Ethan was torn. As precarious as their relationship was with Houston’s committee, they couldn’t afford to have any negativity get back to him if the test didn’t go well. On the other hand, he felt an unexpected excitement at sharing the groundbreaking experiment with such an insightful student. He turned his gaze toward her, and they locked eyes. When she smiled at him, he imagined she could hear the debate waging inside his head. He nodded. “Okay then, shall we get started?”
Rachel’s heeled boots clicked across the wood floor until she stopped on the opposite side of the Logos from Ethan, extending her hand to Sister Terri.
“Hi, I’m Rachel. Chris was telling me that you’re a nun?”
“Franciscan, since I was nineteen.” Terri took her hand in both of hers. “I’m Terri.”
“Rachel helps out at the capuchin lab where we tested the Logos last week,” Ethan said.
“You guys were so cryptic then. I know this machine has something to do with testing spiritual states or something in the brain, but what exactly are you doing?”
Elijah walked to her side with a bounce in his step. He reached across Terri and lifted her medical file from the table. Flipping back pages, he turned to a series of colored images.
“Five years ago, when Ethan was a new MD working on his PhD, he and I conducted a study in which we used SPECT imaging to scan the brains of five Franciscan nuns from Terri’s convent and five Tibetan Buddhist monks. Each of these subjects engaged in either deep contemplative prayer or meditation during the scanning process. The nuns’ prayers consisted of repeating a short verse of the Bible and contemplating the image of Christ, while the monks focused only on the in and out of their breathing.”
“And Terri was one of the nuns?”
“She was.” Elijah pointed to one of the brain scans. “This area here?”
“The orangey color?”
“That’s Terri’s left temporal lobe. Although the monks’ and nuns’ religious doctrines were different, we discovered that the neurological activity in their brains during their spiritual practices was essentially the same.” He pointed to a darker section on the image. “Most areas of the brain that are active during conscious activity are quiet, but the temporal areas here”—he pointed again to the orange section—“are lit up with a type of activity that we don’t see during baseline measurements in either wakefulness or sleep.”
“So even though the nuns are focused on God and the monks on their breath, they are having the same religious experiences?”
“This is what fascinated me. Their respective interpretations of their experiences were different. The Buddhist monks believed the world and themselves to be impermanent and in a constant state of flux. The purpose of meditation for them was to achieve Nirvana, a state of Absolute Reality that is the absence of desire and suffering. The nuns, on the other hand, saw their mystical prayer as leading to a communion with God.”
She nodded. “So while their religious beliefs were different, they were having similar experiences from a neurological standpoint.”
“Exactly. Their descriptions of the subjective feelings and emotions that resulted from their spiritual practices—feelings of cosmic unity, a subjugation of the individual self to a larger reality—are common descriptions of mystical experiences that exist in every world religion.”
“So the Logos”—Rachel pointed toward the metal arm suspended over the chair—“measures these spiritual experiences?”
Ethan couldn’t suppress a grin. “No, Elijah’s insight was that if a common neurological mechanism in the human brain seemed to account for religious experiences, then maybe we could induce such experiences in others.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean to cause someone to experience God?”
“I wondered,” Elijah added, “whether we might be able to induce, if not a belief in God, then at least the experience of what such a belief or connection with the divine might feel like.”
“You can do that?”
Ethan nodded. “Psychologists in the 1960s inserted electrodes into the areas of the brain that produce emotional responses. When they sent electrical impulses through the electrodes, their subjects felt pain, happiness, and pleasure, depending on which area they stimulated.”
Chris, who was still standing behind Elijah and Rachel, spoke. “The professors are being too modest. The Logos isn’t just about showing that there is a God part of the brain, just as there are parts related to smell, taste, and touch. If the experiment works, they’ll be the first ones to change thoughts and experiences in a directed and purposeful way.”
“What about hallucinogenic drugs?” Rachel asked. “Don’t they control our thoughts through specific neurological pathways?”
Ethan tilted his head, impressed. “True, but they’re crude. When taking mescaline or psilocybin, you don’t know what kind of vision you may have: will it be sacred or profane, religious or alien? We think we have tuned the Logos to produce a uniquely religious experience of the divine.”
“But you aren’t inserting any electrodes into the brain.”
“My first desire,” Elijah said, “was to do this in a noninvasive way.” He touched the arm of the Logos. “I hoped that by stimulating the areas of the temporal lobes that were active on the brain scans from the nuns and monks that we might induce some kind of mystical experience. We took a TMS machine and played with the settings and experimented with magnetic stimulation in the left temporal areas.”
“By tuning the magnetic pulses in a particular way,” Ethan added, “we hoped to cause the neurons to fire in a predetermined pattern—a pattern we thought would produce a religious vision.”
“Seems like something out of science fiction movie, shooting a beam into someone’s head to affect their thoughts,” she said.
“Indeed.” Elijah laughed. “But the technology has been around for many years. Our problem was that we never understood how the brain takes these electrical signals and turns them into thoughts. Our early testing of the Logos was too blunt. We didn’t understand how to program it.” He nodded at Ethan. “The breakthrough came from the brightest student I have had in my many years here. Ethan theorized that by recording EEGs from epileptic patients who experienced hyperreligiosity, we could capture the specific neurological electrical patterns that led to their corresponding religious visions.”
