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suspension of the parietal lobe, loss of kinaesthesis, sense of self

I need to review the lectures on "The Spiritual Brain" that talk about the suspension of the parietal lobe.

In that lecture, Professor Andrew Newburg talks about a loss of self combines with a religious experience.

Perhaps the so-called "self" that is lost is the spatially localized self, but the self that remains is one with only an indeterminate (but not utterly abstracted) sense of how one interacts with one's local environment.

Perhaps the religious awareness had by those in this suspended state is an aspect of our our moment to moment experience, but one that gets drowned out, as it were, by the noise of our bodily interactions.

If the latter is at least partially plausible, then I would refer all of this to a thought experiment offered by Fr. Luigi Giussani in the The Religious Sense where he asks us to reflect what an infant's awareness of the world is like.

Comments

Leo White said…
Update: this post seems relevant:
http://thomism.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/epistemology-in-light-of-mysticism/

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