The Neuroscience of Religious Experience - Jeremy Teissere

In this episode we explore the fascinating world of neuroscience with Dr. Jeremy Teissere, Stanley Road Professor of Neuroscience at Muhlenberg College, who introduces us to the discipline's key questions and recent developments. Then, we turn to the enduring legacy of William James, the early 20th century thinker at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and religion. We consider how James's pioneering insights into mystical states, consciousness, and conversion continue to resonate with modern neuroscientific understanding.

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:04

Welcome to ReligionWise, I'm your host, Chip Gruen. On today's episode. My guest is Dr. Jeremy Teissere the Stanley Road Professor of Neuroscience at Muhlenberg College. The way this episode came about, actually, was Jeremy and I were talking we serve on a college committee together, and I was talking to him about the discipline of neuroscience, and in a sort of half joking, half not joking, kind of a way, was giving him a hard time with neuroscientists in various labs around the country, connecting Buddhist monks up to electrodes and seeing what lights up while they meditate. Hopefully you can imagine that I don't think that this is a particularly interesting or meaningful exercise. It doesn't really get at the nature of the religious experience at all. And, you know, I don't know. I'm sure it shows something. I'm not quite sure what it shows, but a little bit to my surprise, as I was giving him a hard time about this, he rolled his eyes and expressed similar frustrations to the one that I have, which really made me think we need to get into this a little bit more. We need to think a little bit more about how Dr. Teissere and the Department of Neuroscience here at the college thinks about these issues and how they might be useful for the ReligionWise audience to think about this confluence of science, brain science, and religious experience. As you'll hear on the episode itself, he is, you know, very much a champion of the humanities and liberal arts, and comes at neuroscience from a maybe a different perspective than some others in the field do well as we started exploring the conversation a little bit more. You know, he sort of made the off handed comment like, well, I'm always happy to talk about William James. And for those of you who don't know William James, he is a philosopher, a psychologist, a physician, one of these Renaissance people of the early 20th century who gave a series of lectures called The Varieties of Religious Experience, and it has been published, is now a seminal work on the psychology of religion. You know, I always tell my students, keep a lookout for it at library book sales. It's one of those things that went into big publication, and still, you can find good copies of it. And Jeremy's interest in this text and his interest in William James was really interesting, really fascinating to me. I mean, aside from cocktail party conversation, you don't really hear too many people you know, really eager to have a conversation about the varieties of religious experience and the work of William James. So our conversation today kind of spans those two sections. One is, what is neuroscience exactly? How can studying the brain, you know, and thinking about the brain and its connection to the mind help us think about religion, religious experience more broadly, and then, on the other hand, thinking about the life and legacy and career of William James and how his work is still influential and groundbreaking a century later. So with all of that being said, I hope you really enjoy this conversation. I think there are ways in which this conversation and many others that we have here on ReligionWise really talk about the power and the strength of the liberal arts, and how thinking about these questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives simultaneously can be fruitful and interesting and really what the world of higher education and scholarship should be about. Jeremy Teissere, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

Jeremy Teissere: 3:43

Thank you for having me.

Chip Gruen: 3:44

So let's start with your work and how you got here. So you're a professor of neuroscience here at Muhlenberg. Can you talk a little bit about your academic trajectory? How did you become interested in your field?

Jeremy Teissere: 3:57

Yeah, I It's interesting, because I'm still of the generation when neuroscience didn't exist as an undergraduate major, and yet, like I was hired by Muhlenberg to start such a major, half of the fun has been trying to figure out what an undergraduate neuroscience major is. My background is was originally in the humanities. I majored in English at Willamette University, and I also had a strong interest in science, and kind of did that in the background of my English work, Willamette required us to do a thesis, and I did my thesis on the poet Wallace Stevens. And one of the things I was interested in was about consciousness on the page. And I think that interest in representing consciousness, or what inner experience is in a form of writing or putting experience on the page or in an art is still something that motivates me and my interest even in neuroscience, but I thought of neuroscience as perhaps a field that I where I might unify some of this interest and experience with the biochemistry I also loved so much, and so I put myself out there for graduate programs and said, you know, take a risk on me. I, you know, I love science, but I want to do something kind of new. I went to University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I did my PhD in neuroscience there. And since that time, I think I've I'm always trying to approach questions about mind and brain in a really broad minded way, even though my bench work like what I actually do and what I publish, and the science that has sort of occupied my time is, you know, just a very small part of that question. I think, certainly my teaching is a space where I can push students to try to explore this, these larger aspects. I was hired by Muhlenberg 21 years ago, as I say, to start the neuroscience major. And in that time, it's really grown, and I've been able to hire colleagues. And so I feel like my own sense of what's possible in undergraduate education, and also, really the field itself, continues to change, and the public becomes more and more interested in it, and the questions that neuroscience can ask, I'm not sure. I guess the only other thing I'd say is that I think this shows my humanities disposition too. I don't really see myself as like a believer in a certain way. I don't think my job is to necessarily, you know, argue that what neuroscience is finding is like, quote, unquote, the truth. Rather, I'm so excited to work critically with the kind of science that neuroscience can do, including my own, and ask like, what are the limits of neuroscience, or what are the limits that neuroscience might have in studying human experience?

Chip Gruen: 6:40

So I want to follow this down, because, as you said, neuroscience is a newer discipline, usually the academic study of religion, you know, we talk about as a newer or newer, newer discipline, but it's from the 60s, you know. So you're even newer than that. So I'm sure a lot of our listeners...

