Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Jump-starting Your Spiritual Life

  Two years and fifteen subjects later, Mario Beauregard could talk about the brains of people who had touched death and returned. When he and I were observing Jorge in the brain scanner, the neuroscientist had predicted that Jorge’s brain might look similar to those of some Carmelite nuns he had studied. Like Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, Beauregard had conducted brain-imaging studies of people engaged in “centering prayer.”8 His subjects had all lived in the cloister for decades, where they spoke for but one hour a day, and their lives orbited around periods of this sort of meditative prayer: on average, they each had spent nearly 15,000 hours in prayer.

  When Beauregard eventually coaxed the nuns from their cloister to the brain scanner, he was effectively able to shoot a movie of brains in mystical union with God. The images told a complicated story: areas associated with positive emotion became a happy cauldron of activity; the circuits associated with unconditional love also lit up brightly and the parietal lobes, which determine the subjects’ physical boundaries—where they end and “God” begins—showed unusual changes in blood flow. Their brains seemed to be saying that the nuns felt themselves absorbed in something greater than themselves. In the end, Beauregard amassed sufficient visual evidence, in the form of brain images, to make the case that a mystical state was physiologically distinct from either an intensely emotional state or a resting state.

  His research suggests that the brains of Carmelite nuns operate differently from the ordinary brain. In this, his conclusions matched those of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, with his Buddhist monks, and those of Andy Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, with his Franciscan nuns, Buddhist monks, and Protestant Pentecostals. Spirituality, it would seem, does leave an indelible fingerprint.

  Now Beauregard’s question was: Would near contact with death trigger the same sort of neural activity? When he sat down and compared the brain reliving a connection to God in prayer with a brain reliving a connection to the “light” in a near-death experience, he made a remarkable discovery: a near-death experience unfolds in the brain in much the same way as a meditative union with God. It lights up the same areas and travels along the same neural pathways. One uses Google Maps, the other uses Yahoo!, but they visited many of the same points along the way.9

  For example, Beauregard noticed that both for those who nearly died and for those who meditated, the part of the brain usually associated with “the subjective experience of contacting a spiritual reality” showed a spike in activity: the nuns sensed that they were in touch with God; the near-death experiencers felt they had contacted the “Light.” Another part of the brain associated with overwhelmingly positive emotions lit up. The same occurred in an area of the brain that involves unconditional love, both romantic and maternal love.

  “It’s not surprising to see this type of activation during the NDE condition,” Beauregard theorized,“because love is one of the key components of this experience.”

  Beauregard’s research suggests that both meditation and death rewire the brain in similar ways. It comes as no surprise that Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks can essentially sculpt their brains, fine-tuning them to access another dimension of consciousness. After all, they engage in rigorous mental workouts every day, praying and meditating for hours at a time. But what about Jorge Medina, who had never meditated a day in his life, and before his accident rarely darkened the doorway of a Catholic church? His brain gave him access to a spiritual or altered state of consciousness, just as theirs did—but without the decades of training. It seemed to occur in an instant, jump-starting his spiritual life.

  Or, as Beauregard put it: “It’s like it will accelerate to a great extent the spiritual path for transformation.”10

  Beauregard discovered another startling similarity between spiritual virtuosos and the survivors of death. Not only did similar parts of their brains light up when they reenacted their experiences, but they could both manipulate their brain-wave activity, almost like a key, to open the door to a spiritual realm.

  I watched this occur at seven p.m. on July 12, 2006. Mario Beauregard, his research assistant Jerome, and I squeezed into a cold, windowless twelve-by-eight-foot room, along with Gilles Bedard, one of Beauregard’s subjects. The room was crammed with computers, some piled one atop another. Gilles sat on an ancient wooden chair, wearing a blue-and-red plastic cap with thirty-two small white buttonholes in it. Jerome bent his six-foot-three-inch frame over Gilles, filling the holes with gel and then meticulously attaching electrodes to his scalp. These electrodes would measure electrical activity in thirty-two parts of Gilles’s brain—and, the scientists hoped, produce a brain-wave recording of a near-death experience, or at least a simulated one.

  Gilles’s near-death experience happened upon him on November 17, 1973. He was a nineteen-year-old with undiagnosed Crohn’s disease. During his five-month stay in the hospital, he had wasted to sixty-four pounds. One night, after a priest had given him the last rites, Gilles found himself perched in the corner of the ceiling, looking down at himself, the doctor, his family, the room.

  “And suddenly, I felt a call.... I just turned maybe ninety degrees, and there was a huge light in the back, and in front there were twelve beings of light,” he recalled. “So I came upon them, and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ They said,‘Well, you’re not going to die. You must go back. You have things to do.’They were talking to me by telepathy.”

  “Were you afraid?” I asked.

