Fringe-ology (23 page)

This description is both spot on and probably a bit tame. But that is to be expected. Telling people, as Edgar Mitchell has, that “
your flesh and bone will melt away as you feel yourself become one with the universe!
” is probably not the best way to sell tickets. Telling people that astronauts are profoundly affected, usually for the rest of their lives, and that some change their vocations altogether, also qualifies as a tad too intense for a marketing handout. But Beaver's contention is that the tourism industry—and the rest of us—need to be prepared.

“I think what's kept the overview effect from having a larger impact on society, is that so few people have experienced it,” Beaver told me. “And those people are generally one small part of society. They are space explorers. When more people are going into space, from various walks of life, change is going to start happening, really fast.”

This sounds a bit dramatic. But is that because the power of the overview effect is overstated? Or because, when we listen to this story, we don't have ears that are prepared, in the least, to really hear it? This is the question—and the answer may be that we don't fully understand what travel into space will mean for us; that in fact we can't understand it until it happens.

Frank White, who literally wrote the book on the overview effect, is also a part of the Overview Institute. And he thinks of space travel largely as Mitchell does—an evolutionary step. “If fish could think at our level of intelligence,” White said, “back before humanity existed, and some fish were starting to venture up on land, a lot of them would be saying, just as we do now about space: ‘Why would we want to go there? What's the point?' And they'd have literally no idea of what venturing onto land was going to mean.”

The move from water to land, according to White, is a kind of mirror in history—a pane of glass for us to stare through and understand that our next shift, from Earth to space, will be equally important. But what species has ever understood its own evolutionary future?

Because we are more intelligent than the fish, because we have developed the scientific method, because we can create art and films that provoke our imaginations, we of course have a better opportunity than a trout to understand what's next for us. But there is abundant evidence that we don't even understand what is happening right now.

The space tourism industry has long been plagued by a phenomenon known as “the giggle factor.” In short, when people hear an idea that is profoundly disturbing—like the destructive effects of climate change—or scientifically challenging—like the idea of microscopic life once was—we giggle. And in the case of space tourism, we giggle because the idea seems too far-out—too remote from our experience. Our natural hubris, it seems, is most clearly captured in our automatic inclination to laugh at information we don't understand.

The implications of this for the paranormal are obviously great. Yes, some people want to embrace every New Age idea. But others laugh, just as automatically, before even considering what they're laughing at. “In my conversations with people in the aerospace industry,” Beaver told me, “they expected they would announce flights into space—and that would be that. People would start calling for reservations. But it wasn't like that, and they realized the ‘giggle factor' was to blame. They needed to do more work, just convincing people this is real.”

That work has since been done, and what Richard Branson is selling through Virgin Galactic is real. We as a species just had (and some still have) a hard time believing it. Branson's newly designed craft have been making successful test flights, and industry observers believe that even the most far-out plans—like Bob Bigelow's idea to sell $8-million weekends in a space hotel—are
when
, not
if
, propositions. Branson even has competition, from the likes of PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Branson has been working with no less a visionary than Burt Rutan, whose ideas can be found in the ever-so-practical unmanned drones currently hunting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Check the clips covering the progression of the aerospace industry, and it appears that circa 2005 everyone involved adopted the same mantra: “The giggle factor is gone,” as a means of overcoming the public's doubts.

When it comes to perception, perhaps just saying it can really make it so. People are now booking flights with Virgin. But according to Beaver, aerospace insiders aren't taking any chances. They are now loath to say too much about the overview effect, for fear of reigniting our mirth. And they probably aren't wrong.

My favorite example of the skepticism that greets the overview effect is a 2007 article in
Wired
magazine, covering the Overview Institute's first conference. “Scratch a Space Nut,” reads the unwieldy headline, “Find a Starry-Eyed Hippie.”

I think, in the end, this is the conundrum of Edgar Mitchell. He helped usher in what appears to be the next step in human evolution: from land to space. But he can only be viewed through the glasses we're grinding today. Too much of what he has involved himself in provokes our laughter—from mental telepathy, to shamanistic healers, to the overview effect itself. But where he has landed is more nuanced than all that.

