Intelligence is the ability to respond appropriately to a situation. For example, the intelligence that is measured by the IQ test is our problem-solving capacity, assumed to be mental and thus algorithmic, logical, and quantifiable. Is there intelligence aside from this mental intelligence?
One other kind of intelligence touted today is emotional intelligence, thanks to a popular exposition by Daniel Goleman (1995). When we are faced with an emotional situation, mental problem-solving capacity is not of much help.
So what is emotional intelligence? The psychologist Peter Salovey (Salovey and Mayer 1990) defines it as capacities in five different domains of experience: knowing oneself (awareness of one's own emotional nature); emotion management; controlling emotions in the service of motivation toward goals; empathy (the ability to interact with other people's emotion yet retain one's objectivity); and handling emotional relationships.
The perceptive reader will already note that many of the techniques of mind-body medicine of a previous chapter (see chapter 15) are designed to help us grow emotional intelligence—for example, awareness and empathy training and chakra psychology. Thus emotional intelligence is an essential ingredient of good health maintenance and disease control.
How does emotional intelligence grow with awareness and chakra psychology? Through awareness training, we learn to feel our own emotions, discover the chakras, and develop the ability to move vital energy in and out of our chakras using imagination, vital energy massage, and so forth (see chapters 11 and 15). Through empathy training, we learn to experience the emotions that interaction with an emotionally disturbed person (nonlocally) brings us, without identifying with them. With chakra psychology, we learn to stop mentally amplifying the vital energy expressions of the vital body. Such training then enables us not only to motivate ourselves to goals and empathize with others, but also to exhibit a considerable number of relationship skills.
We can also see why emotional intelligence helps us deal better with mind-body diseases than when we employ mental intelligence alone. Whereas mental intelligence tends to lead us to a mentalization and mental creation of emotion, emotional intelligence helps us get rid of some of the evils of mentalization and mental creation of emotions.
Yet both mental intelligence and emotional intelligence are developed and applied by continuous methods. They cannot heal when the mind gets bogged down with a serious contextual crisis, and its habit of mentalizing feelings causes, first, imbalance of vital energy and, eventually, a physical disease. Let's face it. The techniques of mind-body medicine are fundamentally coping mechanisms; they help you to keep control of a bad situation. But they cannot transform the mind; they cannot change the mind's habit of mentalizing and fantasizing feelings.
Consider an example, the case of a heart disease. Due to environmental stress and your lifestyle situation, feelings arise in your navel chakra, you mentalize them, and now you have emotions of anger and irritation. As the mental habit becomes chronic, the energy flows into the navel chakra from the heart chakra that is now depleted, and you have the emotion of hostility. Chronic hostility with your intimates causes havoc with the vital energy movements associated with the physical heart. A faulty vital blueprint leads to faulty representation at the physical level, and you end up with heart disease.
Now you engage in meditation and that gives you a relaxation response. Since you are learning to be emotionally intelligent, you visualize peace to compensate for your hostility. And these things will certainly help to keep your heart problems in control. But will they cure them? No way. Your habit of mentalization will take over whenever the stimulus is strong enough, and you will end up with a heart attack.
Consider another example. You are uneasy about romantic feelings in your heart chakra, the beginning of mentalization. You don't know what to do with romantic feelings, so you begin to suppress them. The vital energies associated with your immune system are thus suppressed; eventually, this suppresses the immune system at the physical level. When the immune system fails to do its normal job of getting rid of abnormally growing cells, you get cancer.
Now you practice techniques of mind-body medicine—you begin visualizing a healthy immune system and all that. But you don't heal. What to do?
Consider still another example. Many men experience an enlargement of their prostate gland when they become older. This is a nuisance because it forces one to make several trips to the bathroom at night, interfering with sleep. If it is a mind-body disease, how does it come about? At older age, some men fantasize too much about sex, have lustful thoughts, and all that. This produces too much vital energy at the sex chakra; this gives rise to too much of the hormone testosterone, which fosters the enlargement of the prostate.
Now suppose these men try mental and emotional intelligence to curb their lustful fantasies. Can they do it? Most would, if they could. But it is not easy. Why?
