Washington National Cathedral

Dean Sam Lloyd: Good morning, and welcome back to the third go-round for the Sunday Forum. We are off to an absolutely fascinating start with our guest. We have with us someone with us whose voice you have probably heard quite a bit of, those of you who might be NPR listeners, and I think there a few of you out there.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the religion correspondent for National Public Radio. She’s been there since 2003 after a very significant career as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. But most recently, Barbara has plunged into an absolutely fascinating arena, exploring the intersection between science and faith and, more specifically, science and ecstatic or mystical religious experience. What does science make of all these experiences, and what do the mystics and the religious seekers make of what the scientists have to say?

She takes us on what is, in many ways, a personal exploration of this whole area of science and faith and interviews a fascinating array of players. Her new book is called Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Barbara, it is wonderful to have you here to start our new year.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty: Oh thank you, it’s great to be here.

Lloyd: Great. Well let’s start with this Fingerprints of God. One of the things that strikes as somebody begins to read it: it’s very much a personal journey. It’s not simply a report on scientists and mystics and their experiences, but you framed it as a personal exploration. What made you decide to go about it that way?

Hagerty: Well, I think one thing that made me decide to make it personal, and actually show my cards a little bit, was that I didn’t want to sound like an anthropologist looking at these funny little people with these funny little religious spiritual experiences, if you see what I mean.

What I wanted to do was show that I have had these experiences as well. I had one very dramatic one back about, let’s see, in 1995 or so. And that experience actually shifted the way that I looked at the world, and it made me think that perhaps there really is a spiritual reality. You know, it was something I believed in before, but for the first time, I really thought maybe there is a spiritual reality that sometimes we tap into, that breaks into our world, and if that’s the case, is there any way to prove it? Now, I should say at the outset, there is no way to prove there is God or a spiritual dimension.

Lloyd: You are giving away the end of your book. [laughter]

Hagerty: But I would say there are fingerprints of God, there is circumstantial evidence of God. And what I set about doing, it took me—oh, I don’t know, about eleven years to muster up the courage to go ahead and take a leave of absence from NPR and research the book. But what I ended up doing was really trying to see what science is seeing, what evidence they’re finding of God, what circumstantial evidence they’re finding of God.

Lloyd: You do have a fascinating personal story that unfolds, beginning with your growing up in Christian Science. Would you say something about the framing of this story in terms of your beginning, and that powerful experience that launched you on this new way?

Hagerty: Sure. I was raised a Christian Scientist and, as many of you know, what they’re famous for is not going to doctors. Put another way, these are people who put their money where their mouth is, in the sense [that] they really believe that prayer works. They believe that when you tap into a spiritual reality that your body conforms, that your sickness will be healed, or your relationships will improve, or whatever the situation is that needs to be “healed” will be healed.

And so I was raised to think that there is, in the most reductionist way, that thoughts have power, that prayers actually affect your world. I never lost that sense. I had a really happy encounter with Tylenol when I was in graduate school back in 1994, which made me think that medicine was really a very wonderful thing and that I wanted it to be an intimate part of my life, and so ended up leaving Christian Science. But I didn’t leave that notion that prayer works.

And a couple of years back, in 1995, what happened… I was, I had left the Christian Science Monitor right after going to graduate school, and I was doing a story for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, may it rest in peace. It is no longer extant.

But I was doing a story for them about why some churches grow and other churches don’t grow, and in the course of this I went out to a place called Saddleback Church. Now back then, there were only about ten thousand people going to that church. It actually wasn’t very well known. But I was interviewing a woman named Kathy Young, and it was after the Saturday night service. We were sitting under a street light. We were sitting on a bench, and she was talking to me about how her melanoma had returned, but that she didn’t see this melanoma coming back as an attempt by God to kill her, but to give her a transcendent purpose, to help other people.

And as she was talking… it was a very powerful story, and I was really engaged in this story, and as she was talking, something very odd happened, kind of spooky. The air grew thick and moist, as if someone were breathing on us. It was as if someone had stepped into this little circle of light that we were sitting in that night and was breathing on us.

And it wasn’t just me that felt it, she felt it as well. She stopped midsentence and I felt this thing, this kind of change in atmosphere for about thirty seconds, sixty seconds, not very long, and then it receded.

