Picking Up William James’s Gauntlet
How I would have loved to talk with William James about the present-day research in “neurotheology”—the study of the brain as it relates to spiritual experience. But I found a proxy for James, one who had the advantage of being available for interviews.William Miller would turn out to be my guide through the psychological exploration of mystical experience, and like the other guides who led me through genetics, neurology, and quantum physics, Miller seemed delighted to spend a few hours talking about his research, challenging, as it does, the materialist assumptions of science.
“When I went to graduate school, I got the very clear message: Spirituality is not something it’s okay to talk about,” Miller recalled. “We could ask our clients about anything else. We could ask them about family life and violence in the home and sex life, but never about spirituality or religion. It was the great taboo.”
Miller leaned forward in his chair. It was late July 2006, a blindingly hot day in Albuquerque. A lanky, bearded, rugged fifty-something, Miller looked more like a forest ranger than a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. The look seemed fitting for an academic with Miller’s chosen path. His specialty was the psychology of spiritual experience, a path so long neglected that William James’s footprints were barely visible for the underbrush. And yet, Miller has attained a sort of cult status among social scientists at universities like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. He was brave enough to tackle the supernatural mysteries of the psyche.
“William James was talking about these things in a very respectful way at the turn of the century,” I said. “What happened between then and now?”
“My own metaphor is that psychology had to go through adolescence. Because psychology came from religion and philosophy, we had to say, ‘I am not religion, I am not religion, I am not religion.’ And then as you grow up, you kind of find your way back to your roots. And I think psychology is doing that: we’re reconnecting with William James and the philosophic and theological roots that were there when psychology began.”
My own view is that psychologists and other scientists have been ignoring the spiritual at their peril, since half of all Americans claim to have had some sort of spiritual experience. Psychology is the study of humans, after all, and at some point psychologists should probably accommodate these peculiarly human beliefs. More than 90 percent of Americans believe in God. Compare that with the scientists: recent polls suggest that only 40 percent of scientists overall and 7 percent of the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences believe in God.17 Therein lies an explanation for why researchers have neglected the spiritual.Why should they study what they consider a delusion?
Bill Miller’s own quest to study the spiritual began in the most personal of ways in the summer of 1989. Miller and his family were preparing for a yearlong sabbatical in Australia. All of the family but one. His fourteen-year-old adopted daughter, Lillian, had gone through a particularly rebellious period and was living at a girls’ ranch two and a half hours away. One day, Miller trekked off to visit her, only to find that she refused to see him.
“So I turned around and drove home again,” he said.“And then later that week she called, and on the phone, her voice was different. There was something different about this voice I was hearing. And she said, ‘Dad, I need to talk to you.’ ”
He arrived at the ranch a few hours later.
“And this was a different person from the one I had known before that. And I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘There’s a mandatory chapel here. I went and sat in the back row like I always do, waiting for it to be over. And then this thing happened to me and I don’t even know how to talk about it. I don’t have any words to describe it.’
“She’s really been a different person ever since,” he continued, noting that his daughter was now thirty. “And I won’t say she’s been without problems or struggles or difficulties. But in the sense of being a different, compassionate, empathic person with a sense of reality bigger than the material world—yes, that came that day and has been there ever since.”
If this had been a one-off, Miller might have let it slide away. But for some time, he had been hearing about these epiphanies from clients in his clinical work at the university. He noticed that some of his patients underwent sudden spiritual experiences, and when they emerged on the other side, they had been transformed: no longer alcoholic, no longer suicidal, they were people who treated life as a gift. He called the phenomenon “quantum change.”
“And I couldn’t think of any theory, or even a word, that described this kind of change within my own discipline,” Miller said. “That was part of what fascinated me. I thought, Wait a minute, if a personality can change literally overnight, and it’s permanent, shouldn’t I be interested in that as a psychologist?”
Miller decided to pursue the question, and to find his subjects, he persuaded a journalist at the Albuquerque Journal to write a story about his work. At the end, the article noted that Miller was eager to talk with anyone who had undergone a dramatic psychological change or spiritual epiphany.
“The next day, the phone rang and rang and rang,” he laughed, still tickled by the memory. “In the end, eighty-six people called us, of whom fifty-five agreed to come in and spend three hours with us for no pay, to just tell us what had happened to them. And it turned out one didn’t need sophisticated clinical interviewing skills.You just had to say, ‘Tell me about your experience,’ and it would just come pouring out.”
Those stories fill the pages of Miller’s book Quantum Change.18 Many times, the event was subtle yet caused a wholesale shift in the person’s approach to life. Miller recalled the mother whose teenaged daughter had once again slipped out in the middle of the night. She was paralyzed with anxiety, but this time she surrendered her sickening fear to God. In the next instant, “there was just sort of a wave of knowing that everything was going to be all right,” she told Miller.“All of a sudden the desperation was gone and in its place was this assurance.... I felt at peace. I felt reassured. I felt loved, too, like there was a union; I was a part of something that was a loving, peaceful thing, something a lot bigger than me.”19
Other times, the mystical event crashed into the person’s life, often in the middle of a traumatic event, as happened to the woman whose abortion went violently wrong. Instantly she found herself transported out of her body.
