Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [14]
“William James was talking about these things in a very respectful way at the turn of the century,” I said. “What happened between then and now?”
“My own metaphor is that psychology had to go through adolescence. Because psychology came from religion and philosophy, we had to say, ‘I am not religion, I am not religion, I am not religion.’ And then as you grow up, you kind of find your way back to your roots. And I think psychology is doing that: we’re reconnecting with William James and the philosophic and theological roots that were there when psychology began.”
My own view is that psychologists and other scientists have been ignoring the spiritual at their peril, since half of all Americans claim to have had some sort of spiritual experience. Psychology is the study of humans, after all, and at some point psychologists should probably accommodate these peculiarly human beliefs. More than 90 percent of Americans believe in God. Compare that with the scientists: recent polls suggest that only 40 percent of scientists overall and 7 percent of the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences believe in God.17 Therein lies an explanation for why researchers have neglected the spiritual.Why should they study what they consider a delusion?
Bill Miller’s own quest to study the spiritual began in the most personal of ways in the summer of 1989. Miller and his family were preparing for a yearlong sabbatical in Australia. All of the family but one. His fourteen-year-old adopted daughter, Lillian, had gone through a particularly rebellious period and was living at a girls’ ranch two and a half hours away. One day, Miller trekked off to visit her, only to find that she refused to see him.
“So I turned around and drove home again,” he said.“And then later that week she called, and on the phone, her voice was different. There was something different about this voice I was hearing. And she said, ‘Dad, I need to talk to you.’ ”
He arrived at the ranch a few hours later.
“And this was a different person from the one I had known before that. And I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘There’s a mandatory chapel here. I went and sat in the back row like I always do, waiting for it to be over. And then this thing happened to me and I don’t even know how to talk about it. I don’t have any words to describe it.’
“She’s really been a different person ever since,” he continued, noting that his daughter was now thirty. “And I won’t say she’s been without problems or struggles or difficulties. But in the sense of being a different, compassionate, empathic person with a sense of reality bigger than the material world—yes, that came that day and has been there ever since.”
If this had been a one-off, Miller might have let it slide away. But for some time, he had been hearing about these epiphanies from clients in his clinical work at the university. He noticed that some of his patients underwent sudden spiritual experiences, and when they emerged on the other side, they had been transformed: no longer alcoholic, no longer suicidal, they were people who treated life as a gift. He called the phenomenon “quantum change.”
“And I couldn’t think of any theory, or even a word, that described this kind of change within my own discipline,” Miller said. “That was part of what fascinated me. I thought, Wait a minute, if a personality can change literally overnight, and it’s permanent, shouldn’t I be interested in that as a psychologist?”
Miller decided to pursue the question, and to find his subjects, he persuaded a journalist at the Albuquerque Journal to write a story about his work. At the end, the article noted that Miller was eager to talk with anyone who