The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  Around this time, Cory intensified his meditation practice. When he first entered the monastery, he meditated the mandated fourteen hours a day and did so mostly in the meditation hall. Now he was meditating twenty to twenty-two hours a day, mostly in his small, dark room. He woke up at 2:30 a.m. and went to bed around midnight, leaving his room only for breakfast and lunch.

  One day during his final few weeks at the monastery, Cory woke up feeling unusually focused. Before he opened his eyes, he could feel every sensation running through his body like an electric current. As he slowly got out of bed, he found that he was not just moving, but observing his body move. During the morning meditation, his mind did not wander at all.

  Later, on his walk back to his room from breakfast, Cory stopped at a bridge and sat down at a spot overlooking a pond. On previous days, when Cory meditated at the bridge, he would feel peace and tranquillity, but nothing beyond that. But on that particular day, as Cory looked at the water, his concentration grew more and more intense, and then something remarkable happened: his sense of separation between himself and the pond vanished. Before, he always experienced himself as a distinct entity looking at the pond, another distinct entity. Now it was all “oneness, non-duality, communion,” he said. He felt himself surrendering to all that was around him.

  “I saw clearly that the idea of the self—of distinction, of me, of an inner and outer—is just an illusion,” he said, “something created by the mind. It was like wisps of smoke from a pipe. The idea evaporates as soon as you cease to create it.” When his mind stopped creating that illusion at the pond that morning, his heart burst open and a wave of compassion washed over him. “When you become nothing,” he explained, “you realize that you are one with everything.”

  When Cory returned home to Long Island a month later, his approach to life had changed. Instead of searching for a lucrative career, Cory now wanted to help other people find relief from suffering. He began to work as a mindfulness teacher. The emotional high from the experience in Burma began to wear off, but what he learned there remained with him. Once he started teaching, for example, he found himself striving to make more money and become a great teacher. But as soon as he recognized that his ego was taking over, he surrendered his pride and focused on his students. “It’s easier to let go of my self-focus now,” he said, “because I’ve seen so clearly what an illusion the self is.”

  Scientists can actually see the mystical experiences of people like Cory unfold in the brain. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University, investigates the brain activity of devoted meditators—including Buddhists, Catholic nuns, and Sufis—to determine what exactly happens during transcendent states. In one study, he and his colleagues studied eight experienced practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation using a form of brain imaging called single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT.

  The scientists measured their subjects’ baseline level of brain activity and then left them alone to meditate in a private room. When a meditator felt like he was approaching a moment of transcendence, he tugged on a long piece of string that Newberg and his colleague Eugene d’Aquili were monitoring in another room. The researchers then injected a radioactive substance into the meditator through a long intravenous line and, once the meditation was over, led him into a special high-tech camera that took a snapshot of his brain activity. The radioactive substance allowed researchers to see the amount of blood flowing into various regions of the brain: the more blood flow, the more activity there is in that part of the brain; the less blood flow, the less activity.

  At the peak of the mystical moment, Newberg and d’Aquili found, the meditators had decreased activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe—an area of the brain that Newberg calls the “orientation association area,” because its main functions are to locate the self in space, keep track of physical boundaries, and distinguish the self from the not-self. The orientation association area is usually highly active, taking in sensory information from the world and using that information to perform the crucial function of helping us navigate space. When neuronal inputs to the orientation association area from our senses decrease precipitously, as was the case with the meditators, the brain can no longer separate the self from the surrounding environment. Individuals feel connected with everyone and everything—they feel a sense of unity.

  In a new line of research, Newberg has peered inside the minds of meditating Sufi mystics. The work on Sufis is in its early and exploratory stages—Newberg has studied only two thus far—but it may shed additional light on the neurological underpinnings of mystical states. During meditation, the brains of the Sufis showed a decrease in activity in the frontal lobe, which is responsible for conscious decision-making and giving an individual a sense of control over his environment and actions. If the frontal lobe has dramatically less neuronal inputs than usual, then the logical, controlling part of our mind shuts down, and we feel a sense of surrender.

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  Though the transcendent moment, as William James pointed out, will eventually end, it can leave an indelible mark on the psyche. People can fundamentally transform after the experience of self-loss. Consider the story of the former astronaut Jeff Ashby. Jeff was just a kid when the first American, Alan Shepard, flew into space. It was May 1961. NASA had been created three years earlier. The Soviets had sent the first man into space just a month prior. And Ashby, at the tender age of six, started dreaming about going into space himself.