And I said, “Kathy this has just been so much fun, thank you so much.’ And I shut down the interview.

I was really spooked, drove back to LA, but all I could think of was, “Was I crazy? Was that the firing of my temporal lobe, or, in fact, did something actually happen? Is there a God, possibly, that stepped into that circle, that made his presence known?” And that moment was a powerful moment, because it changed really my world view, my view of reality and, as I said, it took another eleven years to go about writing the book, researching the book, but it was the impetus for me to find out, was I crazy or not?

Lloyd: Your book is filled with accounts that circle around that very same kind of experience. Why don’t you describe what you see as the commonality in those experiences and just to fill out the story, tell us about being in the woods in Tennessee? Because that was another place where a powerful moment happened. What I would like to do is talk about, more broadly, what are these experiences, and what seems to be happening to people? And then talk about what the scientists are doing with them.

Hagerty: Yes. Well, the moment in Tennessee is when I got lost in the woods, in the mountains one night after I was moderating a conference down there, and I got lost in the Smoky Mountains for about six hours. And while I was going up and down these mountains, trying to figure out how on earth to get back, I came across a stream.

It was actually, it was a stream, but to me—it was April, and so it looked like this, or March I guess it was,—this rushing, powerful stream that was, you know, about fifty feet across or so, and I knew that I had to get across the stream to get to safety. But I didn’t want to do that, because it looked really, it looked actually pretty frightening, and I didn’t want to get wet—or drowned, for that matter. And so I kept going back up the mountain, trying to find alternate routes, to find a road. And I couldn’t.

And finally I decided, I can’t keep coming back to the stream, and finally I decided the only way for me to get home is to cross the stream and get to that little white house that I can see in the distance. And so I finally mustered up the courage, dove in, tumbled across the stream, made it across, and got to the white house and found my way home.

That was actually a turning point. That was actually when I decided to write the book. Because I realized that I had spent a lot of time kind of playing it safe with these questions. These were really important questions to me: Is there God? Is there any evidence of God? Or is what I believe a delusion?

And so I realized that I had been spending a lot of time on the mountainside trying not to get wet, and what I needed to do was plunge into the questions. And when I got to the other side, when I decided to go ahead and make that plunge and ask these questions, I found on the other side that there were a whole group of scientists out there who are very prominent, who are very smart and are actually studying these questions, often are taking their career in their hands to do it, but are studying these questions.

Now in terms of the commonalities, I found commonalities in a couple of ways. One is, I interviewed probably at least eighty people just about their spiritual experiences, just to get going. And what I found was that their experiences were very, very similar, no matter what religious background they came from.

So I interviewed Sufis, and I interviewed Catholics and Protestants and Jews and people who were spiritual, but not religious, and Hindus. And what they described was they had this encounter with the Divine that was very, very similar, similar elements. They felt often a sense of overwhelming light, love. This is with this dramatic spiritual, spontaneous experience… overwhelming love, a sense of light. Often they have an out-of-body experience, a sense that they were at one with this being, this Other. They had a sense that all would be well, they had a sense that life was eternal, that this was but a phase, but that somehow we connect, we continue on.

And when they returned from this experience, all of them were transformed, transformed in really fundamental ways, their ambitions were different. Who they hung out with was different. Many of them left their jobs and started new careers, doing things that were more non-profitish, or they went into ministry, or they did things like that. And so what I found was there was this one Other that people connected with and other scientists have found this as well. William Miller at the University of New Mexico did a similar study, a book called Quantum Change. He found the same things: that people have this encounter with the Divine. They don’t quite know what to call it, but it’s very similar and it’s absolutely transformative.

Lloyd: Why don’t we talk about some of the ways those experiences are happening in the book. You have some fascinating chapters on some rather exotic things that might be going on. Tell us about the “God helmet.”

Hagerty: The God helmet. Okay, by quickly getting into that, the scientists believe—neurologists believe that, if there is a seat of spirituality, you know, a place that is absolutely necessary for spiritual experience, it would be the temporal lobe. The temporal lobe runs along the side of the head, and the temporal limbic system mediates things like hearing, smell, memory, that kind of thing. So they believe that, when people have ecstatic visions or even ecstatic temporal lobe seizures, that it is really the firing of their temporal lobe.

