Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  In the mid-1960s, Eric Kast at Chicago Medical School stumbled on a surprising side effect of LSD—one that hinted at the symbiotic relationship among body, mind, and, dare I say, spirit. Kast found that after being treated with LSD, patients with end-stage cancer suffered less pain and “displayed a peculiar disregard for the gravity of their situations.” 10 Study after study confirmed this. From 60 to 70 percent of the terminally ill patients enjoyed a dramatic turnaround in mood and outlook on life after tripping on LSD. Many saw their pain level drop precipitously.11 The question was: Why? Did the chemicals reduce their pain directly—or indirectly, by reducing their stress and thus their pain? Or did these studies hint at another, spiritual, dimension?

  I wanted to know the backstory to these psychedelic studies. I tracked down a few of the researchers, now approaching their seventies, who were too experienced, or too old, to worry about today’s scientific reductionism. One of those researchers was Bill Richards, who helped conduct the Johns Hopkins study. In 2006, I met Richards at his home office, nestled in lush wooded land adjacent to a wilderness park in Baltimore. He sat in his cozy office on a brilliant July morning, a man with copper skin and a gray goatee and a half-smile that put me instantly at ease. A few minutes in his calm presence and I thought, I wouldn’t mind taking hallucinogens from this man.

  Why did psychedelics help the terminally ill? I asked.

  The subjects traveled to “another level of consciousness. The deeper the mystical experience, the better the outcome,” he said.

  “There’s a study I did with a hallucinogen called DPT,” Richards later remembered. “We divided the cancer patients into two groups after the fact—those who had experienced mystical consciousness, and those who hadn’t. And we compared those two groups, and those who did experience the mystical consciousness manifested more capacity for intimate contact, for example, as well as decreases in anxiety and depression.”

  “And pain, right?” I asked him.

  “Reduced pain for some,” he replied.“When we were working with LSD, we recorded decreased reports of pain. That was also true of the other substances. But part of it was, the meaning of pain changed. Before, pain was in the center of the field of consciousness. People would say, ‘I’m suffering, I’m scared, I’m in pain.’Whereas after [the LSD] people would say, ‘Oh! The pain is still there but it’s off on the periphery of consciousness.’ And at the center of consciousness would be relationships with important people.”

  It occurred to me there might be something more spiritual at work in these terminally ill patients than merely rearranging priorities and appreciating the precious time they had left. I voiced that suspicion to Stanislav Grof. Grof had headed psychedelic research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, before the research was shut down. In his fifty years of studying psychedelics and “nonordinary states,” he has sat in on more than 4,000 psychedelic sessions.

  Grof said the mystical experiences were in a class by themselves, because they altered the patients’ concept of reality, an effect that neither antibiotics nor Percocet has achieved. I thought back to Mary Ann and the peyote ceremony. Aided by mescaline that night in the tipi, the Navajo woman had traveled to what she believed was another spiritual dimension, and when she returned, the pain had evaporated.What Mary Ann and Grof ’s subjects shared was mystical experience.

  “They lost fear of death,” Grof continued. “It’s also something we know happens to people who have near-death experiences. They’ve been in a car accident or have cardiac arrest, and they come back and they say they’re not afraid of death anymore. And we found out it had tremendous impact on pain. It frequently helped with pain that was not responding to narcotics. Or the effect was beyond the pharmacological effect of the drug. The relief sometimes lasted several weeks.”

  In his book The Ultimate Journey,12 Grof offers vignettes of cancer patients who had taken psychedelics for his research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Their mystical experiences could have been lifted from the pages of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life or other books on near-death experiences: the visions included hell, judgment, and—always—light and redemption. The patients emerged from the trips convinced that life and love extended beyond the grave. Often, Grof reported, the pain levels dropped so dramatically that the bedridden patients were able to return to work for weeks or months.

  In a groundbreaking study of patients with terminal cancer,13 Grof, Richards, and other scientists reported the case of a woman whose breast cancer had metastasized to her spine.When the doctors first met “Mrs. G,” she was paralyzed from the waist down, anxious, and depressed. After her first LSD session, she emerged determined to work with her physical therapist, and after a few months, she was able to get around with a walker. But a year later, she learned her cancer had spread throughout her body and that she would soon die. She fell into a depression and received another LSD treatment. During this session, “the patient had the experience of passing through a series of blue curtains or veils,” the researchers reported. “On the other side, she felt as if she were a bird in the sky soaring through the air.”14

  Mrs. G’s pain eased dramatically. She was able to walk down the aisle at her daughter’s wedding without so much as a cane, and amazed the guests by dancing with her husband during the reception. Six months later, she was considering returning to work, and asked for another LSD session. This time, she enjoyed a full-blown out-of-body experience. The session began smoothly, but Mrs. G became frightened when she saw a huge wall of flames. After encouragement from the attending therapist, she was able to pass through the middle of the flames, and at this point experienced “positive ego transcendence.”

  “She felt that she had left her body, was in another world, and was in the presence of God, who seemed symbolized by a huge diamond-shaped iridescent Presence,” Grof reported. “She did not see Him as a person, but knew He was there. The feeling was one of awe and reverence, and she was filled with a sense of peace and freedom. Because she was free from her body, she felt no pain at all.”

