How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain: The New Science of Transformation

The bestselling authors of How God Changes Your Brain reveal the neurological underpinnings of enlightenment, offering unique strategies to help readers experience its many benefits.
 
In this original and groundbreaking book, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman turn their attention to the pinnacle of the human experience: enlightenment. Through his brain- scan studies on Brazilian psychic mediums, Sufi mystics, Buddhist meditators, Franciscan nuns, Pentecostals, and participants in secular spirituality rituals, Newberg has discovered the specific neurological mechanisms associated with the enlightenment experience--and how we might activate those circuits in our own brains.
 
In his survey of more than one thousand people who have experienced enlightenment, Newberg has also discovered that in the aftermath they have had profound, positive life changes. Enlightenment offers us the possibility to become permanently less stress-prone, to break bad habits, to improve our collaboration and creativity skills, and to lead happier, more satisfying lives. Relaying the story of his own transformational experience as well as including the stories of others who try to describe an event that is truly indescribable, Newberg brings us a new paradigm for deep and lasting change.


From the Hardcover edition.

• How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
• Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intima cy
• Buddhist Psychology: The Foundation of Buddhist Thought, Volume 3
• Medicine, Religion, and Health: Where Science and Spirituality Meet (Templeton Science and Religion Series)
• Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning
• Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality
• NeuroWisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness, and Success
• Principles of Neurotheology (Routledge Science and Religion Series)
• Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
• The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life