I didn’t know what to expect when we landed in Athens. I knew we were going to be meeting with refugees and hearing their stories, but I did not expect what I saw and heard. For one thing, I may have expected a strong narrative of unbearable suffering that ran through every one of these meetings. A narrative of victimhood and helplessness. A narrative which wanted so badly to be heard and listened to so that it could expose its most tragic and historic aspects to create greater awareness and anger for it. I may have expected helpless, uncontrollable tears rolling down my cheeks in response to harrowing tales of torture, imprisonment, of separation – mother from child, husband from wife, brother from sister.

What happened, instead, has left me incredibly perplexed. I heard the harrowing tales of torture, imprisonment, separation, familial betrayal, the difficulties of escaping a brutal crackdown, and of near-death situations. But an almost unexplainable sense of calm ran through these people as they told their stories. A calm motivated by faith and the belief that God is with the Hizmet, or “service,” Movement and has already manifested His mercy by preserving the movement despite these hardships. These atrocities did not destroy the Movement or break its spirit; they look more united than ever.

The narrative that believers suffer at the hands of unjust oppressors, as many prophets did under the tyranny of various pharaohs, is all too common in the Abrahamic texts. But it is an entirely different experience to physically see and talk with someone who has gone through these kinds of traumatic experiences, who is still in the thick of trying to find a home for themselves and their family, to be able to tell their story while showing the utmost reliance on God’s plan. They were also weary of putting their experiences in the context of other refugees, as they understood that others suffered even more.

I believe that their reliance upon God, and their calm approach to faith in the midst of such turmoil, is real. And the reality is clear for all of us to see and hear. Reading about their stories through an article such as this one, or even hearing them speak on the news, pales in comparison to actually being with them during their greatest hour of need. I feel that my mind is not the same as before. I am not claiming that the refugees, the heroes who were persecuted and driven from their homes for crimes they never committed, are completely okay with their situation. What I am pointing out is that, even in the midst of their losses and suffering, they thank God and are not hopeless.

The hospitality with which they welcome guests is astonishing. Considering the fact that they were refugees, they still took the time to host us and make us feel attended to.

Shaken by trauma, the brothers we spoke to find assurance by making dark jokes about their time in prison, or the difficulties they experienced while crossing over to Greece and other countries. Hours were spent strategizing ways to escape Turkey and flee to other countries or to reunite with family members that had already escaped. Their hopes hinged on the kindness of border police and passport patrol. There was rarely enough time to grieve about a father who might still be suffering in prison, or think about those in prison that were without medical attention, or the difficulty of having to share a single toilet among 50 people at a time. There was rarely enough time to grieve about the discrimination that they endured at the hands of their cruel jailors, who tortured and beat many of them until they went blind. I almost felt ashamed that I did not cry in front of them, however I did not feel that it would be respectful to show my pain in front of them when their suffering had outmatched mine so much more. So I sat there, listening quietly, waiting for their words to unfold into long complicated stories of imprisonment, release, escape, survival (or drowning to death), landing in Greece (or being caught), staying in a refugee camp, and then ending up with fellow refugees from Turkey.

The lessons that this experience taught me are too stark to ignore. It showed me that Hizmet is a movement that brings power into question. Every effort is made to mitigate whatever suffering and loss might come from the jihad of speaking out against injustice. But when it strikes, the experiences of those that are suffering, and have suffered, as a result of doing what is good remind us once again that to be comfortable, and to put all of our eggs in one basket, is not the way to live. We should not just strive to be productive people, and the best citizens we can be, even though this is incredibly important. We should also work within the social sphere to make active change to the way people think, and to the ways in which people oppress themselves and other people. And we must be prepared, as opposed to being scared, for a time in which we might need to make drastic changes to our lives. We might even be forced to do so. To work towards active change does not fit comfortably with people who are happy with oppression. As the common maxim goes, “silence is violence.”

Being as comfortable and privileged as we are in the United Kingdom, we need to remember that, even here, people are suffering. We must stand up for them.

I am still shocked that I had the honor of hearing these most intimate stories. I am also honored that Allah has given me the chance to see what real faith looks like. I say to myself that, if I cry, it should not just be because their suffering is too much to bear (not to say that we should not cry at all about this). But it should be because I have a long way to go to meet their level of faith and commitment to Hizmet and their service to humanity.

With so many expectations and obligations in our lives, it is a surprise we are not all insane. Dr. Brené Brown of the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work program is a shame resilience researcher, learning how people deal with issues like those above that can trigger feelings of shame, negatively impacting our relationships and ability to function. She has published three books covering the topic of shame and shame resilience. Dr. Brown has been gaining attention in recent years as she has appeared on CNN, NPR, PBS, and the internet video site TED. The topic may seem unusual, but the research has far-reaching implications, widely applicable beyond the social work field. Everyone experiences shame, and overcoming shame is necessary to function, instead of being held back and isolated by shame. Responding in a constructive, shame-minimizing way by working through shame issues is what Dr. Brown calls living in a more “whole-hearted” and “authentic” way.

