Fingerprints of God (7 page)

She laughed, and then her tone grew serious. “I’ve changed on a cellular level,” she said. “I literally feel that I’m being rewired. I used to be quite the party girl. I was out all the time. I used to date for sport. And since that happened, I suddenly had no desire to live a superficial lifestyle. It was night and day—this sudden, absolute, quick change. Now a great day for me is playing in the yard, or having a great conversation with my friends at my house, or reading a great book. It
completely
changed my lifestyle.”

Susan had always thought of herself as a spiritual seeker, interested in alternate beliefs.But she never pursued them much past flipping through a New Age magazine. Since that moment, however, she has been obsessed with quantum physics. “Where I thought about it before, now I’m pretty much consumed with it.”

“Why does quantum physics interest you?” I asked.

“Quantum physics tells me that we’re much more connected than we realize.” I thought of Arjun’s connection with the grass.

“What did your friends think of these changes?”

“Well,” she drawled,“the friends I’ve known for fifteen, twenty years enjoy this deeper aspect. People who knew me only four or five years I don’t have as friends anymore. I have very few friends, and that is intentional. I just weed them out. I can sense people who have no depth. I don’t mean to sound rude, but after I changed, I wanted to be around others who had deeper philosophies, who were interested in exploring spirituality, who were interested in bettering their lives and empowering themselves. And if people weren’t interested in that, I didn’t want to be around it.”

Just like Sophy Burnham. And just like me.

When I told Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico about my conversations with modern-day mystics, he merely nodded.

“It’s a one-way door,” he said. “It’s not like you
decide
not to go back” to your previous lifestyle and priorities. “The experience people describe is: I just
am
different.”

“How did your subjects’ values change?” I asked, referring to the people he interviewed for his book
Quantum Change
.

“They were turned upside down,” he said.

Miller explained that he had asked the fifty-five people in his study to look at a list of fifty values, and rank them according to what was most important before and after the mystical experience.

“Essentially the things that were at the top of the hierarchy [before the experience] went to the bottom,” he said.“Often what was literally number one was number fifty, and vice versa: the first became last and the last became first.”

Before the experience, men ranked their top personal values as: wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, and being respected (in that order). After the experience, their top values were: spirituality, personal peace, family, God’s will, and honesty.

The women seemed to have fewer self-centered values than the men to start with, but even these shifted: from family, independence, career, fitting in, and attractiveness (before the mystical experience), to growth, self-esteem, spirituality, happiness, and generosity (afterward).

Often these subterranean changes flowered into a new career or life course. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee became a Sufi mystic and author, for example, and Arjun Patel chose to counsel the dying because of the “light.”

Sometimes these changes dislocated their lives. Usually, the transformed people felt a twinge of regret at losing their former life but found invariably that the spiritual adventure more than compensated. I felt sorrier for their family and friends, who became the “collateral damage” of the spiritual experience, scratching their heads helplessly as the person they thought they knew disappeared forever. Virtually every woman I interviewed, and several of the men, reported that their values and goals had veered so drastically away from their spouses’ that they eventually divorced. Asked why she and her husband (whom she still loves) parted ways, Sophy Burnham replied,“I wasn’t the person that he had married.”

“Have you paid a price?” I asked Llewellyn, the Sufi mystic.

He chuckled wryly. “Ah, dear, yes. There’s always a price. The price is yourself.”

“Is it painful?”

“There’s nothing more painful.You become incredibly vulnerable, you become incredibly naked. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it.”

“Except you can’t help it.”

“There you go,” Llewellyn said. “You don’t have a choice.”

What I did not realize when I said good-bye to Llewellyn was that the stories of my mystics would give me a peek into the rest of my research. Their stories would contain elements that would prove central to an array of different spiritual experiences: the sense of union with all things and the universe; the loss of fear of death; the new definition of reality and of “God”; and profound personal transformation. I heard some or all of these descriptions from people who experienced emotional breakdown or mental dysfunction, who experimented with psychedelic drugs or meditation, who had near-death experiences. I didn’t know it then, but I was on my way to redefining for myself the nature of God and reality.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Fortified by the insight that spiritual experience is not only everywhere but open to research, I was ready to tackle the questions that were driving my own quest. I began by reexamining the faith of my childhood in the light of science.

CHAPTER 3

MARY ANN BRADLEY SAT PERCHED on the living room sofa in her Nantucket home. Her eighty-five years had been kind to her. She always had been short, but these days barely topped five feet, with a perfect mane of silver hair and not a single wrinkle on her forehead. It was August 18, 2006, about ten in the morning. She had prepared for this moment, as evidenced by several pages of handwritten notes spread out on the coffee table before her. She was, and is, one of the dearest people in my life. And at this moment, Mom was serving as my guide to a religion that is, perhaps, a hundred years ahead of modern science—a religion that relies wholly on the power of thought to alter the body.

“I have never known anything but Christian Science,” she began. “It’s been the guidance system of my life and has never let me down.”

Mom comes from a family of Christian Scientists, and raised my brother and me in the faith. Her mother was a “practitioner,” the metaphysical equivalent of an emergency-room doctor. People called her with their problems. Granny prayed for them, and more often than not, a healing ensued.What most people know about Christian Scientists is that they do not take medicine—even vitamins—and that they rarely go to doctors.What most people do not know is that there is a method to this asceticism.

Christian Science holds as a central premise that healing is a function of spiritual understanding; that matter and its conditions, including sin and disease, are “false beliefs”; and that prayer changes a person’s thought, which results in healing. An example drilled into me by my Sunday-school teachers: When a person looks at a dirty bathroom mirror, his reflection may be marred by smudge marks and toothpaste splatters; but the problem is with the mirror (the distorted image of reality) and not the person. In Christian Science, the way you clean the mirror—and restore the reflection—is to clean up your thinking.

