A boy in India never has to wish for a time machine. When I was seven, a two-minute walk took me from Daddy’s army hospital to the Poona grand bazaar. There the old smells hung in the air—saffron, dust, sandalwood, and cooking fires (not that I noticed them then, being glued to the snake charmers). In the hospital, the only smell was of Dettol, an all-purpose cleanser that stung your nose like straight formaldehyde. Physicists compare time to an arrow; in India, the arrow got bent and meets itself going backward. We adjusted to it. If a soldier came in with a puncture wound in his foot, my father gave him a tetanus shot, but if the man wanted to hobble out and make an offering to Shiva, my father understood.
Now when I go back home, I look out the airplane window and see bullocks plowing within sight of the tarmac. In the cities, it is not uncommon for businessmen dressed in impeccable copies of English wool suits to step around the bodies of sadhus, or holy men, who sit calmly in the middle of the sidewalks clothed in loincloths and orange robes. The daily scene is like an archaeological dig whose layers are hopelessly mixed up, or better yet, where the layers have jumped out of the ground and come to life.
Every dig has to have a bottom layer, though. In this case, it is the sadhus. India’s holy men date from at least three thousand years before the birth of Christ. Their words have been recorded and passed on in the original Sanskrit, which lays good claim to being man’s first language. Their traditional home is still the Himalayas, where they go to sit in samadhi, or deep meditation, for days or weeks at a time. For them, life is totally dedicated to inner silence. Very occasionally, the thought might enter their heads that they should go on a pilgrimage. Picking up their begging bowls, they then set off to the south, trusting to nature to provide them with the necessary food and shelter. In modern times, they can usually board any train or bus without a ticket.
As a child what I knew of sadhus came from one of my uncles, my father’s older brother, who traveled all over the country selling sports equipment. We called him Bara Uncle, or “big uncle,” a name that set him apart from our lesser relations. He inevitably arrived at our door with field hockey sticks (India traditionally used to beat the rest of the world in this minor sport), soccer balls, or badminton shuttles as presents. Naturally, we couldn’t wait to see him.
Bara Uncle was hugely affable and gregarious. He spun fabulous tales about the wonders he met on his way. The most vivid happened in Calcutta. Bara Uncle was pushing his way through the crowds when he almost stumbled over an old sadhu sitting near the curb. Absentmindedly, my uncle reached into his pocket, found two annas (about two cents), and put them in the sadhu’s bowl. The sadhu shot him a glance and said, “Make a wish for anything you want.”
Taken aback, my uncle blurted, “I want some burfi.” Burfi is an Indian candy, like fudge, that is usually made from almonds or coconut. Very calmly the sadhu reached his right hand into the air, materialized two pieces of fresh burfi, and gave them to Bara Uncle. Astounded, he stood transfixed for a few seconds, just enough time for the sadhu to rise and melt like a shadow into the crowd. My uncle never saw him again. In a way, he got a fair exchange, since his two annas would have bought him two pieces of burfi from a sweetmeat vendor on the street. But every time he told the story, my uncle would shake his head and mourn, “I am still thinking of all the things I could have wished for.”
As a boy, I firmly believed Bara Uncle’s story, but in contemporary India, people are more likely to see a sadhu and skeptically wonder if he is real. Starting in the 1920s, scientists from Europe and America began to visit India to observe the various swamis, yogis, and sadhus of every description. Some had attained remarkable degrees of control over their bodies—they could apparently stop breathing for minutes at a time or bring their heartbeats down almost to zero. A typical procedure would consist of taking one of those “saints,” as holy men are commonly called in India, and burying him in a box six feet underground. This was supposedly a scientific experiment, but of a very crude sort. After a few days, when the box was unearthed, you either had a result or you didn’t. The desired result would be that the saint was still alive. Almost all the physiological studies from the early days are very shallow in their approach, and many reflect this weird combination of science and sideshow.
A sadhu’s control over his body, however, is still physical and misses the point of his existence. Such people are out to break through the mask of physical appearances; in our terms, they want to leave the world “above the line” to find out what lies beneath. Indian life, in fact, has traditionally been arranged to make this quest possible. After a man has been educated, raised a family, and enjoyed the rewards of material existence, he is expected to take sanyasa—that is, he renounces the householder life, takes up the begging bowl, and goes off in search of something else. If you say that he is searching for God, for truth, for reality, or for himself, all of these would not be quite right, because the essence of the quest is that the goal is unknown. He is setting off into another world that cannot be tracked from this one. To use our terms again, he is setting out across the gap.
