Fifteen years ago I was on a bus traveling through the night between Amherst, Massachusetts and Syracuse, New York. Toward the beginning of the trip a group of people boarded, including a young woman who sat a couple of seats behind me. I had just completed an intense weekend of meditation and spiritual exercises. After a while the young woman moved up to the empty seat next to me. “Hello,” she said. She then told me many things about myself. I felt comfortably but strangely transparent. It seemed as though I were in a field of magic, and the laws of nature had been interrupted. I had a strong desire to hear more and talk and get to know this woman as a person, but just then the bus arrived in the small town of Lenox, and she walked to the front and stepped down into the darkness.
—PSYCHOLOGIST THOMAS MOORE
EVIDENCE OF THE reality of the spiritual world is not in short supply. We are drowning in it. But what we do with this evidence is up to each of us. Every spiritual experience, every encounter with a being beyond the boundary of the merely physical, whether it happens to us or whether we hear about it from someone else, is like a football, thrown high and long, straight at us. We can do two things with this football. We can use every bit of our ability to catch and run with it, or we can let it drop to the ground. Grasping the proof of all such events demands effort on our part. If we are not willing to expend that effort, no bit of evidence, no matter how strong, will convince us.
All “proof,” including the most rigorous scientific kind, demands effort on our part to apprehend, and that effort is always somehow creative in nature. If we fail to make that effort, we will not grasp any of the truths the world offers us. What it comes down to in the end is whether we are willing to accept certain truths that go contrary to beliefs we already have. That is precisely the position that people who refuse to look at all evidence of the miraculous today are in. They don’t buy it, because they are not open for a second to have it sold to them. So in the end, nothing will do it. If we don’t want to be convinced, we don’t have to be.
So how can you prove angels exist? One absolutely correct answer is to say, simply, that you can’t. You can’t prove angels exist in the way that you can prove that salt is made of sodium chloride, or that two objects of different weight fall at the same speed in a vacuum. You cannot prove that angels, or anything spiritual, exists by exerting human power on it, because the spiritual is immune to human power.
I experienced that fact firsthand while working with Eben Alexander on his book, Proof of Heaven. The title of that book, come up with at the last minute, was mine, and at first Eben balked at it a bit. Proof? Wasn’t that a little strong? “Suppose,” Eben said, “we called it My Proof of Heaven?”
But once the word proof was out, it was hard for anyone to get it back in the bag. That word ended up propelling Eben, when the book came out, into a stratosphere of seemingly never-ending controversy, one that I, from my spot on the ground, watched with ever-increasing wonder and fascination. After that, when reading a book about philosophy or religion, I became sensitive to when and where the word proof showed up. I soon noticed that one of the first things many writers on the reality of the spiritual dimension said was that spiritual reality in fact could not be “proved.”
But there is a different kind of proof than the one so many of the skeptics who complained about Proof of Heaven talked about. A proof just as real, just as solid, but different in focus. Many, many people have seen angels. Likewise, many, many people have heard angels speaking in their ear, giving them advice at just the right moment. Some have felt the touch of their hand upon their shoulder.
Meanwhile, no one on earth, not a single person, has ever once seen, much less handled and examined, an electron, or a proton, or a quark, or gravity, or dozens of other modern discoveries that we have been trained to think of in naively concrete terms. That’s not to say that they aren’t realities, of course. But it is to say that it’s not fair, and not correct, to tell someone who has seen an angel that such things are not realities—that they don’t exist because they don’t fit in with the picture of the universe that has been hammered into us by our culture since birth. If you are positive that angels don’t exist, then you’ve got your helmet securely on, and you think you see the world with full and total clarity. And, in fact, you do. But you’re seeing only half of it.
Angels, the most intense manifestation of the divine world that we can see (for as God explained to Moses, if we saw him we would die), have appeared not only to a great number of individuals, but also to a great number of groups of people as well. Cokeville is a fantastically vivid example of this phenomenon, but it is far from the only one, and if you want to read about more, open Jovanovic’s book, or Mark Booth’s The Sacred History, each of which contains dozens. Were all the people who saw these things crazy or deluded? Maybe. But we live now in a world where deciding who is crazy or deluded is not nearly as easy as it was, say, 150 years ago, when it was generally thought that science was on the brink of explaining everything in the universe.
