Neuroscience and Faith
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, February 21, 2010

Reading: From Thich Nhat Hahn

Sometimes people ask you: “When is your birthday?” But you might ask yourself a more interesting question: “Before that day which is called my birthday, where was I?” Ask a cloud: “What is your date of birth?” Before you were born, where were you?”

If you ask the cloud, “How old are you? Can you give me your date of birth?” you can listen deeply and you may hear a reply. You can imagine the cloud being born. Before being born it was the water on the ocean’s surface. Or it was in the river and then it became vapor. It was also the sun because the sun makes the vapor. The wind is there too, helping the water to become a cloud. The cloud does not come from nothing; there has been only a change in form. It is not a birth of something out of nothing.

Sooner or later the cloud will change into rain or snow or ice. If you look deeply into the rain, you can see the cloud. The cloud is not lost; it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into healthy soil and the soil into cherry trees and the cherry trees into blossoms, the blossoms into cherries and then into the cherry pie you eat. Today if you eat a piece of cherry pie, give yourself time to look at the pie and say:

“Hello, cloud! I recognize you.”

By doing that, you have insight and understanding into the real nature of the pie and the cloud. You can also see the ocean, the river, the heat, the sun, the soil and the trees in the pie. Looking deeply, you do not see a real date of death for the cloud. All that happens is that the cloud transforms into rain or snow. There is no real death because there is always a continuation. A cloud continues the ocean, the river and the heat of the sun, and the rain continues the cloud.

Before it was born, the cloud was already there, so today, when you eat a piece of cherry pie, please follow your breathing. Look into the cherry pie and say hello to the cloud.

Reading: Being and Not by Clint McCowen

Message: Neuroscience and Faith

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Malvina Reynolds wrote that song:
O What a Piece of Work We Are
Isn’t that a great title?
Sure the lyrics praise human thought,
praise our ability to make a world of light out of the common clay,
but that first line,
o what a piece of work,
it implies, doesn’t it, that other meaning:
o what a piece of work,
and not in a good way.

Malvina Reynolds, a Unitarian Universalist,
was also the author of Little Boxes:
Little boxes made of ticky tacky –
she had a sense of humor,
so I have to imagine that she knew,
she knew the double meaning:
the praise and the disapproval,
o what a piece of work.

And this is how it is, isn’t it:
we are capable of wonder and imagination,
thoughts sublime and art beautiful.
And we are also capable of great cruelty,
or, more often, simple obtuseness.

Religion is about trying to answer these questions:
why is it that we can be both great and terrible?
How do we be good more often and evil less often?

But religion isn’t the only place where these questions are asked and answered.

Here’s an answer to the question of good and evil:
We are capable of great beauty and thought
when we engage the cortex of our brain –
the part up here in the front,
where we make connections and are creative and plan and understand.
We are capable of great obtuseness and violence
when our older brain, back here
the limbic system, the brain stem, the reptilian brain
takes over, as it sometimes does when we are fearful or confused.

And how do we do more good and less evil?
Why, through neuroplasticsity, of course.

What is neuroplasticity, you ask?
Well, it used to be the common idea
that the brain was like a card catalog
or a storage shed.
You could put more stuff in:
more words, more knowledge, more experience.
And you could, in some sense,
have a brain be better organized –
you could learn where things were,
and put things in the right place,
so that you could find it when you needed it.

This was the theory under which many of us learned.
I remember getting lists of words –
10 each week –
and you were to learn those words;
what they meant (that part was easy for me)
and how to spell them (that part was really hard,
and still is),
how to use them in a sentence, and so on.

Under this theory, the size of your card catalog or storage shed,
and its configuration –
that was decided by genetics.
But how much got into it,
that was decided by education.

But that theory isn’t exactly accurate –
yes, some of your brain’s capacity is about genetics,
and you can fill your brain with information,
and learn how to retrieve it efficiently.

But there is much more going on than putting items on a shelf.
Your brain is made up of electrical impulses and nerve cells
and membranes that connect things,
and you can actually change how your brain works,
how well parts of the brain are connected to each other,
how the currents flow,
how the cells grow,
you can change these things.
Your brain is changeable,
it has what scientists call plasticsity:
thus, neuroplasticity.
You can grow your brain.

Instead of card catalog or a storage shed,
think of a campfire.
You can add some wood,
and where you add it,
and what kind of wood it is,
will change the fire.
You can throw on some lighter fluid.
Although I don’t recommend that.

You can stoke the fire a little,
make some space so oxygen can get in,
and then this part that wasn’t burning
suddenly is.

This is how our brain works.
It is organic and living,
and it can change.

These insights into brain development are having profound implications:
especially when it comes to parenting and early childhood,
on one hand,
and aging, on the other.
Parents and teachers can help children grow their brains.
By using more language, encouraging questions,
talking to young children about their experiences and feelings,
parents can help grow the cortex,
the language and reasoning parts of the brain.

And neuroplasticity doesn’t go away –
it continues all through our life,
and we can continue to form and mold our brains
as we age.