The solution to a problem often lies beyond the level of the problem. The problems here—hostility, lack of love, and lust— have but one solution, love, unconditional love.
I had a friend who, when he reached the ripe age of 60, began to prominently display on his work desk pictures of Playboy centerfolds. When many of his visitors objected, he displayed another sign: Dirty old men need love too. He got that one right.
But unconditional love is not a mental thing; it is not even a feeling energy. Instead, love is a context, an archetype, on which many of our thoughts and feelings are based.
Where does love reside? Beyond the vital body and the mind, it is an element of the supramental body. Developing unconditional love requires a quantum leap from the vital-mental into the supramental. Love is a prime signature of supramental intelligence.
More formally, what is supramental intelligence? The supramental domain of consciousness contains the laws and archetypal contexts of physical, vital, and mental movements. When mental movement has gone unbalanced and reshuffling of old, learned contexts is unable to change a mental habit, it is time to let go of the mind and leap for the supramental. When vital energy movement is similarly unbalanced and the vital blueprint is faulty, it is time to leap into the supramental and create a new blueprint of the desired vital function. The supramental has the archetype for it. Supramental intelligence is intelligence that enables us to make these occasional forays to the supramental as needed.
In the past we have much misunderstood things. For example, when physician Walter Cannon talked about “wisdom of the body,” I think he meant this supramental intelligence I am introducing. Andrew Weil, likewise, calls the body's healing system an “innate potential for maintaining health and overcoming illness.” Maintaining health is a characteristic of our conditioned systems, the body-energy body-mind trio, but overcoming illness is another matter. It may require stepping out of the conditioned systems. It may require supramental intelligence.
Quantum healing, which we discussed in the previous chapter, is a doorway to supramental intelligence. The cases of spontaneous healing that have been reported are mostly examples of unexpected quantum leaps; they happened without any process behind them. This is why I call them an open doorway. When one engages in a creative process or engages in the exploration of love within a tangled hierarchical relationship to foster the quantum leaps to the supramental, then one is no longer at the doorway. Then one has entered the domain of supramental intelligence. And when these quantum leaps occur in an easy sort of way without effort, as appropriate, one is established in supramental intelligence.
I previously mentioned that many mind-body healers think that disease is a creation of the patient. “What do you gain by creating your disease?” is their favorite question to their patient. This kind of question only confuses patients and makes them feel guilty.
Yet the mind-body healer is seeing an opportunity here that the patient needs to see if he is ready for it. The correct question is this: Now that you have the disease, instead of giving it a negative meaning, can you give it a positive meaning? Suppose you take responsibility for the disease and ask: Why did I create this disease for myself? What do I want to learn from it?”
The Chinese ideogram that stands for crisis means both danger and opportunity. In disease, most of us only see the danger—the danger of suffering, maybe even the danger of death. Suppose instead that you see it also as an opportunity to probe deeper into yourself, into your supramental domain of consciousness.
A disease is an expression of enormous incongruence. If the disease is at the physical level, an injury, for example, the physical representation of the injured organ is incongruent with its vital blueprint and negates the feeling of vitality at that organ. This creates an incongruence that we experience as illness. If the disease originates at the mental level because of a mentalization of feeling, the incongruence will be at all levels—mental, vital, and physical. We think something, we feel something else, and we act in still another way.
Years ago, a news reporter was doing a piece on Gandhi for which he had to attend several of his lectures. The newsperson was impressed that Gandhi did not consult any notes while giving his lectures, so he asked Mrs. Gandhi about that. Mrs. Gandhi said, “Well, us ordinary folks think one thing, say another, and do a third—but for Gandhiji they are all the same.” Gandhi was congruent as to thought, speech, and action.
How do we reestablish congruence so that the mind, the vital energies, and the physical representations act in congruence? The answer is supramental intelligence.
A mind-body disease is a fantastic opportunity, a very loud wake-up call, to awaken to our supramental intelligence. It is like being hit by a two-by-four, but it is supremely effective. Yet, so far, very few people have successfully used this intelligence.
