“Let us pray,” the pastor exhorts the congregation attending the Sunday service in his suburban church. A suburban housewife lowers her head and ponders her blessings. She intones her silent prayer: “Thank you, God, for helping me find Zoloft.”

Although people do not think of taking their Prozac as a religious act, in a way it is; and as such, their freedom to take such drugs could easily be viewed in the context of the freedom of religion enshrined in the US Constitution.

The profits to be made from Prozac will keep it legal no matter what connection one draws between access to it and freedom of religion, but the US puts its foot down on psychotropic drugs that “alter reality”, notably LSD, in the name of protecting society’s members from themselves. A lesser known drug banned under Schedule I is DMT.

Dr. Rick Strassman is a controversial DMT researcher, author of DMT , the Spirit Molecule, which claims, among other things, that the emergence of the pineal gland in the brain 49 days after conception marks the entry of the spirit into the body (shades of the ancient Greeks who located the “mind” in that very same gland); that chanting stimulates the pineal gland to produce more DMT; and, farther afield, that DMT is connected to alien visitations. Strassman is also a Buddhist who proposed to Zen students they try some drugs as a way to extend their practice.

DMT, it turns out, is also found in the hallucinogenic tea (see picture) from the Amazon rain forest which adherents of the Brazilian group O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal (UDV) drink as part of their religion. The DEA confiscated the illegal substances, marked “herb tea”. Lower courts then upheld the group’s right to imbibe their sacraments, and ordered the tea the feds had seized returned, but the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Monday agreed to hear the case.

I won’t go into the details of the case here; more information is on the SCOTUSblog and in this Christian Science Monitor article.

The tea is called “ayahuasca” or “hoasca” (site) in Quechua, the language of the Incas. Based on my limited knowledge of Quechua, I believe the pronunciation is something like “wasca”. The meaning is “vine of the soul,” “vine of the dead,” or “vision vine”. The potion is said to

enable access to the visionary or mythological world that provides revelation, healing, and ontological security

I don’t know what ontological security means but it sounds good. Anyway, for purposes of this legal case in the US, the group’s lawyers suddenly sound extremely monotheistic, positioning the tea as letting believers “connect with God”, while denying that it causes any nasty hallucinations.

Ayahuasca is a combination of the vine called Yage, which has sedative, hypnotic, and anti-depressant effects. It becomes a visionary catalyst when mixed with chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which is where the DMT the feds are worried about comes from.

There is an enzyme in our bodies called MOA (Monoamine Oxidase), which serves to deactivate neurotransmitters. The vine contains chemicals which inhibit the functioning of this enzyme (MOAIs). That reduces the metabolization of serotonin, and lets the DMT reach receptors in the brain, with an entheogenic (religious inebriation) effect. Warning to suburban housewife above: do not mix SSRIs with wasca!

As we progress in our understanding of neuroscience, neurochemistry, and neurotheology, our society and legal system will be confronted with increasingly subtle decisions that probe the boundaries of what we consider religion and religious practice. The DMT that naturally occurs in the brain, as the lower court judge in the ayahuasca case pointed out, cannot, of course, be made illegal. But then, what about meditation techniques that stimulate production of DMT in the brain? If DMT is dangerous to humans and should be banned because of its effects on them, then certainly practices causing the internal production of DMT are also dangerous and should be banned, right? If those practices are dangerous, then publishing information about them is equally dangerous, so let’s censor such publications. Or, imagine a device, such as a transcranial stimulation helmet, that activates a naturally-occurring hallucinogenic chemical in the brain—we must ban that as well. Thus begins our descent down the slippery slope.

The Supreme Court rarely gives us broad, overreaching decisions, often limiting their opinions to narrow, legalistic issues, but in this case, we certainly hope that they come down firmly on the side of the wide-ranging religiious freedom that our founders built into the fabric of our government 200 years ago.

Dogen translations which are actually readable seem to be getting more popular. Now Michael Eido Luetchford (picture), whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week, has presented us with his highly accessible version of Bendowa, subtitled “How to Pursue the Truth”.

Luetchford is also the author of Between Heaven and Earth: From Nagarjuna to Dogen, a translation of Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika. He has done a contemporary translation of Uji, which he calls “Being-Present”, as well.

The religiobiological stance is a framework for peering into phenomena that lie at the boundary of religion and biology, or are suspected to. This stance is at the heart of Numenware. The religiobiological stance is an approach which starts with the assumption that there are biological underpinnings to religious experience, and analyzes issues based on that assumption.

The analogy with Dennett’s “intentional stance” is, well, intentional. Like the intentional stance, the religiobiological stance is a mechanism designed to break through layers of relationships to see what a particular perspective yields.

