The most well-known phenomenon of mind-body healing is the placebo effect, mentioned before. Patients are given sugar pills by a physician under the pretense that it is serious medicine, and they are found to heal significantly better compared to a control group who are given the same sugar pills but with full knowledge as to their content. So the mental belief (or faith) a patient has in a pill and a doctor is very important for the physical healing (Benson 1996).
Placebo has been studied within science relatively recently, but there are anecdotes of its use that go back ages. I have heard of many sages of India who could heal. But strangely, they would give something for the patient to take orally, “Take this, and you will be all right.” That something might be a piece of fruit or something equally irrelevant to the disease. But somehow it produced healing. Placebo?
Many conventional physicians think of any healing using a technique of alternative medicine as healing via the placebo effect. In biology, there are many human characteristics, such as consciousness, ethical behavior, or aesthetics, that biology has difficulty in explaining. Biologists promptly attribute such characteristics to the ubiquitous cause of “survival benefit.” But they don't care to explain where the prerogative for survival, which is neither a physical nor a chemical property of matter, comes from. Similarly, allopathic doctors never ask, from whence the efficacy of placebo? Also, mysteriously, placebo cures, although real, are often only temporary. How so? Nobody asks.
Then there are all those reported cases of spontaneous healing that may be triggered by a variety of stimuli, medical procedures, and sometimes just plain intentions and faith (Schlitz and Lewis 1997). In science, unusual phenomena often give us more clues about the system we are dealing with. So what is the explanation of this particular unusual phenomenon?
Visualization has strong effects on the body (see chapter 15). Indeed, visualization has been used with some success for the treatment of cancer patients (Simonton et al. 1978). But visualization works for some people and doesn't work for many others, although they may be quite good at it. Why?
There seems to be a consensus now that includes even conventionalists that a loving environment may be conducive to healing. Similarly, the tangible effect of prayer by prayer groups for the healing of patients has been demonstrated so well that even many conventional health practitioners are persuaded as to the causal efficacy of prayer. So more and more, one finds attempts to create a loving environment and prayerful atmosphere even in hospitals based on conventional treatment. But seldom does a conventionalist bother to ask, Why does loving work for healing? Where does the causal efficacy of prayer come from?
Last, even conventional medical professionals accept the fact that a good doctor-patient relationship accelerates healing. If healing is a material phenomenon and objective, then this, too, is hard to comprehend.
We are missing an important ingredient of the healing that is taking place in these examples. We are missing the quantum aspect. There are a few explicitly quantum aspects of mind-body healing (see also chapter 6): the quantum leap, quantum nonlocality, downward causation, and tangled hierarchy. Until we include the quantum physics of mind-body healing, our understanding of some of its successes will be incomplete.
Mind-body disease consists of physical ailments in which the imposition of mental meaning sets up disharmony in our vital and physical bodies. So mind-body healing must involve changes in the meaning-context that the mind sets up for the malfunctioning of the vital and the physical bodies. Sometimes this change in the context of meaning processing by the mind comes about simply by reshuffling old contexts. This is when the continuous methods of mind-body medicine—self-hypnosis, visualization, meditation, and so forth—work. But sometimes, as in the cases mentioned—some cases of placebo, spontaneous healing, and healing through visualization—the contextual shift cannot happen at the level of the mind itself. In those cases, mind-body healing is a misnomer.
The contexts of mental thinking come from the supramental domain of consciousness; to change the context to a new one, we mental beings will have to leap to the supramental. This leap is a discontinuous quantum leap, and this is why this type of healing is quantum healing.
“Quantum healing” is a phrase that has already been creatively intuited, albeit in rudimentary forms, by at least two physicians, Larry Dossey and Deepak Chopra. Dossey (1989) emphasized the quantum nature of the healing of a patient by another (otherhealing, as it is sometimes called), such as through prayer, as evidence of quantum nonlocality. Chopra (1989) correctly intuited the quantum nature of self-healing: that it consists of quantum leaps. I have already introduced their work in chapter 5. Here are a few additional details. Let's begin our discussion with Chopra's work.
