Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [109]
“I decided I needed to put it out,” he recalled, “and I began to get burned as I crossed the living room. I tried to grab the extinguisher, but I couldn’t because it was so hot. I felt the flames on my body but I didn’t realize I was on fire.”
Jorge ran down three flights of stairs, a live ball of flames, and reached the street. Neighbors doused him. He lay on the street, waiting for an ambulance that would take twenty minutes to arrive.
“They raised me into the ambulance, and I began to feel separate from myself,” he told me, reverting to Spanish to articulate the ineffable. “I felt like everything ended right there. And then I found myself walking toward a door, trying to open it and not able to do so. There was a very large window, with a lot of light in it. I think people were behind it. I felt like I needed to wait by the door for someone to open it for me. And someone said to me—well, it wasn’t a voice, it was ‘peace’ that said to me—‘Everything will be okay. You wait here.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I felt extremely calm the entire time. I didn’t know anything of myself until I woke up three months later.”
Could it have been morphine? I asked.
Jorge said he asked the doctors the same question, and they told him they did not administer morphine until he arrived at the hospital. Beauregard, who was listening to the interview, said that morphine produces a different, more fragmented experience.
When you met the light, I continued, was it a person, was it God, was it Jesus, what was it?
“At first I thought it was God or some image of God, but now I think we will never truly be able to grasp what God is,” Jorge observed philosophically. “It can’t be described. It was a light, and it was peace.”
The doctors and nurses dubbed Jorge “the Mexican Miracle.” He survived nine surgeries, eleven blood transfusions, and months of painful rehabilitation. He stopped drinking and smoking. His family and his Catholic Church moved to center stage in his life. He grew less anxious about his problems with family, work, money. That moment in the light rewrote his vision of the future, and not just in this world.
“I used to believe there was life after death,” he said urgently. “I believed in God. But I lived like everybody—in between yes and no. Now I know there is something else.When I think about death, I think about how nice it is to be alive and to be with my family. At the same time, I don’t worry about what’s going to happen later. Everything will fix itself.”
“Can you tell me what happened in the brain scanner today?” I asked.
“I simply tried to recall the experience, and I began to see the light. I cannot say I saw God, but there was a state of peace, and I left my body. Time and space became relative. Oh, one other thing,” he said offhandedly. “Normally I have a lot of pain in my hand,” he said, rubbing it gently. “And at that moment in the light, it didn’t hurt at all.”
Jump-starting Your Spiritual Life
Two years and fifteen subjects later, Mario Beauregard could talk about the brains of people who had touched death and returned. When he and I were observing Jorge in the brain scanner, the neuroscientist had predicted that Jorge’s brain might look similar to those of some Carmelite nuns he had studied. Like Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, Beauregard had conducted brain-imaging studies of people engaged in “centering prayer.”8 His subjects had all lived in the cloister for decades, where they spoke for but one hour a day, and their lives orbited around periods of this sort of meditative prayer: on average, they each had spent nearly 15,000 hours in prayer.
When Beauregard