar, or at least a resonant perspective. I, I’ve seen you describe it as a kind of new negotiation between science and religion. What, what do you mean by that phrase?
I think that if, if we’re looking at historically, the idea of non-overlapping magisteria is, is sort of nice—wouldn’t that be nice if it were so easy, right? But it never has been, and it probably never will be that easy. And I agree with, um, Richie that it’s, it’s not even really preferable for it to be that easy, because we can learn so much from both of these ways of knowing. There are different ways of understanding the world and ways of, of constructing meaning and, um, understanding ourselves and the universe and bodies and brains and all these things. But, but the conversation is so much more, um, more lively and quite frankly interesting if we try to put those things into conversation. And then also, from a historical point of view, um, these, these two ways of knowing have, have always had a relationship of some sort, right? It’s either been—there have been moments of conflict, for sure, although I would say that the, the warfare hypothesis, which is sometimes posited for the relationship between science and religion, is not really the case. There have been points of conflict; there’s also been points of cross-fertilization and collaboration for a long time. Scientists and theologians were really the same people, you know. I’m thinking like in the Middle Ages and into even into the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton was a strong, deeply, deeply religious man and one of the, the most brilliant mathematicians our world has ever seen, right? Um, and he saw his scientific and his mathematical work as a way of bringing glory to God, right? And understanding the creation. So yeah, so we’ve had kind of this, this, um, morphing, developing, ebbs and flows in the relationship between science and religion, and it wasn’t really until probably Darwin where we really see kind of a break between the two. And that was—there was a lot of contextual factors leading up to that; some factors from geology, you know, um, the age of the Earth, things like that were happening around the same time. But with Darwinism, we see a split, and then we’ve kind of lived with that for a while. And I think that what we’re seeing now is this new negotiation between science and religion where there, where, where there’s a, a real effort, and I think it probably comes from brain science, because this is a new kind of paradigm shift that’s so exciting. And bringing together Richie’s work is an incredible example of that new negotiation process, where we’re kind of asking, well, how can we put these ways of knowing together to come up with something that’s more beautiful and more interesting, really.
Yeah, we’re going to get to, uh, some of that work of, of Richie and yours as well in just a moment. But Karen, in, in your writings, there’s been a, a theme that you have developed and, and put forward in, in a wonderfully articulate and powerful way that is also focused on a division that is somewhat resonant with Stephen Jay Gould’s—that you describe in terms of mythos and logos—sort of two different ways that human beings have tried to engage with the world. Can you give us a sense of how you view those two?
Well, uh, there are two main ways of thinking about the world, it’s been said. One is, uh, mythos. And mythos is about, uh, the—it’s the deeper part of our psychology, um, it is, and it is about transcendence, because we all have transcendent moments in our lives when, uh, we seem, uh, to go beyond what reason can do. And it, and it—these are powerful moments. Uh, logos is what is prevailing in our modern Western world. It, uh, it’s scientific, uh, it’s rational, um, and it’s, it’s, it’s provable and demonstrable. But we need both. Uh, we can’t just go wallowing off into, into some mythical thing, because we, we need to be grounded. Mythos—logos helps us with the practicalities of life and with, uh, learning, with, with science, etc., which tells us a great deal. But the great scientists—think of Einstein—also had moments of transcendence, uh, when we go bey—it seems that we go beyond what we can, what we can think normally, and that has been very crucial, I think, in, in, in, in the spiritual life. And and so when some scientists, or perhaps maybe even many scientists, when they write off religion as something that should be discarded, the focus of the argument and the critique is often in the con of belief—that religion has its notion of belief, and science is all about facts and evidence, and those are the only things that we can hold to be true. But you’ve emphasized that that’s kind of a confusion, I guess, from your perspective—that religion is more about the practice and, and, and the doing. So, so can you just give us a sense of that?
Yes, um, religion is something that we do, um, and it is the practice that, uh, enables us to, to, to glimmer transcendence sometimes, um, but belief—the—it—it—the our word belief, we’ve changed it over the centuries, uh, the—in Middle English, the word believer, it meant to love. It did not mean as we have today, uh, the acceptance of a rather dubious proposition, um, and similarly credo, that’s the Latin word for I believe, uh, it comes from the Latin credo, cordar—to give your heart. I think in our rational, uh, scientific world, we have sort of, uh, emphasized the belief in accepting, uh, certain difficult truths, uh, but, uh, instead of seeing it as a, a moment of awe, really, and love, really, uh, rather than a set of acceptance of a set of doctrines. And I, I would say too that some of those early scientists that that you mentioned earlier, um, knew, I think, had lost the sense of transcendence. I mean, for Newton, uh, God is certainly rather like a larger version of himself. Uh, he says he’s, he’s, he’s very—he’s a, he’s a very—he’s very well-versed, he said, in science, in mathematics, um, and, and astronomy, um, now, and he, he does see, uh, God as some kind of great astronomer in the sky. That is beginning with, theyard to, with Bacon too, earlier, uh, we were moving into a more scientific mode, and I think that that, and a more rational mode, we—on the brink of the Enlightenment, uh, where—deart, of course, um, says that, uh, the, the—he see—no longer sees the things—the nature as alive with divinity as people did in the past, but saw it as, uh, you know, the things of nature were just like the modern machines that are being developed, uh, but not—but not transcendent in that way.
