Unio Mystica in Montreal

Nuns Brains Probed for God

The Carmelite nuns live a life of silent prayer, separated from the modern world by the high stone wall that surrounds their monastery in an industrial part of Montreal. Except for medical care, they rarely leave their sanctuary. But that changed late last month, when they began to make periodic visits to, of all places, a science lab.

The sisters arrive at the neuro-science laboratory in the University of Montreal's psychology department two at a time, wearing habits sewn from thick, dark cloth, high white collars and veils that frame their faces and flow down their backs. On their feet are sensible brown laceups that appear to have never seen the outdoors before.

They come to take part in an experiment that will probe a mystical and very private part of their lives. Sister Diane, the monastery's prioress, and Sister Teresa admit to being nervous as they peer curiously into a dark chamber about the size of a walk-in closet and equipped with an old barber's chair.

It is here that they have agreed to try to relive unio mystica, a religious experience so intense that Christians profess to sense their Lord as a physical presence. The nuns hope to help Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard uncover just what happens in their brains when they feel the hand of God.

My favorite part of this article is the following section:

When the analysis of all three experiments is done, he hopes to have a clear biological picture of an experience that mystifies even those who have lived it. Ultimately, he would like to know enough about how it works to be able to offer the same experience to anybody seeking spiritual growth.

Sister Diane says she is certain that Dr. Beauregard will discover a biological basis for the Carmelites' spiritual experience, one she says is shared by all human beings. God equipped people with the brains they need for a spiritual life, she insists. "Our body has a spiritual component. To be a human being is to be a spiritual being. I'm convinced this will show in the results."

Sister Diane is possessed of a deep and lovely faith! Some people find the idea of a "biological basis for the Carmelites' spiritual experience" threatening, with the implication that "it's all in our heads." Sister Diane, on the other hand, believes that this is a gift from God Himself. Beautiful.

And I like the part about "offering the same experience to anybody seeking spiritual growth." I wonder what that will actually mean, though; an electrical zap to the brain when somebody's got a jones for God? That would seem to take the journey away, and everything one might learn from it. The effort counts for something, after all. If I hadn't gone through the pain of getting sober - if they had just zapped me when I needed to get my mind in order - I wouldn't have learned how to pray. I wouldn't have learned how to meditate and order my own mind. I wouldn't have learned all the things I learned (often the very hardest way), and God wouldn't have been able to "instruct my heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions."

It would have been a flat experience, in other words, one without depth. Pain is the price of admission to a new life, it says in the 7th Step. In every case, it adds.

Meditation May Bolster Brain Activity

Buddhist Meditation May Produce Lasting Changes in the Brain

Nov. 10, 2004 -- Meditation may not only produce a calming effect, but new research suggests that the practice of Buddhist meditation may produce lasting changes in the brain.

Researchers found that monks who spent many years in Buddhist meditation training show significantly greater brain activity in areas associated with learning and happiness than those who have never practiced meditation.

The results suggest that long-term mental training, such as Buddhist meditation, may prompt both short and long-term changes in brain activity and function.

In the study, which appears in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers compared the brain activity of eight long-time Buddhist monks and 10 healthy students.

The average age of the monks was 49, and each had undergone mental training in meditation for 10,000 to 50,000 hours over the course of 15 to 40 years.

The students' average age was 21. They had no prior experience in meditation and received one week of meditative training before the start of the study.

Both groups were asked to practice compassionate meditation, which does not require concentration on specific things. Instead, the participants are instructed to generate a feeling of love and compassion without drawing attention to a particular object.

Researchers measured brain activity before, during, and after meditation using electroencephalograms.

They found striking differences between the two groups in a type of brain activity called gamma wave activity, which is involved in mental processes including attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception.

The Buddhist monks had a higher level of this sort of gamma wave activity before they began meditation, and this difference increased dramatically during meditation. In fact, researchers say the extremely high levels of gamma wave activity are the highest ever reported.

The monks also had more activity in areas associated with positive emotions, such as happiness.

Researchers say the fact that the monks had higher levels of this type of brain activity before meditation began suggests that long-term practice of Buddhist or other forms of meditation may alter the brain.

"A Masterly Instrument"

From Evelyn Underhill's 1936 book, Worship, in the chapter titled "Liturgy a Work of Art":

A certain restraint, a sense of style, is characteristic of all good liturgical action; for it exists to express the common worship of the family, not the fervour of the individual soul. Therefore the individual who prays from within the liturgy has to sacrifice something of his own will and feeling to the corporate movement; must submit to the ritual discipline, and lose his own prayer in that of the fellowship, if he is to "understand by dancing that which is being done." But on the other hand, there are great compensations. If his religious preferences and enthusiasms are checked, and subordinated to "liturgical good manners," his reserves are respected too. The Christian liturgy, as Guardini has said, is "a masterly instrument which has made it possible for us to express our inner life in all its fullness and depth, without divulging our secrets . . . we can pour out our hearts, and still feel that nothing has been dragged to light which should remain hidden."

I'm very interested in the idea that the Liturgy is "a masterly instrument which has made it possible for us to express our inner life in all its fullness and depth, without divulging our secrets . . . we can pour out our hearts, and still feel that nothing has been dragged to light which should remain hidden." I think this is why the liturgical churches have produced such great art, and the non-liturgical sects haven't, for the most part; the shepherding of secrets and the "reserve" of emotion (and the discipline involved) make it possible to "pour out our hearts" into art.

