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WHERE GOD LIVES
By Melvin Morse, MD

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Here is the prologue to a wise and most interesting book. Dr. Morse, a scientist who identifies the right temporal lobe of the brain as our Mind-body connection with God, has put prayer and meditation to the test, and finds some eye-opening answers.

Simple Prayers, Complex Results

"A miracle is not the breaking of laws, nor is it a phenomena outside of laws. It is laws that are incomprehensible and unknown to us, and are therefore miraculous." Gurdjieff

In 1997, neuroscientists from UC San Diego bravely proclaimed that they had found an area of the human brain which "may be hard-wired to hear the voice of heaven." In specially designed research, they found that certain parts of the brain—the right temporal lobe, to be exact--were attuned to ideas about the supreme being and mystical experiences. They called this area "the God Module" and said it was "dedicated machinery for religion."

Many scientists were excited by the research. One, Craig Kinsley, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond in Virginia, even declared, "There is a quandry of whether the mind created God or God created the mind. This is going to shake people up."

I knew what he meant. In three other books, I had already identified the right temporal lobe as the place where man interfaces with God. It is this area, an area I call "The God Spot," that is an area of untapped and unlimited potential where God lives in each of us. This region is instrumental in facilitating mind-body healing. It is responsible for visions as well as psychic powers and vivid spiritual visions.

In short, the right temporal lobe allows us to interact actively with the universe.

Although near-death experiences, NDEs, represent what is thought to be our final communication and interaction with the universe, that couldn't be further from the truth. NDEs are simply spiritual experiences which occur while we are dying. What we learn from studying NDEs is that we have the biological potential to interact with the universe anytime during our lives. In order to do so, we just have to learn how to activate our temporal lobe, the place where God lives.

As a practicing pediatrician with an interest in near-death studies, I have seen what happens when this area is activated in children who have NDEs. I have also seen how those children are affected in the years following their brush with death. Not only are these children better balanced in their physical and mental lives, but they are better balanced spiritually. They eat better food, do better in school, and are more mature than most of their peers. They are aware of a connection with the universe that most other kids don't even know exist. They feel a purpose in living, and they don't fear that death is the "end of it all." They trust their intuitions and feel they can connect again with the divine presence they saw when they nearly died, without having nearly to die again.

"Once you've seen the light on the other side, you can see it again if you try," said one of my young patients. "It is always there for you."

Where is it?

Don't look for The God Spot in an anatomy book. Modern medical science does not officially recognize this area of the brain, or any other area, for that matter, as The God Spot. In fact, standard textbooks of neurology describe the function of the right temporal lobe as processing and interpreting memories and emotions. In Where God Lives, the right temporal lobe will be shown to function as a "paranormal" area, which gives us such abilities as mind-body healing, telepathy, and the ability to communicate with God. Since these abilities are paranormal, they are controversial. So it naturally follows that there is no official medical recognition of The God Spot or anything like it.

How could this be? How could we, for thousands of years, ignore something as important as the ability to interact with God? The simplistic answer would be that we are in the "spiritual dark ages," and have yet to evolve out of them. It wouldn't be the first time. The history of humankind is filled with such intellectual blind spots. The Chinese invented the compass but not for travel. Rather, they used this amazing instrument to align their homes. The Mayans invented the wheel, but only used it for children's toys. It wasn't for many years that other cultures discovered additional uses for these inventions and used them to change the course of history. It will be a long time before Western medicine acknowledges an area of the brain that interacts with the Universe, despite research by respectable institutions. Even though doctors knowingly use this area every day in their medical practices, most deal with the "mind/body connection" as a concept rather than a reality. An actual God Spot? No way.

I was one of them.

Of course, I understand why most Western-trained medical doctors don't acknowledge The God Spot as an anatomical area. After all, I went to medical school at Georgetown University, one of America's bastions of medical education. Had one of us even considered proposing something so nebulous and out of the mainstream as an area of the brain that interacts with God, we would not have been taken seriously.

My strict medical training led me to deny the existence of such an amazing area of the brain. Even when I started studying near-death experiences and focused on interviewing hundreds of children who had nearly died, I had trouble believing everything I was hearing. I interviewed children who had left their dead bodies on emergency room tables and "floated" to the waiting room to visit with their concerned families. Later, they were able to recall conversations and scenes that they could not possibly have witnessed in their comatose state.