Jeremy Teissere: 6:56

About the same time.

Chip Gruen: 6:57

About the same time?

Jeremy Teissere: 6:58

I mean depending on how you judge, like the first professional organization, you know, and which is the site Society for Neuroscience, and its first annual meeting, I think, was also in the 60s.

Chip Gruen: 7:07

Oh, interesting.

Jeremy Teissere: 7:08

So, about the same, if that's when you want to count them.

Chip Gruen: 7:09

Siblings, sure, but I'm sure there are a lot of listeners out there who have heard the word neuroscience, you know, know it has something to do with the brain, right? Know that it has, you know, those roots, but don't really know what questions it asks. So maybe that's a good way to describe the field, a little bit like, what questions does it ask? What are you interested in? What is sort of the discursive range of what happens in neuroscience?

Jeremy Teissere: 7:35

I feel the need to apologize first in answering that question and say, you know, well, this is my take. This is the way I would define it. But because it is such a nascent discipline, and also an interdiscipline, I mean representing more quote, unquote, traditional or historic disciplines are inside it, like biology, like psychology, like parts of philosophy, parts of anthropology. So ultimately, I think that neuroscience is interested in the relationship of the nervous system. However we're going to define that, whether that's the brain, or, you know, the body, in relation, in some kind of nervous relation, to the brain, all this kind of meat stuff and human experience, perception, identity, behavior, if we don't want to make it so human centric. Because, of course, there are biologists who are very curious about these questions in other organisms, I think that still counts as neuroscience and not just as models for human behavior. But you know, why does the skunk act the way a skunk does? You know? Why does a bird have its deep sleep at night time, while it's flying, but still needs to perch on a branch during the day to have its REM sleep because it must fully paralyze just the way humans do during REM sleep. So there are questions about other organisms and their ecological niche and the way the nervous system developed to you know, modulate behavior to be responsive to an environment. And so I think neuroscience is interested in this relation. Our intro class here at Muhlenberg is called Mind and Brain, to try to sort of signal this identity that ultimately, there is some kind of equation maybe that we're trying to set up. Can we really say one to one, mind is on one side of the equal sign, and brain is on the other. No, absolutely not. I think because the brain is quite plastic and experience is quite plastic. But there is some relation. And so neuroscience is interested in uncovering the mechanisms of this relation.

Chip Gruen: 9:33

So to get to it, when we were first having sort of the beginning conversations of sitting down together, we had talked about a number of different ways. And, you know, I have my preconceived notions, some of which you might reinforce, and some of which you might, you know, teach me that I'm wrong about, you know, about what good it is to watch images of the brain and things like that. But you know, there this is an open question about neuroscience and religion, and when we started talking about it, you said, Well, I'm always game to talk about William James. And so you know that is not something that you hear every day. And for those of you who, those of you out there who don't know William James, early 20th century. Take your pet pick, scholar of religion, philosopher, psychologist, you know...

Jeremy Teissere: 10:10

Yes. Physiologist, even medicine is in there.

Chip Gruen: 10:32

Yeah, just a man for all seasons, as they say. And he actually, next time your local library book sale, you should look for The Varieties of Religious Experience, which is his magnum opus. And as I sit here, I have my copy that was probably republished in the 60s or something, and it's very it's very retro looking, but this is the best way to get these classic texts. But anyway, this is an interest of yours, so tell me about William James. Like, what? Why? How did you encounter him? How do you find him interesting? And then we'll sort of use him as a can opener to get into some of these interesting neuroscience questions.

Jeremy Teissere: 11:10

When I was an undergraduate, my one of my English professors, Michael Strelow, said, Jeremy, I think you're on the way to becoming a faculty member with an endowed chair in anti Descartes studies. And I, I think that's true. That is kind of what I became. I started to get interested in people who were interested in unity. And William James is someone I think to look at both for his long interest in different ways, in a kind of radical unity, and also because he's so broad minded, like so lowercase c Catholic in his in his interests and tastes and questions. And so I started looking at him as an undergrad, and then when it came time for me to be a faculty member and to develop an introductory course in neuroscience. The thing I didn't want to do was to have, like, a traditional survey that you might find in a biology course, where we're gonna have like, okay, let's sort of go through all of neuroscience from like, neurons to brain in 14 weeks, and kind of do a superficial job of it, but you know, you'll get a kind of passing familiarity everything. I really don't like that, because it would seem to make a kind of a priori commitment to a way of thinking about neuroscience. And I'm not so sure that the field is unified about, like, what neuroscience is, or even if it will be successful in mapping mind onto brain. And so I decided rather that an intro course should just like open the flood gates and allow students to, like read as much as possible all of the many perspectives on the relationship of mind to brain that are to some extent, I think, foundational to the discipline. And so William James, again, came to the to the fore because he writes, you know, the first psychology textbook ever, certainly in English. He teaches the first psychology course at Harvard before the 1900s he is sort of proto in every way, right? Like he starts off interested in physiology, then goes to Germany and gets obsessed with these early experimental psychologists and becomes convinced that, oh my gosh, we can take the empirical frame, we can take the scientific frame and turn it on anything, and look at any kind of experience. Experience becomes so central to his way of thinking, and it's certainly central to mine. He is like a proto phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl says he keeps psychology on his shelf as he's writing his first text, this textbook that James had written. He's kind of even proto AI and tech in a certain way, in that he seems to understand that the thinking isn't just happening in the brain, but also in a body and in a world. And that the thinking, you know, now we call this externalism, in neuroscience isn't just occupying in the brain, like my iPhone does some of the thinking too, and my you know, my pen and my paper also do some of the thinking, and my body itself and its gestures are also part of the thought, part of the knowledge. So like this way of approaching mind and brain is just so expansive and so broad minded that it's just too tempting to not include him. So it's not exactly Varieties of Religious Experience, though I'm interested in that text that became the rose to the fore. Instead, we read his, for example, his chapter from psychology called the stream of consciousness, in which he defines consciousness, and I think to some extent we still use in neuroscience these working definitions that come from experience. And his definition to ask whether, at least from inner experience, something can be said to be caught to have consciousness. So I think he was just so useful in this way of bringing more of a humane and thoughtful and experience driven way of defining neuroscience.