  It was an exciting time to be a young boy with dreams of space exploration. Within a decade of Shepard’s flight with Project Mercury, the United States sent Apollo 8 into space to orbit the moon. It was a watershed moment in history and a beacon of hope and optimism in an otherwise tumultuous year, 1968, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Never before had astronauts ventured beyond a low Earth orbit. Never before had they orbited another body in space.

  A fourteen-year-old Ashby tuned in with the rest of the world to watch the live televised broadcast of the mission on Christmas Eve. The crew circled the moon ten times and took turns reading from the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

  The Apollo 8 crewmembers also took dazzling photographs, the most famous of which was called Earthrise. Seeing a picture of the earth from space would change how humanity understood itself. From thousands of miles away, our planet appeared tiny and fragile. On December 25, 1968, a day after the photograph was taken, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

  In the decades since the first human beings went into space, fewer than six hundred astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts have had the chance to see the whole earth from this elevated perspective. Jeff is one of them. In 1999, when he was forty-five years old, he realized his boyhood dream, traveling to space as a pilot for the first female shuttle commander, Eileen Collins. Their mission was to deploy a large telescope called Chandra, a complement to the Hubble telescope that would take pictures of high energy events, like black holes, exploding stars, and colliding galaxies. Ashby and Collins were scheduled to lift off on the thirtieth anniversary of the moon landing. The time from liftoff to space was 8 minutes—8 minutes from being on the earth to being 150 miles above it in orbit. Talk about breaking the roof.

  From space, Ashby saw the earth as a sphere suspended precariously in the black void. The atmosphere was “strikingly thin,” he said, “like a piece of paper covering a basketball.” All of human existence rested behind a diaphanous veil. “You realize that all of humankind is on
that little layer on the surface of that rock,” he said. “You realize how close we are to potential extinction from the vacuum of space. You realize that the planet is really small. You could circle it in just 90 minutes. With one or two minor exceptions, you don’t see the boundaries between countries. You just see one contiguous mass of land and water. I got this sense that what happens on one side of the planet affects the other side. So I got this sense of connectedness—that we are all connected in some way.”

  Making it into space requires years of training and hard work at the highest levels of academia, military, and government. Those who succeed become part of an elite group of heroes and heroines celebrated by contemporary culture and lionized in history books. So it’s no surprise that most astronauts, Ashby included, are driven by ambition and achievement.

  The glory of spaceflight motivated Ashby for many years. But after that first mission, Ashby felt that he had fundamentally changed. He started looking for a deeper path to fulfillment, one centered around the greater good rather than his personal goals. Other astronauts who have traveled into space report a similar transformation. Their values, according to one study, shift from self-focused ones like achievement, enjoyment, and self-direction to self-transcendent ones, like unity with nature, belief in God, and world peace. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world,” another astronaut has said, “and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’ ” Scientists have dubbed this dramatic shift in perspective the Overview Effect.

  Ashby flew two more missions to help build the International Space Station. Then, at fifty-four years old, he left NASA. Like many other astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect, he decided he wanted to contribute his experience and talent toward something bigger. Ron Garan, for example, established Manna Energy Ltd., an environmental organization that brought potable water to villages in Rwanda and Kenya, and Edgar Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which researches human consciousness.

  Based on his experience in space, Ashby spent a lot of time thinking about the future of humankind and the earth. “You cannot view the thin blue arc of our atmosphere from space,” he has said, “without developing a great concern for the protection of that fragile band of life and a desire to contribute to its preservation.”

  Given that the planet will one day perish or become uninhabitable, he realized, humankind will need to move to another one in order to survive. “Maybe it’s one within the solar system,” he said, “but eventually, since our sun has a finite life, we would have to move to a planet around another star and start a civilization there.” Ashby now works for a company called Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com. At Blue Origin, Ashby is collaborating with his colleagues to develop the technology to affordably fly people into space. Their long-term goal is to help get people off the planet in the event that Earth becomes uninhabitable. But in the short run, they want to enable ordinary people to travel safely into space so that those people can experience the Overview Effect and, perhaps, come back changed.

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  Few of us will ever fly in a spaceship. But even here on Earth, we can all experience transcendence by turning to the world around us. Perhaps no one understood that better than John Muir, the nineteenth-century naturalist who championed the national park system and was the first president of the Sierra Club.