The last-minute reversal of our confident plan to know everything about the universe came early in the twentieth century, with the appearance of modern physics. Just as we were on the verge of living in a world made up solely of atoms—tiny little objects, each one hard as a rock and easy to measure and predict—those atoms suddenly vanished into thin air. Solid matter, physicists discovered, wasn’t solid at all. That solidity was just an illusion created by us when we gazed out at the material world. We perceive our world as solid because our eyes and brains are wired to do so. In fact, the material world isn’t made of “material” at all, but an invisible force called energy. What is energy made of? No one, as yet, has an answer. So it was that, just a short century ago, the measurable, knowable world that science was getting so comfortable with measuring, understanding, and controlling, vanished with an abrupt poof.
This is fascinating, but it is also terrifying. For it turns out that though those who believed only in the material world thought they were being wonderfully brave in comparison to the poor ignorant cowards who pretended there was a God in order to get through the day, in fact just the opposite was the case.
It turned out that believing in God was much, much scarier than just believing in material reality. Why? Because if there are only atoms, and consciousness is just a wispy sort of nothing that appears for a moment and then is gone, and nothing of us survives the death of the material body and the shutting down of the material brain, we have an escape hatch from the world. It’s called death. To get away from the horror of the world, all we have to do is die.
But if the spiritual world exists? That is infinitely scarier. For that means, basically, there is no getting out of this.
So ever since materialism lost its footing about a hundred years ago (though of course many materialists continue to think its footing remains as secure as ever), we have been living in a world without a floor—a world without any certainties, in which neither science nor religion can save us from that uncertainty.
Living in a world like this produces panic. As the writer Philip Roth has suggested, if each of us were even remotely in touch with how terrified we actually are about living in such a meaningless and valueless and pain-filled universe, we would instantly go insane. Is that exaggerating? Not in the least. It is really the one fact everyone, from Baptists to Buddhists to the most hardheaded of materialists, can agree on.
Today, perhaps more than ever before in history, we live in a world of uncertainty. From the economy to the climate to the terrible things members of different faiths are doing to one another, few times—and many would say no time ever—have been quite as unsettling as this one.
In this world without certainties, the idea—and perhaps the stunning reality—of angels might have something important to teach us. Something that might help us now more than it has ever helped before. Why? Because angels are the most singularly fantastic and powerful answer to the horror of the world there is. Angels are not the highest things in the world. (God, and if you are a Christian, God and Jesus, are higher than the angels. Just as, indeed, we are—potentially—which is why Satan is said to have gotten so mad at God for creating us. Again and again in the Bible and among the church fathers, it is stressed that though the angels are superior to us in many ways, ultimately it is we humans who are the truly singular beings of God’s creation. What is so wonderful about this idea is the message of hope it gives us. We are, this line of thinking would argue, beings with a true future: beings who are on the way somewhere. This world we see is not all there is, so this linear, temporal life we are all leading is not all there is to our story. There is more—much more—to come.) But traditionally, and in practice, angels are the highest beings that appear to us down here. And it is that moment of experience, that moment when an angel appears, that is so extraordinarily valuable, for it answers instantly the nightmare of existence. In a flash, the world we thought we were stuck in is broken—shattered like glass.
If a materialist (someone who believes the world is composed of protons, neutrons, electrons, and the subatomic particles that in turn make them up, and nothing else) tells you the contrary, that there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of purely spiritual beings that show up at unpredictable times and then vanish, you can be pretty sure that he or she hasn’t spent much, or any, time with the vast amount of serious and convincing literature on the subject: literature written not by crystal-gazing tarot readers at mini-malls (not that I have anything against crystal-gazing tarot readers), but people like Gertude Rachel Levy, an accomplished archaeologist and a major figure in British archaeology throughout the middle years of the twentieth century.
Levy, as she revealed in her 1964 book The Phoenix’ Nest, was throughout her adult life in near constant contact with a being that acted as her guide on earth—her spiritual counselor, in essence. Or to use a more common term, he was her guardian angel.
