Fingerprints of God (6 page)

Since I could neither confirm nor debunk their stories, I asked myself two threshold questions to determine whom to include in my research. First, is this someone I would want to join my friends and me for dinner—that is, is he or she educated, reasonable, accustomed to appearing in public fully dressed? And second, did this person wonder about his sanity after his epiphany? (The answer to this question had to be yes, as that would indicate he or she had not lost touch with reality.)

As I heard their stories, I concluded that three elements are essential to profound spiritual experience, and all of them echo William James’s insights. First, the moment itself is weirder and
more real
than everyday reality. Second, it gives the person radical new insights about the nature of reality and the nature of God (the noetic quality). And third, those insights appear to rewire the person and his approach to life.

I met Arjun Patel during a tropical storm in Miami, on December 6, 2006.
²⁴
I had barely made it to the hospital lobby where he worked when the heavens opened, the rain slamming down in angry sheets. Soon a crisply dressed man in his mid-thirties burst through the doors, splattering raindrops in an arc around him. Enter the hospital’s smart, young psychologist who specialized in helping patients with terminal diseases (and their families) negotiate the final yards into death.

We sat down in a sterile examination room. I gazed at Arjun, dressed in a button-down blue shirt, fresh and unwrinkled beneath his gray-and-blue-striped tie. He had beautiful olive skin, a near-shaven head, and a goatee, and he radiated a serenity that surely calms his patients in their final days.

Raised in a Hindu home, Arjun had experimented with meditation in his teens. But in his freshman year at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he and a friend decided to meditate every afternoon at five p.m. After two weeks, Arjun said, he started to “play around a bit” and silently chant a Tibetan Buddhist mantra. He remembered the scene with cinematic precision. He and his friend were sitting cross-legged in their tiny dorm room on Wednesday evening in February 1990, and as the long shadows of twilight crept across the room, Arjun closed his eyes and slowed into a rhythmic breathing.

“I would sometimes see things when I’m meditating, just natural, normal distractions, and little visual things that happen,” he explained. “But this was different. It was dark, and there was this little pinpoint of light that just kept moving closer, relentlessly closer. I thought,
What is this?
It didn’t look the way I imagined any mystical experience to be, and I wasn’t really looking for one. So this light was off in the distance and it kept getting closer and closer, and there was almost a sound that came with it, like a roar.”

I recalled Sophy Burnham’s words—
“there was a hollow darkness . . . sort of like an oncoming train.”

“I was trembling. I was vibrating, I had a tingling in my fingers,” Arjun continued. “Every time I talk about it I feel it again, a kind of clamminess in my hands. I felt very, very weightless, very light and easy. My breathing was very shallow, and I think I was exhaling really hard, and I was rocking back and forth. I could tell I was smiling from ear to ear. At some point, as the light got closer, there were two eyes looking back at me. They were stylized eyes. I later learned they’re called ‘Bud dha’s eyes.’ And they kept moving closer and closer, and the eyes were half opened and half closed. And when it got up to where I was, the eyes blinked. And it was like . . . I don’t really know how to describe it. The light wasn’t out there anymore. I wasn’t in here anymore. Everything just sort of collapsed, and there was nothing left but light.”

“Were you light itself, or was it in you?” I asked.

“There wasn’t any ‘me’ anymore. There was no boundary, no ‘This is me and this is something else.’ There was just total seamlessness.”

“Did you feel a loss of identity?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“And did that feel good or bad?”

“It just felt like,
This is the way it’s supposed to be
.”

Arjun slept little over the next two weeks. He listened to music and kept to himself. And he felt a surreal unity with all things.

“I remember lying on the grass under the tree in the quad,” he said. “I remember just running my hands through the grass, and just feeling for the grass.”

“Feeling for the grass,” I repeated.“You mean, empathizing with it?”

“Yeah. It was alive, the grass was alive, and it was beautiful. There was no self-reference point.”

