about the book
Excerpt
Chapter 1Crossing the Stream
I remember the moment I decided to leave Christian Science. It was a Sunday afternoon in February 1994. By my bleak accounting, New Haven, Connecticut, was enjoying its seventeenth snowstorm of the winter. I was completing a one-year fellowship at Yale Law School. I had abandoned my sunny apartment in Washington, D.C., for a dark cave in the Taft Hotel with rented furniture that, I’d realized upon delivery, was identical to that favored by Holiday Inns.
I was sick—sick with stomach flu, a fever and chills that induced me to pile every blanket, sweater, and coat in the apartment on top of me. Still I shook so violently that my teeth chattered. I slipped in and out of consciousness all afternoon, but in a moment of lucidity I envisioned the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. In normal circumstances, my medicine cabinet contained nothing more therapeutic than Band-Aids. I had been raised a Christian Scientist, and at the age of thirty-four—with the exception of receiving a vaccine before my family traveled to Europe—I had never visited the doctor, never taken a moment, what fl ashed in my mind’s eye like a blinking neon sign was Tylenol, Tylenol, Tylenol. A friend of mine, I recalled, had left some Tylenol during a visit.
The bottle of Tylenol called seductively, and I followed its siren call. I slipped out of bed and, steadying myself on the furniture lest I faint, crept to the medicine cabinet. Before I could stop myself, I downed one tablet, closed the cabinet, averted my eyes from the mirror, and stumbled quickly back to bed. Five minutes passed. My teeth stopped chattering. Another minute or so, I began to feel quite warm, no, hot, hot, what was I doing under all these covers? I threw off the coats and sweaters and blankets and felt the fever physically recede like a wave at low tide. Wow, I thought, I feel terrific!
It was not thirty minutes later when I was up for the fi rst time in two days and cheerfully making myself some tomato soup; it was not then, precisely, that I incorporated medicine into my life. It would take me another sixteen months before I would leave the religion of my childhood for good. Soon thereafter, I announced this to my friend Laura one day at lunch.
“Oh, Barb,” she exclaimed, squeezing my hand in excitement. “Now the whole world of pharmacology is open to you!”
And so it was. But three decades of religious training does not evaporate quickly. As a Christian Scientist, I had come to believe in the power of prayer to alter my experience, whether that be my wracking cough or my employment status, my mood or my love life. In that time, I had witnessed several healings. I had come to suspect that there exists another type of spiritual reality just beyond the grasp of our human senses that occasionally, and often unexpectedly, pierces the veil of our physical world. In Christian Science we called these “spiritual laws,” and (I was told over and over) I needed merely to bring myself in line with those higher laws to banish the cough or the heartache.
I say “merely,” but it’s actually tough sledding, trying to fix all your problems through prayer. In my mid-thirties, I chose the ease and reliability of Tylenol over the hard-won healings of Christian Science. More than that, I was tired of my ascetic diet of divine law and spiritual principles. I suppose I could have walked away from religion altogether, dismissing God and swatting away questions about eternity. But for whatever reason—my genetic wiring or the serotonin receptors in my brain or the stress hormones in my body—I held fast to the idea of God, of a Creator above and within this messy creation called my life and yours. I remained open to something unexplainable, even supernatural. But I did not have a clue as to how radically my life would be upended when I encountered that mystery one summer evening in Los Angeles.
On June 10, 1995, Kathy Younge and I were sitting on a bench outside Saddleback Valley Community Church. The Saturday-night service had ended an hour earlier. Even the stragglers had gone home. I was interviewing her for a Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine article about fast-growing churches—specifi cally, why baby boomers in their thirties and forties were flocking to evangelical churches. This took me into new spiritual territory. As a Christian Scientist, I had absorbed Mary Baker Eddy’s version of Deity. The flinty founder of Christian Science defined “God” as a list of qualities—Life, Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul, Mind, and Principle. The Christian Science God is not a person. But to the evangelical Christians I met during my research for the Times, God is first and foremost a Person, one who came to earth two millennia ago and still yearns for a relationship with every human being.
