Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [111]
Gilles’s near-death experience happened upon him on November 17, 1973. He was a nineteen-year-old with undiagnosed Crohn’s disease. During his five-month stay in the hospital, he had wasted to sixty-four pounds. One night, after a priest had given him the last rites, Gilles found himself perched in the corner of the ceiling, looking down at himself, the doctor, his family, the room.
“And suddenly, I felt a call.... I just turned maybe ninety degrees, and there was a huge light in the back, and in front there were twelve beings of light,” he recalled. “So I came upon them, and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ They said,‘Well, you’re not going to die. You must go back. You have things to do.’They were talking to me by telepathy.”
“Were you afraid?” I asked.
“No. I felt very at peace. Then I asked them, ‘What am I going to do?’ And there was a silence, and then a beautiful sound came into me. It was outside of me, it was inside of me, I was part of a very peaceful, serene sound, but at the same time a very powerful sound. It was like”—Gilles blew out his breath slowly, pursing his lips to make a low whistle —“the breath of the universe.”
It was an echo of Pam Reynolds’s moment “standing in the breath of God.”
Gilles recovered and, happily for Mario Beauregard, could revisit the “light” at will more than thirty years later. We settled Gilles in the acoustic chamber, then closed the door behind us with a quiet thlunk, the seal as tight as a submarine’s. Beauregard and Jerome walked back to the computer, which was recording the undulating lines of thirty-two electrodes.
“He’s already relaxed,” Jerome said excitedly, as the lines on the computer rounded out from sharp spikes to small humps.
“The EEG is slowing down,” Beauregard said, pointing to the screen. “This is good, very slow waves . . . theta waves . . . maybe it’s a correlate of his experience.”
Theta waves, Beauregard explained, are observed in people who are sleeping, or in a state of quiet focus, such as meditation. Beauregard said the average person cannot simply sit down and achieve this level of relaxation in two or three minutes. Over the next hour, Gilles sat in his soundproof tank, herding his thoughts toward various levels of consciousness. Beauregard and Jerome clucked fondly over Gilles’s EEG recordings. Finally, at their command, Gilles plunged into the “light”—or at least, that is the story that the luxurious, voluptuous, sloping lines on the computer told. Look at us! We’re delta waves! We should be in a deep sleep, but really we’re in another state of reality! Well, that is what I imagined his waves were saying.
Beauregard later told me that some of his subjects had been able to slow their brain-wave activity to show delta waves—or states of deep sleep—and all fifteen had shown significant theta waves in their brains, which also occurs during meditation.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We know they’ve been transformed emotionally by the near-death experience,” he said, “and perhaps they’ve been transformed physiologically as well. It’s like there’s a shift in their brain, and this shift allows these people to stay in touch with the spiritual world more easily, on a daily basis.”
Beauregard explained that the University of Montreal maintains a database of the EEGs of thousands of people in the normal population. Most people at resting state exhibit the beta waves of normal waking activity, darting here and there, always in motion, thoughts swinging like monkeys from tree to tree.
“What we’ve seen with our subjects is that they present much slower waves in their brains than normal people”—especially theta waves of meditation and delta waves of deep sleep.
“Yet they are not impaired neurologically, so that their brain is not functioning slowly,” he said excitedly.