Fingerprints of God (32 page)

There we were greeted by Mario’s lanky, handsome researcher, Jerome Courtemanche. Ignoring the din created by the MRI machine, he explained the process to Jorge slowly and carefully. They would take images of Jorge’s brain in three states. Once he was lying comfortably in the brain scanner, Jorge was to relax and think of nothing in particular. This was the “resting state,” which would be the baseline to compare against the other brain images. After sixty seconds, Jerome would tell Jorge through a microphone in the control room to imagine a light generated by a lamp. This was the “control state,” which would theoretically activate the parts of Jorge’s brain that involve memory and vision. After another minute, at Jerome’s command, Jorge was to return to resting state. Then, a minute later, Jorge was to seek the “target state”—he must try to return to the “light,” the luminous presence he experienced two years earlier, when he had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. In this way, the researchers could determine whether the mystical state of seeing the light differed from the mental state of seeing a simple lightbulb. They would repeat this six times. If the two states appeared identical, that would suggest there is nothing inherently special about mystical experience. It is a person’s interpretation and not the event itself that infuses it with meaning—the way, perhaps, a sirloin steak tastes more succulent on the night your beau proposes marriage. The steak is not better than the one you had last Tuesday night but the context makes it so.

I watched from behind a plate of glass as Jerome led Jorge into a cold room. There, waiting ominously in the dim light, was the MRI machine. The brain scanner looked like a large oven, openmouthed and gaping for an object to be placed on the rack and inserted. I wondered if Jorge, already a victim of heat and fire, recognized the awful irony. If he did, he showed no sign: he merely stripped off his shoes, belt, watch, and any other metal object, and hoisted himself onto the gurney-like rack. Jerome fed him into the machine, a sacrificial offering to the gods of science, where enormous magnets would record blood changes in his brain.

Moments later, Jerome ordered the procedure to begin and a piercing ring filled the control room. It seemed unlikely than a yogi master could reach a transcendent state in this racket, much less a Mexican hotel worker who has never meditated a day in his life. I turned to Mario Beauregard, who was standing next to me watching through the glass.

“So, what do you think you’ll find?” I asked.

“I think we’ll see regions involved with positive emotions light up, of course, because it’s a very positive experience for a subject,” the neuroscientist speculated. “We should also see brain regions that are involved in self-awareness, because there’s a change in self-awareness during such spiritual states. And also, the body representation of the subject shifts and the subject becomes less in touch with his body, so we might see major changes in the parietal regions of his brain. But,” Beauregard said cheerfully, “that remains to be seen!”

Jorge Medina was the first of fifteen people to re-create his near-death experience in the brain scanner. Beauregard had no trouble recruiting subjects. A newspaper advertisement drew more than a hundred volunteers, allowing Beauregard to be selective. The subjects had to meet three criteria: when they had nearly died, they had lost consciousness and entered the “light”; they had returned with a transformed view of life; and they could still reconnect with the light.

In the control room, Jerome was saying, “Super, Jorge, we’re done,” and asking Jorge to rate how close he came to the light during his various target states, on a scale of one to five. Because Jerome has recorded the exact times Jorge was trying to achieve the target (near-death) state, he could later match Jorge’s subjective scores with the images of his brain during those moments. Jerome beamed like a proud parent: on a scale of one to five, Jorge had reported mainly fours and fives, a surprisingly strong intensity for a man lying in a metal casket with ringing sounds as loud as ambulance sirens going off around him. Jorge emerged, grinning.

“How was it?” I asked. “Did you connect with the light?”

“Yes, yes, yes, I feel a little bit today like my accident,” Jorge said.We sat down then, and Jorge described that moment as he lay in the ambulance, his body covered with third-degree burns.

“Peace—the peace that is like joy and like love,” Jorge whispered. His eyes welled up as he described his brush with death as “a nice experience.”

