heavy lid to check on dinner.
“What I’m interested in isn’t that. That’s not what I and Abbey
and Muir and Thoreau are talking about. It’s something much deeper,
more cutting close to our soul. Frankly, it’s the essence of who we are
and getting away from the rat race, across the litany of literature.”
Satisfied with the progress of cheese meltage on his enchiladas, he
pulled off his oven mitt. “If I was a betting man, I’d be betting on the
fact that the prefrontal cortex is not in overload in nature.”
STRAYER IS A betting man, because he was out here spending a pile of
the National Academy of Sciences’ money on EEG machines. It
seemed to me that when the brain is “resting” from its onslaught of
daily tasks, it’s making room for something else. It might be the
default network—the one that spurs daydreams and reflection—but it
might not be. One conundrum is that the most accomplished Buddhist
meditators, the ones who’ve spent tens of thousands of hours
mastering that prized calm-alert state, don’t appear to be firing up
their default networks when they meditate. What they’re accessing is
something not easily mapped in discreet places in the brain, but the
circuits seem to be related to feelings of compassion, unity, and—
dare I say it—love. If our brains are wired for religious and spiritual
feelings, the monks have got it down.
But if Muir and Emerson and, before them, eighteenth-century
Irish philosopher Edmund Burke had it right, feelings of spirituality
don’t just spring from religion: they also spring from transcendent
experiences in nature. In 1757, the twenty-eight-year-old Burke
landed in the center of the Enlightenment when he published A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. A secularist, he’d been rambling around Ireland and
feeling, for lack of a better word, moved. Sensitive and dramatic, he
was less interested in landscapes that were picturesque than in scenes
that were a little bit dark. Haunting was good, terrifying even better.