The rishis took a simple position in the mind-body debate. Everything, they said, comes from the mind. It projects the world exactly as a movie projector does. Our bodies are part of the movie, and so is everything that happens to the body. To a rishi, the wonder was not that we can make ourselves sick or well, but that we don’t see ourselves doing it. If we could silently witness ourselves, we would see this and more. The very sky, ocean, mountains, and stars would be pouring out of our brains—they all belong in the movie, too. If the rishis’ views are right, then we have been wrong to put so much faith in objective reality. And yet our objective frame of reference doesn’t seem wrong. It serves us very well, on the whole; the sky and the stars seem to exist “out there,” totally independent of us. Are we being fooled by our own movie?
To make the rishis’ case, you have to adopt their perspective, which means stepping outside ordinary waking-state reality, at least slightly. If you can do that, then you begin to appreciate that the mind is indeed a powerful creator. I caught a small but revealing glimpse of this recently. I was in a crowded plane taking off from Bombay. Everything seemed completely normal except that the No Smoking/Fasten Your Seatbelt sign came back on at the same moment as the steward dashed furiously down the aisle toward the front of the cabin. The pilot announced over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain seated. We are going to return to Bombay for an emergency landing.” His voice betrayed a tremor, and as we all sat tensely silent, a young Indian stewardess started sobbing loudly.
A few minutes later we bounced onto the runway, and three fire trucks sped to our side; we could hear their sirens wailing above the engine roar. Nothing else happened. No explanation was ever given for the incident. The passengers were quickly reboarded onto a different jet; about half elected to stay on the ground. I didn’t feel too disturbed during the incident and got on the second plane. The next time I caught a flight, about ten days later, my mind was at ease. However, as soon as they flashed on the sign, No Smoking/Fasten Your Seatbelt, accompanied by that ding sound, my heart started to pound. At first I couldn’t put two and two together; then I realized that I had created a small conditioned reflex in myself. Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, and I sped up my heart at almost the same thing. I then noticed that as soon as this explanation dawned on me, my heartbeat went back to normal.
For a few seconds I was present at the birth of one impulse that shaped my reality. It is plausible that I have unwittingly created myself by piling up millions of impulses just like it. These come too fast and furious for me to analyze them—as well ask a waterfall to analyze its drops—but the real sticking point is that they are so abstract. To the rishis, the whole world has been built up, layer by layer, out of sheer abstraction. Because you willingly give yourself over to it, a John Wayne western seems real, even though you know it is just beams of light bouncing off a flat white surface. A dream consists entirely of neurological impulses firing in your brain, but as long as you are in it, you are convinced by its reality. (Everyone is familiar with that faint, disappointing moment that comes when the dream stops being convincing. Instead of flying through the air, you begin to sense that “it is only a dream,” and after a brief struggle, the waking world comes back.)
In the same way, the reality you accept in the waking state is known to you only from impulses firing in your brain. When you touch a flower, the act of touching brings together the force and matter fields in your hand with the force and matter fields in the flower. All of these fields are highly abstract, yet touch does not seem abstract to you. You are convinced by it. The rishis placed a huge emphasis on how much we all convince ourselves. A famous parable for this was given by Shankara, the greatest philosophical mind in the Vedic tradition:
A man is walking down the road in the evening and sees a large snake coiled in the dust. He runs away terrified and stirs up everyone with his cries of “Snake, snake!” The people of his village are also terrified; the women and children don’t want to go outside because of the snake, and normal life begins to be overshadowed by everyone’s apprehension. Then a brave person resolves to look at this snake. He asks the first man to take him to it, and when they get there, what they find is not a snake but a rope coiled in the middle of the road. All our fears, Shankara said, have been built up from just such a delusion. In fact, nothing real can be separated from what we tell ourselves is real.
This line of reasoning is not specifically Indian—it can be easily adapted to a modern frame of reference. Think of what happens when two bar magnets come together with their north poles facing each other. The magnetic field repels them apart. If these were thinking magnets, they would “feel” something solid in between themselves. They would create touch out of an abstraction, just as we all do.
The reason why, when you touch it, an object feels soft, hard, ragged, smooth, et cetera, is that such an interpretation is made in your brain. Essentially, the five senses are just tools. Touch is really the brain reaching out into the world, using specialized nerve cells to register certain information—a very narrow band, we must remember, which is entirely different from what a snake “touches” when its tongue flicks the air.