Uma Goswami sometimes works with Swami Vishnuprakash a nanda of Rishikesh in India. Swamiji was a renunciate searching for God realization when he fell so ill in the gastrointestinal system that he could not eat anything for 29 days. An intuition told him to go and lie down at the Anant Padmanava temple in the South Indian city of Trivandram, so he did. Suddenly, he was blessed with a vision, a quantum leap to the supramental; he was healed, and his context of living changed forever. His fear of death was transcended forever.
He now lives at least part-time in what the great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo called the “intuitive mind.” This is the suprarational, supramental way of living where you wait to hear your intuition before you act on anything that is nontrivial (Goswami, 2003).
When we engage in supramental intelligence in the acts of creativity, we can use a quantum leap of creative insight to the service of outer creativity, or we can explore ourselves in inner creativity (Goswami 1999). In the same way, if we are only interested in supramental intelligence to heal our disease, it is like engaging in outer creativity. That's good, but we are limiting the application.
It is entirely possible to use the search for supramental intelligence in the creativity of the vital-physical domain for the objective of spiritual growth. Then it is like inner creativity—it is great. Read Bernie Siegel's book Peace, Love, and Healing for many anecdotes about exceptional people who followed this path from disease to healing and then to wholeness.
There was a rabbi in a village who was a devotee of God, always talking about God's Grace. One day a flood began to rise in the local river. So one of the rabbi's neighbors came and warned the rabbi of the impending flood. “Rabbi, why don't you come with us?” he pleaded. “Don't worry. God's Grace will save me,” said the rabbi. The neighbor shook his head and went away.
The flood came and the level of water reached the veranda of the rabbi's house. Another neighbor of the rabbi came in a boat and asked the rabbi to join him. The rabbi declined. “God's Grace will come and save me,” he said.
The river continued to rise and now it engulfed the rabbi's entire house except the roof, so that's where the rabbi took shelter. The sheriff of the village sent a helicopter to rescue the rabbi. The rabbi was adamant. “God's Grace will find me.”
So the rabbi drowned. When in Heaven, he went directly to God and asked him with not a little emotion, “God, I've loved you all my life. Where was your Grace when I needed it?”
God replied, “I sent you my Grace three times. First, in the form of a car, then in the form of a boat, and then again, in the form of a helicopter. But you didn't see it.”
This rabbi had to die before he could see Grace. For some of us it is necessary to be sick in order to hear the call of Grace. If that is the case, we have to start with disease to explore the supramental. If the disease originates at the mental level, and conventional mind-body medicine techniques are unable to control it, we can die like the rabbi in the story told here, or engage in mind-body healing in search of a supramental healing insight as outlined in the previous chapter.
In the present chapter, I take up the case in which the disease is at the vital level and show how we can use disease at this level to wake up to supramental intelligence.
For many of us, it is not necessary to be sick before we heed the call of supramental intelligence. We can start with health and creatively explore the vital-physical. There is a spiritual tradition in India and Tibet that is based on this idea. I am, of course, talking about tantra. The martial arts developed in China and Japan have a similar objective (see later).
Once the vital functions are built into the physical body hardware, the organs, we forget the supramental contexts (the contents of the vital functions) and the vital blueprints that are needed to make the programmed organs and keep them running. When we deal with the conditioned programmed movements of a living organ, we can even afford to forget consciousness, the programmer. But when something goes wrong with a program, what then? As an ongoing example, keep in mind the case of the immune cell program (killing abnormal cells that cannot stop replicating themselves) going awry, causing cancer.
We need to realize three underlying causes for organ dysfunction. The cause could be at the mental level. For example, the mental suppression of feelings at the heart chakra will cause the suppression of the immune system program and cause cancer. This we have already discussed. The cause could also be at the physical level, a defect of the representation-making genetic apparatus of the body. This we will take up later.
The third possibility is that the vital blueprints, in our example, of the immune system programs, no longer work, because the contextual environment of the physical body has changed. This we cannot fix by the techniques of vital body medicine (outlined in part 2) because of the contextual leap involved. We have to invoke new vital blueprints for the same vital functions for coping with the new context. But for this we need the guidance of the supramental.
