Gazing at the racing water, I listened as carefully as I could. It sounds childish now, but at that moment the existence of God hung in the balance. At my core I believed I would hear a “voice” telling me what I should do. For several minutes, I strained to hear it. Nothing. Nothing but my own sullen admission that I had but one choice. I could stay on the mountain or cross that river.
And so I stumbled into the current as far as I could stand, and then, with a huge inhalation and a small cry, I heaved myself into the stream, tumbling and flailing until, miraculously, I smacked into the bank on the other side. I staggered out of the river, up to the little white house.
“Hello! Hello!” I yelled, banging on the door as I watched the lights turn out in the back. Then, timidly, a frail, white-haired woman peered out her window.
“Please,” I begged, “I’ve been lost in the mountains for hours!”
“Oh, you’re all wet,” she said softly, opening the door a sliver.“Come in, come in.”
I began to sob—relieved, yes, safe, yes—but feeling alive in a way I had not felt in years.
TRANSFORMING INSIGHTS USUALLY COME in small moments and pedestrian crises. So it was for me. In those few hours alone in the Smoky Mountains, in the dark soil of my fear, a seed split open. I realized that for nearly a decade, I had been running down one trail after another, keeping to the familiar safety of a path that would leave me dry but never lead me home. At some point, I needed to cross the river and immerse myself in the unnerving questions about God, and reality, and whether what I instinctively believed was true—or rubbish.
I was, to be honest, skittish. Skittish about ruining my reputation in a career where few people believe in God and fewer still bother to distinguish spirituality from religious politics. More than that, I was skittish about submitting my faith to scientific tests, exposing it to the possibility that the most profound moments of my life were nothing more than, say, electrical activity in my brain.
But in the end, I had to cross the river, and on the other side I found a small, brave band of scientists who had far more to lose than I did. They had slaved away for their medical degrees or their Ph.D.’s in neurology or biology, building a reputation in mainstream scientific research. And then they had risked it all by pursing the taboo questions. Is spiritual experience real or delusion? Are there realities that we can experience but not necessarily measure? Does your consciousness depend entirely on your brain, or does it extend beyond? Can thoughts and prayers affect the body? And that question I cannot seem to escape: Is there more than this?
Every generation claims a few scientists at the fringes wrestling with these questions. Sometimes they are called parapsychologists, a demeaning title that makes them sound illegitimate if not a little bit unhinged. But today’s iconoclasts have an advantage their predecessors lacked. They have technology. They can peer inside a brain as it meditates in prayer or trips on psilocybin. They can look for markers in the brain, and, like forensic detectives, they are studying the evidence left behind by “spiritual” events that occurred out of their eyesight. They are trying to discern the fingerprints of the one—or the One—who passed through a person’s psyche and rearranged his life. They are analyzing these “spiritual” moments, in the form of epileptic seizures or psychedelic experiences, meditations in a brain scanner or out-of-body experiences. In the process, they find themselves in a world of mystery.
I have been privileged to spend time with some of these scientists, as well as the people whose stories they are studying. Along the way, my own spiritual journey has taken a surprising turn. I have shed some beliefs as untenable. And I have reclaimed some beliefs I had long ago discarded—because science may be proving them true, or at least plausible.
I wrestled with the approach to this book. As a journalist, I naturally gravitate toward the safe, clinical, third-person approach to the science of spirituality, setting aside my personal predilections and laying out the evidence for the reader to evaluate. And yet, the questions in this book about the nature of God and reality—these are my questions, this is a personal quest, and therefore I have woven my own story into the larger quest.
Like anyone else who has lived nearly five decades, I am hardly a blank canvas. My life experiences have nudged me into my particular perspective. But I have tried to draw on two experiences to help steer this book. The first is my quarter-century as a print, television, and radio journalist. I habitually shelve my preconceived ideas to try to glean the truth. I have learned to ask questions and really listen to the answers. If the science surprises me, or if it simply does not fit into my worldview, I must take that into account if I am to be an honest guide. Even if the science contradicts what I feel in my gut to be true, I will relay it to the best of my ability.
The second influence is my particular faith journey. Even though I now consider myself a mainstream Christian, I have never entirely shed the perspective of Christian Science. Christian Scientists do not evangelize or impose their truth on anyone else, and they are graciously tolerant of all other faiths. I am not going to foist my findings on you, and I will certainly not advocate a particular religious view. I wrote this book because some questions plagued me. I set about answering them—not by gazing at my navel, for there is only so much information that any one navel can provide. Rather, I am examining the science and the scientists, the “neurotheology,” that might explain those numinous moments that most everyone has enjoyed.
THIS BOOK TACKLES the existence of God, “the reality of the unseen,” as psychologist William James had it. After talking to countless scientists far more knowledgeable and insightful than I, I have concluded that science cannot prove God—but science is entirely consistent with God. It all depends on how you define “God.” If you are trying to locate deity in a thirty-three-year-old carpenter or the unseen divider of the Red Sea, science will offer no help. But if you look for God in the math of the universe, if you perceive God as the Mind that rigged existence to create life, then science can indeed accommodate. If you see God in the breathtaking complexity of our brains, as the architect of our bodies and our minds who planted the question Is there more?—well, science has room for that kind of God.
