The Neurophenomenology Of Spiritual Development
The overall goal of this presentation is to explore spiritual development in light of modern neuroscientific theory. Susanne Cook-Greuter’s model of ego development is used as the basis for this investigation, and neural correlates are offered for each successive stage. A theory of dialectical hemispheric relationship is offered as a means of neurologically explaining the alternation between individualism and communalism in Cook-Greuter’s model. Further exploration is given to the neural processes involved in the progressive dissolution of the ego and subsequent awakening to consciousness as the locus of experience. This essay concludes by theorizing that, with such awakening, right hemispheric modes of direct experience become the greater context in which left modes of rationality function
