God and Guinea Pig

There have always been two major forces operating in my life, a desire to be happy and a fierce skepticism of what could not be proved.

Born on the lower west-side of Manhattan in 1940 into a working-class family of atheist Russian Hungarian Jews, I received no religious training, other than mockery of what was considered to be pure superstition. I could not have been more than six when my grandfather, whose lifelong dream was for a world of "universal understanding and perpetual peace", sat me on his knee and told me with the voice of authority:

"God is the sum total of man's ignorance. We used to think the Sun was God. Then we learned how the Sun works. Now the Sun is not God anymore. Someday we will know how everything works. Then there will be no more need for God."

The family moved out of New York City to suburban New Jersey when I was five. My father was a bookbinder who brought home all the damaged and misprinted books he could for my mother who read anything she could lay her hands on except novels. "There is too much to learn to waste time on fiction," she would say.

I was taught to read before entering kindergarten, no mean feat in the days before Sesame Street. In first grade, while the rest of the class was discovering Dick, Jane, and "Run Spot Run", I was sitting in the back of the room, going over the front page of the previous day's New York Times, circling words I did not know. After two months of this, they promoted me to second grade. But that cut no slack at home. "Think," my mother would exhort me if I was slow to understand the meaning of a word she thought I should know. "Think."

You already know what happened at my eight year old birthday party.

When I was in high school my parents joined the Ethical Culture Society whose humanist philosophy was, "Since you cannot prove there is a God and I cannot prove there is not a God, why waste time talking about God when what we should be doing is improving humankind's lot here on Earth." It resonated.

My college career was not particularly distinguished, a budding math major shriveling in calculus and turning to economics to avoid dying completely. I did not take a philosophy course as an undergraduate, but believing that if you argue against a position you should know it at least as well as those who argue for it, I did take an elective in Religious Studies to fortify my stance in the all night bull sessions with my church-going fraternity brothers, "If I flunk this course do I go to hell?," I asked Reverend Abernathy on the first day of class. I was not always the most tactful in those days.

I reveled in my freedom and made it through the days and nights of books and coeds and pizza and beer far less the scholar than a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the English thinker who stated that people only do what maximizes their pleasure and minimizes their pain. That, too, resonated.

Looking back to that time from the perspective of now, I can see that the single college experience that would most affect my future being was one that stands tangential to what seemed important at the time. It began as I was walking across campus on a lazy Saturday afternoon in 1960. There was this sign:

$5 - GUINEA PIGS NEEDED FOR
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT - $5

I followed an arrow through the door, signed a release, and entered a maze of desks and dividers leading to stations where I was questioned in turn by a bevy of graduate students with theses that needed statistics. The last station was in a room where four other students were already waiting. "Ah, at last," they chimed together as I walked in, "Okay, here's the one we need.” "Let's go."

"Everyone take a seat," said a voice coming through a speaker, "we have the right number, we can start." I saw five desk-high panels with red and green lights and buttons underneath and chairs in front, one of which was empty, so I sat down. The desks were separated by partitions and faced a corner of the room where there was a glass enclosure. Inside, a professor wearing a lab coat and holding a clip board, was speaking into a microphone.

"This is a test of hand-eye coordination. I will push a button in here which will simultaneously activate either the red or green light. Everyone's will be the same. As soon as you see a light, push the button under the one that flashed. The flashes will come faster and faster and we will continue as long as no one in the group makes an error. Do you understand?" We all nodded.

I riveted my attention on the panel in front of me. There was a red flash...I hit red. A green flash...I hit green. The flashes came quicker and quicker but nothing I could not control... green, red, red, green, red. Then a buzzer sounded, the flashes stopped, and the professor said it was over. Someone had just missed and pushed red when it had been green.

"Who pushed red?" asked the guy on the end.

"I did," I said. "Mine was red."

"It couldn't have been," he came back. "The professor said they would be the same for everyone, and mine was green. Yours must have been green, too."

"Well it wasn't," I told him.

"Mine was green," said the woman on my other side.

"Good for you," I said. "Mine was red."

"Mine was green," said the woman next to her.

"Me, too", added the fourth student.

"Tough," I said. "I saw red."

The first guy stepped toward me with a direct challenge, "Are you telling me your light was red when all the rest of us saw green? That can't be true. You fucked up, admit it."

I exploded. "How dare you tell me what I saw! Who the hell do you think you are?" Once again I was seeing red.

"You wanna make something of it!" he yelled back, and fists clenched, shouting epithets, we took steps toward each other as the student in the seat between us dove for cover. Just before we came to blows I felt a strong pull on my shoulders pinioning my arms from behind. I struggled to escape, turned, and saw it was the professor out of the glass cage.

"There, there, son, it's okay. You were right it was red. Relax. Calm down. This wasn't a test of hand-eye coordination. It was really a test of how well someone stands up to peer pressure. So take it easy. You did real well. Now take this ticket to the desk at the end of the hall and you'll get your $5."

I was enraged at having been duped but left without further comment, pushing the test and the feelings it had evoked out of my awareness for decades. It was only years later, after the first out-of-body experience and my trip into the Light, that I recalled and recognized the ultimate importance of having validated my own experiential reality.

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