Similarly, the nerve endings coating the retina of your eye are also extensions of the brain. Structurally, the retina is just a pool of nerve endings fanning out like the frayed end of a rope, the rope being the optic nerve, which gathers a million separate nerve fibers into one bundled cord. Even though they are located deeper inside you than the nerve endings under your skin, the eye’s sensory cells are also “touching” the outside world. There is no intrinsic difference between the field of light contacted by your eye and the energy field you touch with your fingers—the real distinction between seeing and touching is made in the brain. And so it goes for every other sense: hearing, smelling, and tasting involve specialized cells that send impulses directly to the brain for interpretation, and without that interpretation nothing could exist.
All things in existence are tied to our senses, and our senses are tied to our brains. The commonsense notion that “this chair is hard to the touch” is not true, until you restate it as “this chair is hard because my brain made it that way.” (The chair is not hard at all to a cosmic ray, which zips through it like air. A neutrino zips through the whole Earth with equal ease.) Using this insight, the rishis went even further. They noticed that you do not have to touch an object physically to know how it feels. Answer this question: Which is softer, a starched linen napkin or a rose petal? You can easily compare the two in your mind, using an image of touch, without having to go out and find a real napkin and a real rose.
The reason why you can do this is that you have gone to a subtler level of the sense of touch. Similarly, there are subtle sounds, sights, smells, and tastes. However, this level of the mind is not the end—in meditation, one can reach even further back, beyond the five subtle senses (called the Tanmatras in Ayurveda), until one arrives at consciousness in its unified state—the Vedic texts compare this to following the hand’s five fingers back to where they join at the palm. Subjectively, the visual image of a rose would grow fainter and fainter on the screen of the mind, until nothing was left but the screen itself. Then one would be at the true origin of the senses, the field of intelligence itself. In this way, the rishis reasoned, the whole world of physical reality comes into being.
We seem to be in deep philosophical waters here, but in fact every layer of touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste influences our ordinary lives. If you like to eat oysters and I detest them, the difference is not in the oyster or in our taste buds. The contact between the molecules of the oyster and the taste receptors in our mouths is the same for both of us. Yet, in the process of tasting, your delight insinuates itself, and so does my disgust. All the raw data of experience must pass through the filter of intelligence, and no two people appraise it in exactly the same way.
When something seems to change in the world, the rishis said, it is really you that is changing. A friend of mine, also Indian, is a surgeon who has gained a reputation for being rather a gourmet. His specialty is omelets, the more exotic the better. The last time we had Sunday brunch together, however, he didn’t order an omelet. Curious, I asked him about it, and he said, “I can’t stand the taste of an omelet anymore.” It turned out that his liking for them had changed instantly, earlier that week.
He was stirring up an omelet at home while his 6-year-old son, Arjun, looked on. As each egg was cracked, my friend tossed the shell aside. By chance a few of them fell into a small brown bag of birdseed that was going to be set out for the sparrows.
“Oh, don’t do that,” Arjun said seriously. “The birds will think their babies have died, and they won’t want to eat.” My friend is usually proud of his boy’s precocious remarks, but all at once he couldn’t abide the taste of the omelet he was making, or any other. Science would be at a loss to measure the change that occurred in him, because it is too ghostly and too individual. The idea that an omelet tastes good has no more weight than that it tastes bad. The same is true of every other sensation. Is a goose-down pillow soft? Not to someone with a migraine, who groans with pain when his head touches it. Does a jet move fast? Not if you view it from the moon. In short, there is no end to the way a sense impression can be interpreted, and no end to the ways that the body can respond to it.
The rishis said that life is built up by your participation in it. Nothing is good or bad, hard or soft, painful or pleasant, except as you live it. The same is true of disease. A disease is not the molecular contact of some outside organism with the molecules of your body. (As we saw, even if you put a drop of concentrated cold virus into a person’s nose, his chances of getting a cold are no more than one in eight.) It is not even the flow of toxins in your blood or the action of runaway cells. In the rishis’ view, a disease is a sequence of moments that you live through, during which you appraise every iota of the vast input that comes pouring in from all quarters of your world, including your body.