Chip Gruen: 15:13

So you anticipate me a little bit and forgive me for focusing on Varieties of Religious Experience, even if that's not you know the primary text that you use, but I was just thinking as I was preparing for today. Like all three of those words bear so much - varieties, religious......and experience. But it sounds as if you know your sort of definition or your understanding of neuroscience hinges very much on that last word, experience, and James, this is sort of the the kernel of the thing that James is interested in, right? Is when, when somebody has a mystical experience, like, how do we talk about that? And what does it mean, and those sorts of things. So, can you talk a little bit about experience? What is that word doing? You know? What does that word signify for you? Right? That it that might be different, right, than what I would think of when I think of experience.

Jeremy Teissere: 15:33

Yes Well, I think I'll start with James. I think that he's I as I read him. I think he's just really mistrustful of of some kind of thinking your way to truth, not to say that thoughts aren't crucial, that thoughts aren't important, that like that, that we can't have intellectual, cognitive kind of arguments about things, but that, like in some kind of necessary order of things, that sensibility and internal commitments, whatever those are, and like our own primary experience, our feeling, our body senses of being in something, of being in the world, are like a kind of truth that we latch on to first and then, like the cognitive stuff, you know, comes a little bit later, his theory of emotion also hinges on this kind of stepwise process. And so there's something in James that sees experience as so primary. He often uses the word direct in Varieties of Religious Experience, and also in some of his other writing. And that word, I think, is doing a lot of work too, that like there's no mediating thought, that there's just direct experience, the raw experience of the world, is somehow the first and most primary thing. I'm you know, maybe I can say this later, or perhaps we'll get into this, but I find that a lot of now making fun of my discipline neurosciences work to define religious experience in the brain seems to totally miss this. I just don't think fMRI scans of, you know, people having whatever, a breathing experience, or, you know, I actually looked up some recent review articles in neuroscience for you. And the language is very easy to make, to poke a lot of holes on and make fun of, but it just would seem so passive, and would seem to think that maybe even that all religious experiences are similar in a certain way, or that they can be imaged as, like the brain doing something, instead of starting with what the subject of that experience really knows, which is the truth of their experience. And so in James, I'm I'm just so excited that someone wants to start there. You know that, like, we don't need evidence necessarily, that the that the that one's experience is the evidence. And by the end of Varieties of Religious Experience, James would seem to suggest that, like, all kind of theoretical commitments we make are kind of quasi religious in this way that they represent over-beliefs, in that they don't really come from evidence that we like weigh out and consider as a scientist, but just something we know is true because it burns deep within us, in the core of our experience, and something about that just feels really right to me. The phenomenologists in philosophy also put experience centrally. And Husserl had hoped to define a method by which one could investigate experience in this way. And I find that adorable. And I think to get richness out of this relationship of mind and brain, for a neuroscientist, we have to take our subjects' experience very seriously and centrally. And I see James doing that.

Chip Gruen: 19:25

Yeah, so, so let's think about that, because I don't know, do I want to quote Sigmund Freud here? I might,

Jeremy Teissere: 19:33

I think it's relative.

Chip Gruen: 19:34

Yeah, he we were, I was reading with my Theory and Method class. We were reading Future of Illusion, and he throws away the idea of experience as being important, like he just, he says, okay, you know, you can say, you know that it's that he sorts, he sort of tips his hat to the idea of experience being personal in a way that it's not, you can't interrogate it, you know, and and so I rarely side with with Freud on these things. But one of the things I come back to with this thinking about experience and James thinking about experience is what does that evidence look like, right? So when we were having these early conversations, and I didn't know where you stood on any of this, you know, I wanted to make fun of people attaching Buddhist monks up to electrodes, right? And to sort of figure out...

Jeremy Teissere: 20:26

Rightly so

Chip Gruen: 20:26

...you know, like, what part of their brain lights up when they're in deep meditation? Because that's, I guess that's evidence for something, but I'm not sure what it's evidence for. And as a scholar of religion, and this is part of the reason why I tell my Theory and Method class, like psychology of religion, I'm not quite sure what to do with right? Because those eight inches between our ears are so private, right? And if I need you to describe your experience, well, then that's not really, you know, that's not really interior anymore. Then it becomes like anthropological report, right? It becomes something else. So I don't know. I mean, help me think about evidence here, like, what do we what are we looking for, for evidence when we have something so personal, right, as an experience that that can maybe be described, but that's not even doing justice to it.