  Shortly thereafter, Mrs. G was discharged from the hospital “in good spirits.” Later, when she was troubled with pain, she could push the pain out of her mind by reliving her out-of-body LSD experience. A few months later, the cancer finally claimed her life—or, perhaps I should say, claimed her body.

  Because of her mystical experiences, she had lost her fear of death, which the doctors believed dramatically reduced her pain for nearly two years after a bedridden, paralyzed Mrs. G first contacted Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards.15 In trying to explain the dramatic recoveries of Mrs. G. and more than forty other people in the study, the scientists could have copied a page from a book by Carlos Castaneda.

  “Some of the patients who experienced the shattering phenomenon of death and rebirth followed by an experience of cosmic unity seemed to show a radical and lasting change in their fundamental concepts of man’s relation to the universe,” the scientists wrote. “Death, instead of being seen as the ultimate end of everything and a step into nothingness, appeared suddenly as a transition into a different type of existence.”16

  This research, happily, is getting a second life. Two years after I interviewed Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, he wrote to tell me that he and his team of researchers were soliciting volunteers for a new study. They want to treat cancer patients with psilocybin in a “scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning”—picking up where Grof and Richards left off. Richards himself is clinical director in the new research.

  By this point in my research, these eerie descriptions no longer startled me, so often had I heard them from spiritual people like Sophy Burnham and Arjun Patel, from broken and restored people like Alicia, from cherished people like my mother. These descriptions stitched together disparate experiences like quilting thread. The quilt would expand to include people who lived with epilepsy, those who had a brush with death, and still others who meditated for hours on end. It seems to me
that this makes the challenge for an atheist scientist that much greater: instead of reducing transcendent experiences to mere chemical firings, he must produce a plausible explanation for all sorts of experiences that have no connection to one another.

  What Science Has Established

  The cancer studies dogged me. I mused about them constantly. Perhaps I heard echoes from my Christian Science past, which argued that the very act of touching the divine through prayer has physical consequences. I heard, too, the refrain I had learned as a child in a Christian Science household: Your thinking is your experience. How you perceive the world affects how you experience it. And let’s be clear: this is not a metaphor about turning lemons into lemonade. It is an ontological statement.Your thoughts and prayers affect your physical reality, I was taught, because the spiritual world shapes the human.

  I had assumed that my friendship with Tylenol and the world of pharmacology had weaned me from such ideas, but here they were, trotting back and demanding attention. They were joined by Grof’s terminally ill patients and my Navajo woman, who had, with a little help from their friends, replaced one vision of reality with another. For these people, the blotches on the paper had turned into a gaggle of flying geese, and the world would never look the same. They had accessed something—call it a spiritual state or call it an altered one—and returned transformed. Perhaps, I thought, a spiritual reality had broken into their physical lives.

  Thanks to technology, neurologists can now watch the mechanics of the most profound moments of one’s life, including mystical experience. So, what has science established so far? It has confirmed that brain activity correlates to one’s (spiritual) experience. In all likelihood, when Saint Paul or Sophy Burnham enjoyed their spontaneous mystical visions, certain neurotransmitters were coursing through their brains, exciting this lobe and calming that one.

  What this does not establish, in my opinion, is that mystical experience is nothing but brain chemistry. After all, if there were an “Other” who wanted to communicate with us, of course He or She or It would use the brain to do so, as opposed to, say, the left big toe. Of course God would use the chemistry in our brains to create visions.

  God would also use something else: he would use electricity. For if there is a God who wired your brain, He is a master electrician.Your brain crackles with tiny electrical reactions between its different lobes, and some of those reactions spark a spiritual experience. Here we encounter one of the oldest of scientific puzzles in understanding mysticism: Is spiritual experience an electrical storm in the brain that afflicted great religious leaders and mystics down the centuries? Is it faulty wiring that leads to a sort of madness, or superior wiring that leads to spiritual insight?

  Now that neuroscientists possess the technology to tackle the problem, they are looking for the answer in the “sacred disease.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Searching for the God Spot

  THE SUN WAS STILL HIGH in the northern Canadian sky when I arrived at Laurentian University early in the evening on July 8, 2006. I had traveled to the remote town of Sudbury, Ontario, to meet Dr. Michael Persinger, an American researcher who had gained some notoriety in neuroscience circles—and among journalists—for his experiments in spirituality. Several years earlier, he had produced the “God helmet,” a reconstructed motorcycle helmet that was supposed to evoke mystical experiences in its wearer. According to Persinger, the helmet would use weak magnetic fields to stimulate parts of the brain—in particular, the temporal lobe. This, in theory, would evoke a “Sensed Presence,” the feeling that a nonmaterial being was in the room. In other words, through the wonders of neuroscience, the helmet could summon counterfeit angels or demons on demand. I wanted to see if it would work its magic on me.

