Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [35]
“Steve,” I said in a tremulous voice, “I can’t go to Burma with you. I found God.”
An eternal silence ensued.
“Aw, honey,” he said. Another long pause. “I was waiting for this to happen.” Pause. “Your timing’s off, but I’m happy for you.”
Steve would spend the next four years in Burma. He eventually found someone else to love. As for me, it would take me another seven years—past the time I could have children—to find my wonderful husband.
My spiritual transformation blinded me with its intensity, a sunburst eclipsing the stars; it took some time for my eyes to adjust back to the more bearable, and dimmer, hues of daily life and work and love. God outshined all other relationships, which is why Sophy Burnham’s words years later gave me such a jolt. “How can I compete with God?” her husband had asked. And she responded, “You can’t.”
A Conversion of Body and Spirit
Ever since my own encounter with something mystical, I have wondered about the physical nature of these moments. I was relieved to find I was not alone: almost every person I interviewed spoke of the light or warmth or the physical touch at the moment they connected with the divine. Sophy Burnham heard a voice; Arjun Patel saw Buddha’s eyes; Alicia felt a shock of warmth straighten her spine.
These stories made me wonder how a scientist might explain these reactions. Perhaps that jolt of warmth that burned through Alicia’s body was a brief break with reality. Perhaps it was a mental delusion brought on by years of physical and emotional stress. Or perhaps it was the fingerprint that proves God was there.
I called Patrick McNamara, a neurologist at Boston University’s School of Medicine and editor of Where God and Science Meet, three volumes on the latest research exploring the science of religious experience. 4 I wanted to understand what was taking place at a biological level to bring Alicia or Sophy or me to—and through—that breaking point.
McNamara explained that no scientist can say with certainty what happens during these moments. No one, as far as we know, has ever hit bottom and undergone a spiritual experience while he happened to be in a brain scanner. Still, we do know a few things about the biology of stress and the neurology of meditation, and this allows scientists to make an educated guess.
Some scientists believe that just below a person’s well-tended exterior lies an underbrush as dry as timber, strewn with stress, trauma, or a search for meaning. These psychological states are quietly waiting, primed for a spark to ignite a spiritual blaze. That spark can appear insignificant or even random—a stressful day at work, a Zen haiku, a long-forgotten song—but it is enough to set in motion a chain reaction. As in the more dramatic cases, the prelude to this transformative moment is not just emotional. One’s body plays a part as well. Something is happening in the mind and in the body, in the psyche and in the physiology, at an emotional and at a cellular level. And at some point these two states, interacting, bring the person to a tipping point.
“There’s a whole series of stress hormones, so when the mind interprets a set of events as negative, the stress hormones get released,” McNamara explained.“And they function to recruit all kinds of chemicals to meet a threat. In the short term, these chemicals make you stronger and sharper and more vigilant. But in the long term, when the vigilant state becomes chronic, this leads to tissue damage and prolonged activation of the epinephrine system, which activates all of the parts of the body that are meant to meet a threat—the brain, the muscles—the hair, even. If you stay in vigilant state for too long, you’ll collapse sooner or later.”
When a person reaches “bottom”—if she is lucky—certain things begin to happen. The body