Jeremy Teissere: 21:15

I think that you're talking about fundamental obstacles that are crucial in to talk through in neuroscience, if we take up experience as a category, like, to your point, there's going to be some things that are propositional that we can measure from the outside. You know, do you see that red ball? Yes, I do. And then we can verify that it's red. We can look at the light wavelength, you know, spectrometry. We can, we can ask someone else was that, you know, like, there's easy ways we can verify things from the outside in a lot of experience, but there's some parts of experience that really are seemingly wholly phenomenal, meaning not available to be measured or observed from the outside, and true for the subject of that experience, might I say. And so like, the it's not just, I think religious experience that easily falls into that category, but also pain. I mean, when we go to the hospital, there's no painometer by which we can measure what someone else's experience of pain, and yet their experience of pain is true. And like, I wouldn't want to be the person to tell someone otherwise, you know. Like, well, I need some evidentiary, you know, no, no, and I, nor would I want to favor a model by which it's only true if we can propositionally measure it with an EEG or an fMRI or something like this. Like, no, I don't need those tools to say that it's true. The person is telling me I'm in pain. And so the you we've kind of like, as you say, we use language. Telling is a way of making something propositional, but then it's not really phenomenal anymore. It's not really interior, exactly, using the faces and the pain scale, you know, for children or like, numbers, like it's about an eight is not really doing anyone any good, because your eight might be different than my eight, et cetera. So I just, I think this is just true of neuroscience. Dreaming is also phenomenal. There are many other states of consciousness that we just don't have access to in, you know, a very easy, declarative, propositional sort of way, where we can just measure it from the outside. And so that's, that's, that's just, like a key feature, I think, of taking up neuroscience at all. I think that also you use the word personal, you know, that's actually James's first characteristic of consciousness, the if consciousness is personal, you know. And he says, like, well, so there just can't be unowned thoughts. Like all thoughts are owned. Then I guess if we take that seriously, then all I can know about the world is what my perceptory apparatus, my body, my relation to it, can reveal to me. Later, he complicates this kind of extends it in a really great piece called Does Consciousness Exist, in which he argues, like, no, no, no. Like, I didn't mean to say that consciousness is, like a thing inside us when we have this experience. It's a relation between, like, me and something in the world that, in fact, like there's some kind of transaction between me and things in the world, and like the consciousness is in that relationship. But whether it's like wholly inside us, or is some kind of transaction, it's still personal. It's still something that a person you know owns and engages with. And so gosh, to build up a model of like, what religious experience is or what any kind of experience is, we're going to have to let in all of those subjects and all of their experiences. One of the things, the last thing I'll say that I really appreciate about James, but although it makes the problem much worse, is that he really isn't interested in institutions, you know, in this book at all. He really is interested in the person who's having this religious experience. Back to your Varieties of Religious Experience. This is really almost like a biography of religious moments, or like moments people describe that he's pulled together as having a religious tenor in some way. And there's something kind of interesting about that, rather than looking so more like a sociologist at particular structures and the things that happen in them.

Chip Gruen: 24:52

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the other thing about that, for those who haven't aren't familiar with the text, his first, one of his first moves of classification, is the healthy minded individual who he's not particularly interested in, and the sick soul right on the other side is somebody like Martin Luther or Augustine of Hippo who has this crisis, right? And it's like, oh, they had experiences. Let's think about those people. So I've never quite known what to do with that as sort of a first category to split humanity into two.

Jeremy Teissere: 25:52

Well, you could probably tell me more about Freud's approach here. But like, I don't think he means to, you know, pathologize religion at all, or even see the expression of, like, I have this moment with God as being, in any way disease, but yes, like, rather, what I yeah, I always thought the sick souls sounds like a great heavy metal band. The what I really appreciate is that he sees, I think, you know, mystical experience, religious experience, as on a continuum with our normative being in the world, that it's not this kind of, it might be at the extreme end of like the way we typically are in the world, but it's not this, like other, you know, kind of schizophrenic other, you know, or pathologized sort of thing, but rather, is continuous, and I would say, of schizophrenia and other kinds of mental states, I feel like that's also being increasingly appreciated in neuroscience as well that like, consciousness and behavior are rather spectral, rather than, like categorical, and we're all kind of sitting in, you know, some kind of relation to a normative so I guess if you want to define something, James seems to think like, well, just look at the extreme thing of it, you know.

Chip Gruen: 26:02

Which is pedagogically A good thing, right? Let's start at the edges So moving from experience, then he describes mystical experience, or one of the ways he describes it is that the ordinary sense of self melts away. And it seems to me, self is going to be really important for you as it is for him as well. And the relationship of experience to self, and you've mentioned consciousness already, but even then, that the sense of self is not central, right? But the sense of self, self melts away, is sort of key to this, these experiences. What do you make of that?

