How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain

In this original and groundbreaking book, Andrew Newberg, MD, and Mark Robert Waldman turn their attention to the pinnacle of human experience: the Enlightenment. Through brain-scan studies on Brazilian psychics, mystics, Buddhist meditators, Franciscan nuns, racists, and participants in rituals of secular spirituality, Newberg has explored the specific neural mechanisms associated with the experience of enlightenment—and how we can activate those circuits in our brains. In his survey of over a thousand people who experienced enlightenment, Newberg also discovered that profound and positive life changes occurred in the aftermath. Enlightenment offers us the possibility to permanently become less prone to stress, to break bad habits, to improve our collaboration and creative skills, and to live happier and more fulfilling lives. Telling the story of his transformative experience as well as including the stories of others trying to describe a truly unspeakable event, Newberg brings us a new paradigm of deep and lasting change.