Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [20]
Susan had always thought of herself as a spiritual seeker, interested in alternate beliefs.But she never pursued them much past flipping through a New Age magazine. Since that moment, however, she has been obsessed with quantum physics. “Where I thought about it before, now I’m pretty much consumed with it.”
“Why does quantum physics interest you?” I asked.
“Quantum physics tells me that we’re much more connected than we realize.” I thought of Arjun’s connection with the grass.
“What did your friends think of these changes?”
“Well,” she drawled,“the friends I’ve known for fifteen, twenty years enjoy this deeper aspect. People who knew me only four or five years I don’t have as friends anymore. I have very few friends, and that is intentional. I just weed them out. I can sense people who have no depth. I don’t mean to sound rude, but after I changed, I wanted to be around others who had deeper philosophies, who were interested in exploring spirituality, who were interested in bettering their lives and empowering themselves. And if people weren’t interested in that, I didn’t want to be around it.”
Just like Sophy Burnham. And just like me.
The First Became Last and the Last Became First
When I told Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico about my conversations with modern-day mystics, he merely nodded.
“It’s a one-way door,” he said. “It’s not like you decide not to go back” to your previous lifestyle and priorities. “The experience people describe is: I just am different.”
“How did your subjects’ values change?” I asked, referring to the people he interviewed for his book Quantum Change.
“They were turned upside down,” he said.
Miller explained that he had asked the fifty-five people in his study to look at a list of fifty values, and rank them according to what was most important before and after the mystical experience.
“Essentially the things that were at the top of the hierarchy [before the experience] went to the bottom,” he said.“Often what was literally number one was number fifty, and vice versa: the first became last and the last became first.”
Before the experience, men ranked their top personal values as: wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, and being respected (in that order). After the experience, their top values were: spirituality, personal peace, family, God’s will, and honesty.
The women seemed to have fewer self-centered values than the men to start with, but even these shifted: from family, independence, career, fitting in, and attractiveness (before the mystical experience), to growth, self-esteem, spirituality, happiness, and generosity (afterward).
Often these subterranean changes flowered into a new career or life course. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee became a Sufi mystic and author, for example, and Arjun Patel chose to counsel the dying because of the “light.”
Sometimes these changes dislocated their lives. Usually, the transformed people felt a twinge of regret at losing their former life but found invariably that the spiritual adventure more than compensated. I felt sorrier for their family and friends, who became the “collateral damage” of the spiritual experience, scratching their heads helplessly as the person they thought they knew disappeared forever. Virtually every woman I interviewed, and several of the men, reported that their values and goals had veered so drastically away from their spouses’ that they eventually divorced. Asked why she and her husband (whom she still loves) parted ways, Sophy Burnham replied,“I wasn’t the person that he had married.”
“Have you paid a price?” I asked Llewellyn,