The pressing need for a quantum medicine is well illustrated, I think, by the following case study.
A young Israeli named Aaron, 24 years old, called me at my office and said, “I feel perfectly healthy, but my doctor has given me ninety days to live. He took some tests which showed that I have an incurable blood disorder—that was exactly twenty-three days ago.”
Barely managing to suppress his emotions, he told me a story that had taken several strange turns. His diagnosis had come about entirely by accident. Because of an old soccer injury, he had a deviated septum, which made it difficult for him to breathe. He visited a surgeon in Chicago who could repair his nose—Aaron had moved to the United States several years earlier to attend business school—and the surgeon asked him to have a routine blood test.
When the results came back from the lab, the doctor was very disturbed. They showed that Aaron was severely anemic: his hemoglobin count had fallen from a normal of 14 to 6 (a count of 12 would be considered borderline anemic); hemoglobin is the chemical component of the blood that carries oxygen throughout the body. His hematocrit had plummeted to 16; this means that when his blood was spun in a centrifuge to separate the red blood cells from the plasma, the red cells occupied only 16 percent of the total volume. In normal blood, this should be closer to 40 percent.
Aaron was immediately referred to a blood specialist, a hematologist, who asked him a standard series of questions.
“Have you been feeling short of breath lately?”
“No,” Aaron answered.
“Do you wake up in the middle of the night feeling suffocated?”
“No.”
“Have your ankles been swelling up?”
“No.”
The hematologist looked at him very hard. “Look,” he said, “you’re pretty tired all the time, aren’t you?” Aaron shook his head. “That’s amazing!” the doctor exclaimed. “With your hemoglobin counts, you should be in congestive heart failure by now.”
Aaron was shocked. Looking at the blood tests, however, his doctor had a right to be amazed. In severe anemia, the heart has to work much harder than normal to supply enough oxygen to the rest of the body. This, combined with its own oxygen deprivation, causes the heart muscle to swell, leading to congestive heart failure. The patient begins to wake up at night feeling that he is suffocating to death, and eventually that is what happens.
Mystified, the hematologist took a sample of Aaron’s bone marrow. The body typically contains only 9 ounces of bone marrow, but that is enough to manufacture our total supply of red blood corpuscles, at a rate of 200 billion new cells per day. Under examination, Aaron’s marrow showed no signs of the red-cell precursors that should have been present. The hematologist now knew that at the root of Aaron’s condition was a shutdown of the bone marrow (called aplastic anemia), but he could not determine any cause for it. Even without symptoms, Aaron was very sick.
“No one knows for sure how long a red blood cell lives,” the doctor said. “The accepted figure is one hundred twenty days, but it could be as short as a month. Since you are not replacing your current red cells, I’m afraid you cannot live much longer than ninety days.”
As Aaron listened numbly, the doctor told him that medicine could do very little for him—the suggested treatment was a bone marrow transplant, a major operation that he might not survive and that probably would not save him. He could be given a blood transfusion to raise his red-cell count, but the sudden incursion of another person’s blood would further dampen his bone marrow function; moreover, when the marrow detected that the blood count was up again, it might interpret that as a sign to roll back even further.
Because he felt no symptoms, Aaron hesitated to undergo the transplant. The hematologist gave him two weeks to decide. He also said that it was his legal duty to advise the young man to settle his affairs as quickly as possible. (Aaron was not exactly treated with compassion at any step of the way. At one point, he divulged to his doctor that his older sister had died suddenly and tragically in law school. The cause of death, though vague, was thought to be a rare blood disorder, perhaps inherited. On hearing this, the hematologist enthusiastically asked Aaron to try to find out precisely what his sister had died of, since together he and she would make an excellent article for the journals. When Aaron later recounted this incident, I found myself growing extremely angry.)
Within a day of his diagnosis, Aaron began to feel short of breath and found himself unable to sleep. He sought in desperation for a way to cure himself. Almost by chance he took up meditation and heard about our Ayurvedic clinic. Within a month, he had become my patient in Lancaster.
“The most hopeful thing,” I said, “is that you felt healthy before you found out what was wrong with you. Let’s go on the assumption that you are controlling this disorder and do everything we can to allow your body to heal itself.”
Without knowing what caused his disease, I found as I was interviewing Aaron that there were many points of concern. The first was the frightening diagnosis itself, which had thrown him into a panic. In such a condition, it is difficult to see how the bodymind could begin to find a route toward healing. In addition, Aaron seemed a tense and driven person. He had worked four jobs at a time while he was in school, pushing himself to the limit in order to buy a car and keep ahead of school debts. The pressure of school itself was enormous. He routinely took huge doses of vitamins, plus an anti-ulcer medication to soothe his chronic stomach pain. A few months earlier he’d had tendonitis from playing tennis too hard and had taken an anti-inflammatory agent to bring down the swelling—such drugs are known to suppress bone marrow function. I asked him to discontinue all medication.
