And maybe that was the case for Terrence Ayala as well.
Terrence smiled graciously when I met him at Henry Ford Hospital, even though I had kept him waiting for some time. A handsome forty-seven-year-old African-American, lean and muscular in his pullover sweater,Terrence spoke softly, almost shyly. I thought it a winning trait for a man with his résumé: Princeton University, the University of Virginia Law School, most recently a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida.
Several years earlier, Terrence had undergone an operation that left him with a stuttering problem. His words, though they spilled drop by drop from his mouth, glistened with insight and originality. As I listened to him, I thought: This is a man who sees the world differently.
What Terrence sees is either hallucination or an alternate reality, depending on your point of view. Terrence told me that when he falls asleep at night, “frequently there’s this dark presence, usually off to the upper right side of my body. If I’m lying down it will usually be looming over me. And I have a sense that it is a very evil presence. I can see it now—well, I can re-create that experience. It’s a very palpable, powerful experience.”
“And the presence seems just as real as, say, the walls, the table in the room ... ?” I asked.
“Oh yes! It’s as though there’s another person in the room.”
I remembered Michael Persinger’s “Sensed Presence.”We decided to call the presence “Bob.” I asked Terrence if he thought Bob was onto-logically real.
“Well, it’s part of my reality,” he responded.
“Do you think your brain picks up information that, say, mine can’t perceive?” I asked. “I mean, do you think you can tune in to alternate realities, or states of consciousness, that I can’t?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He leaned forward.“If you look in a room full of people dancing, the majority of folks will be going to one beat, but there may be others who are tuning in to five or six or seven rhythms. And they can not only tune into them but move in consonance with those sounds, whereas other folks are just sticking to what others would agree is the dominant beat.”
He laughed. “I wish I could tune in more frequently to the one everyone else is trying to dance to.”
“When was the last time you saw Bob?” I asked.
“Not in the last two or three months,” he said. “They changed my medication.”
“Oh. They changed your medicine and that helped?” I asked.
“Helped?” he repeated.
I was startled. “Do you feel it’s a loss?”
“I do,” Terrence said. He had grown, if not fond of, then accustomed to his extra sense that he believed allowed him to tap into a different dimension.
“You know, we pay a lot of money to musicians who can hear different vibes and harmonies and express them for those of us who have not spent time training those abilities. We pay visual artists to make perceptible the images they have in their minds. And I guess this goes into a whole area of what we would call mental illness, and why we classify these things as illnesses rather than just differences.We have a habit of trying to bring people into conformity through medication and modern science and all kinds of things. Who knows what realities we’re medicating away?”
This is the pivotal question. Are we medicating away realities or delusions? Science believes it has the dispositive answer. For, like magicians with their trick rabbits, scientists can now make these “realities” appear or disappear at will.
Recently a group of Swiss researchers was evaluating a twenty-two-year-old woman for possible brain surgery.20 She had no psychiatric history. The researchers were homing in on a particular spot in the brain—the junction of the temporal lobes (emotional self) and the parietal lobes (the area that orients your body in space and in relation to other objects). When the surgeon electrically stimulated that area, the patient felt the presence of another person behind her.When they increased the voltage, she saw the “person” was young, of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. In the next stimulation, she observed a “man” sitting behind her, clasping her in his arms, which, she allowed, was rather unpleasant. Finally the researchers stimulated her brain while she performed a naming test, holding a card in her right hand. She reported that the man, now behind her to her right, was getting pushy (probably smarting from her earlier rebuff) and trying to interfere with her task. “He wants to take the card,” she told the researchers. “He doesn’t want me to read.”
Stimulating alternate “realities” is a bit of a party trick. Making them disappear is far more common. Indeed, that is what epilepsy specialists are paid to do. It’s called treatment. They lesion, or cut into, the brain and remove the offending tissue, or they medicate the brain and tamp down the electrical spikes. Voilà, the spiritual experiences disappear.
In fact, New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky still remembers the day he made visions of Jesus go away. More than twenty years ago, when he worked as a resident at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Devinsky was called to consult on a woman who had a brain lesion.
“She was talking about Christ, and Christ was speaking to her, and she was in a state of religious fervor, just talking nonstop about this,” Devinsky recalls.
The brain scan showed an abnormality in her right temporal lobe, and her EEG showed that the region was experiencing continuous seizure.
“And when we used medications intravenously to shut down the seizure, the religious ideation stopped immediately,” he says. “So here is a woman with a known structural problem—a lesion on her right temporal lobe—who had a well-documented seizure on her EEG, who had religious ideation that she could not control, it was just coming out of her in an almost violent form—not quite psychotic, but verging on that—and it was shut down immediately by treating her with medication.”
You could conclude that if this woman’s relationship with Christ vanished with a dose of medication, that experience was merely brain activity, not a connection with another reality.
