This article analyzes the distinction between “spiritual experience” and “religious structure” from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. The central assumption is that spiritual experience is a dynamic state of expanded awareness and neural network flexibility, associated with reduced self-centered processing and increased functional integration across large-scale neural networks. In contrast, the institutionalization of this experience in the form of religion is a process of neural stabilization, identity formation, and cognitive structuring that operates in line with the brain’s survival-oriented demands. The article shows how transforming the living experience of awareness into stabilized structures can be accompanied by network rigidity, strengthened group identity, and activation of threat systems in the brain, and under certain conditions can lead to polarization and destructive behaviors. Accordingly, the distinction between spirituality and religion can be reduced, at the neural level, to the difference between network flexibility and network stabilization.
Ramin Bidari (Mon,) studied this question.