I have a little bit of problem with that, because a lot of them try to reduce, say that Paul on the road to Damascus, he just had a temporal lobe seizure, or Buddha, or Muhammad, or Joan of Arc, all of this was just temporal lobe epilepsy. Now I have a little trouble with that. But that is what they say.

But let’s just say for a second, something that I actually believe: the temporal lobe may be very much involved with spiritual experience, which makes sense, because if there is a God, he would create (which I believe there is), he would create us to connect with him. How would we connect with God? Well, probably not through the big toe, probably through the brain. And so, the temporal lobe may be a place that God uses to connect with us.

Lloyd: … that might be the receptors.

Hagerty: That’s right, the receptors, exactly. So there is a neurologist up in Canada named Michael Persinger at Laurentian University. And Michael Persinger is a reductionist. He believes that there is no such thing as God, but that if you manipulate the temporal lobe enough, in a certain way, you can create the God experience in someone’s head. So he’s created this thing called the God helmet. And I went up there to experience it. I wanted to see if he could create God in my head.

And so I went up there, and it was evening when he finally sat me down in his little chamber. It was stunningly low tech. He doesn’t have much money to conduct these experiments, so he sat me in this overstuffed, ripe—we’ll just put it that way—ripe chair, a kind of, with a little blanket in the back in case I got cold and he put on my head a modified motorcycle helmet.

You can see a picture of it when you go to npr.org. There is me in my modified motorcycle helmet which has electrodes on it, which basically, the electrodes would stimulate parts of my temporal lobe, the eight electrodes stimulating parts of my brain. And then he—to make sure I was completely sensory deprived, he put little goggles over my eyes, stuffed with napkins. That’s how low tech it was. So there I am, sitting in this God Helmet, with napkins in my helmet covering my eyes. And he goes to the next room and begins.

The interesting thing is I had a microphone. I was miked, so he could hear what I was saying in the next room, where he was manipulating my temporal lobes. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I had put a microphone in his room, so later I could hear the recording of what he was saying. And what he did is, he manipulated my temporal lobes.

And to me it was just, it was silly. I mean, you know, I kind of saw little things that anyone sees when their eyes are closed for thirty minutes. They’d see little visions or whatever, and that’s a natural thing to happen. And so after, and I also felt, he called it an “out of body experience,” I got very very sleepy and I said that I felt at one with the chair. Well, he classified that as an “out of body experience.”

Now I see where he gets his stunning statistics, but afterwards, I really kind of thought it was a sham. I did not feel God, I did not feel that I was in the presence of the holy. But I have to tell you that six months later, I listened back through the tape of him and what he would say. He would say, “Ok, I am doing a certain pattern firing on your temporal lobe now. In thirty seconds or so you should see, off to your left, little faces, little goblin-like faces.”

And then you would hear me, in the tape recorder because it was coming through on the speaker—you’d hear me say, “You know I am seeing some kind of goblin-like faces off to my left. And he’d say, you know, a little bit later, “Okay, now you should feel a sense of evil.” And a minute later I could hear myself saying, “You know, I see this roiling darkness, like I am in a deep dark forest.”

The upshot was he in fact did manipulate my temporal lobes, and he did in fact make me see or feel something by manipulating my temporal lobes, but was that God? Absolutely not.

It wasn’t God. What that tells me is that we, of course, we’re physical beings, and if God is going to use us, to communicate with us, he is going to use our brain. But does that mean that God is only in the brain and you can make God appear and disappear at will? Absolutely not. But it was a fascinating experience.

Lloyd: In your book there also is record of what you call, looking at what you call some serious spiritual virtuosos, people who are contemplatives and mystics and looking at their brain patterns. What did you learn from that?

Hagerty: Right. It was fascinating. There’s a couple of fascinating take-aways from that. Several scientists, including Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania have looked at different people who meditate or pray for long periods of time. So Buddhist monks who have more than ten thousand hours of meditation under their belt, or under their robes. Or Franciscan nuns who spend their time in a lot of contemplative prayer. He’s also looked at Sikhs who spend time chanting, and other religious groups. And what he has found is that—and this goes to what we were saying about the same other—what he has done is, he has looked at their brains in the moment when he believes they are in the height of their ecstatic experience, their meditative or prayer experience.

