Fingerprints of God (34 page)

Larry Dossey calls this God “non-local mind.” Dossey, a doctor and author, coined the term in his 1989 book
Recovering the Soul.
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It bears more than a smart scientific ring.“Non-locality” is a staple of quantum mechanics, and one of the spookier aspects of physics. For Dossey and others on the edge of science, “non-local mind” refers to a consciousness that defies the bounds of space or time.

“Perhaps the place to start is to say that non-locality is simply a fan cified word for infinitude,” Dossey told me one luminous day in July 2006.“If consciousness is non-local, then it is infinite in space and time. If something is infinite in
space
, it’s omnipresent. If it’s infinite in
time
, it’s eternal, or immortal. So you can see that from the get-go there’s theological dynamite that’s hooked up with this idea of non-local mind.”

Larry Dossey and his wife, Barbie, had invited me to their rustic home on a mountainside overlooking Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dossey, a tall, lean Texan with a mane of white hair parted in the middle, began his career as an Army battalion surgeon in Vietnam, then moved to internal medicine for fourteen years before turning to the pen. When I met him, he had already authored ten books on healing and spirituality.

When I, a stranger, wrote at the last minute requesting an interview while I was passing through New Mexico, Dossey set aside the entire afternoon before he and his wife left for vacation. It turned out to be one of his last mobile days that summer. Two weeks later, as the couple rode out of the Wind River Mountain wilderness area in Wyoming, Dossey was thrown from his horse. He broke his back, fracturing the twelfth thoracic vertebra. Because a helicopter could not land anywhere nearby, the Vietnam vet walked through the night nearly ten hours to civilization, in excruciating pain.

Dossey has taken as much incoming fire from his scientist colleagues as he did from the Viet Cong.What he proposes is a revolution in science. If non-local mind were merely the equivalent of the Divine Watchmaker, who created the universe and then let it tick away on its own, the idea would unsettle fewer of his colleagues. But Dossey’s claim is far more galling: he suggests that this non-local mind interacts—has a relationship, even—with a person’s individual,
local
mind, in the same way that many Christians or Jews believe that God interacts with people. According to Dossey and a growing number of scientists (along with most of the American population), this cosmic consciousness permeates our world and soaks into our human affairs.

Think of your “local” mind as your personal computer. You can keep files and write documents that no one else can access. “Non-local” mind is like the Internet: it contains enormous amounts of information, shared by billions of people (potentially by everyone on earth), and is always available for you to access with your individual mind.
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Dossey theorizes that your consciousness shares qualities with non-local mind, that the local and the infinite are “two sides of the same coin.” This may seem far-fetched until you begin reading the mystics or practicing meditation or listening to anyone who has enjoyed a profoundly spiritual experience. They witness to being “at one” with the universe and God, feeling the boundlessness of the infinite, and experiencing “the divine within.” And if there is a dialogue, so to speak, between your mind and the larger non-local mind, then it follows that your mind could do things that modern science says is impossible, such as impact other minds or know things that you simply should not know.

“One of the things that scientists have had a difficult time doing is to imagine how consciousness might behave non-locally,” Dossey observed. “That it might exert its effects beyond the individual brain and the body, as in the stuff that parapsychology deals with, like ESP, clairvoyance, this sort of thing. And, we must add, intercessory prayer, which has always been a claim of all major religions. So it has been verboten to suggest that this actually happens, that the mind can behave non-locally, because every respectable scientist is dragooned into the notion that, by definition,
that can’t happen
.”

Dossey leaned forward in his chair and gazed at me with his penetrating eyes. “Here’s the problem: The data hasn’t gotten the message. The data doesn’t know it’s not supposed to occur.”

He recalled one data point that grabbed his attention and prompted him to revisit his concept of time and reality. He was in his first year of private practice and had recently moved from “agnosticism bordering on atheism” to a yen for Buddhist writings.