So we need to make a quantum leap from the vital directly to the supramental, bypassing the mind. The supramental is the reservoir of the laws of vital movement and vital functions. There is a probability distribution full of vital blueprints that consciousness can use to make a representation of the same vital function. We use the quantum leap of creativity to the supramental to choose a new vital blueprint to make form that fits the new context. This new vital blueprint then enables the creation of new programs to run the physical organ level or even the rebuilding of the organ itself to carry out the required vital function.
Now the crucial question. If quantum healing involves creativity of the vital body, can we develop a program of action for healing ourselves based on this idea? What would the creative process entail in the case of the creativity of a diseased vital body that will take it from disease to healing?
One problem is that few people today have access to their vital body movements, let alone taking quantum leaps from the vital into the supramental. So preparation is needed, perhaps even more rigorous than in mind-body healing.
The purpose of the preparation stage is to develop a purity of intention of healing (a burning question at the vital feeling level), to slow down the vital body, which has to heal, and to create an openness and receptivity toward feelings. There are techniques of slowing down vital energy flow—pranayama exercises developed in India and tai chi movements developed in China are examples. How do we work to open up at the feeling level of our being?
Through intimate relationships. Burning questions will follow when we pursue relationships with utter honesty. This may involve allowing your partner to express feeling freely. Remember the movie The Stepford Wives, in which husbands made their wives into conditioned robots so that they would be compliant. The fact is, in Western culture, both men and women do this to their mates (women to a lesser extent) in the emotional arena. To do the opposite is a challenge.
At the next stage, the patients and their doctors would try various new (new to the patient) techniques of vital body medicine—acupuncture, chakra medicine, homeopathy, and so forth. This is the stage of unconscious processing in which we use unlearned stimuli to generate uncollapsed possibility waves at the vital and supramental (which guides the vital) levels; but we, in our ego, don't have the ability to choose among the possibilities.
So we wait for supramental intelligence to descend and create the same kind of revolution at the feeling level as the creative insight at the mental level does for mental thinking. The net effect of the quantum leap, the revolution, will be the coming into existence of new vital blueprints to help consciousness rebuild the diseased organ and programs for its carrying out of the vital functions. Since our feelings are related to the functioning of the programs that run the organs, as the vital blueprints begin to run smoothly, there will be an unblocking of the feeling at the appropriate chakra corresponding to what was once the diseased organ.
This unblocking of feeling at a chakra comes with such force that it is called the opening of a chakra. For example, if cancer at the vital level is healed in this way, the heart chakra will open. And, indeed, this is like the samadhi or “ah-ha” experience of inner or outer (mental) creativity. It is transformative. If the heart chakra opens this way, your heart is open not only for romantic love, but to universal compassion.
The final stage of the creative process is manifestation. As in mind-body healing, manifestation is not complete with only the rebuilding of the physical representation (software) needed for proper functioning of the organ(s) involved. After the remission has taken place, the patient has to try to bring to manifestation the transformative universal compassion toward all. Otherwise, the heart energy will contract once again, with disastrous consequences. In other words, when the supramental heeds your call and teaches you a new trick, you take the lesson seriously and try to live it as much as possible.
Similarly, quantum healing of the vital level of diseases at any chakra opens that chakra, and egoic expressions of feelings are transformed into universal expressions (see chapter 11). When we creatively heal a root chakra disease, our feelings of competitiveness and fear transform into confident friendliness and courage. Quantum healing of a sex chakra disease transforms the energies of sexuality and lust into respect for the self and others. In the same way, quantum healing at the navel lifts us from false pride and unworthiness to true self-worth.
At the throat chakra, quantum healing transforms the feelings of frustration and egoic freedom of speech to real freedom of self-expression. Quantum healing of the brow chakra transforms egoic confusion and ordinary clarity into intuitive supramental understanding. Finally, if a crown chakra disease is healed by a quantum leap, the leap will take us from the usual crown chakra feelings of despair and satisfaction to spiritual joy.
What is creativity of the vital-physical body for a well person? Recall once again that the chakras are places in the physical where vital body plans (morphogenetic fields) are represented in the physical as organs. These are the places where we feel vital energy movements associated with the programs that run the functions of the important organs of our body.
