Category: Religion

Why I’m a Believer: Mysticism, the Brain, and the God Who Won’t Go Away

Mystical experience isn’t fantasy but a deeper mode of knowing — where the brain’s highest integration opens us to the faintest glimmer of the God who won’t go away.

I’ve written about why I’m a Christian, how I conceive God and wrestled with the dogma of Trinity but not the existential why underneath all three. This subject lives closer to our deepest experiences than to doctrine or data. But those experiences can still be examined with reason, theology, and neuroscience. We don’t spend much time examining why we love our loved ones or why something inspires us at that deepest level rather we express that indirectly: how my wife makes me feel loved or how the Ignatian Principle and Foundation moves me. That’s what I’ll attempt to do here: use reason, theology and neuroscience to examine the contours of the Real beneath my belief and to explain why I find belief credible, inevitable, and intellectually alive.

A religion without mystics is a philosophy.

Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel,” 2013), § 262

To make a long story short, I have found mysticism and spiritual experience sufficient evidence to make belief epistemically valid. Mysticism is not irrational; it is how the human brain, and by extension the human person, apprehends the Real.

Mysticism as Knowing

Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it…lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVI.

William James argued that mystical experience is a genuine form of knowing — not emotion or fantasy — marked by insight, authority, and transformative power. For him, these states are empirical data to be judged by their fruits, revealing truths that ordinary consciousness cannot reach.1

I found his argument logically persuasive because he was methodical and scientific in his accounting of these experiences that transcended race, gender, social status, and even culture. If the materialists are right about the epistemic strength of scientific evidence then James is, in fairness, also right by the same lights. So faith as crediting mystics with their genuine perception of a deeper order was utterly Jamesian, utterly reasonable.

The Brain as Reality Generator

What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain.

Newberg M.d., Andrew; Eugene G. D’Aquili; Vince Rause. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (pp. 35-36). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Having satisfied myself with metaphysics, I turned to the neuroscience of belief. Dr. Andy Newberg wrote several books on the subject two of which I found extremely instructive, Why We Believe What We Believe and Why God Won’t Go Away.

Newberg argues that the thalamus is the brain’s reality-generator: it filters and synchronizes sensory input, stabilizing it into a coherent world that feels objectively real. This process—called reification—makes our constructed model of reality seem solid and external. When sensory input into the thalamus diminishes during deep prayer or meditation, the normal self–world boundaries collapse, and the brain reifies a different model: an undifferentiated, unitary state of consciousness. In Newberg’s framework, mystical experience is not a breakdown of reality but the brain’s highest integrative mode of perceiving it.2

In other words, the mystic perceives the world in a way that is “realer than real.” The epistemic upshot couldn’t be clearer. If you reading this post believe what you’re reading is real, then the mystic sees it in a way that’s more real than that. If you are one of those who dismiss mysticism as hallucination then you’d be logically compelled to disbelieve your experience as less real than a hallucination. It’s literally how your brain works.

God in All Things

St. Ignatius believed that we can find God in all things, at every moment, even in the most ordinary times. To do this, we must pay attention to what is happening in and around us and reflect on this experience…God is found in what is real, so we pray from what is real in our lives.

O’Brien, Kevin. The Ignatian Adventure: Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in Daily Life (p. 79). (Function). Kindle Edition.

It’s a familiar Ignatian refrain: God in all things. Here it takes on a universal tenor. A mystic, whether a Carmelite nun engaged in contemplative prayer or a Tibetan monk in deep mediation, has ordered their brains to perceive the God I believe in directly. It should be noted that this experience will never show us God but an infinitesimally small sliver of Godself.3

Seeing God in all things is also integrative. I read how mystics try to put the ineffable into words and how remarkably similar it is to the best theology in our spiritual tradition. Dogma as the silent, inexpressible truer faith that lies underneath kerygma the spoken faith in our everyday piety. The Trinity as paradox comes immediately to mind. All of the theological God-talk, in fact.

  • God is Nothing, i.e. No-thing.
  • God is One.
  • The only true thing we can say about God is silence.
  • God is all in all.
  • We are made in the image and likeness of God.
  • God is in our deepest selves.

And on and on and on. It was so clear to me that was the unifying connection between that silent YES in my heart of hearts and the elegant prose and poetry of Ignatian spirituality.

The trick is to remain epistemically vigilant and humble. Because we carry these experiences in daily life and remember them and naturally seek to interpret them. If we aren’t so lucky as to experience them ourselves we have to do the work to discern the accounts of others so we too remain grounded in what is real: God.

The God Who Won’t Go Away

In the end, this is what keeps me a believer.

Not sentiment.

Not inherited doctrine.

Not the feel-good stories I’ve spent years learning how to question.

But the convergence of experience, mind, and discernment — James reminding me that mystical states are a genuine mode of knowing; Newberg showing that the brain is structured to perceive reality at its highest level; and Ignatius teaching me how to test those moments so I don’t mistake comfort for truth.

