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One Mountain or Many: Comparing Prayer, Meditation and PsychedelicsDr. Josh Brahinsky, Stanford/McGill
3-5pm
Do different spiritual practices lead to something essentially similar, or do the differences run deep enough to matter? One mountain, or many? These are old questions — but they have rarely been taken into the brain. Drawing on his new book Tongues of Fire: How Charismatic Prayer Changes Evangelical Brains and Inspires Spirit-Filled Activism, and his research on jhāna meditation, Dr. Josh Brahinsky brings together ethnography, phenomenology, and brain scans from his research at Stanford, UC Berkeley and McGIll Universities to follow these questions from the felt texture of experience into neural circuitry — and back again.
Consider two practices that could hardly look more different. In a Pentecostal church, bodies sway, voices rise, and practitioners deliberately release control of their own speech — surrendering, as they put it, to God. In a meditation hall, a jhāna practitioner sits in near-perfect stillness, attention gathered to a point of extraordinary refinement. Both involve attention — to the breath, to God — that stabilizes, grows vivid, brings pleasure, becomes easy to sustain. What begins as effortful becomes momentum, and at a certain point the familiar sense of "doing" falls away. We call this the Attention–Arousal–Release Spiral.
Similarly, after decades of fieldwork, the convergence between psychedelic experience and speaking in tongues became impossible to ignore — the relinquishing of control, the sense of renewal, the increased sensory experience. Psychedelics may renew the mind by making brain activity more varied and less predictable, loosening the brain's habitual patterns and allowing it to communicate more broadly across its networks. Tongues prayer, it seems, shows a similar signature: felt surrender predicted creativity that was associated with less predictable brain activity.
What emerges is a bit of a muddle: these practices overlap, they feel similar, yet they also take us different places in our felt experience. They certainly provide tools for self and collective transformation. So perhaps the puzzle is more in how they are used.
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631 E 19th Ave Bldg B, Eugene, OR, United States
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