International conference on Church Care for Mentally Ill People

Below are papers read at the International conference "Church care for mentally ill people: religious mystical experience and mental health"
November 7-8, 2019, Moscow (continuation)

Hesychasm and mental health

Archimandrite Meletios (Webber)

I came into contact in a significant way with the Orthodox Church while I was a student in Oxford in the late 1960's.

As I was able to sing a little, it seemed a good idea at the time to join the Church choir. In this way I was not only able to learn the order of the various services, but also take my first steps towards reading Church Slavonic.

I distinctly remember the days leading up to Great Lent in that first year, and singing the words of the psalm of exile "By the rivers of Babylon" for the first time. This was a little while before this psalm entered the popular imagination with the version of the hymn sung by the group "Boney M" a few years later.

In our church music books, the last two verses of this psalm were crossed out. These are the verses which refer to "dashing children upon the rocks", an extremely violent and unpleasant image.

I remember talking to our starosta, Elizabeth Obolenskaya about these verses, and discussing why we did not sing them. She pointed out that although most people objected to the content of these verses in their literal meaning, in Orthodox understanding these words applied not now to real living children (which had most certainly been the original interpretation), but to our "thoughts".

Obviously, since I still remember them, her words made a great impression on me. I was at Oxford University, one of the greatest centres of learning in the western world, where "thought" and "thinking" were deemed to be the highest contribution to man's advancement. Yet here, in that same city, was a tiny Orthodox Church where a different view was held: that our thoughts were not always our best feature.

During my time as a student, I was also introduced to the collected writings of the Philokalia, both in its Greek and Russian forms. This book, or collection of books, perhaps more than any other, is the textbook of Hesychasm. Its contents are somewhat haphazard, at least in the Greek version, since Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain appears to have been more of a collector than a scholar. Not easy to read in any language, the Philokalia nevertheless provides us with the clearest picture of the importance of Hesychasm for the Orthodox Church. The word "hesychasm", rather ugly in English, is based on the more beautiful Greek word "hesychia" meaning silence or stillness. Hesychast living informs almost every aspect of Orthodox life, and far from being an optional extra, it is, in so many ways, the clearest exposition of what it means to be Orthodox.

Going forward some years, I became a priest, then a monk, but mainly a monk living in the world, fulfilling the role of parish priest first in Greece, then in Britain, then in the United States , and most recently in the Netherlands... I went through a number of transformations, not least a struggle with addiction, a Ph D in Psychological Counselling and eventually Licensure as a psychotherapist. And all the time the information contained in the Philokalia was playing somewhere in the back of my mind.

Years later, I came across a translation of a particular piece written by St Theophan the Recluse which severely shook my world view, and allowed the various notions I had about Hesychasm to become a matter of personal experience rather than of theoretical speculation.

In corresponding with one of his spiritual children, Saint Theophan writes:

"You've got to get out of your head and into your heart. Right now your thoughts are in your head, and God seems to be outside you. Your prayer and all your spiritual exercises also remain exterior. As long as you are in your head, you will never master your thoughts, which continue to whirl around your head like snow in a winter's storm or like mosquitoes in the summer's heat... If you descend into your heart, you will have no more difficulty. Your mind will empty out and your thoughts will dissipate. Thoughts are always in your mind chasing one another about, and you will never manage to get them under control. But if you enter into your heart and can remain there, then every time your thoughts invade, you will only have to descend into your heart and your thoughts will vanish into thin air. This will be your safe haven. Don't be lazy. Descend! You will find life in your heart. There you must live" (Письма о христианской жизни [Letters about Christian life]. 26, 28).

Here we find St Theophan speaking in a plain and concise way about what it feels like to be a human being on the inside. He is aware of the dynamic of the internal struggle, he describes the symptoms very cogently and, above all, he provides a remedy for our pain. In the spirit of the hesychast fathers of earlier ages: St Maximos the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian, St Hysechios the Priest, St Gregory Palamas and, above all, Evagrius of Pontus, St Theophan, in a few well-chosen words, gives us a road map we can follow, a practical guide towards communion with God.

It strikes me that these words imply that Hesychasm already has an anthropology of its own, and a psychology of its own… we do not need to start our spiritual work by borrowing from other sources. The inner workings of the human individual are clearly defined in these hesychast writings, both in terms of how he or she is put together, and also in terms of how our inner dynamics are expressed in our inner behaviour and also in our relationships with other people.

