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Conversations Beyond Science and Religion – Science Explores the Spiritual Experience
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Science, we are told, deals with the objective world; spirituality, with the inner world. The disconnect between science and spirituality is shown by the incredible difficulty of imagining how something like spirit — this ephemeral, ghost-like substance — can arise from something as lifeless and as spiritless as matter. Philip Mereton’s guest this week, Thomas Ray, Professor of Biology at the University of Oklahoma, after spending decades researching the effects of psychedelic drugs on humans and laboratory animals, has developed the hypothesis that organs of the mind contribute to richness of our inner experiences of emotion, consciousness, and the sense of self. Further, he believes that what we call mystical experiences are part of the natural architecture of the mind which, over time, we forget about until activitated by such things as mind-drugs and deep meditation. The experience of spirituality, it may turn out, is actually real and wired into our brains.