  1. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, identified a consistent pattern across all genuine mystical encounters. He argued that mystical states are not sentimental or escapist but a form of direct knowing—a legitimate mode of human cognition. He called this “the noetic quality,” meaning that these experiences feel and function as revelations: they disclose insight rather than emotion. James held that mystical states are:

    Ineffable — they exceed language; they must be experienced to be understood.
    Noetic — they convey knowledge, not merely feeling.
    Transient — brief, but their impact endures.
    Passive — they arrive as gift, not achievement.

    James concluded that mystical experience is a valid empirical datum: we must judge it by its fruits, not dismiss it by its strangeness. For him, mysticism is a channel of truth that expands the boundaries of what human beings can know. ↩︎
  2. Newberg breaks it down to three basic levels of consciousness:

    Dream State – The brain generates its own imagery with low coherence, giving rise to a fluid, unstable sense of reality.
    Waking Consciousness – Sensory input drives a coherent, structured world with clear boundaries between self and other—useful, but limited.
    Unitary State – Boundary-making regions quiet and the brain shifts into its most integrated mode, producing an experience of undivided wholeness. The deepest expression of this is Absolute Unitary Being (AUB), where self and world dissolve into a single field of awareness. ↩︎
  3. A physical analogy would be perceiving a grain of sand as part of the entire observable universe (1 x 1061). It is an awesome thought; no? ↩︎

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Forrest Gump’s plain wisdom—“Stupid is as stupid does”—frames a meditation on ideology and discernment. We trade freedom for the comfort of belonging when we let ideas think for us. Faith is the way back to freedom: to think, to pray, to see.

Forrest Gump, an intellectually challenged man who was at the same time exceptionally wise, had a maxim: “Stupid is as stupid does.” In that single sentence lies an indictment of much of what passes for intelligence in our age — people with expansive vocabularies and expensive degrees still doing stupid things because they’ve given themselves over to emotional need without discernment and stopped thinking for themselves.

Ideology (Merriam-Webster): “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and more pointedly, “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”

Ideological (Merriam-Webster): “relating to or concerned with ideas or ideology,” and more critically, “characterized by blind or partisan devotion to a system or belief.”

The first is descriptive; the second is diagnostic. To believe an ideology is one thing: you have an ordered worldview. To have faith in it, however, is to let someone else do your thinking for you.

Most people don’t wake up and say to themselves, “Today, I’m going to let [insert ideology] do my thinking for me!” It doesn’t happen that way. It creeps in. We inherit our slogans from parents, pastors, pundits, or professors, and we wear them like armor against uncertainty. Over time, the armor becomes a cage — most clearly when it fuses with our identity. What once protected us begins to define us. Principles and faith demand the work of discernment — they force us to confront ambiguity and to wrestle with conscience. Ideology relieves us of that burden. It offers the comfort of belonging without the discomfort of examination. It trades freedom for (false) certainty and sells the exchange as virtue.

Ignatius of Loyola would have recognized this as a disordered attachment — the subtle clinging to anything that offers security at the cost of truth. When we identify more with our camp than with Christ, when we prize being right over being good, we begin to confuse the voice of the crowd with the voice of God.

Many ideologies begin as attempts to make sense of the world, and some even manage to remain supple — capable of reflection, repentance, and reform. But most do not. Once the slogans take hold, questioning becomes betrayal of oneself and one’s tribe. Curiosity feels like disloyalty. A set of ideas becomes the grounds for personal and corporate Pride, the mother of all sin. The all-important We then determines Truth and all the rest — replacing God.[1]

Faith, by contrast, is trust in God whom we can never fully know and who is always Mystery. It grows by encounter, by humility, by the willingness to be surprised. It doesn’t spare us the work of thinking; it deepens it. It doesn’t silence doubt; it sanctifies it by putting it in conversation with love. That’s what Ignatius meant by freedom — not the ability to do whatever we wish, but the grace to choose what leads us toward God even when the world shouts for certainty.

So, yes, “stupid is as stupid does.” Stupidity is the refusal — the refusal to look when Truth is right in front of you, whispering through the noise, inviting you — again — to be free: to think, to pray, to see.

  1. The Examen exists precisely to disrupt that drift: to pause, to look back, to notice what moved us toward love and what led us away. It’s not a prayer for the pure but for the brutally honest, for those who know how easily conviction turns into control. The Examen is a bulwark against idolatry. ↩︎

The Subtle Whisper of the Evil Spirit: When Pro-Life Ideals Are Corrupted

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn that the evil spirit employs cunning tactics to corrupt even noble ideals. This post explores how the pro-life movement, despite its aim to express Christ’s love for innocent life, has been spiritually derailed by rigidity and judgment. Through discernment, we uncover how subtle distortions of truth can lead even the most righteous causes astray and reflect on how to stay anchored in Christ’s compassion.