Researching people

Social sciences have different methods of researching, and Dr. Brown used the grounded theory, a method which allows qualitative data, and inductive and deductive reasoning to gather data without having a hypothesis to start with. Using the grounded theory method, consensus from individual interviews was taken based on the language and terms they used to describe their experiences, “and maybe stories are just data with a soul,” posits Dr. Brown in her TED talk. Dr. Brown decided she wanted to study shame, and so she did so without any of her own theories to start. She just had the questions: What is shame and how does it work? According to Robert Hilliker, a licensed counselor, former student, and collaborator of Dr. Brown’s, she has gathered over 11,000 interviews with people, investigating their shame experiences and where applicable, their shame resilience.

Owning our own story can be hard, but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.

Dr. Brown found that some of the people she interviewed showed impressive resilience to shaming experiences. She focused in on these people and studied what made them resilient to the effects of shame. The people were dubbed, “the whole-hearted.”

How shame works

The positive side of shame research is that there are tools to combat the feeling and the experience of shame, and to make our everyday lives less like shame minefields and more like a day at the office, picking up the kids, going to the grocery store, and making friends along the way. Simple exchanges with fellow parents or children, with bosses or teachers, spouses, friends, and acquaintances can easily turn into huge triggers for shameful feelings. When a weak spot is hit, a mistake is made, an accident happens, or someone runs late, short exchanges can become terse and tense, full of hidden meaning and innuendo, implied or imagined incompetence and inadequacy.

Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky, but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy–the experiences that make us most vulnerable Whether a situation goes smoothly or blows up in someone’s face has a lot to do with his or her shame triggers, something everyone has. Detailed in I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power, social and family situations can become nightmares when our lives are ruled by shame. For people that cannot deal with their shame (everyone to some extent, according to Dr. Brown) the options are limited: numbing the feelings of shame and fear through addictions, attempting to become “invulnerable” through perfectionism, making the uncertain certain by becoming dogmatic, and pretending that our actions do not hurt others. But these negative actions do harm others, and they break down our connections to others.

How whole-heartedness works

Even more exciting than learning that shame is universal and awful was that there are strengths that can be cultivated to overcome shame. The title of Dr. Brown’s second book says it all: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. The main components of whole-hearted living were courage, compassion, and connection. Being authentic requires accepting ourselves for who we are and living that truthfully. “Owning our own story can be hard but not nearly as difficult spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy–the experiences that make us most vulnerable,” says Dr. Brown in her book.

There are so many ways to apply such a broadly useful set of concepts, especially for a person of faith. The “guideposts” in The Gifts of Imperfection evoke many concepts from holy books. “Cultivating Authenticity: Letting Go of What People Think” calls to mind the story of Prophet Noah, who everyone thought was crazy as he built an ark. The chapter on cultivating gratitude and joy clearly connects to faith. Dr. Brown’s perspective on gratitude is especially relevant to modern life: “For me and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ … Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it …”

As I read this passage, it makes total sense to me why we’re a nation hungry for more joy: Because we’re starving from a lack of gratitude.

Opportunities for growth

Dr. Brown and counselor-protégé Robert Hilliker have developed a curriculum called Connections which covers many of the concepts from her books and research. They are also developing a certification program for counseling professionals such as social workers and clergy who would like training.

“Spiritual leadership has a responsibility to make faith communities safe and supportive … We actually train spiritual leaders in the curriculum,” says Hilliker. “[Shame resilience] would be a wonderful thing for faith book clubs to sort of rally around … Her work has really reached a tipping point where people are talking about shame, this very pervasive feeling that everybody has and few people deal with well,” he says. Such a common feeling that can be very debilitating may not be the most cheerful topic of conversation, but learning to deal with shame may be one of the most liberating acts in a person’s life. To learn more, please visit: http://www.connectionscertification.com/.

Dr. Brené Brown, from her website.

Defining Some Broad Terms

Shame is simply defined as the fear of disconnection, that a person will be rejected when he or she becomes vulnerable.

Courage from the Latin cor, originally (and by Brené Brown) meant to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.

Compassion, defined as deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it, starts with self-compassion according to the shame-resilience research.

Connection is defined as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.

Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.

All the home-cooked dishes were delicious. It was obvious that the secret ingredient of my Turkish hosts’ cooking was love, spiced with intriguing conversation. I had not known that Turkish cuisine was one of the best three cuisines of the world, along with Chinese and French. As the IID members we had a great time eating the meals, sharing experiences and world views, and indulging ourselves with delicious and sinfully sweet Turkish desserts. During this trip, I had an ample opportunity to learn about Turkish everyday life as our hosts showed us their entire houses and explained Turkish customs and manners. Unlike contemporary, always busy, American or Japanese households, eating meals together still constitutes the core of Turkish family life, and this practice binds each member to the family unit.

