The Future of God by Deepak Chopra

Author:Deepak Chopra [Chopra, Deepak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88499-2
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

A scientist sees a healing

Establishing that miracles exist requires two steps. First, we have to take down the wall that separates the natural from the supernatural. Fortunately, that’s fairly easy to do since the wall was artificial to begin with. The basis of everything in the physical world is the quantum domain. If anything deserves to be called the zone of miracles, it is this level of nature. Here the laws that make miracles “impossible” are fluid. The constraints of space and time as we know them do not hold.

One of the most revered among modern Catholic saints was a humble southern Italian priest, Padre Pio (1887–1968), who caused consternation in the Church by gathering huge crowds and countless believers among the common people. Besides healing the sick, one of Padre Pio’s miracles was bilocation, appearing in two places at once. If this occurrence happened at the quantum level, miracles would be a simple matter. Every particle in the universe can also transition into the state of a wave embedded in the quantum field, and instead of existing in two places at once, such waves exist everywhere at once.

But Padre Pio wasn’t a quantum; therefore the behavior common to the subtlest level of nature can’t automatically be transferred to the grosser level where we live our lives. There must be a second step of proof, showing that the merging of natural and supernatural takes place all around us. Skeptics consider this step impossible, but that’s far from the case. Scientists have been present for supernatural events. There have been hundreds of controlled experiments in psychic phenomena, for example. When a scientist views an actual miracle, however, the inner conflict that results is acute.

In May 1902 a young French physician named Alexis Carrel boarded a train bound for Lourdes. A friend, another doctor, had asked him to be in attendance on a group of the sick who were traveling to the famous shrine in hopes of a cure. Normally the dying were not permitted on board, but a woman named Marie Bailly had smuggled herself on. She was dying of complications from tuberculosis, the disease that had killed both her parents. Her belly was hard and distended from peritonitis; doctors in Lyon had refused to operate given the severe risk that she would die during surgery.

During the trip Carrel was called to Bailly’s side when the woman became semiconscious. He examined her, confirmed the diagnosis of tubercular peritonitis, and predicted that she would die before reaching Lourdes. But Bailly regained consciousness, and when she insisted, against medical advice, on being carried to the healing pools, Carrel accompanied her. The reader will have no trouble anticipating that I am about to recount a miraculous healing—Dossier 54, the official medical records of Marie Bailly’s case, are among the most famous in Lourdes history. But the presence of Dr. Carrel makes the tale far more enigmatic.

Bailly was carried on a stretcher to the pools but was too fragile to be immersed in the waters.

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