In the 1980s, the physician Deepak Chopra was looking for an explanation of self-healing. When asked if anybody can claim to know the cure of cancer, he said, “If a patient can promote the healing process from within, that would be the cure for cancer.”
If this sounds like Mary Baker Eddy, for whom if the mind could discover that all disease is illusion then healing would follow, it is not an accident. Both Chopra and Baker Eddy are introducing the idea of healing as self-discovery. But Chopra went one important step further. He said in Quantum Healing, “Many cures that share mysterious origins—faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the effective use of placebo, or ‘dummy drugs’—also point toward a quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a drastic jump—a quantum leap—in the healing mechanism.”
Chopra introduced consciousness and quantum physics into mind-body healing in an attempt to initiate new scientific modeling of this self-healing phenomenon beyond classical physics, chemistry, and biology, which have no explanation for it. In this seminal book, Quantum Healing, Chopra suggested that mind-body interaction in self-healing occurs through a “quantum mechanical body” and is mediated by “bliss”—consciousness.
To emphasize once again, mind-body healing is not brain-body healing. Fundamental in mind-body healing is downward causation: A thought, an emotion, a belief initiates the healing process. But the brain's capacity for downward causation is dubious. So scientists who study mind-body healing implicitly or explicitly adopt a dualistic mind-body interaction model. Unfortunately, this model is also fraught with difficulties.
If mind and body are two separate substances, how can they interact without an intermediary? How would such an interaction be consistent with the law of conservation of energy in the material world? Hence Chopra's brilliant suggestion: The intermediary in mind-brain interaction is consciousness. How does consciousness mediate the interaction of mind and body? “Through the quantum mechanical body,” says Chopra, a little vaguely, “mind-body healing is quantum healing.”
The vagueness of Chopra's idea disappears when we realize that consciousness mediates mind-body interaction through the “quantum” nature of both mind and body. If mind and body are Newtonian objects of classical physics, there is no way to mediate their interaction without a major revision of known physics. But if both physical and mental objects are quantum possibilities within consciousness, then consciousness can simultaneously and nonlocally collapse the possibilities of a correlated body and mind to create the actual event of its experience.
The puzzle of mind-body healing is how a thought, a nonmaterial object, can cause the brain to make a material object, a neuropeptide molecule, for example, that will initiate a communication to the immune system or the endocrine system, eventually leading to healing. From the point of view of the new psychophysical parallelism, consciousness simultaneously recognizes and chooses the context-changing thought of your self-healing (from among all the quantum possibilities that your mind and supramental body offer) along with the brain-state that has the new neuropeptide molecule (see figure 17).
Of course, the quantum leap of creativity to the supramental is crucial here for healing. This is the idea that lifts quantum healing from being a plausible idea to a legitimate explanatory principle.
Fig. 17. How mind-body healing works.
Dossey (1989) emphasizes nonlocality as the telltale sign of the quantum and consciousness in healing. (Richard Feynman [1981] showed some time ago that a classical computer can never simulate nonlocality.) The previously discussed study by the cardiologist Randolph Byrd (1988) is one of the best to indicate the quantum nonlocality of healing. Byrd's study, involving 393 patients at San Francisco's General Hospital Cardiac Care Unit, looked at the effect of prayer carried out at a distance by several home-prayer groups.
The 393 subjects were divided into a group of 192 patients who were prayed for by four to seven different people and a control group of 201 who did not receive the benefit of any prayer at all. Neither the physician nor the patients knew who belonged to which group. Byrd found the effect of prayer, even when nonlocal, strikingly positive. For example, the prayed-for patients were five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less prone to develop fluid in the lungs (pulmonary edema), both statistically significant results.