Of course, we identify with these movements as they become conditioned in our vital being, giving us a vital persona. Or rather we should say personae, plural, because at each chakra, we have a vital ego-persona, associated with our habit patterns of feeling there. Creativity of the vital-physical body for a well person is creative movement of vital energy beyond the conditioned movements of the vital physical ego/persona.
How does a well person engage with the awakening of supramental intelligence using the creativity of the vital-physical body, the creative process, and feeling as the vehicle (as opposed to thinking)?
I have elsewhere described the creative process involved in attaining the superconscious, supramental state called samadhi (Goswami 2000). The creative process, as elucidated before, consists of four stages: preparation, incubation, insight, and manifestation. Preparation for samadhi consists of many disciplines of the mind, including the important practice of internalizing our life, paying attention to what is happening inside rather than squandering away all of our effort in external activities.
The next stage of preparation is learning to concentrate on a particular thought (concentration meditation, see chapter 15). Of course, very soon we realize it is impossible to concentrate for very long as our organism is not made for that. So we learn to relax and practice concentration alternating with relaxation. I sometimes call it the “do-be-do-be-do” approach to meditation.
What happens then is that we enter the domain of the preconscious, the domain of secondary awareness experiences associated with each of our conditioned thoughts. In this domain, we have greater and greater free will, and we can choose the new thought belonging to the supramental, which is a quantum self experience, when we wish to. In this experience, there is immediacy; the subject-object split is not as prominent as in ordinary thought. There is separateness, but barely. This is samadhi—an experience of the universal quantum self oneness, and at the same time an experience of the supramental, unconditioned being in true consciousness.
Now suppose we do this practice, but not with thoughts, but feelings. Let's work on a heart chakra feeling—romance. I am concentrating on it, at the same time being relaxed about it with or without the object of my romance. Tantra gets its name of “left-handed path” because the practitioners often engage this practice with the romantic partner in the act of sexual embrace. But it is very difficult to transcend the need for orgasm, the habitual expression of sexuality.
If we succeed in sideswiping the “downward” movement of vital energy to the second chakra, and continue looking at the energy in the heart, a time comes when we are in the preconscious; we are dancing with the quantum self of new creative expression of romance—universal romance or unconditioned love. If we stay in this dance for a while, sooner or later, we fall into the quantum self of supramental insight, a universal feeling of unconditional love.
Vital energy, as I have mentioned before, can, with a little practice, be felt as currents or tingles within the body at the chakras. This creative feeling of unconditional love is felt as a current rising from the root chakra (or a lower chakra anyway). This rising energy is called in tantra the rising of kundalini shakti. Kundalini means “coiled up,” and shakti means “energy, vital energy.”
We imagine that the energy is coiled up at the root chakra, where it stays available (the metaphor is that of the potential energy of a coiled-up spring). Once in a while, spontaneously, the potential energy transforms into kinetic energy, moving this way and that way, but those movements just add to the confusion people have about the vital energy domain. (Indeed, many people seem to suffer when their kundalini exhibits such haphazard movement; read Kason 1994, Greenwell 1995.)
The kundalini rising experience, on the other hand, is directed movement. The process seems to create a new pathway; the energy is experienced as rising along this new pathway, in a straight channel along the spine.
Confusion is created because in the tantric literature this pathway of vital energy along the spine is called sushumna and is assumed to exist even before the kundalini awakening experience. It is not new at all. But, of course, this is classical physics thinking. In quantum thinking, the sushumna nadi is only a possible pathway until the kundalini awakening takes place. Only then can it be said to have been actualized. In this way, it is okay to say that the channel is a new creation of the kundalini awakening experience. Energy rising through this channel gives the practitioner an intense feeling of timeless universal love that has transformative value. (That is, one has the opportunity to transform if one carries through the manifestation stage of creativity.)
The tantric tradition says that if the kundalini rises in one's experience from the root chakra following a new channel along the spine all the way to the crown chakra, then the kundalini is totally awakened. Then the control of vital energy movements becomes easy without effort. This is an awakening of supramental intelligence using the vital-physical domain of experience.
