Posted by Judith A. Neal, Ph.D. on May 06, 2001 at 12:34:18:
In the new field of “neurotheology,” scientists seek the biological basis of spirituality. Is God all in our heads? By Sharon Begley, NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
May 7 issue — One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist—who was spending a sabbatical year in England—saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things “as they really are,” he recalls. The sense of “I, me, mine” disappeared. “Time was not present,” he says. “I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things.”
The entire piece is available in the May 7 issue of Newsweek or online: