National Psychedelic Radio
In a recent segment that aired on "All Things Considered," NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty investigated the science of spirituality, or more accurately, the science of cognitive brain function in people who have had spiritual experiences.
Hagerty spent a year conducting research for her book, Fingerprints of God, in which she attempts to answer whether spiritual experiences are real or mere delusions of the mind. Excerpts of the book have been organized into a dense interactive website that is easily navigatable. What is notable is the fact the NPR, in airing this story, has brought attention to of a wide variety of spiritual experience, including those assisted by the ingestion of entheogens.
Hagerty’s journey takes her in and out of laboratories, examining the brain scans of monks and nuns, and into a Navajo teepee for a peyote ceremony, and back to the lab to uncover research about the life affirming benefits of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. This is undeniably a positive step in the right direction, and in this writer’s opinion, visible evidence of a shift in popular consciousness.
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Disappointed in this book
Perhaps this is a positive step but I must admit I was somewhat disappointed in this book.
I saw the book on the NPR web site and had high expectations. I bought and read it.
Unfortunately the book seems to take a survey approach of covering the gamut of phenomena that are outside normal consciousness, but loosely tied to religion,then coming to the forgone conclusion that there is no reason not to believe in God. I say "forgone" because the author's admits she was a formerly devout Christian Science believer who strayed and never seemed to be quite comfortable with it.
During her peyote experience, she "opted out" of taking enough of it to produce an altered state. There are some obligatory references to Aldous Huxley then a confession that it "peeves" her that some one can get religion from a pill as opposed to the way of "hours of study and prayer".
After talking to numerous scientists and accumulating ample evidence of the biochemical/electrical nature of religious experience, she falls back to a mostly conventional view of God, whose fingerprints she sees in the assortment of experiences chronicled in her book.
That's pretty much what I
That's pretty much what I got out of it too.
sing songs you are taught in dreams
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