When Bad Things Happen to Good People

0:00This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 1759, the French writer and philosopher Walter published a satirical novel about a young man and his tutor. Panglass, the tutor, instructs the student Candide that they live in, quote, the best of all possible worlds. As the story unfolds, Candide witnesses war, disease, natural disasters, torture and death. Panglass encounters many of these tragedies himself. Yet, no matter what happens, he continues to insist that everything is unfolding exactly as it should. It's from this character that we get the word Panglassian, describing someone who relentlessly maintains that everything is for the best. Most of us are not as optimistic as Panglass, but many of us do carry assumptions in our heads about

1:01how life works, that good choices lead to good outcomes, that the world is fair, and that everything will make sense in the end. These assumptions are often unconscious and unarticulated, until something happens to destabilize us. This week on Hidden Brain and in a companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, when bad things happen to good people. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts, automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parents permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing

2:06work to protect teens online at instagram.com slash teen accounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain is in fixed, it's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want. A leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible, because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu slash brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced latte as you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at Progressive.com Progressive casualty insurance company affiliates

3:12and other insurers, not available in all states. Modern life gives us remarkable control over our surroundings. We can navigate unfamiliar cities, communicate across continents and order almost anything with the touch of a button. Day after day, the world responds to our wishes. It's easy to start believing that life itself works this way. That with enough effort, planning and good decisions, we can shape our destiny. But sooner or later, many of us encounter a reality that refuses to submit to our wishes. At Duke University, historian Kate Boller has studied the currents that shape people's cultural and religious worldviews when they encounter these unexpected events. She's also had occasion to think about this in the context of her own life. Kate Boller, welcome to Hidden Brain. I'm so glad to be with you. Kate, by the time you were in your mid-30s, you had achieved some significant personal

4:16and professional milestones. What was your life like at the time? Well, I finally got my ridiculous dream. I know not everyone wants to be a historian when they grow up, but both my parents were professors and all I wanted was to live in a tower with many books and gargoyles. So when I got a job, like right out of grad school at Duke University, it was truly so much better than I ever thought I could achieve. You were also, I understand, married and you just had a child? Yeah, I married my high school sweetheart and I'd had years of infertility and finally had this, like squishy little baby that smelled like applesauce and cookies and just like I was just one of those like seasons in the sun. This kid came to me as a complete revelation. I never thought I could have him and so when I was finally just, he's in my arms,

5:17it really felt like everything had come together. So I made all these positive developments. You'd also been experiencing some stomach pain and I understand this was bad enough that it would make you periodically keel over for a few minutes. It was like very sharp sudden pains and it would just come and go. So I would be walking down the hallway and then all of a sudden just like double over and need a minute and I thought, well, this is like not normal. So I went to every doctor who would have me and because I'm at the university, it was really only like a two building over walk to try to see every single specialist but every time they couldn't find anything on a scan and said it was probably normal. You had one memorable meeting with a gastrointestinal surgeon. Paint me a picture of that encounter, okay? By the time I got this appointment, I was truly at my withsend. I didn't look well. I looked like

6:23sweaty and like my mouth was tinny with like the saliva that you get from being too much pain. I looked fried. I felt fried and then when I just got yet another, there's nothing we can do, I lost it. I was like, I am not leaving this. I'm not leaving this room until you give me another scan. And what happened? I went and did the scan and went home. I figured they'd find something in my gall bladder. There would some talk of like maybe it was just kind of like wonky numbers in my gall bladder and they would just have to do a minor surgery and no big deal. And so I was at the office the next day. I was walking on my little treadmill and got a phone call from a nurse who had not met. And she said that the results of my scan showed. And then it was very blurry in my mind. Like I knew she was talking and I couldn't figure out what the words meant. It was something about how it was

7:28everywhere. And I said, I'm sorry, I don't understand what's everywhere. And then she said, cancer. And I couldn't, I think she was trying to like get me to come into the hospital right away. But all I could think to say was, but I have a son. Because it was like, it was the, it was honestly the best argument I could think of like why it shouldn't, why this can't happen and why this shouldn't be me. And I like left my office in my work outfits, went to the hospital, got admitted, got changed into one of those blue rough cotton gowns and felt like I suddenly started a very different life. So you were 35 years old at the time, Kate. And you went from basically

8:36nothing to stage 4 cancer in one conversation. Yeah, that's right. And I honestly, I don't even think I knew what cancer was. Like I didn't have cancer in my family. I knew it sounded bad. I thought it was something that happens to you if it's passed on to you or you have something obvious. It just, it truly had not one framework in my mind that it could, it could happen to me. I'm wondering what conversations you had with your husband, Kate. I'm sure that the things that happened in those, like in the, in what feels to me like forever, probably only happened in like two days. But it felt like it was just a whole, a whole new world. I had, I just, I had to suddenly say everything. I love you. I'm so sorry. Please take care of our son.

9:38Um, has anyone called my parents? Like it's a weird thing. You're not sure if you should prepare everyone for the worst or if you should suddenly start acting like I was somehow going to find my way out of this. Your religious person, Kate, did you find yourself praying at the time? Prayer is not, I don't know. It's just always been like breathing for me. And all of it was rage. Like we're just rage. I can't believe this is, you know, and just like, God, why is this happening to me? Haven't I been faithful this whole time? I sometimes think of it as like you've got two PM prayers and two AM prayers. And like two PM prayers are like pretty reasonable. They are nuanced. They have some measure of like, okay, I, I can see the reality of this whole thing. Two AM

10:42prayers are like, God, make it stop. I will do anything. And there's also a complete surrealness to it. Like, is there anything I can do? God, I swear to you, if I get through this, I will, you know, do anything you want. Be anyone you want. Just get me out of this. At times like this, Kate, I think what we end up mourning is not just what's happening to us, but we also mourn the things that we thought that we would do. And we fear that we are not going to be able to do. Talk about that. What were the dreams that you were mourning that were not going to come true now? I really wanted to see the pyramids. When I was little, I got a hieroglyph set. Why wasn't I an Egyptologist? Why didn't I work for the UN? What about all these people I thought I would be? And places I thought I would go. And, and, and the person in particular I thought I would make my son by being able to go everywhere with him. I used to change his little diaper in like,

11:48in that those like, sweet middle-the-night moments and be like, wow, I just wanted, oh, I want to take you everywhere. I would say it over and over and over again. So the idea that I would not become all those people and that somehow it would foreclose a story for everyone else. And it felt like there could have been so many more worlds to discover. In the wake of her diagnosis, Kate struggled to deal with the ways her beliefs about herself and her life had been shattered. But as she began to share the news with others, she encountered a new problem. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

12:49Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at Progressive.com Progressive casualty insurance company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperature starts to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these

13:50everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. When someone we know experiences at tragedy, most of us instinctively want to help. We offer comfort, advice, prayers, whatever we can think of. These gestures are often sincere and generous, but they can also be driven by something we rarely acknowledge. Other people's tragedies force us to confront the possibility that our own lives are not as predictable or secure as we'd like to believe.