Since my 2007 trip, I have been involved with various social activities at the Little Rock Raindrop Turkish House, and chief among them is the cooking course. A friend and I took the course for a few years, and we are now able to cook some dishes with ease, thanks to the classes and also our Turkish friends who gave us private lessons in their kitchens.

The Raindrop Turkish House cooking classes are taught by Turkish women volunteers, most of who are in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are housewives with small children, and others are teachers, researchers, and graduate students at university. When some of these women’s mothers visit them from Turkey, the older ladies often volunteer to show us different dishes that require some special techniques—which I would describe as “tricks.” I learned that Turkish cuisine is characterized by regional differences from the visiting mothers, who come from different parts of Turkey.

Students taking the cooking classes are diverse; some are university professors, school teachers, secretaries, university and high school students, housewives, and retirees. Their ages range from the high teens to low 60s. The nationalities of the students vary, too; during any semester, there are students from the U.S., Japan (me!), Mexico, Columbia, Uzbekistan, Poland, and Turkmenistan, among other places. The classes are thus international, for over the years I took the classes, a number of different languages were spoken besides English and Turkish.

The religious affiliations of the participants differ, too. All the Turkish women are Muslim, and some of them wear the scarf called Esharp, while others do not. American students belong to Catholic or Protestant churches or Jewish synagogues. I practice Zen (meditation).

The classes are very informal and take place once a week during the evenings. When too many people want to enroll, the classes may be offered twice a week. Usually, the class size varies from 4 to 13 students and two to four Turkish teachers. Recipes are given at the beginning of the class, and students learn about the ingredients, cooking techniques, regional differences, and the significance of the meal as they chop or mix vegetables and meats, and talk about life experiences.

The reasons for taking Turkish cooking classes vary. Zelda, an American woman aged 50, who is married to an attorney, said, “I am interested in the development of food, its difference and similarities with different ethnicities and regions. Plus, I like exploring new cuisines and cooking techniques.” Zelda is a dedicated cook at home and always brings a set of sharp knives to the class. She taught her sons how to cook Turkish meals, too. My colleague recommended Amber, a 23-year-old student to take the class to learn about Turkish culture. It is part of her project for a linguistic anthropology class. Kim, 59, a Jewish homemaker, said “I love to cook and learn new traditions and recipes. I enjoy getting to know the other participants,” when I asked why she wanted to learn about Turkish cuisine. Lynne, 62, said, “The food we’ve learned to make is excellent, but my favorite part is learning from and spending time together with the young Turkish women who teach the class.” She went to the IID’s Houston headquarters for a cooking competition in February, 2011, and won an honorable mention award.

Food is often a symbol of national identity, and it helps define cultures. Food can influence and enrich cuisines of other cultures, too. Historically, food was part of cultural imperialism and colonialism as well. Food unites people and standardizes the world as well—as we can see from the spread of American fast food chains thriving all over the world. As a result of globalization, the boundaries between cultures based on tastes and availability of foods have become much more ambiguous, and certain cuisines have merged in recent years, resulting in the food fusion phenomenon.

For me, as a sociologist, food unites the women at Raindrop Turkish House for world peace. Utilizing the Durkheimian theory of religion, we can say that these cooking classes are an integrator of all the participants from different nations and cultures. The class experience is similar to religion.

The teachers and students gather weekly in search of good food in a cathedral called the kitchen. The cookbook is like the Bible or Qur’an that is used as guide to successful cooking. Chopping boards, knives, ladles, and spatulas are items necessary for the “rituals,” and are comparable to an incense burner, a Yad (a pointer for reading the Torah), candle sticks, a Kiddush cup (for the rabbi to bless the wine). The teachers preach the way of cooking and tell us the significance of the specific meal. Some of the Ten Commandments of Cooking include:

• Always cook with love
• Wash the grape leaves before you wrap them with filling
• For the syrupy dessert, the cake must be warm and the syrup must be cold
• Sauté chopped onions with olive oil before you add the tomato sauce
• Use only the freshest and best ingredients

We work in a close proximity and in unison with all the participants. We laugh together as we dice carrots, mix minced meat, roll sarmas, and make mantis in huge quantities, and we cry together as we chop onions. After the cooking comes the tasting of the food we cooked with love. We open bottles of water and soft drinks to quench our thirst and become our nectar of life. We eat the meal that will become our flesh, blood, and energy to keep us going. We talk about experiences in our countries, share stories, and bond. Georgiana, 63, a secretary, said, “I am taking the class for the fellowship of others—to learn about the Turkish culture, to expand my horizons by meeting people from other walks of life. I love the lessons and I love all the folks!”

The teachers and students in the cooking classes are mothers, university professors, and school teachers who are raising the next generation of Americans. The children, youth, and young adults will grow up to be less prejudiced, more open-minded, and have more knowledge and understanding of each other’s nations and cultures because of the socialization process of their mothers and teachers/professors. By talking casually as we cook and eat together about our experiences, nations, and cultures, the participants can relate better to each other in spite of their different backgrounds and world views. The cooking class companionship promotes international understanding, friendship, and appreciation. This is the first step toward peace.

The Latin origin of the word “companion” includes the words “com,” meaning “with” and “pan,” meaning “bread.” Thus, a companion is basically a person you eat bread with! In Japan, there is an idiom, “eat from the same rice pot.” Our cooking-class companionship makes us bond and become friends. At Raindrop Turkish House, we say “Delicious!” in different languages, appreciate the food, and discuss matters that are important to women everywhere in the world. As women, daughters, wives, mothers, and grandmothers, we do share feelings, emotions, and thoughts about certain things, and they are universal to humankind: feelings of love, understanding, empathy, and compassion.

One night, my friend said at the table, “You know, we eat together, share experiences, and try to understand each other’s countries and culture. We become friends, and we will never think about bombing each other’s country or harming each other’s people.”

I hope that a day will come when there are no more wars in the world, and people live together in peace. And we can begin our efforts right in the kitchen!

Dr. Kinko Ito, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, U.S.A.

Dr. Andrew Newberg is Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. He is also Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of 5 books on this topic: Principles of Neurotheology, Why We Believe What We Believe, How God Changes Your Brain, Why God Won’t Go Away, and The Mystical Mind. He is considered a pioneer in the neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual experiences.

Dr. Newberg’s research utilizes the many recent advances in brain imaging to comprehend the nature of human consciousness and to determine how we, as humans, understand reality and interact with it. His studies now focus primarily on how brain function is associated with various mental states, and in particular, the relationship between brain function and religious experiences.

Matter&Beyond: What aspect of religions interests you personally?

I think the part of religion and spirituality that really interests me the most is its focus on that which is ultimate. Teilhard de Chardin used to tell that religion is related to questions of the ultimate. And that’s something that I guess I’ve always been focused on in my own thinking, trying to understand the ultimate questions about the Universe, about reality, about how we as human beings can interact with that reality and understand that reality, and I think that to me religions have always tried to find those answers.

M&B: You obtain brain scans of people while praying and meditating. What is the focus of those studies?

I think one of the parts of religion that has become very interesting to me is the profound experiences that people can actually have, particularly the mystical experiences where people really feel like they get outside of themselves and they begin to see the world in a whole different way. These transformative mystical kinds of experiences, depending on how you define them, those to me are the most interesting experiences in many ways and certainly worthy of looking at from lots of different perspectives.

M&B: But each religion brings its own perspective. Are you looking for commonalities, do you accept varieties, what is your take on the diversity of such answers?

I don’t always agree with those specific answers, but to me there’s always that pursuit of trying to find the answers of how we understand reality. And I think that is so ultimately, and while this doesn’t always come out in the practice of religions, there is that goal of having human beings attain a higher level of existence, becoming a better person, becoming something more than what we are and feeling more connected with our world than we normally do.

M&B: Certainly, world religions bring thousands of years of accumulated resources and historical notes about those intense spiritual experiences to the table. When you look at them, what are the common elements that catch your eyes?

When we look at the spiritual literature we see when people have had mystical experiences, we frequently see a description in which people feel that they get beyond the self, they get beyond their own ego problems like selfishness, their way of looking at the world from their own self perspective, and they look at the world in a whole different way. They look at the world in a much more holistic way, in a very interconnected way, they have a deeper understanding of what that world is all about, so from a subjective experience, people have the description where they really can get beyond the ego, get beyond the self, and see the world in a very different way. Now the question is, are they really doing that? And that’s something that is certainly open for debate both philosophically as well as spiritually.

M&B: These experiences and what they mean theologically as well as philosophically were debated for centuries. But with the advances of technology, now science has something to say about that too. The study of moment to moment reactions of the brain, that’s what you are doing, was not possible fifteen years ago.

We try to bring the science along with us so that we can then use the science in that new perspective as well and understand the world in a deeper way from both sides. That to me is really where we’re ultimately headed, and hopefully the research that I do and some of the other individuals around the world who are looking at these questions; this is what I hope the world’s going to lead to.

M&B: Let’s go to particular experiences. What would be an example for an intense spiritual state?

In the work that I have been doing over the last decade, I’ve spoken a lot about a state called absolute unitary being where everything is just undifferentiated oneness. Now, theoretically and from a philosophical perspective, that should be a very similar state regardless of how one ultimately gets to it, whether one comes from an eastern or western tradition, if you are in a completely undifferentiated state of oneness, then there really can’t be other perspectives on that. On the other hand, one still has to try to make some sense out of that so that after somebody has that experience, do they then interpret it through the lens of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, what have you, and then try to make some sense out of that.

M&B: About the spiritual states that you are talking about, there’s intense fulfillment related to those states. Sometimes people get the feeling that they reached the ultimate reality, all there is and all there was and all there will ever be. And in history there are some figures who claim that they became like God.

When one talks about the highest levels of mystical states and mystical experiences, it’s always very difficult to know how to respond to people who say that they have had them. On one hand they are, or should be at least, totally indescribable to the human mind and the human brain. On the other hand, when one has any kind of experience that’s a natural tendency that one wants to do is try to explain it and express it to other people. It really creates a conflict for the person who has that experience. Most of the people I have spoken to who have had mystical experiences of one form or another generally acknowledge that while “here’s the description that I’ll give you, but it’s really very far from what that experience was all about,” and I think that’s part of the humility that comes along with those experiences of realizing in many ways that experience was so much bigger than anything that that person really can get a hold of and understand and describe, and we sort of stand before those experiences and say “Wow, this is just something which is so much bigger than me and so much bigger than the world in many ways as I understand it, that there’s just no way for me to really understand it in its totality.”

M&B: What is your scientific goal in studying these intense experiences of oneness?

I think one of the interesting things from a research perspective is to ask “are these experiences the same, are they different, are the people different, is it the interpretation of those experiences that is different”? And that is something that we don’t really know yet. I guess it depends a little bit on the kind of experience that a person has, so I think that the question is, is that experience really the same for all those individual people? Is it not quite the same? Or if people think they did get that experience but feel something a little differently, could they have gotten to another state, another mystical state that isn’t exactly there and hopefully by the study of the biology as well as the phenomenology of these experiences, we might be able to understand them that much more and understand when they’re similar, when they’re different and how people ultimately interpret those experiences to be similar or different.

M&B: On the other side there are everyday religious experiences which are not so intense however more common.

Of course, intense experiences are not the only kinds of religious experiences, and for many people religion and spirituality is a way of life. And I think that it’s equally important for us to understand what that means for a person, so that they don’t necessarily have to have a mystical experience to have a deep understanding of what their religion or what their spiritual tradition actually means to them. And I think we need to look at both. What are the similarities and what are differences.

M&B: In religions there are some rituals related to spiritual states.

A lot of the research that I’ve been pursuing over the last decade or so have looked not just at religion, but at the specific rituals that people take part in that helps you induce various types of experiences and states. One of the things that we can look at when we look at rituals is that there is a very wide variety of rituals and they can have an impact on us in lots of different ways. To that end, a lot of rituals include visual stimulation, hearing or auditory stimulation, different types of body movements and so forth. Some can be very rhythmic, some can be very frenzied, and some can be very slow and methodical. And each of these different aspects of ritual can have a different kind of impact on us as a person, the things that we feel, the experiences that we have, and how they ultimately relate to whatever concepts that those rituals are looking at and helping us to understand in a deeper way.

M&B: What would be the resulting experience after a slow ritual?

So when we look at some of the slow rituals, for example, the ones that may be like a glory and chant which is a very slow rhythmic kind of music, or a very slow physical kind of process where a person may just be doing some kind of bowing or prostration, in a rhythmic way, those are the kinds of practices that can result in very deep feelings of calmness, acquiescence, and they may feel the sense of oceanic blissfulness. We can look also at the biology of that, the different parts of the brain and body that respond to that, so when we talk about slow rituals, we’re usually talking about what’s called the parasympathetic system in the body, or what I sometimes refer to as the quiescent system in body that helps the body relax, it helps the body rejuvenate its energy stores, for example, and this ultimately plays out in the brain because these experiences are associated with emotions such as contentment, happiness, joy, and blissfulness, and we can start to see all the different changes about how the practice itself starts, how it ultimately is played out in the behaviors and the rituals that the person takes part in, and then what happens in the brain in response to the kinds of experiences that they ultimately can have.

M&B: Are there any differences between man and women in terms of spiritual experience?

When we talk about different genders and the kinds of experiences that people have, on one level we certainly have some brain data that suggests that there is a difference between men and women’s brains and how they work, although they’re fairly subtle differences. When we talk about religious and spiritual experiences, obviously both genders can have very profound and compelling kinds of experiences, and to a certain extent when one looks at the literature, they are not fundamentally distinct kinds of experiences, there is probably a different kind of emphasis and we might see that women might focus a little bit more on the emotional aspects, more on the holistic aspects, but that’s a very subtle distinction and in the brain imaging studies that we’ve done as an example, again there are some very minor subtle differences between men and women, but in general, most of the changes that we’ve seen in one gender, we also see in the other. It might be to a slightly different degree in a few different structures, but in general, what we tend to see, especially as you get to the more profound and compelling kinds of experiences, is that there are a lot of similarities between men and women.

M&B: In what way do those mystical experiences transform an individual?

I think, as we look at different kinds of mystical experiences and different kinds of spiritual states, we do see kind of a continuum of these experiences and what myself and what my colleagues have argued for is that when one gets into the real high level of mystical states where that sense of getting beyond the self and the sense of connectedness extends not just to a particular group, but to the entire universe, to all of humanity, to the whole world, than there really is a much deeper level of compassion, a level of realization of where each of us is and the various issues each of us faces knowing that we’re doing the best that we can, but that we’re very limited in that ability, so I think its very correct to say that when people achieve deeper and deeper levels of connection and mystical experiences that they tend to feel deeper levels of compassion and love and humility in the face of other types of belief systems.

M&B: Although you are doing important studies about this topic, there are limitations too. You often talk about the limitations in both the scientific quest and religious understanding.

I think most religious belief systems feel that God is something which is infinite and all powerful and all knowing, and therefore as a human person, it’s very difficult, we’re very limited, and we really can only look at one very small aspect of what God or religion is all about. Therefore, we have to be aware of that limitation and recognize that all of us have limitations. So we’re all, in many ways, doing the best that we can with the belief systems that we have. But we also have to respect, I think, the other belief systems that other people may have because they may be looking at the same thing, but they may just be seeing it a little bit differently.

M&B: Would you give us an example?

I always liked the analogy of having different flies on an elephant, and then you ask each fly to describe an elephant. Well, the fly that is on the trunk is going to say something different than the one that’s on the tail, and different than one that’s on the tusk. And they’re all right, but they’re also all limited in how they’re looking at it. They’re not seeing the whole thing, and I think when we talk about ultimate reality, when we talk about God, these are such huge concepts that I think people really have to be very aware of and careful about the limitations that they are putting on those ideas, on the ideas as they understand them, and also recognize that everybody else is working with very similar kinds of limitations. Hopefully this will give us a little bit more sense of compassion for each other to realize that we’re really all kind of in the same boat, and we’re all kind of dealing with the same problems of trying to understand our world the best that we can.

M&B: There is also the limit of sensory experience.

Certainly, the biology of our brain speaks to that very issue. We miss so much of what comes into the brain, what gets up into our consciousness, and what we are aware of is so small relative to all the other things that are going on around us, that it really is very sobering I think. We think that we see the whole world and that we see it so clearly, and a lot of the research that has been done over the last 10 or 20 years shows that our view of the world is really very limited, and I think when you extent that to religion and spirituality it really makes, at least me, pause and say well maybe we really need to be a little bit more aware of what those limitations are about. On one hand it’s great that we can have a spiritual or religious view about our world, but lets keep it in the understanding of what the limitations that our own mind, our own brain, impose upon that ability to think about that and to act upon it and understand it in the right way.

M&B: To summarize, what would be the role of science and spirituality in understanding the ultimate reality?

On one hand, science offers these wonderful tools to try to get at what is out there. On the other hand, religion and spirituality offer a path towards getting beyond the self. I think we really need to look at those experiences in which the person feels that they get beyond the subjective and objective nature of what the world is all about and look at it from a whole different perspective. However, our sense of religion, spirituality, and God, that is ultimately processed through the functions of the human brain. In that regard, the human brain actually in some ways constricts our ability because the universe and God are very, very big concepts, and we as human beings are very finite and very mortal in terms of how we think about the world. We can’t look at the whole world. We can’t look at the entire universe, and we can’t look at all of God. We can look at a very specific aspect of them. Therefore, the human brain actually constrains how we think about religion, how we think about God, and how we make sense of that.

M&B: So in a sense, we get a glimpse of the unlimited in our limitedness.

We really are trapped within our own mind, we’re trapped within our own consciousness, and we have a long way to go, I think, to be able to get beyond the human brain and in many ways, to have the brain get outside of itself to take a look at and really be able to know what is out there in reality.

This notion, in fact, could hold true for any work of fiction. It is an interesting question then why fiction has been used in literature for thousands of years, given that the message it indirectly contains in its text will be understood by only a small number of people. Would it not be a more rational method for the authors to simply relate the message they would like to give without adding people, events, and all those tedious details of fiction? Apart from making a philosophical point, there is yet another reason for writing fiction; the understandable urge for mortal humans to try to remember how some significant events unfolded in their lives. Through stories and poetry we are able to listen to episodes, fictional or semi-fictional, of people’s lives. However, the same question arises: If for example, the author writes to prevent the following generations from forgetting a crucial battle, then why are they not content with simply giving the actual locations and components of the army, the strategies employed, the weather, etc.? Rather, the author embellishes the story and characters through which we follow the incident. This article attempts to answer this question and concludes that as there is a psychological element in human learning, fiction has the potential of describing ideas that are not possible to relate by any other means.

First, we need to make a definition of the two different categories of knowledge: transferable and nontransferable knowledge. Transferable knowledge is the type that can be easily explained or taught to another person and which will be widely accepted if understood by the listener. For example, multiplying 2 by 2 is easy and transferable; how to use a computer is less easy, but still transferable; the theory of relativity is extremely hard, but it is still transferable. Nontransferable knowledge, on the other hand, contains elements of human cognition and feelings, and it is possible that it can never be transferred to another person fully. A mother’s love to her child is only transferable to a certain extent: However well it can be defined and in whatever detail its feelings can be explained, it can never be felt by anybody other than a mother. Knowledge of the beauty of a childhood memory can never be transferred to anyone else, not at least to the extent which the person who experienced the memory is aware of it.

Obviously, these categories are not as clear-cut as one would like to imagine; in fact, we can easily accept that there is no knowledge that is totally transferable or nontransferable. When we describe a journey that we have made, the names of the streets are transferable, but at the same time there may be quite subtle, unconscious things that these names remind us of, things that are nontransferable. The type of tree and its color are transferable, but the idea of the magnificence of the tree that elevated our belief in God is not, even though the imaging event is the same. However, all knowledge in this world can be understood as being a mixture of transferable and nontransferable elements.

It is one of the great tragedies of humanity that we carry an incredible amount of knowledge that cannot be transferred to anybody else in our lives. We can never make another person understand why we believe, why we love, how we feel. Even when we try to put these things into words, we fail miserably. If we try to explain our reasons, we even fail to explain them to ourselves. You have probably experienced such a moment: Upon trying to express the reasons for your faith, love, or feelings, you become aware that these were not the real reasons, you understand that it was not these reasons that were the cause of everything. It was an experience in time and space. You are what you are only because you have experienced your past. At this point, let us leave the layman in awe or ignorance, and let us turn to the artist.

The fiction writer or artist in general, consciously or not, has the only tool in the world that can be used to transfer nontransferable knowledge. This unique tool uses the simple idea of constructing a past for some people in the reader’s mind. Generally, a fiction work has one intended protagonist and events shape around this character. As a result, we learn a great deal of the experience that the protagonist has gone through. We have discussed above how the only real way to acquire nontransferable knowledge in the first place is by living through experiences. These experiences have molded us into what we have become. By reading fiction, by reading about the experiences of the protagonist, by relating to them, we start to feel like them. By reading the complex descriptions of how they felt and what they did, and what happened to the protagonist, we almost become them. In the end, the process has succeeded: for a certain span of time; we have felt the way the writer wanted us to. This process is bound to change our viewpoint since we have now had different experiences than before.

Another power of fiction is that it does not try to persuade you. We do not like to be persuaded and when someone tries to do so, we get defensive. Reading an ethics book that tells you to do this and that is one of the worst reading experiences. However, when you read a good work of fiction where the protagonist lives what resembles a real life and behaves well to people, in many aspects, and is liked by others, then you will feel as if you also want to be like him. I wonder if there was anybody who has not decided to be a better person after reading “The Idiot.” We learn from his letters that it was Dostoevsky’s intention to relay the above message to us when he wrote “The Idiot.” In this way, another example of nontransferable knowledge (i.e., that being good to others is a good thing) has been transferred to the reader; in fact, I cannot imagine any other way of doing this.

It is very interesting to observe how some great minds that normally do not use fiction resort to it at times when their message becomes more belief-like, more cognition-related: i.e., more nontransferable. None of Nietzsche’s books are fiction except for “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” But again, all his other books criticize the Christian religion, posing alternative explanations for morality and interpreting Greek Philosophy. Zarathustra was a different type of book: Nietzsche knew that it had an element of belief, that it was not an analytical flow of ideas; it introduced two still controversial components of his philosophy: Eternal recurrence and the Superman. Nietzsche well knew that he would be able to transfer these ideas to his readers via fiction, as the reader would feel and live and walk with Zarathustra, and approve of his strength and relate to him, and maybe accept him.

Said Nursi, when he was writing “Ayet-ul Kubra” (The Supreme Sign) knew that if he used fiction, i.e. if he caused us to walk with the explorer in the story and find evidence of the Unity of God, then we would be able to relate to him and accept his findings. He knew that the dictation of this evidence in a didactic manner would not be as effective; belief has a psychological element. Hume, when writing “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” knew fiction was the best way to show the contradictions of the medieval Christian philosophical belief in God, because he knew that disbelief has a psychological element and that it can be transferred in its extent only via fiction.