I grew up to put on a Western-style suit and step around saints on the sidewalk, but as I looked deeper into the issues of mind-body medicine, I kept returning to India’s ancient traditions. The second part of this book centers on what I have found. The known world of our senses, of atoms and molecules, does not just break off abruptly; it shades imperceptibly into a different reality. At some point, however, one reality flips into another. Time and space acquire a different meaning; the neat divisions between inner and outer reality disappear. We find ourselves in a world that has never been explored as well as in India. In his purest form, the sadhu is an investigator into the transcendental reality lying beyond the gap—that is the tradition he upholds, one of the longest and wisest on our planet. To understand his findings will take us on a new road, away from physics, but still on much the same track, in search of ourselves.
In the West, before the advent of the theory of relativity, there was no question that time, space, matter, and energy occupied separate compartments of reality. Our senses detect a tree as entirely different from a beam of light or a spark of electricity; we may feel that time is a more mysterious entity, capable of slowing down, speeding up, or even standing still, but we would never say, “I like New York better than Monday.” It seems self-evident that time and space, matter and energy, are opposite pairs, for the simple reason that none can be turned into the others. The normal world of the senses can be diagrammed in our familiar manner:
After Einstein published the equation E=mc2, this simple, commonsense view had to change, for it was now possible (as the atomic bomb proved) for matter to be transformed into huge amounts of energy. The general theory of relativity did the same thing for the separation between time and space. Now physics deals in a fused entity called space-time, which can be bent to fit certain circumstances (whenever an object travels near the speed of light, for example). After proving that nature was much less compartmentalized than science had previously thought, relativity opened another, even more surprising possibility. Einstein suggested that one underlying field exists as the background for all transformations of space-time and mass-energy. This implies a level of nature that is totally fused; in other words, there is a region of space-time-matter-energy.
Einstein was intuitively convinced of this possibility—the ultimate demolition of the world of the senses—at a time when no one else had the vision to consider it seriously. Beginning in the 1920s, he spent the last thirty years of his life, isolated from the other physicists of his generation and largely ignored, trying to compute the mathematics for a “unified field theory.” His theory would unite all the basic forces in creation and thereby explain the universe as a whole. Instead of four compartments, there would be one.
“To unite,” in the sense that physicists use the word, means to prove that two things that appear to be totally different can transform into each other at a deeper level of nature. The photon and the light wave are classic examples of this: they appear to be entirely different, yet at an infinitesimal level of nature, called the Planck scale, which is more than a billion billion times smaller than the smallest atom, the photon and the light wave can be united. No one has yet solved the mathematics for a unified field. That would be as much as solving the entire hidden zone we have labeled with a ?. (A new theory, however, called the superstring may have cracked the problem at last, thirty years after Einstein’s death.)
In the face of a problem that rational thought cannot solve, science necessarily stops, but other routes may be open. Thousands of years ago, the ancient rishis, or seers, of India also contemplated this question of whether nature is ultimately unified. A rishi is like a sadhu in that his life is devoted to silence and the inner life, but rishis lived much further in the past—they were responsible for writing the most ancient texts of Veda, or revealed truth, such as Rig Veda, which may predate the Egyptian pyramids by several thousand years.
If you ask a modern Indian what the Veda is, he will point to the books that contain the rishis’ words, but in truth Veda is the content of the rishis’ consciousness, which is alive. A rishi has seen deep enough into the nature of things that even God sits at his feet to learn—the lesson can be found in the Yoga Vasishtha, in which the young Lord Rama, a divine incarnation, begs the sage Vasishtha for instruction.
I am not emphasizing the spiritual value of the rishi and his knowledge here. Until very recently in human history, all cultures freely blended religion, psychology, philosophy, and art into one homogeneous whole. But individual strands can be pulled out; in this case, I am interested in what the rishis had to say about the fundamental nature of reality (in the Yoga Vasishtha, God also showed a lively interest in this subject). The rishis were just as capable as we are of dividing nature up into space, time, matter, and energy, but they turned their backs on such an approach, which so totally dominates our way of seeing and thinking about the world.