Your body is a world, too. When I first came to Ayurveda, I was deeply impressed by the following verse in the ancient texts:
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body.
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.
These words are subject to many interpretations. What they signify to me is that when I go about my everyday existence, I am in charge of two worlds, the little one in me and the big one around me. My appraisal of every minute detail “out there”—the sun, the sky, the chances of rain, the words other people say, the shadows cast by office buildings—is matched by an event “in here.” Infinite choice is open at every second for me to alter the shape of the world, for it has no shape other than what I give it. The eminent neurologist Sir John Eccles stated this quite clearly when he wrote, “I want you to realize that there is no color in the natural world and no sounds—nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent…” In short, nothing is so important about the universe as your participation in it.
The rishis’ subjective approach found an enormously useful outlet in Ayurveda. Ayurveda is commonly classified as a system of medicine, but with equal justice you could call it a system for curing delusions, for stripping away the convincing quality of disease and letting a healthier reality take its place. (The name itself suggests that Ayurveda is meant to be medicine in the broadest sense. It comes from two Sanskrit roots, Ayus, or “life,” and Veda, which means either “knowledge” or “science.” The literal meaning, then, is “science of life.”)
Patients are curious to know what kinds of treatments are specifically Ayurvedic—are there new pills to try, exercises, diets, or more arcane Eastern therapies? I say yes to all of these, but then with some embarrassment I have to add that I spend much of my time just talking, trying to get people not to be so convinced by their disease. In Ayurveda, this is the first and most important step in healing. As long as the patient is convinced by his symptoms, he is caught up in a reality where “being sick” is the dominant input. The reason why meditation is so important in Ayurveda is that it leads the mind to a “free zone” that is not touched by disease. Until you know that such a place exists, your disease will seem to be taking over completely. This is the principal delusion that needs to be shattered.
It is undeniable that we all create scenarios and then become convinced by them, down to our very cells. A young girl from Boston who went to college in Vermont was brought in to see me recently by her parents. They had become quite distraught when she showed up in the middle of spring term with sharp chest pains. These had set in while she was recovering from a cold and over a period of a week became alarmingly severe. One night the girl had a bad attack—she began to experience shortness of breath, palpitations, and dizziness, eventually growing so frightened that her parents rushed her to the nearest emergency room.
By the time they got there, the whole family was in a state of near panic. The ER doctor listened to the girl’s heart, detected that she had a slight heart murmur, and decided to run an EKG, or electrocardiogram. The EKG read-out showed occasional ectopic beats, meaning extra beats that were outside the heart rhythm. He then used ultrasound to perform a more sophisticated test, called an echo-cardiogram, from which he discerned an actual heart defect.
“She has mitral valve prolapse,” he informed the family. This meant that when one of her heart valves closed, it ballooned inward, toward the chamber of the heart. “I want her to spend the night here in the intensive care unit,” he continued, and within an hour the girl was taken upstairs, hooked to an intravenous drip of morphine for her pain, and supplied with extra oxygen through small tubes taped to her nose. Around her were heart-attack and stroke victims, some of them obviously dying. She found the whole experience highly distressing and began to hallucinate from the morphine as she drifted off to sleep.
The next morning, a careful examination of her tests led the doctors to diagnose that her pain was probably due not only to the mitral valve prolapse but to pericarditis, an inflammation of the pericardium, the covering around the heart. She was released on strong anti-inflammatory agents for this, as well as beta blockers to slow her heart rate. The pain in her chest subsided; however, she found it impossible to tolerate the beta blockers—besides affecting the heart, these drugs attach to receptors in the brain, causing drowsiness and mental disorientation.
Her medications were changed, only to bring on new side effects and expand her constellation of symptoms. The new prescriptions were meant to dilate her blood vessels, but this lowered her blood pressure too much, causing her to feel dizzy and nauseated; at times she would faint without warning. She managed to tolerate these side effects, largely because she wanted to stay in school at any cost. Every time she tried to cut back on her medication, even slightly, the original chest pain returned in full force, accompanied by her other symptoms. She came home for summer vacation and horrified her parents by clutching her chest one evening at dinner. She started to hyperventilate so severely that her mother went scurrying to find a paper bag for her to breathe into. Within a few minutes, she felt violent heart palpitations, began to vomit, and eventually passed out. Her parents sat up with her all that night and many nights to come.