This is the God I am pursuing in this book. If I were to draw a road map for this journey, I would say the first part is driven by personal questions about my own spiritual experiences. Chapter 2 explores spontaneous spiritual experiences that come unbidden, like the one that washed over me as I sat talking with Kathy Younge. It turns out I was not alone: half of Americans have been overcome and radically transformed by a sudden encounter with the spiritual. Science is only now catching up with the ideas of William James, ideas that it has discarded for a century but can no longer ignore.
In chapter 3, I raise the question at the foundation of my own religious upbringing: Is there a God who hears prayer and heals? When you look at massive prayer studies involving hundreds of people, the evidence for prayer’s efficacy is mixed at best. But go beyond the blunt instrument of strangers praying for strangers, look for the power of thought to stop the HIV virus in its tracks, for example, and suddenly the picture changes. What was once superstition is now accepted science: our thoughts affect us on a cellular level, unfolding the biology of belief.
Chapter 4 looks at the triggers for spiritual experiences. Is there a certain set of circumstances, a certain personality type, a certain cocktail of internal and external stress, that erupts in a spiritual experience? I believe there is, and I believe this explains why alcoholics so often become spiritual people. While an encounter with God can happen anywhere, anytime, my research and my own life story tell me that brokenness is the best predictor of spiritual experience.
Next, I investigate the hard, arid, materialist science that tries to explain (away) spirituality. In the process, I stumble on a new definition of deity.
In chapter 5, I ask the question Why me? Why are some people inclined to pursue and experience God while others couldn’t care l
ess? Is there a “God gene” that predisposes a person to Spirit? It seems to me that one way to define God is as a master craftsman who organizes our genetic code so human beings have a capacity and yearning to know Him.
But God has other talents, and other roles. Chapter 6 explores God as chemist, who adjusts the chemicals in our brains so that we can gain access to the spiritual. To find this God, I traveled to a peyote ceremony in Arizona, and to Johns Hopkins University, where a prominent neuroscientist has found that psychedelic drugs hold a key to understanding our connection with the spiritual.
Chapter 7 reveals God as electrician, who wires our brain to allow us to tune in to an unseen reality. For this I visited an epilepsy clinic in Detroit. Scientists have long believed that the ancient mystics like Saint Paul and Saint Teresa of Ávila did not experience God but only the electrical storms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Recently, however, some neurologists have begun to speculate that those neurological events may not spark mere delusions—but actually allow people to hear and see a spiritual dimension that normal consciousness cannot grasp.
In spontaneous mystical experiences, people stumble into the ineffable; but knowing God is also a muscle that one can develop. Chapter 8 follows spiritual virtuosos—people who practice accessing God as intently as Tiger Woods perfects his golf swing. I witnessed a Christian virtuoso as he meditated in a brain scanner at the University of Pennsylvania, and tried my own hand at altering my brain through spiritual practice. Along the way, I began to question two exclusive theologies—the Christian doctrine that there is only one way to God, and the materialist doctrine that there is no God at all.
Finally, I find myself in territory just beyond the boundaries of “acceptable” science, and here I discover some tantalizing explanations for how science and spirit might coexist. In chapter 9, I look at the twentieth-century assumption that the brain is the sum total of one’s consciousness. Once the brain stops functioning, most scientists say, so does one’s mind, along with one’s identity and existence. Out-of-body experiences fly in the face of this assumption, including the remarkable—and clinically documented—case of a woman who had no brain function but continued to think and observe.
Chapter 10 tackles a different but related question: What happens to people who touch death and return? Today neurologists are submitting people who have had near-death experiences to scientific scrutiny, hooking them up to EEGs and sliding them into brain scanners. The results of these experiments do not prove that we have souls that survive death—that is beyond the capacity of science to determine. But there is room in this science to believe in another reality beyond the veil of death.
In chapter 11, I come to believe that a major problem with God is not whether He exists but how one defines Him. Indeed, scientists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking have looked at the universe and acknowledged a being, or mind, or architect before whom the only response is awe. The “God” that scientists can accept, in His most recent iteration, springs in part from quantum physics, the mysterious behavior of the very smallest particles. I caught a glimpse of this physics in action at a research institute in California, where I watched as one person’s thoughts appeared to affect another person’s body. This, then, is where mysticism meets science, and points to a God who may be the medium through which our prayers and thoughts are transmitted to others.
In chapter 12, I find two sorts of paradigm shifts. One, I believe, is just beginning to take place in science. The other has already begun to take place in my own soul.
Now let’s get on with this radical project. But before we do, I want to make one more observation. Belief in God has not gone away, no matter how secular society has become or how much effort reductionist science has exerted to banish Him. God has not gone away because people keep encountering Him, in unexplainable, intensely spiritual moments. That is where I begin this scientific hunt, with the people who intimately know this God.
I begin with the mystic next door.