Kathy Younge was my tour guide through this evangelical world. I was drawn to her because we occupied the same lonely demographic: both in our mid-thirties and single, we were wrestling with existential questions. But my questions paled next to hers. This woman had been fighting cancer for years. Her melanoma had recently returned, driving her to her knees in despair, and eventually to the comfort of Saddleback Church. Saddleback and its pastor, Rick Warren, are now almost house-hold names, but in 1995, Rick Warren was unknown outside evangelical Christian circles, and his church drew only a few thousand people a week. (Now it’s closer to 20,000.) Many of those people were like Kathy—broken in some way, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and famished for a living, breathing God who listens and intervenes. Saddleback is founded on this kind of God, and gives Him a structure to work with—twelve-step programs, ministries for every sort of physical, emotional, or financial challenge, and a massive prayer chain in which hundreds of Saddleback members pray for those in distress, like Kathy.
“Do you think the prayer group in the church will heal the cancer?” I asked Kathy that night, scribbling notes in the fading light.
“No. Healing comes from God,” she said. “The church is here to be your family. They’re really your support team down here because we don’t have Jesus around to touch and talk to us. The church is God with skin on.”
That was the quote that appeared in my Times article. What happened next did not.
“Kathy, how can you possibly be so cheerful when you’ve got this awful disease?” I asked.
“It’s Jesus,” she said. “Jesus gives me peace.”
“A guy who lived two thousand years ago?” I asked, incredulous.
“How can that be?”
“Jesus is as real to me as you are,” she explained. “He’s right here, right now.”
Right, I thought. Yet there was something wondrous about Kathy’s confidence as she struggled through this disease that could kill her. She told me then how she had been diagnosed with melanoma in her twenties, how her fear and loneliness had led her to Saddleback on a random Sunday, how she had come to believe that God had placed cancer in her life not to snuff it out but to give it a transcendent purpose.
As we talked, the night darkened. The streetlamp next to our bench cast a circle around us, creating the eerie sense that we were actors in a spotlight on a stage. The temperature had dropped into the fifties. I was shivering but pinned to the spot, riveted by Kathy and her serene faith.
My body responded before my mind, alerting me to some unseen change, a danger perhaps. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and my heart start beating a little faster—as it is now, recalling the moment. Imperceptibly at first, the air around us thickened, and I wondered whether a clear, dense mist had rolled in from the ocean. The air grew warmer and heavier, as if someone had moved into the circle and was breathing on us. I glanced at Kathy. She had fallen silent in mid-sentence. Neither of us spoke. Gradually, and ever so gently, I was engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch. I was paralyzed. I could manage only shallow breaths. After a minute, although it seemed longer, the presence melted away. We sat quietly, while I waited for the earth to steady itself. I was too spooked to speak, and yet I was exhilarated, as the first time I skied down an expert slope, terrified and oddly happy that I could not turn back. Those few moments, the time it takes to boil water for tea, reoriented my life. The episode left a mark on my psyche that I bear to this day.
Ever since that night, I have wanted to write a book that answers the questions that I never voice in the two worlds I inhabit. The golden rule of journalism decrees that you take nothing on faith, that you back up every line of every story you write with hard evidence. You question everything. The unspoken ethos of organized religion is that you leave the uncomfortable questions alone, you accept them as unsolved mysteries or previously answered by religious minds greater than yours. You rely on the wisdom of sacred texts and your minister, and you swallow your doubts.
And yet I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks into our world and bends the laws of nature? Is there a being or intelligence who weaves together the living universe, and if so, does He, She, or It fit the description I have been given? I was not worried about losing the old man with a beard—but what about the young man on a cross? Is there a spiritual world every bit as real as the phone ringing in the kitchen or my dog sitting on my foot, a dimension that eludes physical sight and hearing and touch? In the end, my questions boiled down to five words: Is there more than this?
As the years unfolded, I stockpiled more questions and more stories—strange stories that demanded an explanation. I wondered about my friend John, who was a slave to painkillers and scotch. Day in and day out, the cravings drove him away from his wife and to bars and Internet pharmacies. One day he felt the touch of something supernatural, and the cravings vanished. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, and while he never really bought into the tenets of his Catholic Church, he subscribed to the mysterious power that pulled him from the pit.
I wondered about my grandmother, a Christian Science “practitioner” or healer, who prayed for people and saw them recover. I thought about one patient in particular, a teenager in San Francisco who, tripping on LSD, jumped from an eighth-story window onto the street. The doctors declared him brain-dead and left him to Granny’s prayers. Two weeks later, he walked out of the hospital.
I wondered about my own brief brushes with something numinous, and the gnawing suspicion that there might be a reality that hides itself except in rare moments, or to rare people. I have stumbled a few times into a mystical presence—once, as a blinding light in my bedroom, another time as a voice, several times as an undeniably physical presence. Few people know about those times; they are intensely private and, to be honest, a little bizarre. Which is why, I suppose, it took me more than a decade to write this book.