Since there was nothing more that her doctors could do, the family cast about for other approaches. They hit upon a news story about Ayurveda, and one July day all three, mother, father, and daughter, came to the Lancaster clinic. I took a very detailed medical history from the girl, looked at her EKGs, and found myself quite surprised.
“Your pain isn’t from your heart,” I told her, and to prove it I pressed firmly on her sternum, the bone in the middle of the chest that covers the heart. She flinched. “You’re still tender because what you originally had was an inflammation there, where the rib cartilage and the sternum meet. It is a condition called costo-chondritis, which can sometimes set in after a cold or other viral infection.”
She and her parents looked startled, but I went on, taking apart the puzzle piece by piece. On the night they had rushed her to the ER, her high anxiety caused her to exhibit the occasional ectopic, or extra, heartbeats. Her main diagnosis, mitral valve prolapse, may occur in as many as 10 percent of young women with slender builds like hers. The reason for this is not known, nor is there conclusive evidence for why it should cause any pain, although in some patients it does. Similarly, the heart murmur that comes with it does not seem to be dangerous. Her pericarditis was a misreading of her EKG—the violence of her attack had probably made the ER doctor overanxious to find something wrong. The remaining symptoms—nausea, vomiting, heart palpitations, dizziness, fainting, shortness of breath, and hyperventilation—were brought on either by the medications or directly by her.
“I have tried to go back to the moment when your condition was born,” I said, “to show you how it built itself up, step by step. In its present form, your disease is a reflex. It is being kept alive by your own expectations.”
At this point the girl’s parents looked quite offended. I knew the anxiety they felt sitting up all night, worrying that she might be in real danger. To make the parents see that I wasn’t blaming anybody, I told them about my experience on the airplane when the No Smoking sign set my heart going. Add a little more fear to the situation, and my pounding heart could have been the start of a “heart condition” just as convincing as their daughter’s.
They were still uneasy. When their daughter suffered stabbing chest pains, they thought of her as a victim of illness; now I seemed to say that she was doing it to herself. The era of mind-body medicine has made this an extremely sore point. Life was simpler when a disease without a germ was considered “all in your head.” The germs have largely been pushed back, but instead of leaving us free of disease, this has made disease far more enigmatic. Am I waiting for cancer to strike me, or is my personality giving it to me? This girl’s case is a perfect example; A cardiologist might point to her heart defect as the cause of her pain; a psychiatrist could say that the defect didn’t do anything—the girl simply panicked. The drugs she took induced vomiting, but she still vomits when they are removed. Her low blood pressure can cause fainting, but so can anxiety. Modern medicine has swung back and forth debating these points endlessly.
The result, according to patient surveys, is a huge increase in guilt. There is such a fine line between probing a patient’s fears and fueling them. I have sat for hours counseling people with cancer. They listen attentively because “the doctor is talking.” I tell them they can beat the cancer, and they quickly, anxiously agree. But when I am alone again, I am haunted by a terrible thought I see lurking in their eyes: “You say I’m sick, but really I did it to myself.”
The girl had not spoken for quite a while. “So I’m creating this thing?” she finally said.
“No,” I replied, “but you are certainly participating in it. Try taking away your participation—I bet things will change.”
“How do I do that?” she asked.
“You have to break out of your own conditioning,” I said. “The next time you have an attack, just stand back from it a little; let the pain be there, as innocently as you can.” If she could do this, I told her, the whole thing would probably evaporate.
She listened and thanked me, then I heard nothing more for two weeks. Perhaps I had touched too many nerves. I had been making her disease more and more personal, when what the family desperately hoped for was that it was impersonal. Conventional medicine goes out of its way to put diseases into neat, classifiable boxes just so that the personal element is eliminated. I had noticed while interviewing her that this girl placed a huge importance on her diagnosis. She would preface each episode by saying, “When I get my mitral valve prolapse…” It was as if these words explained everything. They were like a net that drew together all her symptoms and held them tight. When I mentioned this, she looked very thoughtful. She had invested so much in the words mitral valve prolapse that they had acquired a kind of magic for her. It was essential to break the spell of this magic, which can be uncannily powerful.
