Porosity Is the Heart of Religion (original) (raw)

Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths

PNAS, 2021

Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit-such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as "porous," or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become "absorbed" in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits. religion | porosity | absorption | spiritual experience | voices T he ancient texts of the great religions describe voices that speak from the air, visions that others cannot see, dead people who walk among the living. They are extraordinary stories, but the phenomenological events that they describe are deeply human and far more common than many realize (1). For the people who experience them, these moments can feel so vividly sensory that they are interpreted as evidence that an invisible other-a god, a spirit-is real. Such events change lives and in turn shape history. Augustine's conversion to Christianity, one of the most influential events in the history of Christianity, was sparked by hearing a disembodied voice (2), and on the eve of the Montgomery bus boycotts , terrified by threats, Martin Luther King, Jr., heard God say that he would be with him and resolved to go forward (3)-a decision of momentous significance for the Civil Rights Movement. Spiritual presence events-the various anomalous, often vividly sensory, events which people attribute to gods, spirits, or other supernatural forces (4)-do not happen for everyone. Within a religious community, people vary in how frequently they experience such events (5); there are deeply religious people who want to hear gods and spirits speak and cannot and atheists who report anomalous sensory events nearly indistinguishable from religious experiences (6). One might suspect that voices and visions are signs of mental illness, but many people report anomalous sensory experiences in the absence of psychiatric distress (7). Moreover, the ethnographic record suggests that such events are more common in some cultural settings than in others (8, 9). Spiritual presence events thus present a striking example of variability in human sensory experience. Why are certain people, and people in certain social worlds, more likely to experience these extraordinary events? We bring to this question a theoretical perspective that centers on people's cultural models of, and personal orientations toward, their own minds. In many aspects of everyday life, cultural models (10) or, in other parlance, "folk theories" (11) and personal orientations (attitudes, motivations, and tendencies) (12), play complementary roles in shaping people's experience and behavior: Cultural models represent how the world works (that is, how it is often understood to work in a particular social-cultural setting), and personal orientations lead an individual to engage with that world in a particular way. Neuroscientific studies suggest that hallucinations arise through judgments of events at the edge of awareness-an indistinct noise in the next room, one's own inner voice-and that interpretation alters the phenomenological quality of such events (13, 14). Building on this work, we propose that the relevant cultural model which undergirds spiritual presence events is a model of experience itself and that the relevant personal orientation is an orientation toward experience. The central claim of this paper is that cultural models of the mind and personal orientations toward the mind shape people's phenomenological experiences and their interpretations of these experiences in ways that manifest as cultural and individual differences in reports of spiritual presence events. For cultural models, we focus in particular on what we call "porosity": the idea that the boundary between "the mind" and Significance The sensory presence of gods and spirits is central to many of the religions that have shaped human history-in fact, many people of faith report having experienced such events. But these experiences are poorly understood by social scientists and rarely studied empirically. We present a multiple-discipline, multiple-methods program of research involving thousands of people from diverse cultures and religions which demonstrates that two key factors-cultural models of the mind and personal orientations toward the mind-explain why some people are more likely than others to report vivid experiences of gods and spirits. These results demonstrate the power of culture, in combination with individual differences, to shape something as basic as what feels real to the senses.

Absorption, Mentalizing, and Mysticism: Sensing the presence of the divine

Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2019

Research suggests trait absorption, individual differences in Theory of Mind (ToM), and orthopraxical training are important for explaining a variety of extraordinary experiences typically associated with religion. However, no studies exist quantifying ToM ability or testing its relationship with trait absorption in the prediction of what is arguably the most ubiquitous type of extraordinary experience—the mystical experience. To address this, two exploratory studies were conducted using a sample of meditators (N = 269) and undergraduate students (N = 123). In study one, regression analyses revealed weekly religious/spiritual practice, absorption, and mentalizing predict increased mystical experiences. Moreover, moderation analysis indicated the absorption-mysticism relationship is stronger among individuals with lower mentalizing ability. Study two only replicated the relationship of absorption and weekly practice with mysticism. These studies highlight the robust contribution of absorption in mystical experiences and suggest a more dynamic role for mentalizing than is accounted for in the current literature.

Thinking about thinking: the mind's porosity and the presence of the gods

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

The Mind and Spirit project found that the way a social world invites its members to experience thought appears to have consequences. When the boundary between inner awareness and outer world is culturally represented as porous, so that thoughts can be construed to move in and out of the mind as if they had agency and power, people are more likely to describe their experience of invisible others as if those others could be experienced with the senses. They are more likely to say that a god or spirit spoke in a way they could hear with their ears, or that they sensed a presence in the room.

