The God Spot in the Brain

The Biological Basis of Spirituality

In all places today we see a great religious effervescence. After being defamed, persecuted, and condemned to disappearance by modern ideologies which negate God and transcendence, from the Enlightenment and culminating in Marxism, religion has resisted it all and today it returns vigorously. Not with ambiguities, which must be criticized. But the phenomenon is indisputable. It seems that human beings are tired of material goods, exalted by propaganda, and also of the excess of rationality, which dominates all of our culture and our professions. It has been very well said that the human being is possessed of two hungers: for bread, which is satiable, and for beauty, for transcendence, and for the sacred, which is insatiable. It is in this second hunger where religion and all spiritual paths situate themselves. They have emerged in history and come time and again in order to attend to this insatiable hunger. Today, the spiritual and religious dimension has reinforced itself considerably, departing from the world of the sciences of life. Religion is not something restricted to religious institutions, nor does it result in something optional. Religions do not have a monopoly. The spiritual, including the mystical, has a biological basis. This is why they are present in all human beings. Whether negated or affirmed, they are always there, because they pertain to our constitution in what makes us human. It is this which the scientists have called the God Spot in the brain. It is something permanent, that is always active when we are looking for the meaning of life, when we have an experience of love, of solidarity, of profound peace and communion with everything. It is what makes us enter into prayerful dialogue with God. The religions of the world are forms of expressing, through rituals, behavior, and doctrines, this God Spot. All have this thing in common. But the expressions vary by culture. Taking seriously this God Spot in the brain allows us to see the unitary foundation of all religions more than their legitimate differences. This finding allows us to value all this wave of mysticism and religiosity that is permeating our culture and inundating mass media like radio and television.

Leonardo Boff
Petrpolis, RJ, Brazil

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Religion offers us instruments so that we can make our lives more spiritual, going beyond what the established religions and churches can offer us. Lets look at the principle facts of this new scientific vision. It is known that an advanced frontier of sciences today is the study of the brain and its multiple intelligences. It has arrived at relevant results to understand the phenomenon. The studies highlight three types of intelligence. The first is intellectual, the famous IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, which was given so much importance during the 20th Century. This is analytical intelligence, with which we elaborate concepts and do science. With it we organize the world, states, companies, all types of bureaucracies, and we solve objective problems. The second intelligence is emotional, popularized especially by the Harvard professor, psychologist, and neuroscientist David Goleman, with his well-known book Emotional Intelligence, (EQ=Emotional Quotient). He empirically demonstrated what was the conviction of a long line of thinkers, from Plato through Saint Augustine and Saint Bonaventure, culminating in Freud: the foundation of the human being is not reason (logos) but emotion (pathos). We are, fundamentally, beings of passion, empathy, compassion, and love. In fact, we only move ourselves when we combine IQ with EQ. The third is spiritual intelligence. Its recognition, with scientific characteristics, derives from very recent investigations, from 1990 on, conducted by neurologists, neurophysiologists, neurolinguists, and experts in magnetic imaging of the brain (who study the magnetic and electronic fields of the brain). According to them, there exists in us--in an empirically verifiable manner--another type of intelligence called spiritual (SQ=Spiritual Quotient). Through this intelligence, we capture the greater contexts of our lives, creatively break limits, perceive unities, and feel inserted in the All, becoming attuned to values, the questions of the meaning of life, and the topics related to God and transcendence. This conscience has its biological base in neurons. It has been proven that all neurons implicated in a

conscious experience oscillate at 40-Hz. When the temporal lobes of the brain are exposed to a stimulus that increases this frequency, this unleashes a spiritual experience of exaltation, of immense joy and happiness, like someone who is in front of a Presence... Scientists have observed that when religious themes, God, or the values that deal with the greater meaning of things, not superficially but with a sincere and profound commitment, are broached, a stimulation is produced that goes beyond the normal 40-Hz. Because of this, neurobiologists like Persinger and Ramachandran and quantum physicists like Danah Zohar have baptized this region of the temporal lobes the God Spot (see the book by Zohar, SQ: Connecting with Our Spiritual Intelligence, Bloomsbury USA 2000). Others prefer to speak of the mystical mind. The existence of this God Spot represents an evolutionary advantage of our homo sapiens species. It is the unique depository of this neurological quality through which we capture the presence of God in the Universe. It does not signify that God is only in this spot in the brain...God encompasses all of reality. But the God Spot is an internal organ through which we recognize Gods presence in everything and in us. Thus evolution took place in such a way that it produced in us many organs--eyes to see, the nose to smell, ears to hear, the sense of touch to feel, the mouth to eat and speak--and with all these organs we internalize the universe within ourselves. It equally created this internal capacity which gives us access to God. If it is like this, in terms of an evaluative process we could say: the universe has evolved, in thousands of millions of years, in order to produce in the human mind the instrument through which it is possible to capture the Presence of God who has always been in the Universe, although not perceptible because it lacked an adequate conscience. Spirituality pertains to being a human being, and the religions do not have a monopoly on it. Rather, religions are like historical translations of the God Spot. But it is not enough to say that the God Spot is in the brain. Like everything that is alive, it has to be fed and activated continually. We do this, above all, by returning towards ourselves and dialoguing with our Center and the Profound that is within us. This dialogue brings us to listen to messages that conscience sends us, messages of solidarity, love, comprehension, pardon, and care for everything. This attitude generates serenity

and peace and confers a sense of purpose for existence. This is an irradiation of the activated God Spot. Our culture does not facilitate this deepening towards the interior. All is directed outward, occupying our minds and distracting us so we dont even encounter ourselves. The nature of the God Spot is to open up dimensions so they are constantly wider, make us see the greater contexts of our life, and permit us to discover the conductive thread that unites and binds everything together. Only in this way do they have meaning and cease to be a random sequence of superficial feelings and sensations. The God Spot nourishes our resistance to doing evil and strengthens us in being able to accomplish the good and implement values, especially those that that imply openness to the other, protection of life, above all to the most vulnerable, compassion, pardon, and unconditional love. Finally, we should incorporate a prayerful meditative attitude: Or rather, we should place ourselves before God not as someone who is on the border of a terrifying abyss, but as if we are in the company of a kind father or mother, feeling ourselves embraced like children who know they are in the palm of the hand of God. Then we can speak with confidence, give thanks for so many graces, beg for light for our searches, or simply turn ourselves over to Him/Her without words, in a silence filled with Gods presence. I would like to say that I myself have developed a way, based on the tradition of the Christians of the 2nd Century of the North of Egypt, combined with methods of Zen Buddhism. I have called this the way of simplicity. It tries to open ourselves up the Light of the Most High, that comes upon our heads, penetrates all of our body, activating all of the points of concentrated energy that Easterners call chakras, penetrating each pore of our being, transfiguring, alleviating, healing, and opening us up to the Beatific Light that is the Holy Spirit, like it is called in the liturgical hymn of Pentecost (Meditacin de la Luz: el camino de la simplicidad, Dabar 2010). The effect of this activation of the God Spot is a profound peace that can only come from God, who integrates Godself with us, who synthesizes with our heart, who opens us to others and to God Godself. Today more than ever we need this spirituality in order to find a real happiness in a time full of contradictions, conflicts, and threats to human life and the q life of the Earth, our Common Home.

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Translated by Rebecca Chabot