I was wrong if I thought she hadn’t taken our session to heart. Out of curiosity I phoned the family to see how she was doing. The news was very good: she was off all medications and her attacks were now limited to occasional bouts of chest pain. Her parents would sometimes see her sitting with her eyes closed. When they asked what she was doing, she said, “I just watch the pain until it goes away.” The accompanying symptoms—dizziness, vomiting, fainting, et cetera—have disappeared.
In psychology there are certain extreme feelings—such as loathing, dread, horror, and awe—that many people cannot face. When these people grow horrified or struck with awe, they could swear that their emotion comes from outside themselves. In cases of paranoia, the person might even think that “they” are broadcasting such feelings into him through some kind of magic. (“They” can be Martians, communists, or next-door neighbors.) Freud called these our “uncanny” emotions and spent many years observing them in neurotic and psychotic patients.
But uncanniness is always present, I think. It is nature’s way of putting a veil over our most secret fears; it hides inner pain from us until the moment when the pain breaks an invisible dam and comes pouring out. Then the twin thought arises, “Is this happening to me, or am I doing it to myself?” It doesn’t really matter if the end result is a disease or just a sense of extreme discomfort. The important thing is to keep the patient from getting twisted up in his doubts—that way lies total paralysis.
Medicine has already paid a very high price for not dealing adequately with the personal nature of disease. For one thing, we have aroused guilt without being able to assuage it. People are horrified at the idea that they are to blame for their diseases. Doctors don’t think they are stoking this guilt. Perhaps it was born out of being told over and over that no one is to blame. But if you say that living right will help prevent a heart attack or cancer, don’t you have to accept that living wrong will help bring on the same diseases?
The whole issue of blame and responsibility is painful to untangle. When I had my private practice in endocrinology, I would see obese patients whose weight put them at high risk for becoming diabetic. I would warn them about the danger of continuing to eat too much; at the same time, I knew I was feeding their guilt, which would only lead to more eating. If a patient was a chain-smoker, I would be very firm and say, “My God, you know you have to quit smoking—think of the risks you are running.” Many of these patients were ex-servicemen I saw at the V.A. hospital in Boston. After listening to me, they could go to the PX upstairs, where government-subsidized cigarettes were being sold at a steep discount. (I bought mine there, too, having become a smoker during my night shifts as an intern.)
In fact, no disease points up the paradoxes of blame and responsibility better than lung cancer. The public is well aware that this is almost exclusively a smoker’s illness. That puts the responsibility squarely on the patient, but then a second thought enters. Aren’t these people addicted to nicotine? A 1988 report by the surgeon general states that they are, and that their addiction may be harder to break than addiction to heroin or alcohol. This means that one is not dealing with a rational situation.
Sigmund Freud attempted for many years to stop smoking after being informed by his doctor that twenty cigars a day—Freud’s normal ration—was bad for his heart. He stopped once for seven weeks, but his heart went into palpitations worse than before. He became intolerably depressed and was forced back to his cigars. When he didn’t smoke, Freud told his biographer, “the torture was beyond human power to bear.” I have witnessed advanced lung cancer patients waiting for radiation who walk around a corner to smoke a cigarette—this implies that prevention may be impossible, because it would have to start before the first cigarette gets smoked.
In every disease, not just lung cancer, the patients are often too hooked, too guilty, or simply too convinced to be helped. There is no denying the deeply irrational streak in man. At the V.A. hospital we took in every variety of alcoholic, including the dilapidated, malnourished ones that were routinely swept in off the streets by the police. One of the most frequent conditions in advanced alcoholism is pancreatitis, or inflammation of the pancreas. Everyone brought in with pancreatitis had to be treated with great care. They could not eat or digest food, because calling on the pancreas only made it more inflamed and extremely painful. Patients would vomit if they tried to eat even one bite. We had to feed them by drip through an IV tube, insert another tube into their stomachs to drain the digestive juices that continued to inflame the pancreas, and inject antibiotics to fight the infection that was often present.
It was all we could do to pull these men back from the brink of death, but when we had succeeded and they were discharged back onto the street, we often saw the same ritual. Looking out the second-floor window, we could see a tavern across the street from the hospital. Our patients walked out the door, barely tottered across the street, and went into the bar. Their first drink came ten minutes after their cure. Compassion for these people has its limits. Anyone could be forgiven for saying, “If you want to smoke and drink, if you don’t exercise and insist on eating cholesterol, then too bad for you.” Undeniably people do say such things, or at least think them. But the essence of compassion lies in recognizing how hard it is to be good. To forgive someone is to let him be free, even if he abuses that freedom beyond exasperation.