“So”—she looked between the two men—“that’s why you wanted to test the machine on my monkeys with your new algorithm—to make sure that the magnetic currents you’ll induce in Sister Terri’s brain will cause a religious experience but not an epileptic seizure?”
“You got it.” Ethan grinned.
Rachel returned his smile, her eyes lingering on his for a few seconds before she looked down at Terri. “But, Sister, why are you here? I mean, using a machine to induce a sacred experience?”
Terri patted her arm. “Anyone can have a mystical experience, dear, even”—she pointed at Ethan—“Mr. Skeptical here, but some people are just more receptive to it than others.”
“Like how some people have a natural ear for music or an artist has an eye for color?”
The nun nodded. “Whether it’s because of my decades of practice, my genetic makeup, or a combination, I am one of those people blessed with the ability to connect with my divine center.”
She tugged on the bottom of her turtleneck, smoothing the wrinkles. “Just think of the possibilities if this machine actually works. An astronomer uses a telescope to explore the universe, to see back in time to the earliest moments of creation. How could I turn down the opportunity to do the same for the mind?”
Elijah put his hand on Terri’s shoulder. “We wanted to test the Logos first on someone accustomed to having mystical experiences. Terri can compare the effects of the Logos with what she sees in her spiritual practice.”
Rachel looked between the men. “So you’ve created a God Machine!”
“God Machine.” Elijah laughed. “That’s catchy.”
She turned to Ethan. “In class you taught us about Freud’s critique of religion as a mass delusion: God is caused by neurological misfirings of the brain.” Her eyes seemed to pierce his. “Don’t you know how threatening your work would be to most of the world’s population if you prove that belief in God can be produced by a machine?”
Elijah raised a hand. “Whoa, slow down a minute, Ms. Riley.” He pointed to the image of the brain scan he still held. “This section of the brain at the rear, above the cerebellum, is known as the visual cortex. Electrical impulses from the optic nerve that originates at the back of the eye are processed here. If I scanned your brain when you were looking at a particular color—red, for example—one area of your visual cortex would light up. Does that disprove that the color red exists as an independent reality? Just because an electrochemical reaction causes you to perceive the color?”
She shook her head. “Definitely not.”
“Why isn’t it the same for God? If people had real experiences of the divine, we would expect to see corresponding neurochemical and electrical changes in the brain. We are simply locating these areas.”
“Now, Elijah,” Ethan said. He knew better than to get entangled in this disagreement yet again, but he couldn’t let his mentor’s assertions stand unchallenged. “Just because an area in the brain is tuned to believe in God or to have certain mystical experiences, does not mean that God exists. I can think of several evolutionary reasons for these brain developments: to give comfort and strength in the face of adversity; to provide group cohesion. We don’t believe that a schizophrenic who has hallucinations of voices or visions is experiencing reality, so why do we afford religion some special status?”
Sister Terri sighed from the chair. He realized he’d just insulted her faith. He was usually careful about revealing his own misgivings about religion outside of academia. She reached out and took his hand. The personal contact made him uncomfortable, but her touch was warm.
“Maybe, Dear, because even with all of its shortcomings, with the tragedies that have been committed in its name, religion opens us up to a depth of our very existence, the very ground of our being, that we need to live a fulfilled life.”
He stared down at the nun. As she had demonstrated in their previous meetings, she had a way of making her faith sound so meaningful and reasonable, yet he still struggled with understanding it.
“That’s so poetic,” Rachel said, saving him from having to respond. “But what I’m still not getting is”—she paused to run her fingers through her hair—“why, if the nuns’ and monks’ mystical experiences originate from the same brain activity, are their religions so different?”
“Such insightful questions!” Elijah said as he walked to his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a four-inch-tall glass pyramid. He held it up so that the light streaming in from the window passed through the glass, casting a color spectrum on the wood floor.
“A prism?” Rachel asked.
“Imagine for a moment that the divine, by whatever name we may call it—God, Allah, Yahweh, Nirvana—is like the electromagnetic spectrum, like the sunlight that passes into the prism. As finite creatures, we cannot see the light in its full spectrum. Humans, for example, only see a small portion of this spectrum that we call visual light. Now imagine how we view our lives through each of our own lenses: prisms shaped by who we are, where we come from, the languages we speak, the time we live in, and what we are taught to believe.” He pointed to the rainbow of colors dancing across the floor. “So you might look at the light through your prism and see blue while I see yellow through mine. We might argue about what the true nature of light is—blue or yellow—maybe even come to blows over the disagreement. Each of us would be right, but our visions would also be incomplete. Blue and yellow are not the same, but both are part of the spectrum that is light.”
“Or,” Rachel said, turning to Ethan, a mischievous glimmer in her eye, “some might not open their eyes in the first place, so they’d never see the light.”
Elijah chuckled. “The word mystical comes from the Greek mystos, which means ‘that which is hidden from ordinary sight.’”