“Everything is thought in Christian Science,” Mom explained. “Everything is going on in your thinking. If you remove the ‘false beliefs’ which we can call error, evil, sickness, and replace those thoughts with the spiritual truth—the truth that man is made in the image and likeness of God—then the body responds. Since there is nothing broken in God, then there can be nothing broken in the image and likeness of God, man.”

Okay, let me translate for those unfamiliar with theVictorian language of Christian Science, which was founded by Mary Baker Eddy in the mid-nineteenth century. Christian Science prayer shares little with the popular conception of prayer. Rather than beseech an authoritative and exceedingly busy Judge to stop what He’s doing, listen to the plea, weigh the arguments, and then miraculously intervene, Christian Science appeals to spiritual principles, akin to working out a math problem. In this sense, Christian Science prayer is nearer to meditation than to petition: it is a mental discipline, one that claims that when you apply spiritual “laws,” you take control of your environment—your body, your employment status, your love life, your mood. Which does not mean that life proceeds perfectly or endlessly—not even Mary Baker Eddy cheated death—but that what you think directs how you experience the world. Or as my mom always says,“Your thinking is your experience.”

I asked Mom for a concrete example.

“Okay, I’ll tell you about my broken hand,” she offered. “I was engaged to be married and it was a Sunday afternoon. I was with my fiancé—your dad—and he was teasing me, and I hit his knee in response. I knew immediately something was wrong with my hand. So I asked him to take me home.

“I started working in Christian Science,” she continued.“And this is the thought I worked with: Nothing can come into my human experience that I do not allow in my consciousness as a reality. And it was up to me to see that this broken bone—or whatever it was, at that point I didn’t know—was unreal. Just as the statement ‘Two plus two is five’ is erroneous, unreal. You take it out of your consciousness as a reality. You erase it, and then you substitute the truth.”

“In this case, what was the truth?” I asked.

“The truth was, that I could not have anything broken,” she said. “I was a spiritual idea of God, so there was nothing to be broken.”

Then Mom grew quiet, overwhelmed by the memory of what came next. I had seen this cascade of emotion before, when I talked with Sophy Burnham, and Arjun Patel, and virtually all of the mystics I had interviewed.

“I was sitting on my bed, about to go to work,” she recalled. She was reading the Christian Science textbook
Science and Health
when the tectonic plates of her reality shifted.

“I had this great sense of light—of one thing flowing out of another, out of another, out of another, out of another, into eternity,” she said. “There was nothing but light. It’s all one. It’s all God. The all-ness of God, which is the oneness of God, and I was within that oneness. And I just sat there, and it didn’t last very long, but I’m quite convinced that that was when my hand was healed.”

At the request of my father, who had not yet converted to Christian Science, my mother visited a doctor who X-rayed her hand two days later.

“And the doctor came back and said, ‘Well, yes, the large bone in your right hand is broken,’ ” Mom recalled. “And he said, ‘What we usually do in cases like this when someone hasn’t gone to the doctor immediately is we rebreak it and reset it. But if you want that done, you’re going to have to go to another doctor. Because it’s perfectly set and it’s almost healed.’ ”

Mom paused, reliving the intensity of that moment.“And I remember walking out of his office—my feet didn’t touch the ground, I was so filled with God’s truth, the spirituality, the marvel of it. That was the end of it.”

As I began to study the biology of belief, I found myself circling back to Christian Science and taking a fresh look at healing—what believers see as the evidence of divine laws in operation. Certainly I continued to delight in swallowing an aspirin or cough medicine anytime I chose. But the more I talked to people about spirit and matter, the more I suspected that Christian Science was onto something.

Mind-body medicine has become so widely accepted today that it is difficult to recall when it was considered fantasy. For ordinary Americans, the conviction that your thoughts or emotions affect your body gained traction in the 1950s when Protestant preacher Norman Vincent Peale wrote his transformative book,
The Power of Positive Thinking.
But it was not until the 1970s that
scientists
finally began to acknowledge a connection between mind and body.

Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, identifies Norman Cousins as the man who triggered the revolution. In the 1970s, Cousins, an influential writer and editor in chief of
Saturday Review
, was hospitalized with a mysterious, crippling disease. Doctors diagnosed some form of progressive paralysis or a degenerative bone disease that would eventually kill him. Facing a death sentence, Cousins threw out the specialists, checked himself out of the hospital, and worked with his own physician to wage a novel war on the disease. His plan was the medical equivalent of unleashing millions of beagles in Baghdad: he flooded the place with good cheer.

“He knew that there was research and evidence showing that negative emotion—fear, anger, anxiety—was bad for you,” Harrington said. “But he felt that there had been little study of whether
positive
emotions might have the
opposite
effect on your health, that it might be good for you. He felt he had nothing to lose, because he wasn’t going to get better through conventional means, and perhaps he had a lot to gain.

“So he checked himself into a hotel,” she continued. “He had films of
Candid Camera
and the Marx Brothers brought in. He read all sorts of funny books, and he discovered that ten minutes of a belly laugh gave him twenty minutes of pain-free sleep. And little by little, as it came to be famously remembered, he laughed himself back to health.”
¹

What earned Cousins a place in medical history, Harrington said, was the fact that his experience was published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, one of the world’s premier medical journals. Cousins received close to 3,000 letters from doctors and researchers, who praised him for medically documenting his novel approach. Firmly clutching the gauntlet thrown down by a mere layman, scientists began to explore how Cousins’s recovery could be explained within the parameters of science.