There is a story in India about the sadhu and the scorpion:
A man is walking down the road when he spots a sadhu kneeling beside a ditch. He approaches and sees that the sadhu is watching a scorpion. The scorpion wants to cross the ditch, but when he gets into the muddy water, he begins to drown. The sadhu carefully reaches down to pull him out of the water, but as soon as he touches it, the scorpion stings him. The scorpion goes into the water again, again it begins to drown, and when the sadhu lifts it out, he receives another sting.
The man sees this happen three times. Finally he blurts, “Why don’t you stop allowing yourself to be stung?” The sadhu replies, “There is nothing I can do. It is the scorpion’s nature to sting, but it is my nature to save.”
The reason that society has set up the institution of medicine is to ensure that our instinct to save one another never dies. It is the same instinct that sees no blame in another person’s weakness; it freely takes responsibility for troubles that are not its own. If I ever walked into a hospital and detected there that the spark of compassion had gone out, I could write the end of medicine—darkness will have won.
Modern medicine is still dominated by the notion that disease is caused by objective agents. A sophisticated analysis shows that this is only partly true. A disease cannot take hold without a host who accepts it, hence the current attempts to understand our immune system. Historically, both Greek medicine and Ayurveda were founded on the idea that the host is all-important. The Greeks believed that there was a fluid called physis that flowed in, out, and through all of life. The flow of physis tied the organs inside the body with the world outside, and as long as the two were in balance, the body would be healthy. (This premise is still reflected in our use of the word physics to explain the outer world and the related physiology to explain the inner.) In Ayurveda, it takes the balance of three elements, called doshas, to maintain health. The point is not whether physis or doshas exist, but that one’s own state of balance determines whether one is sick or well.
Medicine is coming back to this notion, the oldest in all the healing arts, but I notice that an impersonal air still hangs over everything. We are setting up a concrete thing called the immune system and pinning our hopes onto it. The original idea, as voiced by the Greeks and by Ayurveda, was much more organic. A patient was not a collection of host cells but someone who ate, drank, thought, and acted. If a doctor wanted to change someone’s doshas or his physis, he changed his habits. In this way, he got right to the root of the patient’s participation in the world.
There are dozens of medical systems in the world, many of them deeply in conflict with one another. How can they cure people and yet disagree so completely? What is poison to me is cure to a homeopath. I think the answer is that all medicine works by helping a patient live through his disease, moment by moment, until the balance swings away from sickness toward cure. I cannot be more specific, because the process does not happen in books but in living persons. People have drunk grape juice and recovered from cancer. If you can successfully restore balance to the bodymind, then the patient’s immune system will respond. The immune cells do not judge whether the doctor believes in conventional medicine, homeopathy, or Ayurveda. Insofar as it can change our participation in disease, every system is capable of working. I think Ayurveda will rise to prominence, however, because it recognizes the need to cure patients by curing their reality first.
More and more I feel the importance of the patient’s personal reality. A middle-aged doctor, a radiologist, came to see me after he was diagnosed with leukemia. He was extremely sophisticated in his knowledge of the disease, an unpredictable form called chronic myelogenous leukemia, meaning that it affected the white blood cells called myelocytes. As yet he felt nothing beyond some fatigue during the day, but the mortality statistics, which he also knew well, were grim. They said that the average survival was thirty-six to forty-four months. On the other hand, because the disease is unpredictable, he could live much longer.
Before coming to me, he had consulted the leading cancer institute in New York City. They had made extensive tests on his blood and offered him a choice of half a dozen experimental drug protocols. No single accepted treatment for his leukemia exists; none of the experimental ones came with any promises that his life expectancy would be lengthened.
Upon reflection, he had rejected treatment and began to read up voraciously on spontaneous remissions, including something I had written. He had sought me out for that reason. As we talked, I saw that one particular detail was a huge stumbling block for him.
“I want to believe I will recover from this,” he told me, “but something really worries me. I read about a lot of remissions from cancer, but I didn’t run across any spontaneous remissions from leukemia.”