Yeah. And, and, and, and so, so Richie, I guess one question is how much should we make of the supposed warfare between science and religion in the West? As we look across the ages, there’s been places where some scientists really brought them together, places where some scientists really pulled them apart. But a lot of your work has focused in a realm that sways more toward the East, right? In, in the place of Buddhist meditation and, and practices of that sort. Has this schism been less in that domain than what at least the conventional wisdom has described it in the Western side of the religion-science conversation?
Uh, yes, I think in part, uh, I would say that that’s true, and I would say it’s true, uh, uh, also in part because our emphasis, uh, going back to the, um, earlier conversation with Karen, our emphasis has really been on the practices of these traditions, not on their beliefs. Many years ago, the Dalai Lama, um, asked me to please take the practices from his tradition and turn them into a form that anyone would feel comfortable practicing, investigate them with the tools of modern science, and if we find them to be valuable, disseminate them widely. That was his instruction to me and what I considered to be my assignment for the remainder of my time on the planet, uh, and so, uh, uh, the emphasis is really on the practice, uh, and, um, there’s no, um, constraint on our capacity to rigorously examine these practices using the tools of modern science.
Yeah. And we’re going to look at some of the results that, and your colleagues have found. But Kate, I just want to jump off from Richie’s remark there about perhaps the, the Eastern side of the story focusing more on, on the, on the practice as opposed to the beliefs. You know, in the Western tradition, of course, rituals are a vital part of religious practice, and you know, there’s been debate, I gather, as to whether rituals followed from a religious belief system or whether the rituals themselves preceded and perhaps even engendered the religious belief system. Where do you stand on, on that question?
Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting one. I think that when folks often think of, oh, are you religious, they’re asking what do you believe. And I, I definitely think from, from—if you look at it evolutionarily, rituals came first. If you look at it even personally, I think often rituals come first. People are in spaces, and they feel the effective dynamics of religious practices, and spaces are really what sort of, uh, give life to the ideas, right? You can’t—ideas without that kind of, without that kind of emotional sort of attachment and bonding with a community—those are the things that really keep people, um, alive within a religious system, I think. And so, um, yeah. And then in addition, from a, an evolutionary point of view, certainly we could—we were doing rituals before we had language. So I think that rituals are much more important than people often give them credit for.
So Karen, perhaps this is a question that seems too obvious to ask, but I’m going to ask it anyway: How do we actually define what a ritual is? I think many of us have a sense of the various rituals that we have in, in everyday life, you know, weddings and funerals and birth rituals and so forth. But is there a common thread that runs through these practices that makes them qualify for a ritual in the sense that we’re describing now?
I think probably that what unites us all is the body. And very often our, our religions—we become rather mental; we think, uh, in terms of, of doctrines and beliefs. And do we believe, or what does our intellect permit us to believe? Well, uh, we get a lot of information through our bodies—through touching, to—for breathing, um, movement, dance, singing, which is which involves all kinds of exercises of, of the body. And I think, uh, we’ve become—especially in the West—we’ve become so abstract in our thinking, with, uh, science—not—I’m not debunking science; it, it’s, it, it’s amazing—but our bodies tell us—I suffer from a, a form of epilepsy, um, epilepsy of the temporal lobe, and neurologists absolutely love—love me; they come up to me after I’ve spoken and they say, you know what I’m going to say to you, don’t you? And I say—they say, yes, uh, because, um, the—apparently, uh, people with this condition have two characteristics: they tend to be preoccupied with religious and philosophical issues, and they write a lot, uh, not necessarily, uh, through with any great effect, uh, but, uh, but the man who, who engineered this, he said, nobody couldn’t put these two things together more perfectly than you. But we learn so much through our bodies, and we become so mental, uh, in our minds, that we, we’ve lost that sense of, of somatic, uh, thinking—breathing, uh, walking, dancing, singing—that these are what touch us deeply, uh, and reducing religion to a set of intellectual doctrines is, is taking the heart out of it, I think.
Does there have to be an element of the sacred in, in the rituals that we’re talking about? In fact, is there a specific example that comes to mind that is the sort of iconic ritual that you would imagine giving us a sense of what that term means?
Um, I think, uh, chanting, you see, I think, can do that, um, it, it involves a lot of breath control and, and that, which, which affects the way we think, uh, but it is, it is addressed of very often to something beyond. And that word beyond is important, uh, it’s because what, what we’re seeking, or what we call God or Brahman or da, is beyond conception, beyond thought, beyond our minds. And again, we’ve lost that too. I mean, I remember learning a catechism answer at school: What is God? God is the Supreme Spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections. At eight, that meant very little to me. And, um, I think now it’s a, it’s a, it’s an incorrect idea of God, uh, the—that. And we’ve lost that somatic element in our lives. Yoga, for example—now yoga today is often seen as some kind of aerobic exercise, uh, but it was, in effect, a, a means of transcending, uh, the—achieving transcendence—we achieved transcendence and Nana through that, um, it lifts us beyond us, lets us get beyond the body and also beyond this thinking, rational head of ours, uh, that, that we need desperately in our daily lives and has done us great service in matters of, of medicine and science and discovery. But it—our reason cannot help us, uh, when we’re talking about the ultimate. And when we get back into the bodies, uh, we, we, we, we can—we have a better chance, I think.
