Our Minds in Search for God
The mind interprets the world for us, gives it meaning. To a depressed person the sight of a glowing Tahitian sunset mirrors his sadness, while to someone else the same signals to the retina may invoke wonder and joy. The brain is recording the sunset, but only the mind can experience it.
As we search for God, we want our interpretations to rise even higher than our minds can take us, so that we might understand birth and death, good and evil, heaven and hell. When this understanding extends to spirit, two invisible fields, mind and soul, need to be connected if we are to have any confidence in them.
God requires the most delicate response of the mind. If the mind is troubled or unrefined, the journey back to God cannot be successfully made. Many factors come into play here, but in terms of the mind/brain connection, Valerie Hunt, a researcher with degrees in both psychology and physiology, has made some important connections.
After hooking subjects up to EEGs, she determined that certain brain wave patterns can be associated with higher spiritual experiences. This finding extends earlier research which established that going into deep meditation alters the patterns of alpha waves in the brain, along with heartbeat, respiration, and blood pressure.
But Dr. Hunt was further interested in why people do not have spiritual experiences. In doing so, she took the step of supposing that we should all be naturally connected to the totality of the minds field of energy and information, just as we are all connected to the parts that involve thinking. It is a simple but profound assumption.
Adapted from How To Know God, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2000).