The literature on immaterial tutelary beings—spirits who communicate regularly with certain men and women and guide them in their decisions and actions in life—is very large, and a lot of it is very hard to discount, other than by simply waving it away without looking at it. This last strategy is very popular, however, and so it is that books like Levy’s—a book that purely on the strength of its author’s academic credentials and her intellectual achievements in life should have been qualified for serious consideration when it came out—are instead ignored and quickly forgotten. Levy, not surprisingly, expected as much and wrote in the book itself that she wrote it not to garner attention or create a stir, but because she felt that her experiences of the other world had so convinced her of the reality of that dimension and the beings within it that it deserved to be reported about no matter what the personal consequences to her might be. All the same, our dominant intellectual culture still insists on treating all spiritual phenomena somatically—that is, as a function of the body, and more specifically, the brain—even though ordinary people go about having experiences that defy this kind of explanation every day. A stranger shows up at an auto accident, provides a crucial piece of assistance, and vanishes without anyone getting his or her name. People find themselves “guided” through life by inner voices that speak up just when something potentially dangerous is about to happen. An object appears at a certain time and place, just when a certain person needed it to, with no explanation for how it did so.
Silliness? Maybe. But it is a remarkably resilient variety of silliness: one that goes on all the time, without anyone in the materialist community being able to explain even the smallest part of it away. But of course, these things don’t always happen when we want them to. They don’t appear on demand. A young child playing on a beach gets swept out to sea. No rescuing hand comes from out of nowhere to pull her to shore. She drowns. If there is an invisible world crowded with invisible beings just dying to help us, the materialist community reasonably argues, they certainly seem to miss a lot of opportunities to do so.
To say the spiritual exists, that it is (at least in large part) a good place, and that it desires our well-being does not mean that we understand how that world works, why it manifests when it does, and why it so much more frequently doesn’t manifest at all, just when we might most have liked it to.
The piece of literature that addresses this fact most directly is, of course, the book of Job. In that story, God, goaded on by Satan (who in that book is less a figure of evil than a kind of sideman throwing God conundrums to deal with), is given all sorts of opportunities to help an individual who clearly deserves it. Instead, everything is taken from him. The “moral” of the book of Job is generally agreed to be that part of having religious faith—a big part—is accepting that the events of this world don’t turn out exactly as we’d like them to. Drowning children aren’t always saved, and water glasses don’t go smashing against the wall, even at moments when if they did, such an event would provide a wonderful opportunity to convince many people who don’t believe in God or the invisible world in general to change their minds.
But then again, sometimes events do work that way. And they have done so many, many more times than once. Why here and not there? Why to this person but not that one? That answer is the same now as it was when the book of Job was written: God’s ways are not our ways. We don’t know.
But here’s the important thing: when it comes to establishing the actual existence of a spiritual world, that doesn’t matter. As the nineteenth-century American philosopher and creator of the discipline of psychology William James pointed out more than a century ago, to prove a thing or creature or phenomenon exists, one does not need to keep on proving it exists again and again. One needs, in fact, only to demonstrate convincingly that it happened once.
Science—specifically, the experimental method on which science is built—argues that for something to be scientifically true, it must be shown to exist in the right-in-front-of-us physical world whenever we want it to and as many times as we want it to. We can make sodium chloride by mixing hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide all day and all night, and the results will always be the same. That’s the scientific method, and it’s how we determine if a phenomenon is real or not.
Yet at the same time, there are many experiments in physics at the quantum level that are devilishly hard to make happen again and again. In recent years, certain subatomic reactions are becoming harder and harder to reproduce, even though a few decades ago they were (comparatively) easy to bring about. How on earth are we to explain this? As yet, no one can.
The primary argument of many of the greatest religious texts, both ancient and modern, is that the “rules” of the spiritual world cannot be explained from the standpoint of this world—the immediate, plain-as-nails physical one right in front of us. Just as angels are actual, personal beings but not human beings, so the spiritual world has rules and regulations, but they are not the rules and regulations of our world. Its parameters of explanation are much larger, and we flatter ourselves when we imagine that we have anything more than the remotest grasp of what they are. This seems, at least to me, an argument that we should listen to.