Epiphanies: Where Science and Miracles Meet

By Ann Jauregui and Huston Smith

In a quiet moment of therapy, a breakthrough comes -- the miracle of the new.

To experience an epiphany is to have sudden insight into the essential meaning of something, unleashed sometimes in exquisitely slow motion, sometimes in a flash. In an intimate, lyrical integration of the science of psychology and transcendence of spirituality, celebrated clinician Dr. Ann Jauregui introduces us to nine individuals who have undergone astonishing transformations by exploring a world quite different from the one described by our five senses. With moments of miraculous and joyful surprise, Epiphanies exposes a reality outside of everyday existence that has momentous implications for life's ultimate questions.

"Shyly we venture out with these stories," Dr. Jauregui writes, "into a world where science itself is struggling to describe a realm out of time and space and language." We are the beneficiaries of these extraordinary shifts of perspective, invited into a sparkling conversation that allows us to see the potential residing in all of us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words
• Release date: Jul 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781416565420

Ann Jauregui

Ann Jauregui, Ph.D., has been a practicing therapist, consultant, and teacher for more than twenty-five years. She is a cofounder and associate of Vine Street, a multidisciplinary center for the healing arts in Berkeley, California and adjunct professor at the Wright Institute, Berkeley. Dr. Jauregui and her husband John divide their time between California and Northern New Mexico. Visit her website at www.annjauregui.com.

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More Praise for Ann Jauregui and epiphanies

We are taken to the far side of science, which—according to Jauregui—bears a remarkable resemblance to what she refers to as ‘epiphanies,’ moments when the ineffable finds words for itself—the miracle of the new. With bravura, she passes from personal reminiscence to ‘tales of psychotherapy’ to the history of recent science and back again as if the only borders that separate these domains are nothing more than speed bumps.

—David Epston, coauthor of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends

Until now Annie Dillard held my award for the most balanced left-/right-brained person I knew. I have been challenged more than once to bring my spirituality into my work life, and I have taken the conservative path. I think Silver Bay has changed my life forever.

—Joan Herrick, M.A., cofounder with Virginia Satir of Avanta

"Epiphanies is an important book. Ann Jauregui evinces her lifelong fascination/torment with the question of the continuity and coherence of the universe. As a young child contemplating the night sky, as a psychotherapist listening deeply to her clients’ search for meaning, and as a postmodern thinker integrating the new paradoxes of mutual influence and fluid uncertainty, she teaches us about wholeness. In supple prose filled with compelling personal narratives, she offers us a rare integration of the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual aspects of being a conscious human being as we move into the third millennium."

—Ellen Zucker, Ph.D., cofounder of Russell House, Berkeley, CA

"Epiphanies is a powerful and delightful account of the mind’s ability to gain spontaneous insight and reorganize information in therapeutically successful ways. Such events invariably reduce stress and elevate emotional tone toward joy. This is the stuff of conscious evolution."

—Edgar Mitchell, Sc.D., founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Apollo astronaut, author of The Way of the Explorer

"In Epiphanies, Ann Jauregui draws with great imagination upon modern physics and cosmology to reconfigure the most basic assumptions of psychology. She not only enhances the healing techniques of her field but deepens the ethical mission of therapy."

—Theodore Roszak, author of The Voice of the Earth and America the Wise

Such clear intelligence! It’s rare what Jauregui has done, and very precious to me. I feel understood, less alone, less unhinged with this perspective.

—Carolyn North, author of Ecstatic Relations: A Memoir of Love

"I have been rationing Epiphanies, allowing myself only two pages each evening in order to savor its every drop. I didn’t want the book to end, but last night it did, and I will turn out the light tonight a little lonelier. It’s a lovely book, beautifully written, thoughtful, winsome, and wise."

—Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions and The Way Things Are

Splendid glimpses into the sacred space in which therapist and client are willing to wait for the liberating truth that surprises them both.

—Sylvia Boorstein, author of Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake: The Buddhist Path of Kindness

Beautiful book! I couldn’t bear to put it down!

—Michael White, coauthor of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends

"I’ve learned from Epiphanies! The concept of the shift is a useful one. I know now that I have often missed it!"

—Lawrence LeShan, author of Cancer as a Turning Point and The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist

A highly personal wander through the author’s creative and intriguing mind. Jauregui examines a nonlinear, often nonlocal source of therapeutic power, derived from her ability to sit quietly and make room for the deep stirrings of her clients.