In Ignatian spirituality, we learn to discern the movements of spirits—those that draw us closer to God and those that subtly lead us away. For those practiced in this discernment, the evil spirit does not come clumsily or overtly. It is not a shouting adversary but a cunning whisperer, cloaking itself in righteousness to ensnare even the most devout. St. Ignatius teaches that the evil spirit adapts its tactics, employing deceit and half-truths to corrupt what is good and noble.

When I reflect on the current pro-life movement, I see not just a political struggle but a spiritual battlefield. The ideals of protecting innocent life—so central to the message of Jesus—are noble. Yet, like a wily general, the evil spirit exploits the movement’s zeal and transforms it into a source of harm, even to the very lives it seeks to protect.

The Advanced Tactics of the Evil Spirit

For those of us who strive to live the Exercises of St. Ignatius, the evil spirit no longer tempts us with base desires. Instead, it cloaks itself in what seems good. It whispers: Your cause is just; therefore, any means to achieve it are justified. This is a subtle distortion of truth, for it turns a righteous passion into rigidity, zealotry, and even cruelty.

The evil spirit plays on our desire for control and victory, urging us to silence doubt, ignore criticism, and dismiss the human faces of those we oppose even those we intend to help. Instead of inspiring compassion, it inspires pride. Instead of fostering dialogue, it sows division. Instead of focusing on Christ’s love for the vulnerable, it subtly shifts the focus onto our own righteousness and power.

How Corruption Manifests in the Movement

In the pro-life cause, this spiritual corruption can be seen in actions that betray the very principles the movement claims to uphold. Consider how laws are enacted without regard for the complexities of women’s lives, ignoring the cries of those in desperate situations. When compassion and accompaniment are replaced with legalism and judgment, the evil spirit’s influence becomes clear.

This is not to say that the fight for the unborn is wrong—it is noble. But when the effort to protect life results in policies that disregard the needs of the vulnerable mothers who carry those lives, it becomes a shadow of the ideal. The evil spirit is at work here, twisting a good intention into an instrument of harm, just as Ignatius warns.

The Way Forward

How do we resist this subtle corruption? Ignatius would direct us back to Christ himself. Jesus, who cherished the dignity of all life, never enforced his teachings with cruelty or coercion. His way was one of mercy and accompaniment. He dined with sinners, healed the outcast, and showed unwavering compassion even to those who opposed him.

For the pro-life movement—and for all of us in any moral struggle—the call is to imitate Christ’s love, which is never coercive but always invitational. Discernment requires us to ask: Is this action truly of God? Does it reflect the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? And to be clear, this must not be merely in our minds but in the real world by our actions and in others. If it does not, we must be willing to reevaluate, no matter how noble the cause.

Recognizing the Evil Spirit in Our Midst

The evil spirit thrives in division, pride, and fear. It whispers that compromise is weakness and that love is insufficient. But Christ shows us that true power lies in humility, and true victory is won through love, not domination. For those of us trained in Ignatian spirituality, the call is to remain vigilant, discerning not only the good from the bad but also the good from the counterfeit.

The pro-life movement, like any human endeavor, is susceptible to the cunning of the evil spirit. Its noblest ideals can be corrupted when we lose sight of Christ’s example. We must remain anchored in prayer and discernment, striving always to express God’s love—not our own righteousness. For in the end, it is only by walking humbly with God that we can do what we were born to do: God’s will.

Go and Do Likewise

I practice Jesuit (that is Ignatian) spirituality and at its core is the Greatest Commandment. It dominates my life and specifically here, my politics.

I practice Jesuit (that is Ignatian) spirituality. At its core is the Greatest Commandment which dominates my life and, specifically for this discussion, my politics (more on that later).

Let’s look at the how important this is in Luke:

The Greatest Commandment. There was a scholar of the law who stood up to test [Jesus] and said, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?” He said in reply, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” He replied to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”

Luke 10:25-28 (NABre)

Love of God includes love of neighbor. It is one of the direct signs of the love of God. It’s not an accident then, that who “my neighbor” is is critically important and likely why St. Luke connected the commandment directly to the parable of The Good Samaritan.

Continue reading “Go and Do Likewise”

A Bishop’s License to Ill

Christians are called to win the battle of ideas and values in secular society, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput said Tuesday.

via Never accept’ separation of faith from political engagement, Archbishop Charles Chaput says

Chaput is my bishop. I can say he is a man of integrity: pretty hardcore about certain things and I’d be willing to wager that he’s not the turn a blind eye “for the sake of Peter” type from sexual abuse if he were investigate (and to date there’s been no evidentiary reason to do so). He’s been pretty frank about bishop moral credibility, etc. I’ve seen him ay to a bunch of white folks in a suburban parish how they have racism in them and need to combat it to their faces in front of black people no less (of course including me). He’s said repeatedly, that refusing to aid the poor whether government program or charity just because buys you a first class non-stop ticket to Hell. He’s lamented that too many of us have the faith of a 10-year-old, etc. So I respect him and his intentions in general.

