Do the world’s religions and contemplative traditions send people to the same place – compassion, bliss, awe, a sense of God, awareness, or the universe?
We conducted a study that asked a smaller version of this question.
As scientists with a research focus on brain science and spirituality, we ask whether people from very different spiritual traditions – Buddhism and Christian Pentecostalism – use their bodies in similar ways when they’re in intense contemplation.
To make this concrete, let’s play a game. Consider the following quote and ask if it sounds like a person engaged in ecstatic Christian prayer – speaking in tongues – or someone in a deeply quiet Buddhist meditative state known as jhāna.
I let go of everything … It feels like you’re falling. The first few times that happened to me, it was terrifying. I like to call it ‘slipping upward’ because it feels like a lifting to me…