14:53Kate Boller is a historian at Duke University. After she learned that she had staged four colon cancer, she found herself observing the ways people in her life reacted to her situation. Kate, some of your friends and these were primarily your fellow academics, responded in a distinctive way to the news of your cancer. I understand it involved extensive use of internet search engines. Yeah, I think researchers want to research and there was a very frantic attempt to out-know this very sudden diagnosis. And so, yeah, my colleagues just were looking into genetic mutation possibilities. I remember how tempting that was. My mom found me one time at like one in the morning sitting in the middle of the floor and I printed out all the blood work and

15:55all the paperwork and all the from everything that you know they that everyone wanted to try and I had them spread out around me. It looked like rings of a dying tree. And my mom said, oh, honey, you can't out-know this. And everything in me was like, yeah, but I have to try. Okay. Another group of your friends Kate responded somewhat differently. These were your hippie crunchy friends. What did they? What did they say? They were very eager for me to explore the nutritional reasons why this had happened to me. I think every cancer opens up like a different kind of conversation about causality and colon cancer gave me all the food medicine people. I got three new juicers unwanted juicers. I thought like they're in a recent like spate of like cure your cancer with a kale was very hot at the time. So I really got a lot of very highly specific

17:02diets, nutritional advice. People just like came over and poured vegetables on my doorstep basically. And the reason why that was more uncomfortable than the attempt to out-know it was it was really starting to creep into the wasn't it your fault. Like have you been eating a lot of red meats? I had I had somebody actually slap a cookie out of my hand at one point as I was like sitting after chemo just absolutely exhausted and like slap a cookie out of my hand because didn't I know the sugar causes cancer? And it was it was very it was hard to go from now trying to live in a newly highly medicalized world where all kinds of things have to happen to your body that you don't get to pick. And then the second you get home now have all of everything that I put in my mouth be evaluated. So your academic friends were trying to help you think your way out of cancer.

18:12Your crunchy friends were trying to help you eat your way out of cancer. Yeah that's exactly right. Now your professor at Duke University's Divinity School and many of the individuals you know are people of faith. I'm wondering how your religious colleagues and friends responded to the news of your illness. It was actually one of the most meaningful things I have ever experienced right after I was diagnosed. They held like an impromptu church service and I saw the recording later and it was it was like shocking to me to see people that I'd only seen in very respectable settings like beg and plead and weep on my behalf like the desperation that comes from a certain kind of faithfulness that like God hears God might answer maybe God might intervene.

19:28So you wrote about your diagnosis in an essay that was published in the New York Times and you received a many letters subsequently Kate. Not all of them were as kind or as generous as your colleagues at Duke University. Tell me about some of the feedback you received. I thought that I had tried to write an article that was basically saying that it's incredibly painful to die in a culture where everybody has a reason and one of the great ironies of course was that many people read that article and was like oh my gosh it feels like this woman would really like me to let her know what the reason is I will send that to her now. And so I got like I mean thousands of pieces of mail. I got banners with triumphant scripture that I was supposed to repeat over and over again so that I could be healed. I got I mean I think one of the meanest ones was somebody wrote the reasons why he thought that I probably deserved to die on the back of a church bulletin and I think most of

20:32the attempts were trying to pour certainty over pain and to say let me fill in the spiritual gaps and give you a spiritual explanation for how God works. God is just there must be something in here about God's justice that you're not acknowledging. God is is understandable surely you can sift through your own spiritual past and find some kind of opening some kind of causality or or actually maybe maybe God has provided a set of spiritual tools that you're not using let me explain them to you so that you know what to do and some of them were from other religious traditions. Like for those who believe in reincarnation don't worry this your story will go on or I mean I will never forget the like the the love in some of these very heartbreaking notes about like Kate I have wasted my own life I wish I wish there was a way that we could that that you could

21:36take a little of mine and I could take a little of yours and we could make a world that is fair. Hmm I understand that at one point one of your neighbors stopped by your house to share a sentiment with your husband. Yes I had a neighbor stopped by and she told my husband while everything happens for a reason and he immediately just said I'd love to hear it I'd love to hear the reason my wife is dying. The responses to your illness was so consistent that you eventually divided them into different categories and you described these groups of people as the minimizers the teachers and the solutions people unpack those terms for me. Well the minimizers are pretty sure that whatever is

22:43going on it's probably not as bad as I think it is. These were at least any sentence starting with at least is typically a minimizer at least you're at a good hospital. I remember when we were in the earliest days really struggling with weather or not this would bankrupt me and my family and my parents actually at least someone said you have the intellectual resources to deal with it. I always wanted to like push back of like at least it's about stage five cancer like when do I graduate into your compassion. At least the minimizers are pretty easy to spot. The teachers want you to learn something that might save your own life and it could be an emotional lesson, it could be a medical lesson but that there's always have I heard about

23:48you know drinking the blood of ducks from albacarkey like it could get increasingly like ridiculous but there's just such a in the face of this much pain and uncertainty they need to hand you a lesson so that you can climb your way back onto the boat. The solutions people are upset that there is not more certainty and that you should be on a quest to really solve the problem of pain. And so solutions people are not going to believe that you've ever done enough and they're going to want to hear you say that there's a new clinical trial that you're in, that there's like another faith healer that you're listening to or seeking out but they will never accept that illness is likely something that's happening to you and not with your consent.

24:55So I'm hearing a common thread in all of these responses people are trying in some ways to preserve a sense of logic and order around an event that was frightening in its randomness. Does that sound right to you as an explanation for these different veins of feedback and advice? Yeah I think that's exactly right there's a genuine discomfort with that degree of uncertainty and the immediate next step is to try to transform a tragedy into a kind of lesson or staging ground for some kind of next step. And this seems to me to be like a deeply American impulse is that there's no setback just set up that this can't simply be unond doing that there there has to be math here this somehow we'll have to add up. Hmm.