Jorge Medina had arrived in Canada seven years earlier, and began working a string of jobs as a cook and housekeeper in a hotel, sending money back to Mexico City, where his wife and children lived. On Sunday, August 1, 2004, he dragged home after a long shift at the hotel, fretful about his life, about money, about his son’s impending marriage. He relaxed in the living room, beer in one hand, cigarette in another, until sleepiness overcame him. He trundled off to bed, only to be awakened later by black smoke billowing through the apartment. The living room had turned into a furnace.

“I decided I needed to put it out,” he recalled, “and I began to get burned as I crossed the living room. I tried to grab the extinguisher, but I couldn’t because it was so hot. I felt the flames on my body but I didn’t realize I was on fire.”

Jorge ran down three flights of stairs, a live ball of flames, and reached the street. Neighbors doused him. He lay on the street, waiting for an ambulance that would take twenty minutes to arrive.

“They raised me into the ambulance, and I began to feel separate from myself,” he told me, reverting to Spanish to articulate the ineffable. “I felt like everything ended right there. And then I found myself walking toward a door, trying to open it and not able to do so. There was a very large window, with a lot of light in it. I think people were behind it. I felt like I needed to wait by the door for someone to open it for me. And someone said to me—well, it wasn’t a voice, it was ‘peace’ that said to me—‘Everything will be okay. You wait here.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ I felt extremely calm the entire time. I didn’t know anything of myself until I woke up three months later.”

Could it have been morphine? I asked.

Jorge said he asked the doctors the same question, and they told him they did not administer morphine until he arrived at the hospital. Beauregard, who was listening to the interview, said that morphine produces a different, more fragmented experience.

When you met the light, I continued, was it a person, was it God, was it Jesus, what was it?

“At first I thought it was God or some image of God, but now I think we will never truly be able to grasp what God is,” Jorge observed philosophically. “It can’t be described. It was a light, and it was peace.”

The doctors and nurses dubbed Jorge “the Mexican Miracle.” He survived nine surgeries, eleven blood transfusions, and months of painful rehabilitation. He stopped drinking and smoking. His family and his Catholic Church moved to center stage in his life. He grew less anxious about his problems with family, work, money. That moment in the light rewrote his vision of the future, and not just in this world.

“I used to
believe
there was life after death,” he said urgently. “I
believed
in God. But I lived like everybody—in between yes and no. Now I
know
there is something else.When I think about death, I think about how nice it is to be alive and to be with my family. At the same time, I don’t worry about what’s going to happen later. Everything will fix itself.”

“Can you tell me what happened in the brain scanner today?” I asked.

“I simply tried to recall the experience, and I began to see the light. I cannot say I saw God, but there was a state of peace, and I left my body. Time and space became relative. Oh, one other thing,” he said offhandedly. “Normally I have a lot of pain in my hand,” he said, rubbing it gently. “And at that moment in the light, it didn’t hurt at all.”

Two years and fifteen subjects later, Mario Beauregard could talk about the brains of people who had touched death and returned. When he and I were observing Jorge in the brain scanner, the neuroscientist had predicted that Jorge’s brain might look similar to those of some Carmelite nuns he had studied. Like Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, Beauregard had conducted brain-imaging studies of people engaged in “centering prayer.”
⁸
His subjects had all lived in the cloister for decades, where they spoke for but one hour a day, and their lives orbited around periods of this sort of meditative prayer: on average, they each had spent nearly 15,000 hours in prayer.

When Beauregard eventually coaxed the nuns from their cloister to the brain scanner, he was effectively able to shoot a movie of brains in mystical union with God. The images told a complicated story: areas associated with positive emotion became a happy cauldron of activity; the circuits associated with unconditional love also lit up brightly and the parietal lobes, which determine the subjects’ physical boundaries—where they end and “God” begins—showed unusual changes in blood flow. Their brains seemed to be saying that the nuns felt themselves absorbed in something greater than themselves. In the end, Beauregard amassed sufficient visual evidence, in the form of brain images, to make the case that a mystical state was physiologically
distinct
from either an intensely emotional state or a resting state.