One could see how his medical mind was working. The variety of leukemia he has is linked to a genetic component, called the Philadelphia chromosome. He had tested positive for this chromosome, and being a physician, that was the end of the story—he was genetically marked for doom. The only chance for Ayurveda would be if it promoted a miracle. But he couldn’t find any reports of leukemia miracles in the journals.
“Look,” I said, “you are obsessed with the statistics on this disease. Don’t think about them—what you want to do is beat the statistics, don’t you?”
“I know, I know,” he said abstractedly, “but I can’t find a single spontaneous remission in the whole literature. I could be the first, of course, but…” His voice trailed off.
I had a brainstorm. “Why don’t you tell yourself you have some other cancer,” I suggested. “Then at least you would have hope for a remission.”
His face brightened, and he leaped at my suggestion. Then I had more good news for him. I had just stumbled across a review article that connected childhood leukemia and stress. This man had a totally different disease, but he also led an incredibly stressful life. His wife was divorcing him, his medical partners had filed a lawsuit against him, his children, now grown, did not speak to him anymore, and he had to support two houses and three Mercedeses. It was in the midst of his rancorous divorce that his diagnosis had been made, quite by accident, and now his wife insisted on staying with him. The reason she gave was her fear of being left alone after he died.
“I just read that stress is linked to childhood leukemia,” I offered. He beamed when he heard this, because the scientist in him made a causal link between stress, the activation of “stress hormones” like cortisol, and finally a suppression of the immune system. Maybe that was happening to him. No one had actually shown a link between stress and his disease, but now he had one more straw to grasp.
He went away and continued to do well. The next time he came in, he asked me if he should go for a blood test. Leukemia causes a disastrous elevation in the number of white blood cells; a lower count would prove to him that he was really getting better.
“If the counts are bad,” I reasoned, “then you will get depressed and put more stress on yourself. If they are good, then you will be getting better anyway. Why not postpone the blood test until you feel some symptoms?” He agreed to this and went away again.
The last time I saw him was last week. He told me that believing he has cancer instead of leukemia was working out well.
“You know,” I said, “why bother to call it cancer? You could tell yourself that you have a chronic disease that has no name. If it doesn’t have a name, then you won’t have to worry about any statistics. People live a long time with mysterious diseases.”
This final twist absolutely delighted him. With tremendous relief he shook my hand, and for the first time he agreed to come to the clinic to start Ayurveda. So far, I have done nothing for this man except change the label on his disease, but from that he changed his whole appraisal. Now we have a chance to witness the birth of a cure.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
It was hard enough thirty years ago to float the proposition that every disease is personal. In medical school, doctors learn about the natural history of diseases, the course an illness normally takes in the average patient. (As the hoary medical student joke goes, “It takes seven days to get over a cold, but if you really take care of yourself, you’ll get over it in a week.” Imbedded in the punch line is the certainty that hard medical facts come first; personal differences come second and are largely a nuisance, because they skew the statistical sample.)
Now there’s a new proposition to float that’s even harder for doctors to swallow: All disease is personal. In fact, it has to be. This isn’t blatant overconfidence on my part. The reason that all disease is personal is that reality is personal, and being sick or well is part of reality. The fact that a cold virus interacts with your immune system on a schedule that matches your neighbor when he has a cold is just a rough approximation. Some colds linger for a month. Viruses constantly mutate, and when they do, your immune system responds in kind—it learns what the virus has to teach.
Quantum Healing was written before the microbiome was explored, but I felt confident in saying that a bacterium or virus traveling around the world is the play of DNA talking to itself. DNA is sending messages constantly that pass in, out, around, and through the body. With present-day knowledge, we know that the microbiome isn’t a camp of squatters who have parked themselves in our bodies. These microbes are the message, and it’s constantly in flux. In 2014 a team headed by Dr. Patrick Schloss at the University of Michigan analyzed microbes gathered from three hundred people, in eighteen areas of their bodies. It was found that these microbes varied greatly. They changed, sometimes radically, for no known reason. There could be total population shifts in the course of a single day. In a sense the microbiome is the only bodily organ that can be replaced without surgery; in another sense it is a portable ecology, duplicating Earth’s ecology microscopically. Every atom in your body came from soil, air, and water. Your microbiome retains the memory of this.
