Thin places

My first trip overseas, back in 1995, was an ambitious one; I did a month-long solo hike across England, starting on the shore of the Irish Sea in Blackpool and ending on a hill overlooking the North Sea in Whitby.  I decided to have a theme for the trip -- a practice I have continued to this day -- and the theme I chose was monasteries.

A great many of the abbeys in England were destroyed during the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," when King Henry VIII decided the church was getting way too rich and powerful and decided to see what he could do to remedy that.  Between 1536 and 1541, over eight hundred monasteries, abbeys, and convents were closed and their property sold off, the abbots, priests, and nuns turned out or arrested outright, the majestic buildings left to sink slowly into ruin.

Along the path I took, which largely coincides with the North York Moors Trail, there were a number of these relics, and I made a point of seeing as many as I could.  They were impressive, beautiful, tragic places, monuments not only to spirituality but to greed (on both sides of the struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the spiritual side of it didn't have a great impact on me, except for my sympathy for the religious men and women who had dedicated themselves to the contemplative life and then had those lives turned upside down by the conflict.  But it all seemed relegated in the distant past, unable to touch my modern experience except as a historical footnote.

Until I got to Rievaulx Abbey, near the town of Helmsley.

My hike into Rievaulx was on a gorgeous day -- one of the few I had during a four-week period that was cold and rainy even by English standards.  That day the weather was mild and sunny, with only a few white clouds in an azure sky. I crested a low line of hills, and looked down into the little valley in which the ruins of the abbey sit, and was dumbstruck.

It was not solely because of the spot's beauty, although beautiful it certainly is.  The place gave me chills, as if I was looking at something that wasn't quite of this world -- a reaction I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons WyrdLight.com, RievaulxAbbey-wyrdlight-24588, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, twenty-five years ago, I was every bit as much of a skeptic as I am now, but I couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I wandered around the abbey grounds.  I dropped my pack and shucked my shoes by the side of a little tumbling river that runs through the valley, cooling my sore feet, and kept thinking about the men and women who had lived here -- and whose presence I could still, inexplicably, feel around me.

During my visit, I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged couple, who ended up inviting me to have mid-afternoon tea with them.  I mentioned my odd sensations to them, and the woman immediately smiled.  "Oh, yes," she said.  "Lots of people feel that way about Rievaulx.  One gets the impression not that the place is sacred because it's the site of an abbey, but that the abbey was built there because the place was already sacred."

I have never been able to explain what I felt during that visit, other than my rational side's certainty that the beauty of the day and the history of the place simply got the better of me.  But I keep coming back to the fact that I never had those sensations in any of the other religious sites I saw on that trip -- which included gorgeous, history-laden places such as York Cathedral, Fountains Abbey, Kirkham Priory, and Grey Friars Tower.  There was something different about Rievaulx, but what that something is, I've never put my finger on.

The Scots call spots like Rievaulx "thin places."  We walk side-by-side with the spirit world, the legends go, separated by an invisible veil, but in some places the veil is thin and we get a glimpse, or sometimes just a feeling, that there's something more there than meets the eye.  Places like that aren't haunted in the conventional sense, but true believers will tell you that you can't go there and come away unscathed.

I won't say that my visit to Rievaulx convinced me of some kind of ineffable otherworld; after all here I am, over two decades later, still talking about rationalism and skepticism and for the most part casting a wry eye at claims of the paranormal.  But something happened to me in that little valley, whether I was picking up on a thin spot in the veil or it was simply the product of my senses acting on my often-overwrought imagination.

And while I don't agree with his basic assumptions, the whole experience makes the quote from the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade have a strange resonance for me: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane...  In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world."

****************************************

Out of your mind

One of the most striking pieces from neuroscientist David Eagleman's brilliant TED Talk "Can We Create New Senses for Humans?" centers around what is really happening when we experience something.

Regardless what it feels like, all that's going on -- the internal reality, as it were -- are some fairly weak voltage changes bouncing around in the brain.  The brain is locked inside the skull, and on its own is blind and deaf.  It needs the sense organs (Eagleman calls them our "peripherals") to send electrical signals in via input nerves to the right places in the brain, and that stimulates changes in the voltage in those areas.

That's it.  Everything you've ever experienced -- good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant -- boils down to that.  And if something messes around with any step in that process, that altered electrical state in the brain becomes the basis of what you see, hear, feel, and think.  If the wiring is faulty (thought by some researchers to be the cause of the peculiar disorder synesthesia), if there's a problem with the levels of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that either pass signals along or else block them (probably involved in schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, among others), or if you've taken drugs that change the electrical activity of the brain -- that becomes your reality.

I was reminded of this sobering observation when I read an article sent to me my a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  Entitled, "Have Scientists Found the Source of Out-of-Body Experiences?", it describes research into a part of the cerebrum called the anterior precuneus, which appears to be involved in our sensations of conscious awareness.  Neuroscientist Josef Parvizi of Stanford University was working with epilepsy patients who were experiencing drug-resistant seizures, and found that when the anterior precuneus was electrically stimulated (the patients already had electrodes implanted in their brains to try to reduce the frequency and severity of their seizures), they had sensations of floating, and of dissociation and disorientation.

"All of them reported something weird happening to their sense of physical self," Parvizi said in an interview in Scope, Stanford Medicine’s blog.  "In fact, three of them reported a clear sense of depersonalization, similar to taking psychedelics."

Luigi Schiavonetti, The Soul Leaving the Body (1808) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What it made me wonder is if the anterior precuneus might be involved in other types of dissociation.  It's one thing when you artificially trigger a part of the brain to malfunction (or at least, alter its function) using electrodes or chemicals; but what about when it just kind of... happens?  I know I've had this experience while listening to music.  When I was about twelve, my grandma gave me a little portable radio, and I listened to it constantly.  One evening, I happened upon a radio station playing classical music, and just as I tuned in, I heard the wild, joyous trumpets and violins of the overture to J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D.

Then the chorus came in.

Three minutes later, I remembered where (and who) I was.  My face was wet with tears.  I don't know where I'd been during that time, but it wasn't in my attic bedroom in my grandma's house, with its creaky wood-plank floors and pervasive smell of dust and old books.

It was such a powerful and overwhelming event in my life that I wrote it into one of my novels, The Hand of the Hunter -- with setting and character changes, of course -- but to this day when someone says they had a "spiritual experience," this is what I think of.  It's happened to me more than once since then, always associated with music (the first hearings of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Stravinsky's Firebird, Debussy's The Drowned Cathedral, Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, and Mozart's Requiem had similar effects on me), but that first encounter was by far the most striking.

I wonder if the mental and physical sensations that accompanied it had something to do with the anterior precuneus?  And if, by extension, it might be the source of all such transcendent experiences?

If so, what possible purpose could this serve?

Figuring that out is considerably above my pay grade, but considering the similarities -- a loss of awareness of where your body is, dissociation, the feeling of a "time slip" -- it did bring the question up.

In any case, finding a part of the brain that, when stimulated, it makes you lose connection to the outside world is pretty staggering.  I recall one of my mentors Cornell University Professor Emeritus Rita Calvo (of the Department of Human Genetics) saying that if she were going into biology today, she'd choose neuroscience instead of genetics.  "With respect to the brain, we're right now where we were with the gene a hundred years ago.  We have an idea of some of the 'wheres' and 'hows,' but little understanding of the mechanisms behind them.  Think of what was on the horizon for geneticists in 1923 -- that's what the neuroscientists have to look forward to."

****************************************

Thin places

My first trip overseas, back in 1995, was an ambitious one; I did a month-long solo hike across England, starting on the shore of the Irish Sea in Blackpool and ending on a hill overlooking the North Sea in Whitby.  I decided to have a theme for the trip -- a practice I have continued to this day -- and the theme I chose was monasteries.

A great many of the abbeys in England were destroyed during the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," when King Henry VIII decided the church was getting way too rich and powerful and decided to see what he could do to remedy that.  Between 1536 and 1541, over eight hundred monasteries, abbeys, and convents were closed and their property sold off, the abbots, priests, and nuns turned out or arrested outright, the majestic buildings left to sink slowly into ruin.

Along the path I took, which largely coincides with the North York Moors Trail, there were a number of these relics, and I made a point of seeing as many as I could.  They were impressive, beautiful, tragic places, monuments not only to spirituality but to greed (on both sides of the struggle).

Unsurprisingly, the spiritual side of it didn't have a great impact on me, except for my sympathy for the religious men and women who had dedicated themselves to the contemplative life and then had those lives turned upside down by the conflict.  But it all seemed relegated in the distant past, unable to touch my modern experience except as a historical footnote.

Until I got to Rievaulx Abbey, near the town of Helmsley.

My hike into Rievaulx was on a gorgeous day -- one of the few I had during a four-week period that was cold and rainy even by English standards.  That day the weather was mild and sunny, with only a few white clouds in an azure sky.  I crested a low line of hills, and looked down into the little valley in which the ruins of the abbey sit, and was dumbstruck.

It was not solely because of the place's beauty, although beautiful it certainly is.  The place gave me chills, as if I was looking at something that wasn't quite of this world -- a reaction I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons WyrdLight.com, RievaulxAbbey-wyrdlight-24588, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Now, twenty-five years ago, I was every bit as much of a skeptic as I am now, but I couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I wandered around the abbey grounds.  I dropped my pack and shucked my shoes by the side of a little tumbling river that runs through the valley, cooling my sore feet, and kept thinking about the men and women who had lived here -- and whose presence I could still, inexplicably, feel around me.

During my visit, I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged couple, who ended up inviting me to have mid-afternoon tea with them.  I mentioned my odd sensations to them, and the woman immediately smiled.  "Oh, yes," she said.  "Lots of people feel that way about Rievaulx.  You get the impression not that the place is sacred because it's the site of an abbey, but that the abbey was built there because the place was already sacred."

I have never been able to explain what I felt during that visit, other than my rational side's certainty that the beauty of the day and the history of the place simply got the better of me.  But I keep coming back to the fact that I never had those sensations in any of the other religious sites I saw on that trip -- which included gorgeous, history-laden places such as York Cathedral, Fountains Abbey, Kirkham Priory, and Grey Friars Tower.  There was something different about Rievaulx, but what that something is, I've never put my finger on.

The Scots call spots like Rievaulx "thin places."  We walk side-by-side with the spirit world, the legends go, separated by an invisible veil, but in some places the veil is thin and we get a glimpse, or sometimes just a feeling, that there something more there than meets the eye.  Places like that aren't haunted in the conventional sense, but true believers will tell you that you can't go there and come away unscathed.

I won't say that my visit to Rievaulx convinced me of some kind of ineffable otherworld; after all here I am, over two decades later, still talking about rationalism and skepticism and for the most part casting a wry eye at claims of the paranormal.  But something happened to me in that little valley, whether I was picking up on a thin spot in the veil or it was simply the product of my senses acting on my often-overwrought imagination.

And while I don't agree with his basic assumptions, the whole experience makes the quote from the Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade have a strange resonance for me: "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane...  In each case we are confronted by the same mysterious act — the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural profane world."

*******************************

This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]