Take issues as diverse as glossolalia (speaking in tongues), or the Landmark Forum, both arguably religious in nature. There is no direct evidence tying either to biological processes. So we address them from the religiobiological stance to see what light this casts on them.

Why not call this the “neurotheological stance”? For the same reason that “neurotheology” is a defective coinage. First, we know that the brain is an integral part of the body as a whole, and existing knowledge tells us that more than just the brain is involved in religious experience. So we need to widen the “neuro” to “bio”. Taken alone, this would yield the existing, alternative term “biotheology”.

But this term is also misleading. “Theology” is widely understood to refer to the study of a particular type of God . It is not a term that would generally be used in the context of native religions, for example, or even Buddhism. The more general term is “religion”. At least one etymology of “religion” is return to the divine, an arguably more general concept than “theology”. “Religion” does have overtones of organized religion and dogma and ceremony, but we will stipulate that we interpret this to explicitly include pesonal development and transcendant experience (until someone suggests a better word).

But why “religiobiology” instead of “bioreligion”? The latter, like “neurotheology”, would imply that religion or theology is at the heart of our field of study, that we are looking at a specialized subfield of religion. In other words, we start with theology or religion, then examine its biological aspects. In my view, however, that is backwards: we need to start with biology, and see what religoius phenomena it generates. If the terms were untangled, “bioreligion” would be “religion of biology”, whereas “religiobiology” would be “biology of religion”—which is clearly what we are interested in.

Of course, “neurotheology” is widely entrenched as the name for this field, and that terminology will not disappear. Over time, however, I hope we can shift towards “religiobiology”.

In future posts, I will apply the religiobiological stance to the two particular topics I mentioned, glossolalia and the Landmark Forum.

Does your brain have a neuron for recognizing Halle Berry’s face? Or Bill Clinton’s? My brain seems to have one for Reese Witherspoon, but that’s another post.

Research concluding that we do in fact have specialized facial recognition neurons was recently published in Nature and widely reported and commented on in the popular press and blogosphere.

First, I have a technical question. The article says:

The study involved eight patients, all of whom had been temporarily implanted with devices to monitor brain-cell activity as part of their treatment [for epilepsy].

Now how did the scientists determine that a single neuron had been activated? What kind of device is this, and how can it monitor the actvity of a single neuron? How does the data get back out? Can it monitor the activity over time? How many neurons can be watched? What layer of the cortex were these neurons in?

From a neurotheological perspective, what I am really interested in is whether a specific neuron might be mapped to the face of Jesus or other favorite religious figure. If so, perhaps we could then trace neural paths back to other areas involving religious feelings, perceptions, or emotions associated with the figure. Is it too much to ask that the researchers address this in the next stage of their investigations?

My mother once told me about a religious movie she had gone to see and commented that the lead actor “looked just like Jesus must have”. It would be intensely interesting for neurotheologists to understand the mechanisms underlying such an association.

In my relentless quest to bring the very latest and most objective reporting to Numenware readers, I jumped at the chance to go hear Dr. Deepak Chopra talk in person last night. Sometimes people can get their ideas across much better in person than on the written page (see earlier review of Chopra book). The occasion was his receipt of the Navind Doshi Bridgebuilder Award in an event held at Loyola Marymount University.

My conclusion: Deepak is trapped in one of his own quantum discontinuities—between irrelevance and confusion.

I already know that atoms are mostly made up of space. So what? I’ve already heard the analogy about how reality is like a movie being projected on a screen. Who cares?

I don’t understand why Chopra says that, before you “have a thought”, that thought was not in your brain, but lurking somewhere else, in some sea of consciousness. I can’t agree that the “discontinuity” between pieces of physical matter has anything to do with the temporal discontinuities in human processes of perception, and even if I did, what next? I’m at a loss as to what the audience, listening raptly, planned to do with the assertion that photons are the carriers of all information in the universe.

I’m astonished that Chopra doesn’t understand the Heisenberg principle, claiming it states that uncertainty is proliferating. I’m stunned that he mangles Godel’s incompleteness theorem into a proof of the existence of “creative jumps”, which he believes that “gaps in the fossil record” establish the existence of.

I’m amazed that in the cosmology or theology or philosophy or whatever it is that Chopra is trying to construct he fails to answer the most basic question: what is at the root of man’s fall, or, in his terms, the “fragmentation of consciousness”. I find unconvincing his argument that this fragmentation, whatever caused it, is responsible for Hurricane Katrina. I think it highly tautological, and therefore meaningless that the meaning of human existence is to ask “Why?”. I find it very odd that he apparently does not know the meaning of the word “phenomenon”, claiming that “consciousness underlies all manifestations” and then in the same breath calling it a “phenomenon”.