How does prayer work? We can easily integrate Dossey's quantum nonlocality in other-healing and Chopra's quantum leap in self-healing within one model. When somebody prays for you at a distance with purity of intention, consciousness, being nonlocal and unitive, simultaneously collapses the healing intention in your mind as in mental telepathy (although you may not ordinarily be aware of it because of noise—secondary awareness events—in your mind-brain complex). From then on, the same process, quantum healing, operates as in self-healing.
In other words, this kind of other-healing also involves self-healing. And this is true of most, but not all, cases of spiritual other-healing: The other (healer) nonlocally transfers intention at the level where choice and quantum collapse take place, the level of the quantum self or unity consciousness.
Many physicians have cited examples of spontaneous healing, some of them as dramatic as the overnight vanishing of a malignant tumor (see Chopra 1989; Weil 1995; Moss 1984). I cited two such anecdotes earlier.
As I have said before, conventionalists in the medical profession either dismiss the cases of spontaneous remission of disease under the general category of the placebo effect or, if the concept of placebo does not apply, they keep silent about such cases. Either way, they miss a grand opportunity for a new insight. Gradually, however, a new hypothesis is being considered within the medical profession—that our body already has, in many cases of illness, the requisite wisdom and mechanism for cure; we just have to discover it and manifest it (O'Regan 1987; Weil 1995). This idea, too, is limited because what is attributable only to consciousness (the power of creativity and downward causation) is attributed to the causally impotent physical body, which is mere hardware.
But suppose we boldly recognize the healing power of consciousness. Consciousness has the requisite wisdom (in its supramental compartment), the mechanism (choosing a new context for mental processing of the meaning of emotions) for cure. It also has the power to discover what is needed (the power of making the quantum leap of insight) and it has the power to manifest the insight, by unblocking vital feeling at the appropriate chakra, unblocking the vital program and thus also unblocking the correlated physical organs, which revives proper organ functions.
In truth, faith in a doctor's word as in the placebo effect gives a patient only a glimpse of his own healing capacity. To truly manifest this capacity, the entire program of creativity, going through all the stages of the creative process, which ends in no less than a change of the context of one's living, is essential.
Now the crucial question: If quantum healing involves creativity of the mind, can we develop a program of action for healing ourselves based on this idea? It is true that creativity is acausal. We used to call a creative insight God's grace. But it is also true that engaging in the creative process in its four stages (preparation, incubation, insight, and manifestation with understanding) helps creative acts. What would this entail in the case of mind-body healing?
Suppose that instead of a belief that people are getting some sort of medicine, as in the placebo effect, patients operate under the conviction (a “burning” one because of the urgency of the situation) that they already have the mechanism for healing, which they need to discover and manifest. The first step of such a creative question then is preparation.
Patients would be encouraged to research their disease (with a lot of help from their physicians, of course) and meditate on it. Such meditation will readily show the role of mind-brain doshas in how we deal with mental stress and how our habits of mentalization of emotions and suppression or expression of emotions, as the case may be, contribute to the disease.
One of the root causes of mental stress accumulation will also become clear: mental speed—hurrying and rushing—augmenting the pursuit of desires with accomplishments, anxieties, and daydreaming. So the purpose of the preparation stage is to slow down the mind and to create an open, receptive mind, which is an essential first step toward any creativity.
At the next stage, the patients and their doctors would try various new (to the patient) techniques of mind-body medicine. This is the stage of creativity in which we use unlearned stimuli to generate uncollapsed possibility waves of the mind and the supramental, but we don't choose among the possibilities. Since only choice can create an event of conscious awareness (Goswami 1993), what I am talking about is unconscious processing—processing without awareness.
There are well-known cases of art therapy in which people heal themselves by submersion in beautiful, spiritual art. Art therapy does not work for everybody, but how does art therapy work at all, even for some people? The mental imagination of healing inspired by the art very soon gives way to unconscious processing, opening up a new vista of possibilities. Sooner or later a seemingly inconsequential trigger precipitates the quantum leap of insight: Simultaneously, the new supramental context and the mental gestalt that represents it appear manifest in conscious awareness. The insight leads to the corrective contextual shift in how the mind handles emotions.