Reminiscent of Flaubert's admonition to "Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work."

Another interesting thread in the "emotion/religion" linkage. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to research, myself; another was de Caussade's "God instructs the heart; not by ideas but through pains and contradictions." These are such fascinating topics for research projects, I think! We've come to a place where science has become so powerful that it is forgetting the importance of simple human wisdom. Wisdom requires a "big picture" view, though; this is what is disappearing. Science is particularizing everything, even itself. There are no generalists anymore, because scientific disciplines have become too deep and too technical for one person to understand a great deal in a broad way.

The "big picture" isn't possible in science anymore, and the vast amount of information around now is making it difficult to see the large view in any area. But we need to connect with wisdom from the past, and then write our own, in continuation. This is why the Bible is important, still. And so is The Illiad and The Odyssey, and Oedipus Rex and Antigone.

Meantime, I'll try to find if there's any existing research on either of these topics and will publish it. Religion and its connection to art via emotion and psychology is one of the very most interesting topics to me in the world.

Worship

From Evelyn Underhill's Worship, 1936:

The painted cave of those prehistoric worshippers of an unknown God who were "simple-minded enough to give of their best to the supra-sensible powers," the Pagan temple, the Christian cathedral, are all expressions of the same fundamental human need to incoporate, make visible, the spirit of worship; to lavish skill, labour, and wealth on this most apparently "useless" of all the activities of man. So, too, the ritual chant, with its accompaniment of ceremonial movement and manual acts, is found to exert a stablizing influence at every level of his religious life. And when this costly and explicit embodiment is lacking, or is rejected where once possessed, and the Godward life of the community is not given some sensible and institutional expression within the social complex, worship seldom develops its full richness and power. It remains thin, abstract, and notional: a tendency, an attitude, a general aspiration, moving alongside human life, rather than in it.

It is true that worship, when thus embodied, loses - or seems to lose - something of its purity; but only then can it take up and use man's various powers and capacities, turning the whole creature towards the Eternal, and thus entering the texture of his natural as well as his supernatural life. Certainly, it is here that we encounter the greatest of the dangers that accompany its long history; the danger that form will smother spriit, ritual action take the place of spontaneous prayer, the outward and visible sign obscure the inward grace. But the risk is one which man is bound to take. He is not "pure" spirit, and is not capable of "pure" spiritual acts. Even though in his worship he moves out towards absolutes, and in and through that worship absolutes are revealed to his soul, it is at his own peril that leaves the world of sense behind, in his approach to the God Who created and informs it. This humbling truth must govern all his responses to Reality.

Here's some ritual chant: "the Service of Compline as chanted by the choir of St. Joseph of Arimathea Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California."

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

A review of Harold Bloom's new book of the same title.

Where shall wisdom be found? Harold Bloom finds it in the same place as the question -- the Book of Job -- as well as in Ecclesiastes and the writings of Plato, Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Proust, St. Augustine and in the Gospel of Thomas. Bloom's new book, which compares and contrasts what he calls the "wisdom writing" in these varied works, "rises out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends." He tells us, "Since childhood, I have been comforted by Talmudic wisdom," and he cites wisdom writing that helped him rally when he "was ill, depressed, or weary." He also says, "We most of us know that wisdom immediately goes out the door when we are in crisis" and that he has "not found that wisdom literature is a comfort."

These claims may seem inconsistent, but inconsistency does not trouble him. His section on Emerson approvingly quotes that writer's "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" and alludes to Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes." Such familiar sayings contrast with a central delight of Bloom's book -- its inclusion of wonderful aphorisms likely to be new to many readers. One of my favorites is the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus's "Psychoanalysis is itself that disease of which it purports to be the cure," although my delight had dimmed by the time I encountered Bloom's third repetition of this remark.

As the foregoing suggests, Bloom's book is inconsistent (or multitudinous) in quality as well as in attitude. Often his fervent discussion yields shimmering insights. Consider his treatment of what he calls the "Nietzschean" position that what makes one poem more memorable than another "must be that the memorable poem, the poem that has more meaning, or starts more meaning going, is the poem that gives (or commemorates) more pain." Bloom comments, "Strong poetry is difficult, and its memorability is the consequence of a difficult pleasure, and a difficult enough pleasure is a kind of pain."

I've just finished writing elsewhere that the Church - and by this I refer to all of the ancient religious traditions - is the only place (aside from university history and classics departments) still deeply in touch with the distant human past. I believe these enduring writings are an important repository of human experience - of the life of the human being qua human being on earth - and will become more and more important as the world goes more and more techno. It will be necessary to have a baseline of experience from which to draw conclusions about the essence of human nature - or at least about the manner in which human nature evolves, if it does (and I believe it does, in fact).

Also, the Church is one of the few places still thinking (hopefully, but definitely not in every case) about "the spiritual life," and about "meaning" in those particular terms. It's always been my opinion that writers and artists also deal primiarly in the spiritual, but you don't seem to see, in art, these days, a drawing together of the various threads of experience and meaning into a large coherent whole; instead, the focus seems to be on shining light on the particular, and almost for its own sake, now that the "universal" is out of favor. Religion still insists, in its seeking of God, that human experience is universal - for if not, how could religious principles be applied?