Fingerprints of God
Page 11
“There are genes that help regulate the levels of dopamine in specific areas of the brain: the limbic and prefrontal lobes,” he explained. “And those areas of the brain in turn support all kinds of complex functions. And many of those complex functions in turn would support these more basic capacities related to religiosity, namely positing supernatural agents and engaging in rituals.”
The limbic system of the brain is involved in emotions, such as awe, joy, ecstasy, transcendence, deep sadness—emotions that seem to pour out of mystics. The prefrontal lobes involve more complex thought, reflection, and attention—and researchers have found that these areas play a big role in prayer and meditation.
Therefore, theoretically, a gene that codes for the activation of dopamine could affect spiritual feelings and religious behavior. The question is: Is there any evidence of a link between spirituality and dopamine?
David Comings and his team of genetics researchers at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, California, had a hunch that there might be. He speculated that a particular dopamine docking station, or receptor gene, called the DRD4, might have something to do with spirituality.10 The researchers recruited 200 men in California. Some of them were college students, while others were recovering addicts in a nearby treatment program.11 They asked the men to complete Cloninger’s self-transcendence test, and to donate a bit of their DNA. The geneticists knew that dopamine receptors varied from person to person. Comings and his colleagues hypothesized that the gene variation (or “polymorphism”) might affect whether a person believes in God.
That is precisely what they found (although, remember, this is a single study). People with a particular variation of the DRD4 gene scored higher on the self-transcendence scale. To a layperson, that particular gene might seem only modestly important: 3.9 percent of the difference in the men’s spirituality scores could be traced back to that particular receptor.12 However, Comings noted that it is rare for a single gene to account for more than 1.5 percent of variance of any behavioral trait.13 He also noted that the dopamine receptor is present in high concentrations in the frontal lobes of the brain, which is the site of many higher human brain functions.
“One could argue,” he and his colleagues wrote, “that spirituality is the quintessence of higher human brain functions.”14 While the scientists cautioned that this particular gene “is not ‘the gene for spirituality, ’ ” it does seem to contribute to a “significant portion” of the variance, or reason, some people are spiritual and others are not.
There is another frequently mentioned suspect in the God-gene lineup: the serotonin system. The serotonin system has intrigued scientists for years because it dramatically alters moods. For example, the drug Ecstasy creates a high by releasing a wave of serotonin. Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft work more slowly in the system, evening out moods by doing the same thing. And hallucinatory drugs can create a mystical experience worthy of Saint Teresa of Ávila.
In 2003, a group of Swedish scientists led by Jacqueline Borg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm tried another approach to determine what role, if any, serotonin plays in spiritual experiences. They used brain scanners. They recruited fifteen healthy Swedish men for a spirituality test. The subjects took Cloninger’s self-transcendence test and then sat for a PET (positron emission topography) scan, which took pictures of their brain activity.15 Researchers cannot measure the amount of serotonin in the brain directly, so they used an indirect method: they measured the activity of the chemical’s docking stations or receptors, and in a particular receptor gene called serotonin 5-HT1A.
To do that, the scientists injected a tracer fluid that acts very much like serotonin into each man’s bloodstream. Then they put the men separately into the brain scanner and watched what the fluid did once it arrived in the brain. They were particularly keen on seeing whether the counterfeit serotonin would bind with serotonin receptors. Their hunch was confirmed: they found a strong relationship between each subject’s serotonin levels and his spirituality score.16 Specifically, this genetic dimmer switch seemed to affect which man believed in God, a unifying force, or phenomena that can’t be explained by “objective demonstration,” and which tended to favor a “reductionist and empirical worldview.”
This suggests, the researchers wrote, that “the serotonin system may serve as a biological basis for spiritual experiences,” and that the variation in this gene “may explain why people vary greatly in spiritual zeal.”17
Researchers in this area remind me of Sherlock Holmes, piecing together scenarios with shards of often conflicting evidence. It is evident that something has happened, but exactly how it happened remains a mystery. So it is with scientists exploring spirituality: they know that millions of people genuinely experience transcendence—but what, exactly, is the mechanics of that feeling? Is it genes, or temporal lobes, or a psychological coping mechanism? Or is there a Higher Being, something that few scientists have considered yet, like the dog who didn’t bark?
Does God Play Favorites?
As for scientists like Boston University’s Pat McNamara, he’s thrilled the chase is on.
“There’s going to be a specific biology involved in religiosity,” he predicted expansively. “There’s going to be specific brain systems that are always involved in religiosity. There’s going to be specific neurochemistry. There’s going to be drugs that selectively influence religiosity. There’s going to be a specific cognitive neuroscience of religiosity. And on and on and on! But that doesn’t mean that religiousness is nothing but the biology of religious experience. It just says that religiousness is one of the innate capacities of human beings, like a host of other traits.”
“So maybe there’s a Coder, so to speak?” I asked. “I mean, if there’s a genetic code, is it possible there is a Coder, or a Higher Power, or a Creator?”
