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God of the Gaps
The vast majority of humans over most of our history have believed, as a majority probably still believes, that we can make contact with God (or the equivalent), that the transcendent is not beyond our reach. 

A few special people have experienced close contacts of a fourth kind - with God. These are the mystics - holy people who through hard spiritual training are given deep, profoundly satisfying and life-changing experiences involving an obliteration of the self and a merging with the infinite. There is evidence that most people at one time or another, even in our materialistic age, enter a state in which they experience a blissful sense of unity with "the Other" or the universe or nature, call it what you will.

Until now there has been no way of assessing the nature of these experiences from "outside", so to speak. As a result, God has been placed in this corner of life, to as it were fill a gap between what can be demonstrated and what by report happens to many people with such profound impact that it remains a lifelong memory for them.

The "God of the gaps" has been steadily squeezed out over past centuries. Until relatively recently in historical terms, for example, a majority in the West thought that epilepsy was caused by evil spirits. To drive out these devils, it was normal and natural to call for God's intervention.

This gap once occupied by God has now been filled by human knowledge. Medical science has established that epilepsy is a fault in the structure and operation of the brain. Inherited genetic faults or brain damage, not demons, are its cause. While we may pray to God to help an epileptic, most of us would not as a result of that prayer do without medication to treat or control the condition.

The God of the gaps has been gradually - and sometimes suddenly - squeezed from almost every area of human activity. This book squeezes God out of mysticism. The authors do everything they can to preserve the God of the mystics. In my view, they fail.

Photographing the Numinous
I'm not qualified to say if the evidence the authors present to explain the religious and mystical experience as a brain function is definitive. But my limited knowledge of brain function indicates that their case is persuasive and probably conclusive.

Briefly, the authors tell how they "photograph" the brain during meditation by their subjects. The latter are practised in prayer and contemplation and can regularly and deliberately access a state in which they report that the 

... conscious mind quiets, allowing a deeper, simpler part ... to emerge ... it is what remains when worries, fears, desires, and all other preoccupations of the conscious mind are stripped away.

Buddhists and Franciscan nuns show the same brain patterns. Those areas of the brain which are normally intensely active in orientating us in relation to our environment are switched off. The subjects then 

...fail to find the borderline between the self and the outside world ... [and] perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real.

The Buddhists interpret this as merging with absolute being and losing personal separateness. The sisters "...describe the moment as a tangible sense of the closeness of God and a mingling with Him." That is, each group interprets the experience in terms of their own religious background, although there is apparently no difference in the subjective experience.

It's worth reviewing at this point why the human brain is the way it is. As the authors remind us: 

The goal of every living brain ... has been to enhance the organism's chances of survival by reacting to raw sensory data and translating it into a negotiable rendition of the world.

The human rendition of the world, mediated by our brains, is the most successful the world has known. We may argue about whether or not it reflects the world as it "really is". Be that as it may, it works extremely well most of the time and for most people.

The brain receives data via our sensory organs. The data are 

... sorted, cross-referenced, amplified or inhibited, integrated with input from emotional centres ... and finally assembled into a perception that has a useful, individual meaning ...

Brain and "mind" are the same thing seen from differing points of view - just as, for example, a postage stamp appears very different depending upon whether one looks at it from the front or the back.

There are those who, it seems, seek to describe the mystical in terms of something extra-physical. They use the word "spiritual" to indicate a human but non-physical perception or an input from God. The spiritual in this case is not part of normal reality. 

This interpretation of the human condition may be true. Perhaps we do "have" a non-physical part of us we call our "soul". Perhaps God does communicate with us via some hidden sense organ and using a medium which cannot itself be perceived or measured in any known way. Maybe there is a parallel supernatural dimension, utterly different from ours yet able somehow to communicate with our physical universe.

If so, this book has nothing to say. It's concerned with explaining a phenomenon which is part of the material world. As the authors remark, we have no way of experiencing God 

... except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality ... There's no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain's neural pathways.

And again: 

... every event that happens to us or any action that we take can be associated with activity in one or more specific regions of the brain. This includes, necessarily, all religious and spiritual experiences.

The Cognitive Imperative
We can now "see" ourselves meditating. The process is no longer beyond our comprehension. We know enough now about brain functions to work out the physiological components of attaining a blissful, detached mental state - interpreting that state in various ways according to personal background.

Why, ask the authors, should this capacity have developed? Our brain has developed into what it is through evolutionary pressures to survive. We can understand that - but why should religious experiences be of use to us in the struggle to survive?

The authors explore the origins of religion and religious myths, the usefulness of ritual and mysticism. Their conclusions are necessarily speculative since hard and extensive evidence not only isn't there but probably never will be. Nevertheless,  I found their reasoning compelling.

A cognitive imperative is proposed by the authors. This is not a "thing in itself" but a biologically determined compulsion by which the brain orders the world almost automatically. It is a built-in "...need to make sense of things through the cognitive analysis of reality." We know from psychology that the alternative to "making sense of things" is first a mounting and eventually an unbearable anxiety. If sensory input ceases, experiments have shown that the brain supplies us with hallucinations. If the world ceases to make sense, we go mad. We cannot stop ordering sensory input, even in sleep. In short, we must make sense of life or perish. 

The one thing our ancestors could make no immediate sense of is the inevitability of suffering and death. Nor can we, of course. But extend the experience over some millions of years during which our brain was evolving from primitive to sophisticated form, and the perspective changes. Other questions crowd in. Why is the world the way it is? How did it come about? Will humanity die out one day? Is there life after death? And, most pressingly, "How can we live in this bafflingly uncertain world and not be afraid?"

Because the cognitive imperative requires us to cope with this continual anxiety it "... tirelessly pushes the mind to find resolution" to questions of existence. In the course of human history we have created ways of coping:

• We have invented myths to "explain" the way things are.
• Rituals are found in every culture. They help create and maintain social and religious order.
• Everyone to some degree, and mystics to a great degree, feels that the world makes sense for them as they enter the religious experience. 

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