One point of clarification:

Most of the Fathers in the Philokalia wrote in Greek, and even some of those who did not are recorded in Greek.

In Greek there are basically two words used to describe thoughts. One is "skepsis" and the other (important for our study) is "logismos" or in the plural "logismoi".

In the most basic of terms, the former, skepsis, is generally beneficial, consisting of thoughts that we use to solve problems, to communicate with each other, and to manoeuvre our God-given ability to use various forms of logic.

The other, "logismos" denotes an intrusive thought, useful for nothing, with which we are bombarded day and night.

Both forms of thought are important, yet they are extremely different.

You can tell this difference easily, if you are a little bit focussed. Once a thought arises, you are free to ask: "Did I make this thought happen, or did it arise somehow automatically"? If the answer is the former, it is a legitimate thought. If the latter… well, it is just another logismos.

Let me explain in another way.

When asked what logismoi are actually like, my usual reply is that they are what you might experience as you lie in bed at four o'clock in the morning, should you happen to be awake. Too tired to get up, too awake to get back to sleep, you are, at that moment, a prisoner to your own thoughts. Usually you will experience a string of logismoi, followed by a somewhat feeble attempt on the part of the heart or "nous" to make sense of the logismoi. The heart or "nous" is gentle and hesitant in comparison with the logismoi, and the logismoi tend to be brutish and loud. However, while the thoughts of the heart have eternal significance, the logismoi have none. They are simply a waste of spiritual and emotional energy.

Actually, this bombardment by logismoi is true all of our waking hours; it is simply more noticeable in the middle of the night, since there are no other distractions.

If you take the trouble to actually listen to your logismoi - and everyone (even the greatest of saints) has them - you will notice that about 80% of them consist of fear in one form or another. Most often, these fears appear in the form "What if such-and-such a thing were to happen?". What if I have cancer? What if my child fails at school? What if the world runs out of food? What if the economy collapses? And so on. Some are sensible. Some are, frankly, stupid. But they flow together almost all the time.

Such questions are always fear-inducing, since our thinking processes can take us to places of great pain, and simply leave us there to deal with the situation.

The other 20% of this sort of thinking (these numbers are based on experience, but may not be particularly accurate) consists of desire. Although on the face of it desire appears to be a positive influence, the reality is that unmet desires are as great a source of pain to us as fear itself. Desiring what we cannot have (a new house, a better job, fame, fortune and so on) can be as painful as being told that a loved one has a fatal illness. This looks strange, but is almost always true. When we experience an emotion, we quickly try to decide whether it is pleasant or painful. Only then, when we start thinking about it, do we try to decide how strong the feeling might be.

Very often, desire expresses itself in thoughts which begin: "If only…". Thus: If only I had a better job". "If only I had married that person". "If only I could win the lottery…" and so on.

Russian (and Slavonic), like English, Dutch and French, does not have a special word for "logismos" both are described simply as "thoughts"… yet to come to an understanding of what the Hesychast fathers (and now St Theophan) are talking about, we perhaps need to start using it.

A "logismos" is a thought-gone-wrong, emerging not as a result of rational thought, but arising simply from what we might call our "brokenness" as a result of the Fall. As we have seen, logismoi emerge from somewhere in our thinking processes every second of every waking hour and bombard us with negativity, fear, self-loathing and despair, but also (strangely) an inflated self-image. They may play a role in our dreams also, but that is an area of speculation outside the scope of this present paper.

Most of the time, we try to avoid listening to these thoughts automatically. We get into the car… and turn on the radio. Actually, we try to avoid sitting in silence altogether, and modern man has found thousands of ways to distract himself. Sometimes we use alcohol and other artificial means to quieten the logismoi, but unfortunately, once the drinking is over, the logismoi come back, usually stronger than ever.

The ultimate punishment in Dutch prisons is to be placed in solitary confinement, where prisoners are punished, basically, by the contents of their own thoughts. Hesychast men and women, by contrast, long to find precisely that silence that God gives them in solitude. St Theophan's writing gives an exceptionally clear explanation of why that is the case.

When, a number of years ago, I received the blessing to hear Confessions in Russian even though my Russian is very poor, one of the first words I learned was "уныние" - despair or despondency. In other contexts, particularly in psychological counselling, a more useful and usual translation of this word might be "depression".

The second word I had to learn was "гордыня" - arrogance or pride.

Both despair and arrogance exist in us as the direct influence of the logismoi in our heads. Indeed, together they form a classic example of how logismoi work:

The logismoi will often inform us that we are a) "the most important person in the universe" but also b) "a piece of garbage" … at precisely the same moment.

