Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/science- ... _b_8890300One morning after my own daily meditation, as I lay back quietly, my awareness floated to the top of the room, near the ceiling, and I had an amazing sense of freedom and joy. This lasted for a few moments, and then, gradually, my awareness descended once again into my body. As a neuroscientist, I didn’t know how to understand this experience. My materialist scientific background does not accept that such an experience could be anything more than my imagination. Yet, in sharing this experience with others, I found that it was not unique to me. And when I explored the literature on meditation from a variety of spiritual traditions, I found that experiences like this have been recorded for years.
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This is precisely my concern. Scientific research on meditation may be able identify which neurons are activated in meditative states, but this is insufficient. Within our studies, we need to include the first-person perspective and to examine heightened awareness during meditation. This might involve a new way of categorizing brain function. It might require us to entertain the possibility that expanded awareness is super-normal and that there are, indeed, expanded states of consciousness that are currently unacknowledged by science.
Here is a neuroscientist who is willing to engage in meditation. What I like about her article is that she gives an inside picture into how materialists think. How can materialists be so sure that that there is no "expanded awareness" given that the study of meditation is in its infancy and given how much we don't know about consciousness? Secondly, how can psychologists be so sure that these experiences are just "hallucinations" when they themselves never do the "field research" (that is, participate in meditation themselves)?
The answer is that scientists were taught ("indoctrinated") to look at all religious and mystical experiences as being "hallucinations". Like many skeptics here, they do not know how to induce the mystical experience, and they have probably never had one themselves to know what its like. If they experienced themselves, they would be in the same thinking as Dr. Woollacott, questioning the materialistic worldview.
