An anecdotal reference to the life of Thoma d'Aquino tells that he, during his 2 years of imprisonment on the family grounds due to his insistence on joining the Dominican order, was permanently harassed end constrained by his family into relinquishing his desires. Things even got so out of hand that his brothers brought the most attractive prostitute to entice him into losing his path. The story follows that he drove her off using a blazing hot fire poker and that in that night, had a vision of two angels bestowing him with a holy mark of chastity.
This reminds me of Blaise Pascal, the renowned physician, mathematician and philosopher, who during his infamous "nuit de feu"(night of fire) had a series of uninterrupted sacrosanct visions which led him to retire to a monastery and live a very pious life from that particular moment on, albeit a very short pious life.
I have often heard hefty critique and disdain being brought against these men and indeed against most of the people who are affected by religious visions. Before we are to pass judgment onto them and decide which part we are to take, we need to take a closer look on the historical and social aspects that surrounded these people during the troubled times of the 1200s and of the 1600s. A child born around that time did not have many options with regard to faith, answers, ideas standing before him. Joining the clerical ranks was an honour and, especially for people with a high degree of authoritarianism and ambition, living a deeply pious, virtuous life was the equivalent of getting a promotion every day, in present day terminology. Indeed, the feeling of serving the one and only, almighty Creator of all that is, was and will be, the feeling of belonging to a structure that transcends mere human existence was perhaps the best one could be in that world, if one was not blessed with the opportunity of either being born in a noble family, or being born as an heir to the throne, enjoying the material benefits of royal life.
The brain is wired to function so that it constantly works in the background to sort and solve problems, to put our existence in as good an order as it can achieve, or at least that is what one of the psychological theories accepted today holds true, thus aiming at an explanation at the nature of dreams. Thus, Pascal's fever of over 42 degrees Celsius, which is accompanied most often by hallucinations, was interpreted semiotically by his brain as the fire that Moses felt when God presented him with the tablets on the mountaintop, the presence of the Lord manifested into the telluric realm. We may very well imagine the fear and uneasiness that he felt at the same time, relating to both his illness as well as to his fever, forcing his brain to grasp at any explanation available. As a very literate man, he was well accustomed to the representations of the angelic realm, thus his brain constructed all the images necessary to make him feel as a material presence inside the heavenly realm. The brain was actually fooling itself and became convinced by itself. And since the brain forever thought that God Himself had sent the visions and had allowed access into the ethereal sphere, the brain was, actually, God.
It is a most facile argument to dismiss all paranormal activity and all spiritual visions as mere figments of a hyperactive imagination which desperately wants to believe in something and that clings to the existence of higher beings in order to make it through the day and give life meaning. I do not much like generalizations, but this appears as an undeniable truth. The brain creates the images, there is no activity of the retina, the brain is not actively perceiving something that is happening in reality. Or is it?
1991, The Barrow Neurological Institute in Pheonix, Arizona. A younger Dr. Spetzler, world renowned neurosurgeon and in my opinion one of the best that ever existed, operates on a patient named Pam Reynolds. She had a very complicated large aneurysm requiring that her brain be deprived of all the blood, the heart would be stopped and the body coupled to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. During this time, she was under intense medical monitoring and the electrical activity in her brain was closely monitored, The ears had a clicking mechanism installed inside to measure electrical activity in her brainstem(stimulating the vestibulocochlear, for my physician colleagues), eyes taped shut. As her heart stopped and all electrical activity in her brain ceased, as evidenced by eeg and electrophysiological monitoring, she had an out of body experience and could later recall in great detail discussions from within the OR and various instruments for instance the high speed drill, which she could not have seen before the induction of the anesthesia as these are brought in the OR sterile in their own bags and are unpacked only in the moment of use. Furthermore, she met dead relatives and had the infamous light at the end of the tunnel vision. I have read some mind-boggling "explanations" by various physicians who seemed to forget basic neuroscience when attempting to offer a "scientific" explanation for this occurrence. Let me be very clear: the brain had no blood. The neurons were not functioning. There was no electrical activity. There is no chance that her brain had so much as seen one dot, let alone create an image. Prof. Spetzler himself acknowledges that he has no explanation for that which had happened during his aneurysm surgery.
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