No wonder most of us feel crazy some of the time.

One inference I would like to share with you is this: If a person, any person, listens to his or her own logismoi and takes them seriously, he or she will be depressed.

I am not sure what is going on here in Russia, but in Western Europe and in North America the 'number one' complaint of the human race is depression. Everyone is listening to and, to a certain extent, believing, their logismoi.

In the spiritual sphere, the Fathers are quite explicit in their diagnosis that every sin is a direct result of the action of the logismoi. Each sin starts out as a tiny thought, but if we give these thoughts any attention they grow and grow, until they become passions. Actually, passions are simply logismoi brought to their own, rather illogical, conclusion.

Can we turn off the logismoi, or get rid of them altogether?

The answer of the Fathers, including Theophan, is quite clearly "no". The logismoi are with us until the body dies. Even Christ Himself had to deal with logismoi, in His case delivered by Satan himself, after the forty-day fast in the wilderness.

But that is not the whole picture.

St Theophan says "We need to "get out of our heads and into our hearts".

What does this mean in practice?

What St Theophan suggests is that the head is a noisy place, and contrasts with the heart, which is a place of stillness.

As I hinted a little while ago, this picture is made a little more complex when we learn that the Hesychast Fathers tend to place the "nous" not in the head (as happens in western psychology) but in the heart. The finest commentators on the Greek text of the Philokalia, in a team led by Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, define "nous" in this context as the "place of spiritual intelligence" and associate it with the heart, not the head.

"Descend!" says St Theophan. "If you remain in your head, God appears to be outside you"…. i.e. if you descend to the heart, there you will find Communion with God to be unforced… a perfectly natural phenomenon.

The classic method of making this descent is to use the Jesus Prayer, or some other short, easily repeated, words of prayer. Focussing on what is going on inside us, we are invited to seek the place of silence in the region of the heart, and to pray the words of the prayer gently yet firmly in the direction of that silence. Using the breath to give this process rhythm is perfectly fine, although we could note that the teaching of Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was that it would generally be unwise for modern people, outside the context of a very disciplined monastic life, to use any "method" of limiting the breath in any way. Leave that to the experts.

Indeed, the very word "method" when linked to prayer, is itself outrageous. How can any form of deep communion with God ever be described as a "method"?

When we have descended to the heart, we are closer to the silence, and further away from the noise in the head. The noise continues, but it is less intrusive, less "in your face". But being closer to the silence is, of itself, spiritually beneficial, and the more accustomed we become to being close to the silence (which St Maximos calls "the voice" or "the language" of God Himself), then the greater the distance we are from the negative effects of the logismoi.

Is there any physical movement involved in this descent? Probably not. What is being described is a "spiritual movement" rooted in our very real physicality, but not testable in any scientific way. Hesychasm places the body firmly within the action of prayer, but not in a way which can be measured.

In terms of mental health, there is a further step that can be taken.

Modern psychology talks about the ego, although often with very little precision. Freud invented and adapted new ways of talking about the inside workings of the human being, and came up with the "ego", the "id" and the "super ego". It is unfortunate that Freud's analysis of these three parts is not particularly relevant or useful in most spiritual encounters. Whilst it is fine to quote St Theophan to someone in confession, it is not so fine to quote Sigmund.

What I would like to suggest, for reasons of pure practicality, is that now we, following the traditions of hesychasm, have a definition of the ego from our own spiritual tradition.

Please allow me to explain.

Some logismoi are so outrageous that we can dismiss them entirely, almost without thinking about it. If, for example, we were to question a large number of Muscovites as to whether they have ever contemplated jumping in front of a Metro train, the response would, most probably, be alarmingly high. Certainly, a survey conducted in London (on the Underground), and another in New York (on the Subway), confirms this notion. Walking onto a metro platform tends to invite us to contemplate suicide, much more than, for example, a walk in the forest. Yet does that mean that we are all suicidal? Absolutely not… except perhaps for a tiny minority.

Other thoughts are simply fanciful in a way that precludes them ever being put into practice. Inappropriate sexual thoughts often come into this category. Good sense (which, as we have seen, resides in the heart, not the head) quickly brushes such thoughts aside.

However, the really dangerous logismoi are those which have a ring of truth about them. Carefully consider the words of the Tempter to Christ in the desert. The thoughts we find most obvious, most attractive and sometimes most logical, are the same logismoi that get us into serious spiritual trouble. Christ had the power to resist. We, often, do not.