25:56You know one thing I'm thinking about here is the concept of a just world this is described by the psychologist Melvin Lerner for example and he theorized that people have a deep-seated need to believe that the world is fair that life gives you what you deserve and in some ways this might be a defense mechanism you know this terrible thing happened to Kate because somehow she deserved it but I don't deserve something like this so it won't happen to me. I think to one of the extrapolations particularly in I mean most theological traditions is also just working back from the character of God if God is good if God is loving if God is doctor dot then surely like what good God like as little snippet in the New Testament says when your child asks for bread would give them a stone and so I think some of it too just comes from like an intuition about about the goodness of why we were made so why is it then that it looks when you

26:59look around like we're all just stumbling headlong into pain after pain. Talk a moment about the desire for control here when you tell me about your colleagues googling the heck out of the Mayo Clinic website I see people desperately trying to reassort control over something that feels uncontrollable to them. Yeah this is this definitely stems from I mean the many forms of what I think of as like everything as possibleism in particularly in American culture is there worry that if not everything is possible then we sink into realism and despair and nothing is possibleism and what it's really lacking is the kind of precision and nuance around being able to define a space between these two totalizing frameworks but people will immediately assume that it looks like you're just giving up. You found yourself growing angry at the reassurances

28:03that were offered by people in your life and by the culture at large and your irritation came to a head one day when you were at the hospital gift shop can you describe for me what happened? I am a researcher who has spent so long studying these forms of American certainty I'm really good at spotting which books in the marketplace blame people for their own illness so when I was walking by the hospital gift shop I noticed that there were number of books for sale in the hospital that that offer a pretty simplistic solution for why people have cancer and why people are sick and so I went in with just a researcher certainty that that shouldn't be there here in this hospital so I started dismantling the bookshelf just like clawing these books off the shelf looked over and realized there was like basically a 12 year old running the gift shop that was like probably looked

29:05at me and was like ma'am are you crazy and then I just thought no no I should probably explain so I was like I promise I'm not crazy this is my area of expertise but of course I just looked absolutely unhinged is now I'm like stacking them on the ground and they're like no no no I will don't worry I'll give you recommendations of what other books you can that you can put up here instead so as I'm tearing them off some very sweet manager has been brought out to like put them back on and assure me of course they don't know what these books say and but I just everywhere I looked there was somebody trying to sell a solution that that it becomes a particular form of cruelty when you're the ones offering so as a historian of religion Kate you recognize the roots of some of these ideas in a phenomenon

30:07called the prosperity gospel explain this idea to me the American prosperity gospel really comes out of a series of religious ideas from the late 19th century and they are mostly ideas about the power of the mind they argue that every person through the incredible latent power of the mind that they can harness their own thoughts and channel them in a positive direction and if they can channel the power of their mind through positive words that they'll be able to unleash reality so just as God said let there be light and there is light so to then believers any right thinking right speaking person should be able to create a new reality and that that's that's a religious tradition called new thought and it starts in a very rarefied religious form but almost immediately it makes its way into good housekeeping magazine and the very cheap emergent genre of self-help and so soon people from

31:17you know the very rich to the very poor are beginning to hear more and more how a certain kind of very positive American can live out the American dream if they can think and speak in a particular way and how does this theory then account for people who are suffering for people who are diagnosed with state forecolon cancer well I think the the most straightforward answer would be that we have failed to produce the results of the right kind of faith and that we would need to double down on thinking positively speaking positively that our that our symptoms are effectively lies that are acting louder than the truth which is that we have control over our bodies this is a very mind mind mind theology it acknowledges the reality of the body it's not like Christian science it's it's a cousin of Christian science but it says actually like it the body isn't evil but it needs

32:22to be tamed by these positive words and so that and and everybody has the power to do it so there's no exception but if there's no exception that means there's no excuse so in other words the guy who's writing on the back of a church booklet and who sends you that that booklet in the mail is basically saying look you know if only your thoughts were redirected in the appropriate way you wouldn't be suffering and the fact that you are suffering suggests that your thoughts are not directed correctly that's right I think what prosperity believers get frustrated by is that people like me are not harnessing their power as effectively as they could so sometimes they'll say things like it's like you were handed a check and you won't take it to the bank or it's like your there's a light switch right there you just won't flip it so this power is inside of all of us we just need to activate it and then we will be able to see the results in our health in our wealth and in

33:25our overall happiness so just look around you are your own show and tell. Following Hakanza diagnosis, Kate discovered that when tragedy strikes people often rush to explain it. Some see a lesson others a blessing in disguise still others a test of character or faith. Beneath these different stories lies a common impulse a desire to make sense of the senseless. When we come back what would happen if we didn't seek to control to explain? What would happen if we stopped asking why me? Also in our companion story to this episode available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus we take a deep dive into the fascinating origins and surprising spread of the prosperity gospel that Kate has studied. If you're a subscriber that episode is available right now it's titled The Gospel of Success. If you're not yet a subscriber

34:30please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hidden brain. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber only content and you'll be helping to support all the reporting, writing and fact checking that goes into each episode of the show. Again that support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hidden brain. You're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram teen accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens the content they can see and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parents permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's

35:30ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com slash teen accounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side and share feedback like I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash hb. Terms and conditions apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Has this conversation evoked your own experience with adversity and loss? If you have a personal account you'd be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience or a question or comment for historian Kate Boehler, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

36:34Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org using the subject line suffering. Again that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Kate Boehler is a historian at Duke University Divinity School. She is the author of Joyful Anyway as well as everything happens for a reason and no cure for being human. After your diagnosis Kate you started to focus on helping people come to terms with the fact that bad things sometimes happen for no rhyme or reason. Explain why this was important for you to do. The truth is I was very lonely. It had been all of that cultural messaging about how it was I mean probably my fault. What could I still do? Why wasn't I fixing this already? My illness was just like it wasn't just that it was a three month stretch or a six month stretch. It just went on

37:36for years and so in that long period I realized how desperate I was to tell a different story and really to hear the stories of other people who'd gone through similar things. That really began my deep desire to try to create a little bit more loving ambiguity around why people suffer. I understand that you actually have some anti self help sayings on your bookshelf. Yes I have a few favorites. What doesn't kill you will try again tomorrow. Really makes me laugh. We made a big one of my friends that said live laugh hug. That really brings me joy. Yeah I think things not having to constantly improve us give us the kind of liberation to be whoever we ended up being instead of whoever this story was supposed to make us. I'm wondering what you would say to people who would tell you. I actually find

38:41comfort and reassurance in those kinds of messages. Well I think there's a difference between forcing people into stories of exhausting, contextless, hopefulness. I think what people are really asking for in times of suffering which is they want to be able to look into the eyes of someone who loves them and say first will you be a witness? Will you see what this has cost me? And then we need them to say I will keep pace with your hope. I will hold your hope when you can't any longer. Also I won't turn away from the difficulty of what you're trying to do which is still hold possibility but not be blind to reality. There's attention here or cake because I think there is some medical evidence that people with a more optimistic outlook tend to do better both when they're dealing with illness but even when they're not. But also of