Even with the present imperfect understanding, everyone concedes that the trillions of microorganisms that interface with the outside world are major players in how life evolved and keeps evolving. No one has to catch a cold to participate in the self-interaction of life with life. In computer science (and rightly or wrongly), the brain itself is just an information processor. So when you catch a cold—or interact with any microorganism—you and the world are thinking as one.
What’s your conversation like? You’ll never hear a cold virus talking to you, but the exchange of messages isn’t mysterious; it’s just very, very complicated. I’m constantly astonished at how much meaning is contained in catching a cold. To let you in on this astonishment, I’d like to use a cold as the template for your entire life. So many file headings are needed just for this one experience.
Biology: The newly mutated cold virus is a new biological creation.
Environment: The new strain of cold was born at a certain place and time somewhere in the world.
Relationships: The virus’s genes demand an interaction with your genome. In return, your genetic material has something to say about that.
Society: The cold hits a lot of people at nearly the same time, creating social implications, like a rise in sick days from work.
Core beliefs: When you catch a cold, your reaction to it depends on how tough or fragile you think you are, how dangerous or innocuous it is to get sick, and other personal beliefs.
Desires: Catching a cold affects what you wanted to do that week if you hadn’t gotten sick. You may have to put some desires on hold, such as going on a vacation.
Memories: In your immune system, the virus awakens the memory of colds you’ve had in the past. Antibodies are released coded by these past illnesses.
Psychological conditioning: You have personal memories of catching a cold over the years, and your reaction this time is likely to be almost identical to your reaction last winter.
Microbiome: The new arrival in the virus family interacts with the massive colony of microorganisms that are already present in and on our body.
Gene expression: Depending on everything listed above, genes in your brain, immune system, and various organs respond to all the changes occurring or threatening to occur.
It’s a little exhausting to contemplate this list, but that doesn’t mean that the possible implications of catching a cold have been exhausted. For that, you’d have to interview trillions of cells, each of which has its own story. Yet if we back away to a larger perspective, the point is simple: All disease is personal because reality is personal. No one, not even identical twins who begin life with the same genetic scorecard, inhabits a reality that’s the same as another person’s. How could they? The messages delivered by the common cold are like one grain of sand on the beach, and the tide never stops coming in, depositing new grains of information.
Colds take care of themselves, but what about cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other severe disorders? They are influenced by everything on the list, too, and it seems utterly blind to ignore them. A materialist can’t duck out of the argument by reverting to medical school textbooks. A liver enzyme may be a fact, but so are the receptors on the outer membrane of a liver cell, and these are responsive to every single influence I’ve listed. There’s no such thing as being halfway in the game; your total being is committed to participating.
How you see yourself is perhaps the most important influence on your state of wellbeing, or its absence. Life on this planet goes back about 3.5 billion years, and your body retains all the evolutionary knowledge accumulated over the eons. So you can justifiably see yourself as all life, which means that every interaction with the world is actually an interaction with yourself. What then? “Who am I?” becomes a very different question.
In Quantum Healing I offered a better way to manage personal reality. As much as I delighted in discovering countless new facts, simplicity held the key. (I recall a guru saying there are a thousand reasons to pick a pin up off the floor and a thousand reasons not to—no one can live like that.) At some point you simply have to accept the reality of cosmic intelligence and surrender to it.
Surrender connotes defeat to some people, who therefore hate the idea. It connotes drifting through life carelessly to other people, who therefore love the idea. But when it comes to managing your personal reality, surrender involves specific choices, and each must be tested to find out if it’s viable.
1. You relax and relinquish the desire to control.
2. You trust that you are cherished in creation, and you act on this trust.
3. You accept your own being as a source of infinite intelligence.
4. You approach every problem as having a level of solution that can be found.
5. You focus on personal growth, which is eternal, and minimize personal setbacks, which are temporary.
6. You ask for and receive support from Nature.
7. You resist the endless demands and unceasing insecurity of the ego.
That’s the agenda, not just for the spiritually inclined or the mystically gifted, but for anyone who grasps how personal reality really is. A supreme intelligence is responsible for creating order out of chaos, shaping every waking moment into “my” life. The paradox is that if you really want reality to be entirely yours, a unique creation, you must offer it up as a gift from the cosmos.