  A bouncy brunette Ph.D. student named Linda St. Pierre greeted me at the research laboratory. She immediately sat me down and gave me a battery of tests to gauge my personality—and, in particular, to see whether I was prone to epilepsy, religiosity, or suggestibility. Questions like: Do you have a feeling that there is something more to life? Are you afraid of mice? Do people tell you that you blank out (a sign of epilepsy)? Do you believe in the second coming of Christ? And (my favorite): Have you been taken aboard a spaceship? As I was completing the tests, the man himself appeared.

  Michael Persinger was ramrod slim, taut, with a puckish expression. He wore a dark blue three-piece suit, with a gold watch and chain tucked into his vest. I liked him immediately.

  “I heard a rumor,” I said,“that you wear a three-piece suit when you mow the lawn.”

  “True!” he admitted, seeming pleased that this eccentricity had made its way back to the States.

  “Interesting. May I ask why?”

  “For comfort. Three-piece suits are so versatile. I take off the jacket when it’s hot, and put it on when I’m cold.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Since I was in high school at least.”

  I had boned up on Persinger’s theories about spiritual experience, and they boiled down to this: spiritual experience is a trick of the brain. It can be triggered by head injuries and brain dysfunctions such as epilepsy, by the earth’s magnetic fields, and by machines like his “God helmet.”

  Persinger laid out his theory about how, precisely, the brain creates spiritual experience. It was like listening to Mr. Spock in a StarTrek episode—he peppered his theories with just enough acceptable science to make them plausible. The left hemisphere of the brain is associated with language, he explained, and thus the sense of “self.” The right side is more involved with “affective emotional patterns,” or feelings and sensations.

  “When you stimulate the left hemisphere, you’re aware of your ‘self ’—of you as an individual,” Persinger explained.“So the question to ask is, What is the right-hemispheric equivalent of that left-hemispheric sense of self? And the answer is, the ‘Sensed Presence’: the feeling of another entity, of another sentient being that has emotional, meaningful, personally significant, and expansive temporal and spatial properties.”

  If you stimulate the right side of your brain in a certain way, he said, you sense someone nearby. In this way, Persinger claimed to create “the prototype of the God experience.” Persinger claimed that fully 80 percent of the 2,000 or so subjects who have donned the God helmet report feeling a sensed presence, as well as dizziness, vibrations, spinning, and visions.

  Even better, Persinger believed he had found the sweet spot for spiritual experience: the right temporal lobe of the brain. The temporal lobe, which runs along the side of your head near the ears, is involved with memory, emotions, and meaning, as well as hearing and language comprehension.

  Why zero in on the right temporal lobe? I asked.

  “Mystical experiences are in large part associated with temporal lobe function,” he said. “The visual experiences, the hearing, knowing, vestibular [balance] effects, the smell.”

  Persinger explained that the temporal lobe (and, in his view, not the presence of God) explains why the mystics of old were said to smell fragrant flowers.

  “In fact, their sweat emits it,” he said. “Areas of the temporal lobe probably affect the metabolism in such a way that your sweat has a certain smell, and many of the classic mystics are often described as having a smell about them that is very fragrant, like roses, and all of this is tied to temporal lobe function.”

  I would learn much more about the temporal lobe in the coming months. For now, I was eager to test the God helmet.

  At around six-thirty p.m., Michael Persinger led me into the “chamber.” This was a small room with an overstuffed chair and ottoman, covered with what looked like an Indian-style saddle blanket. I settled into it and Linda St. Pierre began to affix eight electrodes to my head. Once the electrodes were properly connected, Persinger eased a motorcycle helmet with its own solenoids onto my head, and covered my eyes with goggles stuffed with napkins. It was stunningly low-budget. I half expected him
to hand me a bong.When I was fully blinkered and feeling fantastically ridiculous, I heard him snapping pictures. Then, with a hermetic schlupf, the door sealed shut, and I was left, wired up and alone, in my soundproof room.

  In order to record what happened while I was in the chamber, I had placed a tape recorder (with Persinger’s permission, of course) in the control room where the neurologist and his assistant were manipulating the magnetic pulse passing over my scalp. The recorder picked up Persinger’s comments to the assistant (which I could not hear in the soundproof chamber), as well as his comments to me when he hit a button and spoke through a speaker in the chamber. It also recorded my comments to him, since I was wired with a microphone that fed into the control room.

  “Ms. Hagerty,” I heard Dr. Persinger’s soothing voice through the speaker on the wall. “Can you hear me? It is important that you relax. The changes will be extremely subtle, so you must let the experiences simply arise.”

  Then the experience began. I relaxed into the chair, and waited. Soon, I grew a little agitated. I could hear the helmet clicking as the magnetic patterns shifted, but I felt and saw nothing. Minute unfolded into uneventful minute, and I began to worry: What if nothing happens? What if I fall asleep in this smelly chair? I found myself straining to see patterns in my mind’s eye, wondering when—or if—the Sensed Presence would show up.

  About this time, in the next room, Dr. Persinger was also becoming agitated, and dictated his concerns into the tape recorder.

  I should point out, he said, that your EEG is quite fast right now. It is way above the level that is optimal. If your brain activity is too fast, the applied field will not drive the neurons to produce the first stages of the mystical experience—that is, the Sensed Presence. Obviously you can’t hear me, since you’re in a closed acoustic chamber, but if you could, I would be suggesting you relax much, much more.