Yes. So, so Richie, in, in your work, you have studied meditators, and obviously there’s a ritual component there, and a lot of dedication and hard work to the act, to the activity. And you, I gather, were among the first, uh, researchers to study the brain of meditation, to, to bring science and spirituality in that sense together. So can you tell us about those, those studies and, and what they have revealed?
Sure. I’m happy to. And let me just first say that I love Karen’s, uh, uh, emphasis on the body, uh, the somatic experience, and also the, uh, uh, the role of the body in helping us to go beyond conceptual thought, uh, which is, uh, so important and something that, uh, is very near and dear to our heart in, in, in how we study these things as well. So, um, uh, to, to address your question specifically, Brian, um, many years ago, uh, uh, we began this work, and we chose to begin by, uh, doing, um, research with individuals who we consider to be very long-term practitioners—people who, um, are like the Olympic athletes of certain styles of meditation. And, uh, our reasoning was that if we were not able to see differences in the brains of these individuals compared to age and gender-matched controls, then it would be kind of pointless to, um, uh, to, to look at the brains of more novice meditators, uh, and so we began this work, and, uh, we brought long-term meditators, uh, from Asia to our laboratory here in Madison, Wisconsin, in the US, uh, to probe their brains. And, um, uh, the, um, each of these individuals that we brought had done at least one three-year retreat where they were actually meditating a minimum of eight hours a day, every single day for three continuous years and never leaving the retreat site, uh, and a good portion of that time was spent in silence, uh, and, um, the average number of lifetime hours of practice among this group was approximately 34,000 hours. Viewers can do the arithmetic at home, but 34,000 hours is a pretty big number, uh, and, um, uh, and so, uh, what we found is that indeed these individuals, uh, do have brains that look quite different from age and gender-matched controls. The very first paper we published on these long-term practitioners was published in 2004, and it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And I mention that only because this was the very first paper on meditation ever published in this, um, august journal that had been around for more than 100 years, uh, and, uh, in it we showed that these meditators had very high-amplitude gamma oscillations in their EEG—the brain electrical, uh, activity that we can record from the scalp surface. And these oscillations are seen in untrained people, but they’re typically seen for very short periods of time. Um, we know from neuroscientific research that, uh, these signals have something to do with synaptic plasticity and learning, uh, and, um, uh, we also see widespread synchrony, uh, across different cortical regions, uh, in this signal. And that synchrony, we think, is indicative of, uh, the kind of panoramic experience that these meditators describe—the kind of meditation that they were doing, uh, we have called open awareness, uh, and open awareness is where the aperture of attention becomes broadened so that they are aware of many, uh, elements—they could be aware of their body, they could be aware of visual sensations, auditory, um, uh, experiences, tactile—so all the sensory channels are completely open. And the other thing we found, uh, and we didn’t quite understand this significance of this when we first discovered it, is that these gamma oscillations are also, um, uh, present during the non-meditating resting state, if you will, much more than in the age and gender-matched controls. And in subsequent follow-up work, we found that these gamma oscillations are even present during deep sleep, um, when the meditators are, um, you know, are, uh, sleeping—they’re not moving, uh, and, uh, uh, again, it is—we think—indicative of this trait effect, um, uh, and this relates to the title of a book that I published a few years ago with, um, my friend and colleague Daniel Goleman, uh, and the, the title of the book was called *Altered Traits*, uh, and it’s a play on *Altered States*. And the reason we call it *Altered Traits* is because when meditators, um, sit on a cushion or on a chair and meditate, the point of the practice is not for any experience which arises during the practice, but it really is to transform everyday life, uh, it, it is to, um, have the impact endure. Because if you—if it was just about the experience when you’re sitting on the cushion or on a chair, it would be like taking a drug, and then when you stopped meditating, if you went back to the same neurotic baseline that you were before, what would be the point of meditating, uh, and so, uh, uh, the, um, the real, uh, aspiration of the practice is to transform everyday life, and we see signals in the brain which appear to be correlated with these changes that we see in everyday life.
So, so Karen, is that an example of logos illuminating mythos? I mean, how do you—how do you hear that—those, that work and result—how does it affect your thinking about the way you organize your thinking about these realms?