Remembering that we are sometimes fascinated by fearful topics, we often find that some of the logismoi are attractive for one reason or another. They have a sort of sticky nature. These thoughts, in particular, are very dangerous. What they tend to do is stick to other, similar, logismoi… accumulating into a sort of lump of sticky, painful thoughts. Here, I think, we can justifiably bring the word "ego" into play. The ego, on these terms, is a whole sticky mess of thoughts that we use to try to make sense of our world. These thoughts probably begin in utero, and are added to… up to the present moment. We can also think of the ego as a lens… through which we see the world. Indeed, the ego tries very hard to become our entire world-view, to dominate us through our thoughts, and to distract us from the Kingdom. The "still, small voice" in our hearts, however, continues to offer an authentic invitation to eternal life.

Another strength of the ego is to join these logismoi together in such a way that they form a story, just as our nighttime thoughts in dreams are almost always story-based. In fact, the story-line which joins the thoughts together is often stronger than the thoughts themselves. If we were to name this story, it would almost certainly be something like: "Why I never really got what I wanted out of life". The logismoi stick together, and our minds make a story out of them. Unfortunately, it is not a story which God would recognise.

Whether the logismoi emerge from demonic influence, or whether they emerge simply from human brokenness, is beyond the scope of this paper. However, I would like to suggest that in the vast majority of pastoral cases that we encounter within the church, it really does not matter what the source of a logismos is, but rather how we, as individuals, react to them.

A further useful level which can be extrapolated from hesychast teachings is that there is a possibility of people having collective logismoi. Such logismoi may be around an ideal (national, political, ideological…) or even something relatively unthreatening, (such as allegiance to a particular football team). This phenomenon would account, largely, for the prevalence of such things as the rise of the Nazi party, and other similar situations, where a logismos was shared by a huge number of people. In this process no one person actually feels responsible for having the logismos in the first place (with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler) and so seemingly normal people can be caught up in extremely self-centred and cruel behaviour quite easily. The relatively modern phenomenon of "haters" on the internet falls within the same category.

Can these basic hesychast principles be used in everyday pastoral situations, including Confession? My own answer would be strongly in the affirmative.

What I am discussing here may be an appropriate tool to use for many different sorts of people. The vast majority of people, including those of us in this room, fall under the category of the "almost well". We, the "almost well" are in as much need of healing as those who carry more serious diagnoses. And, even in terms of prayer, there are indeed those who need special treatment. The average priest, hearing confessions, needs to know how to treat people, not as a staretz, but simply as a human being. For example, there are some people who present themselves complete with clear counter indications for this sort of prayer: those suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder do not do well with repetitive prayer, for example, and those who suffer from personality disorders in particular and psychosis in general need to be treated with great care. And the rule for all sorts of mental health practitioners, including psychiatrists, psychologists and others… that one of the first things to learn is the limit of our own capability, applies to priests as well: when confronted with some situation that lies beyond one's own capabilities, refer the'patient' to a specialist.

So, in summary, seeking the silence in the heart before embarking on prayer, or any other activity, would seem to be a logical outcome of this teaching, and a life-long task. Attempting to pray from the head, from the mind, is (by comparison) an unlikely, even risky, business.

If each of us can learn to "get out of our heads and into our hearts", as St Theophan suggests, we will, I feel sure, be in a much better position to welcome the Kingdom of Heaven into our present reality.

References

The Philokalia, collecting texts from the 4th to the 15th centuries in editions by St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (in Greek, 19th century), St Paisiy Velichkovsky (in Slavonic, 1793), St Ignatius Bryanchaninov (in Russian, 1857) and St Theophan the Recluse (in Russian, 1877), passim.

St Theophan the Recluse, Letters about the Christian Life nr. 38.

Neurotheology: natural sciences grounds of religious experience objectivity?

Hieromonk Damian (Voronov)

He who would study organic existence,
First drives out the soul with rigid persistence;
Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class,
But the spiritual link is lost, alas!

Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Translated into English by Bayard Taylor)

One of the first examples of a controlled study that lasted ten days reflecting the influence of religion on a person is described in the book by the prophet Daniel (605 BC)¹, where two groups of young men selected for court service are compared: the first was composed of the sons of Judah (Daniel (Balthasar), Ananias (Shadrach), Misael (Meshach), and Azariah (Abednego), who strictly obeyed the Law of Moses and did not defile themselves by the potions from the royal table. The second one included their idolatrous Babylonian peers, who daily ate from the king's table. The results impressed the head of the eunuchs Amelsar, who played the role of an independent observer: the first group seemed not only more handsome and dignified in their body by the end of that period, but there was no one equal to these young men in terms of knowledge and wisdom². It is clear that biomedical research has made significant progress since the times of the Prophet Daniel.

