Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [129]
At first I was befuddled by these wildly divergent brain patterns and experiences, but then I began to perceive a theme. Simply put, when you bump against the spiritual, something changes. First, your brain begins to operate differently, even at resting state. Second, your interior life is transformed.Your priorities and loves, how you choose to spend your time and with whom you choose to spend it—all that changes in the blink of an eye. And for me at least, the catalyst for this upheaval is God.
Nature and nurture, my DNA and my upbringing, all no doubt inclined me toward embracing this sort of spiritual science. What I did not expect in the course of my research, however, was a radical re-definition of God.
The scientists I interviewed rarely spoke of a personal God, except for geneticist Francis Collins, who described a God who loves math, creates a universe, and hankers for intelligent beings who “wonder if there is more.” Usually, they recognized the stunning precision of the laws of the universe, laws that govern particles and galaxies alike. Einstein spoke of a “superior mind,” Stephen Hawking of something that “breathes fire into the equations” of the universe. Philosopher Aldous Huxley posited “Mind at Large,” Dean Radin suggested an “entangled” tapestry of information, and Larry Dossey spoke of “non-local mind.”
These men found God in very large things and very small ones, the vast universe and the microscopic cell. As for me, I set out to test God writ small, but not too small. My subjects were human-sized, and I found evidence of the spiritual painted on the canvas of a person’s life. I came to define God by His handiwork: a craftsman who builds the hope of eternity into our genes, a master electrician and chemist who outfits our brains to access another dimension, a guru who rewards our spiritual efforts by allowing us to feel united with all things, an intelligence that pervades every atom and every nanosecond, all time and space, in the throes of death or the ecstasy of life.
This view of God and spiritual reality offers an alternative to superstition. It allows you to steer through an all-or-nothing attitude—that either there is a God who intervenes, depending on His mood and whether you’ve been naughty or nice; or that “God” is the product of ignorance and we live in a cold, uncaring, random universe. It seems to me that advances in science, and particularly in quantum physics, are offering another description of reality in which all things are guided by and connected to an infinite Mind. This description, of course, echoes the words of mystics down the ages.
As I absorbed the science, I found this was the “God” I could defend most easily—not so much a divine “father” as an infinite creator of law and life. Without realizing it at first, I had looped back to the faith of my childhood. I found myself staring squarely at Mary Baker Eddy’s definition of God: “Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; all substance; intelligence.”9 Perhaps Mrs. Eddy was onto something. Perhaps her view of reality presaged what quantum physicists and astrophysicists are finding today.
A Second Look at Christian Science
I remember precisely when I made the connection between my research and Christian Science, and its firm belief that coming in line with spiritual laws will bring about a human solution or healing. I was attending a near-death-experience conference at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, listening to Penny Sartori, the spunky intensive-care nurse from Wales. In her presentation, she described the case of Michael Richards, a sixty-year-old patient who suffered from cerebral palsy that left his right hand curled inward and useless. He had been that way since birth. One day while in the hospital, Richards’s heart stopped beating, his vital signs suddenly flatlined, and he remained unresponsive for half an hour. He later claimed to have left his body