Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [56]
“About twenty minutes into the experience, my friends and I could barely communicate with each other,” he recalled. He looked stricken as he summoned the memory. “We were laughing, but the laughter was tinged with an ‘Oh, shit, we’ve really done it this time’ sense of foreboding.”
Mike wandered off to another cabin on the property and crawled into bed. His body felt thick as an oak tree. He pulled the covers over his head, but could not bar the images from his imagination.
“It was chaotic and phantasmagoric,” he recalled.“Suddenly, I felt as if something evil and malignant had entered my head—an entity of some sort. I had the sensation of tentacles moving around inside my skull. It was terrifying. I started praying the Lord’s Prayer, over and over, like a verbal talisman. Though I’m not religious, I thought maybe just praying, saying anything over and over, would get the thing out of my head. I felt the tentacles probing and moving around, slithering. It was utterly horrific. I wondered if the thing, whatever it was, was going to suck out my mind.”
Just as suddenly, the tentacles withdrew. “I was rolling around in the bed, sweating, confused, and panicky, but glad I was still sane.”
If Franz Vollenweider had been sitting by Mike’s side at that moment, he may have patted his hand and consoled him: Now, now, you’re just experiencing anxious ego dissolution, nothing to be afraid of. According to Vollenweider, bad trips arise from an overactive thalamus, the little gate that filters sensory information. Vollenweider speculates that during trips gone awry, the thalamus lets in too much sensory information, too many lights, too many voices, too many visions. In the nightclub analogy, there is no crowd control; a bunch of bad characters gets into the room, and that leads to sensory overload, anxiety, disordered thinking—Mike’s paranoia about the tentacles in his head threatening to suck out his mind. In fact, an overactive thalamus is associated with schizophrenia.
Most of Mike’s experiences, however, took him to Vollenweider’s heaven. One journey makes his voice quaver with awe to this day. He was twenty-two years old on that early summer night at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland. He and his friend, just finished with college exams, celebrated with some mushrooms. They wandered around the town for a few minutes, eventually finding the door to a historic Catholic church unlocked.
“I had never really been in a church by myself at night and was surprised to see that the candles were lit. It was almost as if I had wandered into this magical place,” Mike recalled. “I sat down and I felt a really strong sense of sacredness. It felt like the accumulated energies and prayers of all the people who had been in this historic church for a hundred years had sort of congealed, that the atmosphere felt very thick with the presence of many, many people. I sat back and closed my eyes and I was overcome with this really profound sense of goodness and rightness and that everything that was, no matter how we felt—good or bad—was just as it was supposed to be,” he said.
Hearing this, I nodded. I recalled Arjun Patel using the same words during his spontaneous mystical experience. There wasn’t any “me” anymore, he had told me. There was just total seamlessness. And did that feel good or bad? I had asked. It just felt like ... this is the way it’s supposed to be.
Mike continued, snapping me back to the present.“And it was really overwhelming. Trying to describe a transcendent experience is difficult. There aren’t the proper words in our vocabulary to describe this immense sense of connection with Something. It felt like an intelligence to be sure, but it felt like a natural intelligence that imbues everything. It imbued the wood of the pews. It was emanating from the candle flames. It was