Never before has the brain captured people's imagination on such a large scale. Functional neuroimaging has become a new stage in centuries long attempts to systematize and understand the connection between the brain and the psyche, and triggered enthusiasm in scientists and naturalists. It is no longer Bohr's planetary model of the atom, but brain images that have become the symbol of science. As a new cultural artefact, the brain is depicted in paintings, sculptures and tapestries, and is exhibited in museums and galleries. Neuroscience has merged with many disciplines in recent years, giving rise to new scientific fields: neuro-ethics, neuro-law, neuro-philosophy, neuro-marketing. Obviously, the brain is at its peak: high profile press releases saying that the centre of faith has been identified, or claims that love has been found in the brain, promise to expose the mental life of man, offering a spectacular study of motives, thoughts, feelings and actions. The brain has rightly been declared one of the latest front lines of science³.

Despite its low weight (about 1.5 kg), the human brain is the most complex structure known in the Universe. Nowadays, knowledge about the brain allow us to conclude that it is extremely complex in its structure. The organ contains about 100 billion nerve cells, each of which interacts with about 1000 other nerve cells - an impressive picture⁴. However, despite advances in science and technology, humanity has not gone far in understanding how the brain works. Neuron⁵, the main structural unit of the brain, was identified 130 years ago. The human brain has become a favourite subject in the media, and its study is one of the most exciting areas of modern biomedical research with millions strong funding.

Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), an American journalist who wrote about the breath-taking discoveries of neuroscience at the dawn of the 21st century, argued that mankind is on the verge of forming a single theory, which will have the same powerful impact as Darwinism. Reflecting his views on the greatest miracle of science - neuroimaging - in his essay Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, he wrote that the brain does not have a single place for the consciousness or self-consciousness, it is nothing more than an illusion generated by the nervous system. Consciousness and religious thinking are its product. Since the brain is deterministic from birth, thus free will is out of question, it is a ghost in the machine. And if we consider the fast-growing capacity and complexity of computers, they will soon be able to predetermine life events of any person, which no 16th century Calvinist could think of. A human being is an analogue chemical computer, processing bubbling streams of information flowing from the environment; there is neither soul nor consciousness in it⁶. Like Nietzsche, who proclaimed back in 1882 that "God is dead, … and the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles"⁷, our contemporary, leaning on the achievements of neurobiology, will probably say, "The greatest of mysteries - the soul - the last repository of values, died because educated people no longer believe in its existence, because the mind for neurobiology is an evolutionary product of genetic history, an absolutely physical phenomenon".

Evolutionary psychology sought to explain the phenomenon of faith in God and argued that primitive people who believed in supernatural reality were more likely to pass on genes to their descendants than cavemen who did not have such faith. It encouraged geneticists and neurobiologists to search for such a gene - the switch of God in the human brain. On October 29, 1997, the first publication of the Indian neurologist V.S. Ramachandran and M.A. Persinger (1945-2018) reported that the "dwelling place of God" had been found in the human brain. Volunteers in the experiment - Franciscan nuns, Tibetan Buddhists and Pentecostals - described their religious sensations (deep sense of unity with supreme reality, joy and serenity) triggered by the application of transcranial magnetic stimulation (with the help of "the God helmet"⁸) across their temporal lobes.

In their want to find out whether brain activity during mystical experience is actually localised in the temporal lobe and whether mystical contemplation really produces brain states not related with ordinary experiences, radiologist Andrew Newberg and his colleagues conducted a study using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), which produced images of blood flow and metabolism after the injection of some radioactive substances⁹. The analysis of the data revealed a significant increase in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the prefrontal cortex, inner parietal lobes and inner frontal lobes. In addition, there was a significant positive correlation between the change in rCBF in the right prefrontal cortex and right thalamus. The change in rCBF in the prefrontal cortex correlated negatively with that in the superior parietal lobe on the same side¹⁰. Scientists, interpreted the obtained data from the point of mechanistic theory and suggested that meditation happened through a simultaneous activation of several cerebral areas and systems - the human brain is designed to believe in God.

