CHAPTER SIX
John was standing by the water cooler at work, laughing at a joke that one of his co-workers had made, when he suddenly doubled over with pain, clutching at his chest. All the breath went out of him, and it seemed as though an enormous weight were crushing his heart. John felt panicked but could not scream or breathe. A minute or so of complete terror seemed to stretch on interminably, but then gave way to the inexplicable presence of overwhelming love and deep peace. John could have rested in that state forever, but a curious thing was happening. He was rising up out of his body, looking down at the peculiar, crumpled form barely recognizable as himself, attended to by one of his co-workers who was administering CPR.
He thought, “Oh, God, I've had a heart attack and I'm dead. But then he thought about all the stories he'd heard about people being resuscitated and reasoned that perhaps he was just having a near-death experience! Perhaps the paramedics would arrive fast enough to save him. As soon as he had that thought, John found himself instantaneously present in the dispatch area where two paramedics were already responding to the call from his office. In a hurry to leave, one of them knocked over a cup of coffee. The paramedics did arrive in time to restart John's heart, and he later validated that, just as he had witnessed while in his out-of-body state, one of them had overturned a styrofoam coffee cup en route to the ambulance.
Over the years, we've heard hundreds of near-death experiences and many of them, like John's, involve specific knowledge of events that were happening some distance away. These stories are intriguing, not only because they clearly demonstrate to us that we are more than our bodies, but also because they lead to speculation on the nature of mind. As medical scientists, we can attest to how little our scientific field understands the powers of the mind.
For the past three chapters, we have been discussing the body/mind without really defining mind. Is mind just a random side effect of physiological function—that is, a chance result of electrical fields set up when neurons fire? Are fear and love, delight, and inspiration no more than the mathematical sum of the ion flux that ensues when a neurotransmitter gets squirted out into a synapse? How about the near-death stories? Is the experience of peace, love, and uncommon wisdom—often coupled with the presence of a Supreme Being of Light—merely the meaningless last gasp of oxygen-deprived brain cells? Many scientists such as Carl Sagan and Sir Francis Crick—the latter being the co-discoverer of DNA—believe that it is. Most scientists, in fact, ascribe consciousness to a poorly understood property of neurons.
Personally, we love neurons. Their capacities are incredible. For example, neurons in the right temporal lobe of the brain, when stimulated, will give rise to visions of light. People with temporal lobe epilepsy or TLE, a disorder in which the neurons discharge electrically in an abnormal way, often describe mystic experiences. Another common symptom of TLE is a pressing urge to write material of a religious nature. Some people with TLE complain of orgasmic discharges of energy throughout their body that may even lead to their contortion into yogic postures that they are normally unable to achieve. But does this prove, as some scientists suggest, that all mystics simply had TLE or some other neurological disturbance?
Dr. Melvin Morse, a pediatrician who has written two books—one about near-death experiences in children, and another about light experiences in general—suggests that the right temporal lobe is indeed the “circuit board” for mystical experience. After all, we live in bodies. It is perfectly logical, and consistent with scientific data, to reasonably assume that all of our earthly experiences require some physical circuitry. If the circuitry of the right temporal lobe is stimulated—-whether by epilepsy, prolonged meditation, prayer, fasting, drumming, singing, intense joy, intense fear, drugs, or oxygen deprivation—it may be able to process information through newly accessed pathways. There's nothing mysterious about that. After all, every time you turn on your TV or change the channel, you tune into energy waves that were always present in potential form, but simply undecoded until the physical receiver was aligned correctly with the signal.
Miron often points out that if you were mechanically inclined, a TV neurosurgeon, so to speak, you could go into the back of your set and, by severing some wires, you could wipe out your patient's speech. By cutting other wires, you could eliminate the picture or possibly change the nature of the image you see. But does this prove that the signal that comes through your TV—its mind—originates in its circuitry? You can dissect your television thoroughly, and you will never find the little man inside who is reading the news. In terms of the brain, the natural corollary of the opinion that mind resides in the wiring is that when the brain dies, the mind dies, too. What do you think? When your TV dies, will the evening news go with it? When your body dies, will the consciousness you know as yourself disappear?
The former Catholic theologian, Caroline Myss, who has the remarkable gift of medical clairvoyance, can diagnose a person's illness without even seeing the individual. Harvard-trained neuroscientist and physician, Norman Shealy, who has studied the mysterious nature of mind for years, validated that Caroline's remote diagnoses were accurate nearly 95 percent of the time. Her accuracy was more impressive than a CAT scan, microscopic laboratory findings, and a physician's finely honed observational skills combined! As scientists, we would hypothesize that the energy waves that each of us continually emanate are encoded with information that Caroline's brain—or perhaps other cells in her body—can somehow decode.
Neuroreceptor cells in the brain and throughout the body, like televisions, can pick up information through the airwaves. When we see color, for example, we are receiving and decoding energy waves corresponding to a graded spectrum of light. When we hear sound, little hair cells in our inner ears are responding to the magnitude of sound waves. All information is encoded in energy waves. At times, we may receive this information through pathways other than our typical five senses. Such reception is generally called intuition.
Intuitive faculties vary from person to person and within the same person at different times. Unlike the well-researched physical senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting, the intuitive sense of knowing involves physical receptors that our science has yet to discover. But just because the mechanism through which extrasensorial informational energy waves are received is unknown, we cannot infer that no mechanism exists. That would constitute the same kind of “scientific” acumen shown by an 18-month-old child who believes himself to be invisible when a piece of cardboard held in front of his eyes shields others from view.