39:44course being relentlessly optimistic, relentlessly positive can also be delusional and there's a real tension between those two things. Yes. I think we should parse the word optimism there because there's I think these are different flavors of you know of of feelings that we want to group onto the positive end of the spectrum. I would imagine that it's people who still hold open what what better might look like that there's still beautiful things ahead of them. Like that to me is a deep stubborn kind of hopefulness that I imagine does have enormous health implications. Those kinds of people are going to hold a sense of like self-continuity between the person they were before, the person who is frankly being robbed in the meantime and the person who they might yet be. Now I think this is different though than a certain kind of of of blind optimism of what why we would

40:47say toxic positivity is because people like that who say I will be okay no matter what those people are not emotionally flexible. They are quite unlikely to listen to the advice of their doctors who might be giving them what they would then consider negative confession or that's the that's the religious term for like negative words that they worry might create reality. So I've been to prosperity, gospel funerals, people who died after having forced everyone around them to say that this could never happen to them and the kind of devastation that happens to the people who were never allowed to admit the truth. I can't overstate how awful it is to be forced to live inside a world in which only good things can happen. You draw on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor

41:52to argue that we can endeavor to remain porous. Explain this idea to me. I think Charles Taylor is the genius of explaining the modern self and he has a very helpful distinction between the way we imagined our selfhood, our relationship to the world in a pre-modern version as being porous as being the idea that ourselves are the very nature of our being is open and he meant it not just in a sentimental way like to God but also to like terror, to despair, to reality, big or reality as it is. Now that we prefer to have what you call the buffeted self which is the self as a sealed off project. This is the modern self. Frankly this is the this is the self that's most likely to be an optimizer to want to make every act of both meaning and longevity

42:54and happiness a kind of project and the problem with that kind of self is we're going to look at ourselves and see only homework is just like a project to be finished and I think what's so exhausting about being us now in an age of AI and social media and endless endless everything as possible is that we think of every dark chapter as something that has to be contained and then not just maintained but improved and what's kind of lovely about Charles Taylor's vision is that like if we are the porous self if we're the one that is sometimes acted upon then then maybe we don't have to have such like a fists clenched attitude toward us as a self improvement project maybe we are maybe we are more open to both the good and the bad but

43:54when we relinquish that kind of self making I think we will find that in that possibility more beautiful than bad will come our way and we will have spared ourselves the delusion of that much control. I mean in some ways the idea that pops in my mind as you describe the work of Charles Taylor is that if you think about species that have scales on the outside they are hunkered down so if you think of a tortoise inside a shell or a turtle inside a shell you know you have the hard stuff on the outside and it's armor that protects you against the world and it is something of a radical risk to put your nerve endings on the outside because of course that exposes you to pain and many of us respond to that by trying to build psychological armor to protect ourselves but really what I'm hearing you say is that when we do that we also see ourselves

44:57off from everything that is good and positive and beautiful and not just things that are painful. I think that's I think that's perfectly said. I think this is partly why the modern self is so impervious to beauty is because when they try to immunize themselves against uncertainty they they accidentally made a prison. you also talk about the importance of embracing the absurd and I understand that you've actually gone to some lengths to try and embrace the absurd. You're saying that in such a nice way because you know my answer is so stupid. I like I really love dumb stuff and it was I think it's partly because when I was diagnosed with cancer it was frankly like it was like all tragedy is it just absurd it's just dumb it's for it's for no

45:57reason and what I noticed is that just like the worst moments can hit you in a senseless way. strangely like beautiful things of absurdity can also hit you and then it's for no reason way that actually can light you up. So I love to go visit world's largest objects, world's largest ball of twine, world's largest thermometer, world's largest and smallest palm onion. It is so dumb but what I found is that like because inside of joy one of the primary emotions is delight and for me like the feeling of random adventure and being opened up to the world that I don't always get to choose it's that that like it makes me feel like life is full even when in a moment it should have been empty but look there it is the world's you know largest frying pan. you also write that we can get over a fear of asking for help but a fear that you yourself

47:02experienced talk about this and the importance of doing so. I think one of the great lies of pain is that it will never end and that no one wants to hear about it because isn't it so dark and frankly costly and it is costly like we'd be lying if we didn't say it doesn't cost the people around us when we are miserable but those lies will convince us of something which is utterly untrue which is that people don't want to help. Yes it will be costly but people want to reach out they wish they had something to do they love to feel useful and frankly like in the end we are all going to be group projects and so I had initially really believed that because all these bad things were happening that somehow I was the bad thing and that I shouldn't I shouldn't burden people with with the reality of how scared I was and frankly all I needed like in the early days I had to get medical

48:05treatment outside of the state and I couldn't afford my own plane tickets and it was so embarrassing because we don't want to say the thing that is true which is that medical bankruptcy is the number one form of bankruptcy in the United States and that it's not just that something bad happens to you but it threatens to take everything that you love and so we get really scared that if people knew that that all of a sudden you'd be alone in a different way and it frankly like it just isn't true like we have to find more and more ways to let people know how they can help and frankly like it will create new kinds of relationships and friendships that you wouldn't have dreamed if you just stayed an autonomous robot your whole life. You talk about the importance of rousing ourselves to provide service to other people and in some ways this is related to what you just talked about but perhaps not just providing service at a time when you know someday in the future

49:05when we are passed an illness or passed a period of suffering but even when we are suffering to ask ourselves how we can be of service to other people why do you think this is important to do? There is a really weird relationship between joy and service that I think is underestimated and I say weird because it's just not good math it should be that when we give we have less because that's how subtraction works. It's like it's just not how it is though like there so partly so joy is socially contagious and it's highly connective meaning we feel closer to other people and we feel more in live end and it often is triggered by service so sometimes when we think when we're going through something awful like I should just carry this by myself one thing that we will have forgotten is people derive enormous satisfaction and meaning making from being able to do something useful for others. I told every single person I know

50:06how much I love gummy bears do I love them that much? Not that really but like I knew that what people wanted was to feel like they had a way to delight me when they knew that my life was pretty awful and so I still get gummy bears from friends and what they're saying is we're all desperate to find a foothold into each other's lives give people an opportunity to share in your delight and I swear to you it will bring them joy. A reminder has this conversation evoked your own experience with adversity and loss? If you have a personal account you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience or a question or comment for historian Kate Boehler please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone two or three minutes is plenty then email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org use the subject line suffering again that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org

