Holiday evening reflections (or, On being untethered in a mundane world)

The end of May draws near and in the United States it is unofficially now summer.

My job for the last nearly six years has been... uhh... well, to describe how unusual and stressful and frustrating it can be would require actual examples that no one would believe. It's not all bad, but the unbelievable and vexing parts are made worse by how unnecessary they are. So having a three day weekend is really valuable.

I would have posted something hear last week but my attention was grabbed by another mass shooting at a school in America. Once again the same well-funded political movement is blocking any meaningful changes to save lives by idolizing guns and gun violence. Once again there is a chance to put momentum into calls for reforms.

Whether heart-rending tragedies or the banal vagaries of every day life, many people have some form of reframing or re-contextualizing their experience of the world, either to try to make sense of or accept what transpires or generate and sustain motivation for change. While some will quibble over the use of spiritual as inadequate to label all such transformations in perspective, many such transformative experiences share common events such as being moved by natural beauty or music or other inspiring stimuli. Or by having one's mortality brought sharply into view for some reason.

In my last entry I referenced themes of health and wellness connected to our circumstances and how any type of spirituality, whatever its form, needs to be able to address everyday concerns as well as existential ones. The writing could use some revision but it was a quick lunchtime musing so it is a little untidy and lacking a bit in focus.

Nonetheless, it does lead to this: I never have been able to really get into or stick with any religion, sacred tradition, or anything more than an intellectual yet generic spiritual framework. As I've no doubt shared here before, I don't perceive the world around me as full of wonder and mystery and potential. It offers no sense of hidden truths or unseen depths. It's just flat. Mundane.

To use other language, no sense of the numinous. A super low score on the M-scale. A world without a soul. Neither empty nor full. Neither hot nor cold.

I like parts of Christian monasticism and a lot of the Westernized translations of Buddhism and so on, but commitment is hard when the mystique and newness wear off. I can appreciate the wisdom regarding the human condition but it's hard to not wander off and let whatever practice I had picked up lapse as there is little or no personal connection.

Some people may wonder what that means for dealing with everyday life or horrible catastrophes, but it's just like everyone else I guess only without turning to a liturgy or prayer or whatever. I guess we are all used to what we know? We all have our own ways of filtering and processing our experiences.

Sometimes I use spiritual language and gestures anyway because they are a form of expression even if you don't feel a deep belief or faith in the literal meaning of the gesture or expression, because why not? It's part of our shared human heritage. I don't mean any disrespect to those who idolize such religious forms, especially ones I have a personal connection to.

God delusion or God bias?

Visualization of a DTI measurement of a human brain. Depicted are reconstructed fiber tracts that run through the mid-sagittal plane. Especially prominent are the U-shaped fibers that connect the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum (the fibers come out of the image plane and consequently bend towards the top) and the fiber tracts that descend toward the spine (blue, within the image plane) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The premise we will be exploring here today is that peak experiences, a sense of the numinous, the health benefits of spirituality and religious faith in a higher power,  and so forth can potentially be explained solely in terms of human biology.

A few caveats first, though.  I am not claiming to represent the cutting edge of neuroscientific research or to speak for that scholarly community. The hypotheses and conjectures are based on general models and speculations about brain function and evolutionary theory.

Second, I am not attempting to prove or disprove the existence of God.

Third, I am not suggesting that the rough sketch of a model presented here is superior to other explanations. Sometimes people think that if an alternative to a view they don't like or find implausible that it is better or more correct. This is just a thought experiment. Others can judge what value it may hold and to who.


It's always good to have as many provocative yet reasonable and supportable models as possible to stimulate creativity and to challenge other models in a robust way, and I really like formulating new models within a set of interesting parameters.

The Numinous

The numinous is considered here to be a powerful sense of the sublime which can include a feeling of non-dual unity with the universe, possession by absolute acceptance and bliss, or an overwhelming sense of wonder and awe generating a sense of connection to a larger mystery. It is used in describing mystical experiences which are attributed to a vast conscious awareness which includes and subsumes reality in its entirety. This conscious awareness is sometimes referred to either as ultimate reality or a sentient being's perception of same, and in theistic religions this in turn is associated with God.

Such experiences can also be combined with claims about the association of spirituality and a sense of an overarching purpose for existence with improved mental, emotional, and physical health as evidence for the existence of higher states of reality beyond conventional material models of the universe and in some cases for the existence of God. These claims provide the empirical grounding for many arguments in favor of such higher states, which in some models are seen as different levels of awareness and integration with the divine.