Intense Experiences and Ultimate Reality
Intense Experiences and Ultimate Reality
A major collaborator on this project is Dr. Wesley Wildman (Boston University, Department of Theology, Boston, MA). This project is funded by the CTNS/STARS Program.
We would like to extend a big thanks to Ronald Pekala for allowing us to use the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory in our study.
We propose to test the hypothesis that intense experiences tell us something unique and important about ultimate reality. The claim that intense experiences uniquely reveal the nature of ultimate reality is virtually ubiquitous in every form of religion, from folk religions to religions that articulate themselves through complex philosophical and theological literatures, and from religions that emphasize corporate experience to those that stress individual spiritual practices. Typically, something like intensity is taken to be a marker of both spiritually authentic and cognitively reliable religious experiences.
The Leading Research Questions
We propose to investigate our hypothesis by means of two specific research questions.
First, can neurology help to quantify intensity? Our working hypothesis is that such quantification is possible by means of:
- a neurological interpretation of intensity as activation patterns that richly connect many parts of the brain, and
- interview and analysis techniques that operationalize this interpretation of intensity for practical research.
Second, what is the relationship between religious experiences and intensity? Putatively non-religious people have intense experiences that can be extremely meaningful for them. Thus, our working hypothesis is that not all intense experiences are religious and not all religious experiences are intense, but that there is a significant overlap between intense experiences and religious experiences. If correct, this narrows the scope of religious experiences that can be studied through the lens of intensity, but it also broadens the scope of intense experiences beyond the nominally religious in a way that impacts subsequent philosophical interpretation of the religious significance of intensity.
- We expect that when religious experiences are also intense experiences the subject will describe these as particularly significant and informative for his or her religious life. Given a suitable method, the comparison of self-reported impact of intense religious experiences versus intense non-religious experiences on the lives of our participants will provide a quantitative window onto the ways in which intense experiences function to shape behaviors and beliefs of ordinary people.
- We expect that the distinctive neurological and semantic markers for intense experiences that subjects are willing to call religious are substantially similar to markers of intensity in other existentially intense events with no religious overtones. We suspect that cultural and contextual factors account for the difference between these domains of intensity. If this is correct, then we gain leverage on the philosophical question about the line between contextual conditioning and neural production of intensity. If this is incorrect, we gain robust knowledge of what is distinctive about religious intense experiences.
