Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941) is a very good writer, an atheist, and someone who seems eminently sensible. I was surprised, then, to see her piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “A rationalist’s mystical moment,” describing a shattering spiritual experience she had.

That experience occurred to in Lone Pine, California, the most beautiful town in the Owens Valley, flanked to the west by the near-vertical rise of the Sierra Nevada, and to the east by the barren deserts leading to Death Valley. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and it’s a good place for a “spiritual” moment, if you construe that misused word as “deeply moving.”

But Ehrenreich’s experience was far more intense:

Thanks to a severely underfunded and poorly planned skiing trip, I was sleep-deprived and probably hypoglycemic that morning in 1959 when I stepped out alone, walked into the streets of Lone Pine, Calif., and saw the world — the mountains, the sky, the low scattered buildings — suddenly flame into life.

There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, too vast and violent to hold on to, too heartbreakingly beautiful to let go of.  It seemed to me that whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze. I felt ecstatic and somehow completed, but also shattered.

Well, I’d ascribe that to some physiological reaction, as Ehrenreich suggests, but she suggests that it indicated something numinous—something out there that was real:

An alternative to the insanity explanation would be that such experiences do represent some sort of encounter. It was my scientific training, oddly enough, that eventually nudged me to consider this possibility. Sometime in middle age, when I had become a writer and amateur historian, I decided that the insanity explanation may have been a cop-out, that I could have seen something that morning in Lone Pine.

If mystical experiences represent some sort of an encounter, as they have commonly been described, is it possible to find out what they are encounters with? Science could continue to dismiss mystical experiences as mental phenomena, internal to ourselves, but the merest chance that they may represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect. Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences?

Science, I think, has always been ready to “take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences,” and we already know the source for some of them: mental illness, drugs, the power of suggestion, a trance-like state induced by meditation, and so on. What we don’t need is simply more subjective accounts, but more neuroscience.  And, indeed, if there were something transcendent that produces these experiences, presumably science would be interested in it. Perhaps, as Jeffrey Kripal suggested, our brains are radios picking up spiritual signals coming from other brains. And perhaps those brains are in dead people. Well, we could test that, by looking for reliable information from the dead, or even for evidence of ESP or other forms of inter-mind connections.  Yes, those could be tested, and have been. And they’ve shown no evidence for a non-natural, non-material source of our “uncanny experiences.” Still, we can’t rule them out completely, but, after so many searches, one reaches a point of diminishing returns, and loses enthusiasm for that search.

Ehrenreich continues:

Fortunately, science itself has been changing. It was simply overwhelmed by the empirical evidence, starting with quantum mechanics and the realization that even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and giving birth to bits of something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe. There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.

Or it could have been sleeplessness and hypoglycemia.

I’ll be very interested to see how Sam Harris’s new book, Waking Up: a Guide to Spirituality without Religion (coming out on Sept 9.) deals with such experiences. I’m hoping he’ll discuss Ehrenreich’s piece on his website.

h/t: Merilee