The persistent curiosity of inquisitive minds of naturalists, their desire to explore the astonishing phenomenon of religious viability and the rapid development of brain sciences has led to the emergence of neurotheology, which is a unique field of multidisciplinary research where theology, philosophy, religious studies and practices, intersect with psychology and anthropology. Its key method is functional neuroimaging, reflecting the real-time activity of different brain areas immediately at the moment of meditation which is considered the basis of religion from the point of experimental psychology of William James (1842-1910) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who supported the ideas of functionalism, according to which any psychical phenomenon can be defined in terms of causal and effect of the observed psychic conditions, environment and the individuum's behaviour.

Interestingly, the Russian scientist I.M. Sechenov (1829-1905), founder of the first school of physiology in Russia, who provided evidence in support of the reflex based nature of conscious and unconscious behaviour, strictly followed the materialistic approach to explain the spiritual life of man. This eventually led to his conflict with the Orthodox Church and ecclesiastic censorship¹¹. Prof. Sechenov, inspired by the ideas of G. Spencer, presented his views on the nature of human mental activity in Brain Reflexes (1863), asserting with confidence that it was based solely on physiological processes. "Absolutely all qualities of external manifestations of brain activity, which we characterize by such words as spirituality, passion, mockery, sadness, joy, etc., are nothing but results of stronger or weaker contraction of some muscle group, which we know as a purely mechanical act. Even the most hardcore spiritualist cannot but agree with this. The brain is the organ of the soul, i.e. it is such a mechanism, which, being set in motion by some reason, ultimately produces the series of external phenomena, which characterize the mental activity"¹². Sechenov wrote with excitement and enthusiasm that the time would soon come when the analyses of external manifestations of brain activity would be as accessible and clear for people as it is for a physics, who easily characterises the phenomenon of a freely falling body¹³.

A century later, James Ashbrook (1925-1999) and Eugene d'Aquili (1941-1998)¹⁴, became the pioneering scientists who decided to study this problem of "religious" neuroscience and laid the foundation for the subsequent development of this field, confidently followed by such scientists as James Austen, Rayne Joseph, Mario Beauregard, Patrick McNamara and Gregory Peterson¹⁵. Dr. Ashbrook wrote that mankind needs to focus on the key issue of mind-brain interrelatedness, identify the ground of our being, the source of all, which is called "God". "We must not only passively observe how physical matter - the human brain - generates a range of cognitive processes and subjective religious experience, but seek to comprehend this phenomenon as Homo sapiens, as Homo religious"¹⁶.

Despite the ambitiousness of neurotheologists, the question remains whether measurements of the subjective nature of religious experience in different cultures and traditions are reliable; its quantitative and qualitative evaluation is also difficult due to the lack of standardized adequate scales in scientific literature¹⁷. It should be noted that most of the applied scales require the subject to answer the following questions, "How did you feel it? What feelings did you experience? What do you think about your experience?"¹⁸, which, on the one hand, seems to be very valuable for the researcher of neural correlates of religious experience, since the answers can be correlated with the dynamic nature of psychological, affective and cognitive processes in the brain. However, on the other hand, the most interesting thing would be to scan the "praying person" to discover that there are no changes in this moment of his meditative religious experience, excluding cognitive, emotional or sensory factors, which would make it possible to register essentially spirituality without any biological correlates.

Although methods of neuroimaging contribute greatly to our understanding of how human brain works, each of them has both cons and pros. For example, an fMRI¹⁹ that captures changes in cerebral blood flow helps to conclude that a particular brain area is active during a specific task because its fulfilment is accompanied by an increase of the blood flow. Relative concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood in a small area of brain tissue creates a so-called BOLD (blood-oxygen-level-dependent) signal. The higher the ratio of oxygenated blood to deoxygenated blood in a certain brain area, the higher its energy consumption. The images obtained are based on statistical differences between BOLD signals. The blood-flow-activity ratio, combined with anatomical scanning during a session, allows the precise localization of specific brain regions activated during prayer. However, actual activity may not be related to cerebral blood flow in case of head injuries, stroke or pharmacological effects of medication. fMRI is also unable to identify the role of neurotransmitters - such as dopamine and serotonin²⁰ - in religious experience. In turn, PET, where an injected radioactive tracer is trapped in the brain, can reflect cerebral activity more accurately, evaluating both long-term and short-term effects of prayer experience, taking neurotransmitters into account.