They chose instead to solve the problem in the most practical way imaginable. They decided to cross the gap and actually enter the ? zone, where thinking cannot go. They used a simple twist in their awareness, but one that has profound consequences—it was like turning the objective world inside out. To do that, the rishis had to analyze nature in an unexpected way, which can be represented by another diagram:
This diagram is just as valid as the one on page 206, but it looks on the world from a purely subjective viewpoint. Rather than seeing time, space, matter, and energy “out there,” the rishis observed that reality begins “in here,” with our conscious awareness. At any particular time, they reasoned, a person must be in one of three states of subjective awareness—waking, sleeping, or dreaming. What he perceives in these states constitutes his reality. The ancients assumed that reality was thus different in different states of consciousness—a tiger in the dream state is not a tiger in the waking state. It obeys entirely different laws, and similarly, the laws of the sleep state, although not known to the conscious mind, must be distinct from those of the waking and dreaming states.
The rishis looked closer and detected between each of these states a gap that acts like a pivot as one reality turns into another. For example, just before falling asleep, the mind gradually leaves the waking state, withdrawing the senses, shutting out the waking world, but at the junction point before the mind actually falls asleep, a brief gap is opened, identical to the one that flashes by between each thought: it is like a little window into the field that is beyond either wakefulness or sleep. This realization opened the possibility for leaving behind the usual boundaries of the five senses by diving through the gap.
Considering that the West is supposed to be practical and the East mystical, it is fascinating to find that the rishis were much more avid for direct experience than any quantum physicist. Their subjective approach was called Yoga, the Sanskrit word for “union.” (The various exercises taught in yoga classes belong to just one of its branches, called Hatha Yoga; we will be looking at Yoga’s most powerful approach, which is mental.) Because both are looking for an underlying layer of unity in nature, one can immediately see the resemblance between Yoga and Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory. The major difference between the two is that the rishis, not being theoretical, declared that the unified field exists in the real world—it is an experience and not merely a mental construct.
From the rishis’ subjective viewpoint, the only thing that the unified field could be is another state of consciousness. They called it simply turiya, or the fourth, to denote that it was not part of the three states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming. They also referred to it as para, or beyond, meaning that it transcended ordinary experience. But how could a fourth state even exist? The answer was twofold. First, the seers said that the fourth state exists everywhere but is hidden by the other three states as if by a screen. (Some ancient texts declare that the fourth state has been mixed into the other three like milk into water, and finding it is as difficult as separating milk from water.) Second, they said that the fourth state can be directly experienced only after the mind has transcended its normal activity, which requires the special technique of meditation.
The word rishi itself stands for a person who has learned to enter the fourth state at will and observe what is there. This ability is not “thinking” as we use the term—the whole phenomenon is an immediate experience, like recognizing the fragrance of lilacs or the sound of a friend’s voice. It is immediate, nonverbal, and, unlike a flower’s fragrance, totally transforming. As they sat in meditation, deeply absorbed in their own subjective awareness, the rishis explored turiya the way we would look at the Grand Canyon. As individuals, these seers have names, but going into the transcendent blurred the edges of what we consider personal identity. Vasishtha, for example, is not just the name of one of the greatest of the ancient rishis; it stands for an integral part of Veda—transcendental knowledge—which the man Vasishtha first cognized; to truly know that part of Veda, one would have to be in “Vasishtha consciousness.” In short, these sages observed existence in its purest form.
For all intents and purposes, there was no way for the West to systematically test the existence of the fourth state. Lacking the right technique, the scientific community has ignored turiya. In fact, many scientists would consider it irrelevant or threatening. The very notion of “union” brings undesirable images to mind: dissolving into a state of nothingness, or losing one’s identity like a drop of water disappearing into the ocean. Despite occasional bursts of enthusiasm for Eastern ideas, the progress of knowledge in the West has overwhelmingly depended on outward observation, not inner.
But if there is a state that transcends the usual three, then it seems likely that it would show up from time to time, if only by accident. For example, Charles Lindbergh reported one experience that took place in 1927, during the most critical moments of his life. When he was into the second day of his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh found that he had passed the limits of physical exhaustion. Fearing that he would lose control of his craft, he skirted disaster by fitfully dozing off and hoping that he remained on course. Then, as Lindbergh recounts in his autobiography, a remarkable change of awareness took place:
Over and over again on the second day of my flight, I would return to mental alertness sufficiently to realize that I had been flying while I was neither asleep nor awake. My eyes had been open. I had responded to my instruments’ indications and held generally to compass course, but I had lost sense of circumstance and time. During immeasurable periods, I seemed to extend outside my plane and body, independent of worldly values, appreciative of beauty, form, and color without depending upon my eyes.
As a child, Lindbergh had lain in the cornfields on his father’s farm and felt a similar sense of being “beyond mortality” as he gazed into the sky. But the episode over the North Atlantic went further. What Lindbergh concluded about it was this: “It was an experience in which both the intellect and senses were replaced by what might be termed a matterless awareness….I recognized that vision and reality interchange, like energy and matter.”