. . .
March 6, 2004, exploded with promises of spring. I had spent the past two days moderating a forum on the history of faith and law in a hotel conference room in Walland, Tennessee. It had been heavy intellectual lifting, and when we fi nished the last session late in the afternoon, I burst outside like a kid at recess, sprinting to my hotel room and throwing on shorts and a sweatshirt. The hotel sat at the base of the Smoky Mountains, and my forty-four-year-old heart raced as I made a dash for the trail that led me into the nearest set of hills.
The sun was already hovering just over the horizon. But I only planned to hike a three-mile loop. Plenty of time. As I left the road and started up the trail, a longing swept over me, a memory of what it felt like to be young. Perhaps it was the smell of the spring moss, or the way the shadows dappled the path, but my mind’s eye scanned back twentyfive years to those summers I had spent backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, in that pink dawn of life when your future fans out before you and you instinctively know that now is the time to risk everything because you may never have another chance.
The exhilaration did not serve me well. It blinded me to my surroundings and the stealthily setting sun. Only after I had hiked up and down one of the foothills did I notice it was growing quite dark. In the mountains, night dims gradually for a while—and then instantly, like a towel dropped over a birdcage, it is black. I started to run along the path that I knew would lead me back to the main road, when the trail simply ended. Curving from the left roared a small churning river, swollen from melted snow. On the right, the hill swept up vertically, thick with trees and prickly bushes. There was no path forward.
Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have waded into the ice-cold river and followed it to the main road. But doubts crowded in. Maybe I took a wrong turn. Maybe I misread the map and this stream doesn’t return to the road. I decided that the only way back to safety was to retrace my steps.
For the next three hours I raced up and down the densely forested hills, blindly stumbling down one trail after another, unable to see my hand in front of my face. At some point, I became genuinely frightened. The Smoky Mountains are home to bears. A few days earlier, I had been warned (wrongly, I later learned), a serial killer had been caught in these very woods. Finally, I sat down, closed my eyes, and prayed. I prayed to a God who engages with His creation, a personal God intensely interested in every one of us, an all-seeing God whose GPS would guide me off the mountain. I began to sing Psalm 139, sotto voce at first, then louder in case the All-Hearing didn’t pick it up. “Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from Thy presence . . .”
This is the image I hold in my mind: singing a psalm at the top of my lungs, clapping my hands to scare away the bears between verses. Bolstered by the prayer, I ventured down one more trail, and in a few moments I saw—Thank God!—lights from houses in the far distance, with people inside, tucked in for the night with a book. I careered down the rocky trail, relieved that my small nightmare was over. It was a perfect story for telling at dinner: a little dangerous but not too.
But the scene I was already imagining, regaling my dinner partners with this small adventure, abruptly ended. Between me and the little white house that had become my passage out of these black woods rushed a torrential river. Admittedly, it was more like a stream. But in the dark, it was a loud and angry stream, and dangerous, too, swollen to about forty feet wide by melted snow. Carefully, I waded into the water, hanging on to a tree branch that extended over the stream. The current instantly swept me off my feet. I clung fast to my sturdy little branch, surprised and grateful that it did not snap. Scrambling back onto the bank, I imagined some poor fisherman finding me three days later, miles downstream, caught in the brambles, my bloated body slapping softly against the bank.
Gazing at the racing water, I listened as carefully as I could. It sounds childish now, but at that moment the existence of God hung in the balance. At my core I believed I would hear a “voice” telling me what I should do. For several minutes, I strained to hear it. Nothing. Nothing but my own sullen admission that I had but one choice. I could stay on the mountain or cross that river.
And so I stumbled into the current as far as I could stand, and then, with a huge inhalation and a small cry, I heaved myself into the stream, tumbling and flailing until, miraculously, I smacked into the bank on the other side. I staggered out of the river, up to the little white house.
“Hello! Hello!” I yelled, banging on the door as I watched the lights turn out in the back. Then, timidly, a frail, white-haired woman peered out her window.
“Please,” I begged, “I’ve been lost in the mountains for hours!”
“Oh, you’re all wet,” she said softly, opening the door a sliver. “Come in, come in.”
I began to sob—relieved, yes, safe, yes—but feeling alive in a way I had not felt in years. Transforming insights usually come in small moments and pedestrian crises. So it was for me. In those few hours alone in the Smoky Mountains, in the dark soil of my fear, a seed split open. I realized that for nearly a decade, I had been running down one trail after another, keeping to the familiar safety of a path that would leave me dry but never lead me home. At some point, I needed to cross the river and immerse myself in the unnerving questions about God, and reality, and whether what I instinctively believed was true —or rubbish.