Jeremy Teissere: 27:33

Do you know? So his, his definition of the self, right? Is that, like, there's this I, and there's all these me's, and the The I is the thing that makes the me is mine. That's sort of really poetic. But like, what I what I think is going on here is that, like, you know, there's all these ways in which we make attachments in the world, in our experience, but then there's some unifier that's saying, like, and all of this is mine, and the it can't be in the mystical impulse, just like, just another experience, like standing in line at Wawa. You know, it has to be that something has changed, and maybe even this unifier, the sense that, like it happened to me, that I own it has somehow been complicated or broken down. When I was in college, I took a religion class in which we read Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, and I really liked it, and influenced me in a way, in that, like, I was curious about, like, what defines these, you know, kind of other things, these other kinds of times, these other kinds of separate like, what are the boundaries that create this other kind of experience that we have? And ritual, of course, is a part of that. The what's so interesting is that like, and he says this throughout Varieties of Religious Experience, is that, like, really abstract notions of, primarily, he's thinking about Christianity, but really abstract notions of things like cause people to have profound, you know, bodily experience, and allow them to feel like the touch of the numinous or like the hand of the mystical presence. They feel presence, you know, they feel something. And the feeling, I think, is what moves them. And yet it could be like meditating on a really intellectual concept, like God's mercy, or, you know, the complexity of the Trinity, or some kind of, you know, really heady religious idea that it can provoke such a wellspring of feeling and connection and presence, I think, does suggest like something is breaking down, you know, because we're so willing to let this unknown thing move us and shape us. One of the things that maybe you can help me understand better is like, when I look at this impulse, sometimes it seems like the impulse believes we really do reach across, that we really do puncture through to the other side, or that maybe even at the extreme, that it's already here and everywhere, that the Divine is all, that there is, that radical unity would imply no separation at all, that it is us we are. Other times it would seem to say like it's not possible at all, that, like you can try and try. You can whirl and whirl, and you can meditate, and you can try, and you can get really close to where the bubble ends, but you cannot cross it. That there's some way in which, like there is it is inviolable. One cannot connect to it. And so I he doesn't really go there, but I guess I have a lot of questions in thinking about the mystical impulse, about what we really mean, or which frame we're really taking when we think about what that connection is, does that make sense to you as a religion?

Chip Gruen: 30:46

Yeah. I mean, I think the other the other part of that is that when and again, it becomes discourse. When somebody talks about the mystical experience, how they talk about it is analogical, or metaphorical or something. I mean, I'm thinking about some of the medieval women mystics, right? Then it's all like sexual right? It's all about this. And of course, right, as an experience. I mean, I say, of course, maybe not, right? Is this a sexual experience that they're having, or is that the way that they're choosing to talk about it? And, yeah, and so, you know, thinking about that distinction between, like, Hey, I'm just realizing the deeper reality that I'm part of and that we're all here, or I can get really close to it, but I can't quite get there. I think the third category is, like, it's like a relationship that I that I can compare right to, to something else, to something physical, you know, and that that becomes a useful, I mean, a useful tool, right for, for at least these, these women mystics, to use, I think it's kind of interesting, particularly given their sort of social position.

Jeremy Teissere: 31:55

In neuroscience, it's like, so I looked up a review article of kind of looking at recent attempts to define religion and the brain in the brain, whatever that means. And one of the things that I was really struck by is just the sheer number of categories that the article was taking as, quote, unquote religion. So sometimes it's as you say, like sort of bodily discipline that leads to spiritual experience, whatever we mean by that. So, like, you know, I, I'm doing yoga, I'm doing certain kinds of breathing, I'm praying in a certain kind of position. I'm I'm acting on my body in a way with great control to to bring out this, this relation to the numinous. Other times, like, also with the same category, are like involuntary seizure episodes that create this feeling that have nothing to do with spiritual discipline, but are, you know, the result of a lesioned brain. Also, like meditation, is being grouped in with, you know, other kinds of verbal recitations, like prayer or rosary, like that, don't I don't know if those are all the same. And then some studies are asking people to just cognitively think about God or think about, you know, their faith or their belief, and I don't know how to compare any of these things. You know, it would seem to me to that it's would be easier to start simply with, you know, the primary experience of the body, and to try to keep categories for now around that I absolutely respect the wish to want to define these things. But if we're going to put Buddhist monks, you know, and we have in the fMRI and you know, and think about what that means about meditative acts, I would keep it to just meditative acts. Also, meditation is many things in many spiritual traditions and many religions and many, you know, faith doctrines, and so there's real sloppiness if you look in the literature you know about what, whether we're talking about Vipassana, or whether we're talking about just kind of open monitoring meditation or mindfulness or transcendental or and some of these are patented, so I just it's really hard to know when we're talking about mystical experience, what we're really talking about, from a neurosciences point of view, we're just kind of, we're throwing it all in at the moment.

Chip Gruen: 34:27

The thing that holds those things together, though, and I'm going to lump these, these two words together, and you can tell me, if that's a bad move, is the feeling of a general or, I'm sorry, a genuine perception of truth that contains knowledge, right? That it's noetic, right? That there's something about it, you know. So leaving aside the questions of sincerity, even though that's one that sort of gets me right, like to be able to separate the sheep from the goats on what is sincere religious experience, and what is, and I...

Jeremy Teissere: 35:03

Do have a test?

Chip Gruen: 35:05

Well, the reason I bring that up is is, you know, I'm teaching a class on new religious movements right now, and you know, a lot of those people are described as charlatans, and right? And so the Supreme Court, this is what they use, they say, sincerely held religious belief. And I don't know what to do with that, right, but it seems like we might be in a similar bind here when you're trying to categorize and think about different movements and different groups and what they describe as religious experience. So I think we can maybe shelve that for a minute, but everybody would claim truth and knowledge, right? That comes from these experiences. So A what do you do with that? And B, knowing that you also are interested in, like, brain chemistry and drugs and so forth, it occurs to me like that is also a response to, like, certain classes of drugs or hallucinogenics. It's like, Oh, I see the world. You know differently now, or that there's so I'm curious about this, this idea of truth and knowledge, and how it can be disconnected.

