Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [98]
She looked surprised at the question.
“Yes, my EEGs—my brain waves—are extremely slow,” she replied. “Even when I’m asked to do difficult mental functions, my brain waves act as if I’m at rest. But I can do the function and do it accurately.”
“How do your doctors explain that?” I asked.
“They don’t.”
I got up to leave. I asked if I could take her picture outside. She laughed.
“I don’t do stairs well, baby.”
As I looked back, I snapped an image of Pam Reynolds’s life: trapped in a broken body, yet savoring her husband, her children, her grandchildren. Walking with a cane but freer than most people I know. A 100-watt woman living in a dimly lit bus.
And the Blind Shall See
Pam Reynolds’s story compelled me to seriously reconsider the assumption that the mind cannot function without the material brain. Vicky Bright’s story took me one step further. Could it be that we possess spiritual senses that lie dormant until they are called into action?
At one-thirty in the morning on February 2, 1972, Vicky Bright (now Noratuk) had finished her shift as a pianist and singer at a small restaurant in Seattle. She was twenty-three years old and owned no car. With considerable misgiving, she accepted a ride from a couple who had enjoyed a little too much to drink. The wife was chattering away when the husband, who was driving, mentioned he was seeing double. Suddenly, they began to weave across the road. At the bottom of Queen Anne Hill,Vicky heard a sickening squealing of wheels. Their van spun and crashed into a wall, and then, in slow motion,Vicky sensed herself being flung out of the vehicle and dragged along the road.
“I saw the pavement,” Vicky told me in an interview thirty-four years later. “I was up above, looking at my body on the ground.” Her world went blank, until she found herself hovering near the ceiling in an operating room at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Below Vicky lay a woman on a cart—tall and slim, her thick waist-length hair shaved in places like a Mohawk.Vicky thought she knew the woman, but was not quite sure.
“I saw the people working on the body,” she said.“There was a male and a female, and they were doctors. The male doctor was saying, ‘It’s a pity that she could be deaf, because there’s blood on her left eardrum.’ And the female doctor said, ‘Well, she may not even survive. And if she does, she could be in a permanent vegetative state.’That really upset me.
“And I floated down closer to the female, and I tried to communicate with her. Then I saw my wedding ring, and I thought, Oh my God, that must be me they’re talking about. And I thought, Am I dead or what?”
Vicky can perhaps be forgiven her confusion. This experience marked the first time she had ever seen herself. Or seen, for that matter.Vicky Bright has been blind from birth. Like many other premature babies born in the 1950s, she was placed in an incubator when she was born at twenty-two weeks, and the incubator destroyed her optic nerve.
“Some people say, ‘Don’t you see black?’ No, I don’t see anything, because my eyes are atrophied and the optic nerve is dead. So I’ve never seen light. I’ve never seen shadows. I’ve never seen anything, ever. Ever, ever.”
That night in the operating room would be the exception. After she failed to draw notice from the female doctor—trying to grab the woman’s arm and watching her hand pass through it—Vicky felt herself move “up through the ceiling and I was out up above the buildings and the street.”
“Could you see the buildings and the street?” I asked, curious whether she could distinguish forms.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what you saw? Like, did you see a car?”
“I saw several cars. They were going down the street. It was in the middle of the night. I saw buildings, I saw the street. But I had trouble discerning what things were—because, of course, I’ve never seen. And it was really