Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [61]
Shortly thereafter, Mrs. G was discharged from the hospital “in good spirits.” Later, when she was troubled with pain, she could push the pain out of her mind by reliving her out-of-body LSD experience. A few months later, the cancer finally claimed her life—or, perhaps I should say, claimed her body.
Because of her mystical experiences, she had lost her fear of death, which the doctors believed dramatically reduced her pain for nearly two years after a bedridden, paralyzed Mrs. G first contacted Stanislav Grof and Bill Richards.15 In trying to explain the dramatic recoveries of Mrs. G. and more than forty other people in the study, the scientists could have copied a page from a book by Carlos Castaneda.
“Some of the patients who experienced the shattering phenomenon of death and rebirth followed by an experience of cosmic unity seemed to show a radical and lasting change in their fundamental concepts of man’s relation to the universe,” the scientists wrote. “Death, instead of being seen as the ultimate end of everything and a step into nothingness, appeared suddenly as a transition into a different type of existence.”16
This research, happily, is getting a second life. Two years after I interviewed Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, he wrote to tell me that he and his team of researchers were soliciting volunteers for a new study. They want to treat cancer patients with psilocybin in a “scientific study of self-exploration and personal meaning”—picking up where Grof and Richards left off. Richards himself is clinical director in the new research.
By this point in my research, these eerie descriptions no longer startled me, so often had I heard them from spiritual people like Sophy Burnham and Arjun Patel, from broken and restored people like Alicia, from cherished people like my mother. These descriptions stitched together disparate experiences like quilting thread. The quilt would expand to include people who lived with epilepsy, those who had a brush with death, and still others who meditated for hours on end. It seems to me that this makes the challenge for an atheist scientist that much greater: instead of reducing transcendent experiences to mere chemical firings, he must produce a plausible explanation for all sorts of experiences that have no connection to one another.
What Science Has Established
The cancer studies dogged me. I mused about them constantly. Perhaps I heard echoes from my Christian Science past, which argued that the very act of touching the divine through prayer has physical consequences. I heard, too, the refrain I had learned as a child in a Christian Science household: Your thinking is your experience. How you perceive the world affects how you experience it. And let’s be clear: this is not a metaphor about turning lemons into lemonade. It is an ontological statement.Your thoughts and prayers affect your physical reality, I was taught, because the spiritual world shapes the human.
I had assumed that my friendship with Tylenol and the world of pharmacology had weaned me from such ideas, but here they were, trotting back and demanding attention. They were joined by Grof’s terminally ill patients and my Navajo woman, who had, with a little help from their friends, replaced one vision of reality with another. For these people, the blotches on the paper had turned into a gaggle of flying geese, and the world would never look the same. They had accessed something—call it a spiritual state or call it an altered one—and returned transformed. Perhaps, I thought, a spiritual reality had broken into their physical lives.
Thanks to technology, neurologists can now watch the mechanics of the most profound moments of one’s life, including mystical experience. So, what has science established so far? It has confirmed that brain activity correlates to one’s (spiritual) experience. In all likelihood, when Saint Paul or Sophy Burnham enjoyed their