“I had a dream one night in which I saw a patient undergoing certain tests,” he recalled.“I even saw how the outcome of the tests would manifest. I went to my office the next day, and the scenario played out in camera-like detail. This was non-locality of consciousness manifesting outside of time—
precognitively
, as we say, anticipating something in architectural and camera-like detail before it even happened.

“Now, my experience doesn’t amount to very much,” he conceded, sitting back in his chair. “But you couple this with the record of the human race as far back as we know, and even surveys in contemporary America would show that precognitive dreams—dreaming something before it happens—are one of the commonest so-called parapsychological experiences that human beings have. One option is to say that the vast majority of Americans are nuts. There could be a case for that. But I don’t think that we’re all fooling ourselves when we talk about these non-local manifestations of consciousness.”

I want to step back from seeing the future in “camera-like detail,” to the more commonplace “gut feelings” that most of us have felt. A mother waking up certain that her son is curled up with stomach flu on his bunk bed at summer camp. A man sensing that his wife has just been in a car accident. Almost everyone carries around an anecdote like that. To test the hypothesis, simply tell one of these stories at a dinner party and wait for the dam to burst.

Such stories present circumstantial evidence of a stripped-down God 1.0, an infinite intelligence that knows past, present, and future, is everywhere, and can communicate with us through our own (local) minds. But science always demands a mechanism, in this case, an explanation of
how
these uncanny, some would say spiritual, phenomena occur, including prayer and healing.

Dean Radin has a hypothesis: We have “entangled minds.” Radin, who authored a book by that title,
¹¹
is a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), a research organization founded by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell to rigorously study the “inner space” of consciousness. Radin could be a middle-class computer whiz straight out of central casting—bespectacled and balding, with a pencil-thin mustache, his voice a tad nasal and his speech hyperarticulate. Radin loves his numbers—he performs all the statistical analysis for the research projects at IONS—but he possesses an original mind that is two parts science and one part imagination.

As a child, Radin practiced violin several hours a day and eventually played professionally. His brain, as I understood from my exposure to virtuoso minds, was physically molded by the hours of practice. He was a loner who devoured hundreds of books in the public library, beginning with fairy tales, moving on to science fiction, and finally to mythology.

“Early on I was attracted to the notion that there were multiple layers to any story,” he recalled, gazing out his window at the mountains surrounding the IONS compound, a wilderness paradise some forty miles north of San Francisco.“I never forgot that virtually anything that people are presenting to you, even in science, has multiple levels of meaning.”

This intuition—that there may be a hidden reality—led Radin to
entanglement
. The idea of entanglement is this: when you delve down to the subatomic or quantum level, particles remain connected even when they are apparently separated. Albert Einstein called these connections in quantum theory “spooky action at a distance.”

When Einstein was alive, entanglement was only an idea that was predicted by mathematics, but it had not yet been demonstrated in the laboratory. That would begin to happen in the 1970s, when researchers first started to explore whether the predicted properties of entanglement could be observed in the laboratory. In a groundbreaking study in the 1980s, French scientist Alain Aspect and his colleagues experimentally caused two photons, or light particles, to become entangled.When a property of light—such as spin, position, or momentum—was measured in one of the particles, the “twin” particle instantly showed the opposite property. What was especially spooky was that distance between particles did not matter. Even though the twins were more than thirty miles apart, they behaved as if they were still connected. They were entangled.
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Radin is quick to point out that entanglement has been shown only at the subatomic level, and that we human beings are much bigger than that.
¹³
But since people and things are composed of subatomic particles, Radin argues, entanglement may suggest that
everything
is interconnected, even people. We are not billiard balls on a pool table that occasionally bump into each other. We are part of a fabric woven so tightly that pulling one thread alters the whole tapestry. Or, try this: Reality is like Jell-O: Poke one side of the bowl and the green stuff on the other side jiggles. According to Dean Radin’s entangled reality, if that “poke” is an event—say, a car accident—information about that event could pop into someone’s head miles away.

