AMBUSHED BY SPIRITUALITY

It was tooth grinding that got me to God. I didn't know I was on a spiritual path at the time. I couldn't face the prospect of wearing a night guard to protect my teeth from stress, and the alternative I stumbled onto was meditation, which I'd read about in a Deepak Chopra book. If it could help people facing terrible things like cancer, why not my molars?

I got more from mind-body medicine than I bargained for. I got religion.

I'm the last guy you'd figure would go spiritual on you. To be sure, I started out a nice Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey. But with puberty came doubt. I became the Voltaire of Schuyler Avenue, the scourge of poor Rabbi Engel, who endured my contempt for his gullibility. By the time I graduated from high school, I was a budding molecular biologist, and though I continued fasting on Yom Kippur, it had become an act of solidarity with my heritage, not obedience to a God I believed in.

Harvard, from which I would get a summa in biology, completed my secularization. This is not a criticism. If Harvard had made me a more spiritual person, it would have failed in its promise to socialize me to the values of the educated elite. Those values are secular. The prized act of mind in the Academy is the laying bare of hidden agendas. The educated person knows that love is really about libido, that power is really about class, that judgment is really about politics, that religion is really about fantasy, that necessity is really about chance. These views come from an Enlightenment that began with Galileo and Newton and a modernity begun by Darwin, Marx and Freud. We are Nietzsche's children, shivering in the pointless void.

Some people manage to find purpose despite this, making from wholly earthly values a sufficient basis for moral choice and a meaningful life. Love--even if it can be reduced to psychological explanations--can still make the world go round. Justice--even if its origin is political--can still be legitimate. Beauty--even if its perception is hostage to the taste of local tribes--can still move the spirit.

That is where I thought I would spend my life: a cultural Jew, an agnostic, a closet nihilist.

Of course I didn't like it. Who wants to face death without God? Who wants to tell kids that the universe is indifferent to them? But the alternative--faith--was unavailable to me. Once the mind thinks some thoughts, it cannot unthink them.

What attracted me to meditation was its apparent religious neutrality. You don't have to believe in anything; all you have to do is do it. I had worried that reaping its benefits would require some faith I could only fake, but I was happy to learn that 90% of meditation was about showing up.

The spirituality of it ambushed me. Unwittingly, I was engaging in a practice that has been at the heart of religious mysticism for millenniums. To separate 20 minutes from the day with silence and intention is to worship, whether you call it that or not. To be awakened to the miracle of existence--to experience Being not only in roses and sunsets but right now, as something not out there but in here--this is the road less traveled, the path of the pilgrim, the quest.