Doctors to whom I mention meditation generally assure me, whether they “believe” in it or not, that meditation is for relaxation. It is only in the light of Veda that one can understand why this view is so shortsighted.
Veda represents an immense expansion of the human mind. The best way to describe it is that Veda is the total content of the cosmic computer. All the input of nature is channeled into it, and out of it flows all natural phenomena. The control over this computer is located in the human brain, whose billions of neural connections give it enough complexity to mirror the complexity of the universe.
The brain is not important as an object, the rishis contend. It is important because our own subjectivity shines through it; when our brains show us the world, they are really showing us ourselves. By analogy, when an image falls upon a mirror, a blending takes place. The mirror is the reflection; the reflection is the mirror. In the same way, the only reality we can know anything about is the one that is being mirrored in the brain—everything that exists is therefore inside our subjectivity.
A physicist would not normally agree with this, since he cherishes the objective method and looks on subjectivity as virtually his enemy. A physicist says, “This is a proton,” not, “This is my feeling for what a proton is.” Actually, Veda is not devoid of objective knowledge—it gave rise to its own sciences of botany, physiology, astronomy, medicine, et cetera—but the rishis did not feel that objectivity was the most reliable way to know things, particularly once you investigate deeper than nature’s surface. The truth, they said, is that subjectivity can be either narrow or expanded. Nature is like a radio band. When you pay attention to an isolated object—a rock, a star, or an entire galaxy—you select one channel on the band. The rest obviously has to be excluded—but only for that level of consciousness.
It may be that other levels of consciousness receive more bands, or more than one band at a time. Right now, physicists estimate that our senses choose less than one-billionth of the energy waves and particles that surround us. We live in an “energy soup” incredibly larger than the world we see. The visible universe itself is now thought to be but a minuscule version of the original creation, the residue of a much larger reality that collapsed somewhere before time began, reducing its original ten dimensions to our four. (I apologize for using the phrase “before time began,” which is a blatant paradox, but there is no way to state verbally how pre–Big Bang events occurred.) Also, it appears that at the moment of creation our universe was filled with a billion times more energy than we now observe with radio telescopes; the remainder was reabsorbed into the same hidden field where the other six dimensions went.
The rishis declared that through expanded consciousness, even this inconceivable lost reality could be made available to us. Theoretical physics agrees that the lost dimensions and invisible energy fields have not actually gone anywhere; they have only sunk back to “sleep” in the primordial field. Similarly, the transcendental level of awareness is available everywhere; you need not go anywhere special to find it. It only needs to wake up. William James expressed this idea in a famous passage:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all around it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.
If so much more reality is nearby, why can’t we touch it? Researchers found a clue to the answer, curiously enough, by experimenting with newborn kittens. Kittens are born with their eyes shut and their optic nerves undeveloped. When they open their eyes, the mechanism for sight matures at the same time; these two events always go hand in hand. However, it was found in the mid-1970s that if you blindfold a kitten during the two or three days when it first opens its eyes, the animal will be blind for life. During thus brief but critical period, the experience of seeing actually shapes the inter-neuronal connections in the brain that make sight possible.
This was an important finding, for biologists continue to disagree over whether genetics or experience is more important in behavior. This is the old question of whether a trait is innate or acquired. Does a robin learn to sing from its mother, or will it sing if raised in isolation? The experiment with the blind kittens showed that both “nature” and “nurture” are essential; the kitten’s brain is programmed for sight, yet it requires seeing for the programming to unfold properly. There is a deeper implication to all this, however. Our own brains could be limited in just this way. Many things “out there” don’t exist for us, not because they are unreal, but because “in here” we have not shaped the brain to perceive them. We are like radios that appear to have all the channels when actually they are stuck on three—waking, sleeping, and dreaming.
Because your brain is the only radio you have, you can never know whether the fourth state exists unless your nervous system is prepared for it. It is entirely possible that we are literally bathed and surrounded by the transcendent and yet have not tuned it in.
The Veda gives a supporting analogy: thoughts are like ocean waves. Rising and falling, they see only their own motion. They say, “I am a wave,” but the greater truth, which they do not see, is, “I am ocean.” There is no separation between the two, whatever the wave might suppose. When a wave settles down, then it instantly recognizes that its source in ocean—infinite, silent, and unchanging—was always there.