I would now like to introduce the concept of positive health as a parallel to the concept of positive mental health introduced by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow researched mentally healthy people and found that about five percent of all people have 16 personality characteristics that ordinary people don't enjoy. Principal among these characteristics are creativity, unconditional love, environmental independence, and humor.
These are characteristics of supramental intelligence arrived through transcending the mind to the supramental. I also think that a similar study is due for physically healthy people, especially those who work with their vital energy, who have kundalini experiences, or experiences of rising chi in the Chinese/Japanese system of martial arts.
The psychologist Uma Goswami makes another point. She maintains that people of positive mental health radiate positive emotions such as peace. She cites the example of the great sage of India, Ramana Maharshi, in whose proximity many people have deep experiences of peace. She calls this radiant mental health (Goswami 2003).
I have experienced one such person of radiant mental health, the American philosopher-mystic Franklin Merrell-Wolff (Goswami 2000). In 1984, I was still searching, still groping in the dark for a solution to the question: “Does consciousness collapse the quantum possibility wave?” I intuited that consciousness is the key also to personal salvation. But I was tired, I was unhappy, and I had doubts about my search when I met Franklin at his ranch in Lone Pine, California.
He was 97 years old and refused to talk quantum physics with me, because “that gives me headaches.” So I just sat with him in his garden. In a matter of days, I was amazed to hear whispers about myself in which I was described as a “delightful” physicist. When I examined myself, I found all the unhappiness gone, replaced by spiritual joy that lasted during my stay at Franklin's ranch.
I think there are people of positive and radiant health among us in whose presence we feel vitality and unexplained tingles in the body, lightness seems to permeate the body, and joy bubbles up. These states of health are within the reach of all of us, but available only if we are ready to pursue creatively the domain of vital energy of consciousness.
Wouldn't it be nice if some of our health professionals were people awakened to supramental intelligence using the path of vital-physical creativity? Wouldn't it be nice if we went from our excessive preoccupation with disease to a preoccupation with health? If we learned to look at the glass as half-full instead of half-empty? For one thing, this would contribute to eradicating the fear of death that drives our preoccupation with illness.
In answer to the question of what one cause drives up health-care costs in America, many people respond that it is the money we spend to keep people alive in the last months of their lives. Death is not only regarded as painful and undesirable, but also essentially as an encounter with the great void, nothingness, a finale—and there is the source of the fear of death.
But a science within the primacy of consciousness tells us otherwise very quickly. Consciousness is the ground of being; it never dies. Additionally, we have the mental and vital subtle bodies out of which the personality arises from conditioning. When we look at the mental and vital conditioning, we find that this is the result of modification of the mathematics, the algorithms, that determine the probabilities associated with quantum possibilities.
The “quantum” memory of these modifications is not written anywhere local, so it can survive the local existence from one space-time to another, giving us the phenomenon popularly called reincarnation. What survives then are not “bodies,” but propensities of using the mind and the vital body, propensities that are popularly called karma.
But why do we reincarnate? Because it takes time to awaken to supramental intelligence. It requires many permutations and combinations of vital and mental patterns (that Easterners call karma) and many quantum leaps to learn eventually the contexts that constitute supramental intelligence.
It is this karma accrued in our vital and mental bodies that explains why we are born with certain vital and mental gunas, which, in our growing-up process, lead to the vital-physical and mind-brain doshas.
So what is death in this perspective? Death is an important part of the learning journey that we are on (Kübler-Ross 1975). Death is a prolonged period of unconscious processing, the second most important stage of creativity (Goswami 2001). The evidence of this is found in near-death experiences.
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been known about for some time. Some people who could be regarded as clinically dead, due to a cardiac arrest, for example, after being resuscitated, report numinous experiences—being out of the body, meeting a spiritual master, going through a tunnel, and so forth. How do we explain such experiences, which require a subject-object split, when a person is clinically dead? The explanation is unconscious processing.
The NDE subjects were processing possibilities unconsciously while “dead”; only after they were revived did their possibility wave collapse, and their experience take place retroactively. This retroactive collapse of an entire pathway of events leading to the current event is called in physics “delayed choice” (see Goswami 2000; Helmuth et al. 1986; Schmidt 1993). It follows that if the patients were not revived, they would have continued unconscious processing until their next birth.