The euphoria eventually ebbed, although, Arjun said, every time he talks about it “my body remembers what it feels like.” Sixteen years passed.When I met him, Arjun was meditating twice daily, and considered that moment the most important of his life. Since then, he has married, started a family, and, as an end-of-life psychologist, has eased hundreds of people through sickness and death.

I told him I did not know how he coped with the emotional drain of his job.

“It was the light,” Arjun said, and laughed self-consciously. “I don’t ever, ever,
ever
talk about this with my patients. But, you know, I feel that the experience—the light, whatever you want to call it—it’s always there. It’s kind of like a well: you can dip down into it and draw some of it up when you need it for spiritual energy and emotional energy. It’s something you always have access to.”

He paused.

“It was an eternal moment. It doesn’t matter that it was sixteen years ago. It’s happening now.”

One theme kept drawing my attention, like a buoy that repeatedly popped up in the choppy sea of research. No matter what their belief systems, the people who had enjoyed profound spiritual experiences saw the same kind of “Other.” In fact, they often shunned the word “God,” since God is the purview of particular religions.Without exception, this being in the eye of their spiritual tornadoes was a loving presence, infinitely intelligent and gentle. My mystics might use different terminology, but they described uncannily similar experiences: love, peace, and, often, an overwhelming sense of unity with the universe—and always,
light
.

A Sufi mystic named LlewellynVaughan-Lee, for example, described his first mystical experience as a light switch flipping on.

“I saw light dancing around everything. You know when you get sunlight sparkling on water? It’s like that. I felt really alive with this quality of joy and laughter. And I just knew,
this
is the way it is, and everything else is the way it isn’t. Everything else is covered up. Everything else is veiled.”

Undergirding the light was love, Llewellyn said, a physical love, the kind that Saint Teresa of Ávila experienced in what can only be called spiritual orgasms.

“You long for God,” Llewellyn explained, “and if the spiritual love is awakened, that draws your attention closer and closer and closer to God, until finally you have these mystical experiences of union, in which the ego falls away and you are drawn into the ocean of love. There is no ‘you’ anymore, there is just divine love, which is what the mystic longs for.”

So it was for Adam Zaremberg, a young Catholic man who had recently converted from Judaism. His first encounter with God was a visceral event. It was like downshifting from third gear to first: the world bucked with pent-up energy. One spring day in 1999, when he was a senior in high school, he spotted an underlying reality, and in the blink of an eye, the mundane was teeming with explosive energy

“I just sat down on a bench, and suddenly I was able to see the world in a new way. Everything had just changed. It was like . . . all of creation emanating itself. It was just infinitely more itself. Like everything seemed magical and filled with energy... but it didn’t change the way anything looked. I came up with an analogy for it: it was like a grape squeezed to the popping brink.”

“So it’s still in its same form,” I clarified, “but it’s bursting. . . .”

“It’s bursting at the same time. It really is radical—everything changes. And it was accompanied by a very calm feeling, where you’re glad to be there, glad to be alive, not afraid of anything.”

A Buddhist, a Muslim, and a Catholic have similar mystical experiences—it sounds like a bad joke, but it is cosmically accurate. I asked Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico if he had found any particular themes in the accounts of his “quantum changers.”

“All the people who described the mystical type of experience described the same ‘Other,’ ” said Miller, who is a Presbyterian. “Never mind their religious upbringing—they were in the presence of the same thing.”

“What is that ‘Other’?” I asked.

“It’s profoundly loving and accepting beyond words. It doesn’t demand anything of you at the moment.You simply feel accepted as you are, and loved as you are, to the very depth of your being.”
²⁵

Many of these people did view this “Other” through the lens of their faith. In their everyday spiritual practices, Arjun Patel, a Buddhist, saw Buddha’s eyes; Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi, communed with the Beloved; and Adam Zaremberg, a Catholic, visualized Christ. But none of them claimed his “God” as the only authentic God, nor did they begrudge anyone else a different view. They were like witnesses to the same God but from different angles.

