2007
Dec 
30

When Religion Attacks…

7:22  
 

What will come over us next?

Jesus on a Fish-Stick [image: Associated Press]

I caught this article this week on Reuters. Apparently, it has become a bit of a problem in Jerusalem that while people are there visiting holy sites and relics, something comes over them, causing odd behavior, spontaneous preaching and the perceiving of visions of prophets and messiahs. This phenomenon has been termed “Jerusalem Syndrome.” However, this label is reserved for pilgrims who have no prior mental disorders. I will leave that completely alone.

The topic of religious experiences is an interesting one. William James argued that they were somehow simply a part of the human psychological structure. As humans, he said, we have mystical experiences as a normal part of our development. The degree to which this has an effect over an individual, of course, varies greatly from individual to individual.

I have always taken the stance, as a hardcore materialist, that these experiences are physio-neurological events which our brains cannot interpret rationally. Rather, when such an event occurs, we go outside the normal rational structure which we have developed since childhood and unconsciously search our minds for some explanation, which generally results in something which appears more like a dream rather than your average experience of external phenomena. Some part of the process confuses the interpreting mechanism in our brains and we interpret these events as though we are perceiving and processing sensory data from external sources.

Mamoon Yusaf, my friend and a London-based NLP coach, confirms that this perceptive shift is also possible to produce synthetically using tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Since our perception of sensory data from external sources is actually processed by the same parts of our brain as our internal representations, human beings can actually alter their emotional and physiological state through simply meditating upon and reproducing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues in our minds. Conversely, when a human being alters his physiology—by, say, smiling—his internal representations will change considerably.

So, imagine this scenario: you go to Jerusalem. You carry a bunch of internal representations with you regarding feeling inspired by religious text, artifacts, sites. You walk into [insert place of religio-historical significance]. Your brain starts mulling over the fact that you are standing in the place where [insert important religio-historical event here] happened. You feel a sense of inspiration. Your body feels tingly or light, you head starts to swim a little bit. You begin to look around and imagine the places that [insert religio-historical figure here] stood, talked, laughed, spoke, performed a miracle, etc. These stories have a great deal of significance for you. You, standing in this place, seeing these things in your mind, contemplating the mysteries and significance of this event/place, have begun to confuse your perceptions of the world outside of your body with the vivid, emotionally charged pictures/sounds/feelings in your imagination. You are physically standing in a spot of religio-historical signifcance. You are emotionally seated in that place in your mind. At this point, for your brain and your body, your outer and inner perceptive mechanisms are the same, and you shift into that place/time.

This is the only explanation of “Jerusalem Syndrome” that makes any sense to me. We can argue about where the inspiration comes from or what has made these things significant to the point of causing a “mystical” experience, but that will tell us nothing. This would be an interesting topic to study with the help of neuro-psychologists and neuro-linguists. Perhaps I will conduct such a study in coming years. I believe that this model can be applied to my particular field of study—Sufism—though I feel like it would be pretty significant if we could find data that suggest a wider application of such a theory.

Fun times ahead for the scientific study of religious behavior! In the mean time, I hope that you all see Jesus, Buddha, one of the 99 names of Allah, or something spiritually significant to you on your toast, tomatoes, lambs, or fishsticks and have a good weekend.