Interestingly, the word “healing” has the same etymological root as “wholeness.” This means that healing in the ultimate sense is achieving wholeness. What does this imply?
Patanjali said that all our suffering comes from ignorance, ultimately. The ultimate disease, the root disease, is the illusory thinking that we are separate from the whole, which is what Patanjali calls ignorance. To heal the disease of separateness is to realize that we are the whole, we have never been separate, that the separateness is an illusion.
After one has healed oneself thusly, one can heal others. The philosopher Ernest Holmes (1938), who founded a healing tradition called Science of Mind, knew that the healing of another does not take willpower, but the knowing of truth: “Healing is not accomplished through willpower but by knowing the Truth. This Truth is that the Spiritual Man is already perfect, no matter what the appearance may be.”
However, it would be wrong to say that the realization of truth automatically heals a pathological condition of the physical body (of the realized) for which the separation (for example, structure) has enormous inertia. What the realization does is free the realized from the illusion of identity with the physical body, from the illusion of identity with any suffering, be it disease or death.
In this materialist culture, when we speak of strategies for good health, we include good hygiene, good nutrition, exercise, and a regular checkup. We are really speaking of caring for the physical body. In contrast, positive health begins when we start caring also for our vital, mental, supramental, and even bliss body.
What does good hygiene for the vital or mental body mean? Just as physical hygiene tells us to avoid harmful physical environments, similarly, vital and mental hygiene must mean avoiding vital and mental pollution.
The psychologist Uma Goswami emphasizes this when she says, “Emotions are more contagious than bacteria and viruses.” So we must avoid the contamination by negative emotions and, by the same token, negative thoughts as part of good hygiene for the subtle bodies.
Nutrition also must include the vital and the mental. Since fresh food (cooked and uncooked) has more vital energy than stale food, even refrigerated food, fresh food is to be preferred. A good case can be made for vegetarianism when we consider nutrition at both the physical and the vital body levels. Especially when you consider the way we manufacture meat and poultry in this country (read Robbins 1996), you have to worry about the vital energy you get from these products. Eating the meat of a fearful and unhappy animal of negative vital energy (angry beef) can only bestow you with negative vital energy: anger, lust, fear, insecurity, and competitiveness.
Nutrition of the mental means feeding ourselves good literature, good music, poetry, art—what can be called “soul food.” This is no less important than regular food. Entertainment that provokes laughter and joy is to be preferred over that which makes you feel “heavy.” This is the general rule of mental nutrition.
How do we exercise the vital and mental? Here the Eastern traditions have contributed much toward the exercises of the vital body. Hatha yoga postures and breathing exercises (pranayama) have come from India, tai chi from China, and aikido from Japan. But as Uma Goswami emphasizes, do not engage in these exercises with hurry in your mind. Relax instead. Slowing down and paying attention to your inner space of vital energy is the objective.
For the mental body, the exercise is concentration—for example, mentally repeating a mantra such as om. You can practice it during work, or you can sit and do concentration meditation as in transcendental meditation practice (see also chapter 15). But concentration is work and it tires you out until you discover how to alternate concentration with relaxation—do-be-do-be-do style. In this mode, prolonged concentration is possible without tiring out the nervous system.
And do-be-do-be-do occasionally will get you to the flow experience when you dance with the quantum self, when quantum leaps to the supramental are likely to happen. This is the exercise for the supramental body.
In my workshops, I often lead my participants in a flow meditation by following an idea that originally came from a Christian mystic named Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence, a simpleminded and good-hearted cook, used the practice he called “practicing the presence of God” to attain enlightenment. In my version, you begin by sitting comfortably. Do a quick body awareness exercise to bring the energy down to the body, then bring love energy to your heart. You can do it in a variety of ways.
Think of a loved one (your primary relationship) or of a revered one (for example, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, or Ramana Maharshi), or simply of God's love. Once you feel the energy in your heart, diffuse your attention (like you do from focused eyes to “soft” eyes). Let some of your attention go to peripheral activities going on around you—sounds, sights, even chores. Let it become a flow between your soft attention at the heart (being) and the stuff of doing at the periphery.
