The dialogue between “Religion” and “Science” has been shaped as a duality between black and white, with each side poised to believe that their view is right. But currently there is a confluence of events where neuroscience has begun measuring what faith and spirituality intuitively already know.
The stunning beauty of a black and white photograph is in the range of grays that give depth, create perspective and evoke a feeling—all of which are created in a chemical process from developer to photographic paper. I propose that notions on science and religion span a similar dichotomy. My journey to this thinking began nearly forty years ago.
I grew up in the Catholic faith, was confirmed in eighth grade then went onto have a born-again Christian experience throughout high school. Around my freshman year my aunt had affair with a priest and then married him. At that point, I stopped blindly following the Catholic faith. As a born-again Christian during those high school years I also have an intense memory of being at a bonfire with my youth group where I experienced the phenomenon of speaking in tongues and I had a vision of being in Jesus’ tomb.
Just before my junior year—and for the next four years—I began working summers at a Catholic camp for mentally challenged youth and adults. The camp was staffed by kids who went to the Catholic high school in my hometown. As counselors they were a wild and rowdy bunch. Their partying ways were juxtaposed to their incredible compassion in caring for campers with limited abilities both physically and in speech. Those summers were another moment where I wondered what defined my religion and questioned Christianity in general as no one from my youth group participated in that kind of community service. Even though I had a sense that there was hypocrisy in religion—I didn’t stop believing in something greater than myself—but I did start to question what was “religion.”
In the 80’s after graduating high school and leaving home, I tried college in a few places then landed in the backcountry of Yosemite National Park working on a California Conservation Corps trail crew. I wish I could say that I blissfully found God again in the beauty of all that nature, but really I just survived an incredibly hostile work environment for the nine-month stint.
But there was a moment in all that natural grandeur that is forever embedded in my memory. Near the end of the season while doing my business—on the outdoor shitter, a pit with a toilet seat—it began to snow.
Given my situation and location, I couldn’t move as a single perfect snowflake the size of my fingernail floated in front of me and landed on the thigh of my pants. And just before it melted away, the intricacy of its delicate beauty was revealed to me. The cut out of paper snowflakes and snowflakes that adorn so much Christmas packaging was in fact real beyond an intellectual exercise in understanding snow.
That snowflake was perfect and elusive. It could not be touched. It could not be a captured. I did not see another snowflake like that then nor during all the other times I have experienced snow. That snowflake could only be held in my mind’s eye as memory. It brought tears to my eyes then and still does even now. It was transitory perfection that I experienced personally. Was it a religious experience? Maybe.
The beauty of Yosemite National Park is and was amazing and after that job I was lucky enough to go to Russia for a climbing expedition. Due to a previous injury, I decided to end my ascent of Mount Elbrus before making the summit and turned back before a guide needed to go with me. And it was there that I had a second moment in my life with a sense of awe that really cannot be captured well with just words.
When I turned around I saw the dawn and the night sky meeting in a line before me with the edge of the glowing sun rising on one side, a spray of stars, and the moon high in a black purple sky on the other side. Again the intellect bows to the understanding of beauty and perfection that is captured in photographs, but rarely seen and experienced personally.
And if that wasn’t enough there was a butterfly two feet away resting on the snow, which even today in my mind defies logic. But my lived experience still holds that moment, which really was a moment as I began my descent down the mountain moving forward through the intense cold back toward Priyut Refuge. Breathless was the view and no one else saw it, as all the heads of my American and Soviet comrades were bent down focused on the small, slow trudging steps taken at 16,000 feet toward the summit of Mount Elbrus.
A few years later when I finally found my way to college at 23 years old, it was there that I began my exploration of religions. I wouldn’t say I was on a quest as much as I stilled wanted to understand dogma and the notion of religion. The hypocrisy of my aunt’s act haunted me, but as time passed and their marriage endured I wondered where dogma and faith intersected? My personal experiences of religious ecstasy and of raw natural beauty made me wonder what makes a religion? What is dogma?
Dictionary.com defines dogma as
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an official system of principles or tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior, etc.,
as of a church.
Synonyms: doctrine, teachings, set of beliefs, philosophy.
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a specific tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, as by a church: the dogma of the Assumption; the recently defined dogma of papal infallibility.
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prescribed doctrine proclaimed as unquestionably true by a particular group: the difficulty of resisting political dogma.
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a settled or established opinion, belief, or principle: the classic dogma of objectivity in scientific observation.
The nuances inherent in the English language and the way connotation informs how a word is used are so clearly delineated in the above definition of dogma.
At college I began reading about Sufism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, The Bahá'í Faith, and different sects of Christianity, and over time I began to see the similarities of all religions that I was learning about and at times experiencing when I participated in different religious rituals. I am no theologian, but the basic message felt the same across all religions, but presented in different packaging.