  “No. I felt very at peace. Then I asked them, ‘What am I going to do?’ And there was a silence, and then a beautiful sound came into me. It was outside of me, it was inside of me, I was part of a very peaceful, serene sound, but at the same time a very powerful sound. It was like”—Gilles blew out his breath slowly, pursing his lips to make a low whistle —“the breath of the universe.”

  It was an echo of Pam Reynolds’s moment “standing in the breath of God.”

  Gilles recovered and, happily for Mario Beauregard, could revisit the “light” at will more than thirty years later. We settled Gilles in the acoustic chamber, then closed the door behind us with a quiet thlunk, the seal as tight as a submarine’s. Beauregard and Jerome walked back to the computer, which was recording the undulating lines of thirty-two electrodes.

  “He’s already relaxed,” Jerome said excitedly, as the lines on the computer rounded out from sharp spikes to small humps.

  “The EEG is slowing down,” Beauregard said, pointing to the screen. “This is good, very slow waves . . . theta waves . . . maybe it’s a correlate of his experience.”

  Theta waves, Beauregard explained, are observed in people who are sleeping, or in a state of quiet focus, such as meditation. Beauregard said the average person cannot simply sit down and achieve this level of relaxation in two or three minutes. Over the next hour, Gilles sat in his soundproof tank, herding his thoughts toward various levels of consciousness. Beauregard and Jerome clucked fondly over Gilles’s EEG recordings. Finally, at their command, Gilles plunged into the “light”—or at least, that is the story that the luxurious, voluptuous, sloping lines on the computer told. Look at us! We’re delta waves! We should be in a deep sleep, but really we’re in another state of reality! Well, that is what I imagined his waves were saying.

  Beauregard later told me that some of his subjects had been able to slow their brain-wave activity to show delta waves—or states of deep sleep—and all fifteen had shown significant theta waves in their brains, which also occurs during meditation.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “We know they’ve been transformed emotionally by the near-death experience,” he said, “and perhaps they’ve been transformed physiologically as well. It’s like there’s a shift in their brain, and this shift allows these people to stay in touch with the spiritual world more easily, on a daily basis.”

  Beauregard explained that the University of Montreal maintains a dat
abase of the EEGs of thousands of people in the normal population. Most people at resting state exhibit the beta waves of normal waking activity, darting here and there, always in motion, thoughts swinging like monkeys from tree to tree.

  “What we’ve seen with our subjects is that they present much slower waves in their brains than normal people”—especially theta waves of meditation and delta waves of deep sleep.

  “Yet they are not impaired neurologically, so that their brain is not functioning slowly,” he said excitedly. “And it’s possible that it’s a biological marker of their near-death experiences—that they are changed by the experience, even physiologically.”

  I recalled that Pam Reynolds, whose brain was shut down for more than an hour during a surgery, had told me that her brain-wave activity was “extremely slow,” even when she was performing complex tasks. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin found that his monks possessed a different brain rhythm—very fast gamma waves—which he said were a unique marker of meditation. And then there was Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, puzzling over the fact that the Tibetan monks in meditation, the Carmelite nuns in prayer, the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, all showed the same neurological quirk: one thalamus was more active than the other.

  Perhaps a close encounter with death has the same effect as a psychedelic drug. Perhaps it swings open the door to a spiritual realm, instantly accomplishing a state that usually requires untold hours of prayer. And once you have come in contact with God, or the Light, or the ground of being, or another reality, the experience leaves a fingerprint on your brain—that metaphysical stamp in your passport that proves you’ve traveled to another reality.

  Beauregard said it is possible to test this hypothesis by looking at the EEGs, the brain scans, the immune systems, and the DNA of people before cardiac arrests and then after them. He wants to work with surgeons who perform the kind of surgery Pam Reynolds received: the “standstill procedure,” which takes one’s brain off-line for forty-five minutes or longer. That would certainly improve the odds of capturing a near-death experience. Beauregard mused that researchers might be able to determine whether the brains of those who experienced the “light” really did operate differently from the brains of ordinary, mildly spiritual people like me. And if they did, the question became, did the NDE brain start functioning differently before they died—suggesting that some people are born with the brain wiring to allow them mystical experiences? Or was it after they died—suggesting that their brains were altered by the experience? Beauregard has already proposed such a study, and hopes with the fervor of a true believer that he will one day know the answer.

  “Of course,” he added with a sly smile,“the spiritual world, the source, has to be willing to play that kind of game for us to be able to do this.”

  Yet even this sort of study cannot prove that the soul survives death, or that life continues after our hearts stop beating. It would only demonstrate that the brain is recording an event, either a real encounter or a hallucination. And there is another problem. Even if everyone from Richard Dawkins to the Dalai Lama agrees that something occurs in the boundary between life and death, no study can prove the content of near-death experiences, because no objective scientist can follow the dying person into the light, shake hands with Aunt Sally or Jesus, and return with a clipboard full of notes.

  I outlined my concerns to Mario Beauregard. He nodded. Some things, it seems, must be taken on faith.