Imagine yourself taking a shower with a shower cap on. The water wets you everywhere, but not your hair. Similarly, the worldly chores grab your attention away from feelings at all the chakras, but never from your heart. Once you get the hang of it, you can do what Brother Lawrence did, live your life in flow.
Occasional creative quantum leaps are important also for the mental body, because only then does the mind get to process truly new meaning because of the new context involved. There is a story about the surrealist artist René Magritte. Magritte was walking along a street when a display cake at a confectioner's window sidetracked him. He went inside and asked for the cake. But when the shopkeeper was bringing out the cake in the display case, Magritte objected. “I want another one.” When asked why, Magritte said, “I don't want the display cake because people have been looking at it.” Likewise, it is healthier for your mind not always to process only those thoughts that everyone is processing. Hence the importance of creativity.
For the bliss body, the lazy person's exercise is sleep. But when we wake from sleep, although we feel happy, we remain the same even though we enjoyed being without the subject-object split. This is because only our habitual patterns of possibilities are available for us to process unconsciously during ordinary sleep. This changes when we learn to sleep with creativity in mind. Then states that are sleeplike can be reached, but when we wake up, we burst with inner creativity, we are transformed. This “creative sleep” is the best exercise for the bliss body.
If you are serious about positive health, don't forget checkups with persons of good positive health. In India, this is called sat-sang—to be in the company of people with little or no separateness from the whole. For a person interested in positive health, satsangs are more important than usual checkups, encounters with diagnostic machines in a doctor's office.
Finally, a few comments about a very controversial subject: miracle healing—healing that seems to be in violation of even physical laws because it is truly instantaneous.
By miracle healing I don't mean all the cases of healing that happen at Lourdes and that are labeled by the Catholic Church as “miracle healing.” People, usually from the Catholic tradition, go to Lourdes with incurable diseases, and there are many instances of healing among such people. The neuroscientist Brendan O'Regan (1997) studied these cases rigorously and concluded that they fall into the same category as spontaneous healing. And thus a majority of them are probably examples of quantum healing in the mind-body category; a few more are examples of quantum healing of the vital-physical body.
But a still smaller number may not fit in either of those two categories. Those are the cases I am talking about. Here also, there is some sort of quantum healing going on. But what does it involve?
In all cultures, there is much anecdotal evidence in favor of such healing. It is said that Jesus had this power. In India, there are many stories of the healing power of a nineteenth-century sage named Sirdhi Sai Baba that borders on the miraculous. More recently, Paramahansa Yogananda wrote (in Autobiography of a Yogi) about a sage named Babaji who restored all the broken bones of the body of a disciple who jumped from a cliff to prove his faith. In a more recent case of healing:
There was a young boy in New York, 11 years old I believe … who collected salamanders when he was little. And a salamander—if you pluck off a leg or pluck off a hand—just grows another one. And no one ever told him that humans couldn't do that. They forgot!
And so when he was about 11 years old he lost his leg up to his thigh or somewhere around there…. The doctor said, “It's all over.” But [the boy's] belief systems weren't tied into that, and he just grew another one. It took him almost a year … grew a leg, started growing a foot. Last time I heard he was growing these little toes on it (quoted in Grossinger 2000).
I don't know if these episodes are true; I haven't verified them. But suppose they were. Is there any way to incorporate this kind of “miracle” healing in our scientific thinking about health?
We have to remember that supramental intellect provides the contexts of all movements—physical, mental, and vital. Thus once we develop a mastery over the supramental intelligence, we gain the easy-without-effort facility over the movements in all three arenas. In simple terms, this means the ability to control and manipulate all the three worlds—physical, mental, and vital.
One has to consider this carefully. Even a little change in a physical law can potentially change the workings of the universe. Obviously, we cannot contemplate universal changes in physical laws. Nobody can have that power. But a local change (manipulation) of the physical laws without harming anything else is certainly of no disastrous consequence. Creativity in the domain of the physical must be considered only within this very local context. True miracle healing, I think, falls into this category.