The Original Ritual
There is something almost funny about the fact that the two most electrifying topics in human history — sex and God — turn out to be running on the same hardware. Andrew Newberg walks into Dax's attic and essentially confirms what every mystic, every addict, every lovesick teenager has always suspected: the most sacred and the most carnal experiences are cousins, sharing a nervous system, borrowing each other's neurotransmitters, lighting up the same neighborhoods of the brain. The autonomic nervous system, that ancient two-armed thing — arousal on one side, surrender on the other — turns out to be the engine of both the orgasm and the prayer. The speedball of the soul, Dax calls it, and he's not entirely wrong.
What this conversation quietly reveals is that human beings are creatures desperately trying to get outside themselves. Andrew spent a summer after college chasing infinite doubt — not knowing anything, not even knowing that he didn't know anything — and landed in bliss. Dax spent years getting outside himself through chemicals before finding other routes. Both men arrive at the same strange clearing: the pressure comes off when you admit the whole project is unknowable. It's very Buddhist, Andrew says. It is, Dax agrees, and somehow that moment of mutual epistemic surrender is more intimate than anything either of them planned.
The book's central argument — that religion is downstream of sex, that the first ritual was a mating ritual, that every Gregorian chant and every peacock feather are expressions of the same biological imperative — is almost too tidy to be true and almost too obvious to have needed saying. And yet nobody said it, not in this way, not with brain scans and GABA receptors and Pentecostal speaking-in-tongues studies and orgasmic meditation research to back it up. The frontal lobe shuts down in Islamic prayer and in sexual surrender. The parietal lobe goes quiet when you lose yourself in God and when you lose yourself in another person. The Jennifer Aniston neuron fires somewhere in a seizure patient's brain and Monica reveals she has epilepsy and loves Friends and the whole thing collapses into a kind of gorgeous absurdity.
Dax's addiction lens never fully leaves the room. The speedball comparison, the mention of AA's higher power, the observation that sex addiction and religious mania may be operating the same regulation strategy — these aren't digressions, they're the through-line. He is always, on some level, asking: what are we all trying to get away from, and what are we running toward? The answer this episode offers is: each other. Rituals, myths, sexual selection, orgasmic meditation, the call to prayer five times a day in Hyderabad — all of it is the brain's attempt to dissolve the boundary between self and other, finite and infinite, mortal and eternal. It is, as Andrew keeps gently insisting, the same mechanism. And it is, as Dax keeps pointing out with a kind of wonder, beautiful that it's the same mechanism.