Continue reading “A Bishop’s License to Ill”

This Bears Repeating

We are locking up asylum seekers, intentionally traumatizing their children in order to traumatize their parents, and then calling it “security.”

Forgive the length but this bears repeating:

Trump overwhelmingly won the Catholic and evangelical votes. They were warned about this. Prophetically. The man in the White House is not a man of God nor even a Christian (at the very least you have to believe you need redemption to be one). They voted for him anyway. Some it appears lusted for power (and now feel some sense of it, read racists). Others were single issue voters on issues like abortion. I said this election and presidency would be one long civics lesson for these people and I was right. This is what you get when you vote for a sociopath. Kids forcibly removed from their parents, locked in cages by the dozens, hundreds.

A sociopath is “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.” This certainly applies to Trump. He is not “the lesser of two evils.” Hillary was. But that’s like saying speeding is the lesser of two evils when compared to driving your car into a crowd of protestors. (And spare me the canard of abortion. It’s legal now and it’s going to stay quite legal for decades to come given the trends in women running for office. Trends instigated by you know who.)

Our nation has always done evil like this: slavery, Wounded Knee, the Tuskegee Experiment, and so on. No nation is God. Evil exists everywhere and in all of us. In particular, racism and greed are at root in this situation. And that makes our nation much like Sodom which BTW was not turned to ash for having gay pride parades:

Ezekiel 16:49 (NABre)
“Now look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy.”

We are locking up asylum seekers, intentionally traumatizing their children in order to traumatize their parents, and then calling it “security.” Was such wonton callousness secure for Sodom?

For those who voted for Trump, you bear responsibility for this. For those who I know personally, understand that this is not a political issue. It’s a moral one (for me it always has been). Support for this tells me who you are. I will be watching.

A Better God than the One We Have

Amen. a.co/eFAksF9

I was once saying mass at the San Fernando Juvenile Hall. With nearly three hundred detained minors—mostly gang members—a homie reads from Psalm 138. I’m seated, vested, eyes closed, choosing to listen to this kid’s proclamation, rather than follow along in the liturgical sheet that rests on my lap. He reads, with an overabundance of confidence, “The Lord . . . is EXHAUSTED.” What the hell? I open my eyes and hurriedly refer to my sheet. It says, “The Lord is exalted,” but I think “exhausted” is way better. I’m not sure I want to spend eternity with a God who wants to be exalted, who longs to be recognized and made a big deal of. I would rather hope for a humble God who gets exhausted in delighting over and loving us. That is a better God than the one we have [made in our own image].

I am a Techie. Through and through.

This is why I practice Jesuit spirituality. They speak right to and for me! This quote is exactly me.

“First of all, we always recognize that we could be wrong. Logic can be flawed. Tables have been known to contain misprints. Hunches sometimes turn out to be mistaken. Next, we allow our beliefs to be tested by results. If we get an answer that works, it confirms our trust in the data, and it strengthens our preconceptions the next time we’re looking for a hunch. We allow our beliefs to be confirmed by our experience. And finally, we’re a whole lot more comfortable with our results if there is more than one line of evidence leading to the same conclusion.”

from “God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion” by Guy Consolmagno.

I Just Want to Do God’s Will

This MLK Day, I read someone comment on King’s optimism and how it animated his work, basically him as the Dreamer. But he was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and God is what animated him. He did not mince words about this. The night before he died he said,

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

And the next day he was shot and killed.

Loving Your Neighbor is Communal

This conservative “Christian” idea that the Bible demands individual acts of charity and this government programs aimed at social and economic justice is flat out idolatry. Jesus himself spoke communally about justice and Judgment.

This conservative “Christian” idea that the Bible demands individual acts of charity and thus government programs aimed at social and economic justice can be resisted is flat out idolatry. Jesus himself spoke communally about justice and Judgment.

Mark 7:6-13 (NABre)

[Jesus] responded, “Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

In vain do they worship me,

teaching as doctrines human precepts.’

You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” He went on to say, “How well you have set aside the commandment of God in order to uphold your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Whoever curses father or mother shall die.’ Yet you say, ‘If a person says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is qorban”’ (meaning, dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many such things.”

And in one of the few places where Jesus condemns people to hell:

Matthew 25:31-33,41-46 (NABre)

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left…Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

In a country where government is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people are responsible for its morality. If your are Christian, as in an actual follower of Christ, then the government must act in certain ways for you to support it. If you want it to ban abortion, you better accept it should provide poor children with healthcare. Otherwise stop pretending to be a follower of Christ.