Rethinking religion to transcend your stress

Religion can make people happier and less stressed. We do not have to follow any official religion to get some of the positive effects. I do not have a better word for the practice than transcendent. For more reading, I prepared articles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Religion makes people happier

There is a consistent 10% gap in happiness between religious people and everybody else. This gap stays approximately the same as we cross cultures and religions, as long as countries are democratic and religion not zealous. It is reasonable to assume that religions were invented for a good reason, as well as atheism. Can we enjoy the benefits of both without confusion and with a high degree of authenticity?

Wise man story

There is a story I love and occasionally tell. I read it in some book when I was very young. I will not quote it but use my own interpretation.

A wise man used to sit on a small bench on a mountainside every time the sun used to set and cover the sky in magnificent reds and purples. He used to smile every day exactly the same smile, in every weather. Even when the sun was not visible in the fog he used to look in the same direction, as if he could still see the sun. During the day he helped all the villagers in the village below the mountain. He delivered babies, tended to sick and buried the dead, always polite and full of compassion.

One day three villagers came to him with religious passion.

The first said: “You are happy because you believe in god!”.

“Well, no!”, the wise man applied, “Why would you say such a thing! I am perfectly happy without any god.”

The second said: “I am happy to see a fellow scholar! You can help everyone because you do not believe in this mumbo-jumbo!”. The wise man frowned, “Please go away. You show no respect for other people. Clearly you would be better off if you believed in god!”

The third said: “Not sure what I will learn, but I am eager to follow you…”. The wise men smiled and asked him to watch the sun. As they watched the sun the third man asked to explain the meaning of the event. The wise man said: “I do not know if there is a god, but each time the sun settles I am full of awe, gratefulness, and compassion. That’s more important than any religion.”

Nondual approach

I use the premise of the nondual dialect approach: we take two opposite alternatives, and then transcend them by introducing an additional dimension. While the question of religion polarizes us, we are pretty sure how a wise man should behave.

It does not matter if the wisdom comes from a religious book or a secular one. For me, religious books focus on the form of wisdom as the essence is rooted in faith. The secular books focus on the essence, as the form is free. When we take the best of both we get mindful and compassionate spirituality.

Moral intuition

From the dawn of humanity, people appealed to gods and spirits for moral support. Arguably, the most important part of the Bible is the short list of ten commandments.

Ethics used to be one of the justifications for religious beliefs until Baruch Spinosa explained how ethics can serve our well-being. I will use an alternative formulation. In the theory of games, this is shown as the prisoner’s dilemma. Ethical behavior allows for very effective win-win strategies, instead of zero-sum strategies of more conventional competition.

The game theory may explain another wonder of moral intuition. Why are men eager to sacrifice their lives in a fight for an idea? Typically explanation is brutally honest. This is a magnet for female attention, multiplying the chances of creating offsprings. In a similar way, women join forces for the protection of their offsprings and potential offsprings. We see these lines of moral in other social mammals.

This does not prove the existence or lack of existence for any god or prophet.

Occam’s razor

The same argument used to prove first the existence of god and then several centuries later the lack of god. It is sometimes paraphrased by a statement like “the simplest solution is most likely the right one“.

The mathematician Blaze Pascal was a profoundly religious man. His belief was a bet which I rephrase:  “better to live a righteous life than to risk hell”. 

The profound contribution of religious people in scientific discoveries is on-going. Georges Lemaître was a Jesuit-educated Belgian Catholic priest who proposed the Big Bang theory and developed with Hubble the laws of an expanding universe.

Atheists would like to dismiss religious people as believing in “alternative facts”. Georges Lemaître had several passionate arguments with Einstein. Einstein used to say “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious”.  So far it appears that Einstein was wrong in this discussion.

For me, this demonstrates that wisdom transcends religious beliefs…

What happens when we die?

There is a profound mystery of physics called quantum entanglement. Particles tend to modify other particles near them in a way that is preserved after the particles are no longer close. Basically this means that our effect on the universe will not die when we have to go. This is a profoundly religious position, and it clashes with atheist beliefs that we go into nothingness.

No one actually knows what happens when we die. Past lives and their experiences are practically indistinguishable from confabulation. Heaven and hell belong more to this life than the next one. People who have done bad things relive them and start to hate their own existence.

Mindful people often claim that we can create our heavens here and now. If we practice compassionate gratefulness, do not envy, focus on the path rather then the results… Heaven on earth is claimed to be possible, but no reliable person claims to achieve it. As we meditate we can change our subjective feeling of time, into something as short or as long as we fancy. Can we call it subjective immortality?

Our current existence can be as spiritual as we want it to be. What happens next is a mystery, and maybe it is best to preserve the mystery.

The leap of faith

Taking risks without knowing what happens next is the best and the worst decision one can make. Religious people call this leap of faith or destiny. How do atheists call it?

I quote a great general: “I am convinced that all that is needed in order to achieve what I want is bravery and self-confidence. I certainly have enough self-confidence… I told myself that I shall either be a general at thirty or that I shall not be alive by then.”

This bravery was pivotal for his success. At the same time, there are fewer generals than casualties. We do not hear casualties tell their stories.

