Tag: faith

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. ↩︎

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.

What happens when Jesus is not the answer?

Doing good cannot be an optional extra for Christians, but must be at the core of our existence.

What happens when Jesus is not the answer?:

Doing good cannot be an optional extra for Christians, but must be at the core of our existence. For our faith is not measured by a list of sound doctrine, but instead by the fruit it produces in doing good.

(Via Red Letter Christians)

Amen. Read the whole post. It’s worth it.

I Have Experienced It to Be True

Nadia Bolz-Weber:

Years ago on a bright Tuesday in March I was driving to seminary and I found myself stuck in traffic on I-25.  Sitting in a dead stop on the interstate I stared up into the clear blue Colorado sky and thought “What in the world  am I doing?  I don’t believe a word of this Jesus stuff. I mean, It’s a fairy tale”.  But then in the very next moment I thought “except…throughout my life…I have experienced it to be true.”  I experience the gospel to be true even when I can’t believe it. And honestly sometimes I believe the gospel even when I don’t experience it.  [emphasis mine] And I suggest to you today that this is why we have and even why we need Word and Sacrament. Because see, we are a forgetful people.

via Sermon for the ordination of Matthew Nickoloff.

Great is Thy Faithfulness

Our guest soloist, Jaime, who usually leads our other choir really tore it down Sunday. We made a joyful noise!

The soloist who usually leads our other choir, Jaime, really tore it down Sunday. We made a joyful noise!

Is It Real Son, Is It Really Real Son

I get a lot of crap on Twitter from atheists who like to assume that they know reality and of course I as a Christian do not. Patent faith assertions and (childish?) attempts to cover up for a distinct and clear lack of evidence for their claims.

Is it real son, is it really real son
Let me know it’s real son, if it’s really real
Something I could feel son, load it up and kill one
Want it raw deal son, if it’s really real.

–Method Man, Bring the Pain

“The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.”

–Rene Descartes

I get a lot of crap on Twitter from atheists who like to assume that they know reality and of course I as a Christian do not. “Trust your senses.” “You have belief and I have reality.” “Reality doesn’t require faith.” (That one’s my favorite!) And so on and so on, etc., etc. ad nauseum. It’s deeply ironic because they cover up for a distinct and clear lack of evidence for their claims. (I ignore specious “burden of proof” gambits designed to relieve themselves of their burden because opinions stated as fact require evidence. Period.) To illustrate why such a believe is a step out in faith, I quote from Chris Impey, atheist and cosmologist, writing in his wonderful book How It Began.

[Nick] Bostrom [futurist and philosopher] frames a logical argument based on three propositions, at least one of which must be correct. One: Almost all civilizations go extinct or destroy themselves before gaining the capability to create simulated creatures like us. That’s a gloomy option because we’re approaching that stage. Two: Almost all civilizations choose not to create simulated creatures, even though they could. That’s possible, but the $50 billion a year gaming market on this planet indicates a strong desire of humans to create and manipulate artificial entities. Three: Nothing is real, everything is an illusion, and we actually live inside a simulation.

Rebutting the third proposition is surprisingly difficult. Any simulation constructed by a far superior race wouldn’t be glitchy, as it was in the movie The Matrix. There’s no reason we’d know we’re simulated unless the creators wanted us to. Your conviction that you’re made of flesh and blood and free will is part of the simulation. Since it’s easier and cheaper to create computational life-forms than biological organisms, by the Copernican Principle there are many more simulated than real creatures. OK, this argument is more of a provocation than a serious suggestion, but it’s no more unfounded or illogical than the multiverse or hidden space-time dimensions [from theoretical physics and quantum mechanics].

Impey, Chris (2012-03-19). How It Began: A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Universe (Kindle Locations 5596-5606). Norton. Kindle Edition.

I came to the same extremely disturbing conclusion after watching The Matrix. There would be no way to prove I wasn’t in one myself. Any “evidence” I employed to rebut the possibility could also be used to support the proposition that I am in fact in a power plant somewhere!  It didn’t matter whether we are or aren’t actually in some power plant. What matters is that the standard rules of scientific evidence are powerless to get us out of this quandary. Repeated “physical” demonstrations within a simulation simply reveal the simulation performs as expected.

Materialist atheists make an ironic choice in faith to believe no simulation or Matrix or Dream exists, and God bless ’em for it! Ironic because they have absolutely no evidence with which to support that belief. And that’s what many such fideisitc atheists can’t admit to: their faith.  And why I always have an impish little smile on my face when I read their quips on Twitter!

Let he who has ears to hear, let him hear…

Objective Certitude

When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.

James, William (2011-03-23). The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (pp. 16-17). Kindle Edition.

Dogmatic Science

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

― Thomas Aquinas