What do you think?
Rate this book
Sacred Pathways: The Brain's role in Religious and Mystic Experiences
(Currently sale priced) "... illuminating ..." - The Dalai Lama. Sacred Pathways explains how the brain areas that support Near-Death Experiences are also the basis for mystic experience during our lives. It's a 21st century synthesis of science and spirituality by brain scientist Todd Murphy, in which spiritual, religious, and mystic events are explained with neuroscience. Edited and re-edited to make the science easy to understand, it's a readable introduction to the science of the spiritual. Murphy uses Darwin's theory of evolution to understand the human death-process, and proposes that reincarnation is an evolutionary adaptation which contributed to the survival of our species. The book explores the ideas that the self is actually a hallucination, God is a manifestation of a part of ourselves, and enlightenment comes from a blast of neural activity in specific parts of the brain. It also looks at prayer, spontaneous mystic experiences, romantic love, and psychic skills. The author also believes that spirituality is a very positive force, both in the world and in our lives. Spirituality, he argues, is an adaptive force that's crucial to our survival as a species, making it an integral part of human nature. An atheist who openly encourages prayer, Murphy goes past the debates between skeptics and believers and shows how religion helps us, without regard for the truth or falsehood of anyone's beliefs. Sacred Pathways is a fascinating example of no-nonsense 'new science' at its best. This extensively referenced tour-de-force work explains the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences including, enlightenment, prayer, near-death experiences, and even psychic perception. It also explains reincarnation, out-of-body experiences and the spiritual nature of romantic love. It includes a chapter that summarizes Murphy's concept of reincarnation; the first to be published by a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It also has an in-depth discussion of the famous God Helmet, and explains how psychic skills work, based on lab experiments with telepathy and remote viewing. Sacred Pathways is a major advance in neurotheology, a synthesis of science and religion that discusses spirituality only in the language of science. Most people in this field confine themselves to looking at what the brain is doing when people have otherworldly experiences, epiphanies, and peak experiences. Murphy goes further than that, seeing these things in the context of anthropology, sociology, and human evolution as well as in the human brain. Todd Murphy has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal for Near-Death Studies, Psychology Reports, NeuroQuantology, and Activitas Nervosa Superior. This fascinating, accessible, and thought provoking book will change the way you see spirituality. Sacred Pathways is "...the principia (principle work) of the scientific investigation of spiritual experiences" (From the forward by Dr. Michael Persinger, inventor of the God Helmet).
522 pages, Paperback
First published November 18, 2013
34 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 13, 2018
It was the best of books, it was the worst of books . . .
First, the worst. Please, Mr. Murphy, get an effective editor, for heaven's sake! How a message is delivered affects the message itself and how clearly it's received. To write that those who have read manuscripts of this book were so busy reacting to the concepts that they couldn't pay sufficient attention to grammar and style is not an acceptable excuse. Editors are hired to look at both, and as a matter of fact the best ones have to look at both at the same time. There are far too many typographical errors and block duplications and deletions and grammatical faux pas here. They more than distract from the message; they obscure it. Seriously. In far too many places, the text is simply unintelligible. It's said that any work is a self-portrait of the one who produces it (and who is ultimately responsible for it); I don't think that you want easily corrected errors to smudge the picture that readers get of you.
I understand the care that the author is trying to take to address concerns from those on different spots along the spectrum of theistic probability and from those of different backgrounds and perspectives, but sometimes he comes across as a little too defensive. He also seems to be scanning, often not quite successfully, for the appropriate tone.
But I still recommend this book. I recommend it because despite its manifold irritations it presents a good synthesis, with references, of structures and pathways in the brain and of how they might relate to spiritual experiences. In general, Murphy is pretty good about stating when he's speculating and when he's not, and the references help. I don't mind seemingly far-fetched hypotheses; in fact, I love expanding my mind with them, even when I'm not fully convinced. I confess that I'm less convinced by the Darwinian explanation put forth for reincarnation than I am for the idea that spiritual experiences are recastings of near-death experiences, but as Murphy himself emphasizes, eventually there either will or won't be sufficient data to buttress any given idea. In the meantime, I found it exhilarating to encounter Murphy's ideas.
So despite its serious flaws, I still consider this a useful book, one that I'm glad to have read. But please, please, Mr. Murphy, think about your tone and style for the next edition of this book (and for the next volume or volumes), rewrite carefully, and hire a good editor!
P.S. Murphy also mostly follows the common practice of speaking of meditation as if it were one monolithic process. In terms of brainwave generation, one can speak now of not two but three meditation types, each with its own characteristic brainwave pattern: a) focused attention, b) open monitoring, and c) automatic self-transcending. See http://www.drfredtravis.com/downloads... . I think that the next revision would benefit from considering the three types separately rather than lumping them together. For example, Murphy associates meditation with theta waves, which are indeed seen with open-monitoring meditations such as Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation but which are not the prominent waves seen with the other two types.
First, the worst. Please, Mr. Murphy, get an effective editor, for heaven's sake! How a message is delivered affects the message itself and how clearly it's received. To write that those who have read manuscripts of this book were so busy reacting to the concepts that they couldn't pay sufficient attention to grammar and style is not an acceptable excuse. Editors are hired to look at both, and as a matter of fact the best ones have to look at both at the same time. There are far too many typographical errors and block duplications and deletions and grammatical faux pas here. They more than distract from the message; they obscure it. Seriously. In far too many places, the text is simply unintelligible. It's said that any work is a self-portrait of the one who produces it (and who is ultimately responsible for it); I don't think that you want easily corrected errors to smudge the picture that readers get of you.
I understand the care that the author is trying to take to address concerns from those on different spots along the spectrum of theistic probability and from those of different backgrounds and perspectives, but sometimes he comes across as a little too defensive. He also seems to be scanning, often not quite successfully, for the appropriate tone.
But I still recommend this book. I recommend it because despite its manifold irritations it presents a good synthesis, with references, of structures and pathways in the brain and of how they might relate to spiritual experiences. In general, Murphy is pretty good about stating when he's speculating and when he's not, and the references help. I don't mind seemingly far-fetched hypotheses; in fact, I love expanding my mind with them, even when I'm not fully convinced. I confess that I'm less convinced by the Darwinian explanation put forth for reincarnation than I am for the idea that spiritual experiences are recastings of near-death experiences, but as Murphy himself emphasizes, eventually there either will or won't be sufficient data to buttress any given idea. In the meantime, I found it exhilarating to encounter Murphy's ideas.
So despite its serious flaws, I still consider this a useful book, one that I'm glad to have read. But please, please, Mr. Murphy, think about your tone and style for the next edition of this book (and for the next volume or volumes), rewrite carefully, and hire a good editor!
P.S. Murphy also mostly follows the common practice of speaking of meditation as if it were one monolithic process. In terms of brainwave generation, one can speak now of not two but three meditation types, each with its own characteristic brainwave pattern: a) focused attention, b) open monitoring, and c) automatic self-transcending. See http://www.drfredtravis.com/downloads... . I think that the next revision would benefit from considering the three types separately rather than lumping them together. For example, Murphy associates meditation with theta waves, which are indeed seen with open-monitoring meditations such as Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation but which are not the prominent waves seen with the other two types.
May 3, 2019
As a companion to this book, see his lecture series on youtube. They go hand in hand.
October 5, 2024
Fantastic Book 📖
Really interesting book. It's was quite dense in some parts, but it's well worth reading it. 📚 I gained some fascinating insights. Thank you 🙏
Really interesting book. It's was quite dense in some parts, but it's well worth reading it. 📚 I gained some fascinating insights. Thank you 🙏
December 30, 2016
A fascinating book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews