Localizing the Sacred Is Not the Same as Explaining It: Mohandas at the Fault Line Between Neuroscience and Depth Psychology

E. Mohandas’s Neurobiology of Spirituality (2008) arrives at a moment when the neurosciences were aggressively colonizing terrain once held by religion, philosophy, and depth psychology. The text surveys functional neuroimaging studies, lesion data, and neurochemical models to argue that spiritual experience — meditation, mystical union, near-death visions, glossolalia — has identifiable neural correlates centered on the temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, and limbic system. Mohandas marshals evidence from Persinger’s temporal-lobe stimulation experiments, Newberg and d’Aquili’s SPECT imaging of Franciscan nuns and Buddhist meditators, and pharmacological studies of serotonergic and dopaminergic pathways. The ambition is synthetic: to demonstrate that spirituality is not an epiphenomenon of culture alone but a biologically grounded capacity of the human brain. This is a legitimate and important claim. But the text’s deeper significance lies less in what it proves than in what it reveals about the epistemological trap into which the neuroscience of spirituality inevitably falls. As Richard Tarnas argues in Cosmos and Psyche, modernity constellated “a seemingly irresolvable tension of opposites, a fundamental antithesis between an objectivist cosmology and a subjectivist psychology.” Mohandas’s project lives inside that tension without resolving it: to identify the neural substrate of spiritual experience is not to adjudicate whether such experience contacts anything beyond the brain. Tarnas’s point — that “the discoveries of psychology could reveal nothing with certainty about the actual constitution of reality” — applies with equal force to neuroscience. The fMRI scan of a meditating monk tells us where the brain lights up; it says nothing about whether the monk’s reported encounter with the divine is veridical. Mohandas seems aware of this limit but does not press it to its philosophical conclusion.

The Temporal Lobe Is Not the Soul: Hillman’s Critique Anticipated

What makes Mohandas’s text so instructive for depth psychology is that it performs, in neuroanatomical language, exactly the literalizing move that James Hillman spent his career diagnosing as the psyche’s primary pathology. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman insists that soul is an “imaginative possibility in our natures,” irreducible to any single explanatory register — biological, sociological, or theological. “Where there is a connection to soul, there is psychology; where not, what is taking place is better called statistics, physical anthropology, cultural journalism, or animal breeding.” Mohandas’s work, for all its empirical rigor, risks collapsing the symbolic density of spiritual experience into the flatland of neural localization. When Persinger electrically stimulates the temporal lobe and a subject reports a “sensed presence,” Mohandas treats this as evidence that God-experiences are temporal-lobe events. Hillman would counter that the image of the divine presence is not explained by its neural correlate any more than Hamlet is explained by the chemistry of ink on paper. The soul’s depth, as Heraclitus and Hillman both insist, has no measurable limit. To say that the temporal lobe participates in mystical states is to say something true but radically incomplete — it addresses mechanism while ignoring meaning, the precise domain depth psychology claims as its own.

The Praying Brain and the Dreaming Brain Share an Architecture That Neither Discipline Has Fully Theorized

Mohandas’s most generative contribution, one that exceeds his own stated framework, is the implicit convergence between the neurobiology of spiritual states and the neurobiology of dreaming. His review of prefrontal deactivation during deep meditation parallels findings from REM sleep research: in both states, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — seat of executive control and reality-testing — goes offline, while limbic and temporal structures become hyperactive. Robert Bosnak’s Embodiment theorizes precisely this territory from the imaginal side, describing the hypnagogic state as a domain of “simultaneous multiplicity” in which dissociated embodied selves coexist. Bosnak’s claim that the dreaming state is not a degraded form of waking consciousness but a distinct mode of encounter with psychic reality finds unexpected neurobiological support in Mohandas’s data. If prefrontal quieting is the shared neural signature of both dreaming and contemplative prayer, then the distinction between “spiritual experience” and “dream experience” may be less a matter of kind than of cultural framing — a point Thomas Moore makes in Care of the Soul when he argues that “the soul needs an intense, full-bodied spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food,” without privileging any single modality of access to the sacred. Mohandas, unwittingly, provides the neural grammar for what Moore articulates as a phenomenological truth.

Why Neurobiology Needs Depth Psychology More Than It Knows

Jung warned in his late writings that “the problem of neurosis ranges from disturbances in the sphere of instinct to the ultimate questions and decisions affecting our philosophy of life,” and that “a therapy along purely biological lines does not suffice, but requires a spiritual complement.” Mohandas’s text is, in effect, an empirical footnote to this claim — documenting the biological infrastructure of what Jung called the numinous. But Jung also understood that the numinous resists reduction: dream motifs bearing archetypal content are “not merely similar but even identical” to mythologems, and their significance cannot be captured by the language of neurotransmitter concentrations. The deepest limitation of Neurobiology of Spirituality is that it has no theory of meaning. It can describe the serotonergic cascade during psilocybin-assisted mystical experience but cannot say why that experience reorganizes a person’s life narrative, dissolves addictive compulsions, or initiates what Sri Aurobindo calls the “unfolding here of the Being within from birth to birth.” For that, one needs the hermeneutic tools of depth psychology — the capacity to read images as Hillman reads them, to honor the soul’s symbolic speech as Moore honors ritual, to situate the individual’s experience within the archetypal patterns Jung mapped across decades.

This is precisely why Mohandas matters for the depth-psychological reader: not as a replacement for the imaginal tradition, but as its necessary interlocutor. The book demonstrates that the brain is structured for spiritual encounter, that contemplative states are not aberrations but expressions of a dedicated neural architecture. What it cannot do — and what no neuroscience can do — is tell us what those encounters mean. That remains the work of soul.