Obviously, not all fiction works have a conscious intended message, but it is easy to see that every good work of fiction will have some evolving influence on the reader’s mind. In fact, leaping one step ahead, I want to suggest that abstract fiction (in particular, poetry) has an even deeper potential to transfer “more nontransferable” knowledge. The Modern and Post-Modern eras have given us fiction that speaks of our inner fears and our deepest secrets. These are ideas that even the authors cannot explain explicitly, however, by supplying a rich medium they are somehow able to remind us of these things; they are able to transfer some knowledge that is essentially non-transferable.

In summary, the fiction writer tricks us into believing that we have assumed a neutral position from where we can observe the events and people of the story. However, this position is not neutral: As we watch the story unfold, as more details become apparent, the characters become more real and the incidents become more lifelike. The teaching power of fiction is twofold: First, since we assume that our position is neutral, we do not take the defensive. Even if we read that the protagonist chants a new system of belief, even when we chant with him, we do not feel that we are being taught; it is just an event that happens in a story. Secondly, when we read about the experiences of the protagonist, and since we relate with him or her, we are also able to experience the same events. These are the experiences that make the protagonist what they are now. To an extent, depending on our prior predispositions and the power of the narrative, we have also by now lived these experiences. Again, to an extent, we have now changed in a way that would never have been achieved by listening to a lecture of ideas.

The argument above can readily be extended to other forms of art as well. The seventh art, cinema, is the one that most closely resembles literary fiction and it also incorporates components of other arts. Although there are some disadvantages concerning the narration of the thought process, these are compensated for by visual cues, and we again can learn things concerning human cognition that would otherwise not be able to be transferred.

Paintings are crystallized forms of visual cues and they can have the same influence. If I simply told you that this life is a bridge between birth and death and that there is a terrible lack of meaning, as well as there being a great ignorance on the part of most people of this vacuum, an ignorance which is maddening, you may well agree, but you would not experience the emotion I was trying to convey, and again an attempt to transfer nontransferable knowledge would fail miserably. But if you were to come across the painting known as “The Scream” by Edvard Munch (see picture), which even in the first instance seems frightening and repellent, you would wonder what this might mean, why is this man apparently screaming, of what is he afraid? Later you might notice the other people in the background, who are happy and walking on their way, apparently not noticing or maybe ignoring whatever the man in the foreground has been frightened by. Then, you might notice that the man is standing on a bridge. Maybe you would walk away from this picture without finding any meaning in it. However later, when the time is ready for you to understand, you will be able to perceive what the painter was trying to convey. Munch is trying to convey to us what we described above, but in a most delicate and cunning way. He used paint as a medium to tell this, because he knew that this is nontransferable knowledge and in order to convey this information, he had to use art.

Music might very well be the ultimate form of transferring nontransferable knowledge. Love, rage, sorrow, joy, and things that cannot be put into words can be expressed by music and can be immediately perceived, at least to some extent, by the listener. How else are we to understand the grief and wrath that Beethoven felt when he was slowly but certainly going deaf if it were not for his music? In his 3rd piano concerto, while submersed in the music, we feel the helplessness and anger of the great composer. Even if we did not know that Beethoven had composed this concert during the latter stages of his life, we would still share and feel his feelings. One high note on the flute can influence our feelings more than hundreds of words.

If we return to fiction, if we accept that this argument has some truth in it and that fiction is a way to convey nontransferable knowledge by making us live through experiences, then we should observe that the fiction which has the greatest influence on us is that which is rich in content; it is evocative. Such literature mimics human experiences as closely as possible, making us feel like we have experienced the same. In fact, we are aware of both these elements in good fiction.

Another point to note is that if this argument contains some truth, then one can consciously counteract fiction by choosing not to read the works of fiction known to have a view of the world that one does not want to accept. If we want to learn about communism, but not have our feelings on communism affected, we could read “Das Capital” with no fear. However, if we read some works of Gorky, if we see from inside the difficulties of the lives of the people and the hopes they have invested in the idea of equality and the ideal of communism, then we are almost bound to find ourselves transformed to approving of communism somewhat in the end.

Naturally, I am not pretending to explain the reason for the existence of art in this article. However, it seems that one of the reasons for art and fiction is to be able to relate things that concern human cognition, things that cannot be related or conveyed by any other means. These things cannot even be put into words. This is the power of fiction and art. Ironically though, to relay this idea to you I have used nonfiction. In fact, I know I would have been more convincing if I had made up a character who wanted to tell others about his ideas but could not achieve this via an analytical description. He might then decide to write a story and explain his experiences that led to his ideas. To his surprise, he might see that his ideas have been truly understood by his readers. If I had written such a meta-fiction, I know that the idea presented would be perceived more clearly and persuasively. I did not choose a work of fiction only because good fiction takes great time, work, and talent. This is the difficulty of art.