What I’m not surprised about is that people lap up this confused, pseudo-scientific mishmash. It’s merely the much hipper, New Age equivalent of good old religious myth.

Mapping the Mind, by Rita Carter, is a great overview of our current scientific understanding of the brain, targeting the amateur. It’s filled with attractive, easy-to-understand graphics.

However, although I obviously share the perspective that neuroscience is going to be a major element in the new understanding about reality that the human race is slowly arriving at, I don’t really think the field needs to be oversold the way she does in her cover copy:

The latest brain scans reveal our thoughts, moods and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones.

Then in the introduction (p. 6), she continues breathlessly:

The knowledge that brain mapping is delivering…is of immense…importance because it paves the way for us to recreate oursevles mentally in a way that has previously been described only in science fiction…brain mapping is providing the navigational tool required to control brain activity in a precise and radical way…all it will take is a little refinement of existing methods and techniques like drugs, surgery, electrical and magnetic manipulation and psychological intervention.

Oh, is that all.

Carter’s coveage of neurotheology is skimpy, limited (p. 13) to a mention of Persinger’s work, and concluding:

The fact that we seem to have a religious hot-spot wired into our brains does not necessarily prove that the spiritual dimension is merely the product of a particular flurry of electrical activity…Nevertheless, it is easy to see that being able to get your God Experience from a well-placed electrode could—at the very least—undermine the precious status such states are accorded by many religions. How believers will cope with what many might see as a threat to their faith is one of many interesting challenges that brain science will throw up in the coming millennium.

Note also that this book is very focused on imaging and macro brain structure. You’ll find very little here about synaptic behaviors or neurotransmitters.

Overall, though, this book is one of the best introductions to popular neuroscience I have seen. Recommended.

Dr. Gary Urton is one of the foremost scholars of quipu, the Incan system of knotted cords for record-keeping.

(The spelling “quipu” is Spanish. The Quechuan alternative is “khipu” where the “h” indicates an aspirated consonant.)

Dr. Urton is the author of Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, where he unfurled the theory that khipus represent a seven-bit coding system, one that I found utterly unconvincing. In my review on Amazon, I picked apart his theory and compared his approach to discussing an Egyptian tombstone covered with hieroglyphics and spending all your time on categorizing them by shape and size without being able to understand a single one. Dr. Urton responded by saying “…my analogy to binary coding is just that, an analogy that is used to give the reader a general understanding of the type of system that is proposed…the theory of binary coding is put forward in this book in an attempt to find some new way(s) of working with these devices to move us to a new level of analysis and, hopefully, understanding.”

But I’m still not convinced. The theory is an “analogy”? It’s not supposed to be an explanation, but just an “attempt to move to a new level”?

Now the New York Times has reported important new research by Dr. Urton (see also the paper in Nature (subscribers only) and the report in Scientific American):

A new and possibly significant advance in deciphering the quipu system may now have been gained by two Harvard researchers, Gary Urton and Carrie J. Brezine. They believe they may have decoded the first word—a place name—to be found in a quipu, and have also identified what some of the many numbers in the quipu records may be referring to.

Any and all progress in deciphering khipus is welcome. However, looking at these newest findings from Dr. Urton (who has apparently discarded his 7-bit ASCII theory), I am once again underwhelmed.

It’s always been obvious that most khipus record numbers. To simplify a bit, the number 123 would be encoded in a khipu by tying one knot at the top of the cord, leaving a bit of space, tying two knots, leaving more space, then tying three knots, with a special twist indicating this is the last digit. That’s right—the Incas used base-10 arithmetic. The two major questions were: what was being recorded, and did some khipus encode non-numeric information—perhaps even a form of “writing”?

On the first topic, in his latest paper Dr. Urton merely “suspects” and thinks it “likely” that the numerical records are of labor quotas. (The Incan empire was sustained by a system of drafted labor.)

On the second, the “word” found and supposedly “decoded” was simply a 1-1-1 knot which is conjectured to be the name of the town where the khipu was found and presumably created. It’s like finding the number “367” on an Excel spreadsheet and imagining that it must be the code for the department of the guy that created it, and then saying that it’s a “word”.

The NYT thus goes completely overboard when it says that this “discovery” could “resolve a longstanding controversy by establishing that quipus included a writing system. That in turn would help explain the ‘Inca paradox,’ that among states of large size and administrative complexity the Inca empire stands out as the only one that apparently did not invent writing. The paradox would be resolved if indeed the quipu encode a writing system as well as numbers.”

This is absurd. A three-digit city code is not a “writing system”. Dr. Urton says “the use of conventional signs is my definition of writing.” Wrong. Using signs for numbers is not writing.