—Psychotherapy Networker

"Epiphanies is seamless as it floats from memoir to client to principles of science. I love the detective work, the sense of discovery along the way, the magic artlessness that is high art. As for Jauregui’s attempt to reconcile what we consider irreconcilable, well, it’s so ambitious it’s mind-boggling. And to have done it so beautifully…ah…"

—Linda Robinson Walker, Jane Austen and Tom LeFroy: Stories in Persuasions

Answers to questions that wake you up at night.

—Neil Levy, author of The Last Rebbe of Bialystok

Jauregui’s beautiful but grounded writing, as well as her gentle and fiercely intelligent personal presence, make her stories hard to discount whether or not mystical experiences are easy to integrate with one’s own beliefs. And the stories are not odder (and no less odd), in the final analysis, than the theories of quantum physics.

—The Source

A profound meditation on the junction of science, spirituality, and human consciousness. Having had her own transcendent experiences as a child, an epiphany while listening to a radio panel speak about quantum physics years later stimulates Jauregui’s exploration into how we participate in the creation of reality and how we heal.

—Shift, review of the Institute of Noetic Sciences

Epiphanies is a wonderful, wise book that travels back and forth in time, and in the human mind, with compassion and with a wonderful sense of awe and possibility. Core mysteries are probed with a simple and profound clarity. Jauregui’s insights ripple gently from the elegant prose to touch our hearts, making us smile and nod our heads in startled recognition and gratitude.

—John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and The Magic Journey

For John

It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road.

It was the time to hear things and talk.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON,

Their Eyes Were Watching God

acknowledgments

One evening, camped with good friends on the Salmon River, I was watching the purple water as it flowed along, lapping at our little flotilla of rafts and kayaks pulled up haphazardly on the beach. Lee was sitting near me, watching too.

Lee?

Mm? he answered through the dusk, probably reviewing some of the more challenging rapids of the day.

What’s the name of that yellow garden flower that starts with ‘w’?

Coreopsis, he said.

Coreopsis. Thank you.

Don’t mention it.

And so thanks to Lee Ballance and to all these mind-sharing friends:

To Dick Olney, who said one morning, as if he were ordering scrambled eggs, We are here to behold the wonders of the universe.

To Martha Cochrane, sure-handed and constant.

To Jane Gray, Greg Hofmann, Annie Kane, Diana Kehlmann, Liz Raymer, Roussel Sargent, Caroline Pincus, Carole Sky, Kendra and Huston Smith, and Richard Trumbull.

To the good people at Beyond Words.

To John Jauregui, my heart and compass, and to our children and grandchildren, deliciously wise.

Especially, thank you to all my clients who have shown me the way, and to those who have generously agreed to share their stories here.

foreword

The best way I can think of to introduce this slim book is to say that in my long life of happy reading it is unique. In this way. When I first got my hands on the book I gulped it down in a sitting. And then that evening I started to reread it at a different pace, rationing myself to two pages every night before I turned out the light. Pacing myself in this way allowed me to ponder the paragraphs and let them sink in while savoring the book’s every drop.

Risking hyperbole, I feel like saying that this book has everything. The author can write—vividly, pacing herself with dramatic touches that keep the narrative moving, and never wasting a word. She is widely knowledgeable and profoundly thoughtful, and she is building bridges between views of the world that have been separated too long.

Let me offer an example.

Having taught the history of philosophy for years I thought I knew Isaac Newton, but now I wish I could go back and re-teach him, armed with what I have learned from this book. I knew of course that Newton tossed off Principia Mathematica, his breakthrough book in science, in a year. But I had not known that he kept revising the Principia to expurgate from it all traces of the sacred that were in his initial draft. For though Newton was himself deeply religious, he lived in a time of witch burnings and had a great fear of persecution. With his sanitized version of the Principia in place, the sacred was pushed to the periphery of Western thought, and the stage was set for the culture wars—the split between science and religion, and between science and the humanities—that have plagued us right down to today.

Yet science hasn’t stopped with Newtonian physics and neither does this book. (I remember walking once into the Jauregui house and seeing Ann sitting on the floor with science books scattered all around her.) We are carried forward from the Scientific Revolution to the twentieth century when something enormous happens. The most profound scientific discovery of all time—anticipated by Einstein, formulated in Bell’s Theorem, and confirmed by the Einstein-Podosky-Rosen experiment—is that the universe is nonlocal. What this comes down to in layman’s language is something like this: If you separate two particles that have been paired and give one of them a downward spin, its partner instantaneously spins upward. This holds regardless of how far the two may have been separated, obliterating classical notions of space, time, and ways of knowing.

