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For the remainder of the session, I felt blackness cresting over itself like roiling waves. I briefly saw a woman’s face, but even in that suggestible moment, I knew these were creations of an imagination trying too hard, and certainly not the presence of a Sentient Being. Mercifully, the session ended a few moments later.

My answers on Persinger’s follow-up questionnaire reflected my desultory performance. On only one question—“I felt relaxed”—did I give an enthusiastic response. I had also (erroneously, I came to believe) checked the item:“I felt I left my body,” thinking about the union with the chair.

Dr. Persinger seized on that answer. I tried to explain that it was more relaxation, not an out-of-body experience, but he persisted.

“But you did feel something like this,” he insisted, and in that instant I realized how he came by his remarkable results.

“Yes,” I said, “but no Sensed Presence.”

“Well, according to your EEGs, you were right on the verge of feeling a Sensed Presence,” he assured me. The machine was showing very fast spiking behavior in my brain waves about three minutes before the session ended.

“If we had continued, it would have hit you”—he flicked his fingers in front of his face, as if releasing a ball of energy—“it would have hit you powerfully.”

“Say it had hit me powerfully,” I suggested.“Would that mean spiritual experience—God or Allah or whatever you want to call it—can be reduced to brain activity?”

“Well, certainly from the point of view of neuroscience, all experience is generated by brain function,” Persinger said.“That means when you have an experience of a memory, that’s a brain pattern being activated. When you have an experience of God, or Allah, or Buddha, or whatever the cosmic whole is that inspires you, that is brain activity. Does that mean that everything is programmed by brain structure or electromagnetic activity or chemistry? Of course it is.”

Simply because the brain is firing during these experiences does not mean the brain causes them, Persinger quickly added. But in the next breath he gave up the game, blithely stating what I suspect many scientists believe but do not say, at least not to religion reporters like me: Neuroscience will soon relegate “God” to the ash heap of history.

“If we look at the trend in the history of science, first we thought we were the center of the universe, and Copernicus modified that,” he said. “Then Darwin removed the illusion that we were a special creation. Freud ripped apart the concept that we were logical animals and showed that that was only a veneer, that actually we were still a primitive animal.

“So the next big question is: What is the last illusion that we must overcome as a species?” he asked rhetorically.“That illusion is that ‘God’ is an absolute that exists independent of the human brain. That somehow we are in His or Her care. We have to realize that ultimately that may not be true, but what we may learn from it may take us much further than we ever imagined.”

I left Persinger’s laboratory near midnight, deflated. I had been secretly hoping for a spiritual experience, perhaps as confirmation that I had the right biological makeup, the right polymorphism in my DNA, to connect with a “Sentient Being.” I guess I’m not nearly as spiritual as I want to be. Besides that, I was now highly dubious that Persinger’s God helmet could just tickle the temporal lobe and evoke a counterfeit God. Sure, his ideas were plucked from the work of pioneering neurologists like Wilder Penfield and cited by many neurologists today. But his research had drawn derisive criticism from other researchers.1

So imagine my bafflement six months later when I finally transcribed the tape that we had recorded in the control room. The recording revealed that Persinger’s God helmet had in fact manipulated my temporal lobes and my experience.When Persinger began to stimulate my right temporal lobe, he predicted (into the tape recorder) that I would see slightly scary objects, such as faces, to my left.