Loriliai Biernacki
Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
Loriliai Biernacki is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research interests include medieval Sanskrit texts, the subtle body, Indian philosophy, New Materialism, gender, and the interface between religion and science. She is currently working on neuroscientific models of body-mind connection, including Integrated Information Theory. Her first book, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra (Oxford, 2007) won the Kayden Award in 2008. She is co-editor of God’s Body: Panentheism across the World’s Religious Traditions (Oxford 2013). She recently published The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and New Materialism (Oxford 2023) on the writings of the medieval Indian mystic and philosopher Abhinavagupta and their relevance for a contemporary science and New materialism.
Mantras, Mental Causality, Information and Transcendence
This talk addresses the nexus between mind, information and mental causality. How is it
that the mind — what we think of as a mental entity, with a first-person perspective —
cause the brain to register particular neuronal states affecting the physical material of
the brain and the body? As a way of probing the question of mental causality, we look
here at the limit case of yogis using mantras, magical formulas, as a mental mechanism
employed not only as a means for transforming a person’s state of mind, but also as a
means to effect events outside of a person’s own physical body. Indian yogis, like those
Yogananda described in his well-known Autobiography of a Yogi, are famed for various
seemingly impossible mental feats, using mantras to affect matter in ways that defy our
normal conceptions of how matter is affected. This talk draws from a variety of sources,
medieval Sanskrit texts, the work of the 20th century yogi scholar-adept Gopinath
Kaviraj, contemporary neuroscientific work on the concept of information and mind to
tease out the links between mind and the brain in relation to the workings of mantras as
a form of mental causality that transcends our assumed models of physical causality.