He stayed two weeks at the clinic and for the first time lived in an environment free of “normal” stress. He continued to meditate, ate a simple vegetarian diet suited to his particular body type, and received a course of massage treatments that Ayurveda prescribes to purify the physiology. I also instructed him in the primordial sound technique suitable for his condition. One night a nurse caught him walking down the hall with wet hair, and he sheepishly confessed that he had sneaked off the property to go swimming. When I heard this, I was very happy—another patient with Aaron’s blood count could easily have been on oxygen and blood transfusions. The signs were more than encouraging.
On the day he left, I asked Aaron not to have any more blood tests for at least two weeks. A blood sample drawn at Lancaster had disclosed that his supply of immature red blood cells, called reticulocytes, was four times higher than when he entered. Since these are the cells that later mature into red corpuscles, I felt that his condition had turned around. As I write, Aaron has just outlived his original prognosis. He is still severely anemic, but on the other hand he has not gone into the serious decline expected of someone whose blood count is heading toward zero. In fact, his anemia has slightly improved.
In my mind, Aaron stands on the dividing line between two kinds of medicine. The first is standard scientific medicine, whose methods are deeply ingrained in me, but which I can no longer trust absolutely. It is not that standard medicine has failed. Aaron’s doctors expertly tracked down his disease at every level of the body, from tissues to cells to molecules—in Aaron’s case, the tissue was bone marrow, the cells were red blood corpuscles, and the molecule was hemoglobin. To a doctor trained in conventional medicine, this is the end of the route, a route that has taken two centuries of painstakingly rational investigation to find. Once you know what is wrong with a person’s very molecules, what else can be known?
This logic is impeccable science, but it is dangerously divorced from the ordinary input of life. By “ordinary input” I mean what a person eats and how he sleeps, the thoughts that go through his head, and all the sights, smells, sounds, and textures that enter through his senses. You can say that the body is made out of molecules, but with equal justice you could say that it is made out of experiences. That definition matches our own self-image, which is not scientific but fluid, changeable, and alive. Out of ordinary experiences, the second medicine, which is quantum, takes its origin.
We might casually think that everyday life is too commonplace and simple for science to bother with. In truth, it is far too complex. Although a molecule of hemoglobin is structured out of 10,000 separate atoms, it can be isolated and mapped—a feat that has led to several Nobel prizes. However, to trace what hemoglobin is doing when you take in a single breath would be impossible, because each red blood cell contains 280 million molecules of hemoglobin, each of which picks up 8 atoms of oxygen. Considering that the lungs expose about one quart of blood to the air per breath, containing 5 trillion red cells, the total number of chemical exchanges is astronomical. The whole process quickly disintegrates into a swirling chaos of activity.
When you open the human body during surgery, what confronts you is not the well-defined map of textbook anatomy, with the nerves in blue, blood vessels in red, and a green liver neatly set apart from a yellow gallbladder. Instead, an uneducated eye sees a jumble of tissue that is mostly undifferentiated—almost all of it is pink and moist; one organ slides imperceptibly into another. The great wonder is that scientific medicine has learned as much as it has about this pulsating chaos. But in return for its knowledge, science has paid a high price by having to abandon ordinary experience. A breath of air, after all, is not chaos, except to a molecular biologist. Breathing is the basic rhythm of life, upon which all other rhythms are based.
Eric Cassell, a professor of physiology at Cornell, astutely points out that when a doctor asks his patient questions, he is not trying to find out what is wrong with him; he is trying to find out what symptoms he might have that match a known, classified disease. This is a subtle but very important distinction. It reminds us that the whole system of organs, tissues, and so on was set up intellectually to make the body easier to classify. There must be other views that are truer to nature, in that they rely on ordinary experience, defying nature’s disorderly exterior in order to understand its real meaning.
Chaos is just an appearance, a mask, and with a different eye it metamorphoses into pure order. Until its code was cracked, a honeybee’s dance looked like chaos, a random display of twitches and turns. Now we see it as a precise set of directions leading the other bees in the hive to a source of nectar. This does not mean that the dance changed from chaos to order, only that its appearance changed in our eyes. Similarly, if you take a few blood pressure readings from a heart patient, it is unlikely that they will form any pattern, but if you monitor him constantly, a definite wave pattern emerges, with peaks and valleys that occur over the space of one or two days. This fact, which was only recently uncovered, has allowed cardiologists to detect hypertension in patients who have deceptively normal pressure in a doctor’s office because their peaks occur only at night. Clearly some kind of tidal swing is at work, but no one yet knows its significance. The mask of chaos is too freshly broken.