“There is a strict idealism,” he told me, “which is where the New Agers are at, which says that essentially there is no matter or that matter is irrelevant. And then there is extreme scientific reductionism, which tends to dominate science, and says that consciousness is epiphenomenal—a kind of illusion produced by materialistic processes. I say somewhere there is reality in all this. And our task is to find it. But both of these, the New Age way of looking at things, and the strictly materialistic way, are wrong. It's a more inclusive view of reality that I'm after.”

Mitchell's journey, then, goes both in and out—as deeply into ourselves as we can go, as deeply into and as far from scientific dogma as we can get, as far out into space as we've dared. And he has paid a price.

The most poignant conversation I had about Edgar Mitchell was with Dr. Marilyn Schlitz. The current president of IONS, Schlitz has known Mitchell for close to twenty years. And I was frankly a bit afraid to share my final observation with her. “Edgar struck me,” I said, “as lonely.”

Schlitz was quiet for a couple of seconds before she responded, long enough for me to wonder if she was offended on Mitchell's behalf. But then she spoke: “I think Edgar
is
lonely,” she said, and from there she painted a portrait of Mitchell, suggesting history will judge him, as it judges all things, far more accurately than the present can.

“He grew up on a farm,” she observed, “and he has great respect for his family history. But he traveled to the moon and back. His experience of life is so unique. You have to consider: Even his fellow astronauts, there is a fraternity there that means a lot to Edgar. They had the same experience as him. But they didn't pursue it the way he did: So there isn't anyone on Earth he can look at, and feel that sense of total, shared experience. There isn't anyone on Earth who really understands him.”

How New Science Is Revealing the Power of Meditation and Prayer

And when we could go no further, and were drowning on a desert, we raised our flag to follow the breath of God? But it was blowing every which way.

—Joe Henry, “Flag”

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

—Barack Obama, January 12, 2011

D
r. Andrew Newberg was late for class, as he would be every week. About ten minutes after the scheduled start time, he hustled around the corner, walking fast, a sheepish smile playing out underneath his thick mop of hair. He dressed in well-worn brown shoes, nondescript slacks, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt that hung loosely from his bony figure. “Hi, hiya, hi,” he repeated to the line of students arranged pell-mell, sitting and standing on the floor around the locked door to his classroom.

These kids must have ranked, statistically, among the brightest in America—freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), many of them in their first semester. They smiled back at their professor. Newberg unlocked the door to the classroom. And everyone piled into the small, theater-like space. The whole room worked by means of electronics, with dials on the walls like the bridge of a movie spaceship. Newberg never did learn how to dim the lights himself. And over time, the class would seem to love him for it, smiling as they might at the eccentricities of a beloved uncle. But on day one, most of them had no real idea who Newberg was. They had enrolled in RELS 102:
Science and the Sacred
:
Neurotheology
, without knowing what they were in for at all.

Dr. Andrew Newberg works, full-time, as a radiologist at Penn, one of the nation's most prestigious teaching hospitals. But he is best known as the lead author of five books, which renders him an authority to anyone investigating the relationship between science and religion. His field, neurotheology, is, simply, the scientific investigation of the relationship between brain function and spiritual experience. But of course, in the context of our culture, there is nothing simple about that. And so Newberg's field has caused something of a ruckus among believers and unbelievers alike.

The foundation of Newberg's credibility is that there is nothing faith-based about his science. Medical imaging devices allow him to monitor the brain activity of believers as they engage in spiritual practice. What makes his work so controversial is the manner in which people choose to interpret his data: some see God in every grain of sand and every neuron; others see the brain at work and figure that's all there is. These days, in particular, it's not overly dramatic to say this is one debate that truly rages. And Newberg is the man in the middle—religious fundamentalists to one side, New Atheists to the other.