Thus, the interpretation of findings of functional brain research ultimately leads to the problem of determining causal links between brain processes and subjective experience of the subject. Brain structures rarely perform a single task, therefore, it is practically impossible to establish one-to-one correlation between specific brain regions and certain mental states. Perception of brain images resembles a kind of high-tech test of Rorschach's ink spots, but speculation on what one wants to see on the basis of multivalued results is a serious violation of falsifiability. Is it at all possible to translate the complex pattern of neural activity into the language of simple interpretations? Although neuroimaging has deepened our knowledge about the brain structure and functions, its populist application tends to reinforce the misconception of the brain as a mechanism consisting of individual modules controlling specific abilities in the field of thought and feeling, which is reminiscent of the once discredited phrenology by Franz Gall (1758-1828), who identified personality traits and talents by reading bumps and dents in the skull. There is nothing petrified in the brain, it is constantly re-adjusting in response to learning and experience, and it instantaneously changes the strength and pattern of connections between its parts the countless number of times. Even when brain activity is detected in a certain "hot spot", it is not always clear what is happening there. A statistical activation chart may show brightly (as supposedly "increased brain activity") areas of inhibiting neurons that do not stimulate the activity, but, on the contrary, work to suppress it. Conversely, dark spots may appear where the activity goes on. Moreover, if we judge only by the degree of activation, a certain brain area may deceptively appear less involved in the task than it actually is. It is not easy to answer the question how to compare observed physiological changes with subjective religious experience? It is also not clear where is the level of relevance of changes, at 5 or 10, 20 or 30 percent? The time period during which the person's dynamic spiritual and physical development takes place, is also a significant factor. An adequate assessment of this can be given only years after, in which case targeting visualization is impotent.

Summing up, Christian anthropology, describing man as the entirety of the immortal soul and body, created in the image of God, opposes materialism - neuroreductionism being the latest form thereof - which reduces the soul with its mind, feeling and will to the level of epiphenomena of the body, identifies the manifestations of soul properties with the simultaneous coherent activity of functionally combined neural ensembles, leaving no room for the life-giving Spirit²¹. The results of neurotheology come into conflict with Christianity and other world religions, though not explicitly, trying to show their incompetence, reducing the religious experience to molecular biology, without giving a satisfactory answer to epistemological and ontological questions arising in the context of scientific research. One can see man in many ways: as a set of organs and systems, as a set of billions of atoms and molecules, as body and soul²², as the image of God. However, Our Saviour said about such people that "they seeing see not, and hearing, they hear not"²³. We may refer to ambiguous images (reversible figures) which allow to see, for example, a vase or two human images (Rubin's vase is a classical example of the figure and the ground correlation). The image of the former and the latter is possible only as a result of a conscious choice of perception undertaken by the subject. Obviously, it makes no sense to ask which of two the images is more real; likewise, it is senseless to try to decide what comes first - the vase or profile - until someone perceives it. A similar situation exists with religious consciousness, which belongs to the properties of the soul together with the mind, feeling and will, that are being reduced by modern neuroscience, as it was shown above. The fact that consciousness is not irreducible to brain activity can serve as an apologetic answer to the modern challenge of Christian faith considered in the research. This is a limitative question for modern science - all subjective processes are reduced to brain activity, except for consciousness, science has no tools available to assess and describe the subjective reality. When a scientist looks at his subject - a living carrier of consciousness - it ultimately depends on the former what he will perceive - a spiritualized body or a soulless set of organs and systems, functioning according to the laws of determinism.

¹Ринекер Ф., Майер Г. Библейская энциклопедия Брокгауза. [Rieneker F., Mayer G. Brokgauz Biblical Enciclopaedia]. М.: РБО, 1999. С. 224-225.

²Dan. 1:3-20

³Сэйтл С. Нейромания. Как мы теряем разум в эпоху расцвета науки о мозге. [Sally Satel, Scott О. Lilienfeld BRAINWASHED: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience]. М.: Изд-во "Э", 2016. С. 36.

⁴Collins F. The Symphony Inside Your Brain // National Institutes of Health [E-resource]. URL: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2012/11/05/the-symphony-inside-your-brain/ (reference date: 12.10.2019).

⁵The German anatomist Henrich Waldeyer (1836-1921) was the first to introduce the notion of neuron (from old Greek νευρον - fibre) back in 1881, suggesting that it is the main functional unit of the nervous system. In fact, is an electrically excited cell which processes, stores and transmits information with the help of electric and chemical signals.

⁶Wolfe T. Sorry, but your soul just died // The Independent. URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/sorry-but-your-soul-just-died-1276509.html (reference date: 8.10.2019).