The two medicines do not have to be antagonists, but for the moment they clearly face in opposite directions. To a hematologist, it is largely irrelevant if Aaron is tense, driven, full of dubious substances, and panicked at the thought of dying. To an Ayurvedic doctor, these are primary inputs to his sickness—they have entered on the quantum level, where he turns into the person he is. The hematologist is not being heartless; he may care very deeply about Aaron, but he cannot prove a connection between bone marrow dysfunction and working four jobs at a time. That is the limit where the Newtonian notion of cause and effect, the basis of standard scientific medicine, breaks down.
You cannot possibly ask enough questions to find out what really makes a patient sick. In Aaron’s case, I would want to know how he felt about his sister’s death, what he eats for breakfast, who his friends are, how he feels when he loses at tennis—in effect, I want to know every relevant experience. This is virtually impossible. So many influences press in on us every day that the idea of causation disappears. I would think it absurd to dissect a poet’s brain to find the cause of his sonnets; his cortex undeniably had to exhibit specific brain-wave patterns to produce a sonnet, but they have evaporated and been carried to a realm hidden by time. It begins to seem just as absurd to claim that an isolated physical cause lies behind Aaron’s bone marrow dysfunction. His life is swept along by time, too, and what I want to find has evaporated.
I know this sounds shocking, because without a cause, how can we find a cure? But all physical causes are partial at best. If you try to give someone a cold, for example, it takes more than a virus. Experimenters have incubated cold viruses, placed them directly on the mucous lining of the nose, and found that their subjects came down with colds only 12 percent of the time. These odds could not be increased by exposing the subjects to cold drafts, putting their feet in ice water to give them chills, or anything else that was purely physical. Ordinary experience, a complex play of inner and outer forces, defies the rules of causation that work for billiard balls.
Conventional medicine already recognizes that ordinary experience can play a complex role in disease. For example, statistics show that single people and widows living alone are more likely to get cancer than people who are married. Their loneliness is called a risk factor—one could just as truly call it a carcinogen. Then why isn’t curing loneliness a cure for cancer? It may well be, but in a different kind of medicine than we now practice. An Ayurvedic physician is more interested in the patient he sees before him than in his disease. He recognizes that what makes up the person is experience—sorrows, joys, fleeting seconds of trauma, long hours of nothing special at all. The minutes of life silently accumulate, and like grains of sand deposited by a river, the minutes can eventually pile up into a hidden formation that crops above the surface as a disease.
The process of accumulation is impossible to see or to stop. I may sit in a traffic jam and think, “Well, nothing is happening to me now,” but in fact I am taking in, or ingesting, the world around me. My body is metabolizing everything I see, hear, smell, and touch and turning it into me, just as surely as it ingests my orange juice.
The input that is turning into me is constant, and by my participation I shape it into final form. Science will not be able to measure this process, because it cannot put my senses or my emotions on a scale. How much loneliness does it take to turn into cancer? This is a meaningless question. The carcinogen is invisible. I remember one night when I stood in the emergency room of a suburban hospital after attending to an overflow of patients. A late commuter train had crashed, and with one other doctor I had to work in a near frenzy seeing dozens of passengers who might be in shock, bandaging their wounds, calming their nerves, setting bones, and performing minor surgeries. Our job seemed endless, but after five hours it was done, and we felt like heroes.
Then the ambulance radio came on again, and the driver said, “We’re coming in with a two-month-old infant, female, who is unconscious. No signs of respiration or pulse, and she’s turning blue.” All at once I went cold, and I saw a look of despair on the other doctor’s face. We knew what was ahead of us. The ambulance unloaded its stretcher, bearing a tiny infant who looked lost on the big, white sheet. To put an endotracheal tube down her throat and begin cardiac massage was a horrible travesty, but we went through with it. From the first moment, we knew this must be a “crib death,” which medicine calls sudden infant death syndrome. It affects seemingly normal babies, there is no known cause, and even the fastest emergency treatment is usually of no avail.
As soon as we decently could, we took away our apparatus and closed the baby’s eyes. I went out to talk to the parents, young and well-to-do, who were devastated. All I could do was tell them about a support group of other parents whose children had died this way. They left, still in shock, and I never saw them again. Who can measure what happened to me? I don’t recall the face of a single victim from the train wreck, people whose bodies I worked on for hours. But the blond hair and blue eyes of the baby are as vivid in my mind as the first second I saw her. She has entered into me. I do not know where she lives inside me—is it really some bit of gray matter in my cortex? It would seem ridiculous to look for the location. What is important is that my whole being is made up of such experiences. I have metabolized a hundred thousand such things every day, and if you want to see them in detail, just look at me.