The same holds true for the mind. When it is thinking, it is all activity; when it stops thinking, it returns to its source in silence. Only then, when the mind touches pure awareness, will the real storehouse of Veda be located. The experience of Veda therefore is not ancient or even particularly Indian. It is universal and can be had at any moment by any person. The whole trick is not to move horizontally, which is how the stream of consciousness normally moves, but to sink vertically. This vertical descent is transcending, meditation, dhyan, “going beyond”—all manifestations of a mind that ceases to identify with waves and begins to identify with ocean.
If this argument is right, then the nature of the mind and the mind-body connection have to be reconsidered. The point that Archimedes was looking for—a place to stand on and move the world—actually exists. It is inside us, covered up by the fascinating but misleading moving-picture show of the waking state.
This may explain why mind-body medicine has proved so inconsistent. We casually assume that a person who survives cancer or can cure himself of a fatal disease operates with the same mental machinery as anyone else, but this is not true: mental processes can be deep or shallow. To go deep means to contact the hidden blueprint of intelligence and change it—only then can visualization of fighting cancer, for example, be strong enough to defeat the disease. But most people cannot do that; their thought power is too weak to trigger the appropriate mechanisms.
The practical question is whether meditation is strong enough to radically improve our thought power. Several studies conducted by scientists have shown that meditation may in fact induce profound change, far beyond the simple relaxation that most people use it for in the West, even beyond the medical applications of relieving stress, reducing blood pressure, and so on.
The first Western scientist to make any major breakthrough with the fourth state was an American physiologist, Robert Keith Wallace, who proved that it existed. In 1967, Wallace was a doctoral student at UCLA, where he began his Ph.D. research on the physiological changes that take place during Transcendental Meditation (a form of mantra meditation). Using the methods of modern biomedical research, he compiled data from meditators over a period of several years. Without causing any discomfort, he wired them up to measure their brain waves, blood pressure, heart rate, and other indices of physical change.
Wallace soon began to build a considerable body of unique results. First, he discovered that something real was indeed happening to the body in meditation. Within a few minutes of beginning their practice, his subjects entered a state of deep relaxation, marked by slower breathing and heartbeat, by the appearance of alpha waves in their EEGs (electroencephalograms), and decreased oxygen consumption detected in the breath. This last measure was particularly important because it showed that the body’s metabolic rate, tied to the total consumption of fuel in the cells, had dropped—physiologists refer to this metabolic reduction as a “hypometabolic” state.
Meditators achieved their deepest relaxation quickly. It takes four to six hours after falling asleep to reach the period where oxygen consumption falls to its lowest levels, while meditators took only a few minutes. Moreover, in sleep the drop is usually less than 16 percent, whereas meditators achieved relative reductions that momentarily dipped almost twice as low. Wallace was impressed by these figures because such a deep state of relaxation had never been recorded before. What this showed was that the subjective feelings reported during meditation—inner silence, peacefulness, and relaxation—had a real physical basis. It was also very important that these subjects had not fallen asleep or gone into a trance. They were fully awake inside, even feeling a sense of heightened awareness. Wallace concluded therefore that meditation was a state of “hypometabolic wakefulness.” Since his measurements were different from any seen in waking, dreaming, or sleeping, he concluded that he had verified an entirely new state of consciousness—the fourth state.
Certain of the meditators had exhibited physical changes that went far beyond the average. As with the yogis measured in India and the Himalayas, their breathing seemed to stop for long stretches. At the subjective level, these deeper states were experienced as absolute inner silence, a feeling of vast expansion, and a profound knowingness. The mind was emptied of all specific thoughts but left with the clear awareness of “I know everything.” No one could explain these experiences, because scientific instruments are too crude to analyze or even detect them.
To anyone versed in the Vedic literature, however, it was obvious that these subjects were experiencing transcendental awareness of a deep sort. The Yoga Vasishtha, one of the greatest sources on direct experience of the transcendent, says of the fourth state, “When there is effortless suspension of breath, that is the supreme state. It is the Self. It is pure, infinite consciousness. He who reaches this does not grieve.” It would be hard to find a better description of what the physiologists were seeing. Wallace looked at physical measurements made with Zen meditators in Japan and found comparable results; what was astonishing, however, was that his American subjects, most of them young, posthippie, and new to meditation, were achieving the same scores as Zen adepts who had practiced meditating for ten years.
Seen in a different light, what Wallace did was to legitimize the mind-body connection. It is now accepted fact that one’s body spontaneously responds to one’s state of awareness, just as the rishis said. The paradox is that we have to learn to dive inside at all. Meditation teaches us to control a process that is constantly influencing us every day, whether we realize it or not.