I was, to be honest, skittish. Skittish about ruining my reputation in a career where few people believe in God and fewer still bother to distinguish spirituality from religious politics. More than that, I was skittish about submitting my faith to scientific tests, exposing it to the possibility that the most profound moments of my life were nothing more than, say, electrical activity in my brain.
But in the end, I had to cross the river, and on the other side I found a small, brave band of scientists who had far more to lose than I did. They had slaved away for their medical degrees or their Ph.D.’s in neurology or biology, building a reputation in mainstream scientific research. And then they had risked it all by pursing the taboo questions. Is spiritual experience real or delusion? Are there realities that we can experience but not necessarily measure? Does your consciousness depend entirely on your brain, or does it extend beyond? Can thoughts and prayers affect the body? And that question I cannot seem to escape: Is there more than this?
Every generation claims a few scientists at the fringes wrestling with these questions. Sometimes they are called parapsychologists, a demeaning title that makes them sound illegitimate if not a little bit unhinged. But today’s iconoclasts have an advantage their predecessors lacked. They have technology. They can peer inside a brain as it meditates in prayer or trips on psilocybin. They can look for markers in the brain, and, like forensic detectives, they are studying the evidence left behind by “spiritual” events that occurred out of their eyesight. They are trying to discern the fingerprints of the one—or the One—who passed through a person’s psyche and rearranged his life. They are analyzing these “spiritual” moments, in the form of epileptic seizures or psychedelic experiences, meditations in a brain scanner or out-of-body experiences. In the process, they find themselves in a world of mystery.
I have been privileged to spend time with some of these scientists, as well as the people whose stories they are studying. Along the way, my own spiritual journey has taken a surprising turn. I have shed some beliefs as untenable. And I have reclaimed some beliefs I had long ago discarded—because science may be proving them true, or at least plausible.
I wrestled with the approach to this book. As a journalist, I naturally gravitate toward the safe, clinical, third-person approach to the science of spirituality, setting aside my personal predilections and laying out the evidence for the reader to evaluate. And yet, the questions in this book about the nature of God and reality—these are my questions, this is a personal quest, and therefore I have woven my own story into the larger quest.
Like anyone else who has lived nearly five decades, I am hardly a blank canvas. My life experiences have nudged me into my particular perspective. But I have tried to draw on two experiences to help steer this book. The first is my quarter-century as a print, television, and radio journalist. I habitually shelve my preconceived ideas to try to glean the truth. I have learned to ask questions and really listen to the answers. If the science surprises me, or if it simply does not fit into my worldview, I must take that into account if I am to be an honest guide. Even if the science contradicts what I feel in my gut to be true, I will relay it to the best of my ability.
The second influence is my particular faith journey. Even though I now consider myself a mainstream Christian, I have never entirely shed the perspective of Christian Science. Christian Scientists do not evangelize or impose their truth on anyone else, and they are graciously tolerant of all other faiths. I am not going to foist my findings on you, and I will certainly not advocate a particular religious view. I wrote this book because some questions plagued me. I set about answering them—not by gazing at my navel, for there is only so much information that any one navel can provide. Rather, I am examining the science and the scientists, the “neurotheology,” that might explain those numinous moments that most everyone has enjoyed.
This book tackles the existence of God, “the reality of the unseen,” as psychologist William James had it. After talking to countless scientists far more knowledgeable and insightful than I, I have concluded that science cannot prove God—but science is entirely consistent with God. It all depends on how you define “God.” If you are trying to locate deity in a thirty-three-year-old carpenter or the unseen divider of the Red Sea, science will offer no help. But if you look for God in the math of the universe, if you perceive God as the Mind that rigged existence to create life, then science can indeed accommodate. If you see God in the breathtaking complexity of our brains, as the architect of our bodies and our minds who planted the question Is there more?—well, science has room for that kind of God.
This is the God I am pursuing in this book. If I were to draw a road map for this journey, I would say the first part is driven by personal questions about my own spiritual experiences. Chapter 2 explores spontaneous spiritual experiences that come unbidden, like the one that washed over me as I sat talking with Kathy Younge. It turns out I was not alone: half of Americans have been overcome and radically transformed by a sudden encounter with the spiritual. Science is only now catching up with the ideas of William James, ideas that it has discarded for a century but can no longer ignore.