Still, I had trouble accepting the reality of the near-death experience, largely because my strict scientific training made me suspicious of unexplained events. I was like a man who reads books about surviving in the wilderness, but has never actually camped out at night to put those skills to work.

Then one day, I saw the light. I was speaking to a group of electroencephalographers, people who use EEG machines, when one of the technicians asked, "How can you stimulate your right temporal lobe?"

I responded technically, telling her about a neurologist who used electricity to stimulate the temporal lobe artificially. In the middle of my response she impatiently interrupted, "No, I mean how can you do it naturally?"

I shrugged and said the first thing that came into my mind. "I guess that's what people do when they pray."

Taste of my own medicine.

I never thought to try this time tested method of temporal lobe stimulation, this thing called "prayer," myself. I was like most doctors who rarely taste the medicine they dispense. I kept it at a distance, using it to explain my work but never praying in my own life. I can honestly say that I had never truly prayed until I was forty years old.

Almost on a dare, I decided to take a leap of faith. My leap happened during the publicity tour for our third book, Parting Visions. Book tours are fast-paced events in which authors often run from interview to interview. The relentless pace is monitored by a media escort who specializes in getting authors from one interview to the next. It is a mind-numbing exercise, answering the same questions over and over again, trying to summarize such a complex topic as spiritual visions into three or six minutes or whatever time bite before the next commercial break. Book tours are tough duty, but they have value beyond just selling books. For one thing, they give me an opportunity to learn firsthand how people feel about my research.

One of these opportunities came in the midwest, where I was picked up at the airport by a media escort whose husband had recently died of cancer. It was one of those days where nothing seems to go right. Several radio stations cancelled their interviews with me, and I was left to do nothing but kill time with my media escort.

She was deeply religious and had no doubt whatsoever that there is life after death. Her terminally ill husband had true spiritual visions of another life, she said, and she saw his visions as an affirmation of her life-long faith. She treasured, rather than feared, his final moments of life.

"How do we connect to God?" she asked.

I told her my theory of The God Spot, and how I now realized that it could be "turned on" in a number of ways besides near-death or active dying. I mentioned a number of studies in which the temporal lobe had been stimulated and spiritual experiences "turned on" as a result. I also mentioned that "true prayer" could turn it on. "But," I said, "I am not sure what 'true prayer' really is."

"You must know what it is," she said. "You have never prayed?"

I had to answer, honestly, that I had not. I prayed when my dad had cancer, but I felt that it was just a way of expressing extreme anxiety. Even though I attended Hebrew school as a child, the prayers we said there seemed to be the meaningless chanting of ancient writings.

I had no trouble with the pursuit of science as a sort of religion. Although much of my work had involved leaps of faith, they were calculated leaps backed up by scientific research that made them very short and safe. But religion, I told this woman, was on the other side of a gap that was too wide for me to cross.

"Perhaps," she said. "But I didn't ask you if you were religious. I asked if you have ever prayed. Don't you think prayer and religion can be two different things?"

I had never thought of them separately, I said, but I see how prayer and religion can be used together or separately as the gateway to spirituality. I also mentioned that religion is frequently used as a method of control rather than a means of freeing one's soul.

"Don't think about all of the bad that has happened as a result of religion," she said. "Just think about the creator of the universe and about trying to touch that power. Just get on your knees and talk to God. If you do it right, maybe God will respond."

I laughed, "Well, maybe I will try it."

"Promise me that you'll try it tonight."

"Okay," I promised. "I'll try it tonight."

Promise kept, question asked.

Later that night, I kneeled at the foot of my bed, as promised. It didn't feel as dumb as I thought it would. I thought lovingly about each of my children, laughed about something each of them had said and thanked God for them. I thought of my wife and how lucky I was to have someone who could put up with my devotion to the practice of medicine. I prayed for the health of my patients and that I would have the insight to help them. And then I decided to ask God a question. I asked, "What is the nature of God, and what is the relationship between God and man?"

I know my prayer seemed contrived, but I was acting with a completely open heart. In the end, I sincerely and openly prayed for about five minutes that night. I followed the formula my escort had outlined for me, a few minutes thanking God for my blessings, a few minutes praying for others, and then my question.

To make my experiment with prayer more scientific, I included in my prayer that I had to have the answer within a twenty four-hour period. That way there would be a clear end point, and I wouldn't have to wonder if events during the next several days could be interpreted as God's answer to my question.