Jeremy Teissere: 36:07

I'm glad, yeah, you prompt me honestly, because in that review article, they also included psychedelic studies, and I have no idea what to make of that. And yet, yes, in experience of psychedelics, one may have an experience of, you know, this larger presence, this god like experience, this numinous, this connection with the divine or the mystical, that makes perfect sense to me, just looking at reports of people who've taken serotonergic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin or Ayahuasca or whatever. And of course, there is a long, I think, anthropological record of of connections of cultures to using drugs of various kinds, including alcohol, tobacco, to have a relationship with the larger worlds of God and and the divine. I don't want to make a general one. I really want to resist like a general, universal comment about the ways in which people are longing for that larger sense of things. But it just seems like we have the capacity to have that feeling in a variety of ways. One of the things that James is helpful here is in saying that the noetic, the knowledge, the knowing you know, is coming after the primary you know, experience of the feeling in the body. I should say, you know his theory of emotion, which was sort of ridiculed in his life, that the body responds, and then we cognitively label the famously, you know, one of the letters to the editor after he published his first article on emotion, said, Well, if this is true, then people who have spinal cord breaks at the neck, where they lose where they're paraplegic or hemiplegic, they lose connection with their bodies. That would suggest that they wouldn't be able to talk about their feelings or know about the feelings of others, and that's just patently false. But as it happens, that's entirely true, that if we patients who lose connection with their bodies, not only have a very difficult time describing their own experience emotionally and so forth, they have a very hard time reading the emotions of others, suggesting that, like, that kind of empathic mirroring response in one's own body is like no longer possible, and that the body is the primary source of this kind of emotional valence. So having that coming first and then the thinking, to me, makes sense from the point of view of conversion. Like I don't think we persuade people to like get them into a religion by using a lot of charts and diagrams and, you know, appealing to their intellectual sense, but with some kind of emotional commitment, sometimes in ritual, where their body undergoes something, and they're transformed by that, and then that's where the, you know, the spirit of the thing kind of lies. That does not help neuroscience and trying to figure out what that is, but it just feels to me right, that James is right, that like that's on the individual level anyway, that's the way in which you know the religious experience occurs.

Chip Gruen: 39:03

So tell me if you've had the same, the same experiences I have here in talking to students, that it seems like our students' perception, and I think probably because it's a quote, unquote Western perception generally, is that you believe a thing, and then you do the thing, right? You and your your actions, your practice, is always motivated by this...

Jeremy Teissere: 39:25

The belief first. Yeah, and I it would be interesting. We need a sociologist to help us here. But, like, I'm wondering if, like, by going this other way of belief, then, you know, I do and have the experience that, like, by putting the belief first, maybe gives kind of social permission for having the, you know, the mystical experience at all, especially in a work a day world where we're, you know, we've got, like, soccer practice and we have, you know, got to go to the grocery store that like the belief, like, creates the space by which then I can engage this world. I'm sort of not allowed to do so at any moment, you know, staring at the cantaloupes in Wegmans, but and so it maybe that's part of why the belief commitment comes first. I think often the student essentializes themselves like I just believe this, because that's what we believe. You know, they don't even really know why. So it's not actually, like an intellectual commitment, usually, but just like, well, this is it, you know, this is, this is our belief. And it's interesting. I don't know that I'm gonna say something rather ignorant, because I'm, again, not a religion studies scholar, but it would seem to me, especially since you're teaching new religions, that there's this, like, kind of funny pattern where, like, the the the originator of the religious tradition, like, never has these qualms. Like, is often like, you know, truly having a primary experience in the world for better or for worse. And is like articulating that experience in really profound ways that culture decides to follow and save and it's usually, like the next people that, like that, sort of hammer it into a doctrine and like a set of rights and wrongs, and like what the beliefs ought to be, and the Catechism comes later, and then we kind of squeeze out, like the primary experience in favor of, is that fair?

Chip Gruen: 39:26

The belief first. And I, you know, and I'm sort of, at some point in every class, I said, let's think about that, right? Let's think about, you know, we even have the colloquialism, fake it till you make it, yeah, right. And that, a lot of religious systems around the world sort of recognize that. I mean, that's the whole principle of all the different kinds of yoga, like you do this thing and that leads you right, yeah. I mean, you know, maybe in this life, maybe in the next, but that you you, you move right. You move from practice right to something that is that becomes noetic, right? That becomes a grasp on the truth, which seems to be exactly right, how James is, is encountering the mystical experience too? Absolutely. So I will point to Max Weber..

Jeremy Teissere: 42:01

Okay Yes

Chip Gruen: 42:02

...right? And his sociology of religion, he talks about the prophetic impulse being charismatic, right, which is how we describe leaders of new movements, right? They have the charismatic leader, yeah. And they do their thing, right? And then the next after they're gone, right, which is often traumatic for the community, somebody has to come in and pick up the pieces, and that, that is, Weber refers to as the priest, the priestly function. And so it becomes doctrinal. It becomes ritualized. It becomes routinized. Is the word that the charisma is routinized.

Jeremy Teissere: 42:27

Yes.

Chip Gruen: 42:27

And made, you know, made into what we call institutionalized, organized religion.

Jeremy Teissere: 42:39

Yes.

Chip Gruen: 42:40

It's interesting though, you look at something like you mentioned conversion earlier. And of course, the the locus classicus for conversion is Paul on the road to Damascus. And I always think about the the prophet and the priest saying, Well, Jesus is the charismatic prophet in that case, and then Paul is maybe the second version of the charismatic prophet. There's this interesting kind of double...

Jeremy Teissere: 43:04

Yes!

Chip Gruen: 43:04

...and then only in the next generation does it, does it start to become more routinized. But yeah, I think that that's right.