His research suggests that the brains of Carmelite nuns operate differently from the ordinary brain. In this, his conclusions matched those of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, with his Buddhist monks, and those of Andy Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, with his Franciscan nuns, Buddhist monks, and Protestant Pentecostals. Spirituality, it would seem, does leave an indelible fingerprint.

Now Beauregard’s question was: Would near contact with death trigger the same sort of neural activity? When he sat down and compared the brain reliving a connection to God in prayer with a brain reliving a connection to the “light” in a near-death experience, he made a remarkable discovery: a near-death experience unfolds in the brain in much the same way as a meditative union with God. It lights up the same areas and travels along the same neural pathways. One uses Google Maps, the other uses Yahoo!, but they visited many of the same points along the way.
⁹

For example, Beauregard noticed that both for those who nearly died and for those who meditated, the part of the brain usually associated with “the subjective experience of contacting a spiritual reality” showed a spike in activity: the nuns sensed that they were in touch with God; the near-death experiencers felt they had contacted the “Light.” Another part of the brain associated with overwhelmingly positive emotions lit up. The same occurred in an area of the brain that involves unconditional love, both romantic and maternal love.

“It’s not surprising to see this type of activation during the NDE condition,” Beauregard theorized,“because love is one of the key components of this experience.”

Beauregard’s research suggests that both meditation and death rewire the brain in similar ways. It comes as no surprise that Catholic nuns and Buddhist monks can essentially sculpt their brains, fine-tuning them to access another dimension of consciousness. After all, they engage in rigorous mental workouts every day, praying and meditating for hours at a time. But what about Jorge Medina, who had never meditated a day in his life, and before his accident rarely darkened the doorway of a Catholic church? His brain gave him access to a spiritual or altered state of consciousness, just as theirs did—but without the decades of training. It seemed to occur in an instant, jump-starting his spiritual life.

Or, as Beauregard put it: “It’s like it will accelerate to a great extent the spiritual path for transformation.”
¹⁰

Beauregard discovered another startling similarity between spiritual virtuosos and the survivors of death. Not only did similar parts of their brains light up when they reenacted their experiences, but they could both manipulate their brain-wave activity, almost like a key, to open the door to a spiritual realm.

I watched this occur at seven p.m. on July 12, 2006. Mario Beauregard, his research assistant Jerome, and I squeezed into a cold, windowless twelve-by-eight-foot room, along with Gilles Bedard, one of Beauregard’s subjects. The room was crammed with computers, some piled one atop another. Gilles sat on an ancient wooden chair, wearing a blue-and-red plastic cap with thirty-two small white buttonholes in it. Jerome bent his six-foot-three-inch frame over Gilles, filling the holes with gel and then meticulously attaching electrodes to his scalp. These electrodes would measure electrical activity in thirty-two parts of Gilles’s brain—and, the scientists hoped, produce a brain-wave recording of a near-death experience, or at least a simulated one.

Gilles’s near-death experience happened upon him on November 17, 1973. He was a nineteen-year-old with undiagnosed Crohn’s disease. During his five-month stay in the hospital, he had wasted to sixty-four pounds. One night, after a priest had given him the last rites, Gilles found himself perched in the corner of the ceiling, looking down at himself, the doctor, his family, the room.

“And suddenly, I felt a call.... I just turned maybe ninety degrees, and there was a huge light in the back, and in front there were twelve beings of light,” he recalled. “So I came upon them, and I said, ‘What’s happening?’ They said,‘Well, you’re not going to die. You must go back. You have things to do.’They were talking to me by telepathy.”

“Were you afraid?” I asked.

“No. I felt very at peace. Then I asked them, ‘What am I going to do?’ And there was a silence, and then a beautiful sound came into me. It was outside of me, it was inside of me, I was part of a very peaceful, serene sound, but at the same time a very powerful sound. It was like”—Gilles blew out his breath slowly, pursing his lips to make a low whistle —
“the breath of the universe
.
”