The religious, if they pay attention to such science at all, portray the findings of neurotheology as illuminating the relationship between soul and flesh. The leading New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—mean to put religion to as swift a death as they can manage, or, at least, to mock it into ever-narrower corners. As a result, New Atheists and materialist philosophers tend to see Newberg's findings as further proof that religious experience is reducible to mere brain function. Newberg, for his part, merely wants to find out what effect religion has on the human brain—to see how God, or the notion of God, occurs in our neurons. And his origin story, which he shares with his class, describes the sudden formation of a brand-new field of science.

Newberg's initial research subject was Robert, a Buddhist and an experienced practitioner of Tibetan meditation. The plan Newberg and his co-researcher hatched was novel in scientific terms. Newberg and Robert sat several feet apart, separated by a closed laboratory door yet connected by a single strand of twine. While Newberg sat on one side of the door and waited, Robert sat on the other, meditating. The activity of meditation has always been supremely difficult to study. The experience of meditating is purely subjective—and happening only in the practitioner's mind. A thought can't be pinned to a microscope slide, but science had advanced enough by this time, in the mid-1990s, that Newberg could take a picture of Robert's brain
as
he meditated. Still, it wasn't going to be easy. The system they had devised required precise coordination of elements as primitive as a length of twine and as advanced as a massive brain-imaging device. The experiment also depended upon Robert achieving a delicate mental state with distractions all around, including an intravenous line threaded into his arm.

Robert's goal was to reach a bliss that humans have been chasing, and finding, for thousands of years: the transcendent experience. In this condition, the human mind, normally so noisy with the worries of the day, quiets to a hush. Time and space drop away. The meditator feels one with the universe—every atom of
every
body, all part of his body. For centuries, mystics have described this root experience in varying terms, and in metaphorical language. The “ecstasy of unity,” as Edgar Mitchell put it in the previous chapter, is both real and ineffable—an experience beyond words.

Newberg waited for an hour, unsure if the plan would work, and then—he felt it: a small tug on the length of twine running between him and Robert. This was the signal Robert was to give just before he reached the state Newberg wanted to study. Newberg waited a few beats, allowing Robert to achieve whatever nirvana he'd won for himself, then jumped into action. He opened the door between him and Robert and injected the intravenous line with a radioactive tracer. If the injection was precisely timed, the tracer would document the blood flow patterns in Robert's brain at the moment his meditation reached its peak.

Rousing Robert from his meditation, Newberg then hustled him to a room in the Nuclear Medicine Department. He laid him down on a long metal table and slid him under a huge, high-tech SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Temography) camera, designed to detect radioactive emissions.

Newberg didn't know whether this part of the experiment would work. No one had ever tried this before. But the results were all he could reasonably have wanted. Looking over the SPECT scan, Newberg could see that the areas of Robert's brain associated with judging distances, angles, and depths—in short, his position in space—had gone whisper-quiet. During normal consciousness, this area—the posterior superior parietal lobe—lights up on a SPECT scan with the furious red of active blood flow. This part of our brain has a lot of work to do. It keeps us from running into walls and missing the chairs we intend to sit in. Even when we're still, in fact, this area of the brain remains active: always aware of which parts of our body are in contact with the chair, and which are floating in space; how far away the water glass sits on the table, and how high. But in Robert, during the peak of his meditation, the blazing red turned cool green and blue. The suggestion was obvious: Robert felt himself become one with the universe because the part of his brain that tells him where his body begins and the objects around him end pretty much shut down.

Newberg studied eight Tibetan meditators and took similar pictures. Then he moved on to Franciscan nuns, who practice a form of meditation called “Christian centering prayer.” A new field of science was born. And as Newberg accumulated data, he made an important finding: “The altered states of mind [our subjects] described as the absorption of the self into something larger were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple, wishful thinking,” writes Newberg in
Why God Won't Go Away
, “but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function.”

In short, the world's mystics have not been kidding themselves—or crazy. But what did this say, if anything, about God or spirituality?