“I saw heaven and I saw hell,” she told Miller.“I also knew that there is much more than the physical body and that when you die, you go on. . . . And then I just felt so at peace. It was very, very, very calming, because I knew something really important. I knew I was no longer limited by the physical.... I was able to transcend the physical, to see beyond the physical limitation. I have never feared death since then, nor have I ever experienced depression, which was a major change for me.”20
My favorite story involved a scientist whose alcoholism landed him in a treatment program. As the man, an agnostic, lay on his bed one afternoon, he decided to play a thought game: If there were a God, what would God look like? He closed his eyes and imagined a “blue-white star.” He reached out, snatched the star, and touched his hand to his chest.
“As soon as I put it into my chest, something took over my body,” he told Miller. “It was physical. I could feel my skin bulging outward, and I started to gasp for breath. I felt an ecstasy that was—the only way I can describe it is that it was just like a sexual climax, except that there was nothing physical to it and it was better than sexual climax, infinitely better.21 This thing had control of me; I mean, something took over my body. I was not in control. Something was doing this to me. . . . When it left me, I just wept. I was just stunned. I thought, ‘What the hell was that?’ I mean, it was real. And I was saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, my God, thank you.’ ”22 From that moment, he stopped drinking, and he quit his high-stress job.
In his
book, Miller picked up William James’s gauntlet from nearly a century earlier, and he found the very same elements that James identified: union with the universe, the peace and love, the feeling that something external was acting on them, and the conviction that this experience was more real than everyday life. And, like William James, Miller accepted these stories at face value, not cramming them into a file labeled “Psychosis” or “Sexual Disorder” or “Head Injury.” Admiring his pluck, I set out to do the same. As a reporter, I try not to rely on other people’s research. I wanted to gather my own stories and run them through the filter of my own close questioning. And I suspect because I had experienced a little of the mystical myself, I wanted some reassurance. If these people weren’t crazy, neither was I.
A Nation of Believers
Over a three-month period, I interviewed more than two dozen people who testified that they briefly brushed against the fringes of another, nonmaterial, dimension, and were transformed by the contact. Each time I finished an interview and turned off the tape recorder, I tried to identify how I felt about these modern-day mystics, like Sophy Burnham, who saw “the hem of God’s garment.” Intrigued?Yes. Awed? Certainly. But in the main, I felt a little deflated.Why were they chosen to enjoy this overpowering event, and not me? I couldn’t help suspecting that God might be an arbitrary schoolmaster, dispensing gold stars to the talented but naughty (think Mozart) and withholding them from the earnest but dull (think Salieri).
Of course, most people in the United States have never felt themselves dissolve into union with God. But according to surveys,23 fully half of Americans claim to have experienced a life-altering spiritual event that they could circle on the calendar in red ink.
It appears that spiritual experience (as opposed to belief in the tenets of a religion like Catholicism or Islam) occurs as often today as it did a century ago. Even the twentieth century, with its Freuds and B. F. Skinners, its technological advances and scientific reductionism, could not quash Americans’ yearning for the divine.
On the theory that the extreme cases paint the spiritual realm more vividly than moderate ones, I did not seek out people like me, who had experienced God in a brief religious shiver. Rather, I sought out people who had traveled to a different spiritual continent and back, and were willing to tell their stories.
Finding a mystic, it turns out, is pretty simple. They are everywhere. Many do not broadcast their experiences, worried that they might be considered odd. I located some of my mystics by asking friends, or by calling up people I had interviewed while on the religion beat at National Public Radio. Then I stumbled onto a mother lode of mystics: I called up Cassi Vieten at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a group that studies the intersection of science and spirituality. IONS had just conducted a survey of people who had undergone a dramatic spiritual transformation. Cassi sent an e-mail to four hundred of them, describing my interest in their stories and giving them my e-mail address. Within a week, more than eighty people had sent me long essays about their experiences, which were often—literally—incredible.
Since I could neither confirm nor debunk their stories, I asked myself two threshold questions to determine whom to include in my research. First, is this someone I would want to join my friends and me for dinner—that is, is he or she educated, reasonable, accustomed to appearing in public fully dressed? And second, did this person wonder about his sanity after his epiphany? (The answer to this question had to be yes, as that would indicate he or she had not lost touch with reality.)
As I heard their stories, I concluded that three elements are essential to profound spiritual experience, and all of them echo William James’s insights. First, the moment itself is weirder and more real than everyday reality. Second, it gives the person radical new insights about the nature of reality and the nature of God (the noetic quality). And third, those insights appear to rewire the person and his approach to life.
