How the Brain Creates the Feeling of God: The Emergent Science of Neurotheology

Abstract

In creativity and meditation we seek in a fully conscious way, willfully cooperating and facilitating the process not only of connecting with God, but experiencing oneself in the process of “becoming” god. The absorbed ego no longer perceives itself as a separate expression of consciousness, but as the same essence as All. We can become technoshamans, using the process of altering our consciousness through spiritual technologies. Even “lesser” mystical experiences have significant implications for spirituality and theology. It is the nature of the mystical mind to have such experiences and they have altered religion. So, a thorough understanding of how the mind/body functions to generate them is extremely useful. Paradoxical physiological mechanisms operate in the body under most conditions to chemically prevent the attainment of higher states of arousal on either end of the spectrum. But it is possible, with repeated exposure to the paradoxical situation to function effectively at higher levels of conjoined sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal, traditionally associated with sacred experience.