As someone whose mental illness largely revolves around overthinking and the behavioural/psychological consequences of trying to deal with that overthinking, meditation has always appealed to me. Its focus on gaining control of the mind through a letting go of that very control seemed like a natural and valuable skill for dealing with my issues. While I wish I did it more, the times where I’ve meditated consistently have always felt beneficial.

The benefits that I found got me interested in whether there was any research regarding the psychological benefits of meditation. While there’s been some interesting stuff done and some books have touched on the subject, I was looking for something that directly explored the connection between not just meditation, but the broader ideals that surround it, like spirituality, sense of a higher power etc. In my searches, Lisa Miller’s, The Psychology of Spirituality, cropped up, its name seemingly indicating a perfect book to satisfy my curiosity. I looked up the author, she’s a well-established psychologist at Yale, who worked under Martin Seligman, alongside other such credibility-inducing attributes. This all sounded very promising.

Although the title of the book is ‘The Psychology of Spirituality’, I feel it’s important to clarify that spirituality is not the same as religiosity. Miller defines spirituality as the deeply personal sense of connection to something greater than oneself, which includes all the beliefs, experiences, and acts that contribute to this sense of higher self, and that are irrespective of religious affiliation.

In the first few chapters, the book makes some pretty astounding claims as she details her journey exploring the role of high personal spirituality to prevent depression. She eventually concludes that “depression and spirituality are two sides of one coin” due to results like these:

“Adolescents with a strong personal spirituality were 35 to 75 per cent less likely to experience clinical depression”. No other mental health intervention, clinical or pharmacological, for adults or adolescents, had anything close to these prevention rates”

“Adolescents with a strong personal spirituality were 40 to 80 per cent less likely to develop substance dependence or abuse”

These are, as she rightly describes, shocking scales of magnitude. The science seemed good, and I was fairly convinced that I’d stumbled across a pretty phenomenal bit of research that I’d felt myself when meditating.

          The ‘Awakened Brain’

The main theory (and title) of this book is regarding this idea of ‘the awakened brain’.

“The awakened brain includes a set of innate perceptual capacities that exist in every person through which we experience love and connection, unity, and a sense of guidance from and dialogue with life”

Most of us, even if like me you aren’t that spiritual, can say you’ve had experiences resembling something spiritual. A moment of deep connection with another person or with something in nature, a feeling of awe, a time you felt held or inspired or motivated by something bigger than yourself. Maybe not, but if you have then you’ll get what she’s referring to.

She believes that the awakened brain is how you engage with experiences like these. It works like a muscle; if we choose to engage with it, it strengthens, and if we don’t, it will atrophy. If you spend your life not engaging with any type of spirituality, then your capacity to experience it will diminish, in the same way that if you never use a language then your capacity to use that language diminishes. On the inverse, it is then possible to strengthen this muscle by engaging with this spirituality, this awakened brain. Through this, you can gain all the benefits that make it such a critical predictor of mental well-being: less depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, and more resilience, optimism, tenacity, and creativity.

          Awakened vs Achieving Brain

To further illustrate what she means by the awakened brain, it’s useful to think of it as one of two sibling entities: the ‘achieving brain’, and the ‘awakened brain’. The former helps us achieve our goals, helps us advance as people and cognitively manage the complexities of day-to-day life. In other words, it’s the part of our brain that’s good for getting things done.

Our awakened brain plays a different, but equally important role. The ‘awakened brain’ is what helps us feel fulfilled, connected with the world, and achieve higher meaning and purpose. She argues that the world has become too ‘achieving brain’ oriented, too me-centric, and that if the achieving brain is given too much emphasis, it cultivates stress, fear and disconnection at the expense of larger meaning, purpose and unity.

When I look at all the issues in the Western world, it definitely feels like there’s an achieving brain majority and awakened brain minority. I’ve often felt disconnected and lost and I think having a more awakened brain and a less achieving brain, both in myself and from the people around me, would have done some good. I agree with her that the world would be better off if people utilised their awakened brain more. Greater connectedness, a larger awareness of the fabric of all life, a sense of shared responsibility etc., all seem like values everyone would benefit from.

          Connectedness

A key component of this awakened brain is about ‘connectedness’. Connectedness can be described as the supra-cognitive awareness that we are not alone and separate from other beings, as well as the experiences we have that transcend the cognitions of our achieving brain.

I really think that engaging with the connected aspect of the awakened brain is an important philosophy to incorporate into our lives. Despite some of her more outlandish claims, the crux of this book is about opening your heart and mind to the notion of interconnectedness. She says something along the lines of, ‘If you don’t open your eyes to the awakened brain, you’ll never be able to see it’, and in a metaphorical sense, I completely agree. Opening your mind to this ideal feels like a comfortable and positive ethos in the midst of an individual, lonely, and scary world.

Her idea of some higher ‘thing’ providing a sense of meaning is not new to psychology. Jung’s theory of Synchronicity argued that events are not merely related by chains of cause-and-effect, but by some other force that makes a meaningful coincidence involve something other than coincidence.

“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred, the letter was already lying in the post office of the addressee”

-C.G.Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

The way Jung describes Synchronicity as a skill that can be trained and improved is very similar to the way Miller describes training your awakened brain. On a personal level, engaging with synchronicity (alongside the pursuit of some goal) will help by increasing the attention paid to things that may help you achieve that goal, regardless of if they’re just coincidences. In a clinical setting, engaging with synchronicity may help overcome negative thought patterns by utilising perceived value from seemingly coincidental events, and can also help derive direction and meaning.

          However,

At times, it didn’t feel like it was trying to inform me of some new academic insight, it felt like she was trying to convince me of something. My doubts got stronger as she strayed from her academic opening into a more anecdotal piece about the way her ‘awakened brain’ helped guide her through motherhood. On a number of instances, she refers to an ability to tap into an awakened brain, and essentially ‘communicate’ with animals. At times the animals communicate back to her, sending her important messages relevant to current struggles going on with her life. Or times when she’s been awoken in the night by a presence that has provided guidance on a particularly hard life decision. I’m probably not doing justice to these stories and they’re worth reading for yourself. In essence, she argues that by opening your mind to the ‘awakened brain’, this supra-cognitive consciousness, one can literally, emphasis on literally, tap into the shared experiences of living things.

While I am sceptical of her anecdotal evidence, I also acknowledge my own, perhaps inherently more sceptical bias as an areligious, not actively spiritual person. I’m aware that weirder things that have received more scepticism have been proven in the long run, so I like to keep an open mind – perhaps human technology just isn’t in a place where these metaphysical ideas can be properly measured, maybe it will never get to that place, who knows.

Regardless, by the end of the book my astonishment and intrigue elicited by the results from her opening research studies had waned away and I was left feeling a tiny bit disillusioned. Regardless, I think that there is a valuable lesson or idea to be taken from the book. There are aspects of spirituality, the connectedness, the sense of unity, the positive existentialism etc., that, regardless of empirical scientific standards, are beneficial and healthy to engage with. Aspiring towards a more awakened brain alongside the cultivation of the achieving brain seems like a good angle to take on the path to self-improvement, fulfilment, and life satisfaction.