Um, in a sense, I, I don’t focus so much on, on the brain, uh, um, for, for me, I, I—for as you know, I was a nun as a young woman, and we had to learn to meditate, and I could not do it. We did it, uh, we followed the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, which was very organized, um, and thought-pro, you know, um, but, um, I could not do it. So I—but I—my prayer now is my study. I found a, a footnote, um, by the—by the great, uh, Islamist, L. Maso, who said that, uh, that we have to learn to, uh, to cultivate what he calls the science of compassion, uh, compassion, which means to feel with the other, um, he said, when you’re reading about another culture or another, and you’re really struggling with, with making sense of it, keep going on, keep going on, and saying, yes, but how, but how, but how—going further into the unknown. And he said, in that way, you will, um, enhance your knowledge, but you will also be feeling with somebody else and leaving the self behind, um, and I found that that was what did it for me. And I, I find—I get these moments of up-lift in, in my, in, in my study, uh, which—when you do leave the self behind by immersing yourself in something else—we all have different ways, I think, of, of doing this—for other people, um, it might be sheer physical, um, activity where you really take yourself out of yourself into another system. But for me, it was that—as Bass said—that the science method of knowledge that comes through compassion—feeling with others—just to that extent, uh, I think what we’re trying to do is leaving the ego behind, um, and you see what you have with, deut, uh, is—who is—is breaking away from, from the whole—the mystical idea is a focus on the ego. E—I think, therefore I am. So the idea that you make reference to, of, of leaving the ego behind, transcending perhaps through extreme physical exertion, does bring to mind other fairly extreme rituals that are practiced in, in various parts of the world. I’m sure you are familiar with these rituals of, of fire-walking, where individuals will walk across, you know, incredibly hot stones—again, taking physical exertion to the extreme. And so, so Kate, when you, when you think about these kinds of, really, in, in intense rituals, um, there’s a kind of, um, you know, more pain, more gain perspective that I think, uh, is behind this. Does this, uh, perspective, um, resonate with your view of ritual as a whole and the role that it plays in, in, in human development and, and, and in human religious practice?
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that these, these kinds of intense rituals, um, are resonant of all sorts of shamanic practices that were around since the beginning of, of human history, right? So that kind of synchronization between bodies is incredibly powerful for bonding people together. And when people are bonded together, they cooperate better—that means—and this is not all like always rosy and fun, right? Sometimes people use cooperation to do terrible things—to go off to war and to fight other, other people who have bonded together themselves. But in, in essence, I do think it was the key to our species survival through some of the hardest and roughest, um, environments that we’ve encountered—the humans who were able to, uh, bond together, which I think was really dependent on successful rituals like that, um, we obviously able to survive because we are still—we still feel such deep resonances of those rituals in our bodies. And, and the things that we’re most attracted to today are often, um, they often look quite different, you know. But I’m thinking, you know, musical concerts where there’s loud drumming and bodies in synchrony dancing, um, sporting events, you know, where you have kind of an interesting tribal, um, uh, association with the players on the field, you know, it’s kind of—they’re very different. And I like the way that you asked the question previously, you know, do these need to be sacred rituals? And I do definitely—I do definitely think that the religious systems—religions are huge, complex, dynamic systems, right? Um, that evolve and that have all sorts of components, and ritual is one of those components. I would say it’s a very important component, but it’s not the only one, right? The ideas do matter; they do change things. And, um, so I do think that sacred rituals are a—especially, especially powerful and have been absolutely key throughout, throughout time. And so now when we’re seeing sort of a little bit of a decline in interest in traditional, uh, religions in our contemporary society, I don’t think that that desire is going away at all. I just think we’re going to find it manifest in new ways now. And that’s nothing new; we’ve seen the evolution of religions has, has developed over time.
So, so when you think about pain and suffering and ritual—say, certainly there are profane rituals that are just practiced even in a mindless way—but some of the other rituals that we’ve discussed that involve extreme pain—you know, the piercing and the fire-walking and so forth—how does the pain and suffering in those rituals feed into a, a religiosity? Are they deeply connected? Do you see them as a continuum?
I, I would find them rather disturbing, these, uh, rituals. I mean, in the convent, we had to, uh, beat ourselves, uh, around the back of the neck, uh, and we had to wear a bracelet with, um, with, with spikes in it for certain times of the month or day. And really, I can’t say that that helped me at all. It made us more conscious of ourselves and our suffering and even gave us a sort of buzz of importance and righteousness—here we are suffering with Jesus, as it were—whereas we’re not at all, um, we weren’t at all, uh, and our hearts were not being broken by the pain of the world, as, as you see—you see Jesus weeping, uh, when, when he sees pain, um, and I think that it’s so—F—that, that—in—so if we, if we’ve lost that sense of, uh, the value and sacredness of every single human being, as the Indians do when they put their hands together and bow—at—not acknowledging that the Divine that they are meeting in the other—I think we’ve lost a bit of that, um, and, and—and seeing the pain of the world—we—at the moment, with what’s going on in the Ukraine and, and, and the, the, the danger that we’re all in now—this should—this should activate that sense of concern and compassion, which it takes us out of ourselves in an ecstasy that’s not a, a rapturous experience or a sense of, of calm, but it takes us out of the ego and puts us in the place of another—the Golden Rule again, right?