Now Jauregui asks rhetorically, if nonlocality holds for the material world, what about the world of the human mind? If both mind and matter are nonlocal, we are on our way to regaining what was lost in Newton’s time—a complete, whole world in which we can live complete, whole lives, in the awareness that we are far more interrelated than we had thought.

This may sound like heavy-sledding philosophy, but the author is a psychotherapist by profession, and her accounts of sparkling breakthroughs in her office breathe life into her considerations of Newton, nonlocality, and the transcendent, bridging them and making them eminently readable.

Let me end by returning to one of the book’s dramatic touches. Early on we see the author driving home at noontime after a morning with her clients when, scanning her radio absent-mindedly, she happens onto two scientists discussing quantum mechanics. Too excited to drive, she has to pull over to the side of the road. When the dialogue ends, she finds herself muttering, Surely a person’s most compelling problems or a family’s most entrenched patterns are no more solid than a seemingly solid particle of seemingly solid matter. And though she doesn’t realize it at the time, the book is on its way.

The best thing I can now do is to stop standing between the reader and this lovely, thought-provoking book.

Huston Smith

Berkeley, California

preface to the new edition

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international boundaries. Often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.

ANNE FADIMAN

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

My first public reading of Epiphanies fell on a spring evening in 2003, shortly after its publication. The event was at Black Oak Books, my comfortable neighborhood bookstore in Berkeley, but I was nervous. I had written something that would be hard to shelve in bookstores, or in people’s minds, because it tries to situate itself at that place where seemingly disparate worlds meet and spark: the worlds of postmodern science and age-old miracle stories. Plus, I felt tenderly, even protectively, toward the stories my therapy clients had generously agreed to share with readers.

The room was crowded with people I knew and didn’t know. Taking a breath, I launched into the pages I had marked ahead of time. As I read along I began to feel a warm receptivity in the room, and when it came time for questions, a lively conversation broke out. Then something happened that took me completely by surprise.

A woman who had been standing alone at the side of the room raised her hand. Shyly she said, I feel moved to share an experience I’d almost forgotten. As a child, I was lying in the grass at a park near our house, daydreaming. Through the green, my eyes suddenly went to the yellow blur of a dandelion, and I just felt the universe open up to me. She waited for just the right words. It was immensely peaceful, ecstatic—like the truth of the way things really are. It had the quality of a new revelation and yet something I had always known, even before I was born.

The room had gone quiet to hear her soft voice, and now there was a hush.

Finally a young man at the back raised his hand and said to her, May I ask you, did you ever tell anybody about your experience? I’m wondering, because something like it happened to me once. A portal opened into a completely wordless, timeless place—beautiful—and I never told a soul.

No, I don’t think I ever told anybody until tonight, she said. It was so simple, so inconsequential in what we call the real world. Invisible, really.

Since that moment at the Black Oak reading I assume and believe that every person we see on the street has a story like the woman at the side of the room, that it comes with being a person. And since that moment a remarkable stream of stories has been coming my way, stories that have these three fundamentals: an unexpected moment of revelation or deep recognition, an experience of time and place suspended, and, very often, a not-telling or forgetting.

Not talking about a revelatory experience seems as important to me as the experience itself. But other stories have been coming too, experiences that had been held quietly but were distinctly not forgotten.

A couple of weeks after my book reading, my letter carrier paused at my front door. What’s up? he asked. He’d noticed something going on from the mail I was getting.

I told him about the publication of Epiphanies, and he volunteered, I had an epiphany a few years ago. It came to me in a dream, except I’m not sure I was really asleep. I told my mother about it, and she said, ‘You’ve had an epiphany.’ I knew it was important. I just didn’t know there was a word for it.

A couple of days later this typewritten account was slipped through the slot with the day’s mail:

It was at the time in my life when stress was highest. In the middle of a nasty divorce, fighting over custody and money. I had three kids half time, a full-time job, enormous child support, and no coping skills. Every day I felt like I was stretching farther and farther beyond hope. I blamed my ex-wife, I blamed my employer, I blamed anyone who came into my sights. Then one night I had a dream. As soon as I woke, I knew what it meant, I knew what I had to do and I knew it was going to be okay.

The dream was short, colorful, and so real that it may have been a visit from an angel. In the dream a man, who was me, was beating a child, who was also me. The anger I felt as the man was so all consuming I didn’t know who I was. The pain the child felt was so strong it was as if it would never end. All of a sudden an angel, who was also me, floated down and put his wings around the man and the child, calming and soothing us. The emotions remained, but the violence was gone.

I had found my angel and figured out that

I could forgive myself.

Such an encounter would seem to be the best of news for a troubled world. But we live in the shadow of a materialistic worldview that expects scientific