51:08so Kate in August 2024 you are able to announce that you are in durable remission from cancer you've said that even though you are now cancer free there's no going back you're right I am forever changed by what I discovered life is so beautiful and life is so hard unpack that idea for me Kate life is so beautiful my first so hard is just something I I realized I was saying over and over and over again right when I got sick it was I could feel my own heartbreaking from my own life for my own son from my own family but then I'd be like at the hospital and and someone would lean on someone else's shoulder and they would you know put a stranded hair behind their ear and I realized just like how how beautiful everyone is like how heroic everyone is as they are all going through

52:09things that we can't possibly understand and that cracking open to the beauty and the tragedy of the world it it did convince me that a broken heart is an open heart and it's that kind of heroes journey feeling that I feel like I once I was set on it it has it has utterly changed how I hope to see other people forever the beauty and tragedy that Kate sees all around her it's all around us too it's just harder to see this big picture when we're caught up in the busy details of our daily lives our minds focus on work meetings and our kids schedules and the chores we have to do around the house it isn't until something big and terrible happens that we pick up our heads and even notice the bigger picture it's precisely at times like this that many

53:11people turn to spirituality and religion when Kate was diagnosed with cancer she resorted to two a.m. prayers as in God I will do anything to get out of the situation recently we heard from a listener named Anne one Saturday in 2003 she felt a piercing pain in her head and shook it off but brought it up with her sister a nurse just in case upon hearing the symptom she put her arm around me tisked and said I should have gone to the doctor promised me she said you'll go to the doctor first thing Monday and I vowed that I would and Monday I got the kids off to school packed my duffel with tennis clothes for a lesson that evening and went to work I call the doctor's office and gave the details to the triage nurse who said she'd get back to me within 20 minutes she called back and she wasn't messing around go to the emergency room immediately have someone drive you don't finish any work tasks go now you may have had a stroke

54:12at the ER the doctor gave Anne a scan and diagnosed her with a brain bleed and stayed in the hospital for more testing including an MRI I was never so afraid the gravity of the situation had finally hit me I could die situated in the MRI machine I waited while the technicians finished their prep just like still they said so as I leave there I began to pray dear God don't let me die don't leave me I'm scared don't leave my boys without a mom I pleaded and in that moment a weight of what can only be described as physical and utter peace came upon me it felt like someone lowered a warm blanket of calm and love and certainty on top of me certainty that all would be fine I'd never had a physical experience like that before we'll back to my room I was met by the concerned and worried faces of my husband and pastor they couldn't know why I was almost giggly as I hopped onto the hospital bed

55:17that evening an neurologist came to my hospital room and announced all tests were negative and I could go home in fact he quipped pretend it never happened it wasn't anomaly just to be sure they rechecked in six weeks and all was good that was 23 years ago and I'm still here and in good health for most of the 20th century science had little to say about moments like the one and experienced it would be filed away as a coincidence or wishful thinking or a trick of a stressed mind psychology in particular tends to treat spiritual experiences not as something to be explained but as something to be explained away but there are some researchers who've been asking if the capacity for spirituality isn't a glitch in human cognition but a feature something built into the architecture of the brain when we come back listener share stories about their spiritual

56:20experiences and we ask whether there is a way to think about these experiences scientifically you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because scaling your business model isn't a set it and forget a thing you want to test iterate and launch new pricing plans constantly with Stripe Billing you can easily experiment with new subscriptions and launch new usage based and hybrid pricing models so your revenue model can changes fast as your product and market fit evolve reach new customers expand globally and keep revenue operations ready for whatever comes next. Stripe Billing powers any business model it's built to support you no matter how much you scale with the network powering more than 1.6% of global

57:22GDP and the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI50 companies that have monetized to date learn how you can power any business model at Stripe.com slash billing. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in boarding and lounge access onboard enjoy menus from renowned French chefs wines and champagne selected by a sommelier and free high speed Wi-Fi when it's time to rest settle into a fully adjustable life flat bed with added mattress comfort the art of travel elevated because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam. The Western world tends to pit science and spirituality against each other. Science is based on testable hypotheses and evidence

58:26rationality. Spirituality on the other hand is rooted in faith it requires a belief in the supernatural. At Columbia University psychologist Lisa Miller seeks to bridge that gap. She studies spirituality and transcendence from a scientific perspective. She's the author of the Awakened Brain, the new science of spirituality and our quest for an inspired life. Lisa was a guest on two previous episodes of Hidden Brain waking up your spiritual brain parts one and two. Today she joins us for your questions answered our segment in which we bring back guests to respond to listener questions and comments. Lisa Miller welcome back to Hidden Brain. Oh Shankar is wonderful to have an opportunity to come back and share some more, particularly around people's questions. To just remind listeners about some of the ideas we discussed in the earlier episodes you found that just as we exercise certain parts of the brain when

59:32we're doing a math problem or eating or painting we engage certain brain areas when we are praying or meditating. What are these brain areas Lisa? Yes we all, every one of us are born with the same circuits in our brain for transcendent relationship whether it be through prayer or meditation or a deep relationship with the spirit and through nature. The brains are common in universal amongst all of us when it comes to transcendent relationship. And is it possible to actually measure changes in the brain as people are undergoing spiritual experiences? Yes when we put these three networks together we perceive not just believe but perceive that we are loved held guided and never alone. We have measured the engagement of these three sets of circuits in the brain real time in an MI study in which through their recounting in a very detailed way

1:00:38of their direct spiritual relationship to the source their higher power. In real time we could track the circuits and it does not matter if I am Hindu or Jewish or Muslim or Catholic or Christian or spiritual not religious nature is my cathedral. The same three circuits run. Whether I say I am in deep relationship to God and the pews of my childhood house of worship or I am in glacier national park scenes light on the water and I feel part of all life the same neural circuits run. There is one awakened brain and we all have it. So this leads us to an interesting question that I think many listeners had which is how are you defining spirituality or a spiritual practice Lisa? It sounds like your definition is actually quite broad. You know scientists do not define spirituality all told we are very good at identifying

1:01:43threads of lived human spiritual life which are profoundly game changing onto the rest of our lives and we are very good at understanding the pathway or ideology if you will in the development of these dimensions of lived spiritual life. In the awakened brain I focus on that dimension of lived human spiritual life which is inborn has a home in the brain is absolutely game changing onto the rest of our life and that dimension is a capacity to perceive a transcendent relationship. That is not a belief it differs from the most frequently used sense of faith which would be tending more towards a belief. Spirituality as we understand it through the lens of science and in particular that thread of spiritual life which is game changing onto the rest of our lives in Nate and has a home in the brain is the capacity for a direct authentic

