The Transcendent Brain (Alan Lightman)

OVERVIEW

“I’m a scientist and have always had a scientific view of the world – by which I mean that the universe is made of material stuff, and only material stuff, and that stuff is governed by a small number of fundamental laws. . . . Yet, I have transcendent experiences. . . . I have a sense of connection to other people and to the world of living things, even to the stars. I have a sense of beauty. I have experiences of awe. And I’ve had transporting creative moments. Of course, all of us have had similar feelings and moments. While these experiences are not exactly the same, they have sufficient similarity that I’ll gather them together under the heading of “spirituality.” I will call myself a spiritual materialist.”

Alan Lightman is an astrophysicist interested in spirituality. In The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, Lightman asserts that all experiences come from the brain, including transcendent ones, and that it’s these transcendent experiences which comprise spirituality. Spirituality, then, can be secular.  

The appeal of the immaterial

According to Lightman, we came to our belief in the immaterial world and immaterial soul rationally. To our ancestors, it was clearly observable in the natural world that living things were different from non-living things. They moved (not like rocks, for example) – they seemed to be animated by some invisible force. It was probably perfectly logical to conclude that this invisible, animating force was immaterial, for it couldn’t be touched or seen or extracted. And if all living things possessed this immaterial force, then the cosmos must be divided into what is material and what is immaterial. This is where the concept of souls and afterlives came from. But gaining an afterlife meant gaining the worry that it would be horrible, boring or painful. The ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius, saw the suffering this created in people and offered them a more rational perspective: that only the material world existed, and all the rest was superstitious nonsense (he was, arguably, the “most influential materialist of the ancient world.”). Today, Lucretius’s perspective is the most scientifically accepted one – that the universe is made up of material stuff. No souls, no shadowy other-worlds. Just us. Just this.

But most people still believe in souls and afterlives. Even 58% of physicians in the US do. It can’t just be the absence of scientific thinking that pushes us to non-materialist beliefs (because physicians are, undoubtably, rational men and women of science). What’s going on here? There is that ancient intuition that life must contain some special, immaterial property, but the second most obvious driver is our wanting there to be souls and afterlives, wanting there to be immortality and something “more.” This is surely motivated by our fear of death and our fear of meaninglessness (which Ernest Becker thought were one and the same). We yearn for something that lasts, which we associate with meaning, with being of greater significance. We probably also want miracles and mystery! We want the cosmos to be interesting. And, finally, like Freud thought, our inability to imagine death, to imagine our own nothingness, probably contributes to our deep gut feeling that death can’t be the end.

“For all of these reasons, belief in a nonmaterial, ethereal world is deeply appealing and resonates with many of our psychological needs and desires.”

We are living in a material world

Regardless of those desires, the scientifically accepted view of the world is a material one. But does a materialist stance preclude spirituality and spiritual experience? Lightman argues no. For him, “spiritual experiences” are experiences of transcendent quality – “feelings of connection to nature, the cosmos, and other people; the feeling of being part of something larger than one’s self, the appreciation of beauty; the experience of awe; and the creative transcendent experience.” These five experiences are produced by the natural brain – no supernaturality is required. Transcendent experiences are just another type of experience your brain can give you.

In addition to the spiritual experiences themselves, Lightman believes our impulse to spirituality is natural. Affinity for nature, our senses and sensitivity to the environment, is baked into our DNA; as such, the transcendent experience of deep connection to the natural world is likely instinctual. Similarly, our pro-socialness drives us to connect and cooperate with others, and this requires merging into something larger than ourselves (belonging requires that we fit in, which means we can’t stand out; embeddedness requires some degree of self-less-ness). Our love of beauty is natural too – the delight of curves and colours, which indicated ripe fruit, was carved into us by natural selection. Consider too that our most beloved paintings and architecture depict the “golden ratio,” which is found everywhere in nature. “Our aesthetic of beauty is literally an expression of our oneness with nature.” The creative transcendent experience is the name Lightman gives to “that exhilarating, soaring sensation when we produce something new in the world.” This is likely an expansion of our evolved disposition toward exploration and discovery (big brains only get big when you’re pushing intellectual boundaries!). Finally, there’s awe, that feeling of something so vast that we can’t accommodate it with our senses. Awe connects all four – we feel it staring out at a sweeping vista or up at a starry sky; we feel it holding our newborn babies, overwhelmed by the immensity of love that exists in the world; we feel it when we discover some new truth about the cosmos, or marvel at our own creative endeavours; and we feel it when we are overcome by art, something so beautiful it takes our breath away.

Now we have not just a natural account for spiritual experience (the transcendent experiences of connection, unity, beauty, creativity, and awe), but a natural account for the impulse toward these experiences as well. Connection is natural. Unity is natural. Beauty is natural. Creativity is natural. And awe is natural. Therefore, spirituality, as the collection of these transcendent experiences, is natural too. Spirituality is not just for the religious, for the believers in souls and afterlives and destiny and cosmic consciousness… it’s for the skeptics too, for anyone with a physical body and brain. Spirituality was sculpted into you by nature, and it’s yours to have without appealing to anything beyond the natural world, without appealing to anything beyond this reality.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Spirituality for skeptics and scientists.

Who should read this book? Any atheist who wants a natural account for spiritual and transcendent experiences.