The next day I got up early and flew to Los Angeles, where I faced a busy schedule of radio and TV appearances. By mid-afternoon I had completely forgotten about my prayer experiment. When I got to the hotel that evening, exhausted, I got my answer. Filled with pent-up energy, and pacing around my hotel room, I was suddenly surrounded with an incredible sense of peace, calm, and love.

I knew what it was immediately. The slight hiss I had been hearing in my ear all day from clenching my jaw muscles was gone. In fact, all sound was gone. I felt immersed in a sweet, warm, honey-like feeling. I could feel it on my skin as much as feel it in my heart and brain.

I felt completely at peace, surrounded by love. I knew everything. I suddenly felt that if I asked any question, I would immediately know the answer. I heard my question again, in my head, "What is the nature of God's relationship to man."

I understood that man and everything else in the universe is a piece of God. As each snowflake contains miniature representations of the entire snow flake, and each strand of human DNA contains the code to create a unique human, we are all tiny pieces of God.

I understood the answer to one of the most perplexing questions in biology: why does each cell contain the DNA of the entire body? It seems unnecessary, redundant. Yet, if each of us were tiny pieces of God, then each of our cells would have to be tiny representations of ourselves.

The sensation of being exposed to this universal light was like doing a belly flop off the high dive. All the wind was knocked out of me. My entire body experienced an intense pain and then all feelings and sensations ceased. In one blinding flash, I suddenly understood I was a body within a soul, not the other way around.

I understood this all in an instant, an instant which seemed to be never ending. I had studied this sort of experience for years in other people, but never until then did I have one myself.

Such an epiphany has not yet been repeated, even though I have prayed many times since. It was enough to have had it happen once, because now I know I can communicate with God in times of need, a belief of virtually every religion. I imagine that this feeling will be there for me again if I ever really need it.

The Bottom Line

My work with children who have had NDEs and my own spiritual experience have taught me some valuable lessons that I may not always follow but that are always present in my mind: my wife and children are the most important gifts in my life, love is the fabric that binds humanity together, and few things are really worth getting "worked-up" over.

I don't want to portray myself as a minor saint. I still yell at my kids at the end of a long weekend when everyone is tired. I still can be insensitive, stare at the TV too much, and not listen to my wife attentively. I still can be grouchy at work. But I realize all of life is brief and precious. "We only have a few minutes," Billy Graham said. "The great mystery of life is how short it is."

My brief right temporal lobe awakening has led me to have confidence in the rest of my right temporal-lobe abilities—telepathy, remote viewing, and mind-body healing. I have learned to trust my instincts and to see intuition as an asset that is biologically hard-wired in our brains.

After fifteen years of listening to children describing what it was like when they died, I have learned what happened to them in the final moments of life can happen to any of us, at any time throughout our lives. The experiences teach us we have a large area of the brain—our right temporal lobe—which remains under-used. It is now a scientific fact--which I will establish in this book—that when this area functions fully, we receive insight into the meaning of life and a personal introduction to God.

For most of us, the search for spirituality is like the man who searched for fire with a lighted candle. Fire was in front of his face all of the time, he was just looking beyond it.

We often ignore the insights and visions we obtain from our right temporal lobe. We don't trust them, or we don't believe the answer to our problems could be so simple.

As you will discover in this book, the right temporal lobe is giving us insights about living all the time. The challenge is to learn how to hear that inner voice, and distinguish between the insight presented to us by the right temporal lobe and the cacophony of other voices and feelings that clutter our brain. This reminds me of a story a child once told me when she recounted the particulars of her near-death experience. She said she went to a "place of light" where she encountered a frantic little man who was a picture of frustration. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her, "They keep praying to me for answers, and I keep sending them answers, but they never seem to listen or hear."

Learning to Listen

Learning how to listen to our inner voice is what this book is all about. It is a voice we all know exists. That inner guidance system tells us who we are and where we are going. It is our connection with the divine. It is the divine light seen by many who have had NDEs. As one child who nearly died of bacterial meningitis described it, "it's the light that told me who I was and where I was to go."

Of course, none of us should wait until we die to learn who we are and where we are to go.

We urgently need to connect with that light right now. And you can. By reading this book, you will discover that this spiritual light is available to you throughout the rest of your life. It is easier to experience than you think. You just have to want it.

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The above excerpt is from Where God Lives by Melvin Morse.

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