As long as you are surrounded by the input of life, there is no stopping the rush of events that makes me what I am. On the other hand, my nature may go deeper than the things I see and hear. There may be a zero point in me, like the point of zero vibration which gives rise to the entire spectrum of light.
If you stepped outside my thoughts, senses, and emotions, you would be left with the equivalent of empty space. But like the empty space of quantum physics, my “inner space” may not be empty at all. I would argue that our inner space is a rich field of silent intelligence, and that it exerts a powerful influence on us.
Intelligence is easily located and yet impossible to find. The body’s know-how seems to be the result of a complexity of parts, broken down according to functions—digestion, respiration, metabolism, and so on. Although this division of labor is real enough, intelligence remains everywhere the same despite it, just as a drop of sea water shares the saltiness of the whole ocean. Sea water gives us a perfect example, in fact. The fluid in the body tastes as salty as the ocean and is equally rich in magnesium, gold, and other trace elements. Life began in the sea, and we are alive outside it only because we carry an internal ocean around with us. When you are thirsty and take a drink of water, you are actually rebalancing the fluid chemistry everywhere in your inner ocean.
The feeling of being thirsty is stimulated by the hypothalamus, a piece of the brain about the size of a finger joint, which in turn is connected by both nerves and chemical messengers to the kidneys. The kidneys constantly monitor the body’s need for water by “listening in” to signals from the blood. The signals are chemical, as with the neuro-peptides, but in this case the molecules involved are salts, proteins, and blood sugar, as well as specific messengers. The blood in turn is picking up these signals from every cell in the body, each of which is constantly monitoring its own need for water. In other words, when you want a drink of water, you are not just obeying an impulse from your brain—you are listening to a request from every cell in your body.
If you drink one small glass of water, you will replace only 1⁄400 of your total bodily fluid, yet that will satisfy the precise needs of 50 trillion different cells. Such exact monitoring is often attributed to the kidneys alone, but as we have just seen, the kidneys never make decisions alone; they work in constant consultation with the quantum mechanical body—the whole field of intelligence. The evenness of intelligence is not apparent from the physical makeup of the cells; it coexists with the body’s extreme specialization. The neuron, which is outfitted on its cell wall with a million sodium-potassium pumps, is not at all like a heart cell or stomach cell. Yet, the integrity of the message “time for some water” is constant everywhere.
In physics, a field is what propagates an influence over a large, or even infinite, expanse of space. A magnet creates a magnetic field around itself; small magnets have a weak field that extends a few inches, while the Earth’s magnetic poles are powerful enough to cover the entire globe. Anything that falls within a field feels its effect; that is why the magnetic needle of a compass automatically aligns itself with the Earth’s magnetic polarity. Sitting in the body’s field of intelligence, each cell is aligned with the brain, which stands as the north magnetic pole.
A cell is a small outcropping in the field, while the brain is a huge one. But the cell, when it “talks” to the rest of the body, is not inferior to the brain in the quality of what it says. Like the brain, it must correlate its message with trillions of others; it must participate in thousands of chemical exchanges every second; and most important of all, its DNA is the equal of any neuron’s. Therefore, the smallest impulse of intelligence is as intelligent as the largest. In fact, it is meaningless to speak of important pieces of intelligence or insignificant ones. We need only to remember the chain that builds dopamine; the inability to turn the humble protein serine into the equally humble metabolite called glycine leads to a minutely higher level of dopamine, with the catastrophic outcome of schizophrenia, overwhelming the entire mind.
Every cell is a little sentient being. Sitting in the liver or heart or kidney, it “knows” everything you know, but in its own fashion. We are of course used to the idea that we are smarter than our kidneys. The very concept of a “building block” implies that the brick is simpler than the building. That is true of a nonliving structure, but not of us. The nerve impulse for worry, for example, may show up in the stomach as an ulcer, in the colon as a spasm, or in the mind as an obsession, but they are various manifestations of the same impulse. Worry transforms itself from organ to organ, yet each point in the body knows that there is worrying going on, and every cell remembers. You may consciously forget that you are worrying, but then all at once the feeling is there to remind you, and it seems to be everywhere.
Earlier, we noted that if you could see the body as it really is, you would see it as constant change mixed with complete non-change. It is like a house whose bricks are constantly being replaced, or a sculpture that at the same time is a river. The obstacle confronting medicine so far is that one side of our nature—the flowing and changing—has been sacrificed for the sake of the other—the stable and fixed. Now, having looked at the quantum level, perhaps we can package both into one unit that captures our real double essence—the impulse of intelligence. An impulse of intelligence is the smallest unit that preserves itself intact (non-change) while undergoing transformation (change). If impulses of intelligence did not have this one general property, then they could not be the basic building block of the body; either some purely mental impulse or some purely physical particle would have that distinction.