So, so Kate, you’ve also done work on rituals writ large—the megachurches, which bring together a great many, sometimes quite zealous, uh, practitioners, if you will, into a forum that some on the outside have viewed as sort of the Disneyland of religion as opposed to sort of an organic and authentic religious experience. But you’ve actually studied these scientifically, and I gather you have found that the megachurch experience, as a ritual experience, does serve a, a, a spiritual need that is measurable, right?
Right, which is, um, you know, a really interesting case, I think, um, you know, there’s a, a man who studies ritual who talks about imagistic rituals and doctrinal rituals, and he’ll distinguish between these two types of rituals and say that they’re both really important, you know? Imagistic rituals are sort of those big, flashy moments that sort of—these moments of transformation where maybe people are crying and, and having, having an ecstatic experience. And then, um, doctrinal rituals are, are in the same system—in the same religious systems—but those moments are the ones where you’re sort of reinforcing the ideas of the group, you know? And both are really important. And I think that, um, megachurches have a really interesting way of almost accomplishing a bit of both at once, um, a lot of megachurch worship services will have altar calls each Sunday where you’re really asking people to make a transformative choice—to, to join—and everybody gets to observe this personal transformation that’s happening in each and every other person there. So yeah, the emotional and affective dynamics of those spaces is, um, is more than we expected, honestly, going into it, you know? My co-, uh, researchers and I were all, um, I think, you know, kind of brought up in more mainline Protestant traditions that are a little more, um, calm and don’t have as much exciting music and things like that, but they’re, they’re really interested in kind of more contemplative practices, for example. And so we were kind of wondering, what is it about these spaces that’s—and this is when I was at the University of Washington in Seattle, which is one of these very, very secular spaces—it’s sort of like the land of the nuns, they call it—the nuns are sort of like the people who don’t have, um, attachment to a religious tradition. So it’s a space kind of like where Karen is describing she is. And so, um, but all these, these college-age students were just marching off to this megachurch service, you know, thinking, what is, what is happening? So what we did find was that there is a way in which that kind of emotional, affective, uh, cathartic experience—that ecstatic experience—um, was something the students yearned for—that something that the, the congregants yearned for. So these kinds of human desires are, are, are there, and can be exploited for good and evil, you know? Sometimes—a lot of times when I’m talking about collective effervescence, people will bring up like the Nuremberg trials and stuff. And so you’ve got this, um, this powerful, powerful force that’s sort of built into our systems. And, um, I think it—when, um, sort of exercised and lived out in spiritual spaces, it can be the most transformative, healing, um, bonding-together, community-building experience that we have, um, and it can also do harm.
So Karen, what’s your take on, say, collective effervescence? You know, Durkheim, you know, turning the last century, spoke of this kind of phenomenon. In a language that now—using, you know, evolutionary psychology—some would say that religion is adaptive because it allowed, as Kate made reference to earlier, groups of our fourbears to bond together—greater social cohesion—win the battles on the ancestral plane—hunter-gatherers fighting each other. So are these megachurches, in some sense, recapitulating the very kinds of cohesion that allowed us to survive and prevail?
Probably—perhaps they are, uh, and yet what the religions—the main religion—the axial religions—are asking us to do is not just to concentrate on our own survival, but to reach out to the other,
And we saw this strong activation in motor regions of the brain, brain. And uh, it wasn't until we engaged in a dialogue with these practitioners that we came to understand, we believe, why uh compassion is associated with activation in these motor circuits. The reason is is that compassion is a uh a a characteristic or a state uh which prepares a person to act when suffering is encountered. It's it is action readiness. Uh and so um uh uh uh they when we explained that we had seen this activation in motor regions, they immediately felt it was very very familiar to them because uh they feel this compassion training as action preparedness. It's amazing. So, so Karen, when you hear a story like that that speaks to a specific kind of of compassion and a certain kind of human transcendence, and you place that in the context of the historically clear urge of our species to go beyond, to have these kind of transcendent experiences—Transcendent moments—whether it's done through extreme ritual, extreme pain, meditation, 34,000 hours—there are a variety of approaches that we as a species have employed.
In your recent book, you're suggesting a distinct approach where it's more of a communion with nature that will be the place that Transcendent moments will emerge from. Can you give us a sense of of how you think about that?
What of the chief ways in which people have experienced what we call the sacred or Divine uh in has been through the natural world. They've created a set a a a a theory, a Doctrine if you like, which is remarkably similar whether we're talking about China or far away in India uh which suggests that this might be an archetypal way of of of approaching both the natural world and the divine. All of them see uh the the sacred not as a a being or a Divinity somewhere up in the sky—that's a largely Christian and Jewish notion—but as imminent, as a force not personalized, but as a force that runs through every single thing. It's both spiritual and physical uh Divine and human uh Divine and natural. Um, it's a force that brings everything con—it's constantly surging, bringing everything into being and uh and and and moving it on and on and on in um in uh China it's called Chi, and it is the Ultimate Reality. In uh India, the beginning they called it R uh and then later it became the Brahman, which is present in me, in you, in those flowers, in those trees.
But you developed that sort of outward-looking uh sense of of of and that's what we need today in our environmental catastrophe. We've instead of seeing nature as a means to the Divine or as something fundamentally sacred um and that fills us with awe um we've seen it as a resource.
