Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [135]
16 John B. Watson, “Psychology As the Behaviorists View It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158-77.
17 The polls were reported in Nature, April 3, 1997, 435-36, and July 23, 1998, 313.
18 W. Miller, Quantum Change (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).
19 Ibid., p. 83.
20 Ibid., p. 85.
21 I heard a lot about orgasm in my research. Sophy Burnham told me: “I’d wake up, just with radiance running through my body. It was as if I’d been made love to by God.” Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi mystic I interviewed, was more explicit. “The Sufis would say that the external relationship between two people is a pale reflection of the relationship between lover and beloved,” he explained. As I listened to Llewellyn, it struck me that his words and his faraway tone reflected something, well, erotic. “If you really practice mediation, and you’re taken along that path, you experience a much more enduring bliss. It’s very sexual but it’s beyond sexual. The orgasm doesn’t happen in the sex tracts, but happens in the heart. And that is unbelievable. You have experiences of cosmic love and cosmic bliss. And rather than lasting for a moment, it can last for hours. It is a quite wonderful experience.” I was dumbfounded. “How many people can achieve that?” I blurted. Llewellyn burst out laughing. “It’s what mystics long for, that ecstatic union with God,” he said, not really answering my question, but I suppose I did not expect him to give me numbers. “It is very, very erotic, but it is much deeper than that. It’s what lovers long for.” Of course, the mystics of old alluded to this. Consider Teresa of Ávila, whose erotic notions of God were immortalized in a statue by Bernini. In one of her mystical states, she wrote, she encountered an angel; he was not tall, but very beautiful, and his face was “aflame.” “In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God.” Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1988), chapter 29. Why, I thought, would a spiritual experience give a thousand-watt jolt to the body? The answer is simple—and, happily, it opens the door for scientists to explore. We are, after all, physical beings. If there is such a thing as a veiled reality, how else are we to experience it except physically, with our synapses firing and our brains activated and our hearts racing? Given our makeup, is it really surprising that spiritual virtuosos might enjoy a little afternoon delight?
22 Miller, Quantum Change, p. 106.
23 National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, “Spiritual and Religious Transformation in America: The National Spiritual Transformation Study” (report prepared for Metanexus Institute, Philadelphia, June 2005). To find out just how present “God” is for the average American, I called up Tom W. Smith at the National Opinion Research Center. In June 2005, he and his team of researchers completed their twenty-fifth General Social Survey. They had interviewed 1,300 people at length about their spiritual journeys. For most in the survey, that spiritual experience was relatively tame: being “born again” in a Baptist church, feeling moved by a sermon, or inspired by a hymn when singing in the church choir. It could be an “aha” moment, often in the wake of a death or a tragedy, when people turn to God. But some described less run-of-the-mill events. “For some people, angels played the trumpet,” Smith observed with admirable restraint. “We got every standard litany of change: God talking to them, floating, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, tunnels with light.” According