Jeremy Teissere: 43:10

It's sort of incredible that the priestly function still permits individual revelation and real feeling like it can't totally stop it from happening. It's just even though, like, the charisma becomes routinized, as you say, like those who follow still may truly have, like, you know, I had to use the word prophetic because you did, sort of prophetic, like experience, or just that, that sense of religious experience that's really true and personal to them, even though they're they're sort of following in this very doctrinal step, you know, lock step.

Chip Gruen: 43:45

Well and kind of the gray area in between is that if you have an institutionalized way of achieving that experience, right? So that might be, you know, you know, through physical substances, right? But it also might be meditative practice, like somebody who has meditative practice, who is able to achieve one of these mystical experiences, very likely learn that meditative practice from a master, right from somebody previously, so that in itself, that there is a way to do it, is that kind of institutionalization. So we get this kind of gray area in between.

Jeremy Teissere: 44:22

I feel like I owe you some neuroscience, the that you can make fun of and, you know, and or just enjoy as it kind of emerges. So one of the things that I think many, many studies keep kind of pointing to that is sort of unifying here, across many of these like hard to explain experiential states, which include psychedelics as well, is the is this relationship between the frontal cortex or the forebrain, the most kind of evolutionarily advanced parts of the brain that are right under our forehead, and the default mode network. Which is a collection of areas of the brain under the cortex, so kind of deep in the brain, some of these areas used to become, used to be called part of something called the limbic system. That your listeners might be familiar with, that term is kind of falling out of favor. But these sub regions, these this default mode network, is a site of rumination, so when we're not on task, when we're just kind of in default mode, so to speak, this area is quite active, and one of the things that has been associated within a variety of different domains is unwanted thoughts, traumatic memories, ruminations, repetitions and repeated sort of repetitions in thought primarily. And this area can be inhibited by the frontal cortex, by the the frontal brain. And that inhibition happens when we are deeply in task that like, if you give me hard math problems or a really difficult crossword puzzle, or I have to really think through something or something that absorbs all of my attention, like when I'm working with wood, or I'm I don't know I'm working in the kitchen, that the default mode network is quieted. One of the things that the emerging psychedelic science in neuroscience is suggesting is that psychedelics disrupt the default mode network, that they act to basically unpattern it, that it establishes these kinds of rhythms and patterns and firing of neurons in that area that are disaggregated by by psychedelics, and that this disaggregation is good, that it sort of it breaks the the user out of repeated thought patterns or unwanted patterns. So it actually acts differently than this kind of like act of suppression by being on task by the by the forebrain. The way this kind of plays out is interesting in that I'm teaching a seminar this semester on sleep and dreaming, and there's some evidence that, like, sleep deprivation, for example, like weakens the ability of the forebrain to inhibit the default mode network, which would suggest that the less able we are to have restful sleep, the more this you know, chattering default mode is active and that it that can be rescued by psychedelics and also other states of consciousness that sort of disaggregate. Some of the emerging therapies for treating trauma, in particular, ketamine induced comas seem to also disaggregate the patterning in the default mode network that doesn't necessarily lead directly to a comment about religion or anything we've been talking about this hour. But it's sort of interesting to think about, you know, what is spiritual discipline and what is the relationship of, you know, the numinous to this kind of model that's emerging in this sort of tug of war between two very different states of brain.

Chip Gruen: 48:00

Yeah, the only thing I'll say to that, and I think this is, this is on the in the the background of what you're saying, and you're thinking it, you're you're probably just not saying it is, if you think about monastic discipline, for example, weaving baskets, right? Or painting icons, or something like this. Like, it's not what we would call directly a mystical experience, but it maybe is sort of performing similar functions...

Jeremy Teissere: 48:27

Yes...fully absorbing...

Chip Gruen: 48:28

Yes, exactly.

Jeremy Teissere: 48:29

...tasks, yes, of spiritual discipline, I would imagine would like help us not attach so much, because, like the dmn is a is essentially recirculating the past. It's not updating in the present, right? Like the whole point of this kind of, I suppose, of this default mode that's like filled with unwanted thoughts and repetitions and so forth, is like it's not updating, it's staying in a past kind of place. And so the way of losing that attachment, you know, to that past, or actively suppressing that attachment might be wholly a whole absorbance in a task, yes.

Chip Gruen: 49:08

All right, one more place I want to go before I let you go is consciousness. Because that, again, I think, is a word that, that you, that you use, and you teach in in neuroscience, and now we can think about, you know, you were referring, I think, a little bit to, like the idea of stream of consciousness. But then there's also, we are interested in animals and robots and everybody in between of having consciousness or not having consciousness. You know, obviously that is connected, you know, that is also connected to the idea of mystical experience and what happens to consciousness. Tell, tell me a little bit about consciousness.