But you could also argue that this proves nothing about the existence of God. Consider, once again, the brain as a radio. Let’s say you open the lid and remove some components and wires: that’s called le sioning the brain. Or say you pour maple syrup over the connections: that’s called seizure medication. Either way, chances are the radio will not be picking up All Things Considered, even though the program is in fact broadcasting. In the same way, if there is an alternate reality, if there is a God who is constantly sending out signals, surgery or medication can destroy the ability to receive them—but God could still be speaking.
As I considered all I had learned about temporal lobe epilepsy, I realized I had circled back to the same irritating conundrum. Is the transcendent experience of an epileptic like music playing on a CD player—a closed loop dependent on nothing but the machinery? Or is it like a radio—tuning in to a hidden spiritual reality outside your physical brain?
Most scientists believe the question has been answered. It’s all in your head. But that points more to the nature of scientific inquiry than to truth. Neurologists cannot climb inside Terrance Ayala’s head and witness his alternate realities. Therefore under the rules of modern science—which require observation and precise measurements—Terrence’s experience loses every time. It is a little like playing a basketball game in which the mystics’ hoop is considered out of bounds. No matter how many times Terrence Ayala and Sophy Burnham and Don Eaton shoot the ball through the hoop, they cannot score points. But in fact, the ball still swished through the net.
Spiritual Experience for Bubba
Most of us have never suffered an epileptic seizure and resulting visions. But most have enjoyed some more run-of-the-mill moments of transcendence. I wondered: How do neurologists explain the experiences of “normal” people?
According to Michael Persinger at Laurentian University, people’s spiritual experiences fall along a spectrum, with an atheist like Sigmund Freu
d sitting at one end and a mystic like Joan of Arc at the other. Somewhere in between are you, me, and anyone else who has shivered with a numinous experience. Persinger hypothesized that a person’s spirituality correlates to his brain-wave activity. The more “temporal lobe signs” a “normal” person shows, the more likely he or she is to encounter God.
Persinger studied more than 1,000 people over ten years, comparing “normal populations” and “special normal populations” and clinical populations.21 “Special normal populations” included creative people: artists, drama students, writers, and (oddly, I thought) women who experienced the psychological symptoms of false pregnancies. Clinical populations included people with epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder. He found a continuum of brain activity. The nonartistic drone showed average brain-wave activity, like the cold porridge of the mama bear. The artistic people showed more spike bursts: “theta” activity over the temporal lobes, which is a relaxed state of consciousness. They also presented discrepancies between the right side of the brain and the left. Persinger concluded that artists’ elevated activity sparked creativity—the porridge was just right. But the clinical populations—they were too hot, and their brains’ excessive temporal lobe activity brought anxiety, thoughts of suicide, and an intense, dominating, and often intrusive fantasy life.
What Persinger’s work suggests is that anyone with a temporal lobe has a gateway to the divine, or at least to divine feelings. How strong those feelings are depends on the way your brain fires.You don’t have to be crazy to feel “God.” You just have to be human.
I asked Orrin Devinsky about my own mystical experience, a little baby experience, to be sure, but one that is seared into my memory and changed my view of the world. I told him about the incident eleven years earlier, when I had been interviewing a woman about her cancer and her religious faith.
“And suddenly I felt this numinous presence all around us,” I recounted. “She felt it, too. Do you have any idea what would explain that?”
“I think the way you’re wired, what was going on in your brain at that time, your past history—combined with that woman’s story—profoundly affected you at some level,” he speculated. “Maybe it kindled or reawakened a neural state that exists dormantly within your mind, and it triggered the right frequencies, and the right resonances, and the right connections, to reawaken that feeling. And the way that manifested itself within your nervous system was to trigger a specific type of religious experience.”
“Does that exclude the possibility that there might have actually been something spiritual?” I asked.“I mean, does the fact that we might be able to explain it with brain function eliminate the possibility that there might actually be something spiritual going on?”
“No!” Devinsky said, and I was surprised by the heat of his answer. “I think the two can clearly exist together. Say there was a man and a woman who loved each other and when they looked at each other, they experienced that emotion that we refer to as love. There would be a change in their brain state, and probably a change in the temporal lobe as well. Does that negate the presence of true love between them? Of course not.When you get to spirituality, as a scientist I think it really becomes extremely difficult to say anything other than ‘It’s possible.’ ”
It makes sense that those epiphanies physically alter the brain as well as one’s life. After all, being bitten by a dog, or memorizing 2 + 2 = 4, lays down permanent tracks in the brain. What might a moment with God do?
The brain of someone suffering with temporal lobe epilepsy is like a stallion that has not yet been broken and trained. It becomes too activated, it spooks too easily, and for those people, their spiritual experiences are wild, ragged, scary things, galloping through a forest with low-hanging limbs. For them, nothing but a shot of tranquilizer or an operation will calm down their wild lobes—and then, often but not always, the religious experiences disappear.
And yet I know people who connect with this “Other” and visit another reality without the drama of disease or the aid of drugs. These are the horse whisperers: they have trained their brains through years of meditation, and their restraining hand turns the wild stallion into an Olympic jumper or a Secretariat. These people are spiritual virtuosos, and none is more winning than Scott McDermott.
