HOW TO 'MEASURE' A TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE.

Neuro-theology attempts to explain religious experience, transcendental states, and intangibles like faith, in neuro-scientific terms. It uses advanced imaging modalities like PET Scan, f-MRI and other technological applications to study correlations of neural phenomena with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. Can experience ever be objectively documented or measured? Could experience be reduced to neuro-chemistry and then measured in micro electron voltage potentials? Experience is essentially a 'qualia' phenomenon. Feelings, experiences and emotions vary widely in different people subjected to similar sensory inputs. The sight of a lush green meadow, for example, will elicit a unique sensation that's exclusive for each individual. Qualia are complex entities comprised of objective sensory data tagged with a subjective affective component. This affective component draws inputs from the conscious as well as sub-conscious realms. Whether qualia actually exists is hotly debated and that is largely because they are considered as being an obvious refutation of physicalism.

Philosophers often use the term 'qualia' (singular: 'quale') to refer to the introspective , phenomenal aspects of our mental constructs. Qualia are impacted by the intrinsic neutral processing of each subject, and how the individual relates to the physical world. Qualia is in many ways central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness, the epicentre of the Cartesian mind-matter duality. Can scientific endeavour ever objectively explain and explore the subjective domain of 'qualia'?

The 'Explanatory Gap' was a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine who addressed the puzzling inability of physiological theories to account for psychological phenomena. Levine's main focus was on consciousness, or 'qualia', our subjective sensations of the world. But the explanatory gap could also refer to mental functions such as perception, memory, reasoning and emotion - and to human behaviour. Imaging modalities could help identify the anatomical locus of a sensory or perhaps even a transcendental experience. It would however have limitations in explaining the unique emotional fingerprint, the subjective perceptive variation generated by the same stimulus in different subjects.

Spiritual, transcendental experiences are entirely experiential, and in the realm of 'qualia'. Spiritual masters endeavour to explain these states metaphorically. Experience of an incredible expansile consciousness is made possible when the subject effaces himself totally eliminating subjectivity and the subject-object dichotomy. An experience that is experienced only in the absence of the entity that experiences. What happens to the subject during this experience? 'Who' experiences satisfaction after the prolonged deep sleep when all the while the Self has lapsed beneath the cognitive horizon.

Can consciousness exist fundamentally even in the absence of an objective cognising entity? Is the subject created in consciousness by consciousness rather tha consciousness being an epiphenomenon of the subject? Is qualia an objective conscious experience by a subject which is also a construct of consciousness? Is qualia experiencing itself by consciously becoming the subject and object simultaneously? A transcendental state will then be an integration of the experience, experiencer and experiencing. An experience that is experienced in the absence of an experiencer.

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