“The mystery with all psychic phenomena is a mystery of how information gets from one place to another,” he explained. “So if you hear the phone ring and somehow instantly you know who’s calling without answering the phone yet, how did the information get into you? Where did it come from? Of all the infinite number of places where the information could have gone, why did
you
pick it up?”

“Which reminds me of a story my sister-in law, Katherine, told me just the other day,” I volunteered. “Katherine’s great-grandmother was traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago by train, and suddenly in the middle of her journey, she jumped up and said, ‘My husband has just severed his forefinger. I must get off the train and go home.’When she arrived in Los Angeles a couple of days later, lo and behold, her husband was missing his finger. Can you walk me through what happened?”

“It’s not as though the pain suddenly found her in a train,” Radin hypothesized. “They were connected. They always had an open channel. The moment something happened to him, she was aware of it instantaneously because of that continuous connection. Now the interesting question is: Why didn’t everybody else jump up with the same information? And the answer is roughly like this: In an interconnected space, everything truly is interconnected with everything else. If you think about what it would be like, it would be overwhelming. If you were able to sense exactly what is happening to everything else throughout the universe, it would be such a cacophony of information all the time that you couldn’t think straight. So I believe that we have evolved in such a way as to exclude almost all available information, except the stuff close to you, in front of you here and now.”

This dovetailed with the metaphor of Aldous Huxley, who proposed that the brain is a “reducing valve” that strains out all extraneous sensory information. He suggested that the valve occasionally opens—during a psychedelic drug experience, for example—to admit normally inaccessible information. It is like a voice an octave above our usual range of hearing, a light just outside the visible spectrum. Some people with temporal lobe epilepsy claim to hear and see another dimension, as did mystics from the beginning of recorded history. Here Dean Radin was suggesting that other things—important events, people, relationships—have the same ability to break through the veil of ordinary perception.

“If you are at cocktail party, and someone says your name across the room, you tend to hear it,” Radin said.“Why do you hear it? You’re not consciously listening for it. But you have maybe ten things you’re constantly scanning, unconsciously, and these are a little bit easier to get into your conscious awareness than all of the other things you don’t care about. So, by the same token, it’s almost as though we are in a universe-sized cocktail party all the time, and we have the ability to have our attention placed subconsciously on the things that are of interest to us. So in that case, your sister-in-law’s great-grandmother had one of her attentional filters subconsciously attuned to her loved one.”

Dean Radin and other scientists around the world are running tests to determine whether this kind of connection is coincidence or a measurable phenomenon, whether we are disconnected billiard balls or dynamic beings living in an entangled tapestry that some would call God’s universe. This amounts to declaring civil war on normal science, since most scientists insist that one person’s thoughts or consciousness cannot extend beyond the brain, and certainly not far enough to affect another person’s vital signs.

Yet a small avalanche of experiments suggests that we may in fact be connected in this way. Researchers at universities around the world—from Stanford to the University of Edinburgh—have conducted more than fifty studies to test the hypothesis, and found a “small but significant effect” of one person’s thinking upon another person’s body.
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Some studies using EEGs showed that when the “sender’s” brain-wave activity changed, the “receiver’s” brain-wave activity followed within milliseconds.
¹⁵
Other researchers employed brain-scanning technology and found that when the sender tried to relay an image to the receiver, parts of the receiver’s brain that handle visual images were activated.
¹⁶

In one intriguing experiment, Jeanne Achterberg, a psychology professor at Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, and her colleagues gathered eleven shaman healers on the Big Island of Hawaii.
¹⁷
At random two-minute intervals, each healer prayed for a close friend as the friend lay in a brain scanner. When Achterberg analyzed the brain scans, she was astonished at the results. During the intervals when the healers were sending their prayers and intentions, the partners’ brains “lit up” in the areas that are usually activated when someone does something or says something in response to a stimulus—possibly, she theorized, the healer’s thoughts. The odds that chance alone accounted for the partners’ brains lighting up in this way were 7,874 to one.