While in college I had another encounter that I added to my catalog of religious experiences. In an old house where I lived I believed my room was haunted. Early one evening while I was sitting in my bed studying. I closed my eyes and felt I couldn’t move. Then a mandala-type shape began pulsating in front of me. The next night I was sleeping and I awoke and again couldn’t move as I lay in my bed. A vision of crinkly aluminum foil highlighted and outlined in an electric blue edge was hovering above me. When I felt released I left my room, drove my truck to lit parking lot so I could sleep for the rest of night. I decided that a new antique teapot I had brought home was the cause of my night visions. I got rid of it, but I really don’t know what that experience was. Within a month of those frightening nights I moved out of the house.
After college I eventually I found myself in New York City running a little art gallery I had started in Tribeca. I lived an ascetic’s life at the gallery with a foldup futon as my bed and little else beyond the art on the walls. One day when the gallery was closed, I had a waking vision.
Lying in my bed a number of knives flew from my torso to land in arc across the room. Mini sunflowers grew up in the holes that were left by the knives creating a grove of flowers growing a foot above the height of my head. Through the flowers a serpent with a head like a tortoise came to rest at my face. I looked at it and was very afraid. I called the name of a friend and a white light in the shape of a human came to me, taking my hand, and helping me to my feet. When they did this the flowers pulled through my torso leaving the stems in the ground behind me with the petals left inside me. When I was standing the light being continued holding my hand and we walked toward a cityscape. As I walked I opened my mouth and the petals flowed out making a ribbon like path toward the city. Then we walked beyond the cityscape coming to an old woman who was covered in a heap of red, white, and blue trash. I began eating the little wrappers and explained, “We must take care of her.”
Later in my process to discern the meaning of the symbolism of that vision, an astrologist said it was the story of my life. Astrology is not something I personally practice, but at the time a friend recommended checking it out and so I did.
All those memories make up my life before November 1999 when the article “This Is Your Brain on God” by Jack Hitt came out in
Had I been experiencing, in its myriad forms—what Hitt described in his article—the electromagnetic pulses that the God Helmet of Michael Persinger’s research could simulate? Were my experiences just so much synapses firing due to electromagnetic stimulation? The article made me ponder even more what is religious experience and its push against science. Even though I am not drawn to scientific reading, I read what I could find in mainstream articles about brain research.
Around this time I realized that I believed all the paradigms of every religion I had encountered so far. Each was right and flawed at the same time: love is the great definer and something exists beyond that. There was an equalizer moment when I could see or rather feel that each part was relevant though not exclusive to a greater whole than any single religion could hold.
All the different experiences from my youth jumbled into one notion, which follow the story of the blind men and the elephant. This story has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but for me the blind men are the religions of the world describing the parts of the elephant and science is the blind guy trying to measure the elephant. Dogma is how each religion attempts to name the truths it has discovered in describing the part of the elephant it’s holding.
And what is the elephant? Could it be the “life force” in The Sea of Troll by Nancy Farmer, or “dust” in The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, or “the force” of Star Wars fame or all the other names that artists call a living presence flowing through the earth when not using the word God?
The elephant for me is all of the above and that something more—the amorphous quality of love: an immeasurable substance with measurable outcomes.
Mata Amritanandamay, known to the world as Amma, is singlehandedly imparting a message of love that transcends religion. “[She] has never asked anyone to change their religion[,] [o]nly to go deeper into their values or faith, and live by those essential principles.” From her website some of her words on love are noted below.
“Love is our true essence.”
An excerpt from a poem I wrote before I read “This Is Your Brain on God” highlights some of my own thinking on love.
...but our poor little brains are so small that we can’t love and think at the same time like walking and chewing gum or patting your head and rubbing your stomach it’s possible if you really concentrate and with practice it could begin to feel natural...
Fast forward to now—and a life that includes more than 14 years of parenting and teaching students to write—and my wonderings about how elements of religion intersect with science have only increased as neuroscience has made even more strides measuring and understanding the human brain.
One of the places—that is leading the charge to learn the skill of patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time—is the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine. Founded in 2008 and directed by Dr. James Doty, Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery, CCARE’s mission “draws from several disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, economics and contemplative traditions[.]”
[R]esearch and programs supported and organized by CCARE examine: the neural correlates, biological bases and antecedents of compassion[;] the effects of compassion on brain and behavior[; and] methods for cultivating compassion and promoting altruism within individuals and society-wide.
For me, this is one of the most important and hopeful endeavors happening on the planet right now and the Dalai Lama thinks so too, having committed his time to work with CCARE. In an op. ed. piece in The Washington Post from June 13, 2016 “Why I’m Hopeful About the World’s Future,” the Dalai Lama writes:
To find solutions to the environmental crisis and violent conflicts that confront us in the 21st century, we need to seek new answers. ...I believe that these solutions lie beyond religion in the promotion of a concept I call secular ethics. This is an approach to educating ourselves based on scientific findings, common experience and common sense — a more universal approach to the promotion of our shared human values.