Manifestation of the insight begins at once: Freed from the shackles of mentalization, feelings and the vital blueprints become functional once again, leading, sometimes dramatically, to healing of the correlated organ concerned.
I have already mentioned that there are some reported successes in treating cancer patients via the use of creative visualization (Simonton et al. 1978), to which the previous scenario applies. Here is a particularly poignant description of one person's quantum healing through visualization:
When I was in Mexico, I had started having pain in my chest. I went across the border and got an MRI scan, which showed a mass on my thymus connecting to the aorta. I decided just to wait, but a scan six months later showed it was still there.
I decided to spend a week at Carl Simonton's healing center in California, and I imaged “sharks eating cancer cells” as they recommended. But toward the end of the week, I had this extremely vivid, spontaneous vision that wasn't on the program. I saw a mass on my thymus as a piece of ice that just started to melt in these big, amazing drops. I've never in my life had this kind of clear image just come up by itself. And I knew instantly the drops are just teardrops. My whole life, through all the losses, I'd never been able to cry. Now there was this melting away of the oppression I'd been feeling; the deaths and the abuse in my childhood, the unresolved relationship with my ex-husband. The emotion was suddenly available, and it felt so powerful.
Four months later, I had another MRI, and the mass was gone—there was no sign of it. I had no new treatment. Whatever this mass had been, they said the only way they could tell it had ever been there was from the previous two tests (quoted in Barasch, The Healing Path, 1993, pp. 273–274).
Clearly, the experience released the depression of emotions accumulated through a lifetime. And there is no doubt that the experience was sudden and unexpected, a genuine quantum leap.
A spontaneous remission, in this way of looking at things, corresponds to a creative insight, when we are able to choose “the healing path” out of myriad possibilities generated by unconscious processing. This choosing is the work of unitive consciousness in its quantum self.
How does one experience this choosing of healing insight, this quantum self experience? Experiences vary. The previous example was a vision. Physician Richard Moss (1981, 1984) talks of a cancer patient who attended one of his workshops; I mentioned this one before. During the workshop, she was defiant and not responding to the various attempts of Moss to energize her. But at some point Moss broke through her shell and she responded by participating in a spontaneous dance that led to a tremendous “ah-ha” experience. The following morning the patient woke up feeling so much better that Moss felt compelled to send her for a checkup. Miracle of miracles, her cancer was gone.
The patient in Moss's anecdote experienced the “ah-ha” of creative insight. But patients also report experiencing the choice itself, when the purity of the healing intention is crystallized. As an example, here is the physician Deepak Chopra's account of the healing of a cancer patient through sudden insight:
[A] quiet woman in her fifties came to me about ten years ago complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suffering from gallstones, I had her admitted for immediate surgery, but when she was opened up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer throughout her abdominal cavity.
Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the incision without taking further action. Because the woman's daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had been successfully removed. I rationalized that her family would break the news to her in time …
Eight months later I was astonished to see the same woman back in my office. She had returned for a routine physical exam, which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no detectable sign of cancer. Only after another year passed did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, “Doctor, I was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick another day in my life.” Her cancer never returned.
This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears, through her deep seated resolve, and that was good enough…. I must call it a quantum event, because of the fundamental transformation that went deeper than organs, tissues, cells, or even DNA, directly to the source of body's existence in time and space (Chopra 1989, pp. 102–103).
I have cited several cases of spontaneous healing of cancer and have claimed that in each case the cause is a quantum insight. To see clearly the dynamic role that the insight plays, it may help to probe a little deeper into what has to be involved in these kinds of cases of cancer cure (Weil 1995).
There is always pressure on the cells of our body to become malignant, a condition in which they do not die at the expected time, do not stay in the same place, and in general do not conform to cellular laws of regular behavior. But malignant cells do not represent cancer, only seeds of cancer.
