Porosity Is the Heart of Religion

Abstract

When scholars and scientists set out to understand religious commitment, the sensation that gods and spirits are real may be at least as important a target of inquiry as the belief that they are real. The sensory and quasisensory events that people take to be the presence of spirit—the voice of an invisible being, a feeling that a person who is dead is nonetheless in the room—are found both in the foundational stories of faith and surprisingly often in the lives of the faithful. These events become evidence that gods and spirits are there. We argue that at the heart of such spiritual experiences is the concept of a porous boundary between mind and world, and that people in all human societies have conflicting intuitions about this boundary. We have found that spiritual experiences are facilitated when people engage their more porous modes of understanding and that such experiences are easier for individuals who cultivate an immersive orientation toward experience (absorption) and engage in practices that enhance inner experience (e.g., prayer, meditation). To understand religion, one needs to explore not just how people come to believe in gods and spirits, but how they come to understand and relate to the mind.