 |
| Image via Wikipedia |
Those who work in the religion of psychology, a field I confess to not being well acquainted with, have as I understand it tried to come up with scales and measures based on self-reporting and self-scoring of experiences which are associated culturally with transcendent phenomena, including what are known as peak experiences, and the effects of those who have such experiences. Ralph Hood at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga and his M-scale come to mind.
There are also students of the brain such as Andrew Newberg who have tried to identify the neurological structures and processes related to such experiences, not to mention the accounts of trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and her shift in consciousness after having a stroke. Dr. Taylor's stroke impaired activity on the left side of her brain, in particular the areas that discriminate and label experience as a part of our capacity for language.
While none of the work or insights by these and other researchers has come to any firm conclusions about the nature of the spiritual experience, and while the left-brain vs. right-brain dichotomy may be over-generalized, over-exploited, and potentially misleading, there does seem to be evidence for distinct ways of shaping conscious experience corresponding to neural process and structure.
And this does match some accounts by contemplatives and mystics about the nature of transcendent consciousness. Not only does this have the potential to validate the experiences of such spiritually oriented people as healthy brain function rather than delusion, it may also help shed light on why some people seem to have difficulty in recognizing, generating, or maintaining such states.