This is so because malignant cells distinguish themselves by displaying abnormal antigens (“not me”) on their surface membranes. So the immune system, whose job is to distinguish “me and not me” can recognize them and get rid of them. In this way, cancer becomes reality only when for some reason this normal immune system function is inadequate (due to a physical or a vital defect) or suppressed (due to the mind-brain doshas). For example, when excessive mentalization and intellectualism lead to the suppression of feelings at the heart chakra, this also suppresses the immune system programs that are correlated with the feelings (see chapter 14).
So the spontaneous healing of cancer must be due to the sudden onset of such a dynamic surge in immune system activity that the cancerous growth is gotten rid of within days, even hours. Suppose the immune system inadequacy or suppression is due to faulty mental processing—excessive mentalization and intellectualism taking its toll. A quantum leap to the supramental is accompanied by a shift in the processing of mental meaning; this frees the blockage of feelings at the heart chakra. This then can have the desired dynamic effect on the immune system in the form of reactivating its vital program of getting rid of cancerous cells with such vigor as to effect very rapid healing.
What do the data say on spontaneous remission of cancer? The Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Brendan O'Regan (O'Regan and Hirshberg 1993), who did perhaps the most extensive research on the subject, talked about three kinds of spontaneous remission cases: (1) pure remission—remission with no allopathic treatment after the diagnosis is made; (2) remission with some treatment after diagnosis, but the treatment is clearly unsuccessful; and (3) the most unusual kind of remission, in which the “cures are sudden, complete, and without medical treatment,” associated with spiritual cures.
This third class passes as quantum healing with clear discontinuous “spiritual” experience (or insight). For the other two classes, healing may be due to situational reshuffling of previously known programs of the mind leading to adaptation of the new situation and healing. But the healing may also be due to the same kind of discontinuous quantum leap as the patients of class three, except that the participants were not observant enough to note the special-ness of the creative moment. I think that this was due to the lack of preparation; the insight was not particularly meaningful to them so they did not take notice.
The final stage of the creative process (Goswami 1996, 1999)— manifestation—is also important to discuss in this creativity model of quantum healing. Manifestation is not complete with only the reactivation of vital blueprints that are needed for the normal functioning of the organ(s) involved. After the remission has taken place, the patient has to bring to manifestation some of the lifestyle changes that are commensurate with the shift of context in the mental processing of feelings if the remission is to be stable and permanent. For example, a lifestyle that produces excessive intellectualism and defensive reactions must give way to a more balanced one.
Why do most placebo healing cases appear to be only temporary healing? I think those are not cases of genuine quantum healing by the self. Instead, the faith that “I am getting medicine from my doctor whom I trust” leads to a reshuffling of known meaning contexts of the mind that temporarily allows the mind to adapt. In other words, they are examples of healing due to situational creativity taking place spontaneously without the participation of the conscious self.
Let's again discuss the case of the former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins (1989) who has written about his self-healing from a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative disease that causes the connective tissue in the spine to wither away. Experts estimated that his chance of recovery was one in five hundred. He stopped standard medication and substituted it with megadoses of vitamin C, all this in full consultation with his physician. Rumor has it that he may also have used homeopathy. But also important, he watched funny movies (for example, old W. C. Fields flicks and the Marx brothers’ escapades) and read his favorite comic books. And miraculously, Cousins completely recovered from his condition and resumed his very productive life.
I think that Cousins went from a serious disease to healing more or less following the stages of the creative process. The first stage, his hobnobbing with standard medicine and all that, was preparation. The second stage, watching movies and reading the funnies, allowed him the all-important relaxation “being” mode of creativity alternating with the “doing” mode of taking vitamin C (“do-be-do-be-do”). Eventually, he got his quantum leap, leading to recovery, and from all accounts, he did make lifestyle changes.
