Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [17]
“I would sometimes see things when I’m meditating, just natural, normal distractions, and little visual things that happen,” he explained. “But this was different. It was dark, and there was this little pinpoint of light that just kept moving closer, relentlessly closer. I thought, What is this? It didn’t look the way I imagined any mystical experience to be, and I wasn’t really looking for one. So this light was off in the distance and it kept getting closer and closer, and there was almost a sound that came with it, like a roar.”
I recalled Sophy Burnham’s words—“there was a hollow darkness . . . sort of like an oncoming train.”
“I was trembling. I was vibrating, I had a tingling in my fingers,” Arjun continued. “Every time I talk about it I feel it again, a kind of clamminess in my hands. I felt very, very weightless, very light and easy. My breathing was very shallow, and I think I was exhaling really hard, and I was rocking back and forth. I could tell I was smiling from ear to ear. At some point, as the light got closer, there were two eyes looking back at me. They were stylized eyes. I later learned they’re called ‘Bud dha’s eyes.’ And they kept moving closer and closer, and the eyes were half opened and half closed. And when it got up to where I was, the eyes blinked. And it was like . . . I don’t really know how to describe it. The light wasn’t out there anymore. I wasn’t in here anymore. Everything just sort of collapsed, and there was nothing left but light.”
“Were you light itself, or was it in you?” I asked.
“There wasn’t any ‘me’ anymore. There was no boundary, no ‘This is me and this is something else.’ There was just total seamlessness.”
“Did you feel a loss of identity?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“And did that feel good or bad?”
“It just felt like, This is the way it’s supposed to be.”
Arjun slept little over the next two weeks. He listened to music and kept to himself. And he felt a surreal unity with all things.
“I remember lying on the grass under the tree in the quad,” he said. “I remember just running my hands through the grass, and just feeling for the grass.”
“Feeling for the grass,” I repeated.“You mean, empathizing with it?”
“Yeah. It was alive, the grass was alive, and it was beautiful. There was no self-reference point.”
The euphoria eventually ebbed, although, Arjun said, every time he talks about it “my body remembers what it feels like.” Sixteen years passed.When I met him, Arjun was meditating twice daily, and considered that moment the most important of his life. Since then, he has married, started a family, and, as an end-of-life psychologist, has eased hundreds of people through sickness and death.
I told him I did not know how he coped with the emotional drain of his job.
“It was the light,” Arjun said, and laughed self-consciously. “I don’t ever, ever, ever talk about this with my patients. But, you know, I feel that the experience—the light, whatever you want to call it—it’s always there. It’s kind of like a well: you can dip down into it and draw some of it up when you need it for spiritual energy and emotional energy. It’s something you always have access to.”
He paused.
“It was an eternal moment. It doesn’t matter that it was sixteen years ago. It’s happening now.”
A Different Sort of God
One theme kept drawing my attention, like a buoy that repeatedly popped up in the choppy sea of research. No matter what their belief systems, the people who had enjoyed profound spiritual experiences saw the same kind of “Other.” In fact, they often shunned the word “God,” since God