• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 557 0

Jorge was to return to resting state. Then, a minute later, Jorge was to seek the “target state”—he must try to return to the “light,” the luminous presence he experienced two years earlier, when he had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. In this way, the researchers could determine whether the mystical state of seeing the light differed from the mental state of seeing a simple lightbulb. They would repeat this six times. If the two states appeared identical, that would suggest there is nothing inherently special about mystical experience. It is a person’s interpretation and not the event itself that infuses it with meaning—the way, perhaps, a sirloin steak tastes more succulent on the night your beau proposes marriage. The steak is not better than the one you had last Tuesday night but the context makes it so.

I watched from behind a plate of glass as Jerome led Jorge into a cold room. There, waiting ominously in the dim light, was the MRI machine. The brain scanner looked like a large oven, openmouthed and gaping for an object to be placed on the rack and inserted. I wondered if Jorge, already a victim of heat and fire, recognized the awful irony. If he did, he showed no sign: he merely stripped off his shoes, belt, watch, and any other metal object, and hoisted himself onto the gurney-like rack. Jerome fed him into the machine, a sacrificial offering to the gods of science, where enormous magnets would record blood changes in his brain.

Moments later, Jerome ordered the procedure to begin and a piercing ring filled the control room. It seemed unlikely than a yogi master could reach a transcendent state in this racket, much less a Mexican hotel worker who has never meditated a day in his life. I turned to Mario Beauregard, who was standing next to me watching through the glass.

“So, what do you think you’ll find?” I asked.

“I think we’ll see regions involved with positive emotions light up, of course, because it’s a very positive experience for a subject,” the neuroscientist speculated. “We should also see brain regions that are involved in self-awareness, because there’s a change in self-awareness during such spiritual states. And also, the body representation of the subject shifts and the subject becomes less in touch with his body, so we might see major changes in the parietal regions of his brain. But,” Beauregard said cheerfully, “that remains to be seen!”

Jorge Medina was the first of fifteen people to re-create his near-death experience in the brain scanner. Beauregard had no trouble recruiting subjects. A newspaper advertisement drew more than a hundred volunteers, allowing Beauregard to be selective. The subjects had to meet three criteria: when they had nearly died, they had lost consciousness and entered the “light”; they had returned with a transformed view of life; and they could still reconnect with the light.

In the control room, Jerome was saying, “Super, Jorge, we’re done,” and asking Jorge to rate how close he came to the light during his various target states, on a scale of one to five. Because Jerome has recorded the exact times Jorge was trying to achieve the target (near-death) state, he could later match Jorge’s subjective scores with the images of his brain during those moments. Jerome beamed like a proud parent: on a scale of one to five, Jorge had reported mainly fours and fives, a surprisingly strong intensity for a man lying in a metal casket with ringing sounds as loud as ambulance sirens going off around him. Jorge emerged, grinning.

“How was it?” I asked. “Did you connect with the light?”

“Yes, yes, yes, I feel a little bit today like my accident,” Jorge said.We sat down then, and Jorge described that moment as he lay in the ambulance, his body covered with third-degree burns.

“Peace—the peace that is like joy and like love,” Jorge whispered. His eyes welled up as he described his brush with death as “a nice experience.”

Jorge Medina had arrived in Canada seven years earlier, and began working a string of jobs as a cook and housekeeper in a hotel, sending money back