THE saints of organized religion have lost influence in recent years, but the kind of religious experience usually associated with saints is being rediscovered in the laboratory. A husband-and-wife team of experimental psychologists in a New York City research center has concluded on the basis of hundreds of experiments with normal, healthy persons that "the brain-mind system has a built-in contact point with what is experienced as God, fundamental reality, or the profoundly sacred."
At their Foundation for Mind Research, a unique center devoted to the new "science of consciousness," Dr. Robert...