CCARE’s work connects up with research that is being done around the study of happiness: measuring, creating and sustaining it. As a late-life parent I was blessed with a happy daughter. She was born happy and she continues to be happy. My main goal in life is to not mess that up. In pursuing my own development I have read a number of articles and books about happiness including taking the Awakening Joy course offered by James Baraz.
Actually seeing the notion of a high happiness set point in my daughter and watching her self-sooth with singing and dancing after she is in “trouble” or when she is upset is mind-blowing. Singing is just one of the things that Baraz includes in his course about how to find personal joy. He is teaching a course in something that every person has innately, but somehow many people have lost access to. It is interesting to consider that different religions have used both singing and dancing to create euphoric states of being in adherents.
When I think about religion as a parent, I at times worry what I may not be giving my daughter: dogma to push against when explaining the world beyond the everyday and possibly euphoric experiences that can be encountered through faith in a particular divine being.
Equally fascinating as a parent has been watching the development of memory in my daughter and the creation of her self-narrative and the assigning of meaning to events and things in her life. Parenting her has shown me how much my view on how the world works directly impacts her view of herself. Watching how her Waldorf education collides with interactions with her classmates and seeing all the forces around her mix with her inherent personality has left me awed and of course terrified at the same time. What would be considered “textbook psychology concepts” become quite intense in the direct experience of raising one’s own child.
As an educator of high school students and then college students of various ages I have come to see how much the creation of a self-narrative impacts self-expression. In my teaching what I have found is that fear is the greatest obstacle to writing. Most students have a level of trepidation when it comes to writing expository papers, no matter how good of a writer they may be. My work led me to read about language acquisition. But truth be told, I am not an academic and so the ponderous writing I have read about teaching I find mostly unhelpful, but that expanse of knowledge did bring me back to my musings about religion and brain development.
So where does this all lead? I realize I have stated that I am not a theologian, nor an academic, nor scientist, so what is my perspective? I move through the world with the lived experience of an artist. I am a keen observer into the workings of humans in language, expression, and connection.
The artist is one who attempts to capture the something beyond. Art—photos, paintings, poetry, film, literature, poetry, any medium—permits the immeasurable to be glimpsed fleetingly like little tiny Polaroid photos giving close up images of the elephant. At times more can be understood through the linking of these tiny images of art as they give a depth of detail not discerned by the blind men of religion and they give a glimmer into what science is trying to measure.
As an artist—writing, poetry, filmmaking are the mediums of choice in my life right now—I realized in my teaching that to help my students write I had to create a way for them to face their fear. And what is that fear? It is a fear of the unknown and the chaos of ideas colliding in one’s head before order has been created for logical expression. It is the ordering of ideas that is required for writing.
I believe the process of writing is a metaphor for how humanity interacts with science and religion creating an interlink that cannot be articulated in words at this time in human development. The pre-writing techniques that I am about to share weren’t invented by me, but in them I see the gestalt of how religion and science balance each other and are both needed for how the mind works.
With my students there are three components that I utilized to begin the process of writing a paper. The first step is creating a web—a circle in the middle of the page with the topic to be considered—where floating ideas are captured and noted on lines coming out from the center circle. This is a non-linear thinking process and I tell my students that if “Aunt Bertha” shows up write her name down; don’t censor the unconscious even though “Aunt Bertha” or any other thought may seem completely unrelated to the topic in the center of the web.
Next, once the web process is done the student should let the task compost, which means walking away leaving the web alone for a period of time. This part of pre-writing I believe is unique to my teaching strategy, but I have found through my own experimentation on myself and with classes that this is the most important element to the writing task. I call it composting because I believe the captured thoughts that have moved from the mind to paper become digested by the mind again—in a way that moves beyond just rethinking about the webbed ideas—improving what was originally captured. In the silence “Aunt Bertha” begins to be revealed for what she is: shorthand, a symbol—about a related experience to the topic selected.
When the composting is done, outlining begins. There is no required amount of time for the composting to be effective, as I have employed the strategy for timed writing tests. The web is used to create the outline and the composting process feeds a sense of order for the structure and the symbol of “Aunt Bertha” is often fully revealed as the magic piece that weaves through out the writing task. Now it should be noted that this process is often happening for the naturally fluent writer without even realizing it. I myself am doing some of this for every piece of writing I undertake though not in such a structured form unless I am stuck.
Through this process I believe I have slowed down a naturally occurring process that is constantly at work in the mind. Our lives are filled with experiences that are constantly being sifted through to make meaning and create order. Religion makes meaning—religion becomes the symbols, a kind of shorthand to spiritual experiences, which can be chaotic, but through dogma become clarified. Science creates order—the ordering of the measurable and the creating logic about the vastness that is life on earth. The composting connects in the something beyond and is a part of the elephant though I cannot explain exactly why I think that.
Smeared with a palette knife where is the point between black and white called gray? Light
gray, dark gray...it’s all gray.
© Maureen Eich VanWalleghan July 2020
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