Fingerprints of God
Page 34
Indeed, Jansen himself has shifted his position, suggesting that a ketamine-like chemical may be one trigger of authentic spiritual experience, while coming close to death may be another. He no longer rules out the possibility that people are catapulted—chemically or traumatically—into other worlds, and that these worlds might be, in fact, real. “I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience,” he wrote. “It exists when we begin and may persist when we end. Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist.” See K. L. R. Jansen, “Response to Commentaries on ‘The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-methyl-D-asparate Receptor,’ ” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 79-95. Blackmore insists that nothing, including consciousness, can separate from the body and survive. In fact, she asserted, “If . . . truly convincing paranormal events are documented then certainly the theory I have proposed will have to be overthrown.” See Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (New York: Prometheus, 1993), p. 262.
7 Peter Fenwick, “Science and Spirituality: A Challenge for the 21st Century,” paper presented at International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) 2004 Conference, Evanston, Illinois.
8 Mario Beauregard and Vincent Paquette, “Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns,” Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006): 186-90.
9 Specifically, one area that lit up in the brains of both nuns and near-death experiencers was a region of the temporal lobe called the middle temporal gyrus. Having considered reports by clinical neurologists and research on people with temporal lobe epilepsy, Beauregard said, “I hypothesize that this activation is related to the subjective perception of contacting a spiritual reality.”Another curiosity concerned the caudate nucleus, which is involved with feelings of intense love. “We just finished a study on unconditional love and we found out that this caudate nucleus was crucially involved with unconditional love. But it’s also involved in other forms of love, like romantic love and maternal love. The major puzzle involved the parietal lobe, the area that helps you determine your body schema. In the nuns’ brains, this area showed unusual activity, suggesting they were being absorbed into a larger being. The near-death experiencers showed no unusual activity at all, even though they talked about walking toward the light. “I’ll have to think about this,” was all Beauregard would say.
10 It is unlikely that a brain would rewire itself in an instant, Andrew Newberg told me. Newberg has puzzled over this, and says that if further research shows that a person’s brain structure or brain-wave patterns do in fact behave differently as a result of a near-death or other experience, he can imagine a couple of mechanisms. Perhaps the jolting experience suddenly taps into unconscious areas of the brain; or perhaps it activates and strengthens weak connections in the brain, and the newly robust connections create a new pattern of brain activity that becomes the norm.
11 William James recognized this phenomenon a century ago. Mystical states, he wrote, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985; originally published 1902), allow the mystic to become one with the Absolute, and to be aware of that oneness—a tradition that defied “clime or creed.” “In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land” (p. 324).
CHAPTER 11. A NEW NAME FOR GOD
1 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Dell, 1973), p. 255.
2 For an excellent account of Einstein’s “God,” see Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 384-93.
3 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 174.
4 Gregory Benford, “Leaping the Abyss: Stephen Hawking on Black Holes, Unified Field Theory and Marilyn Monroe,” Reason, April 2002, p. 29.
5 Paul A. M. Dirac, “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature,” Scientific American 208 (May 1963): 53.
6 Max Planck, quoted in Charles C. Gillespie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner, 1975), p. 15.
7 Anthony Flew, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: Harper One, 2007), p. 155.
8 Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 250.
9 Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul (New York: Bantam, 1989).
10 The analogy breaks down slightly because, as Dossey and others have it, non-local mind possesses infinite information, not just boatloads of it, and non-local mind knows what is happening in the past, present, and future.
11 Dean Radin, Entangled Minds (New York: Paraview, 2006).
12 A. Aspect, P. Grangier, and G. Roger, “Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities,” Physical Review Letters 49 (1992): 91-94. Many experiments have proved the same thing, separating particles by as much as thirty-one miles and still seeing entanglement.
13 Radin argues that each level is built on smaller ones: atoms are built from subatomic particles, molecules are built from atoms, chemicals are a lot of molecules, biology emerges from chemicals, society is a group of biological beings—all the way up to the level of the universe. He believes that science will find unexpected properties in biological systems (including ESP) that emerge from elementary forms of entanglement, just as water emerges from a unique combination of oxygen and hydrogen. From either individual element alone, you could not predict water.
14 Studies have been conducted also at Bastyr University in Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, the universities of Nevada and Hertfordshire, and University Hospital of Freiburg. See S. Schmidt, “Distant Intentionality and the Feeling of Being Stared At: Two Meta-analyses,” British Journal of Psychology 95 (2004): 235-47.
15 Of the more than fifty studies, three of interest to me were: L. J. Standish et al., “Electroencephalographic Evidence of Correlated Event-Related Signals Between the Brains of Spatially and Sensory Isolated Subjects,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10 (2004): 307-14 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). In five of the sixty subjects tested, the receiver’s brain showed significantly higher brain activity when the sender was projecting an image. The chances that this would happen randomly to this number of people are more than 3,000 to 1. However, when researchers tried to replicate the results with the five successful subjects, only one showed a statistically significant “response.” D. Radin, “Event Related EEG Correlations Between Isolated Human Subjects,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10 (2004): 315-23 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). For three of the thirteen pairs of adult friends or relatives, the receiver’s brain-wave activity jumped when the partner was sending positive intentions. On average, the receiver’s EEG peaked 64 milliseconds after the sender’s, then sloped downward, as did the sender’s.
D. Radin and M. Schlitz, “Gut Feelings, Intuition, and Emotions: An Exploratory Study,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 11 (2005): 85-91 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.). In this case, involving twenty-six pairs of adults, one person sat in a shielded room, while another tried to evoke positive, negative, calming, or neutral responses. There seemed to be a “response” in the EEG of the receiver when the sender sent positive or negative emotions. The odds against these being chance findings were 167 to 1 and 1,100 to 1, respectively.