Jeremy Teissere: 49:48

I feel so guilty for like, you know, adopting this word as the word people associate me with, because, gosh, it is a really difficult word to work with and define. So much so that I'm associated with it that when our colleague Jim Peck did one of his more recent books on different kinds of theater, when he was presenting and was talking about consciousness on the stage, he literally said like and Jeremy. So I feel like I'm too associated with this word. But why am I attracted to it? As you say, it is a way we could start to think about inner experience across multiple kinds of organisms and forms. Like Turing. I'm very interested in questions of the experience of machines. And of course, I'm not a machine. Like, you know, biologists, I'm really curious about the inner experience of my doggy or of that, you know, bat over there, and like Tom Nickel wrote, I can't know what it's like to be a bat, and I'm well aware of that, in fact, so much so that I actually get bothered by a lot of scientists who seem unaware of the human words and experiences that they project on animals or machines for that matter. I mean, I'm sort of here in a, you know, in a different way, thinking like I I recognize my own humanness in making these definitions, and I'm not sure they will be adequate in defining the experience of other things, but consciousness is a word I can use to gesture at this experience. James totally defines it from an individual person's point of view. So if you read the Stream of Consciousness, it's written for a human person to read and ask themselves if they also have this thing. And so I can't give that to a cat or a cactus, you know, and ask them to answer me in the same way, and especially because the first character is that consciousness is personal. I suppose whatever is going on in a dog's experience is particular to that dog. If we're really going to take this. The way a neuroscientist thinks, is that if they can show that similar brain structures, you know, evolutionarily speaking, homologically speaking, are performing parallel behaviors or sort of parallel or congruent relationships or behaviors, then they must be pretty equivalent. For example, songbirds learn song at a particular age in their juvenile life as an organism, and there is a critical period for that song bird to hear the song, and if they don't hear it during that critical period, they don't sing. And the brain structures that support song acquisition in songbirds are identical and home and also homological to areas of the human brain that process language, that both produce and comprehend language. Also, when juvenile birds are first learning to sing, they go off by themselves and whisper sing and and also kind of practice without singing out loud. And that, that we have done fMRI's on songbirds and shown that that's also equivalent to the way that young children rehearse words as they're learning them. So from a brain point of view, so like, it's, you know, a lot of philosophers quibble with this idea, these kinds of relationships, but that's the way neuroscience thinks, is that, well, if I can show these kinds of that's a way from the outside-in any way that I can get an idea that perhaps the consciousness is is somehow homologous or isomorphic, is probably a better word, not quite the same, but in some relation. And the so it's, I think that word has just been useful to neuroscientists to talk about inner experience. I think we are all really curious about, like, what octopi know, and what you know sharks know, and what other life forms know, and if aliens exist, and what they know. And we, I think neuroscience is biased in bringing at least this base kind of ground work into play that like, well, I guess whatever it is, it must be having a primary experience. It must have some kind of meat, or, you know, tissue that's able to absorb the environment and make choices and, you know, remember and direct and in some way respond. That does, there's also inherited, you know mechanisms that are somehow working through us. I'm really suspicious of genetic arguments on behavior directly. You know, I just don't think genes equal behavior. So, and neuroscience did invent this word plasticity. It was, in fact, the first word that neuroscience ever really unleashed on the human population in the 20th century. It really comes from us, this idea of like a dynamic circle, and maybe that's part of it too, is that if we really adopt the dynamic circle of causality, that means we have, in order to understand consciousness, we have to understand not just the brain, but the body and the world and the ecological niche and the population relationships. Because all of those are actually actively shaping our brain. The you might know that from time zero, from the time we're born, we begin pruning off neurons in our brain that we ultimately as an adult, have about 100 billion of them making about 10 trillion connections, maybe more than 10 trillion connections, and those are just neurons. There's also glial cells in the brain, the other cell, the mad women in the attic, who don't get the same kind of attention that neurons do. And there are, at least, by some estimates, twice as many or five times as many, of these cells. And they also can build relationships and so forth. So this is like an incredibly complex kind of tissue, the and yet, from experience, from the moment that we come into the world, we begin yanking out the ones we, quote, unquote, don't need. So we're literally the world is acting on us in some way. It's shaping us. And so this consciousness, I think, if we situate it this way, rather than, like unidirectionally, linearly from genes or brain out to behavior, but rather in this, like interconnected circle of relationships, and I'm gesturing with my hands in a circle to go from brain to body and world and back again. That maybe is the kind of healthy consciousness picture I want to have and want to bring into neuroscience.

Chip Gruen: 56:21

All right, well, the question I'd like to finish up on, and maybe this is an opportunity for us to come back to religion a little bit a little bit more closely, or at least religious experience, is, what am I not asking you that I should be? Like, what is the elephant in the room that we're not talking about that you think is really important, right for our listeners, if we're thinking about the confluence of neuroscience and religion or religious experience, like, what am I? What am I missing here?

Jeremy Teissere: 56:53

I you know, gosh, these are, I don't know if you're missing a question. I think in having me on this show, I'm so delighted to be here, I think is, in some ways this kind of thing, like we might all be missing an opportunity to bring science into these conversations about human experience in ways you'd like to do. It's so easy, I think, in the way, unfortunately, science has professionalized to see it as, like, you know, so difficult. I'm not a science person. I'm not a math person, or just like, inchoate hard to understand, just so much jargon and and yet, I feel like so many scientists are motivated to do what they do because they do care about experience in some way, you know, like we gravitate to it because it helps us answer these questions. We just go about it in this kind of odd evidence based, empirical way and and so I think the thing we're all not really asking is, like, how can we include that, you know, in our in our conversations about experience, and I would never want to support a neuroscience that was somehow divorced from those conversations, you know, I guess going back to where I started, I wouldn't want to say neuroscience is just about the brain and if you learn about the parts of the brain and all the neurotransmitters, then you know what neuroscience is, because then you have you've missed a fundamental opportunity to talk about what it does and what it is and what it's in relation to. And so in that, I see real generosity in my colleagues in all of the other disciplines, in wanting to play along and see us as like part of the conversation.

Chip Gruen: 58:42

All right. Well, I think that's a great place to stop. Jeremy Teissere, thank you very much for being here.

Jeremy Teissere: 58:47

Thanks so much, Chip.

Chip Gruen: 58:50

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise, wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.