Recently I saw a Boston woman in her sixties who for several years had been suffering from a slow degeneration of the heart muscle called cardiomyopathy. There are various kinds of cardiomyopathy; hers was considered idiopathic, meaning that no cause could be found for it. Her main symptom at the time of diagnosis was shortness of breath whenever she exerted herself—she was experiencing heart failure from the enlargement of her heart. Medicine can do little or nothing for this disease, which greatly worried her, but when she had last seen her cardiologist two months earlier, he had suggested that she go into the hospital for an angiogram.
The purpose of an angiogram is to determine if the coronary arteries, the vessels sending oxygen to the heart, are blocked. The cardiologist was reasoning that if there was any blockage, some of her problem might be due to arterial disease, which is treatable. Apprehensively she underwent the test. The angiographer, who was also a physician, came to her room afterward.
“I have good news,” he said. “Your vessels are clean—you don’t have coronary artery disease. As far as I’m concerned, there is no need for surgery.” As he was leaving, he turned to her and remarked, “If your condition gets any worse, the only thing that really can be done is to have a heart transplant.”
The woman had never been told this before, and within a few days she began to have shortness of breath not just on exertion but whenever she lay down. Unable to sleep and getting more and more anxious, she returned to her cardiologist, who could find no reason for the worsening of her symptoms. Finally he confronted her one day, and she told him she was afraid of having a heart transplant. He assured her that her fears were groundless—her condition was by no means advanced enough for such a drastic procedure. From that day on, her new symptoms disappeared.
Once again we see that subjective reality and objective reality are tightly bound together. When the mind shifts, the body cannot help but follow. Objective reality looks obviously more fixed than our subjective moods, fleeting desires, and swings of emotion. Yet perhaps it is not; it is more like a violin string that can hold one pitch but also change pitch as your finger slides along it—that image occurred to me thinking about Chitra’s case at the beginning of this book, but it holds true for all of us.
What the pitch on the string stands for is your level of consciousness. This is a very basic inner attribute, like a focal point on which all your thoughts, emotions, and desires converge, or a pair of green glasses that makes the whole world look green. Most people don’t realize how consistent their pitch is, but others are quite aware of it—a depressed person radiates depression, even when he forces himself to act positive; a hostile person can set a whole room on edge, even if he says the most harmless things. One’s level of consciousness fits into broad guidelines. Nobody is absolutely hostile or joyful, intelligent or dull, satisfied or discontent; dozens of subtle gradations exist in every personality.
The important point is that everything you think and do is determined by this point—you cannot think yourself to a higher or lower level of consciousness. This helps explain why meditation is not simply another kind of thinking or introspection, a mistake Westerners tend to make. It is actually a way to slide to a new pitch. The process of transcending, or “going beyond,” detaches the mind from its fixed level and allows it to exist, if only for a moment, without any level at all. It simply experiences silence, devoid of thoughts, emotions, drives, wishes, fears, or anything at all. Afterward, when the mind returns to its usual pitch (level of consciousness), it has acquired a little freedom to move.
From a medical standpoint, a disease may represent a place on the violin string that is out of tune. Yet, for some reason, the mind-body system cannot find a way to let go, to slide to a healthier pitch. If that is so, then meditation may be a powerful therapeutic tool, allowing the body to get unstuck from the disease. Meditation researchers caught on to this potential in the late 1960s when they discovered that many college-age meditators who used alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs spontaneously quit their habit within a few months of beginning to meditate. We can call this getting unstuck from an old level of consciousness that needed the drug; in terms of neuropeptides, it may be that the meditation freed up certain receptor sites by offering molecules that were more satisfying than alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana.
By 1978, Robert Keith Wallace had spent more than a decade validating separate mind-body effects on meditators. He decided to follow a new lead and investigate a more complex, holistic area, human aging. The aging process has traditionally been accepted without question as an inevitable aspect of normal life, and variations in it have been considered largely individual. Some people live longer than others owing to privileged genes, a strong immune system, or good luck, but there is no anti-aging factor that can be applied to everyone. If there were, then 70-year-olds would be more uniformly healthy in their bodily functions, just as most 20-year-olds are.
However, there is no scientific proof that aging is normal—it is just something we all happen to do. So many stresses are involved in “normal” living that the physiology might be considered under abnormal pressure all the time—from noise, pollution, negative emotions, improper diet, smoking, alcohol, and so on. Just “the disease of being in a hurry” hastens aging in almost everyone today. If meditation counters these factors, then it might reveal something entirely new about the aging process.
