Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [11]
But just beneath that physical explanation lie explosive questions that scientists often prefer to ignore or to declare irrelevant. Who or what causes these spiritual dramas, these tiny gold threads of mystery that have woven their way down the centuries and into religions, through Christianity and Buddhism, through Islam and Kabbalah and Hinduism? Often, scientists can spot patterns in these mystical accounts and, with a sigh of relief, offer a diagnosis. Oh, that’s temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s schizophrenia. It’s LSD, or magic mushrooms, or a chemical that is released in the brain as it shuts down to die.
It is, both literally and figuratively, all in the head.
And yet, small cracks are appearing in the smooth façade of this paradigm, thanks to a small army of psychologists, geneticists, and neurologists. They are making surprising discoveries about the physiological underpinnings of the spiritual. Before delving into DNA and brain chemistry, I want to turn to the most mysterious genre of experience—the spiritual storm that passes through otherwise healthy people, often unbidden, usually unexpected, and always unexplainable by material science.
This is the God who breaks and enters.
William James’s Outrageous Ideas
If Sophy Burnham had crossed paths with William James, her story might have found its way into the pages of his Varieties of Religious Experience. Sophy missed the famous Harvard psychologist by a century: James’s series of lectures was published in book form in 1902. That Varieties is still regarded as the classic attempt to understand spiritual experience from a scientific perspective is, no doubt, a tribute to the originality of James’s thinking. It is also a reflection, and perhaps an indictment, of twentieth-century science, which shied away from investigating this most basic of human sentiments—the longing for “something more.”
I like to imagine William James arriving at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. I can picture him, with full beard, receding hairline, and thick eyebrows crowning his intense eyes, approaching the lectern, gazing out at the sea of European scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals, and taking a deep breath.
“It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk,” he began his first lecture, “and face this learned audience.”4
James professed to be intimidated by his colleagues’ erudition. But he must have felt a twinge of exhilaration as he began to dissect, like a sure-handed surgeon, the philosophical wisdom of his age. In his twenty lectures, James rejected the reigning theory of his colleagues, who diagnosed spiritual experience as evidence of a disordered brain and believed that mystics and religious believers were better suited for the asylum than pulpit or pew.Why, he asked, could scientists not envision the world as consisting of “many interpenetrating spheres of reality,”5 which can have both scientific and spiritual explanations—just as, to day, depression can be explained by both psychotherapy and altered brain chemistry?
“The first thing to bear in mind,” he warned the august crowd, “is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.”6
Then James set out to do what scientists do so well. He categorized. First he analyzed the more common (and less intense) spiritual experience: religious conversion. Drawing from the rich personal stories of Saint Augustine, Leo Tolstoy, John Bunyan, and less famous converts, he concluded that people who had undergone religious conversions had achieved something that most of his intellectual colleagues had not. They had pushed through the angst of a “divided self,” with its disappointments and doubts