Sexuality and Spirituality
The talk shows and multiple Internet sites have picked up on a story about a controversial website that is pulling a great many people to a progressive church in Granger, Indiana. Some people have been getting very hot under the collar, and saying that there’s no place for frank advertising and for discussions of sex in a church, or a church-based website.
To be honest, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. It is self- evident that no two people are ever going to agree about everything to do with religion. And just as obvious that there are some clearly different schools of psychological and spiritual development. Some are by their very nature sexually repressive while others, and I am thinking here primarily of Tantric and Taoist traditions, have actively used sex for spiritual enlightenment. But there has also been an important study that has shown that many people who are not following any particular spiritual tradition have spiritual, mystical or transcendent experiences during sex. This is reported in a very fine book by developmental psychologist Jenny Wade.
In the introduction to Jenny’s book, the philosopher Ken Wilber makes an important point, that leads us straight back to the controversy over the website. He asks why so many people laugh at or snigger about sex? And his answer is superficially astonishing, but, I think, quite correct. He says that we laugh at sex because it can kill us.
Many psychologists and philosophers have examined the basis of laughter, and have all, in their different ways come to the conclusion that it has something to do with an event that we find unnervingly significant. I think that is was Freud who pointed out that laughing when someone slips on banana peel causes laughter because it is a reminder that anybody can fall victim to the same thing.
So what does Ken mean by that statement? He means that sex can kill the “everyday you,” your normal personal ego, and sometimes enable people to experience the depths of their own spirituality. And that can be very scary. Clinicians still see a great many people who have developed problems because of conflicts over their own sexuality and their beliefs; In particular their religious beliefs. Yet here is the paradox: sex may not be conducive to religious belief but it can be highly conducive to spiritual experience. Yet Jenny Wade’s study also showed that 80% of the people who had these experiences never told a single person about them. Presumably because they fear that they will be laughed at.
For the people who felt upset about the Church in Indiana, I think that it’s important to realize that sex is not going to go away. Everybody knows that sex sells, and if people are drawn into hearing a balanced message to help them re-establish their moral compass, isn’t that a good thing?
Technorati tags: sexuality, Jenny Wade, spirituality, Ken Wilber
Meditation and the Brain
1. There are many types of meditation: many are a form of intense concentration, others are a witnessing or watching of thoughts, yet others are a form of profound devotion. So it is no surprise that different forms will produce different effects in the brain.
2. The fact that the brain can be trained to produce certain types of electrical activity is in line with multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that the brain is not the static structure that we used to think it to be: it can learn and develop. We already knew that with motor functions and some cognitive abilities, but now we can extend those findings into the emotions: feelings of love and empathy can be developed, expanded and deepened. The old metaphor that the brain can be exercised like a muscle may not be a metaphor after all, but a biological fact.
3. The fact that there are neurological correlates of meditation or of any emotional or psychological state does not mean that we can reduce the experience to the firing of some neurons or the synchronization of regions of the brain. Some of this research has been misinterpreted to mean that meditative states or mystical insights are no more than the calming of neural activity. It is vital that we also acknowledge the subjective experiences and reports of individuals and recognize that they are as valid descriptors as changes in the brain.
4. Meditation has been shown to have a great many physiological and psychological effects, from lowering blood pressure, to improving the performance of sleep-deprived individuals, reducing age-related cortical thinning and ultimately leading to demonstrable psychological and spiritual development. So the neurological and psychological findings provide a partial explanation for those observations.
Technorati tags: meditation, Dalai Lama, brain, Neuroscience
Healing and Spirituality
For thousands of years, spiritual teachers and healers were one and the same. The first hospitals in Europe were founded by religious orders. There was always a rather interesting split: folk healers were primarily, though not exclusively female, while the hospitals were male dominated. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment was the separation of healing from faith. The separation of body and spirit was pursued vigorously by medical science as it advanced. Indeed, many in the medical establishment echoed Freud in comparing religion to a neurosis. A well-known figure in British medicine has made no bones about his opposition to the involvement of spirituality in medicine, which he says is the proper business of the church, and has nothing to do with science.
Over the last two decades, things have been changing. A number of physicians and scientists have recognized the importance of re-introducing a spiritual perspective into medicine. But do they have any right to do so? The answer is a definite “Yes”! There has been a gradual build up of scientific evidence that prayer and faith can protect health. A second area of investigation is whether religious or spiritual practice, in particularly intercessory prayer, can affect the health of those being prayed for?
First is the clear observation that faith and prayer can support physical and emotional well-being as well as the health of relationships. One school of thought is that this is all the consequence of an internal healing mechanism. Over 30 years ago Herbert Benson at Harvard first described the “Relaxation response,” a simple method of using techniques derived from Transcendental Meditation for changing a person’s emotional response to stress. He then demonstrated that prayer could also elicit a relaxation response.
In recent years, there has been a global effort to research the connections between faith and health, and I have been particularly impressed by the body of work being generated by the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, that has provided incontrovertible evidence that religious people live longer, healthier lives. This seems to be more than just the stress-reducing impact of prayer and meditation.