Taking risks and increasing the bets is a controversial evolutionary move. Genghis Khan and Cao Cao are ancestors of millions, but very few haplotypes can be traced to generals and even fewer generals produced lots of offsprings.

People who build their own businesses also take leaps of faith. Some of them are incredibly rich, but most of them lose everything.

What determines the level of religious belief?

This is something that psychology can actually measure.

Reflective thinking on the one hand and religious belief on the other show a negative correlation. Analytic thinking tends to decrease religious belief.

However, awesome arts [picture of Rodin’s The Thinker or that of Myron’s Discobulus] and nature may increase both the analytic thinking AND religious belief.

What has an immense effect on religious belief is exposure during the first years of our lives. Very few people choose to change their religion and way of life.

The role of trans in transcendence

Somehow the religious and spiritual beliefs, even reports of new sense of purpose often originate from trans. There are many kinds of trans: meditative, narco-induced, caused by starvation or sensory deprivation, sleep-walking.

The state of trans is not a state our brain evolved to support. So, its behavior is pretty much random. There are all sorts of hallucinations that can visit us during trans, and unlike in sleep, our inhibitors are down.

If the sense of trans is induced and guided, our visions will guide us towards some purpose. When the trans is not guided, we may experience strange sensations. Tunnel vision is typically caused by the lack of oxygen to the areas processing periphery vision. We may see a very familiar face, as it has been imprinted in our visual cortex. Our sense of weight and orientation in the inner ear starts to fail and we feel either too heavy or too light. Certain stable audio associations start to play, so we hear voices and music. As the oxygen does not flow into vital organs, the immune system kicks in to fight possible infections: bleeding stops and wounds heal. We become insensitive to pain as pain signals stop being processed. And we retain some motion, most of our consciousness and some ego.

Not everybody experiences the same hallucinations, but certain hallucinations are experienced quite often. They also tend to be very pleasant, and we feel to transcend our physical limitations. [Disclaimer: yes, I experienced all of them personally, multiple times, many years ago]

The transcendence is as real as any physical experience, more real than lucid dreaming, just as real as seeing a magic trick. We see something happening, and at the same time, we understand that we misrepresent the real nature of things.

Dissociations

The easiest way to introduce trans without medication is dissonance. Like the hysterical laughter, we get after a particularly good joke. Think of zen koans. Another common trick is desensitization: we focus on some repetitive visual signals, like a bright pendulum and let go. Yet another common way: when someone moves his hands very near to our body without actually touching us. In all of these cases, our senses get confused and we “let go” of our control.

When we step out of the comfort zone and take a leap of faith, we also dissociate from familiar reality and are likely to undergo a spiritual experience.

In the dissociated state, we are likely to relapse to our basic behaviors: perceive and act like children. Whatever our beliefs were in our childhood, we might reacquire them again. Some may call this our truest authentic self. I consider this a primitive unfiltered response.

Sins

We tend to be frightened by some of our unfiltered responses. What are the most dangerous sins? I quote one of the theological researches: “Greed, lust, pride, anger, gluttony, envy, apathy, and melancholy. Of these sins, melancholy, anger, and lust were considered the worst by both men and women. Younger adults were more repelled by lust and anger; older adults were more concerned with melancholy.”

I perceive the “sins” are very universal feelings that may lead to self-destruction. The higher the chance of self-destruction the “deadlier” the sin. The “sinful” thoughts are usually controlled by acquired filters. When we get into the state of trans, the filters are gone. The “sins” may be more powerful than the transcendence effects we want to achieve and hence “deadly for the soul”. The deeper the trans, the stronger the feeling of the sins.

The meditative/hypnotic trick used to deal with “sins” effectively can be vocalized as “this too shall pass”: ignoring the visions until they exhaust themselves.  Zarotustrean and later European monks did not understand this trick and used to fight against themselves to exhaustion.

Reality of religion

It is hard not to notice how the subjective reality of a trans-state is similar to religious doctrines. Before passing to practical tips, I will mistify you with another psychological research:

“One particular configuration of brain structures relevant to religious belief is the so-called theory-of-mind network. This comprises a wide array of brain areas that become active during social interaction.

The term “theory of mind” refers to the ability to make inferences about what other people know and think. In other words, it’s the capacity to take another person’s perspective. These abilities don’t appear in humans until the preschool age, and they continue to develop through adolescence and adulthood. ”

In other words, empathy is relevant to religious beliefs. As if we did not know…

How to enjoy the benefits of religion no matter what you believe in

• • Enjoy the profound feeling of awe. Hug babies, visit museums, climb mountains… I do not know what works for you.
  • Meditate. Or medicate. Trans is a great state to visit shortly, but not so great to get stuck in.
  • Define your purpose in life and stick to it. That’s a hard one. Something that you do better than others, making the world a better place, energizing you…
  • Socialize. Be a member of a community that shares the same beliefs. Make sure the communication is positive. I work in an office mainly because I like people I work with.
  • See the world from the perspective of others. Call it empathy, compassion, “golden rule”… Does not matter.
  • Do not stop learning. Possibly this is the most positive aspect of certain religions (Judaism, Buddhism).
  • Be your better self.