⁷Nietzsche F. The Joyful Wisdom. London: T.N. Foulis. 1910. P. 275.

⁸Beauregard M. The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul. NY: HarperOne. 2008. P. 79-80.

⁹Newberg A. The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During the Complex Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study // Psychiatry Research. 2001. Vol. 106. P. 113.

¹⁰Beauregard M. The Spiritual Brain… P. 260.

¹¹Мумриков О., иерей. Концепции современного естествознания. Христианско-апологетический аспект: учебное пособие для духовных учебных заведений. [Rev. O. Mumrikov, Concepts of modern natural sciences. Christian apologetic aspect]. Сергиев Посад; М.: Паломник, 2013. С. 507.

¹²Сеченов И.М. Рефлексы головного мозга [Sechenov I.M., Brain reflexes] // И.М. Сеченов. М.: АСТ, 2015. С. 5.

¹³Ib. p. 6.

¹⁴Wentzel J. Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. NY: Thomson Gale. 2003. P. 617.

¹⁵Newberg A. Principles of Neurotheology. Surrey: Ashgate. 2010. P. 12.

¹⁶Ashbrook J. "Mind" as Humanizing the Brain: Toward a Neurotheology of Meaning // Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. 1997. Vol. 32. P. 312. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/0591-2385.00093?purchase_referrer=onlinelibrary.wiley.com&tracking_action=preview_click&r3_referer=wol&show_checkout=1

¹⁷Newberg A. Principles… P. 116.

¹⁸Hill P. Measures of religiosity. Religious Education Press. Birmingham, Alabama. 1999. P. 79.

¹⁹Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with the structural brain imaging produces pictures that reflect the local activation of nerve cells during psychic activity. It produces detailed spatial images, but the method cannot be used to register fast processes of changes in cerebral activity (low time resolution). fMRI makes it possible to track the nature of activity of deep brain structures (not only the cortex) that are responsible for emotions.

²⁰Baert A., Sartor K. Diagnostic Nuclear Medicine. Berlin. Springer. 2006. P. 18-19.

²¹John. 6:63, Jackob. 2:26, Luke. 8:55.

²²Gen. 2:7.

²³Is. 6:9-10, Mathew. 13:13-15.

References

1. New Geneva Learning Bible: Synodal Translation [Новая Женевская Учебная Библия: Синодальный перевод. Под ред. Р.К. Спраула. - Hanssler-Verlag, 1998].
2. Ashbrook J. "Mind" as Humanizing the Brain: Toward a Neurotheology of Meaning // Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science. 1997. Vol. 32. P. 301-320.
3. Baert A., Sartor K. Diagnostic Nuclear Medicine. Berlin. Springer. 2006.
4. Collins F. The Symphony Inside Your Brain // National Institutes of Health [E-resource]. URL: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2012/11/05/the-symphony-inside-your-brain/ (reference date: 12.10.2019).
5. Hill P. Measures of religiosity. Religious Education Press. Birmingham, Alabama. 1999.
6. Newberg A. Principles of Neurotheology. Surrey: Ashgate. 2010.
7. Newberg A. The Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During the Complex Cognitive Task of Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study // Psychiatry Research. 2001. Vol. 106. P. 113-122.
8. Wentzel J. Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. NY: Thomson Gale. 2003.
9. Wolfe T. Sorry, but your soul just died // The Independent. URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/sorry-but-your-soul-just-died-1276509.html (дата обращения: 8.10.2019).
10. Beauregard M. The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul. NY: HarperOne. 2008.
11. Rev. O. Mumrikov, Concepts of modern natural sciences. Christian apologetic aspect. [Мумриков О., иерей. Концепции современного естествознания. Христианско-апологетический аспект: учебное пособие для духовных учебных заведений. Сергиев Посад; М.: Паломник, 2013].
12. Nietzsche F. The Joyful Wisdom. London: T.N. Foulis. 1910.
13. Rieneker F., Mayer G. Brokgauz Biblical Enciclopaedia [Ринекер Ф., Майер Г. Библейская энциклопедия Брокгауза. М.: РБО, 1999].
14. Sechenov I.M., Brain reflexes [Сеченов И.М. Рефлексы головного мозга / И.М. Сеченов. М.: АСТ, 2015].
15. Sally Satel, Scott О. Lilienfeld BRAINWASHED: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience [Сэйтл С. Нейромания. Как мы теряем разум в эпоху расцвета науки о мозге. М.: Изд-во "Э", 2016].