Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Exploring a strange yet familiar landscape: a strategy for interpreting religious and spiritual experiences
- 2 Spirituality and the brain: a revolutionary scientific approach to religious and spiritual experiences
- 3 A smorgasbord of dangers and delights: the phenomenology of religious and spiritual experiences
- 4 Gateway to ultimacy: the importance of intense experiences
- 5 Can you trust your instincts? The cognitive reliability of religious and spiritual experiences
- 6 The brain-group nexus: the social power of religious and spiritual experiences
- 7 Make it start, make it stop! Religious and spiritual experiences in the future
- 8 Brains in bodies, persons in groups, and religion in nature: an integrative interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
7 - Make it start, make it stop! Religious and spiritual experiences in the future
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Exploring a strange yet familiar landscape: a strategy for interpreting religious and spiritual experiences
- 2 Spirituality and the brain: a revolutionary scientific approach to religious and spiritual experiences
- 3 A smorgasbord of dangers and delights: the phenomenology of religious and spiritual experiences
- 4 Gateway to ultimacy: the importance of intense experiences
- 5 Can you trust your instincts? The cognitive reliability of religious and spiritual experiences
- 6 The brain-group nexus: the social power of religious and spiritual experiences
- 7 Make it start, make it stop! Religious and spiritual experiences in the future
- 8 Brains in bodies, persons in groups, and religion in nature: an integrative interpretation of religious and spiritual experiences
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
From the earliest traces of human history to the present there have been technologies of religious and spiritual experience. This chapter is about the form these technologies are likely to take in the near and longer-range future, assuming continuous growth in scientific and cultural understanding rather than civilizational collapse and reversion to less technologized forms of life. Whether we welcome it or fear it, the era in which we can induce, prevent, and effectively control many kinds of religious behaviors, beliefs, and experiences is fast approaching. This presents us with an ethical quandary of enormous proportions. What does this level of control say about the authenticity of religious behaviors, beliefs, and experiences?
In relation to some forms of religiously relevant experience, this era is already upon us. We are able to measure such experiences, describe them, distinguish them, and evaluate their social functions, behavioral consequences, and health effects. We are also more and more able to start them, stop them, alter them, and even exert control over the way people interpret them. For example, religious experts have long known that bright lights, emotional passion, and repetitive motions make people vulnerable to suggestion, which is often a key component of religious conversion (as well as health changes; see McClenon 2001, 2006). In addition, certain entheogens reliably produce experiences that seem suffused with profound existential significance for those who ingest them.
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- Information
- Religious and Spiritual Experiences , pp. 227 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011