The Myth of Religious Experience

Religious Studies, 2004

I argue that people do not and cannot have religious experiences that are perceptual experiences with theological content and that provide some justification for the belief in God. I discuss William Alston's resourceful defence of this idea. My strategy is to say that religious perception would either have to be by means of one of the ordinary five senses or else by means of some special sixth religious sense. In either case insoluble epistemological problems arise. The problem is with perceiving God as God, which we need to do if reasons to believe in God are to be generated. To do so, we would have to perceive the instantiation of His essential properties -being all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. But perceiving the instantiation of these properties of God, even by some special sixth religious sense, is impossible. Hence, God cannot be perceived either by the ordinary five senses or by a sixth religious sense. Religious perceptual experiences are a myth.

Ethnological and Neurophenomenological Approaches to Religious Experiences

Spiritual experiences are often individual and private affairs, perhaps even unique to the person. Such strictly personal experiences would seem to be beyond the purview of scientific inquiry. Religious experiences often reflect the expectations of their respective traditions, and as such, have been seen as requiring no explanations beyond those expectations. Yet both individual spiritual experiences and those induced in the context of established traditions reflect similarities across time and cultures that reject the notion of these being merely idiosyncrasies of personal or institutional biases.

Human Interaction with the Divine, the Sacred, and the Deceased

2021

Human Interaction with the Divine, the Sacred, and the Deceased brings together cutting-edge empirical and theoretical contributions from scholars in fields including psychology, theology, ethics, neuroscience, medicine, and philosophy, to examine how and why humans engage in, or even seek spiritual experiences and connection with the immaterial world. In this richly interdisciplinary volume, Plante and Schwartz recognize human interaction with the divine and departed as a cross-cultural and historical universal that continues to concern diverse disciplines. Accounting for variances in belief and human perception and use, the book is divided into four major sections: personal experience; theological consideration; medical, technological, and scientific considerations; and psychological considerations with chapters addressing phenomena including prayer, reincarnation, sensed presence, and divine revelations. Featuring scholars specializing in theology, psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and ethics, this book provides a thoughtful, compelling, evidence-based, and contemporary approach to gain a grounded perspective on current understandings of human interaction with the divine, the sacred, and the deceased. Of interest to believers, questioners, and unbelievers alike, this volume will be key reading for researchers, scholars, and academics engaged in the fields of religion and psychology, social psychology, behavioral neuroscience, and health psychology. Readers with a broader interest in spiritualism, religious and non-religious movements will also find the text of interest.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty\_books/1518/thumbnail.jp

Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

This special issue reports the findings of the Mind and Spirit project. We ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape the ways that people attend to and interpret thoughts and other mental events – and whether their judgements affect their experience of (what they take to be) gods and spirits. We argue in this collection that there are indeed cultural differences in local theories of minds, in the way social worlds draws the line between interior and exterior, and that these differences do affect the way people sense invisible others. This introduction lays out the ideas that inspired the project and the methods that we used. This is the first report on our work.

Can religion be explained? The Role of Absorption in Various Religious Phenomena

This article claims that the study of religion has overlooked a feature of the human mind that may yet help to explain certain aspects of religion. Awareness, it is here argued, can vary along a dimension that is characterized by the density of associations and other inputs that accompany it. The mechanism behind this is concentration, including the stronger form of concentration here called absorption. Absorption has cognitive effects, and is at least in part responsible for the human tendency to believe in a different, " higher, " reality. Various other features usually associated with religion— including ritual behavior and asceticism—also make sense in the light of this observation.

Immersion, Absorption, and Spiritual Experience: Some Preliminary Findings

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020

Many traditions have utilized silent environments to induce altered states of consciousness and spiritual experiences. Neurocognitive explorations of spiritual experience can aid in understanding the underlying mechanism, but these are surprisingly rare. We present the verbal report and the electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha profile of a female participant scoring a maximal 34 on the Absorption Scale, recorded before and while she was immersed in a whole-body perceptual deprivation (WBPD) tank. We analyze her trancelike experience in terms of the imagery reported: a spaceship, corridors, doors, a man dressed in white, speaking to God, the sun, supernova, concentric images, and an out-of-body experience. Her report is indicative of a spiritual experience, given that she felt that she was "meeting God" in the laboratory. She exhibited both frontal and parietal left > right alpha power asymmetry at baseline, whereas in the WBPD condition, there was a global increase in alpha power and especially a sharp increase in right-frontal alpha power. Her verbal report and EEG alpha profile were compared to those of another female participant, also scoring high on absorption, whose verbal report was also indicative of a trancelike experience. For further comparison, we present the data for two participants scoring low on absorption. Spiritual experience that can be verbalized might be associated with a marked increase in right-frontal alpha power, as reported here. In contrast, a mystical experience characterized by ineffability would be indicated by a marked increase in left-frontal alpha power.