Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Page B

five years I don’t have as friends anymore. I have very few friends, and that is intentional. I just weed them out. I can sense people who have no depth. I don’t mean to sound rude, but after I changed, I wanted to be around others who had deeper philosophies, who were interested in exploring spirituality, who were interested in bettering their lives and empowering themselves. And if people weren’t interested in that, I didn’t want to be around it.”
    Just like Sophy Burnham. And just like me.

The First Became Last and the Last Became First
    When I told Bill Miller at the University of New Mexico about my conversations with modern-day mystics, he merely nodded.
    “It’s a one-way door,” he said. “It’s not like you decide not to go back” to your previous lifestyle and priorities. “The experience people describe is: I just am different.”
    “How did your subjects’ values change?” I asked, referring to the people he interviewed for his book Quantum Change .
    “They were turned upside down,” he said.
    Miller explained that he had asked the fifty-five people in his study to look at a list of fifty values, and rank them according to what was most important before and after the mystical experience.
    “Essentially the things that were at the top of the hierarchy [before the experience] went to the bottom,” he said.“Often what was literally number one was number fifty, and vice versa: the first became last and the last became first.”
    Before the experience, men ranked their top personal values as: wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, and being respected (in that order). After the experience, their top values were: spirituality, personal peace, family, God’s will, and honesty.
    The women seemed to have fewer self-centered values than the men to start with, but even these shifted: from family, independence, career, fitting in, and attractiveness (before the mystical experience), to growth, self-esteem, spirituality, happiness, and generosity (afterward).
    Often these subterranean changes flowered into a new career or life course. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee became a Sufi mystic and author, for example, and Arjun Patel chose to counsel the dying because of the “light.”
    Sometimes these changes dislocated their lives. Usually, the transformed people felt a twinge of regret at losing their former life but found invariably that the spiritual adventure more than compensated. I felt sorrier for their family and friends, who became the “collateral damage” of the spiritual experience, scratching their heads helplessly as the person they thought they knew disappeared forever. Virtually every woman I interviewed, and several of the men, reported that their values and goals had veered so drastically away from their spouses’ that they eventually divorced. Asked why she and her husband (whom she still loves) parted ways, Sophy Burnham replied,“I wasn’t the person that he had married.”
    “Have you paid a price?” I asked Llewellyn, the Sufi mystic.
    He chuckled wryly. “Ah, dear, yes. There’s always a price. The price is yourself.”
    “Is it painful?”
    “There’s nothing more painful.You become incredibly vulnerable, you become incredibly naked. Nobody in their right mind would want to do it.”
    “Except you can’t help it.”
    “There you go,” Llewellyn said. “You don’t have a choice.”
    What I did not realize when I said good-bye to Llewellyn was that the stories of my mystics would give me a peek into the rest of my research. Their stories would contain elements that would prove central to an array of different spiritual experiences: the sense of union with all things and the universe; the loss of fear of death; the new definition of reality and of “God”; and profound personal transformation. I heard some or all of these descriptions from people who experienced emotional breakdown or mental dysfunction, who experimented with psychedelic drugs or meditation, who had