But neither of these can survive change. The molecules forming your brain on the day that you first thought the word rose are not there anymore, and yet the concept is. At the same time, you do not have to think the word rose all the time to retain it; you can think literally millions of other thoughts without ever referring to this word. The next time you want it back, there it is, without confusion. It has retained its integrity through thick and thin because the impulse of intelligence contains mind, matter, and the silence that glues them together.
The physical structure of the body mirrors intelligence and gives it a projected form, but intelligence is not trapped inside this framework of flesh and bones. A startling confirmation of this fact appears in the brain. Karl Lashley, a pioneer in neurophysiology, tried to discover where memory was located in the brain by performing a simple experiment with lab rats. He taught them to run a maze, a skill that is remembered and stored in their brains, just as we acquire skills. Then he systematically removed a small amount of cerebral tissue. Lashley supposed that if the rats still remembered how to run the maze (as measured by their speed and accuracy), then the brain’s memory center must still be intact.
Little by little, he took out more brain matter, but the rats, curiously enough, still remembered how to run the maze. Finally, more than 90 percent of the entire cortex was gone, leaving only a speck of brain tissue, and still the rats remembered the maze, with a slight fall-off in accuracy and speed. This experiment, among others, suggested a revolutionary idea, that every cell of the brain must store the whole brain while at the same time storing its own specific task. This is exactly what we have found: every impulse of intelligence is equally intelligent, opening up endless possible projections of mind into body.
John Lorber, a British neurologist, specialized in examining patients who were hydrocephalic—in place of cerebral tissue, their brain cavities were filled with fluid. Generally, this condition, popularly called “water on the brain,” can be quite dangerous and lead to serious mental impairment.
However, one of Lorber’s patients was a gifted college student, majoring in mathematics, whose IQ was measured near 130. Referred to Lorber by his family doctor, who thought his patient had an enlarged head, the student was given a brain scan, which revealed that his cortex was only 1 millimeter thick, compared to the usual 4.5 centimeters. In other words, fluid had replaced about 98 percent of the neurons needed for thinking, remembering, and all the other higher functions centered in the cerebral cortex. With 2 percent of a normal cortex, this man was in the same position as Lashley’s rats, physiologically, and yet infinitely more capable—he was in fact normal or above average in all respects.
We are being driven closer and closer to the silent field of intelligence as our fundamental reality. But once again, there is the problem that a silent mind seems to contain nothing at all. If we go back nearly a hundred years, a similar dilemma was very much in the air. A new science called psychology was trying to be born, but it was having a hard time because to qualify as a science, psychology needed an object to study. It was obvious that every person had a psyche, but no one had ever seen or touched one. The most basic questions about the psyche had remained unsettled for centuries. Was it the soul, the mind, the personality, or all three? No one was going to be able to set up the first experiment in psychology until these matters were settled.
The turning point came when William James, a brilliant philosopher at Harvard who also held a medical degree, asserted that psychology did indeed have a proper object to study. Or rather, thousands of objects—all the thoughts, emotions, desires, and impressions that swirled through the mind. James called these the “stream of consciousness.” If there was a mental essence or soul, as pre-psychologists back to Plato had affirmed, then science could not find it. James did not say that such an invisible essence did not exist, but he saw no way to experiment upon it scientifically.
James defended the stream of consciousness on purely pragmatic grounds, reasoning that nothing in the mind could be considered tangible except the objects (thoughts) that passed through it. If one is always thinking or dreaming—no one knows what he does mentally in deep, nondream sleep—then the reality of the mind must be simply a continuous flow of thoughts and dreams. James was a very astute observer; he had to be when you consider that he basically founded the field of psychology on the data he saw in his own head (as Freud did, extending the data into the field of dreams and unconscious motives). But James missed a tiny aspect of the mind that might have seemed completely trivial. The stream of consciousness is not made up solely of objects floating downriver; in between every thought there is a fleeting gap of silence.
It may be very tiny and all but unnoticeable, but the gap is always there and absolutely necessary. Without it, we would be thinking like this: “IlikethislunchanddessertbutifleattoomuchohthereisSid lneedtowhereismywallet…” and so on. The silent gap between thoughts, being intangible, still plays no part in modern psychology, which is oriented completely to the mind’s contents or the brain’s mechanics. The gap turns out to be the central player, however, if you are interested in what lies beyond thought. Every fraction of a second we are permitted a glimpse into another world, one that is inside us and yet obscurely out of reach. A verse from an ancient Indian Upanishad describes this beautifully: “A man is like two doves sitting in a cherry tree. One bird is eating of the fruit while the other silently looks on.” The bird who is the silent witness stands for that deep silence in everyone, which appears to be nothing at all when in reality it is the origin of intelligence.
