Fingerprints of God Read Online Free PDF

compete with God?’ ” she recalled. “And I said, ‘You can’t.’ ”
    Sophy Burnham tried to make her marriage work. She had teenaged children, after all. But she had been transformed, as she put it, at a “cellular level”—to the core of her being, where she could think of little else but to pursue this God she had encountered on Machu Picchu. There was no turning back. It was as if the door back to a normal life had been locked from the other side, and she could only move forward. And like other modern-day mystics I interviewed, Sophy set about transforming her external life to match her new inner world.
    The Burnhams divorced three years after Sophy’s trip to Machu Picchu. Her daughters were furious for several years, but Sophy says she has repaired those relationships. Her choices—her single-minded pursuit of God and her resulting singleness—is yet another reason her story terrifies me.
    Had Sophy Burnham been lying in a brain-imaging machine at the time of her mystical experience, a neurologist might explain the incident like this: The part of Sophy’s brain that orients her in time and space became quiescent. Her spatial boundaries fell, creating the sense of oneness with the universe. Meanwhile, the part of the brain that handles hearing, vision, and emotions spiked, creating the roaring sounds and the particles of light that composed, for her,“the hem of the garment of God.”
    But just beneath that physical explanation lie explosive questions that scientists often prefer to ignore or to declare irrelevant. Who or what causes these spiritual dramas, these tiny gold threads of mystery that have woven their way down the centuries and into religions, through Christianity and Buddhism, through Islam and Kabbalah and Hinduism? Often, scientists can spot patterns in these mystical accounts and, with a sigh of relief, offer a diagnosis. Oh, that’s temporal lobe epilepsy. It’s schizophrenia. It’s LSD, or magic mushrooms, or a chemical that is released in the brain as it shuts down to die.
    It is, both literally and figuratively, all in the head.
    And yet, small cracks are appearing in the smooth façade of this paradigm, thanks to a small army of psychologists, geneticists, and neurologists. They are making surprising discoveries about the physiological underpinnings of the spiritual. Before delving into DNA and brain chemistry, I want to turn to the most mysterious genre of experience—the spiritual storm that passes through otherwise healthy people, often unbidden, usually unexpected, and always unexplainable by material science.
    This is the God who breaks and enters.

William James’s Outrageous Ideas
    If Sophy Burnham had crossed paths with William James, her story might have found its way into the pages of his Varieties of Religious Experience. Sophy missed the famous Harvard psychologist by a century: James’s series of lectures was published in book form in 1902. That Varieties is still regarded as the classic attempt to understand spiritual experience from a scientific perspective is, no doubt, a tribute to the originality of James’s thinking. It is also a reflection, and perhaps an indictment, of twentieth-century science, which shied away from investigating this most basic of human sentiments—the longing for “something more.”
    I like to imagine William James arriving at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. I can picture him, with full beard, receding hairline, and thick eyebrows crowning his intense eyes, approaching the lectern, gazing out at the sea of European scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals, and taking a deep breath.
    “It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk,” he began his first lecture, “and face this learned audience.” 4
    James professed to be intimidated by his colleagues’ erudition. But he must have felt a twinge of exhilaration as he began to