Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [123]
And while the terminology of “entanglement” and “non-local mind” may be twenty-first-century, the idea dates back to antiquity.
“This is the place where science and spirituality are converging,” Schlitz observed. “You look at the great teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, a lot of the shamanic traditions, even in the Christian traditions, and you see this sense of unity and wholeness. And now what we’re finding is that there is a justification for that sort of philosophical position from an empirical base, from a scientific base.”
While this definition of God does little to fill my soul or feed my emotions—I gain little comfort from imagining myself in the arms of non-local mind, for example—it does go some way toward nourishing my intellect. As I was wrestling with my own concept of God, one that could survive the science I was absorbing, I suffered a small crisis that allowed me to put some of these ideas to a test.
The U.S. Postal Service and the Fabric of Reality
On January 30, 2007, a tiny error set off a chain reaction that threatened nearly a year of research. All year long, a young colleague of mine had been generously transcribing my interviews from various reporting trips, for a pittance. I could not have finished the book without her. Over Christmas, she had taken some minidisks (three-inch-by-three-inch square digital disks) to her family’s home in New England and accidentally left them there. This particular set of minidisks included interviews from four trips (New Mexico, Canada, Florida, and Pennsylvania), which were essential for five different chapters—nearly half the book.
Her mother put the minidisks in a manila envelope and dropped them into a mailbox. On February 2, the envelope arrived in Washington with a large gash in it, minus the minidisks.When I learned this, the earth lurched to a halt, silence roared in my ears, and I was paralyzed by the implications like a mouse before a rattlesnake.
If you live on the East Coast and noticed a decline in your mail delivery service in the first half of February 2007, you can direct your ire at me. During that time, I enlisted the help of every U.S. Postal Service customer-relations officer between New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. By seven o’clock each morning I had methodically called the managers of mail distribution centers up and down the coast. I e-mailed them digital pictures of the minidisks. I called individual post offices, and enjoyed several conversations with the investigative arm of the U.S. Postal Service. By the end of the third day, the Postal Service officer who was in charge of my case remarked, “Ms. Hagerty, we have thirty people working to find your minidisks.” I did not mention to her the dozen or so other federal employees I had called on my own.
I also took a step I had not considered in a decade. Christian Scientists, I have noticed, are strangely adept at finding lost things, possibly because they focus on God as “infinite Mind,” the all-knowing and all-seeing. I called a Christian Science “practitioner” to pray for me.
“Hello, darling,” she greeted me, with a warmth that almost reduced me to a puddle of tears. “How can I help?”
I explained the situation and then heard the familiar, steely resolve of a Christian Scientist in action. There followed a brief conversation, in which she made a series of declarative statements. Among them: “Nothing that belongs to you can be separated from you. Feel your oneness with the Source of intelligence.” And: “You think you have covered a lot of ground in searching for this? God has already covered all the ground there is. Nothing passes His notice.” And: “It’s like the law of mathematics. It is always operating, and everyone is responding to this law. It’s like gravity. You don’t have to understand it but you obey it. Everyone