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“The next day, the phone rang and rang and rang,” he laughed, still tickled by the memory. “In the end, eighty-six people called us, of whom fifty-five agreed to come in and spend three hours with us for no pay, to just tell us what had happened to them. And it turned out one didn’t need sophisticated clinical interviewing skills.You just had to say, ‘Tell me about your experience,’ and it would just come pouring out.”

Those stories fill the pages of Miller’s book Quantum Change.18 Many times, the event was subtle yet caused a wholesale shift in the person’s approach to life. Miller recalled the mother whose teenaged daughter had once again slipped out in the middle of the night. She was paralyzed with anxiety, but this time she surrendered her sickening fear to God. In the next instant, “there was just sort of a wave of knowing that everything was going to be all right,” she told Miller.“All of a sudden the desperation was gone and in its place was this assurance.... I felt at peace. I felt reassured. I felt loved, too, like there was a union; I was a part of something that was a loving, peaceful thing, something a lot bigger than me.”19

Other times, the mystical event crashed into the person’s life, often in the middle of a traumatic event, as happened to the woman whose abortion went violently wrong. Instantly she found herself transported out of her body.

“I saw heaven and I saw hell,” she told Miller.“I also knew that there is much more than the physical body and that when you die, you go on. . . . And then I just felt so at peace. It was very, very, very calming, because I knew something really important. I knew I was no longer limited by the physical.... I was able to transcend the physical, to see beyond the physical limitation. I have never feared death since then, nor have I ever experienced depression, which was a major change for me.”20

My favorite story involved a scientist whose alcoholism landed him in a treatment program. As the man, an agnostic, lay on his bed one afternoon, he decided to play a thought game: If there were a God, what would God look like? He closed his eyes and imagined a “blue-white star.” He reached out, snatched the star, and touched his hand to his chest.

“As soon as I put it into my chest, something took over my body,” he told Miller. “It was physical. I could feel my skin bulging outward, and I started to gasp for breath. I felt an ecstasy that was—the only way I can describe it is that it was just like a sexual climax, except that there was nothing physical to it and it was better than sexual climax, infinitely better.21 This thing had control of me; I mean, something took over my body. I was not in control. Something was doing this to me. . . . When it left me, I just wept. I was just stunned. I thought, ‘What the hell was that?’ I mean, it was real. And I was saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, my God, thank you.’ ”22 From that moment, he stopped drinking, and he quit his high-stress job.

In his book, Miller picked up William James’s gauntlet from nearly a century earlier, and he found the very same elements that James identified: union with the universe, the peace and love, the feeling that something external was acting on them, and the conviction that this experience was more real than everyday life. And, like William James, Miller accepted these stories at face value, not cramming them into a file labeled “Psychosis” or “Sexual Disorder” or “Head Injury.” Admiring his pluck, I set out to do the same. As a reporter, I try not to rely on other people’s research. I wanted to gather my own stories and run them through the filter of my own close questioning. And I suspect because I had experienced a little of the mystical myself, I wanted some reassurance. If these people weren’t crazy, neither was I.

A Nation of Believers

Over a three-month period, I interviewed more than two dozen people who testified that they briefly brushed against the fringes of another, nonmaterial, dimension, and were transformed