The fascinating thing about intelligence is that it is like a one-way arrow: you can use intelligence to shape a molecule, but if you look at the molecule, you cannot take the intelligence back out of it. When the poet Keats wrote his beautiful sonnet “To Sleep,” he began with the haunting line, “O soft embalmer of the still midnight.” If he had been hooked up to an EEG while he was writing, the readout of brain waves would have formed a unique pattern, yet no amount of examination of those brain waves could ever yield a line of poetry.
In the same way, all of our molecules are hitched up with a bit of intelligence, which influences everything they do, but you cannot see it by looking at them. DNA provides a good example. Sitting in the nucleus of each cell, DNA is constantly bathed in a swirl of free-floating organic molecules, the basic building blocks of the material body. Whenever it wants to be active, DNA attracts these chemicals and uses them to form new DNA. This is an essential part of cell division—one double strand of DNA must divide in half, splitting right down the middle like a zipper, and then each half turns into new, complete DNA by attracting the appropriate molecules to itself. The bath of swirling, aimless source molecules surrounding DNA provides it with “letters” to combine—there are just four of them, labeled A, T, C, and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. DNA spins these four letters out into an infinite variety of combinations, some of which are short (it takes three letters to code a basic amino acid), others of which are very long, like the poly-peptide chains that can be seen streaming away from DNA like tendrils.
The DNA knows exactly what information to pick out and how it all goes together for each thing it wants to “say” chemically. Besides building itself, DNA knows how to build RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which is its nearly identical twin and active counterpart. RNA’s mission is to travel away from the DNA in order to produce the proteins, more than 2 million in number, that actually build and repair the body. RNA is like active knowledge, in comparison to DNA’s silent intelligence.
DNA does not work just from rote memory. It can invent new chemicals at will (such as a new antibody after you catch a strain of flu you have never been exposed to before). Exactly how this is accomplished is not known, although molecular biologists have found the spacers that separate different genetic words, or genomes. It is also well established that only 1 percent of the genetic material in DNA is used for its complicated coding, self-repair, and manufacture of RNA, leaving 99 percent doing nothing that science can account for.
This puzzling silence has stimulated a great deal of curiosity, especially among people who believe that humans do not use their full intelligence. William James ventured to guess that we use only 5 percent of our intelligence—he meant mental capacity—with an Einstein utilizing up to 15 percent or 20 percent. How this percentage translates into usable DNA is unknown, but we can venture to say that DNA is keeping a large vocabulary in silent storage—one geneticist has calculated that the number of molecular “words” produced in a single cell, if translated into English, would fill a thousand-volume library. And that is the product of just the active 1 percent we have managed to understand. Thanks to the discovery of recombinant DNA (pieces of genetic material that can be shuffled in and out of sequence on the DNA strands), the potential vocabulary may be infinitely larger than we suspect; already the combinations of “letters” encoded on DNA are sufficient to create every life form on Earth, from bacteria and molds to all plants, insects, mammals, and people.
One might suppose that the more complex the organism, the greater its share of DNA, but in fact a lily contains about a hundred times more DNA than a human being. Counting genes does not give very much of a meaningful picture: the difference between man’s DNA and that of chimpanzees or gorillas is about 1.1 percent. This seems like a surprisingly small divergence, and a highly suspicious one. Can all the structural differences between a jungle primate and Homo sapiens, as well as our vastly superior brains, be packed into such a tiny fractional difference? Evolutionists, having inherited Darwin’s faith in materialism, insist that it can. The issue is somewhat blunted when you realize, once again, that a gene count is not very significant—two different kinds of fruit flies (Drosophila) are much more closely related than man and chimpanzees, yet their DNA differs by considerably more.
Another way to show that our inner silence is alive and intelligent is to compare it to a machine’s. When a computer approaches a problem, it uses electrical impulses that must be separated from one another by gaps, forming a complex series of coded data out of 1 and 0. This enables the computer to handle any problem that can be broken down into information, since all information can be coded into 1 and 0, just as any message in English can be broken down into the dots and dashes of Morse code. The human brain also takes advantage of mechanically coded information, but the gaps in between are not just empty; they are the pivots that allow the mind to swing any way it wants. In other words, a computer has finite gaps made of emptiness; we have infinite gaps full of intelligence.
We can pull anything out of the gap. Mozart pulled whole symphonies at a time, not just note by note, but—as he recounted the experience—with every orchestral line already composed and orchestrated. Mathematics, like music, has many such mysteries. A woman in India named Shakuntala Devi multiplied two 13-digit numbers together in her head, arriving at the 23-digit answer in 26 seconds. (It takes more time than that to read the numbers out loud: 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730.)