1:02:48relationship to the higher power and again source for us God has shem allah jesus the name doesn't matter because how we conceptualize of this great source is downstream of the foundational perceptual catch in the catchers met the direct perceived experience of relationship with the source. Now you found that engagement with a spiritual practice is associated with reduced stress improve resilience and faster physiological recovery we heard from several listeners who shared stories along these lines here is listener crystal. I used to travel and hike around the world but I am now a homebound disabled 46 year old woman and I leave the house twice a week often I can't feed myself I have a spiritual practice that I call the goddess meditation which I practice five to seven times a day it grounds me in my core essence guides me in my decisions

1:03:53big and small and has transformed my relationship to time itself I no longer despair at obstacles or loss I see them now as the necessary bridge to what is bigger and more lasting and ultimately making me stronger more grounded in my existential worth and more focused on my highest priorities I don't belong to a religion but the one thing I do know about God is this infinite love is infinite and I now understand I am in an infinite relationship of love I am unstoppable wow I am unstoppable I have to confess Lisa I feel a little envious of crystal yes crystal is unstoppable that was absolutely magnificent and beautiful and profound crystal thank you we are indeed built through profound challenges even traumas to deepen spiritually to widen the lens

1:05:01and discover so as crystal shared five to seven times a day she's in a deep transcended practice a goddess meditation in relationship to divine force so while we all do have this ability to grow spiritually through trauma it is the choice is made by crystal to say yes and practice deepen observe and shift our conceptualization of the nature of reality based on the hard data of direct experience you see that another benefit of an awakened brain is an increased capacity for purpose meaning and constructive engagement with the world how does a well developed spirituality make us better neighbors and team members yes well what I find perhaps most beautiful in this body of science is that the same neural correlates through which we experience

1:06:01a direct authentic relationship to God the higher power whatever one's word may be the same neural correlates through which we experience an authentic direct relationship to the source of life are the same neural correlates through which we feel the loving presence of the source through fellow human beings and fellow living beings this commonality in the neuro seat of transcendent relationship brings together a humanist who says my ultimate understanding of life is human's relationship to human with on the other hand perhaps an orthodox Jew or an evangelical Christian who has a if you will God centered or divine centered understand the in a relational spirituality as you do unto others you do unto me because there is one core deep seat of relational spirituality

1:07:02you mentioned a second ago that many people find themselves leaning on their faith or becoming spiritual for the first time when tragedy strikes their lives we helped from many listeners who had experiences like this here's Mariana who is a Quaker I grew up in a Quaker camp where we spent time in nature sitting in silence discussing the interlite and singing and joy together it's been an important part of my life my whole life and yet it wasn't until I had a relapse of a disabling chronic illness that took away my capacity to work and the dissolution of my 20-year marriage that had been the center of my life that I realized that my spiritual grounding was in fact the only thing that was still there for me as many things fell apart my question is what is the relative role of suffering and hardship in people's

1:08:13turning towards those circuits of our brain if you will and has your scientific study found anything about the relative role of hardship and suffering in a spiritual we guided life what do you think Lisa oh we do have very good science that mirrors exactly what Mariana knows through the wisdom of her direct experience and it's this together with my colleague Mernow Weissman we looked at people over 35 40 years and what we saw was that for many people suffering is a knock at the door to spiritual deepening 250 percent more likely to have felt betrayed to have felt abandoned to have faced illness that changes our way of life or lost someone we love before their time the real hardships of life don't break us if we can turn to the deeper source of life prayer

1:09:17meditation open the aperture we don't need to shoulder pain alone and in fact we're not built to we heard from several people Lisa who experienced a sudden turn to religion let's hear from two of them listener Danny was raised Christian but rejected religion as manipulative one day while I was working alone in a field I heard my name spoken even though no one was around in that moment I was overwhelmed by a simple realization trying to make life about myself would never bring lasting satisfaction my desires were too fickle and everything was ultimately temporary but if life was about God and participating in his eternal purpose then everything made sense my priorities changed almost instantly from that day forward I embraced Christianity I had a hunger to read the Bible and I finally understood the joy and conviction that I had once dismissed and other believers I

1:10:22also became much less judgmental realizing that sincere faith is something people grow into and listener Heidi shared this story about an experience she had when she was young I had broken up with my boyfriend when I was 16 and a few months later my mother ran into him and invited him for dinner she came back and told me I've invited you know your ex-boyfriend over for dinner I screamed but why would you do that she said I have no idea why I did it he came we had dinner we took a walk on after dinner and we were walking it was rainy it was dark it was quiet and I remember very distinctly hearing a voice that said if you move forward with this it will be forever and is that what you want and I remember not really having an answer but thinking about that that might be a profound question anyway he's my soulmate been married over 40 years and I do very much remember

1:11:32that day and it felt like an external voice asking me what I really wanted so in our previous conversation Lisa we talked about these moments called synchronicities explain what synchronicities are yes a synchronicity is when two events reveal a deeper unit of meaning or direction I would even say in this case we are hearing stories of mystical experience we are loved we are guided and we are never alone but we need to show up perceptually to perceive and listen and then what both Danny and Heidi do is act they hear the mystical experience as a blueprint for action Danny makes a choice to live a divine centered life Heidi is given quite clearly a choice will it be forever and she makes a decision and follows it through in other words mystical experiences are not only

1:12:36to be seen perhaps appreciated and then tucked away in the back drawer of our inner mind mystical experiences are the opportunity of our lifetime they are opening the double door and showing us a path forward to a sunlit landscape that is ours when we come back is intuition a form of spiritual guidance you're listening to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam I need a lawyer new CBS Thursday taking on Silicon Valley lawsuits no one else will the fight the Jackson overall is real I know these companies you're being surveilled from the creators of the good wife these tech pros meet guardrails where the disruptors now comes a new series critics are calling compelling and insightful is anybody not paranoid

1:13:42now we just got a win Cupertino new series Thursday 109 central part of CBS premier streaming on paramount plus support for Hidden Brain comes from us back with a us bank smartly visa signature card you earn an unlimited 2% cashback on every purchase no quarterly activations no categories to track just unlimited 2% cashback on every purchase visit us bank.com slash smartly card to learn more the creditor and issuer of this card is us bank national association pursuant to a license from visa USA ink some restrictions may apply this is Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam today we're exploring the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality Lisa Miller is a psychologist at Teachers College Columbia University her work seeks to bring scientific tools to the study of spirituality

1:14:53Lisa before the break we heard from people who heard voices that they interpreted as being divine we received an interesting question about how to interpret that kind of voice from listener Elizabeth I'm not a religious person but I do often experience notches in the right direction for example when I really should have already left something encourages me to go back into my study and then I see that I have left something important lying there another example is when a task or my long to do list suddenly stands out as urgent a specific business phone call for example and then it turns out that I shouldn't have called the day later because your office would have been closed for weeks even when things go wrong I can often trace them back to moments when I ignored a mental notch in the right direction I have been more alerted as lately and it feels like something intangible that I can trust I call it intuition is intuition a form of spiritual guidance

