Sacred Moments, Secular Spaces

What makes a moment sacred? For some, it's kneeling in prayer or participating in ancient rituals. But perhaps our most profound experiences of transcendence often occur in unexpected places. In the artist's complete absorption in their craft, in the hiker's breathless awe at a mountain sunset, in the scientist's wonder at the elegant mathematics underlying reality.

As Yogi Ramacharaka observed: "Even those who style themselves 'free-thinkers,' 'agnostics,' as well as those who deny the existence of God at all... feel this instinctive urge, and manifest it in the love of nature, or art, or music, little dreaming that in so doing they are still loving and practically worshiping some of the manifestations of the God they deny."

Yet this observation invites deeper questions. The neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, studying the brains of both meditating monks and contemplative atheists, found something striking. The same regions lit up during their deepest moments of transcendence.