Wallace set out to measure a group of adult meditators for what is called biological age. Biological age shows how well a person’s body is functioning compared to the norms of the whole population. It gives a truer measure of how the aging process is progressing than does chronological or calendar age, because any two people who are both 55 years old by the calendar will generally have very different bodies. Initially all that Wallace needed to test were three rather simple variables: blood pressure, acuteness of hearing, and near-point vision (the ability to see objects close-up). All three steadily deteriorate as the body biologically ages and therefore serve as convenient markers.
Wallace discovered that the meditators, as a group, were significantly younger biologically than their chronological age. The difference between the two was not small, either—the female subject who scored the best was fully twenty years younger than her chronological age. Strikingly, how much younger a person tested was closely correlated to how long he had kept up his meditation practice. Wallace found a dividing line between those who had meditated fewer than five years and those who had meditated five years or more. The first group averaged five years younger biologically, while the second averaged twelve years younger. A backup study conducted in England later calculated that each year of regular meditation takes off roughly one year of aging. Another finding that particularly impressed Wallace’s team was that their older subjects showed as good results as much younger people. A typical 60-year-old meditating five years or more would have the physiology of a 48-year-old.
Another important point raised by this remarkable study is that the subjects were not trying to age more slowly. They were simply removing an invisible barrier, and then the desirable physical changes took place of their own accord. This spontaneous flowering seems to be quite nonspecific; a 1986 Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance study based on two thousand meditators in Iowa showed that they were much healthier than the American population as a whole in seventeen major areas of serious disease, both mental and physical. This was a very significant improvement. For example, the meditation group was hospitalized 87 percent less often than nonmeditators for heart disease and 50 percent less often for all kinds of tumors. There were equally impressive reductions in disorders of the respiratory system, the digestive tract, clinical depression, and so forth. Although the study was limited to one group, this is very encouraging news for anyone who wants to follow a holistic program of prevention.
The fourth state may play an important role in our future. At the source of human awareness lies a super-normal level of consciousness—it can become normal, however, once we have accustomed ourselves to experiencing it. If turiya is the mind’s birthplace, then why can’t it be the mind’s permanent home? This is the next area to explore, investigating whether nature is unified not just in Einstein’s hypothetical model but in ourselves.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
In hindsight, the practical side of this chapter, connecting meditation with positive changes in the brain, has only expanded.* Research into meditation continues apace, following the same lines I described thirty years ago. Vital signs are seen to improve, and various effects on brain function can be observed with ever-increasing accuracy. Skeptics have been thoroughly driven out of the debate on these issues, but not on the notion of unbounded awareness. Recognition of a fourth state of consciousness, beyond waking, dreaming, and sleeping, arouses fierce opposition because “unbounded” would mean that mind exists outside the brain.
The path to proving the reality of unbounded awareness isn’t by introducing cosmic mind, not if you want to convince anyone who would suspect that God’s in the wings. It’s more convincing, especially to doctors, if you direct them to the intimate scale of the human body. When someone asks, “Where is the mind located?” they will automatically point to their heads. Why? Is it because we automatically expect to experience our thoughts in our heads? That seems to be the case. When dreaming at night, it gets a bit more ambiguous, since we feel that we are “inside” our dreams. But for most of us, most of the time, “my head” is where “my mind” is located.
This response may feel true simply because so many sense organs are located there: eyes, ears, nose, tongue. But we can easily undermine the commonsense model of sight and sound taking place in the head. When a car backfires behind you, the sound can’t be felt entering the ear canal, being processed in the inner ear and then in the brain’s auditory center. There is no noise in the brain. Quite clearly the sound of the backfiring car comes from outside you. In some cultures, hearing is a faculty that goes from inside to outside, the opposite of what we assume. Think about driving down the highway and suddenly noticing the driver in front of you hitting the brakes. Your attention goes out in order to see his rear lights go on. The senses follow attention, which makes it plausible to say your mind went outside your body when you spotted the brake lights. We casually adopt this model for vision when we say that someone “shoots a glance” at someone else.