So prevalent was this nonreligious “Other” that I wondered why these people would remain content with a particular religion. I mused about this with Sophy Burnham, who had spent years delving into Asian religions and ended up where she started, in the Episcopal Church. I told her I was surprised by that.

“So was I,” Sophy said.

She explained that she thinks of spirituality as a wheel with spokes leading to the hub. “And each of the spokes is a path to God—is a religion, if you will, or a spiritual practice. And they will all take you to the direct experience of God. But you have to choose one and go all the way down it. If you dive down one and test it for a minute and you come back out and go along the circumference again, and dive down another, you’ll never reach the hub.”

I must admit, I disliked the analogy. If truth be told, all this interfaith Kumbaya unnerved me. A decade earlier, when I had been spiritually adrift, it wasn’t a nondescript “Other” who slipped the rudder into place and breathed life into my faith. It was Christ who met me. Moreover, I
liked
the idea of God’s becoming a person and going to weddings. I
liked
the man who outargued the lawyers, who outpreached the rabbis, who declined the help of the governor of Jerusalem to stave off His own wrongful death, yet spared the life of a prostitute on the verge of legal execution.

And what was I to do with Jesus’ words,“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me”?
²⁶
Jesus did not fudge His words. His vision of the “Other” is no fuzzy thing, but a God with likes and dislikes, who has a personality and a plan.

And yet, I had always squirmed when my fellow believers declared there is but one way to God. I had chafed at the assertion that a philanderer or an embezzler or a rapist who asked Jesus into his life would take the express train to heaven, while Mahatma Gandhi writhed in hell because he didn’t. For that matter, I have never been comfortable with heaven and hell, much less certain about their residents. The stories of my modern-day mystics were like a crowbar prying open my faith. I had opened a Pandora’s box.

These spiritual experiences, it seems to me, have the air of high-priced interior decorators on reality television shows: they arrive (unbidden), and immediately begin punching through walls and removing countertops. They haul away most of the furniture, including your favorite red leather chair, and what they deign to leave, they put in the basement. These experiences don’t ask, they simply move in, insisting you’ll
love
it when they’re done, and then with a brisk clap of the hands, they’re gone, leaving you stunned, panting, and utterly transformed.

I could hear all of that in Susan Garren’s voice.

In the summer of 2004, Susan was thirty-seven years old and living in Asheville, North Carolina. She had started her own real estate appraisal business, which was flourishing, and she had begun dating a handsome young doctor named Vince Gilmer. On July 5, the police arrested her beau for the murder of his father. (He was later convicted of first-degree murder.)

Susan considered herself self-reliant: she managed her business and owned a house. She ran in a sophisticated circle of friends. A nervous breakdown was not in her makeup. But after Gilmer’s arrest, she retreated to her bed, traumatized.

As she lay there, she said, one by one, her senses ceased to operate.

“All of a sudden I realized I wasn’t able to see anymore.Then I couldn’t hear anything. But I could
sense
. And I heard a voice—well, I didn’t technically hear it. It was some sort of communication that I could understand. And it was just reassuring me that everything was okay. I felt very calm, very safe. The more I relaxed into it, the safer I felt.”

“How would you define this voice or this experience?” I interrupted. “Is it God? Is it the universe? Is there a personality to it? Is it infinite mind?”

“I call it the Source,” she said.“It’s the Source of all that is, and everything that encompasses it. It wasn’t the old man with a beard; it was some very powerful force able to communicate in extrasensory ways. But it was very loving, very comforting. Every time I think about it I begin to tear up. It’s absolutely the most powerful feeling I’ve ever experienced.”

“How did it end?”

“I came out the same way that I went into it. The first thing I could remember is I could hear the birds chirping in my yard. And then I was back in this consciousness, and I lay there for however long, thinking,
Holy shit, what just happened?
”