Most of us have had some experience with extrasensory perception. Have you ever thought of a person only to have them telephone a few seconds later? Perhaps you have experienced such a strong sensation that someone in another car was watching you that you felt compelled to turn around and look back. A college friend, “Susan,” awoke one night with such a start that she was thrown from her bed. She had dreamed that her fiancé's car had skidded off a steep mountain road. A few hours later, the man's mother called with the terrible news that “Vincent” had indeed died when his car careened over the edge of a steep precipice in the mountains. Susan had been thrown forcefully from her bed at about the same that Vincent had fallen to his death. Was this a coincidence, as some people might argue, or did Vincent and Susan's minds actually touch?
Strong bonds between people, such as the one between Susan and Vincent, or the connection of a mother to her child, seem to predispose one to the extrasensory perception of information. Although I have strong intuition, I certainly don't think of myself as “an intuitive” or psychic. But when our youngest son Andrei was a baby, I left him with Miron one Sunday morning while I went to church. Our kitchen doubled as a family room, and we had placed the baby's playpen several feet from the stove. Although there was ample space between the stove and the playpen, just to be extra safe we never used the playpen if anything was cooking. I had finished pressure-cooking a pot of beans much earlier that morning, so I didn't give a second thought to putting Andrei in the playpen as I walked out the door.
While driving to church about 20 minutes later, I felt a physical “tug” just over my heart where the thymus gland is located. Simultaneously, I saw a vivid vision of the pressure cooker exploding and an arc of hot liquid jetting several feet into the air and hitting Andrei on the right side of his back, just above the diaper line. Confused and upset, I pulled over to think. Was this another example of “awfulizing,” or had I really seen something? Should I put a lid on my foolish negative thinking, or should I drive home? Because there is so little support in our culture for intuitive knowing, I concluded that I had been duped by my own negativity. But when I returned home from church a few hours later, an ashen-faced Miron met me at the door. His first words were, “There's been an accident, but don't worry, it's not serious.”
I caught my breath and whispered, “Don't tell me. The baby's been burned on his back, hasn't he?” Miron nodded as I ran to Andrei in tears. The freak accident had occurred exactly as I had seen it in the vision. Furthermore, as near as we can tell, I actually saw the vision a few minutes before the accident occurred. Andrei was fortunate. Although a few days later the burn had to be debrided, a procedure in which the dead skin is peeled away, the wound healed without incident. In the 21 years that have passed since that Sunday morning, I've never had another precognitive knowing about Andrei or our other two children.
Naturally, I like to believe that if anything serious happened to any family member or close friend, I would get the message, but I can't be sure of that. The sporadic nature of intuitive phenomena points out the precise difficulty in studying them. Although some individuals such as Caroline Myss seem to have a constant receptivity to certain types of information, many of us have only the occasional ability to tune our physiological receptors to extrasensory frequencies.
In the mid-1980s, for example, for no particular reason and with no conscious volition, I developed a fascinating capacity that lasted for only a few weeks. I could guess, to the penny, the amount of change that Miron had in his pocket, or the bill for the groceries. I shocked a few check-out clerks by making out my checks, correct to the penny, before they had even finished totaling up the items in my basket!
For a fascinating review of research in this field, you might enjoy reading Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne. The book was published in 1987 when Jahn was Professor of Aerospace Sciences and Dean Emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, and Brenda Dunne was manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, a facility that seeks to extend the margins of science arid its understanding of consciousness—the mind.
We hope that this chapter has stimulated you to think a little bit about the nature of the mind. It's heady stuff, if you'll forgive both the pun and the typical tendency to locate the mind in the brain. Each one of us has some conceptualization of mind which, as we will explore in future chapters, has a great deal to do with how we think about life. Those of us who believe that mind is a form of conscious awareness limited in space and time to the vicinity of our brain, subscribe to a paradigm, or belief system, resting on separation, isolation, and the ultimate finality of death. Those of us who believe that mind is a form of conscious awareness unlimited by space and time, and shared among all of life—both animate and inanimate—subscribe to a paradigm of interconnectedness that is intimately related to the power of the mind to heal and to the immortality of the soul.
There is no time when our understanding of the mystery of mind has been more important, for at no other point in history did we have sufficient knowledge to destroy ourselves and our planet. On a hopeful note, Caroline Myss believes that our species is undergoing an actual physical transformation from Homo sapiens to Homo noeticus. The former term means “man of knowledge”—a very valuable, but somewhat limited, form of knowing based only on reason. The latter term means “man of intuition”—capable of the direct perception of information that is unlimited by bias, belief, space, or time.
This evolution in consciousness may indeed involve an actual physical change in the right temporal lobe of our brains. It is interesting to note that one in twenty Americans, or more than eight million people, have had near-death experiences. And about 20 percent of those have subsequently reported fascinating changes in their ability to perceive information and interact with the physical world.
One such change is electrical sensitivity. Such “electrical sensitives” can no longer wear watches, because something about their energy field actually stops their operation. Many such people also report the nonintentional shutting down of computers, street lights, and electrical appliances as they walk by! Other phenomena may include the development of intuition and other special abilities such as medical clairvoyance, contact with angelic realms, and the power to heal by the laying-on of hands. Is it possible that the right temporal lobe activity of these “sensitives” was changed by the near-death experience?
Fortunately, we don't have to undergo a near-death experience to open up the limitless possibilities of our minds. As we shall examine, the power of prayer, meditation, belief, and basic good-heartedness can all put us in touch with a reality much richer than our current science can describe. Then, perhaps, we can realize intuitively what the great quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger meant when he commented that if we could measure the sum total of all the minds that were present in the Universe, there would be just one.
