Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [18]
A Sufi mystic named LlewellynVaughan-Lee, for example, described his first mystical experience as a light switch flipping on.
“I saw light dancing around everything. You know when you get sunlight sparkling on water? It’s like that. I felt really alive with this quality of joy and laughter. And I just knew, this is the way it is, and everything else is the way it isn’t. Everything else is covered up. Everything else is veiled.”
Undergirding the light was love, Llewellyn said, a physical love, the kind that Saint Teresa of Ávila experienced in what can only be called spiritual orgasms.
“You long for God,” Llewellyn explained, “and if the spiritual love is awakened, that draws your attention closer and closer and closer to God, until finally you have these mystical experiences of union, in which the ego falls away and you are drawn into the ocean of love. There is no ‘you’ anymore, there is just divine love, which is what the mystic longs for.”
So it was for Adam Zaremberg, a young Catholic man who had recently converted from Judaism. His first encounter with God was a visceral event. It was like downshifting from third gear to first: the world bucked with pent-up energy. One spring day in 1999, when he was a senior in high school, he spotted an underlying reality, and in the blink of an eye, the mundane was teeming with explosive energy
“I just sat down on a bench, and suddenly I was able to see the world in a new way. Everything had just changed. It was like . . . all of creation emanating itself. It was just infinitely more itself. Like everything seemed magical and filled with energy... but it didn’t change the way anything looked. I came up with an analogy for it: it was like a grape squeezed to the popping brink.”
“So it’s still in its same form,” I clarified, “but it’s bursting. . . .”
“It’s bursting at the same time. It really is radical—everything changes. And it was accompanied by a very calm feeling, where you’re glad to be there, glad to be alive, not afraid of anything.”
A Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Catholic have similar mystical experiences—it sounds like a bad joke, but it is cosmically accurate. I asked Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico if he had found any particular themes in the accounts of his “quantum changers.”
“All the people who described the mystical type of experience described the same ‘Other,’ ” said Miller, who is a Presbyterian. “Never mind their religious upbringing—they were in the presence of the same thing.”
“What is that ‘Other’?” I asked.
“It’s profoundly loving and accepting beyond words. It doesn’t demand anything of you at the moment.You simply feel accepted as you are, and loved as you are, to the very depth of your being.”25
Many of these people did view this “Other” through the lens of their faith. In their everyday spiritual practices, Arjun Patel, a Buddhist, saw Buddha’s eyes; Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi, communed with the Beloved; and Adam Zaremberg, a Catholic, visualized Christ. But none of them claimed his “God” as the only authentic God, nor did they begrudge anyone else a different view. They were like witnesses to the same God but from different angles.
So prevalent was this nonreligious “Other” that I wondered why these people would remain content with a particular religion. I mused about this with Sophy Burnham, who had spent years delving into Asian religions and ended up where she started, in the Episcopal Church. I told her I was surprised by that.
“So was I,” Sophy said.
She explained that she thinks of spirituality as a wheel with spokes leading to the hub. “And each of the spokes is a path to God—is a religion, if you will, or a spiritual practice. And they will all take you to the direct experience