If you tell a computer to add 2 plus 2, it comes up with either a right or a wrong answer. If you ask a 5-year-old boy to do the same, he may come up with an arithmetical answer, but he just as well might say, “I want some vanilla ice cream.” We can assume that he is bored; perhaps he is too tired for an arithmetic lesson. So it is not correct to say that his response is a computational error; his mind is simply not under our control—you cannot come up with a program to include all the possible reactions a human being can display as he interacts with the world.
What this all amounts to, in my mind, is a vindication of how complex ordinary experience really is, and how far away from life a scientific model is when it tries to describe it. The old view that the brain is a computer, stable in time and space, localized into various functions, and restricted in its flexibility, is unjustified. A Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist, Dr. Gerald Edelman, has pointed out that the brain is much more like a process than a thing, and this process is continually evolving. It is true, for example, that memory depends on two small pieces of “hardware” on either side of the brain called the hippocampus; if both sites become damaged (through loss of blood flow or disease), the ability to recollect is destroyed.
Yet, within this physical limitation, each person’s brain is unique, both in structure and content. No two people have the same neuronal connections, and each person is constantly growing new ones from the moment of birth onward, giving rise to all the memories that make you and me totally different. (A connection does not have to be physical; the flashing signals in the brain are constantly making patterns and reforming them into new patterns.)
Edelman holds that no one literally repeats a memory. When you recollect a familiar face, something will be different about it, if not the face itself, then the context that caused you to remember, which may be sad now instead of happy. Memory is a creative act, then. It creates new images and new brain at the same time. Edelman theorizes that every experience one has in life changes the brain’s anatomy. Therefore, it is not wholly true to say that the hippocampus is the seat of memory, for any one memory—the first day you saw a field of daffodils—shifts and shimmers across your entire cortex, touching other memories here and there, passing into new interpretations, and having to be re-created every time you need to recollect it. Unlike any computer, we remember, reconsider, and change our minds. The universe was created once, but we re-create ourselves with every thought.
Everything, in short, depends upon how well you can build in silence. Whatever can be experienced on the surface of life—love or hate, disease or health—wells up from a deeper level and floats above it as little more than a bubble. One can try to prick the bubbles one by one, but they float up from below unendingly. If we want to navigate the field of intelligence, we must learn about it to the very depths, where the silent witness inside us waits. That is our next step, to map the inner silence and master its secret places.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Only doctors are licensed to practice medicine, but everyone practices Ayurveda, only not systematically. The “science of life” pertains to everyday experiences of pain and pleasure, likes and dislikes, comfort and discomfort. This goes back to a term introduced at the end of the last chapter, qualia. A qualia is any quality of experience. Consider pain, a qualia no one likes to experience. If you X-ray the spine of any older person, there will be compression in the resilient fibrous disks that provide a cushion between each vertebra. Yet only a certain percentage of older people experience lower back pain.
Obviously the ones who experience no pain shouldn’t be treated medically. The patients who complain of severe or acute pain should be treated immediately, while most people, who experience intermittent pain that goes away on its own, fall somewhere in between. We should look at pain, then, very personally.
Ayurveda takes the personal approach to every situation. By consulting a person’s level of discomfort, the diagnosis can be any of the following:
1. There is no imbalance. The person is healthy.
2. There are early signs of imbalance. The person needs to make a lifestyle change to bring the system back into balance.
3. The imbalance has reached the stage of exhibiting physical symptoms. Medical intervention is called for.
4. The symptoms are so severe that chronic illness has set in, with the possibility in extreme cases of imminent death. Intense medical intervention is called for.
In the mid-1980s I was struck by how sensible and natural this way of looking at disease was. It gave me a prime motivation for writing Quantum Healing. Asking people to possess medical school knowledge about their bodies is unreasonable. Asking them to be in touch with their experience isn’t. How else can we live?
Recently I heard about a case where a man in his seventies had a stiff shoulder that over time became quite painful. Suspecting the onset of arthritis, his doctor took X rays, and indeed, the rotator cuff had turned dry and pitted because the slick membrane that keeps joints moving smoothly had worn down. The doctor explained that this deterioration was irreversible and would only grow worse. He recommended immediate replacement, a procedure that has become standard for millions of older people once a shoulder, hip, or knee gives out.
What if I go to physical therapy instead? his patient asked.
The doctor, who was an experienced orthopedist, shrugged. Physical therapy would deliver some short-term relief, but replacement surgery was a certainty down the road, probably sooner than later.
The man went for a second opinion, which concurred with the first. But something inside resisted the trauma of major surgery, and he decided to pursue physical therapy. Today, seven years later, his pain remains intermittent. It hasn’t grown worse, and the man himself feels that his shoulder is flexible enough for normal tasks like driving. Since he hasn’t returned to an orthopedist for regular X rays, no one knows if the underlying arthritic condition has worsened. But it doesn’t matter right now. If the patient’s quality of life hasn’t deteriorated, that’s the main thing.