Now he can’t know for sure; I won’t go into all the details. But it’s a pretty good guess that they are absolutely experiencing God, or the ground of being, or something, when he is taking a snapshot of their brain. What he’s found is that the same parts of the brain light up and go dark, no matter what the religion.

Okay, so the part of the brain that mediates, that works on focused attention, it’s called the frontal lobe. That is a cauldron of activity. Because it makes sense, when people are praying deeply or meditating deeply, they are focusing, they are focusing on Jesus in one case, or focusing on, you know, doing compassionate intention in the other case in the monks, but they are concentrating.

The fascinating part is that there is a part of the brain that goes dark, and that is called the parietal lobe. And that is the part of the brain that orients you in time and in space. It tells you where your body ends and the universe begins. That part of the brain goes dark, meaning that they have no sense of personal boundaries. They feel at one with God. They feel at one with the Universe. They feel a timelessness, a spacelessness, a sense of eternity.

That feeling that they describe, that we hear from mystics down the ages, is actually a brain phenomenon as well, which once again makes sense. Now one of the interesting take-aways is that the same things happen no matter what your religion. There is an exception to that rule. Charismatics, Pentecostals seem to have something very different going on in their brains, but generally the same thing happens. It’s as if the nuns took, used MapQuest and the monks used Google Maps and they went the same routes and got to the same place, the same spiritual experience.

Does that mean that all religions are the same? Absolutely not. But what it does mean, possibly, possibly, is that from the point of view of the brain, spiritual experience is spiritual experience. There are commonalities there, maybe not in doctrine but in experience.

Lloyd: Very good. In a minute I want to go to questions from the audience. I suspect there will be a few, but I can’t leave this phase without just saying it gets more and more exotic as your book goes on: out-of-body experiences, instances of a couple who know each other well, completely cut off from each other, seemingly able to communicate or send brain waves to each other. Talk a little bit about those outer edges you were exploring, too.

Hagerty: Right. I felt that materialist science didn’t answer all the questions about spiritual experience. I felt that materialists try to say it’s all brain activity, spiritual experience is just brain activity, but that didn’t seem to work.

There are two huge debates right now and I’ll just briefly mention them. One is the notion of prayer. Scientists believe, yes, that my thoughts affect my body. My prayers do in fact affect my body. It’s called psycho-neuro-immunology. When you have a word like that, you know that science has accepted it.

But what is far more controversial is the notion that my thoughts or prayers can affect your body. There is no mechanism for that. And there have been prayer studies over the years, and at best those studies were mixed. At worst those studies seemed to show that one person’s prayers do not affect another person’s body. However, I think—many people think that those studies are flawed. And the reason they are flawed is because they don’t take into account how prayer is done. Prayer is generally done when one person cares deeply about the outcome. One person is praying for the other person. They’re connected in some way. Not always, but often. That is how it’s done. So they are deeply connected in some way.

So there’s a whole new set of studies a whole new set of studies that are being funded by NIH and other places, which look at bonded couples. And I went and I looked at one of these studies. Essentially what they found—it’s called a love study, by the way, which is a great term. When you have two people who are bonded, a husband and a wife, that’s what I saw, when you put them in isolated rooms, and you have the husband think about the wife at random intervals and they are both hooked up with physiological, you know, they are looking at pulse rate and sweat glands, and things like that, so they are using all these physiological measurements to see what each person’s physiology is doing.

When the husband thinks about the wife at random ten second intervals over a half-hour period, what they found is, yes, the husband’s physiology changes when he sees an image of his wife on the short-circuit television—the closed-circuit television, excuse me. But the question was, would the wife’s physiology respond?

Lo and behold, it did. That when the husband was looking at the wife, and the wife had no idea that he was, her physiology seemed to mirror his during those ten seconds, going up and down. And then it would go quiescent, you know: it would go back to normal when he wasn’t thinking about her.

The chances of this happening by chance were 11,000 to one, or one in 11,000, we’ll put it that way. These seem to indicate that somehow we are connected. Mystics talk about this, that we are all connected in some way. The scientists talk about quantum entanglement, that in some way, maybe we are all connected. This is a huge and controversial area but I think this area might begin to chip away at the paradigm that we are just material beings who are unconnected, who cannot connect with each other.