So, yes, playing bridge, doing crossword puzzles –
but even better, learning new things.
Take up something you’ve never tried.
I don’t care if you are 50, 80, or 102 –
try to learn something new, some new skill,
read about a subject area you’ve never explored before.
It will keep your brain growing
and it will, often, keep you alive.

It is because of neuroplasticity
that mindfulness practice is so valuable.
One of the leading researchers in this field is
Richard Davidson at UW-Madison.
Davidson is one of the folks who have looked at brain scans
of Buddhist monks,
compared it to the brain scans of novice monks.
What he, and others, have discovered,
is that when you meditate,
as we did this morning,
even a little bit,
it activates the left prefrontal cortex –
which is the site of compassion, empathy, and happiness.

you also produce what are called gamma waves in the brain.
Gamma waves are about connecting the parts of the brain,
the parts of ourselves,
integration.
And when you meditate, this starts to happen.
Well, the real experienced Buddhist monks,
their gamma waves were off the charts,
more than Dr. Davidson had ever seen.
They had changed their brain,
changed the ability to be connected,
to feel compassion.

Practice matters.
Our brains are malleable, flexible.
We are a piece of work,
and we can, through activity,
make that a good thing.

Another word about that prefrontal cortex.

Dr. Dan Siegel, a professor at UCLA,
says that through mindfulness –
not just Buddhist meditation,
but any practice of paying sustained attention
to what you are doing right now,
through mindfulness we can train the prefrontal cortex
to be stronger,
we can train our brain to turn to the cortex first,
even when we are fearful or confused,
instead of turning to our reptilian brain.

In fact, Dr. Siegel has a beautiful definition of mindfulness:
he says it is “a way of calming the past’s intrusion on our experience of the present.”

Isn’t that great?
Calming the past’s intrusion on our experience of the present.

It is hard to be present to the present,
to be mindful.
To pay attention to what we are doing right now
in this moment.
To know that every moment is brand new,
with new possibilities.

Dr. Siegel says that mindfulness has nine benefits –
and, in fact, these nine things are what constitutes mental health.
We’re quite good at diagnosing mental illness,
but we don’t have a good sense of what mental health looks like,
let alone how to cultivate it:
but Dr. Siegel says that mindfulness, attention,
is the way to engage our neuroplastic brains and move towards more health.
Here are the nine benefits –
you don’t have to take notes, because I’ve put this list in the order of service,
so you can follow along.

First, regulating the body.
Mindfulness can lower blood pressure, increase immune response,
reduce pain

Second, Compassion.
We are attuned to others – we feel with them more deeply,
are more connected to what others are feeling.

Third, we move from the right prefrontal cortex –
the place of judgment and negativity
to the left cortex,
a place of engagement and, as the choir put it, the spirit of understanding.
That’s called the left shift.
As a religious liberal, I’m all in favor of shifting things to the left.

Fourth, we extinguish fear.
That sounds good to me.
This is about moving away from that reptilian response,
pausing before we move to fight or flight,
pausing long enough that we don’t have to cower before life.

Fifth, we have more responsive flexibility.
Not only can we turn away from flight or flight,
when we are more present to the present,
we see before us many more options for how we might respond.
By being less reflexive and more considered,
we expand our possibilities.

Sixth, we have more self-insight.
We understand ourselves better.
This is partly about those Gamma waves,
about how mindfulness makes more electrical connections,
more pathways,
and we become more integrated in ourselves.

Seventh, empathy.
Imagining the lives of others,
taking those lives seriously.

Eighth, morality.
When we are mindful, we can consider whether our acts
do good or evil in the world.

And ninth, intuition.
Which is, and I’m quoting Dr. Siegel here,
which is really gaining access to your body's wisdom.
There's a lot of neural net processes …around the heart and around the intestines that have lots of deep wisdom they give us. Usually we ignore it, because it's coming into a part of the brain we haven't learned to really honor. But with mindfulness, people learn to access this more right hemisphere aspect of their awareness.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
To live with more intuition, more self-insight, more compassion,
more health and understanding.

I can testify to this,
as I bet can most of you.
When I engage in spiritual practice:
prayer, walking meditations, worship,
all these things happen.
I feel more connected:
to myself, to others, to truth.
I get this moments of clarity.
Tricky problems resolve themselves.

Anyone can do this:
you don’t have to do Buddhist meditation,
or prayer,
you can do something else.
But you do have to do something,
some practice, time and time again,
where you focus your mind on what you are doing in that moment.

Where you focus your mind.

Notice I’ve said mind,
not brain. The Mind and the Brian are not the same.

When we are talking about cortexes and limbic systems,
we are talking about brains.
We are talking about the thing that’s in your head,
inside your skull.

But the brain is part of a larger system:
the nervous system.
That goes throughout your whole body –
your spine, and down all your limbs,
and into all your organs,
indeed, into every cell in your body.

And this nervous system does more than send instructions down
and give information back.
That’s the old way of looking at:
that our nervous system is just a telegraph machine,
back and forth,
and the brain does all the work.