“Theoretically, if God wanted to communicate with us, then He, She, or It would create a biology that allows us to communicate,” McNamara stated. “So it makes sense that there is specific biology that allows for that sort of relationship. But the fact that there is a specific biology of religiosity does not rule in—or rule out—God.”
While the findings in this realm are preliminary, they do suggest that some people have a greater propensity to respond to God than others. But, I sputtered, feeling acutely my own spiritual mediocrity, what if there is a God who writes His language in our genes unequally—apportioning to some a bounty of spiritual gifting and to others a meager gruel? Isn’t that a bit of deistic favoritism?
“For some people that could be troubling,” observed Ron Cole-Turner, a bioethicist at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. “It’s not for me, but it could be for some. If you thought God is going to send some people to hell on the basis of a lack of response and the lack of response is hardwired in our genes—that would be troubling.
“But,” he added quickly, “don’t read ‘genetic’ as deterministic. Because genes don’t create hardwired, deterministic outcomes. They create a range of possibilities that might incline you one way or another. It’s by no means determined that if you have a certain gene sequence you are spiritual and if you don’t have a certain gene sequence you can’t be spiritual.”
In other words, nature (genes and biology) plays some role, but so does nurture (one’s environment and life events).What genes do is create a sort of tipping point for spiritual experience. If you are genetically inclined toward spirituality, a relatively small event can flip your Sunday mornings from sitting on the couch watching the Sunday talk shows to sitting in a pew watching a preacher. But if you are born with a genetic predisposition to think religion is complete bunk, then it’s going to take an enormous dose of environment to push you to religion.
It’s a little bit like automatic air-conditioning. For some people, a relatively modest rise in temperature—breaking up with a boyfriend, for example—can flip on the cooler system. Those people are genetically inclined to be spiritual. Others may sweat it out to 90, 95,
100 degrees; only then will their God-switch flip on. And some would rather die of heat than turn to “God.”
Those explanations worked well for psychiatrist Robert Cloninger for many years. Cloninger, who developed the self-transcendence scale, heartily believes that genetics is at play. He has conducted some of the studies himself. He also believes that life events push a person toward or away from spirituality. But the more people he worked with and the more studies he performed, the more he felt he was missing a piece: the soul.
“I realized there were other differences that we didn’t measure with temperament or character or genes, that were really spiritual differences,” Cloninger said. “There was a whole dimension here that was basically unexplained. Like how do you explain free will? You can’t do that from a materialistic standpoint. How do you explain intuitive creations and sudden insights?You can’t do that from algorithmic thinking. How do you explain the gifts of Mozart? I had to move to recognizing that we actually do have a psyche, a soul, and that it does have characteristics, and those characteristics differ from one to another.”
“You seem to be saying,” I said carefully,“that there’s nature, nurture, and then something ...”
“Mystical?” Cloninger laughed as he finished my sentence. “There is. And it’s real.We really do have a soul. And we really can listen to it. And it’s good and it’s intelligent and it’s what makes life worthwhile.”
To those inclined toward God, this makes perfect sense, while others may scratch their heads in puzzlement. As for me, I see this as an invitation to unravel the mystery of soul and body and their relationship to each other. It is a laughably ambitious task, and to even begin, we have to drill down further into the science.We must wade through the synapses and lobes and chemicals in the brain, the stuff of neurology that is so intricately tuned that it takes my breath away in wonder.
Let’s turn, now, to God as chemist. The brain is a cauldron of chemicals that color how we feel and think. Mania and depression, fear and love, all of our moods trace back to chemical reactions. Why not transcendence as well? And if there is a chemistry to spiritual experience, does that imply the hand of a Chemist? These puzzles led me to the ancient practices of Navajos and to the rebellious days of the 1960s. They zeroed in on a particular neurotransmitter that holds a key to spiritual experience. They took me to a type of spirituality that is both instant and measurable synthetic spirituality.
CHAPTER 6
Isn’t God a Trip?
THOSE WHO SAY LIFE IS SHORT have never attended a peyote ceremony.
This thought occurred to me just after midnight on July 23, 2006. Thirty-one of us formed a circle around a fire in an enormous tipi we had erected on top of a mountain near Lukachukai, Arizona. Thunder and lightning ripped through the sky, and heavy rain lapped under the edges of the tent, soaking our cushions and turning the dirt floor into a muddy paste. My companions sat cross-legged on the floor, motionless, gazing at the flames with sleepy eyes dilated by the mescaline from the sacred herb peyote. Three strapping young men with long black hair moved around the circle, pounding on a water drum and singing an urgent chant, which sounded to my untrained ears like, Doo doo doo doo DOO DOO doo doo doo doo DOO DOO. I understood nothing, since they sang in the Navajo language, Diné, but I felt the power of the chant like ropes wrapped tight around my body. I could not move, only breathe.