I think that this begins to suggest that maybe the mystics had it right, that maybe we are all connected, in this one quantum soup or by this thing called God.

Lloyd: Okay, thank you. Let’s go to questions. Deryl.

Deryl Davis: We’ve got a few questions to start with here, and I ask you in the audience if you would begin passing your questions into the center aisle. To start with, “How did the process, how did your conception of God change through the process of researching, reporting, and writing this book?”

Hagerty: That’s a really great question. And it’s a very uncomfortable one, in the sense that as a journalist, I try… Well, I was very personal in this book, but I’ll tell you how it changed. I knew that I was running, I had a danger when I started this book, and that danger was that I would find out that God was a sham. That God is completely explainable by material methods. And what I found is, there is enough circumstantial evidence pointing to a spiritual reality that I can believe both in science and in God.

That’s a hallelujah for me, to tell you the truth. I am really glad, because I was afraid I might find there wasn’t such a thing as God. And so what… the way God, my perception of God changed is, I have, in a way, a kind of binary view of God now. One is the God that Einstein talked about; and the other is an infinite intelligence that stitches together the universe. I think that’s utterly defensible, even using science: that the world, the universe, is so intricately and finely tuned that there had to be an intelligence stitching it together. Many astrophysicists and physicists believe this as well.

So on the one hand I really feel that God is a defensible proposition. That’s wonderful. On the other hand, my view of God in terms of my own personal beliefs didn’t really change. I am a Christian. I am a believer. One thing that did happen, though, is that I have to be utterly humble when I think about other religions. Now I feel I always was, but there is a lot of connection between religions, between spiritual experiences among religions and we have to be really, really humble when we… I feel I can’t judge, a sense of, I can’t say one religion has an absolute claim on truth. I know that’s controversial, but all I am saying is, you know, this is a work in progress. The science tells me that people from different faiths have very similar experiences, and so we have to be respectful of other religions.

Davis: “Do you think that we will ever have scientific proof of the existence of God, of a spiritual reality?”

Hagerty: I asked that question to every scientist I talked to. “Can you think of an experiment that would prove or disprove God? And all of them said no, we can’t think of anything right now but never say never, essentially.

I think there’s one area that we’re kind of getting close to that. It’s not so much proving a spiritual reality, but it’s proving, maybe suggesting, that our consciousness might extend beyond the body, beyond the brain. And that is, I looked a lot at out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. And I won’t go into the most dramatic experiences, but there is one case, the case of Pam Reynolds, that I really believe suggests that our consciousness survives, if not death, our consciousness can operate when the brain is not functioning well. You hear a lot about this, about people looking down. You know, they’ve had a cardiac arrest. It’s as if they look down and can see what’s happening around them and all of that. That suggests that their consciousness is operating when their brain isn’t functioning well.

Lloyd: Tell us about Pam Reynolds

Hagerty: You want to hear about Pam Reynolds? Okay, Pam Reynolds. In 1991, Pam Reynolds suddenly got very sick. She went to the doctor. She couldn’t talk. She went to the doctor and it turned out that there was this enormous aneurysm on her brain stem. It was about to blow. It was about to kill her. And so she did what was, back then, a very experimental surgery. It is called a standstill operation.

She went out to Barrow Neurological Institute. And what they did with Pam Reynolds is essentially, they drained the blood out of her head, like oil from a car engine. What they did is, they—the reason they wanted to do that is because, if they drained the blood out of her head, they could go in, the aneurysm sac would collapse. They could go in, snip it, you know, sew it back up, and she’d be good as new. But to do this experiment, what they had to do is, they had to lower her body—put her under deep anesthesia, lower her body temperature to sixty-five degrees. They covered her eyes, they taped them shut. They put in her ears clickers that were as loud as ninety to one hundred decibels, that’s like a jet plane going off if you are standing on the tarmac. The reason they did that was they wanted to make sure there was no brain activity at all before they started, you know, draining the blood out of her head. You know, good idea.

And so she had no perception. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear, she was under deep anesthesia, and she was in a hypothermic state. Even when she had blood in her head, there was no way that she could form or retain memories.

