Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1 - Crossing the Stream
CHAPTER 2 - The God Who Breaks and Enters
CHAPTER 3 - The Biology of Belief
CHAPTER 4 - The Triggers for God
CHAPTER 5 - Hunting for the God Gene
CHAPTER 6 - Isn’t God a Trip?
CHAPTER 7 - Searching for the God Spot
CHAPTER 8 - Spiritual Virtuosos
CHAPTER 9 - Out of My Body or out of My Mind?
CHAPTER 10 - Are We Dead Yet?
CHAPTER 11 - A New Name for God
CHAPTER 12 - Paradigm Shifts
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2009 by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without
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Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from William R. Miller and Janet C’de Baca,
Quantum Change:When Epiphanies and Insights Transform Ordinary Lives (Guilford Press, 2001).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hagerty, Barbara Bradley.
Fingerprints of God: the search for the science of spirituality/ Barbara Bradley Hagerty.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-05260-0
1.Religion and science. I.Title.
BL240.3.H
215—dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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To Mom,
the finest person I know
What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
CHAPTER 1
Crossing the Stream
I REMEMBER THE MOMENT I decided to leave Christian Science. It was a Sunday afternoon in February 1994. By my bleak accounting, New Haven, Connecticut, was enjoying its seventeenth snowstorm of the winter. I was completing a one-year fellowship at Yale Law School. I had abandoned my sunny apartment in Washington, D.C., for a dark cave in the Taft Hotel with rented furniture that, I’d realized upon delivery, was identical to that favored by Holiday Inns.
I was sick—sick with stomach flu, a fever and chills that induced me to pile every blanket, sweater, and coat in the apartment on top of me. Still I shook so violently that my teeth chattered. I slipped in and out of consciousness all afternoon, but in a moment of lucidity I envisioned the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. In normal circumstances, my medicine cabinet contained nothing more therapeutic than Band-Aids. I had been raised a Christian Scientist, and at the age of thirty-four—with the