Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [100]
I had been taught that there is a close connection between material and spiritual existence, that out bodies and brains are the human counterpart to a spiritual identity—and that a transcendent realm can be perceived by spiritual senses. As I listened to these stories, I wondered if spiritual senses could be triggered not just by prayer and meditation but by drugs or seizure, by lucky happenstance, or by a close brush with death, as Vicky Bright and Pam Reynolds claimed.
It is one thing to swallow doctrine as a child, another to find that the very ideas you discarded as an adult might in fact be legitimate. It unnerved me. But I found that these ideas were not so strange after all. Consider, again, Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve.” The author (and connoisseur of LSD) proposed that drugs, spiritual exercises, hypnosis—and, he might have plausibly added, death—can open up the valve to let us perceive at least a sliver of “Mind at Large.” He defined Mind at Large as “something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.”12
True, the strange idea that an invisible reality penetrates the material world, this bizarre notion that our minds might be able to operate independently of our brains—these are mere hypotheses. At the same time, these hypotheses about mind and brain are more than fantasy or speculation. They spring from life experience. These stories are everywhere, accessible. They are low-hanging fruit, and you need only step into your backyard and pluck them. And while people’s experiences are not as conclusive as a DNA match, they are something, and they point toward a reality beyond the horizon of this world.
Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has studied near-death experiences for thirty years, has noticed a rare but extraordinary phenomenon that can occur when people are slipping from life to death. As their brains shut down, they often enjoy brief and clinically inexplicable recoveries in the final moments of life. People suffering from dementia become lucid. Those with Alzheimer’s disease recognize family members after years of confusion. Schizophrenics become clearheaded.
Even though this happens very rarely, he told me, “the fact that this ever happens at all is inexplicable if we equate minds with brains, because dying people’s brains do not correct their structural or chemical derangement” when they are dying.
“When the brain is not functioning well,” he reflected, “the mind becomes free to function.”
And, perhaps, free to explore another, spiritual, realm.
Now let’s travel all the way down the rabbit hole. Say, for the sake of argument, that these people who could see and hear when their brains were not functioning were not lying. Say their consciousness was not trapped in the brain. Does this unleash the outrageous idea that consciousness—your life and mine—survives death? Scientists summarily dismiss this idea as so much rubbish. I would not even raise it—except that now neuroscience is getting into the act.
CHAPTER 10
Are We Dead Yet?
THE FRAGILE YELLOW PAPER IS UNDATED, but my mother and I figured it referred to the winter of 1939. Mom was enrolled in a finishing school just outside of New York City. She was eighteen. My grandmother was forty-one. One bitterly cold evening, Mom received an urgent phone call. Granny had fallen deathly ill.
When Mom arrived at Granny’s bedside, she found her mother slipping in and out of consciousness. Granny was attended by two Christian Science practitioners and a medically trained Christian Science nurse. They kept a fierce prayer vigil for nearly three