When she came back from this—when they completed this surgery, and she came back eight hours later, she could describe large parts of the operation. She could describe the Midas Rex bone saw the neurosurgeon used. She said it looked like an electric toothbrush. She could describe the drill bits and the case they came into. She could describe how many people were around the operating theatre. She could describe conversations, even though she couldn’t hear. She heard a conversation where, supposedly, where one surgeon said to another, “Her left femoral vein is too small.” And another surgeon said, “Well, then try her right,” so he could slip a tube up her. She could hear these things. She saw them when they resuscitated her. She could hear conversations. How could she do this?

I talked to the neurosurgeon about it. I interviewed people about this. The neurosurgeon said that there is no way to explain this from a material scientific point of view. She could not have formed or retained memories when her brain was in that state.

How do you explain it? He doesn’t know, but he said it changed his view of reality. Now one thing I think this suggests is that maybe, maybe our consciousness, our identity—dare I say our soul—survives when the brain isn’t working well, when the brain is stopped. Maybe that’s a possibility. This is, as I say, the camel’s nose under the tent. This is the cutting edge, the big debate in neuroscience that might be able to prove that there is more than this, that we are more than molecules and our identity is more than a brain.

Davis: I am marrying two questions here that have to do with brain activity and spiritual experience. “Did scientists discover any differences in terms of age, say, between children having spiritual experiences and their brain activity and adults? And likewise, what is the difference between that sort of brain activity and Pentecostals and Charismatics and people of other traditions?”

Hagerty: Right, I should say first, I didn’t study children at all. You hear a lot of anecdotal evidence. Children just seem to have a thinner veil between this world and the next. They seem to be more perceptive. And many of the people I interviewed in my book also had been very kind of spiritually minded children. So I think there may be a connection, but that may be a genetic thing. They were wired that way. The other part, tell me what was the other part?

Davis: Differences between Pentecostals…

Hagerty: Pentecostals. Okay, this is pretty interesting. Pentecostals have the opposite brain activity as monks and nuns. And it makes a little bit of sense when you think about it. Pentecostals, they are very active, they are speaking in tongues, and what happens is the front part of their brain which is the part that focuses and is organized, the executive part, that actually goes dark. And the other part of the brain, the parietal lobe, actually lights up, or it stays lit up.

And what they believe, what Andrew Newberg, who’s looked at this, believes, is that their experience… once again, their brain once again is reflecting their experience. When you talk about Pentecostals, what they say is, “I don’t feel at one with Jesus, it’s not like I lose my boundaries. I am very much aware of myself and where I am, but I am having a conversation with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit. I am having a conversation and the Holy Spirit is flowing through me, but Jesus is a separate thing.” So they don’t lose their boundaries.

On the other hand, I think that this whole business of the frontal lobes going dark has to do with the notion that they are speaking a kind of pre-language language, you know, a primitive language that actually isn’t really a language. Andrew Newberg has only done about a dozen Pentecostals. He’s found the same thing but he can’t quite explain it all. But what’s interesting is, I guess, the meditative prayer is very different from, say the jumping around, you know, speaking in tongues type of prayer.

Lloyd: Let me jump in and ask a question to bring it back from the exotic to the more ordinary. One of the questions that occurred to me reading your book was, it focuses largely on mystical moments, ecstatic experiences, in your study, as the quintessential religious experience. You cited in your book, I thought it was fascinating, that ninety per cent of Americans at least believe, I think, in a personal God. Fifty percent say they’ve had some kind of life-changing, almost transformative, experience.

Now maybe it’s because I’m an Episcopalian, but they don’t seem quite as religiously ecstatic as maybe some other people are. And yet I find people in mainline traditions faithful, thoughtful. My sense is a lot of people would love to have one of those experiences, but probably have not. Take that piece. Then take the other piece, that Jesus doesn’t really try to help people… just to take somebody, Jesus doesn’t really try to help people have ecstatic experiences. If we take the lessons for today or any day in here, it’s a lot more like losing your life to find it, becoming a servant, living a certain path, living a certain way, not for the fruit of an ecstatic experience, but that he actually is saying that, living that way, you will find yourself drawing closer to God.

I guess I am asking, how would you bridge this remarkable study of these particular kinds of experiences with maybe the more ordinary life of a practicing Christian?