  Muir was born in the seaside town of Dunbar, Scotland. It was there that he first fell in love with the natural world, taking walks as a toddler with his grandfather. Once he was old enough to get around on his own, he spent his free time by the shore of the North Sea or in nearby meadows. When his family immigrated to the United States in 1849, the eleven-year-old Muir found another wilderness playground in the Wisconsin farm where they settled. Its birds, insects, squirrels, flowers, and ferns all filled him with wonder.

  Muir’s love of nature deepened as he grew older. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin when he was in his early twenties and studied botany for the first time. The subject sent him “flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm,” as he would later put it. “Like everybody else,” he wrote, “I was always fond of flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.”

  If those flowers excited him, then the Sierra Nevada mountains of California threw him into an ecstatic frenzy. Muir moved to the Golden State in 1868, and he spent the summer of the following year in what is today Yosemite National Park, where he “bounded over rocks and up mountain sides, hung over the edge of terrifying precipices, his face drenched in the spray of waterfalls, waded through meadows deep in lilies, laughed at the exuberant antics of grasshoppers and chipmunks, stroked the bark of towering incense cedars and sugar pines, and slept each night on an aromatic mattress of spruce boughs.” This nineteenth-century John the Baptist was impressed by the unity and harmony he perceived in nature. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

  Muir’s reverence for nature was influenced by Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement that flourished in New England around the time of his birth. One of the seminal works of that movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature.” For Emerson, the beauty we find in nature is a reflection of divine beauty; nature itself is a manifestation of and portal to God. But most people, Emerson thought, fail to appreciate that splendor. They are too distracted, as his friend Henry David Thoreau lamented, by the tasks of daily living—a problem that was only getting worse with the quickening pace of life occasioned by industrialization and the advent of trains. “To the dull mind,” wrote Emerson, “all nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.”

  Muir had such an illuminated mind. For Muir, being in nature was a transcendent experience. When he ventured into the wild, he did not just see mountains, streams, and meadows; he saw the face of God and was humbled by it. “Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?” he wrote. In “Nature,” Emerson used different language to describe the same feeling. In the woods, he wrote, “I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

  Muir and Emerson had the same experience in nature that Jeff Ashby had in space and that Cory Muscara had at the monastery in Burma. But all they had to do in order to break the roof was walk outside. “If this is mysticism,” as Emerson’s biographer writes, “it is mysticism of a commonly occurring and easily accepted sort.”

  In a study published in 2015, the psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues investigated the effect an awe-inspiring encounter with the natural world would have on their research subjects. Would they feel, as Emerson did, like a transparent eyeball after a walk in the woods? To find out, the researchers led ninety undergraduates, one at a time, into a towering grove of eucalyptus trees. Half of the students spent one minute staring up at the two-hundred-foot-tall trees, while the others looked at a tall building a few yards away for the same amount of time.

  The students did not know the purpose of the study—they had been told the researchers were studying visual perception. Even so, that single minute beneath the towering grove was transformative.

  After the students spent some time looking at either the tree or the building, an experimenter approached
each one with a box of pens and a questionnaire to fill out. Then the experimenter “accidentally” dropped the pens on the ground. Piff and his associates hypothesized that being awe-inspired would lead the students to focus less on their own individual concerns and more on others and the world at large. That turned out to be the case: people who had focused on the trees were more helpful, picking up significantly more pens than those in the control condition. The questionnaire they later completed offered a reason why. The awe-inspired people, researchers found, felt a diminished sense of their own importance compared to others, and that likely led them to be more generous. As with Emerson, their mean egotism vanished. They abandoned the conceit, which many of us have, that they were the center of the world. Instead, they stepped outside of themselves to connect with and focus on others.

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  The self-loss felt during a transcendent experience is sometimes called “ego death,” and it prepares us for the final loss of self we will all experience: death itself. “When many people think about death,” writes the psychologist Mark Leary, “they think about the fact that this conscious thing—the self that seems most central to their existence—will no longer exist.” The demise of the self in death is a terrifying prospect for most people. But the person who has already experienced ego death during a transcendent experience is far better prepared to face and accept that loss.

  Take the case of Janeen Delaney, who was diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2005. Janeen had grown up in a Christian household in Michigan, but she eventually drifted away from the faith. In her adulthood, she considered herself vaguely spiritual and derived inspiration from Buddhism, but she had no formal religious or contemplative practice. When she received her diagnosis, the lack of religion in her life suddenly seemed like a hole. “I didn’t have a belief system in place,” she said, “and that bothered me.”