1:15:56what do you think Lisa what Elizabeth is calling intuition I might call direct knowing and here I find it is very helpful to take just a step back and wonder how does our brain really work for much of the 20th century we thought of the brain as something like a factory that makes or constructs thoughts increasingly in the past 10 20 years science has started to investigate the brain as a conduit to consciousness as more of an antenna we are built to be able to receive information now where this gets very interesting I often hear from creatives when I am in a state of painting or composing music or even listening to music I am in a spiritual state and indeed in music in art the creative is using inspiration much like the mystic is receiving if you will the

1:17:04divine touch on the system chapel many listeners drawing about synchronicities and had questions about what to make of these moments here is listener Kerry the woman who has become my stepmother was married quite young and had a baby who died at the age of 17 months my stepmother to be divorced after that and lived a single life for 10 years until she met my father my father was a single parent and when my stepmother to be came into our lives I was about 10 years old only years later did I learn that my stepmother's baby had died on the exact same day month and year that I was born but we always felt that this was some kind of divine intervention what were the odds that her baby would die on the same day that I was born and that 10 years later I would become her

1:18:08stepdaughter and she would become my beloved stepmother Lisa you told me during I last conversation about some amazing moments when you felt you were guided on a journey and you told me that if you had dismissed these moments as mere coincidences you would have missed out on some of the most important relationships in your life but as a psychologist you also know that our brains are wired to find patterns to seek out meaning how can we teleport the patterns that our minds generate from moments where the universe is trying to tell us something it's a very important question I hear this a lot how do I know I'm not making up a synchronous city what's the difference between imputing a pattern or wishing a pattern upon the universe and really listening inductively to the voice of the universe this is a practice is a practice that we can all engage to really perceive in our heart when we feel we are being guided and when we feel we're taking perhaps a warrior through

1:19:10a eccentric stance and pushing the universe now that's sad people who are new to synchronous city people who are new to trusting synchronous city people who might feel unsure whether synchronous is real the invitation is to be your own scientist to pay attention to the patterns that are so bold they hit you over the head and which in our deepest inner wisdom don't just tap them maybe but which undeniably hold deep meaning one of the complicated factors in studying spirituality and religious belief is that these terms mean a lot of different things to different people the major world religions often differ from each other in the number of deities the style of their rituals the moral codes they espouse Elisna named Deborah shared some thoughts about that not all religious or spiritual practices

1:20:11create that sense of feeling held feeling guided not all of them activate those neural networks i'm thinking for example of a client of mine who was gay and was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community very tight-knit community her faith was strong but in this community she felt that she did not belong she felt not held she felt excluded i'm also thinking of another client who was raised in a cult that involved ritual abuse a very strong spiritual practice and belief system of those people but it inculcated fear and none of that sense of being loved and held Lisa Miller alludes to this point in passing but i think it deserves more emphasis that it depends on the nature of the spiritual and religious practice it depends whether they activate

1:21:17those networks that she's talking about so in some ways what i hear Deborah saying Lisa is that your version of spirituality is a kinder and more generous version of spirituality than the spirituality that many people encounter in religions around the world how would you respond to to Deborah's comments so i would say there is a natural inborn human spirituality we know through twin studies that this capacity is heritable we know through MRI studies that there are common circuits universal circuits in the brain through which we feel and know we are loved held guided and never alone that is our birthright in other words that is natural human spirituality the capacity to perceive a universe if you will perhaps higher power god who is all loving all knowing and all present

1:22:17there's a match there now if i encounter a practice that violates loved health guided and never alone if i meet a ambassador who has dawned upon themselves the name of a faith that is only a human rendering of whatever that perspective may be and if i feel from that human rendering that they are not aligned with natural spirituality then there's the opportunity to authorize ourselves to feel and know if there's truly an alignment with our natural spirituality and that which is being taught or professed or practiced in other words just because something is presented as so-called spiritual or so-called religious or so-called anything else that has an ism on the end it may or may not align with natural spirituality

1:23:17when we come back practical steps to take when you're searching for spirituality you're listening to hidden brain i'm Shankar Vedanta i need a lawyer new cbs third day we're taking on silicon bali lawsuits no one else will the fight the jatcha over who is real i know these companies you're being surveilled from the creators of the good wife these tech pros meet guardrails where the disruptors now comes a new series critics are calling compelling and insightful is anybody not paranoid we just got win kupertino new series third day 10-9 central part of cbs premiere streaming on

1:24:17paramount plus it's not just electric it's toyota electric and during toyota's easy toy sales event going electric is easier than ever right now save instantly on a new toyota eb with special incentive programs for first time eb buyers and prior eb owners choose the sleek bz the adventurous bz woodland or this sport echr but don't wait these special savings won't last mean make it easy toyota let's go places this is hidden brain i'm Shankar Vedanta Lisa Miller is a psychologist at teachers college columbia university she's the author of the awakened brain the new science of spirituality and our quest for an inspired life Lisa in some nations religion plays a dominant role in the culture you can see this in the institutions that are a part of the community like churches or synagogues or mosques or temples you can also see the impact of religion and charities like the salvation army or in health care

1:25:22institutions like catholic hospitals or in groups like alcoholics anonymous but many people feel either that they've been burned by organized religion or they feel like spirituality is an intensely personal topic that they would prefer to experience alone here's listener Heather with a question along those lines the guest dr miller has really provided a pretty big tent for us to sit under together to think about not just religion but spirituality and just interconnectedness as a part of what becomes a more awakened brain and for that i'm very grateful i also had a question about building community in that sense it's a lot easier to join a church than it is to find like minded people who are really feeling into interconnectedness and the belief in something greater than themselves that may not follow a specific religious tradition and i'm wondering if

1:26:26dr miller has any ideas about building that sort of connection with like minded people in the us what do you think Lisa is is there a secular version of spirituality i think is the question that Heather was asking shankar remember from the brain science study perhaps one of the most moving findings we i felt in the whole body of work was that the same circuits in the brain through which i feel a deep relationship to god are the same circuits in the brain through which i feel that ultimate love towards you my brother my sister or fellow living beings in other words relational spirituality shares the same neural correlates whether it's directly to the higher power or the ultimate presence in one another traditionally as she put very beautifully it is true that it has been within faith traditions whether that is a synagogue or a church or a temple or a mosque