So Kate, on kind of the flip side of that, your research has been focusing on a more artificial, a more human-made approach to facilitating heightened spiritual experiences or for fast-forwarding us to some kind of transcendent State using modern technology. I think you call it Spirit Tech. I think that's the title of your your book on the subject. Can you give us a sense of of what it is that you're focusing on and and what it does to the to the human brain or Human Experience?
Yeah. Um, my co-author and I explored this whole area. There's lots of different ways in which Technologies are being employed to sort of and enhance folks' spiritual lives. Um, but it really comes from um some of the research that people like Richie are doing, right? They're they're seeing these changes in the brain, documenting them, and some uh researchers and Technology uh entrepreneurs are taking this science and thinking like, okay, if we can see these changes in the brain and we sort of also have techniques for changing the brain, can we change the brain to to look like these meditators' brains? You know, can we either with something called neuro feedback, which basically reads brain waves that are coming from the brain and then with um with auditory or visual feedback helps give positive reinforcement for the types of waves you're looking for, so that in that way you can kind of program the computer to uh with a a specific kind of um brain map of sorts that looks like a meditator brain and then help coax that person's brain into that meditative State? That's the idea. And the same thing can be done with um brain stimulation, different forms of brain stimulation. There's magnetic stimulation, electrical stimulation um which are both sort of uh Broad in general and then more recently um research have been looking into ultrasound wave stimulation, which actually can reach deeper into the brain, can penetrate deeper and more specific brain regions, so it might be more effective in kind of tackling one specific area of the brain, for example tackling the the posterior singulate cortex or something, which is a specific area of the brain that we see changes in meditators.
So if they can stimulate that area of the brain, help ease a person into a little bit more quickly meditative States—meditating is hard, just like Karen mentioned, it's hard, you know, and a lot of people get really frustrated before they even really get to any of the good stuff, you know—and so these the idea—does it work? Does it does it really work? I mean, does the data show? Well, I think that a lot of people say yes. I think that there's still a lot of research happening. So for instance, um um I'll I'll use the example of the ultrasound waves meditation since that seems to be one of one of the most promising ways to kind of get deep into the brain and Target something very specific. Um, there's no no product on the market yet that you can buy that will do this for you, um but it's in the lab. And so the first the first subject for researching this kind of simulation was uh Shinzen Yang, who's an expert meditator who's been meditating for 50 years, a shingan monk um and a scholar of religion, he has a PHD also. And so he received the stimulation and said, yes, this is the same state that I that I access when I'm doing my deepest forms of meditation. He says normally I would get this kind of experience when I'm um at a retreat, you know, meditating all day long, these kinds of things. So he was very struck by the effectiveness um and but I've also heard him speak and his colleague J sanguinetti, who's a neuroscientist who works with him, and they'll say, you know, of you know, they have to be honest and say, of course they want this to work, so there might be a little bit of that. So so then they invite other expert meditators who maybe have a little bit less skin in the game to to you know to prove that it will work um and those meditators also said, okay, yeah, this is getting to that that um that place that my brain has been before in deep meditative States. Now the question—could you do the same thing with a novice brain? There's al also a lot of dangers, right? Um, because even though ultrasound stimulation is fairly safe in terms of the mechanics of the brain uh and the materiality of the brain and sort of the health and safety perspectives, if you're thrusting people into a deep meditative state that they may or may not be ready for, that can actually be pretty dangerous, you know, it can kind of be almost like a um a difficult experience with a psychedelic or something like that. So, right. Yeah, there's a lot to consider there, but it's really an interesting example of of using the science and then sort of combining it with with the technologies that we have available to us today to to see if we can make meditation a little bit more accessible.
You made reference to the Dalai Lama a couple of times, clearly had an incredible impact on your life. There's a a quote of the Dalai Lama where he said something to the effect of, if there were a safe painless way for an electro to kind of go into my head and pull out, remove the negative thoughts, I'd be all for undergoing that procedure, which sort of resonates with what Kate's talking about in terms of sort of the Spirit Tech. On the other hand, I've also believe I've heard you speak with a little bit of disdain on these shortcuts toward say Transcendence or going Beyond. So where where do you come down in this place?