In most classrooms, with most teachers, the first day of the semester is an easy ride through the syllabus. But in Newberg's class, this most fundamental question of man's existence, asked for millennia—
Is there a God?
—was first-day stuff. Newberg told his class about Robert and landed them all in this contentious territory. I sat in the back of the room, watching Newberg's students turn serious with the weight of the subject.

In a strict scientific sense, Newberg has always been pretty humble about his data. His findings, he cautions, do not comprise evidence that God exists. Then again, his data also do not suggest that God or spiritual experience is simply a delusion. “We have to be careful,” he said, “about how much we reduce spiritual experiences down to brain function, because it can be very complicated. If God or a sense of God is strictly produced by the brain, then all theological questions fall away. If the brain is
accessing
God, or some higher reality, then theology obviously comes back in.”

The problem, Newberg told his students, is that “I can't tell you definitively what the answer is. No one can.”

He used a brief analogy, versions of which regularly appear, as a kind of neurotheological disclaimer, in all his books and talks: “The brain mediates all our experience,” he said. “Real and imagined. If I took an imaging scan of someone eating apple pie, certain areas of the brain would light up. Does that mean apple pie is just a delusion produced by the brain?”

In short, Newberg said, “We can't tell you the origin of the experience. But we can tell you the brain does appear to be built to have these experiences. There are examples of people reaching similar states, spontaneously. But for the most part, it takes work. Meditation and these powerful prayer experiences require dedication and practice. But people have figured out how to do this, and the question is, ‘What is the source of that experience?' The answer is, ‘We don't know.' Science doesn't really have an answer for you.”

Newberg's students shifted uncomfortably in their seats, some with nervous smiles. I would imagine that their brains were accessing the series of complicated questions Newberg had raised: Have the world's various religions found ways for the human machine to trick itself into experiencing something that feels profound? Or have the world's religions found ways to access something real? For that matter, is there any meaningful distinction between a
truly
profound experience and one that only
feels
that way?

After allowing this heavy silence to persist for a few seconds, Newberg went on: “Here's what I can tell you,” he said. “I can tell you, when people are having a particular spiritual experience, which parts of the brain light up. That's it. That's all I can tell you.”

I followed Newberg's class throughout the semester, and as the weeks wore on Newberg's students told me they admired their professor for avoiding big pronouncements, for avoiding the kinds of statements that fuel opposition and debate. But the irony is that, in his unrelenting humility, Andrew Newberg might be making the biggest statement of all. And his pictures of the human brain, engaged in a spiritual quest, might be just what we need to quiet this cultural war.

T
HE SPEECH OF RELIGIOUS
fundamentalists is filled with judgment and fantasy. Just consider Pat Robertson's take on Haiti, in the direct aftermath of an earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people in 2010. “They were under the heel of the French,” he said. “They got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal. . . . Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

The actions of religious fundamentalists are often as profane as their speech, and for evidence we need look no further than the Catholic Church's decades-long cover up of child sexual abuse perpetrated by some of its priests.

In response to such bad behavior, which has accumulated with the centuries, a movement has risen up—with great vengeance and furious anger.

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry,” writes Christopher Hitchens, in his bestselling rant,
God Is Not Great
, “invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. . . . With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it ‘looks forward' in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur.”

Daniel Dennett writes, in
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
, “The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight—
that
God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in.”

Perhaps most famously, the Pope of the Godless, Richard Dawkins, sounded a call to arms with an editorial he wrote after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. “Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense,” he observes. “Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness.”

Newberg might seem a physically and temperamentally slight figure to hold the center of a cultural maelstrom. He is an apologetic believer who has admitted he suspects there is some higher truth in religion but further admits he cannot prove his position. He is physically unimposing. He wears a perpetual smile. He is gentle and mild. And he altogether lacks the capacity, in my experience of him, to reach the verbal extremes that excite debate. He won't wound a man, like Hitchens will, with a wit sharpened by many long years of use in fiercely opinionated journalism. And neither will he commend another man to the fire, like Pat Robertson. But the details of his biography do reveal the contours of a strong spine.