1:27:28the type of relationships which are loving holding and guiding have been centered around faith traditions but now that we have many people who are not affiliated there is a movement to create intentionally spiritually grounded relationships and all sorts of settings oftentimes insettings of service where the science chimes in once again is that when we looked at what form of spiritual practice most appears to cultivate and strengthen our spiritual awareness at the level of the brain it is service service is prayer and action service literally strengthens the cortex across the regions of spiritual perception if i were looking to build a community built on relational spirituality in which all are loved held and never alone i would build that community

1:28:31around service because already we have mobilized an opening of our heart and an augmenting of our spiritual perception hmm let's talk a moment about people who are struggling with their spirituality many people experience peaks and valleys in their faith practices here is listener julie for 40 years i was a pastor a minister in a progressive denomination and then in 2023 my oldest daughter died of a rare and very aggressive cancer and of course this was devastating for all of us i did not feel the presence of the divine of god with me in ways i had in the past but i did have a sense of being held i did struggle with god's absence or what i perceived to be god's absence and then in april of twenty four my husband and i drove a distance to see the full totality of the

1:29:35eclipse and we watched the solar eclipse from the small hillside it was an experience i'd never had before it would fill me with awe and also this immediate profound sense that the universe was so much bigger that the divine the mysterious was so much greater than anything i had ever comprehended before and since then i have been on a spiritual search uh and continue to to try and be open and awake and asking those questions that leesa miller asked and i am grateful again for this program thank you so i feel for julie leesa losing a child has to be one of the most difficult experiences anyone can go through now we've talked on the show about the experience of awe and its psychological benefits talk for a moment about the intersection between awe and

1:30:35transcendence and whether all itself can be a spiritual experience it's very interesting in the whole experience of awe when there is exactly what julie felt as she looked at the eclipse when that experience of awe holds a sense of vastness and connection to the universe at the same time that we might even have a sense of ego dissolution we effectively become part of the vastness there is often a spiritual growth even a spiritual awakening and people tend to say that they move forward in a more uplifted less depressed less anxious more holy meaningful way awe has within it for many people a dissolution of the bonded self that moves us out of the little s self as Carl Jung put it to the

1:31:41big s self that which is part of the greater field of life part of the oneness of the universe in quite specifically the feeling of connectedness and vastness many people heard our previous conversations leesa and wrote into say that they want to develop a spiritual practice for themselves but they don't know how here is listener Karen I grew up a very religious person and I agree that I was a much happier and much less depressed person when I followed a faith practice however somewhere along the line I lost my faith and I don't seem to be able to get it back again I was wondering if leesa had any ideas for how I could open my mind and become a spiritual person again Karen is a spiritual person already nobody has left out the opportunity perhaps before Karen is to engage this natural form of perception now it could be that dusting off a rusty prayer that was felt in a place of great love perhaps by the side of

1:32:45her grandma or perhaps in a moment whereas a child she did feel the presence could help her return to her natural open up the passageway it could also be that for Karen she's on a spiritual path in which being in the presence of people who are spiritually engaged of all different faiths and of all different practices naturally awakens our capacity I have a very dear colleague Andy Newberg who found that if nine people are in a state of transcendent practice and the tenth person walks in the room they more quickly move into a deep state of transcendent connection as measured by the rapidity with which their mirror neurons come on board which means we hold presence we hold consciousness for one another simply being in the presence of true torchbearers helps to awaken us the invitation perhaps to Karen is this is your sacred life you have an

1:33:48invitation to a quest your natural curiosity the hunger of your heart and your inborn ability born inside of you to feel and know the presence of love and guidance is already there how exciting you're going to meet people you're going to try practices some may be in nature some may be in houses of worship and some may be in the trenches of service but they are all forms of lived spiritual awakening many people who are trained in science and prized scientific methods of thinking struggle with the topic of spirituality Lisa listener dasha is one of them I am a PhD trained immunologist and have been doing science for close to fifteen years now and I find myself through the years having this need to come closer to my spirituality again to my religious practices but now I feel like I have this issue so to say

1:34:55is that I cannot find enough data points to believe in it again and I know it I know how it sounds and that I should take the the scientific glasses off and look at the world as is and try to believe but I find that I struggle very very much in believing so I guess my question is that especially now after hearing Lisa's research I find the drive to be religious or spiritual has increased but also the frustration in the sense that I feel like I have tried for years and failed because of my quite analytical brain so if you have any tips or reflections for that I would be really really grateful I'm wondering Lisa as a scientist yourself have you ever felt a struggle like the one

1:35:57that dasha is experiencing we are all born with multiple forms of knowing we are born with a capacity for empiricism and logic and equally we are born with capacities for intuition mystical awareness and of course esceptic when we align multiple forms of knowing ask a drilling question and then receive an inspired knowing of the heart perhaps have a mystical experience and then discern its meaning or empirically map a synchronicity we are more creative more aligned with the challenges and the road of life when we can bring into connection our inter mystic with our inner legion are empiricist with our intuitive and the skeptic gets a place at the table the skeptic can propel inquiry the skeptic is not the bouncer at the door the skeptic does not get to shut down

1:36:59other forms of direct perception you know it's interesting I know many people who have a scientific bent of mind and maybe do not consider themselves religious or spiritual but you know they're able to read a great novel and be transported or listen to a beautiful piece of music and feel a sense of transcendence and in some ways what you're saying is that perhaps those things can also be considered spiritual experiences we don't have to limit spiritual experiences to religion and to God I would say that science itself is a form of witness and when we pay attention it is jaw drop inly awesome and awe inspiring science for much of the 20th century didn't pick up the question of the impact of spiritual life onto the rest of our lives science ignored the origins and pathways of spiritual development and when we do cultivate our natural spirituality we're less addicted less

1:38:02depressed have deeper running character stronger commitments how could one thing have such broad and pervasive impact it is foundational if you want is the core of the whole person science is a form of witness and as such I can say that I find it profoundly jaw droppingly inspirational in fact I would say science as a form of witness is profoundly spiritually inspiring Lisa Miller is a psychologist at Teachers College Columbia University she's the author of the Awakened Brain the new science of spirituality and our quest for an inspired life Lisa thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain our Shankar it's been wonderful joy to share this science with your community

1:39:06we also heard today from Duke University historian Kate Boller hidden brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul Christian Wong Laura Quarelle Ryan Katz Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury Tara Boyle is our executive producer I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor if there's someone in your life who would find today's episode to be comforting or thought provoking please share it with them take a walk together and talk about the ideas we discussed today you never know where those conversations might take you I'm Shankar Vedantum see you soon it's not just electric it's Toyota electric and during Toyota's easy choice sales event going electric is easier than ever right now save instantly on a new Toyota EV with special

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