Yeah, it's uh thank you for asking that, and I have so much to say about um what both Kate and Karen have have just described. Yes, I am a little bit skeptical of uh these technological shortcuts, albeit uh it's important to say that I'm not opposed to technology as an aid at all. I think that it it potentially could be um but when we specify a particular brain region or a specific brain state to Target for neuro feedback or for stimulation, there's quite a bit of hubris uh in in in doing that, basically—you're making a a sort of isomorphic Link if you will between that specific brain State and the state of transcendence. Uh, we don't know that. Uh I think that uh there's a lot more that we need to discover before we can say that it's that it really is just this. Uh I think it excessively simplifies what inevitably is going to be far more complicated. Uh and as we probe these states and these practices with multi-modal um uh Precision uh we are beginning to expose more and more of the complexity. Uh and so uh uh I think that while I certainly admire those who are doing this work and I know that their motivation is good, I think some of it may be premature. Um uh I also want to go back to this point about how hard meditation is. Meditation actually isn't that hard um if you start with really short periods of practice. Anybody can meditate uh and uh we you know when human beings first evolved, none of us were brushing our teeth uh and somehow we've managed as a species—virtually everyone on the planet brushes their teeth. We spend a few minutes every day. If we spent even just that short amount of time nourishing our mind, this world would be a different place. And finally, let me say that Karin's emphasis on the natural world I think is beautiful and important, and uh I also want to point out that there are good neuroscientific data showing that when we have people in nature compared to having them in the same period of time, for example on a city street, their brains look completely different, and um that brief exposures to Nature really do change our our brains. So I would applaud uh Karin's emphasis on that uh and uh I also just finally want to say that one size is not going to fit all uh and so I think we need to explore many different strategies. And one of the ways that science I think can really be helpful is um to develop a kind of precision uh um strategy here. And one of the buzz words in medicine these days is precision medicine, where we can Target specific medicine uh based on an individual's genotype. Here I think we can Target specific practices to cultivate flourishing based on deep phenotyping, and I think this is possible, and I think this can be enormously helpful.
So you're talking about sort of personalized spirituality—personalized?
Yeah, that's a that's an amazing thought. Uh and one of the arguments Kate that I gather you would make in favor of the technological approach to these kinds of practices is that it may allow for a democratization of these experiences. Um, people have even started I gather having virtual reality churches, allowing for a community that would otherwise be difficult to attain, again through the use of technology. Is that working? As a VR Church EXP experience uh aligned with what would normally would imagine uh in-person version to be like?
Yeah, I think that's one of the most incredible features of virtual reality is that it really does actually trick your mind and body into thinking that you're present in whatever space you are, even if it's a cartoonish space. You know, if you walk out on a plank, you know, there's like this famous walk the plank VR program, your body, your knees will go weak, you'll you'll feel as though you're you're afraid of heights, even though you know you're safe in your living room or whatever. So it's it's a really interesting question. I don't know um as a scholar of religion, I study Collective effervescence, I study ritual. I think I value these kinds of human experiences so deeply that I I don't know yet if a virtual reality situation can actually approximate um that kind of presence and produce that kind of effect, but it's intriguing, right? Because it's something that can bring people together in an anonymous way potentially if they want that, which a lot of the people who go to V art Church want to be a little bit Anonymous um because either they're living in a place where they can't legally go to church or they have felt very alienated from their religious community and they don't they just kind of want to be there but they don't want anyone to recognize them, these kinds of things. There's lots of reasons that people um might want a virtual setting church as opposed to an in-person um including, you know, being Homebound and things like that. So um so yeah, there's something kind of special about that potential um and I think in general we have technology—humans have been technology-creating creatures since the beginning of time—our current, you know, and I'm thinking stone tools and even for um spirituality, right? We've always had little uh um material objects that are associated with our spiritual lives—mandalas help Focus the Mind, rosary beads might help Focus while you're praying. Um, we've always had Technologies of the body, ways to influence our bodies—this is sort of, you know, combined with the conversation of practices um but fasting, you know, sow flagellation, ways that we've influenced our bodies to um to make a spiritual experience more likely, let's say. And so now we're in a position where our relationship with technology and these bodily practices stuff is a little off, right? We have more of the sense that you need to detox from technology than like, oh, you need to go find more Technologies to enhance your spiritual life. That feels very strange to people. And so um but the folks that that I interviewed and that we spoke with to write that book, Spirit Tech, I was pretty impressed with um like Richie said, just their intentions and their motivations to do this work, and I I think that the the jury is still out on which Technologies are going to kind of bubble to the surface as the most effective ones, maybe um and I think maybe the the research will continue for a long time. We're still sort of in a in a very early phases of this adventure, I think um and what we do know is that there will, without a doubt, because there always is, be sort of snake oil salesmen, right? There's going to be people who are who are making all sorts of wild claims in their marketing schemes um and and we have to be aware of that. Um but the I guess the remaining question is then, will there be folks who are able to engineer technologies that can have a place, you know, maybe not replace, because I really truly hope that people still are going out in nature and understanding that technology can't replace nature. It might be able to facilitate collective effervescence, I don't know, but it's not going to be able to replace an experience of nature.
So Kate, when we think about religion, spirituality as it will unfold in the future, right, there's some data, right? There's some data that suggests that, you know, the number, say, of uh people in the world, or I don't know the exact data, at least in America, who identify with a specific namable religion has been dropping over time. Do you think that these kinds of practices ultimately are going to die away or are they going to transmute into some different form, perhaps in the virtual or technological realm that that you've been working in?