16 fMRI technology is far more expensive (about $1,000 per brain scan), and few researchers have access to these machines. Therefore, few studies have gone this route. The results, while mixed, have been suggestive that this is an area ripe for research. See L. J. Standi
sh, “Evidence of Correlated Functional MRI Signals Between Distant Human Subjects,” Alternative Therapies 9 (2003): 122-28. In one pair that was tested—a man and woman who had been colleagues for two years—when the man was sending images to the woman lying in the brain scanner, her brain lit up, or activated in areas 18 and 19 of the visual cortex. This is the region of the brain that is activated when someone directly sees an object.
17 J. Achterberg, “Evidence for Correlation Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Imaging Analysis,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 11 (2005): 965-71 (published by Mary Ann Liebert Publishers, Inc.).
18 D. Radin, “Compassionate Intention as a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patients: Effects of Distant Intention on the Automatic Nervous System,” Explore 4 (2008): 235-43.
19 I asked Schlitz if she had found pairs other than bonded couples who excelled at these tests. She nodded.“We see that they are typically people who come from three sets of trainings,” she said. “They are meditators. They’re martial artists. Or they’re classically trained musicians. So you might ask the question, what do those three populations have in common? Well, they have in common both intention and attention training.” A meditator trains his brain to be still and highly focused. An Aikido master learns to focus on the opponent in front of him and movement on the periphery, with “eyes on the back of his head.” The same is true for a classically trained musician, she observed. “Their brains are actually different from a person who hasn’t been trained that way. And one of the things a musician can do, for example, is attend to their own line in the symphony and stay very focused on a particular melody that they’re doing, and at the same time they have the larger capacity to track the whole symphony as it’s performing. So there’s something about that focused attention combined with this more generalized intention.” Having seen how meditation literally molds the brain, I was hardly surprised by this finding. It seemed to add another straw to the mounting pile of evidence that the trained brain has a capacity to glean information and dimensions that the flabby or distracted brain cannot.
20 Specifically, when the “senders” (such as J.D.) saw the image of their loved ones on the screen and began to think about them, certain things happened: for five seconds, their brain waves spiked, as did their heart rate and sweat-gland activity, and their blood flowed away from their fingertips, which happens when people gear up to do a task like focusing their attention. Then, halfway through, the process reversed as they began to relax. That much was predictable. But what gave the researchers pause was the response of the “receivers” (such as Teena) in the soundproof, electromagnetically sealed room. The receivers mimicked their partners’ physiology within a few milliseconds, becoming aroused and then relaxing toward the end of the ten seconds. One curious outcome, Radin said, involved breathing. “At the end of the sending period, the sender typically does a big exhalation, because they’ve been holding their breath for the ten seconds. There’s also a big exhalation for the receiver at the same time, even though they’re not holding their breath.” He laughed. “I didn’t expect that.”
CHAPTER 12. PARADIGM SHIFTS
1 My colleagues hailed from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, Newsday, ABC News, the BBC, and New Scientist magazine. Another journalist made his living authoring popular science books. This was the sharpest and most magical group of people I have known, their intellect rivaled only by their capacity to laugh and to drink.
2 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Bantam, 2006).
3 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 3rd edition; originally published 1962).
4 This quotation has repeatedly, and wrongly, been attributed to Kuhn. In fact, the words are those of a science writer reviewing Kuhn’s book: Nicholas Wade, “Thomas S. Kuhn: Revolutionary Theorist of Science,” Science 197, no. 4299 (1997): 144.
5 Kuhn, Structure, p. 6.
6 Ibid., p. 5.
7 Darren Staloff, “James’s Pragmatism,” a lecture in the series “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition,” produced by the Teaching Company.
8 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1916), p. 107 (italics mine).
9 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1875), p. 587.
Index
Accelerator machines, pilots in
Achterberg, Jeanne
AIDS
prayer and
spirituality and
Albuquerque Journal
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)
Alcoholism
recovery from
spiritual experience and
Alicia (recovered alcoholic)
Americans
belief in God
and prayer
Amygdala
electrical stimulation
temporal lobe epilepsy and
Angular gyrus, malfunction
“Anthropic Principle,”
Antidepressant drugs
Anxious ego dissolution
Apostle,The (movie)
Arnott, John
Aspect, Alain
Astin, John
Astonishing Hypotheses, The (Crick)
Atheism, and transcendence
Attitude, and disease outcome
Auditory spiritual experiences
Augustine, Saint
Autoscopic seizures
Ayahuasca
Ayala,Terrence
Baby boomers, and evangelical churches
Baine, Michael
Barkley, Gregory
Barrow, John
Beard, A.W.
Beauregard, Mario
Bedard, Gilles
Behaviorism
Belief in God
Benson, Herbert
Bible
Blackmore, Susan6
Blanke, Olaf
Blind Faith (Sloan)
Blindness, and spiritual sight
Body, and mind
Bonds, emotional
Borg, Jacqueline
Bowyer, Susan
Bradley, Mary Ann
Brain
changes in
chemicals of
and consciousness
dying
electrical activity
epilepsy and
and mind
science and
and mystical experience
and near-death experiences 6
and out-of-body experiences8
plasticity of
as radio receiver
remolding of
spiritual
spiritual center
and spiritual experience
Persinger’s view
study of
training of
transformation of
Brain scans
of Buddhist monks
of Carmelite nuns
for glossolalia
for near-death experiences
Brain-wave activity
manipulation of
Brave New World (Huxley)
Breast cancer, emotions and
Breath
Bright,Vicky
Britton,Willoughby