Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [16]
Of course, most people in the United States have never felt themselves dissolve into union with God. But according to surveys,23 fully half of Americans claim to have experienced a life-altering spiritual event that they could circle on the calendar in red ink.
It appears that spiritual experience (as opposed to belief in the tenets of a religion like Catholicism or Islam) occurs as often today as it did a century ago. Even the twentieth century, with its Freuds and B. F. Skinners, its technological advances and scientific reductionism, could not quash Americans’ yearning for the divine.
On the theory that the extreme cases paint the spiritual realm more vividly than moderate ones, I did not seek out people like me, who had experienced God in a brief religious shiver. Rather, I sought out people who had traveled to a different spiritual continent and back, and were willing to tell their stories.
Finding a mystic, it turns out, is pretty simple. They are everywhere. Many do not broadcast their experiences, worried that they might be considered odd. I located some of my mystics by asking friends, or by calling up people I had interviewed while on the religion beat at National Public Radio. Then I stumbled onto a mother lode of mystics: I called up Cassi Vieten at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a group that studies the intersection of science and spirituality. IONS had just conducted a survey of people who had undergone a dramatic spiritual transformation. Cassi sent an e-mail to four hundred of them, describing my interest in their stories and giving them my e-mail address. Within a week, more than eighty people had sent me long essays about their experiences, which were often—literally—incredible.
Since I could neither confirm nor debunk their stories, I asked myself two threshold questions to determine whom to include in my research. First, is this someone I would want to join my friends and me for dinner—that is, is he or she educated, reasonable, accustomed to appearing in public fully dressed? And second, did this person wonder about his sanity after his epiphany? (The answer to this question had to be yes, as that would indicate he or she had not lost touch with reality.)
As I heard their stories, I concluded that three elements are essential to profound spiritual experience, and all of them echo William James’s insights. First, the moment itself is weirder and more real than everyday reality. Second, it gives the person radical new insights about the nature of reality and the nature of God (the noetic quality). And third, those insights appear to rewire the person and his approach to life.
A Different Sort of Reality
I met Arjun Patel during a tropical storm in Miami, on December 6, 2006.24 I had barely made it to the hospital lobby where he worked when the heavens opened, the rain slamming down in angry sheets. Soon a crisply dressed man in his mid-thirties burst through the doors, splattering raindrops in an arc around him. Enter the hospital’s smart, young psychologist who specialized in helping patients with terminal diseases (and their families) negotiate the final yards into death.
We sat down in a sterile examination room. I gazed at Arjun, dressed in a button-down blue shirt, fresh and unwrinkled beneath his gray-and-blue-striped tie. He had beautiful olive skin, a near-shaven head, and a goatee, and he radiated a serenity that surely calms his patients in their final days.
Raised in a Hindu home, Arjun had experimented with meditation in his teens. But in his