Yeah. Um, this is the question that I think is the most exciting. It's probably because it's the question that um I still don't know the answer to, you know. So it's I mean, there's many questions I don't know the answer to, but but this one is especially kind of um exciting to think about. So uh I don't think that the urge, the human sort of Need for religion is going away. I certainly not the spiritual sense, and the spiritual urge isn't going away. I do agree 100% with what Karen has said that we've sort of lost touch with the value of Mythos and that they're you know, maybe part of this sort of, you know, conversation and kind of history of conflict between science and religion. There was a moment where folks were trying to think within the Mythos space, but then also uh almost trying to make Mythos fit into a logos box because there was almost a competition between these ways of knowing, and um what that did was we sort of lost something there, you know, and and I think people feel that they know that they know something is missing. That's why so many people are seeking something more, you know, they're looking in spiritual spaces for new uh insights and deeper meanings for their lives and things like that. So that is alive and well, but I do think that there's something to be said for the fact that the um the the the religions that we sort of have today, these traditional religions, you know um some Scholars will call them axial age religions—Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, DSM, you know, Islam—these these Traditions do seem to be losing their grip a little bit on on humans' um uh interest and on that spiritual sense. Uh a lot of times folks will maybe participate in a traditional religion uh for the community and whatnot, but they actually kind of go somewhere else also to to feel an additional spiritual sense because they're not getting that yearning met at their traditional service. So I think that there's something happening there.
So Karen, where do you come down on that? I mean, a do you think that as Kate says that the religions that can be traced back to Carl Jasper and the axial age that they are losing their grip on the World At Large or uh or is your take different?
I think if they're losing their grip uh it's because they are not being practiced properly, I think. Um I think that uh I it's very difficult for me to talk here because I live in a country where which is very unreligious—in Britain only 10% of the population attend a religious service regularly, and most of those are Muslims—and um part I think uh the religions have often become stuck, the the traditional religions in a sort of a routine—hymns are sung, a few prayers are said—but we're not getting down to the core of the these religions which gave them their impetus in the first place. Uh the if you look at uh the the the raw need for compassion that you see in the Gospels uh with Jesus endlessly going out, Paul going out to people—and we're sort of turning in and polishing ourselves or singing a few hymns in church and then going back, passing on the street uh people who are beggars in rich countries like ours who have to sleep in the streets rough—this is a religious attitude, and this is this is where I think we're we're losing our grip. Um every time we look at the news now um some the newscaster is likely to say, a warning, you may find this next item distressing, and that gives people a chance to go make a cup of tea or um let the dog out or something and so they don't have to face this pain and suffering that we're seeing in the world every night and US week. We should let it break our hearts, and I think that if we if we did that uh these religions would would come back to themselves in and and get back that early impetus that they've got sterilized in SE in in in a few uh sort of uh rituals, but they've lost that core of raw direct compassion and and and concern for uh the suffering that we see all around us.
One final question, if if you would endure it. Um, the urge for going beyond, the urge for tendance has sometimes been noted as an iconic quality of of our species. Some even would say it is the defining characteristic of what it means to be human. Am I question car is and there's obviously no answer to this that can be justified, just sort of a gut feeling. So the the the Mythos as opposed to logos reaction, do you think that this kind of sensibility is somehow specific to human beings in our particular history throughout the ages or is it any life form that reaches a certain level of self-reflective awareness will have that urge? I mean, concretely, if we encounter aliens at some point in the future and we tell them about our our religious practices, our spiritual practices or meditative practices, will they look at us like, what in the world are you talking about, or will they say, yeah, yeah, we got it, you know, we we do that too?
Well, I I'm thinking of there there a very various Indian texts in the Upanishads uh that say that every one of them is is reflecting deeply—the sea is reflecting deeply in its own way. It's both reflecting the the the sun um and it's bringing light to us. Uh every one of them has its own special life, but they are doing it without complicating things as we human beings do, without obstructing things with our own ego and selfishness. But uh the what what we have to do is when we look around at the world and look at the trees and stop using our phones for a moment, uh turn off the the the headphones and let nature speak to us, let us look at the at the sun of the rain reflecting deeply in its own way, meditating, being itself in its own way, and that takes us out of ourselves.
Yep. Richie, any thoughts on that?
Uh, I do think that there are some distinctly human characteristics that enable us to reflect uh on our experience in a way that is different from other species uh and it's this capacity for what scientists call Meta awareness uh and we know something about the brain circuits that are important for meta awareness, and meta awareness is knowing what our minds are doing uh and this is something that I think uh is an important component of the kind of um Transcendent experiences that we're describing. Having said that, I think that there also is uh a more primitive kind of experience of um well-being that uh is likely present in many other life forms, but not nearly to the same extent of reflection that we can see uh in humans. And uh the sacred uh in everyday life as uh kin was describing is something both important and very accessible uh and I think that simple practices of appreciation—we think of them as micro interventions, the micro do of flourishing—uh is very much possible, and I think that if um we spent even as I said earlier a few minutes a day reflecting on these positive qualities uh of our mind uh and our soul, if you will, uh we really could change the world uh and I think most of us would agree that Humanity needs some recalibration.
With that vital note, let me thank you all—Richie, Karen, and Kate—for this fascinating discussion and a deep look at who we are as human beings and where this Collective urge to go beyond, to be Transcendent, May one day take us. So thank you so much. Thank all of you for this wonderful conversation. Thank you. Thank you. [Music]