Another aspect of the new research is the finding that khipus formed a hierarchy, sort of a medieval Andean roll-up. The same numbers were found on two different khipus, and it’s believed that on the first it’s the Excel SUM function adding up all the individual numbers of hours of labor or heads of llama or number of virgins or whatever it was, which was then brought over to the second khipu as a line item to be added up into some kind of regional grand total. That’s interesting, but hardly surprising.

Sadly, we will probably never find the equivalent of the “Rosetta stone” for khipus. It’s essentially equivalent to the problem of someone in the year 2500 trying to unravel record-keeping in 2005 when all they have is 700 Excel expense reports. Urton and other researchers are now entering all extant khipus into computers to find new patterns—but there simply isn’t enough data there to crunch.

I’ve massively revised my translation of Dogen’s Genjo Koan, which I now translate as “Unfolding Puzzle”. The new version is designed to appeal to the contemporary Western sense and is much more interpretive in style, although it is based on a scrupulous re-reading of Dogen’s original Japanese and numerous commentaries and translations both into modern Japanese and English.

I’ve chosen to publish this in the form of a 32-page book available here, where you can also find a free preview, including brief notes about the essay and the translation.

Sample:

Gaining enlightenment
is like water cradling the reflection of the moon.
The moon remains dry;
the water remains unbroken.

However large and bright the moon,
it can be reflected in mere inches of water,

or in the dew on a reed,
or even in a single drop.

Man is no more ruffled by enlightenment

than the water is ruffled by the moon.
Enlightenment can no more be blocked by man
than the moon can be blocked by a dewdrop,
whose depth inevitably fits it to perfection.

Briefly or at length,

examine the expanse of the water;
observe the extent of the moon in the heaven.

When I wrote in an earlier post about Japan’s “Batting God”, “God” was a direct translation of the Japanese kamisama . The nuances line up perfectly. Both Gods and kamisama are unrivaled, omniscient, and omnipotent entities—in their particular contexts, batting in this case.

So it’s not surprising that when Christianity reached Japan, the native word kamisama was immediately adopted as the translation for “God”. (African tribesmen also used native words for supernatural beings to refer to the new white God the missionaries introduced.)

“God” itself derives from the Proto-Indo-European “ghut”, meaning “that which is invoked”, “that which is called upon”, although some scholars think the origin is a word meaning “to sacrifice”. The alternative, deva/theos/deus/dios/dieu, derives from a different Indo-Germanic root meaning “to shine”.

Originally “god” and its etymological forebears indicated any spiritual force or influence present in a thing, a phenomenon, an animal, or a place. This nuance is extremely close to that of the Latin “numen” (whose original meaning, by the way, is “a nod of the head”).

Interestingly, this is also precisely the original nuance of the Japanese word kami. Kami are the gods or spirits worshipped at each Shinto shrine, and indeed the name “Shinto” means “Way of the Kami”. A kami could be the spirit of a well-known local figure, a more traditional historical/mythical god-type being, or, just as easily, a river, mountain, animal, or even rock. I remember visiting one shrine where the object of veneration, located on the back wall and symbolizing the kami being worshipped, was simply a hole in the wall—letting you gaze through at the mountain behind the shrine. The mountain was the kami.

[Note that many students assume that kami meaning God is the same word as, or shares an origin with, a different kami meaning “up”/”above”. But linguists tell us that this is not the case—the “mi” of the kami meaning God was originally a different sound than the “mi” of the word meaning “up”. So just as English “god” and “good” are not related (God is not necessarily good?), neither are Japanese kami/god and kami/up (God is not necessarily up?).]

We thus have the odd historical parallel that words which originally pointed to a diversity of spirits, immanent in objects and places, were borrowed to refer to a monotheistic entity in both hemispheres: the West (“god”) and, much later, the East (“kami”).

(Calligraphy by Kanjuro Shibata Sensei.)

Are high altitudes conducive to revelations and other spiritual experiences, and if so, why? That’s the topic of a recent article in Medical Hypotheses by Swiss and Israeli neuroscientists.

According to the authors, mountaineers have described the experience of feeling or hearing presences, autoscopic phenomenon (seeing an image of yourself externally), hallucinations, and other manifestations, especially when alone on the mountain.

Why? The authors note that “brain areas such as the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex have been suggested to be altered in altitude. Moreover, acute and chronic hypoxia significantly affect the temporo-parietal junction and the prefrontal cortex and both areas have also been linked to altered own body perceptions and mystical experiences”.

It may not just be the thin air up there; it could also be the climb. The authors point to research that “stressful events, physically and emotionally, while climbing mountains, cause release
of endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which, in turn, may evoke revelation-like experiences”.

There is no new research here, just ideas. But these ideas lead to some fairly straightforward experimental designs—researching the results of meditating in a hyperbaric chamber immediately comes to mind.