But I wanted to move. I was desperate to move. I had been sitting for three and a half hours on a thin, wet cushion. The only relief came in shifting from cross-legged to a kneeling position, and then for but a moment. Unlike my happy and stationary co-participants, I was not in fact stoned. I was an “observer”—an observer of one of the only forms of drug-induced spirituality sanctioned by U.S. law. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), and mescaline had been outlawed by the “war on drugs” in 1971, ending most of the emerging research on the states these drugs seemed to uncork. Only peyote and ayahuasca used in Native American religious ceremonies are permitted, which is how I found myself sitting in a tipi, bobbing my head to Navajo chants with a silly grin, wet and sore and as close as I could legally come to observing mystical states created by Schedule I drugs.
Well, almost as close. I could have ingested enough peyote to reach an altered state myself. But I had opted out. Okay. I took a little. The law permitted Native Americans to ingest peyote for religious purposes only, and there appeared to be no loophole for NPR. More important, I thought the peyote might actually interfere with my work, since violent vomiting is common for the uninitiated. I then reminded myself that I had a stepdaughter, and tripping on sacred mushrooms might not be the best message to send a twelve-year-old.Whole truth be told, I also worried that the peyote would deliver on its promise and thrust me into an enlightened spiritual state. I fretted that God might be reduced to a chemical, making my own daily commitment to spiritual practices look a bit archaic. All that prayer and study, when I could just swallow a bit of mescaline—a little like using the Pony Express in the age of e-mail.
Once in the tipi, I found that skipping the altered state was, from a culinary point of view, less of a sacrifice than I had imagined.When the peyote man first came around with his coffee can full of dark brown sludge and spooned the peyote paste into my mouth—using the same teaspoon for everyone, I noticed—I nearly choked on the acrid taste and lima-bean-like texture. Just as I was recovering from the paste, another man thrust a silver bowl in front of me. I reached into what felt like a mass of writhing worms and plucked out a peyote button, the cactus herb itself. I held the soggy yellow button reverently in my hand until he had moved on, and then quietly dropped it on the dirt behind me. I looked up to find a third man kneeling before me with a jug of green liquid—peyote tea—which he pressed to my lips before I could brace myself.
The trinity of peyote would return every two hours or so, but after the second circuit I politely declined, leaving myself in a wired but not altered state. At just after midnight, the drumming ceased, catapulting us into silence, save for the hiss of the fire. Eventually the Navajo woman in the place of honor cleared her throat, and we all turned to gaze at her.
“I want to thank you for praying with me,” Mary Ann began in a reedy voice. “I know that the peyote and your prayers will heal me. Now I want to tell you something I have never told anyone.” She paused, looking around the circle. “I need to confess to the fire.”
Jesus as Chemical Compound
I had met Mary Ann the morning before. She showed up just as a group of us—about a dozen Navajos, a Harvard professor, his wife, and I—were heading off to set up the tipi for Mary Ann’s healing ceremony the next night. She had come to work out the last-minute details.
My instant impression was that this was a woman in long-term pain: She was sixty-four, and her golden face bore deep lines around her nose and mouth, which was set in grim resignation. She jackknifed slightly at the waist, bent in discomfort.When I introduced myself as a journalist who would be attending her ceremony, she poured out her story of shingles and unreceptive doctors and unrelenting pain.
“I’ve been suffering, suffering for five months now,” she said, her voice wavering. “I can’t get out of bed. My husband has to do everything for me.” Her husband, frail and ancient, nodded soberly.“Tonight I’m going to ask the peyote to help me. I’m putting faith in the medicine to heal me.”
I murmured sympathetically. I thought it unlikely that mescaline would do the trick.
Her wording captured the difference between Native Americans and a white girl like me. I thought of peyote as a chemical compound that alters consciousness; they thought of it as a divine gift throbbing with supernatural power. In my conversations with Mary Ann and others, I noticed that Navajos referred to peyote as a being, a personality. One called it the flesh of God, another called it a spirit. A third said it was holy medicine intended by the Creator only for native people.
Peyote, Andy Harvey explained, is “a sacrament.”
Peyote is like the Eucharist for a Catholic, he said. It is God, and it opens the way to God.
“We take it, we pray with it, and we ask the Creator to help us in the experiences that we would have as we ingest that peyote. So in a sense we ask the peyote to help us to come to realize certain things in our lives that we want to realize. And some things we can’t understand, when we want answers to certain things. And in the case of being sick, sometimes we ask the peyote to help us cleanse the illnesses away and cleanse our mental being, our spiritual being, our psychological and emotional being. And we believe that’s what peyote does. That’s why we call it a sacrament.”
“For a Christian, it might be like addressing Jesus,” I offered, trying to translate into a metaphor I could understand.“It’s like an intermediary between you and God.”
“Right,” he agreed.“And just like Jesus Christ was sent to save mankind, to provide us a means to salvation, this sacred herb has got the same philosophy. We believe that the Creator put it on this earth for us to utilize and provide salvation, and provide us a life that we could be satisfied with. And,” he added quickly, “I’ve never taken it for the fun of it.”
“The word peyotl,” John Halpern explained to me a few minutes later, “means ‘heart of God.’ And these people believe it is a blessing of God to all native people, for their healing, for their strength.”