Introduction
"Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, must be put in terms of time rather than of space."
~ Henri Bergson (1859-1941) French philosopher
Phenomenology seeks to unveil the fundamental structures of experience, by shedding all the assumptions one has about objective reality. Perhaps the most basic of these assumptions is our own spatially derived presence, whereby our surroundings provide the context for our own presence. Neurologists point to the posterior superior parietal lobe-the portion of the brain Newberg and D'Aquili (2001) have dubbed the orientation association area, or OAA:
"The primary job of the OAA is to orient the individual in physical space-it keeps track of which end is up, helps us judge angles and distances, and allows us to negotiate safely the dangerous physical landscape around us. To perform this crucial function, it must first generate a clear, consistent cognition of the physical limits of the self. In simpler terms, it must draw a sharp distinction between the individual and everything else, to sort out the you from the infinite not-you that makes up the rest of the universe."
They suggest that reduced neural activity in the OAA during transcendence indicates a deficit condition resulting from a lack of information processing:
"Would the orientation area interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean that such a distinction doesn't exist? In that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real."
However, by assuming that the spatial limits of the self are the absolute limits of the self, they overlook the key attribute of transcendence, which is the heightened sense of immediacy. They fail to acknowledge that the OAA has to first generate a perspective from which to interpret the spatial boundary of the self.
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