![]() Mary, the mother of Jesus, is reported to have been told by an angel that the Holy Spirit was upon her, and Francis of Assisi described a mystical experience of brotherhood with earthly creatures, extending even to the sun and moon. While in no way directly refuting this line of argument, it is worth noting that the tradition of mystical experience is a remarkably rich and venerable one. This and similar assertions have been advanced in the form of claims that subjects who don a “ God helmet,” a device that produces low-level stimulation of the brain’s temporal lobe, experience similarly uncanny sensations. But they are, at least scientifically speaking, false. Experiences of God are not useless, because they can tell us a great deal about how the mind works. To Sacks as to others, the fact that such experiences are associated with unusual electrical activity in the brain constitutes powerful evidence that epiphanies are grounded in neurological physiology. ![]() “During this episode,” Sacks reports, “he lost his faith.” Three years later, however, the man experienced a series of three seizures on successive days, during which his mind cleared. He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divining and angelic voices, for two days.” He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in heaven…. ![]() “was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. ![]() The second patient Sacks describes is a bus conductor who, at the onset of a seizure: I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours, or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. The first, the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, describes in his own words how, in the aura of a seizure: In a 2012 article in the Atlantic, “ Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” Sacks prefaces his discussion of religious epiphanies with accounts of two epileptic patients. ![]()
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