CHAPTER 2
The God Who Breaks and Enters
IF I HAD SEEN SOPHY BURNHAM in the produce section of my local grocery store I would not have thought, Oh, she looks like a mystic. But that is precisely what she is—a woman who has perforated the veil of physical reality and glimpsed another world. She lived only a few blocks from me, and after reading her book The Ecstatic Journey,1 I made an appointment to see her. I approached this interview with a sort of fascinated terror. I was drawn to the untamed, almost uncontrolled spirituality she had described in her book. But I was also skittish because her journey bore an unsettling resemblance to my own.
True, her mystical experience was a nuclear explosion compared with my little blast of dynamite. But I knew instinctively that I had the same sensibility, the same sort of internal compass that might set me on a parallel spiritual path. This haunted me. I recoiled at Sophy Burnham’s adventurous faith life, the way she bushwhacked through the spiritual woods, testing this religion and that. I was quite comfortable with my faith life, with the rhythms of a certain kind of prayer and reading each morning, a certain type of church and pastor, a reliable faith where I could turn a knob to get hot water from the faucet or a flame from the stove. For all the excitement, Sophy had paid an exorbitant price for her spiritual journey. She had ended her marriage, given up her longtime friends, and abandoned her comfortable life as a Washington journalist. I glimpsed in Sophy’s past my own potential future, and it scared the hell out of me.
The woman who ushered me into her Washington apartment was small and lithe, wearing black pants and an orange crocheted sweater. She bustled off to the kitchen, her movements quick and precise as she prepared a cup of herbal tea. Sophy Burnham was nearing seventy, but looked twenty years younger. She wore her dark-blond hair short, simple, and parted on the side, framing a delicate nose and mouth and—clichéd as it sounds—penetrating eyes. She gave me a brief tour of her airy apartment, which occupied one of the city’s oldest and most elegant buildings. The tall windows overlooked a canopy of lush trees on this morning in May. The eclectic artwork on her walls reflected the taste of a woman who has traveled widely: two large oil paintings of saints (booty from the Mexican War); a framed page from a medieval manuscript; an Indian cloth painting of a blue Lord Krishna with his gopis, cows, and peacocks. She cleared a space on a dining room table cluttered with manuscripts and began her story.
Sophy was three or four years old when she first felt some kind of “connection with the universe.”
“It wasn’t that there was something more than this—that there’s a physical world and something else,” she explained. “I had the sense that—like Gerard Manley Hopkins—the physical world was glowing with life. Shining like shook foil. I knew that everything was alive, and that the universe was on my side.”
When she was ten or eleven, she was out riding with her father on their remote Maryland farm.
“My father said to me,‘For some reason the horses are really spooking. ’ Because they were dancing all over the place. And I said, ‘Well, of course they are, they’re feeling all this electricity in the air.’ He said, ‘Oh? Is there electricity in the air?’ And that was the first time that I realized, Oh, not everybody feels this. Isn’t that interesting? I just assumed that everybody was intimately attuned.”
I wrote down her comment and circled it in my notes. As I talked with more people, I would find that mystical adults were once mystical children, as if they were genetically wired for the spiritual.
Over the next thirty years, Sophy would attend Smith College, stray from her Episcopal upbringing, and dabble in atheism. She would marry a NewYork Times reporter and give birth to two girls. In her thirties, the part of her psyche that was a spiritual nomad broke free. She began to seek answers from a Hindu guru and Buddhist meditation. Sophy arrived at age forty-two with teenaged girls, a caring husband, a glittering social life, and a demanding career as a freelance magazine writer.
“I was happy, and yet there was something
deeply missing,” Sophy said. “And it was a deep, deep longing that couldn’t be satisfied. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, Is this all? And then thinking, I have everything. I have a loving husband and a house and children and friends and a career.Why am I yearning for something else? And I didn’t know what I was yearning for.”
She found it on assignment. Town & Country magazine sent her to Costa Rica and Peru to profile the World Wildlife Fund. As an afterthought, she added a side trip to Machu Picchu, the sacred Inca mountain ruins in Peru.
She was sitting in the airport in San José, Costa Rica, when she had a premonition of the mystical experience to come.
“Suddenly, I saw everything shining, shining, and the people were shining,” she recalled.“Everyone was luminous, and it was so profound that I just sat at my table, I just shook, with tears streaming down my face, it was so beautiful. And I thought, Oh well, that’s it.That’s as good as it gets.”
She was wrong. Two days later, when she was climbing the terraces of Machu Picchu with a group of other tourists, “I felt a nagging little chord in me, saying,‘You’ve got to go away, you’ve got to go away. You don’t have much time. Hurry. Hurry.’ ”
She left her companions and scrambled up to the terraces, where she could be alone. She sat down, closed her eyes, and instantly was in “another place.”
“The first thing that happened was frightening,” Sophy said, looking into the middle distance. She spoke slowly, carefully, as if she were narrating an event she was witnessing in that very moment. I can do justice to her story only by repeating it verbatim.
Fingerprints of God Page 2