Very importantly, creative healing is an idea that can be medically tested. We can clinically study three groups of patients and compare their healing rates:
A physician (of conventional medicine, of course) goes to Heaven and finds a big line at the pearly gates. He is not used to waiting in line, so he goes straight to Saint Peter, the officer in charge of admission. Upon hearing his complaint, Saint Peter shakes his head, “Sorry, Doc. In Heaven, even doctors have to wait to get in.” But just then, one fellow in a white physician's robe goes running through the gate, paying no heed to the line.
“Ha,” says our doctor. “There goes a doctor without waiting in line! How do you explain that?”
“Oh,” chuckles Saint Peter. “That's God. Sometimes He thinks He is a doctor.”
The point I want to make is that the role of the physician in creative healing has to change drastically. In conventional medicine the hierarchy imposed by the physician in the doctor-patient relationship is clearly a simple one: The physicians tend to think they are God, hierarchically superior to their patients who don't know anything about health and healing. At a recent conference on the philosophy of health held at the University of Oregon (Evans 2003), a family physician said, “The typical doctor-patient interaction is for the doctor to ask, ‘How are you?’ and the patient to respond, ‘I was hoping you would tell me that.’”
But this attitude is clearly not well founded except maybe at the material level of the physical body; patients have the best knowledge of what is happening to their subtle bodies.
Actually the doctor-patient relationship is anything but a simple hierarchy; it is tangled beyond belief. I will repeat an anecdote (Locke and Colligan 1986). A doctor was treating an asthma patient who had difficulty breathing. Naturally, when the doctor heard of a new medicine, he called the company for a sample, got it, and gave it to his patient. His patient got relief in his breathing within minutes; even his bronchial tubes seemed to remain open longer.
Out of curiosity to check the efficacy of the drug, the doctor then administered a placebo to his patient. But now the patient's difficulty in breathing returned. So the doctor was convinced that the medicine worked and wrote the pharmaceutical company for more samples. Imagine his surprise when the pharmaceutical company admitted that he was sent a placebo by mistake the first time. So what explains the efficacy of the so-called medicine then? Obviously, the doctor's belief in the medicine.
Simple hierarchy is detrimental to creativity. If the doctors are authoritarian, their patients will not feel encouraged to think creatively about their situation. Thus in creative medicine, the now prevalent doctor-patient simple hierarchy has to give way to a co-learning relationship—a tangled hierarchy.
Further, conventional practitioners of medicine have developed a habit of looking at healing as an objective science. However, healing is art as well as science, subjective as well as objective. You can learn all there is to learn about standing waves on the guitar string and all the rest of the physics of that musical instrument, but that knowledge will not replace the art of playing the guitar, which requires creativity of the player. Creative healing, above all, demands creativity in the physician-patient relationship, and that creativity begins with a tangled hierarchy—a hierarchical circularity of levels in which each level affects the others ad infinitum.
One of the most desirable aspects of the paradigm shift we are witnessing in medicine is that a transition from simple hierarchy to a tangled hierarchy in doctor-patient relationships is already taking place. I will illustrate this with psychologist Arnold Mindell's story of how he discovered his concept of the dream body—a person's total real personality as manifesting in different channels—while working with a terminal patient with stomach cancer.
During one of the interactive sessions, the patient had a creative insight that he wanted to “explode” in self-expression as never before. Just before the patient was to go to the hospital, he had a dream that he shared with Mindell. In his dream, he was a patient with an incurable disease that could only be treated by a medicine that acted like a bomb. Suddenly, Mindell had his own insight; he saw the underlying unity in the concept of the dream body of the patient's cancer, the bomb of his dream, and his need to explode in expression.
The creative experiences of the doctor and the patient did not end with just realizations, but they both completed the manifestation stage also. The patient left the hospital alive and stayed alive for a few years manifesting a change of lifestyle with his newly discovered expressive ability. And Mindell became famous for his successful dream-body work with patients.