Ethan massaged his temples, chastising himself for allowing the discussion to go down this road. Was he starting to develop a headache?
“Enough philosophy!” Elijah clapped his hands. “It’s time.”
He placed the prism on the desk, walked to the head of the recliner, and lowered the arm so that the solenoids were positioned on each side of Terri’s head.
Ethan slipped a Topiramate from his pants pocket and swallowed the pill, just in case a migraine developed. Then he moved to the rear of the machine and clicked on the red power button. The Logos began to vibrate and hum at a low frequency. Will it work? he wondered. In minutes they would know the result of the past five years of their efforts. He looked up. Rachel was holding Sister Terri’s hand. The nun appeared as calm as she always was.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
Elijah grinned at him like a child waiting to open his birthday gifts. “Let’s make history.”
“Terri?”
She winked at him and then closed her eyes.
He rotated a green knob. The humming grew louder. The dials indicating the frequency and amplitude of the electrical pulses flickered in response to the programming he’d uploaded. He felt his pulse beating in his ears in time to the pulses from the Logos.
“Okay, Terri, just relax,” he said, wishing he could follow his own advice. “Here we go.”
CHAPTER 14
THE MONASTERY
ASWAN, EGYPT
The Bishop hurried down the cloistered hallway of the Monastery, wondering whether the email had come through yet. He pushed the sleeve of his silver robe from his wrist and glanced at his watch, a thin gold Patek Philippe. Six thirty in the evening. The wait was the worst part.
He tugged at the collar around his neck. He should be used to it by now, but his neck felt swollen and hot. The collar was restricting his air, and the scent of incense that he usually found pleasant threatened to overwhelm him. The candelabras along the right wall danced shadows against the sand-like texture of the Venetian plaster; their gray smoke stained the barrel-vaulted ceiling. He wondered whether the candle flames were sucking too much oxygen out of the air.
He thought of the difficulty he’d gone through to build this monastery. He glanced to his right again. Every fifteen feet, spaced between the candelabras, were heavy oak doors set within stone arches—twenty in all in this cloister, and two other cloisters extended off the central core ahead of him, like spokes from a hub. The Monastery could house sixty monks, and that didn’t count the separate living quarters for his staff of priests and assistants. Currently he was at half-capacity, but his benefactors wanted to see the facility full.
The Bishop looked to his watch again. He wasn’t normally the type who worried. He was the one others came to for answers. But his situation had changed recently. He was under pressure now.
Continuing down the cloister, he stopped in front of a stained glass scene that extended the twelve feet from floor to ceiling along the length of the wall. Each of the three cloisters contained similar windows. He had commissioned the work himself. Construction of the Monastery had taken three years and millions of dollars, even with the cheap Egyptian labor. Building such a large project in secrecy in the remote desert on the outskirts of Aswan had complicated the plans. But as was the case with everything he did, he’d been meticulous about every detail of its completion. He admired the stained glass; although it appeared to be lit from a sunny afternoon, the glass wasn’t really a window. They were twenty feet underground.
The vibrant colors were backlit by LED lights. The scene of this window depicted Jesus on the cross. Mary was weeping at his feet, while in the distance the apostles ripped at their clothes in despair. A Roman guard had just finished piercing Jesus’s side with a spear, and the blood glowed crimson. Getting the expression on Jesus’s face just
right had held up installation for weeks. His eyes were full of hope, not suffering. Although his skin had an olive Mediterranean complexion, his eyes were emerald green, and like the Mona Lisa, they followed you as you walked down the cloister. The Bishop knew that the work had a profound effect on the monks. He’d watched them pass by it in reverence, as if the image itself had a power. He didn’t try to persuade them otherwise.
He closed his eyes and inhaled the dusty cave aroma, the scent mixed with incense and candles. Gradually, he became aware of the music. Low and melodic, the chanting of monks echoed throughout the stone hallway. Another of his favorite details: the music was not coming from his monks, who were in their rooms resting or studying. Instead it came from speakers hidden along the walls. It had the effect of creating an atmosphere conducive to faith, and he felt the tension in his shoulders relax. He opened his eyes and looked into the emerald eyes that seemed to read his mind. He needed to be patient. His efforts would pay off. He had faith in his convictions.
Feeling better, he walked over to the oak door opposite the stained glass. He had to bend over to peer through the six-inch opening in the door, crisscrossed with hand-hammered iron. The monk’s cell was identical to all others: fifteen-by-ten feet, it held a cot for sleeping, a desk for studying, and a washbasin for cleaning. This particular room belonged to Brother Youssef, a twenty-four-year-old from Pakistan who had been one of the first monks to arrive just over a year ago. He lay on his cot staring at the ceiling, immobile but for the occasional blinking of his wide eyes. Father Dawkins sat by the bed on the simple wooden chair he’d pulled from the desk. He read to Youssef in Arabic from the Bible open on his lap. Nicholas Dawkins was one of the more advanced priests. Broad-shouldered with close-cropped hair, he’d also been part of the project from the beginning. Although he was American, Dawkins had extensive training in both Arabic and Farsi.
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