9/29/16 Together in Prayer group meditation

September 30, 2016 · by Church of the Village · in Uncategorized

Celebrate

Not a world that has in it nothing but good,

But a world that is good,

While having in it so much that is bad.

Not a life that knows no darkness,

But a life in which even those who walk in darkness

Have seen a great light;

Not a God who gives us everything we want,

But a God who gives us everything we have

And offers us all we need,

Now and forever.

To grow up full-size to the dimensions of significance

And satisfaction that belong to creatures

Who are also co-creators.

Bishop Melvin E. Wheatley, Jr.

EXCERPTS FROM an NPR Broadcast – full program available HERE:

Scientists are making the first attempts to understand spiritual experience — and what happens in the brains and bodies of people who believe they connect with the divine. …although it is new, it’s drawing prominent researchers who have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.

‘You Can Sculpt Your Brain’

You can sculpt your brain just as you’d sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym. Our brains are continuously being sculpted, whether you like it or not, wittingly or unwittingly. It’s called neuroplasticity. Just two months’ practice among rank amateurs led to a systematic change in both the brain as well as the immune system in more positive directions. For example, they developed more antibodies to a flu virus than did their colleagues who did not meditate.

I met Scott McDermott five years ago, while covering a Pentecostal revival meeting in Toronto. It was pandemonium. People were speaking in tongues and barking like dogs. I thought, “What is a United Methodist minister, with a Ph.D. in New Testament theology, doing here?” Then McDermott told me about a vision he had had years earlier.

“I saw fire dancing on my eyelids,” he recalled, staring into the middle distance. “I felt God say to me, ‘You be the oil, and I’ll be the flame.’ Then [I] began to feel waves of the Spirit flow through my body.”

I never forgot McDermott. When I heard that scientists were studying the brains of people who spent countless hours in prayer and meditation, I thought, “I’ve got to see what’s going on in Scott McDermott’s head.”

Focusing Affects Reality

A few years later, Andrew Newberg made that possible. Newberg is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, including How God Changes Your Brain. He has been scanning the brains of religious people like McDermott for more than a decade.

On a spring day in Newberg’s laboratory, the neuroscientist settles McDermott in a darkened examination room and asks the pastor to pray for someone else — that is, intercessory prayer. A few minutes later, at the moment Newberg believes McDermott has reached the peak of his prayer, the researcher injects the minister with a dye that shows the blood flow in his brain.

Twenty minutes later, McDermott emerges beaming. He has enjoyed intense spiritual moments like this ever since he was in his 20s.”The first thing that got me was I could hear God’s voice,” the pastor said. “And it so enamored me — I mean, it changed me dramatically. I couldn’t wait to pray!” McDermott has prayed at least two hours a day for the past 25 years.

I ask Newberg what kind of impact that would that have on the pastor’s brain. “The more you focus on something — whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God — the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain,” Newberg says.

‘I Think We’re Wired For The Supernatural’

Now it’s time for Newberg to take a peek at McDermott’s neural connections, sliding him into a SPECT scanner, which will create an image of which parts of McDermott’s brain lit up and which went dark while he prayed.

A few minutes later, Newberg has preliminary results on his computer screen. He notes some areas of increased activity in the frontal lobes, which handle focused attention — precisely what Newberg would expect from a person praying intently. But he adds that this needs further analysis — and he’ll need to find more volunteers to do this kind of interpersonal prayer before he can come to any conclusions.

Afterward, I ask McDermott if any of this challenges his beliefs. Not at all, he says. “I think we’re wired for the supernatural,” he says. “I think we’re meant to sense a world beyond our five senses. Come on! Taste and see that God really is good.” Newberg says he can’t prove that McDermott or anyone else is communing with God, but he can look for circumstantial evidence.

“What we need to do is study those moments where people feel that they’re getting beyond their brain, and understanding what’s happening in the brain from a scientific perspective, what’s happening in the brain from their spiritual perspective,” he says. Then he’ll compare the mystical feelings with the brain physiology.

A Sense Of Oneness With The Universe

Newberg did that with Michael Baime. Baime is a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Tibetan Buddhist who has meditated at least an hour a day for the past 40 years. During a peak meditative experience, Baime says, he feels oneness with the universe, and time slips away.

“It’s as if the present moment expands to fill all of eternity,” he explains, “that there has never been anything but this eternal now.”

When Baime meditated in Newberg’s brain scanner, his brain mirrored those feelings. As expected, his frontal lobes lit up on the screen: Meditation is sheer concentration, after all. But what fascinated Newberg was that Baime’s parietal lobes went dark.

“This is an area that normally takes our sensory information, tries to create for us a sense of ourselves and orient that self in the world,” he explains. “When people lose their sense of self, feel a sense of oneness, a blurring of the boundary between self and other, we have found decreases in activity in that area.”

Newberg found that result not only with Baime, but also with other monks he scanned. It was the same when he imaged the brains of Franciscan nuns praying and Sikhs chanting. They all felt the same oneness with the universe. When it comes to the brain, Newberg says, spiritual experience is spiritual experience. “There is no Christian, there is no Jewish, there is no Muslim, it’s just all one,” Newberg says.

A little theological dynamite there — but, remember, the research is just beginning.

EXCERPTS from “The Thousand Petaled Lotus, Growing Up Gay in the Southern Baptist Church
By Michael Fields, friend to Pastor Jeff & Diane who read selections at COTV Summer 2016

…it happened at the gym. I was sitting at the shoulder-press machine, resting between sets… a bubble of energy (was) welling up inside me, rising up through my torso like the bubbles in a flute of champagne. …Perceptually, everything was as before…something was subtly but profoundly altered in the way the world appeared to me.

There was only one thing.

There was only one thing. I do not mean that there was only one thing and that I was sitting there looking at it. I mean that the people in the gym, the music, the weight machines, the air in the room, my breathing of the air, my body and my awareness were all one thing. I know that if I were to have any thoughts, they would be that one thing as well…

…Then the first thought arose. The first thought was this: “All of this is my mind.” Those were the exact works that arose. Not “All of this is in my mind” or “All of this is happening in my mind,” though I understood without thinking the thought that those things were true as well. But the startling truth of that moment was the realization that this one thing I had discovered was both the content and the structure of my mind, and that this mind was something much larger than I had ever previously suspected it might be.

…Awareness was aware only of itself and only of that moment. I created the moment. Out of nothing. At the center of creation, at the center of awareness, what I found was nothing. At the center of creation, I found a void… I was not aware of any feeling, but when looking for one just the same… the work for the feeling arose: safe. I felt safe. Safe in a way I had never felt before. Safe because there was no me to be threatened. Safe because there was nothing out there that could threaten me because there was nothing else out there at all. Safe because there was no future to fear, no past to regret, safe because there was only one moment, only one place, only one thing, and I myself was that moment, that place and that thing.

…The kingdom of heaven is spread out on the earth.

The kingdom of heaven is here, the only place there is.

The kingdom of heaven is now, the only time there is.

The kingdom of heaven is this world.

It is this morning.

It is this thought.

It is this body…

This sunlight dancing on the water.

This music from the radio.

This dust mote in the air.

This air I breathe.

This, all of it, this.

This thought.

This air.

This sunlight.

This.