Lying Awake
Are visions and religious experiences caused by medical conditions real?
BY: Mark Salzman
This excerpt originally appeared in the novel "Lying Awake." For online information about this title or other books from Random House, please visit their website.
Two squirrels raced down the trunk of the sycamore tree and halted on a branch. They twitched their tails without looking directly at each other, then spiraled back up into the canopy.
I made a commitment to live by faith, not by reason.
The ever-changing pattern of jet trails overhead was the only visible reminder that the cloister occupied a specified place and time in the world.
Leaves against the sky. Green for Ordinary time, blue for the Marian feasts. The Blessed Virgin's mantle of compassion embracing the world. Sister John had promised to announce the results of her medical tests to the community following the Mass of Our Lady of Sorrows. She had several days until then to meditate and pray on the news in private, and to decide what to do.
I felt so empty for so long, Lord, but I did not turn my back on you. I gave up everything to search for you, and when I had lost everything, you found me. How could I ever doubt you?
From the materials the doctor had given her, she learned that temporal-lobe epilepsy sometimes caused changes in behavior and thinking even when the patient was not having seizures. These changes included hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy. The novelist Dostoevsky, who was epileptic, followed this model so closely that the syndrome was eventually named after him.
"There are moments," Dostoevsky wrote, "and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly...."
Two squirrels raced down the trunk of the sycamore tree and halted on a branch. They twitched their tails without looking directly at each other, then spiraled back up into the canopy.
I made a commitment to live by faith, not by reason.
The ever-changing pattern of jet trails overhead was the only visible reminder that the cloister occupied a specified place and time in the world.
Leaves against the sky. Green for Ordinary time, blue for the Marian feasts. The Blessed Virgin's mantle of compassion embracing the world. Sister John had promised to announce the results of her medical tests to the community following the Mass of Our Lady of Sorrows. She had several days until then to meditate and pray on the news in private, and to decide what to do.
I felt so empty for so long, Lord, but I did not turn my back on you. I gave up everything to search for you, and when I had lost everything, you found me. How could I ever doubt you?
From the materials the doctor had given her, she learned that temporal-lobe epilepsy sometimes caused changes in behavior and thinking even when the patient was not having seizures. These changes included hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy. The novelist Dostoevsky, who was epileptic, followed this model so closely that the syndrome was eventually named after him.
"There are moments," Dostoevsky wrote, "and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think that I was paying too dearly...."
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