Sacred Pathways explains how the brain areas that support Near-Death Experiences are also the basis for mystic experience during our lives. It's a 21st-century synthesis of science and spirituality by brain scientist Todd Murphy, in which spiritual, religious, and mystic events are explained with neuroscience.
Edited and re-edited to make the science easy to understand, it's a readable introduction to the science of the spiritual.
Murphy uses Darwin's theory of evolution to understand the human death-process, and proposes that reincarnation is an evolutionary adaptation which contributed to the survival of our species. The book explores the ideas that the self is actually a hallucination, God is a manifestation of a part of ourselves, and enlightenment comes from a blast of neural activity in specific parts of the brain. It also looks at prayer, spontaneous mystic experiences, romantic love, and psychic skills. The author also believes that spirituality is a very positive force, both in the world and in our lives. Spirituality, he argues, is an adaptive force that's crucial to our survival as a species, making it an integral part of human nature. An atheist who openly encourages prayer, Murphy goes past the debates between skeptics and believers and shows how religion helps us, without regard for the truth or falsehood of anyone's beliefs. Sacred Pathways is a fascinating example of no-nonsense 'new science' at its best.
This extensively referenced tour-de-force work explains the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences including, enlightenment, prayer, near-death experiences, and even psychic perception. It also explains reincarnation, out-of-body experiences and the spiritual nature of romantic love.
It includes a chapter that summarizes Murphy's concept of reincarnation; the first to be published by a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It also has an in-depth discussion of the famous God Helmet, and explains how psychic skills work, based on lab experiments with telepathy and remote viewing.
The God Helmet Experiments is about the research that led to a technology which created a wide range of religious, mystic, and spiritual experiences in the laboratory.
These included some visions of god, out-of-body experiences, waking dreams, apparitions, and the feeling that there is someone standing behind you when no one is there. It's even elicited Near-Death Experience phenomena. Used in other ways, the God Helmet has also created paranormal experiences, including ghostly visions.
There were even a few experiments successfully applying the God Helmet for depression.
The God Helmet was developed by two scientists at Laurentian University's behavioural neurosciences program, Stan Koren, and Dr. Michael Persinger, who was the director of the research group until he passed away in 2017. The editor took some of Dr. Michael Persinger's difficult-to-read scientific papers about the God Helmet, and rewrote them to make them easier to read. This book is designed to help you understand the God Helmet, the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences, and even presents some material related to the debates and misunderstandings in this area of brain science.
The God Helmet Experiments is a new kind of science book, letting the reader see the actual research. It's still a work of science, and still calls for some careful reading, though it's very much easier to read and understand than the original scientific journal articles.
Dr. Michael Persinger was Todd Murphy's (this book's editor) mentor for 23 years, and they even published a few papers together. Not only can The God Helmet Experiments help you to understand how the brain contributes to spiritual experiences, but it will also let you see the other exciting possibilities in this fascinating technology (low-intensity complex magnetic signal stimulation).
The book has three sections. The first is dedicated to some of Dr. Persinger's longer review and summary articles, four in all. The second is a series of experiments using the God Helmet, recounting the experiments, one by one. The third is a response to Persinger's critics and their (unfounded) criticism.
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