Babies, we are told, have a much more diffuse experience of the five senses, perhaps mixing them up in what are called synesthesias (for example, experiencing sounds as colors or tastes as shapes, an experience reported from hallucinogenic drugs and in deep meditative states). Some researchers contend that babies therefore have a poor sense of the boundary between themselves and the world. But infants turn into toddlers, and the separation between self and the world starts to harden. Society and family reinforce this habit as the toddler grows up, and eventually the mind takes its seat in our heads, or so it seems. In altered states, whether induced by drugs or in deep meditation, there are countless reports, echoed by Charles Lindbergh in his transatlantic flight, of the mind extending in all directions. There are even subjective reports of sitting in a chair and reaching out to touch some velvet drapes far across the room—the senses literally go where they are directed.
Neuroscientists would call such experiences anomalies, declaring resolutely that mind and brain have taken up residence together in a box called the skull. But it is undeniably possible to literally “think outside the box,” beginning with the message system discussed in this book that connects every cell in the body with whatever is occurring in the brain. “Fine,” a neuroscientist would argue, “but the brain is still the machine that makes mind. Take away the brain, and there is no mind.” But this is the same as saying that if you turn off the radio, there is no music. You haven’t destroyed the music, only the receiver.
One must be open to asking some culturally radical questions, including the most radical of all: Is a brain even necessary for “thinking”? There are different ways to explore this issue.
First, let’s consider whether only human brains create minds. Few people who have pets or live on farms would say that the animals they encounter don’t have minds. There is already abundant evidence that the genes, receptors, and neurotransmitters involved in human brain function are present in animals. Saying that different kinds of animal brains create minds is not so troublesome if you insist that the mind is rooted in these shared processes and chemicals. We aren’t able to describe what animal minds are like (some may lack anything like human self-awareness), but we shouldn’t have a problem conceiving that these creatures have one.
Second, there are nervous systems on the evolutionary ladder than don’t require a central brain. Some creatures, like jellyfish, have neuronal nets distributed throughout the body. We, too, have such systems. Your gastrointestinal tract sends and receives signals from the peripheral nerves that branch out from the spinal cord. But digestion can function quite well when severed from the peripheral nervous system. As in the jellyfish, your gut constitutes a weblike intestinal nervous system. In the language of cell biology, specialized ganglion cells are located between muscle layers in the intestinal wall that act like a local brain. If one severs any peripheral nerves, these ganglion cells continue to instruct the intestine to move and absorb and secrete, working quite autonomously as a self-contained functional unit.
It turns out that the intestinal tract only takes advice from the rest of the body. It harbors its own reactions. When bad news gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you are experiencing an emotion as surely as you experience it in your head. In fact, your gut reaction precedes the thought. Does this mean that your intestinal nervous system creates such reactions on its own? That’s unclear, but it’s tempting to think so. Certainly many people trust their gut reactions over the confused and compromised responses that the brain is often saddled with.
The muscles of your face are directly linked to your brain. While we assume that the brain is telling the mouth and lips to smile when we’re feeling happy, the reverse is also true. Seeing a smile on someone else’s face can make you happy, and children are taught to smile as a way to break out of a sad mood. Whether this works or not varies from person to person, but it could be argued that the face is controlling the brain in those instances.
Findings about brainlike processes outside the skull have become common. The conduction system inside the heart, including pacemaker cells, which organizes your heartbeat, can be thought of as the heart’s brain in the same way the ganglion cells in the gut are the brain of the intestines. The independence of the conduction system is shown when a transplanted heart keeps beating even though the nerves that connected it to the donor’s central and peripheral nervous systems have been severed. The interaction between the heart’s independent processing and the brain’s is complex and not fully understood.
Still more mysterious are the trillions of bacteria that outnumber the body’s cells by ten to one, living mostly inside the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as invaders, but over eons these microorganisms have actually been incorporated into vast stretches along the double helix of human DNA. The implications for what we call “being human” are enormous and largely uncharted. Taken as a whole, the bacterial component of the body is known as the microbiome. It doesn’t sit passively on the skin or in the gut, nor does it invade the body. Instead, the microbiome is the border between “in here” and “out there,” possessed of genes, receptors, and chemical messaging that make the same things possible for the brain. The function of the microbial DNA that is woven into our genes isn’t known, but at the very least this is ancestral information we’ve assimilated as our own. More suggestively, this once-foreign DNA may be the switching agent for the genes in all higher life-forms.
These discoveries prove that our intelligence extends to the entire ecology. Mind has a physical basis everywhere. Any attempt to isolate it in the skull runs into serious objections. Instead of viewing unbounded awareness with skepticism, we need to see that every thought is unbounded. You cannot see, hear, or touch anything in the world without reaching beyond the illusory boundary of the isolated body. To watch a sunset is literally like watching yourself.