Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [39]
But there is something else, which is why I relate this story. From the very beginning, Don seemed wired to search out God, to place the eternal questions above all others. It was an urgent and sensory thing for him, and it was obvious to everyone else—his family, his wife, even the friend to whom he later described his experience.
“And I said, ‘Man, I don’t know why I was blessed to have this experience, because it’s certainly nothing that I did. I was just driving along the road,’ ” Don recalled. “And my friend just looked at me and said,‘I don’t believe that for a second.’ I said,‘What do you mean?’And he said, ‘You have been knocking on the door one way or another as long as I’ve known you.You’ve been on a spiritual pilgrimage, you’ve been on a deep quest. I think the experience happened to you because you’ve been priming the pump for years.’ ”
The question for me is, why did Don Eaton embark on a spiritual search from the time he was a boy? Why did he look through the telescope and see spirit, while others see the Big Dipper? Did he experience unusual transcendence because he pursued it—and if so, why did he want to pursue it in the first place?
Then there are the other mystics I interviewed. Sophy Burnham jumped with both feet into Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and meditation, before going to the mountains of Machu Picchu. What drove her? And why did she hear the thunder of the universe, while the other tourists heard a history lecture about the fortress? Why did Arjun Patel see Buddha’s eyes when he meditated, while his friend sitting a few inches away did not?
When I asked Arjun this question, he shrugged in genuine puzzlement.
“I don’t know why it happened to me,” he said. “But I’m pretty convinced it has nothing to do with me being a special person. The only qualification was that I was a human being.”
Yes and no. Arjun was pursuing a spiritual life with more verve than the average college freshman. Realistically, not many eighteen-year-old men meditate every day. An internal rudder steered him that way.
You need not visit an ashram in India to recognize that some people are more spiritually inclined than others. The question is, why are some people spiritual virtuosos and others spiritual duds? Here the evidence is just emerging, but the research suggests that spirituality is genetically “soft-wired,” like intelligence or a gregarious personality.
The search for those religious genes has barely begun.We are a long way from building a neuroscience of religiosity. But the concrete has been laid and you can begin to see the superstructure of this new edifice. I will begin, then, with the foundational work: the notion that spirituality runs in the family.
A Knack for God
A few years ago, shortly after I had joined National Public Radio, my mother went to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to hear the National Symphony. She was freshening up in the ladies’ room when in walked Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent and one of the most famous of my colleagues. My mother identified herself and said, “Oh, Ms. Totenberg, I do so admire your work.”
The next day, Nina dropped by my desk.
“Barbara,” Nina said in her operatic voice, “I met your mother yesterday. She’s so . . . spiritual-looking.”
Nina was right. My mother is spiritual. To my mother, events and even physical objects have eternal significance. They are Plato’s forms that are only a shadow of the real, unseen world. As a devout Christian Scientist, Mom relies on prayer for everything from finding a lost ear-ring to recovering from the flu. Although I am no longer a Christian Scientist, I seem to have inherited her transcendent view of the world. And although no one would describe me as “spiritual-looking,” I did for a few seconds peer, as she did, at the misty border of another dimension, and emerged, as she did, fundamentally changed. Of course, it is entirely possible that