CHAPTER 8
Spiritual Virtuosos
NOT OFTEN DO MAGAZINE ARTICLES rob me of sleep. But the Newsweek cover story of May 7, 2001, gave me insomnia for a week. The article discussed “neurotheology,” the neuroscience of spirituality—in this case, the brain activity of Buddhist and Catholic meditators when they dived deep into meditation. These experiments turned a corner in the study of spirituality. No longer would neurologists be reduced to merely extrapolating about spiritual experience from what they knew of abnormal conditions like epilepsy and psychedelic drug trips. They had moved into the realm of clinical, replicable research on spiritual events. And their subjects would not be mere mortals but spiritual Olympians, the Michael Jordans of meditation. I was hankering to get my hands into this research. It would take me another six years, but in June 2007, I would watch as a scanner took snapshots of my friend’s brain while he communed with God.
I met Scott McDermott on January 20, 2004. We were sitting in a quiet room at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship Church. We could hear the quiet brrrr of hundreds of people speaking in tongues in the sanctuary below us. I was there on assignment for NPR to understand this boisterous brand of mysticism. Scott was ready to explain it to me.
Ten years earlier, the story went, the Holy Spirit had “fallen” on the worshippers during a Sunday-evening service. People began swooning and falling to the floor, where they remained pinned like upturned beetles for hours at a time. They began speaking in tongues, barking like dogs, and, most of all, laughing—laughing hysterically, hour after hour, sometimes for days. It would later be dubbed “Holy Laughter,” and the phenomenon named the “Toronto Blessing.”
I arrived for the tenth anniversary, hoping to witness the “blessing” in action. I was not disappointed. During the evening service, people in the audience began to chuckle, one or two at first; then the laughter rippled across the crowd like a squall across a lake. People fell at random, weeping piteously or laughing maniacally. I recorded people barking like dogs and clucking like chickens. I even heard a rooster or two. At the end of the service, people lined up to be blessed by a team of pastors. One pastor would touch a person’s head, while another pastor stood behind to catch the worshipper as he toppled backward. They worked methodically, these anointed of the Lord, like woodsmen felling trees, one by one, row by row. I left well past midnight, with hundreds of people still sprawled on the floor, quietly clucking or barking.
At eleven the next morning, I sat down with Scott McDermott. A self-effacing man of slight build, his blond hair parted in the middle, Scott was the senior pastor of Washington Crossing United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania (about an hour north of Philadelphia). I expected him to provide an oasis of sanity and theological sophistication in this roiling sea of Pentecostal emotion. The United Methodists are known more for social liberalism than charismatic style, and Scott himself seemed hardly a “slain in the Spirit” sort of guy. He was a Ph.D. who in his spare time taught New Testament theology at Southern Methodist University.
But as he talked, his words flowed in a torrent of power and passion. I began to wonder if he was one of them, one of those people who fell on the floor. I asked him how he came to be at the Toronto Blessing. That is when he told me about his vision.
Scott first heard about the Toronto church in 1996, two years after the Holy Laughter had started there. He was skeptical.
“I’d seen enough of this kind of thing in American religion,” he told me. “I did not want one more emotional experience. I was really put off. But enough people were asking me about it that I thought,Well, I should at least check it out.”
Scott caught up with the Toronto pastor, John Arnott, at
a church conference in New Orleans. At the end of the day, Arnott prayed for him.
“And when he did, I fell to the ground. And I felt waves of the Spirit flow through my body, from my hands to my feet, and back to my hands. Then the most unusual thing happened.”
Scott paused, embarrassed, but the spigot had been opened and the story would not be stopped. He had a vision, he explained, that he was in Israel, overlooking the Judean desert.
“And I began to run on the floor. I’m on my back, and I began to run. I’m pumping my arms and legs, and I’m running from Jericho to Jerusalem. I did this for one and a half hours. And the other pastors in the room began to cheer me on. I saw them on the road in my vision. It was like the New York Marathon, people cheering, ‘Run the race! Run the race! Run the race!’ I ran as hard as I could past the Mount of Olives. I ran through the Garden of Gethsemane, through the Kidron Valley, and up the other side to what is the Eastern Gate of the Temple. It’s presently walled shut, but there it was open. There was a finish line across it, and Jesus stood on the other side of the line with His arms outstretched, and I fell across the line into His arms and He just grabbed me and held me, laughing, holding on to me.
“At that point,” Scott said,“I had stopped running on the floor, and I felt the Lord say something to me that surprised me. He said, ‘I want you to go with them, with my faithful servants.’ But in my heart, I thought I didn’t belong with them. For years, despite having a Ph.D. in the New Testament, despite teaching at a university, despite being a senior pastor of a pretty good-sized Methodist church, I didn’t feel I measured up. And so I cried on the floor. I said, ‘No, I do not belong with them. I do not.’
“And the Lord looked at me, with such intensity, and He said very firmly,‘You go with them.’ And when He did, there was this indescribable love, it was beyond words, and it began to fill me. All that low self-esteem, all that sense of not being valued, began to melt in this love.”
Fingerprints of God Page 17