A Different Sort of Reality
I met Arjun Patel during a tropical storm in Miami, on December 6, 2006.24 I had barely made it to the hospital lobby where he worked when the heavens opened, the rain slamming down in angry sheets. Soon a crisply dressed man in his mid-thirties burst through the doors, splattering raindrops in an arc around him. Enter the hospital’s smart, young psychologist who specialized in helping patients with terminal diseases (and their families) negotiate the final yards into death.
We sat down in a sterile examination room. I gazed at Arjun, dressed in a button-down blue shirt, fresh and unwrinkled beneath his gray-and-blue-striped tie. He had beautiful olive skin, a near-shaven head, and a goatee, and he radiated a serenity that surely calms his patients in their final days.
Raised in a Hindu home, Arjun had experimented with meditation in his teens. But in his freshman year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he and a friend decided to meditate every afternoon at five p.m. After two weeks, Arjun said, he started to “play around a bit” and silently chant a Tibetan Buddhist mantra. He remembered the scene with cinematic precision. He and his friend were sitting cross-legged in their tiny dorm room on Wednesday evening in February 1990, and as the long shadows of twilight crept across the room, Arjun closed his eyes and slowed into a rhythmic breathing.
“I would sometimes see things when I’m meditating, just natural, normal distractions, and little visual things that happen,” he explained. “But this was different. It was dark, and there was this little pinpoint of light that just kept moving closer, relentlessly closer. I thought, What is this? It didn’t look the way I imagined any mystical experience to be, and I wasn’t really looking for one. So this light was off in the distance and it kept getting closer and closer, and there was almost a sound that came with it, like a roar.”
I recalled Sophy Burnham’s words—“there was a hollow darkness . . . sort of like an oncoming train.”
“I was trembling. I was vibrating, I had a tingling in my fingers,” Arjun continued. “Every time I talk about it I feel it again, a kind of clamminess in my hands. I felt very, very weightless, very light and easy. My breathing was very shallow, and I think I was exhaling really hard, and I was rocking back and forth. I could tell I was smiling from ear to ear. At some point, as the light got closer, there were two eyes looking back at me. They were stylized eyes. I later learned they’re called ‘Bud dha’s eyes.’ And they kept moving closer and closer, and the eyes were half opened and half closed. And when it got up to where I was, the eyes blinked. And it was like . . . I don’t really know how to describe it. The light wasn’t out there anymore. I wasn’t in here anymore. Everything just sort of collapsed, and there was nothing left but light.”
“Were you light itself, or was it in you?” I asked.
“There wasn’t any ‘me’ anymore. There was no boundary, no ‘This is me and this is something else.’ There was just total seamlessness.”
“Did you feel a loss of identity?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“And did that feel good or bad?”
“It just felt like, This is the way it’s supposed to be.”
Arjun slept little over the next two weeks. He listened to music and kept to himself. And he felt a surreal unity with all things.
“I remember lying on the grass under the tree in the quad,” he said. “I remember just running my hands through the grass, and just feeling for the grass.”
“Feeling for the grass,” I repeated.“You mean, empathizing with it?”
“Yeah. It was alive, the grass was alive, and it was beautiful. There was no self-reference point.”
The euphoria eventually ebbed, although, Arjun said, every time he talks about it “my body remembers what it feels like.” Sixteen years passed.When I met him, Arjun was meditating twice daily, and considered that moment the most important of his life. Since then, he has married, started a family, and, as an end-of-life psychologist, has eased hundreds of people through sickness and death.
I told him I did not know how he coped with t
he emotional drain of his job.
“It was the light,” Arjun said, and laughed self-consciously. “I don’t ever, ever, ever talk about this with my patients. But, you know, I feel that the experience—the light, whatever you want to call it—it’s always there. It’s kind of like a well: you can dip down into it and draw some of it up when you need it for spiritual energy and emotional energy. It’s something you always have access to.”
He paused.
“It was an eternal moment. It doesn’t matter that it was sixteen years ago. It’s happening now.”
A Different Sort of God
One theme kept drawing my attention, like a buoy that repeatedly popped up in the choppy sea of research. No matter what their belief systems, the people who had enjoyed profound spiritual experiences saw the same kind of “Other.” In fact, they often shunned the word “God,” since God is the purview of particular religions.Without exception, this being in the eye of their spiritual tornadoes was a loving presence, infinitely intelligent and gentle. My mystics might use different terminology, but they described uncannily similar experiences: love, peace, and, often, an overwhelming sense of unity with the universe—and always, light.
A Sufi mystic named LlewellynVaughan-Lee, for example, described his first mystical experience as a light switch flipping on.
“I saw light dancing around everything. You know when you get sunlight sparkling on water? It’s like that. I felt really alive with this quality of joy and laughter. And I just knew, this is the way it is, and everything else is the way it isn’t. Everything else is covered up. Everything else is veiled.”
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