  “So what do you think, Mario?” I asked. “Are we’re hardwired to connect to God?”

  “Yes, of course, we are neurologically equipped to be able to connect with God,” he said. “It’s not the same thing as saying we are hardwired to do that, because if that would be the case, we would have seven billion mystics living on the planet. But is the equipment there to allow that to happen? Oh, yes.”

  Of course, Mario Beauregard is a mystic.

  Every person I interviewed who had traveled to the brink of death returned with a new definition of God. I had first noticed this when I talked with people who had enjoyed spontaneous mystical experiences, and I saw the pattern repeat with those who experienced other transcendent moments as well. I realized that after encountering the “Other,” people no longer clung to religious distinctions. If they had identified themselves as Christian or Jewish before, they might still attend church on Sunday or synagogue on Saturday, but they no longer believed their faith tradition could make a claim of exclusive truth. They were like witnesses to the same God, but from different angles. Or, think of God as the head of a multinational corporation. He controls several subsidiary companies, each with its own president: Jesus heading up Christianity, Moses overseeing Judaism, Muhammad guiding Islam, the Buddha launching his own belief system, and on and on. But take the elevator up one level, above the religions that try to make sense of the spiritual world, and you find the “Other” or “Light” or “Source”—that is, the CEO who presides over the whole enterprise. Now, I am not saying I agree with the view that all of the world’s great religious traditions hold, at their root, the same view of the nature of reality. I am simply reporting what spiritual adepts told me.11

  The “God” of mystical experience fits much more comfortably with the one described by Albert Einstein and other great scientists than the neat deity proclaimed by the average cleric. As I inched my way forward, watching and listening to the stories, I found myself wrestling with my own definition of deity, and in the light of morning I would walk away with a new name for God.

  CHAPTER 11

  A New Name for God

  THE SCIENTISTS WHO HAVE ARRIVED at God’s doorstep have not, on the whole, taken a route illuminated by simple religious faith. They have traveled there by evidence, by looking at very small things, or very large: exploring DNA and quantum particles, or the puzzles of the universe. And in the blueprint they see the hand of God.

  I use the word “God” to mean the organizer of the atom and the universe, but other terms fit the description. Albert Einstein, who dismissed a personal God but was persuaded by the evidence to assume there is a cosmic one, concluded there is a transcendent source of rationality in the world. He called this source “a superior mind,” or “illimitable superior spirit,” or a “mysterious force that moves the constellations.”1 When speaking of the order of the universe, Einstein stated, “That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.” Einstein once explained that he did not believe in a supernatural being who answers prayer, but that did not exclude the existence of the Almighty.“Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”2

  Einstein’s vision of “God” presaged the words of later scientific luminaries. Consider theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who spoke of “the mind of God.” It is not enough to think of the order of rules and equations that make life possible, he said. One must contemplate “what it is that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.”3 Asked why he believed the universe exists, he responded, “If you like, you can define God to be the answer to that question.”4

  The pioneers of quantum physics, who peered into the atom and were astonished at the mysterious world they beheld, saw God in much the same way. “God is a mathematician of very high order,” observed quantum physicist Paul Dirac, “and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”5 They saw no conflict between science and religion. Physicist Max Planck, for example, wrote that religion and science are “fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition,” concluding with an odd sort of rallying cry: “On to God!”6

  Even Anthony Flew, a lecturer at Oxford and one of the tw
entieth century’s most renowned atheist philosophers, was converted in 2004 by the logic of God. Nearing his eightieth birthday, Flew abandoned the atheism on which he had built a career because, he asserted, intelligent life could not arise randomly. It must have been sculpted by the hand of a Creator.

  “The journey to my discovery of the Divine has thus far been a pilgrimage of reason,” Flew wrote.“I have followed the argument where it has led me. And it has led me to accept the existence of a self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient Being.”7

  Recently I listened to Francis Collins deliver a lecture to a group of skeptical scientists about his own journey from atheism to Christianity. Collins is one of the country’s leading geneticists and the longtime head of the Human Genome Project at NIH, which created the genetic map of a human being.

  Collins argued that belief in God, “while not provable, is more plausible than atheism.” He arrived at this conclusion by following scientific arguments, not ignoring them. He identified several “pointers to God” that nudged him toward the notion of a Mind that created the universe and, more remarkably, life. One pointer is the fact that there is something—a universe with people—rather than nothing at all. Another pointer is the Big Bang: Collins argued that if there was a beginning to the universe, this required “a Creator not bound by laws of space and time” who lit the fuse.

  A third argument for God is “the unreasonable effectiveness of math,” he said, suggesting “there might be a Mind with a mathematical bent beyond anything we can imagine.” Collins cited the “Anthropic Principle,” which posits that the universe is “finely tuned” to produce and sustain life—or, as physicist Freeman Dyson put it,“the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”8