Spiritual experiences, religious or otherwise, are mental processes. They are biological processes of the highest level of complexity. They occur in the brain of a given organism in certain circumstances and there is no reason why we should shy away from describing those processes in neurobiological terms provided we are aware of the limitations of the exercise. So, here are the answers to my friend's questions. First, I assimilate the notion of spiritual to an intense experience of harmony, to the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection. The experience unfolds in association with the desire to act toward others with kindness and generosity. Thus to have a spiritual experience is to hold sustained feelings of a particular kind dominated by some variant of joy, however serene.
The center of mass of the feelings I call spiritual is located at an intersection of experiences: Sheer beauty is one. The other is anticipation of actions conducted in "a temper of peace" and with "a preponderance of loving affections" (the quotations are James's but the concepts are Spinozian). The e experiences can reverberate and become self-sustaining for brief periods of time. Conceived in this manner, the spiritual is an index of the organizing scheme behind a life that is well-balanced, well-tempered, and well-intended.
One might venture that perhaps the spiritual is a partial revelation of the ongoing impulse behind life in some state of perfection. If feelings, as I suggested earlier in the book, testify to the state of the life process, spiritual feelings dig beneath that testimony, deeper into the substance of living. They form the basis for an intuition of the life process.'
Second, spiritual experiences are humanly nourishing. I believe that Spinoza was entirely on the mark in his view that joy and its variants lead to greater functional perfection. The current scientific knowledge regarding joy supports the notion that it should be actively sought because it does contribute to flourishing; likewise, that sorrow and related affects should be avoided because they are unhealthy. This entails the observance of a certain range of social norms—the recent evidence, presented in Chapter Four, that cooperative human behavior engages pleasure/reward systems in the brain supports this wisdom. Violation of social norms causes guilt or shame or grief, all of which are variants of unhealthy sorrow. Third, we have the power to evoke spiritual experiences. Prayer and rituals, in the context of a religious narrative, are meant to produce spiritual experiences but there are other sources. It is often said that the secularity and crass commercialism of our age have made the spiritual all the more difficult to attain, as if the means to induce the spiritual were missing or becoming scarce. I believe this is not entirely true. We live surrounded by stimuli capable of evoking spirituality, although their saliency and effectiveness are diminished by the clutter of our environments and a lack of systematic frameworks within which their action can be effective. The contemplation of nature, the reflection on scientific discovery, and the experience of great art can be, in the appropriate context, effective emotionally competent stimuli behind the spiritual. Think of how listening to Bach, Mozart, Schubert, or Mahler can take us there, almost easily. This is an opportunity to generate positive emotions where negative emotions would otherwise
It is clear, however, that the sort of spiritual experiences to which I a m alluding are not equivalent to a religion. They lack the framework, as a result of which they also lack the sweep and the grandeur that attracts so many human beings to organized religion. Ceremonial rites and shared assembly do create ranges of spiritual experience different from those of the private variety. Let us now turn to the delicate issue of "locating" the spiritual in the human organism. I do not believe that there is a brain center for spirituality in the good old phrenological tradition. But we can provide an account of how the process of arriving at a spiritual state may be carried out neurobiologically. Since the spiritual is a particular kind of feeling state, I see it as depending, neurally speaking, on the structures and operations outlined in Chapter Three , and especially on the network of somatosensing brain regions. The spiritual is a particular state of the organism, a delicate combination of certain body configurations and certain mental configurations. Sustaining such states depends on a wealth of thoughts about the condition of the self and the condition of other selves, about past and future, about both concrete and abstract conceptions of our nature. By connecting spiritual experiences to the neurobiology of feelings, my purpose is not to reduce the sublime to the mechanic and by so doing reduce its dignity. Th e purpose is to suggest that the sublimity of the spiritual is embodied in the sublimity of biology and that we can begin to understand the process in biological terms.
