People who have what researchers call 'spiritual experiences' — states of overwhelming connection, awe, or transcendence — consistently show changes in a specific region of the brain called the parietal cortex. What's surprising is that damage to this region, whether from a stroke or a tumor, can actually cause people to become more spiritual, not less.
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We deceive ourselves if we imagine that we can ever be passive, impartial observers. Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or know it, or not. We are the directors of the film we are making — but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.
Oliver Sacks
No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.
G.K. Chesterton
The vociferous catastrophes of a general order — fires, wars, epidemics — are one single pain, illusorily multiplied in many mirrors.
Jorge Luis Borges