about the book
Behind the Book
I remember acutely the morning of April 1, 2006. It was the first day of my leave of absence from NPR, and I thought, Oh my goodness, what have I done? I had scheduled one year to research and write a book about an unspeakably large subject: Can science prove the existence of God? I had little background in science, I had never written a book, and at that moment I possessed only a vague outline – a hope, really – of how I would go about the research.
Of course, nothing concentrates the mind like a hanging in the fortnight, and so I plunged in. My first stop was a conference on spiritual transformation at UC Berkeley, where I met some critical researchers looking at the power of thinking to affect one’s health (psychoneuroimmunology – it took me a while to spell it correctly). Every interview ended with, “Whom else should I talk with?” – an old journalist's trick – and soon I found myself exploring everything from temporal lobe epilepsy to quantum physics. I also read a pile of scientific journal articles. These articles, I quickly learned, are as dense as a black hole, and inevitably I called up the researcher who wrote it and asked him to explain the science in layman’s terms.
Journalists depend on the kindness of strangers, and nowhere have I seen this more on display than in my research. To a person, the scientists I contacted spent hours with me, painstakingly explaining and re-explaining complicated ideas, and allowing me to enter their lives briefly but disruptively, like a tornado.
There are always mishaps. I recall an unhappy drive off of the Navajo reservation in Arizona after all the Navajos involved in the all-night peyote ceremony were “too peyoted up” to give me interviews the morning after. A slip of the tongue by a colleague “unblinded” – that is, ruined – a meditation study at the University of Pennsylvania that had taken me a year to set up. I also cherish moments of exhausted accomplishment – the best kind – when sharing a dinner with a near-death-experience researcher in Montreal, or sitting at the kitchen table of a woman who had been freed from addiction by a sudden, unexplained transformation. Most thrilling, perhaps, was when it dawned on me that world renowned scientists and ordinary fellow travelers (including me) are all striving – passionately, sometimes to the point of professional recklessness – to understand the big question of life: Is there more than this?
It was the most exhilarating year of my life, and I hope you enjoy the fruit of my search.