We also have evidence that thankfulness and an attitude of gratitude may have a lasting impact on your mood and state of health and well-being.
Second is intercessory prayer. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the psychiatrist Daniel Benor. Like most people trained in Western medicine, he was very skeptical about spiritual healing until he saw a tough case that failed to respond to conventional medicine but was cured by a spiritual healer. He then started to study spiritual healing and has written the standard textbook on the subject, which runs to FOUR volumes. He once told me that the evidence for spiritual healing is stronger than the evidence for almost any other field of unorthodox medicine and stronger than the evidence for quite a number of practices in orthodox medicine!
The moral of the story? Do not neglect your own spirituality or the spirituality of those around you, and remember that empirical scientific research is showing us yet again, that the power of worship and prayer are far from being neuroses or primitive superstitions.
Technorati tags: spirituality, healing, thankfulness, prayer, Herbert Benson, Daniel Benor
Spirituality and Health
“From its source to the sea, the river represents a hierarchy. We find this same hierarchy in ourselves, from the source, which is our divine Self, all the way to the physical plane. If we wish to drink pure life, we must detach ourselves from the lower regions of the physical, astral and mental planes and seek water in the high mountain peaks within us: in our soul and spirit." Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
This is part of a delightful quotation that is well worth your consideration. I received it on January 9th from Prosveta : I signed up with them some time ago to get daily messages. Aïvanhov is one of a number of spiritual teachers who should be better known. If you click on the "Some of My Spiritual Classics" button on the left hand side, it will take you to a list of books that I put together on the Amazon website. I would suggest that you let your intuition do the walking: see if there is something calling to you.
This leads me to one of my central preoccupations, and that is the relationship between spirituality and health. Before I tell you my own views about this relationship, I would also like to tell you about a wonderful resource, and that is the website of the magazine Spirituality and Health. This, together with What is Enlightenment and Magical Blend , are the only three magazines that I always read from cover to cover.
So first of all, what is spirituality? There are dozens of definitions for something that may truly be impossible to define using language designed for describing the external world and for communicating a limited repertoire of our internal states, feelings and opinions. I feel it most simply as the Transpersonal, the One, that underlies the Universe.
Ken Wilber, whose work I admire enormously, has collected the five most common definitions in one of his most outstanding books, Integral Psychology:
1. Spirituality as the highest levels of any of the lines of development through which we can pass
2. Spirituality as the sum total of the highest levels of the development lines
3. That spirituality is a separate line of development.
4. Spirituality is an attitude
5. Spirituality is to do with experiences that can come about from prayer, meditation, devotion, love and so on.
Which definition you prefer, or even if you have a separate one, depends very much on your own temperament, upbringing, understanding and experience.
If you have any interest in these topics, and if you have not already discovered Ken’s work, you will probably enjoy reading him. He puts a lot of his material on the Internet for free and has a terrific website.
The reason for wanting to spend a moment on definitions and some resources, is that apart from personal experience, there is a great deal of convincing research into the relationship between having spiritual and/or religious beliefs and engaging in spiritual and/or religious practices, and in the maintenance of health, prevention of some illnesses and even in the effectiveness of prayer. I am going to analyze and review any new research that I see, as well as invite correspondence about this important topic.
I was a huge skeptic about prayer and healing, but no more. I review articles that have been submitted for publication to a number of major medical journals. The editors say that I am a bit of a “hawk.” If there’s a mistake, I am usually good at finding it. Several years ago I was sent a study of the influence of distant prayer on the recovery of patients in a coronary care unit. I was certain that I would find a flaw in it, but after three days of intense work, I had to conclude that the paper was sound. And it is now one of many. There is really good scientific evidence that prayer works, whether or not the recipient even knows that he or she is being prayed for.
When I had a health problem a few years ago, I recovered in record time. I do not know whether it was the superb medical care, or the fact that I used homeopathy and practiced qigong every day, or the three prayer circles that were involved in my care. My guess is that is was the combination of all of them. And that leads to a final point for this entry: there is overwhelming evidence that new laws of healing have been emerging over the last century, and the key to working with them is to use the leverage and synergy of combinations of treatments: Combinations Are Key
Technorati tags: Ken Wilber, spirituality, prayer, healing
Synchronicity
In my forthcoming book, Sacred Cycles: Regaining Health and Harmony by Mastering the Natural Rhythms of Life, I disucss synchronicity as a really important aspect of our lives. The notion of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences, was first proposed by the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his friend the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Are there really such connections in our lives, or do we live simply at the whim of random chance in a Universe whose every law has been laid bare by the impassive probing of modern science?
There have been countless attempts by mathematicians and physicists to explain away synchronicity, which some skeptics describe as some sort of refuge of the mathematically challenged. Yet other plenty of other scientists have said, “Wait a minute, there really may be something here.” Or is the whole discussion a pointless comparison of objective mathematical apples with subjective metaphysical pears?
I am very interested in hearing your views as well as any personal experiences.
Technorati tags: synchronicity Carl Jung