The fact that Ayurveda is based on personal experience makes it something unique: a qualia medicine. To someone just discovering Ayurveda, its diagnostic powers can seem mysterious. The most basic diagnosis is body type, or more specifically a person’s prakriti, which determines the fundamental qualia that have been dominant since birth. One of these is Vata, associated with air. If you meet someone with prominent Vata, one glance will allow you to say, “I imagine you have irregular habits. You often aren’t hungry at mealtimes. You find it hard to get regular sleep and often wake up at night. Under stress you become anxious and nervous. But your disposition is cheerful, and even though you suffer from inexplicable aches and pains that come and go, your attitude toward them isn’t gloomy.”
Not many people are such pure Vata types that this entire description will apply, but when it does, they are frequently amazed. (It should be emphasized immediately that Ayurvedic diagnosis consists of several procedures, not simply laying eyes on the patient.) Searching for an explanation in Western terms is often quite difficult, because the qualia that Ayurveda is based on sound totally nonmedical. Besides Vata (air) there is Pitta (fire), Kapha (water and earth), and most mysterious of all, Akasha, or space. The combination of these qualities leads to a highly sophisticated system of diagnosis, because they interact and go out of balance in hundreds of ways.
A Western-trained physician is also dependent on qualia, because treatment always begins with how a patient feels. But from there two paths diverge. Western allopathic medicine searches for objective underlying causes with scientific precision, essentially leaving qualia behind. Ayurveda continues on the road of qualia, seeking to bring them back into balance. And here is where a needless source of confusion and difficulty arises.
Being a “science of life,” Ayurveda prescribes a way of life. Its advice about diet, for example, varies from person to person, because a Vata type benefits, for example, from heavy, sweet, oily foods that are not necessarily good—and may be bad—for other types. Balance is dynamic. It changes from day to day. Therefore, someone who has grown up in an Ayurvedic lifestyle (which means growing up in India before the modern era) will be constantly monitoring their qualia. This is a form of self-care that requires each person to know exactly how he or she feels when going out of balance, long before symptoms arise.
Hence the confusion, because modern people—including modern Indians—go to the doctor when they feel bad, by which time symptoms have already appeared. They are at the second or third stage of imbalance described above. At this point, after years of ignoring the easily treatable signs of imbalance, Ayurveda may be helpless compared with Western scientific medicine. It’s like bringing a car in for its first tune-up after 150,000 miles.
When Quantum Healing was written, I constantly encountered skepticism from other physicians, accompanied by hostile remarks like, “If I got into a car accident, a bunch of herbs isn’t going to help me.” Of course not. Nobody said it would. Today one doesn’t meet as much skepticism, yet it’s clear that qualia medicine, the kind based on personal quality of life, cannot simply be a replay of Ayurveda. Knowledge evolves, and we find ourselves equipped with knowledge from science and knowledge from centuries of human experience.
They don’t have to oppose each other. In the expanding field of integrated medicine, the doctor utilizes both. For example, the majority of patients seek a doctor’s care because they suffer from a cold, headaches, insomnia, or anxiety and depression. These are endemic, usually low-level side effects of modern life itself. They also happen to be Vata disorders. If the doctor knows this, he has more tools at his disposal to cure the most common ills. But that won’t rule out the usual pills, if that’s what he and the patient prefer.
Such a preference shouldn’t come from blind allegiance to science or a rigid belief that one size fits all. The whole point of integrated medicine isn’t to find alternatives to standard medical practice just for the sake of doing so. The point is to personalize medical care based on the patient’s quality of life. It’s frustrating that every medical school student isn’t taught this principle on the first day of class.
Quantum Healing set out a workable theory of Ayurveda for the Western mind. Realizing that readers would ask, “But what do I do?” I wrote a practical handbook on the Ayurvedic lifestyle called Perfect Health. The title wasn’t meant to be hyperbole. Every healthy cell exists in perfect health. It’s our personal choices over a long period of time that create the imbalances that eventually start to damage our cells. Therefore, positing perfect health as a starting point is medically sound.
As things stand today, I practice integrated medicine solidly established on Ayurveda and the Ayurvedic lifestyle. I realize, with a touch of chagrin, that my being Indian makes the medicine go down more easily for my patients. This bias has led me to talk much less about Ayurveda and much more about qualia. For the average person, Ayurveda is a narrow, exotic, specialized interest. But everyone is interested in their quality of life. Self-care based on qualia provides the best results, because it makes the whole project intimate and personal. The fact that thousands of years of wisdom lies in the background is just one more reason to pursue optimal wellbeing.