But now we know better:
that the nervous system has ways of knowing, too,
ways of processing information,
ways of making connections.
Intuition, Dr. Siegel calls it.
We are thinking bodies,
not just brains in a shell.
Our whole bodies are involved in our search for understanding.

So, is the mind the nervous system?
Nope – it is even more than that.
Much more.

We have to back up for this part:
back up to 1640, in Amsterdam.
Rene Descartes publishes that famous phrase:
cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes’ argument is a revolution in philosophy:
it locates the mind, the individual thinking mind,
as the most sure thing –
you can’t be sure, he said,
of what you see or feel –
after all, isn’t a vivid dream just as real as life?
But you can be sure of a thought.
Descartes believed in what we now call dualism:
that there were two types of things:
body and mind.
And body was just stuff.
Descartes was known for occasional cruelty to animals:
after all, he said, they have no mind
so therefore feel no pain.

But mind, mind was sublime.
Mind was precious.
Mind was how we encountered God.
The mind controlled the body,
but existed on a separate plane of existence –
I’m simplifying, but that’s the gist of it anyway.

And dualism is with us to this day.
We continue to think of our bodies as one thing
and our minds as something else.
Or, perhaps, we think of our minds as part of our bodies,
but then we place something else
on the higher plane:
our soul, our spirit.
We remain in this dualistic world-view.

Stay with me here,
because this next part is a little complicated,
but it is really really important:
even when we deny the existence of the higher plane,
we are still participating in the dualistic view of the world.

Materialism, the idea that all there is is what we can see and touch and feel,
materialism is dualistic –
it denies the existence of a higher plane,
but the very act of denial
means we set things up as opposition.
We are still living in a Cartesian world.

In neuroscience this is called physicalism.
that everything we feel and think
can be explained by the study of our nervous system.
I learned about this from a review of the book
“Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?” –
and you understand the immediate implications, right:
if everything is brain chemistry,
then how can their be such a thing as free will?
The authors of this book define physicalism
as the denial that anything needs to be added to a living human body
to constitute a human being.
That a human being is a human body, nothing more.

I was trying to figure out how to make this point
when Jon brought in this great poem
about Being and Not.

Being got the trees and the clouds;
Not got unicorns and pixies.
And they decided to flip a coin,
and it came up heads:
and here we are.

Physicalism puts it this way:
Being got brains and bodies,
and Not got souls.

After all, if you can’t touch it and measure it,
then how can you believe in it?
I know a lot of folks in this room believe that,
and I often agree with you.

If souls, or minds, are supposed to be magic things
which animate an otherwise inert body,
and which live on after our death in individuated existence,
well then,
like unicorns and pixes, I guess I think Not.

But neuroscience is telling us that mind is real,
even though it isn’t a thing.

Dr. Siegel puts it this way:
that mind is a process, a verb,
mind is a process that regulates the flow of energy
and information.
Mind is a process, and it is about relationships –
the relationships between your brain,
your nervous system,
and – importantly – the social world we live in.

Mind – the activity of thinking, observing, understanding –
depends on neurons and chemistry and memory
and language and emotion and the affect of others.

I love this definition of mind as a verb
because I also love the definition of God as a verb.
There is a whole school of theology
called process theology –
we talked about this when we talked about cosmology,
and when we talked about evolution,
and here it is again.
Funny, how it all works together, isn’t it?

Atoms and molecules aren’t static,
they are made of every-vibrating strings.
Life forms aren’t static,
they are always evolving.
And our mind isn’t a thing in our skull,
it’s a process of relating,
of connecting our bodies with the world around us.

There is nothing supernatural here,
the brain, the body, the world,
these are real things.
The mind is the activity of connection.

When the activity of connection
includes a sense of wonder, awe, and beauty,
a sense of compassion and justice,
then I think we can call mind by another word:
spirit.
Which, after all, is a word which means breath,
also a process – not a noun, a verb.

Of course, this raises a question:
if the mind is the activity of relating the brain, body, and world,
then does the part of the mind,
or the spirit,
which is connected to the world
live on after our brain and body cease firing electrical impulses?

In one sense, of course not.
In a much stronger sense,
if you see a pie and say, “hello cloud”,
then of course it does.

Hello cloud!

The patron saint of transcendentalism,
the Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson,
borrowing from Hinduism,
argued that our own spirit
was the manifestation of the great spirit,
that our soul was part of the Oversoul, as he called it.
And neuroscience tells us that, well, maybe kinda sorta
that’s true.

True in the sense that our mind,
the activity of connecting,
is like the cloud,
which comes into a form and departs from that form,
but which is connected to all that is.

We are here, not to burden memory but to quicken thought,
and I don’t want to press too hard here,
I don’t want to get to far ahead of the science.

If you want to restrict yourself to physicalism,
that’s fine.
If you want to fervently believe in the soul,
that’s cool.
I guess I want to leave it here:
the coin up in the air,
turning end over end,
as Being and Not watch and wait,
wondering how it will all come down.
Suspended in mid-flight,
waiting to be understood.