In chapter 3, I raise the question at the foundation of my own religious upbringing: Is there a God who hears prayer and heals? When you look at massive prayer studies involving hundreds of people, the evidence for prayer’s efficacy is mixed at best. But go beyond the blunt instrument of strangers praying for strangers, look for the power of thought to stop the HIV virus in its tracks, for example, and suddenly the picture changes. What was once superstition is now accepted science: our thoughts affect us on a cellular level, unfolding the biology of belief.
Chapter 4 looks at the triggers for spiritual experiences. Is there a certain set of circumstances, a certain personality type, a certain cocktail of internal and external stress, that erupts in a spiritual experience? I believe there is, and I believe this explains why alcoholics so often become spiritual people. While an encounter with God can happen anywhere, anytime, my research and my own life story tell me that brokenness is the best predictor of spiritual experience.
Next, I investigate the hard, arid, materialist science that tries to explain (away) spirituality. In the process, I stumble on a new definition of deity.
In chapter 5, I ask the question Why me? Why are some people inclined to pursue and experience God while others couldn’t care less? Is there a “God gene” that predisposes a person to Spirit? It seems to me that one way to define God is as a master craftsman who organizes our genetic code so human beings have a capacity and yearning to know Him.
But God has other talents, and other roles. Chapter 6 explores God as chemist, who adjusts the chemicals in our brains so that we can gain access to the spiritual. To find this God, I traveled to a peyote ceremony in Arizona, and to Johns Hopkins University, where a prominent neuroscientist has found that psychedelic drugs hold a key to understanding our connection with the spiritual.
Chapter 7 reveals God as electrician, who wires our brain to allow us to tune in to an unseen reality. For this I visited an epilepsy clinic in Detroit. Scientists have long believed that the ancient mystics like Saint Paul and Saint Teresa of Ávila did not experience God but only the electrical storms of temporal lobe epilepsy. Recently, however, some neurologists have begun to speculate that those neurological events may not spark mere delusions—but actually allow people to hear and see a spiritual dimension that normal consciousness cannot grasp.
In spontaneous mystical experiences, people stumble into the ineffable; but knowing God is also a muscle that one can develop. Chapter 8 follows spiritual virtuosos—people who practice accessing God as intently as Tiger Woods perfects his golf swing. I witnessed a Christian virtuoso as he meditated in a brain scanner at the University of Pennsylvania, and tried my own hand at altering my brain through spiritual practice. Along the way, I began to question two exclusive theologies—the Christian doctrine that there is only one way to God, and the materialist doctrine that there is no God at all.
Finally, I find myself in territory just beyond the boundaries of “acceptable” science, and here I discover some tantalizing explanations for how science and spirit might coexist. In chapter 9, I look at the twentieth-century assumption that the brain is the sum total of one’s consciousness. Once the brain stops functioning, most scientists say, so does one’s mind, along with one’s identity and existence. Out-of-body experiences fly in the face of this assumption, including the remarkable—and clinically documented—case of a woman who had no brain function but continued to think and observe.
Chapter 10 tackles a different but related question: What happens to people who touch death and return? Today neurologists are submitting people who have had near-death experiences to scientific scrutiny, hooking them up to EEGs and sliding them into brain scanners. The results of these experiments do not prove that we have souls that survive death—that is beyond the capacity of science to determine. But there is room in this science to believe in another reality beyond the veil of death.
In chapter 11, I come to believe that a major problem with God is not whether He exists but how one defines Him. Indeed, scientists from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking have looked at the universe and acknowledged a being, or mind, or architect before whom the only response is awe. The “God” that scientists can accept, in His most recent iteration, springs in part from quantum physics, the mysterious behavior of the very smallest particles. I caught a glimpse of this physics in action at a research institute in California, where I watched as one person’s thoughts appeared to affect another person’s body. This, then, is where mysticism meets science, and points to a God who may be the medium through which our prayers and thoughts are transmitted to others.
In chapter 12, I find two sorts of paradigm shifts. One, I believe, is just beginning to take place in science. The other has already begun to take place in my own soul.
Now let’s get on with this radical project. But before we do, I want to make one more observation. Belief in God has not gone away, no matter how secular society has become or how much effort reductionist science has exerted to banish Him. God has not gone away because people keep encountering Him, in unexplainable, intensely spiritual moments. That is where I begin this scientific hunt, with the people who intimately know this God.
I begin with the mystic next door.