Hagerty: Right. That’s a great question. And the people I studied—I have to say, the people I looked at had had very dramatic experiences. I looked at them on the theory that the extreme might tell us something about the more mundane. Those fifty percent of the people who have had these transformative moments, I don’t think they’re like the people I described in my book.

They were more like the quiet moments that I had. I think of mine as this little baby mystical experience compared to these other experiences I heard about. So I think people have these quiet transformative moments.

But I also think that you’re absolutely right, spiritual experience is a destination and not just a moment. I think one of the reasons that religions have spiritual practices like prayer, like meditation, even singing in the choir, things like that, is that it does train us. Like going to the gym and sculpting our muscles, it does train us to have these spiritual muscles.

You can be a spiritual luddite. I consider something of a spiritual luddite, and yet I go to the gym every day. And so I will never be a Tiger Woods, I won’t be like some of these people I’ve studied, but in my daily practice I think I become closer and closer to God. And I think that’s what most of us have and I think that religions are great in the sense that they promote that. They give us a means, they give us the gym to go do our spiritual workouts and they help us figure out how to do it.

So I think that most people are not like those people I’ve studied, but there is hope for us all.

Lloyd: And your study is charting out the territory within which ordinary religious experience is one dimension of it and that’s another. But you’re also trying to argue for the case that it’s there.

Hagerty: That’s right. You know someone asked me recently, “Do you have absolute proof that these people had a spiritual experience? Well you know, no. I mean the answer to that is no. I can’t say these people absolutely touched God. I can’t. No one can say that.

But what I can say is that spiritual experience, whether it is large or small, is sui generis, it is different from other types of experiences. I think you can go to the opera and have a transcendent moment. I think you can watch the Red Sox, or probably not the Redskins, you can watch, certainly not the Nats… But you can go to a baseball or football game and have transcendent moment, but you don’t return changed. You don’t return from that moment with a completely different world view.

What we find with spiritual experience is that people are transformed. If I may, I wrote this down, actually, because William Miller has looked at this and what he found, I think you’ll all enjoy this. He looked at people who had had dramatic—what he calls quantum change—spiritual experiences, and he found, he asked them to rank their priorities before and after this experience. And I’ll tell you what the men said. The women were a little less crass to begin with, so they are less interesting.

But the men, the men were really interesting to look at how they changed. Before these men had their experience, their top priorities were, in this order: wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, and being respected. After the experience, their top priorities, in this order, were spirituality, personal peace, family, God’s will, and honesty. Now that’s a dramatic change that you don’t get from watching the Red Sox or going to the opera. I think spiritual experience is different in that sense.

Lloyd: Thank you. Deryl?

Davis: We have a question here asking if scientists are offering any evolutionary arguments, Darwinian arguments, for the development of a spiritual experience or physiology?

Hagerty: I didn’t really look at the evolutionary arguments because they have been so well covered. There is an evolutionary argument, especially for religion. The notion that self-sacrifice and working in a community makes a community stronger and so you can beat up your neighbors, right, so you can beat up the next community to survive, the next community, so there is an evolutionary reason for religion in that kind of community.

There are arguments that man has evolved to have a sense, it’s how they answer the question, say, of death. That we don’t like to contemplate the fact that we fade to black. And that we have developed this sense, this notion what many would say is a myth of God and eternal life. There are evolutionary arguments, I just would suggest that anyone who had had a spiritual experience doesn’t believe those arguments. And they could be true, but I have never heard them voiced from someone who wasn’t a materialist. So all I can say is that I respect the arguments. I don’t buy them, I respect them; but for me personally they don’t carry the water.

Davis: “Obviously you’re a religion reporter. Have you ever felt any tension between your work as a religion reporter and your own religious experience?”

Hagerty: Have I felt tension? You know what’s really great about believing there is a God, and having had spiritual experiences and practicing my faith, what’s great is that I really have a lot of respect for anyone who holds, has strongly held beliefs, and atheists too. They have a good religion too, I think they have a religion too and it’s called atheism. I really respect anyone who has thought through their belief system and really is passionate about it.

And so what I find is I am fascinated, covering religion, to hear why people believe what they believe. There is always a reason for why people believe what they believe. Why did that person become an evangelical? It was a born again experience. But there are other things going on here too. Why did she convert to Islam? I don’t know. Let’s hear about it. And so for me, I have never found a tension between my own beliefs, because I have my beliefs, but you know what, they have a reason for theirs as well and my question is, “Why tell me about it, let’s hear the story.” So I’ve never had a problem with that.

Davis: “We’ve experienced in the past century a relationship between science and religion where they haven’t been much friends. Do you see that changing as we move into the future?”

Hagerty: There is a real competition between the two. Do I see it changing? Probably not any time soon, and I will tell you the reason why. As you cited, about ninety percent of Americans believe in God. Seven percent of the elite scientists in the National Academy of Scientists believe in God. So I think there is a disconnect here between some of people, many of the elite people doing the science and those of us who believe that there may be a spiritual reality. I think what may happen is that we may begin to have a paradigm shift. That as the circumstantial evidence coming from the kind of science that I looked at in my book and we we’ve talked about today. As that evidence begins to accumulate, I think more and more scientists… Now, this is my belief, I may be wrong, but more and more scientists will begin to say, “you know, we need to look at this, we need to understand this thing called consciousness. We have to explain how Pam Reynolds could do what she did, see what she saw and [hear] what she heard. We have to explain this.”

And I think as more and more scientists begin to look at this—and more and more are… We may have a paradigm shift, where this materialist paradigm—that we’re nothing but an assembly of nerve cells—that paradigm may fall. In which case you may have more of an interlap, a friendly overlap and exchange between science and at least spirituality and faith, if not religion.

Lloyd: You mentioned take-aways a couple of times in your reporting. What would you suggest as a take-away or two for people like us, people who are either seekers and wondering about God, or people who have a strong faith and are worshiping on a regular basis. This takes us into a fascinating terrain. It’s sort of like explorers out on the edge, and you have come back with a pack full of data from this amazing exploration, this amazing conversation that’s happening out there. How do you think that impacts the life we’re living as we pick up right here?

Hagerty: Well, I think one thing that I learned from my experience is we don’t need to be afraid of science.

I found nothing in my research that would suggest that there isn’t a God. Now, I can’t prove God or a spiritual dimension. I found nothing that would say that. And so I think you can kind of sally forth without fear, looking at this. And I would jump into the evidence. Maybe there are things that science can’t explain away.

And I am open to the evidence, maybe more fundamentalist views, say, of evolution, or that we live in an earth that is only five years old. I think science has undercut that. Well that’s okay. You know, that’s fine. Does it undercut the notion that there is a God who orchestrates the universe and wires us to be able to connect with him? I don’t think it does undercut that. So I think, I think, that my sense is that we can all go forward and explore the science.

You know, when I got to the end of my research, I realized I had talked to a lot of scientists, a lot of them who believed there might be a spiritual reality and a lot who believed that that was hogwash. What I realized is that how you look at this evidence is kind of like a Rorschach test: that what you bring to the evidence is how you interpret it. And actually, Andrew Newberg at Penn gave me a wonderful analogy that I really like. “When you are eating a piece of apple pie, things in your brain happen. Certain things happen. So when you’re lifting the fork to your mouth, the part of the brain that mediates, say, smell, lights up. As you get closer, the part of the brain that mediates, say, memory, lights up. So you think about the last time you had a piece of apple pie. Does that mean, because there is brain activity, that there is no apple pie?” Course not.

Now, God is a little harder to prove, because you can’t put God on a fork and measure him. But just because there is brain activity, when people have these spiritual experiences, does that mean that it’s only brain activity? And I would argue no, now we can’t answer that question. Science can’t answer that question, but it’s a valid question. And I think for people who want to believe, as I do, who believe that they have touched a spiritual reality at some point in their lives, who believe that there is something more than this, I believe our brain is the way that we connect with that spiritual reality. That’s how we connect with God. Just as the brain is how we understand the eating of apple pie.

Lloyd: I think we’ll stop there on that fascinating note. This has been a wonderful conversation. I want to thank you for that. Hope you will join us next week as we take up a rather more mundane subject, which is keeping our faith in the middle of this economy. David Miller from Princeton University will be with us to talk about putting faith and our current economy together.

We hope you will linger for our service at 11:15 today. But for now, Barbara will be at the west end of the church signing copies of her book, so by all means stop by and say hello to her. Please join me in thanking Barbara for this. [Applause.]