There is no more beautiful experience than when the world expands beyond its accustomed limits. These are the moments when reality takes on splendor. The Veda calls such an experience Ananda, or bliss; it is said to be another quality inherent in the human mind but covered over by layers of dulled awareness. Bliss is an uncomfortable word in the West; like transcendence, it needs to be demystified. Let’s start with a personal reaction to what bliss feels like. A beautiful first-person account is given by physiologist Robert Keith Wallace. The scene is Nepal, where Wallace went in 1974, taking a break from a conference being held in India:
Along with a physicist friend, I made my way up from Katmandu, the capital, to be nearer the Himalayas. We found a beautiful alpine lake, which Nepalese princes once favored as a summer retreat. For less than a dollar, we rented a boat and pushed out onto the water. It was a windy day with clearing skies, a perfect day to fly kites. I had bought one at the bazaar, painted a fierce red and built for acrobatics. I stood up, and it jumped out of my hand as I let it loose on the wind.
The tiny kite floated up into the high, thin air. I stood looking up toward the great mountains around us. Though they hid their heads in the clouds, they gave off an aura of grandeur and peace. As I watched, the clouds lifted all at once. I was absolutely in awe. What I had taken for mountains were only foothills! Beyond them, like ancient gods, rose the true Himalayas, unbelievably mighty and majestic.
We could hardly speak, so much power and beauty was concentrated in that breathtaking scene. The sense of having a small, isolated self disappeared, and in its place was the delicious sensation of flowing out into everything I beheld. I felt a sense of complete fullness contained in my own silence. Fittingly, the tallest peak before us was Annapurna, whose name means “fullness of life.”
Standing there on the lake, I saw directly into the reality where time really is timeless. The same power that reared these mountains was flowing through me. If I wanted to find the source of time and space, I only needed to place my fingers over my heart. The single adequate word to describe my sensations at that moment is bliss.*
What stands out unmistakably in this experience is its sense of revelation. People who have been directly touched by bliss feel that they are suddenly being exposed to life as it really is. By comparison, their ordinary view was flat and distorted; they had been accepting a dingy image for the real thing. To experience bliss every hour of the day would be a sign of complete enlightenment, but even a brief encounter is significant—it permits you to actually feel waves of consciousness as they well up from the field of silence, cross the gap, and are infused into every cell. This is the body’s own awakening.
In Ayurveda, bliss is the basis for three extremely powerful healing techniques. The first is meditation, which we have already discussed. Its importance is that it takes the mind out of its boundaries and exposes it to an unbounded state of consciousness. The other two techniques are more specific. The first is the Ayurvedic psycho-physiological technique—the term psycho-physiological simply means “mind-body” (we often use an informal name, the bliss technique). The second healing technique is called primordial sound.
To explain how such healing works, let me take an example from hypnosis. One of the most surprising findings of hypnosis research is that subjects can make their hands warm or cold, raise rashes on their skin, and even form blisters in a matter of a few minutes after the hypnotic suggestion is introduced. This is not, strictly speaking, a peculiarity of the hypnotic trance—subjects hooked up to biofeedback machines can do similar things in their normal state of awareness. What is being demonstrated here is the power of attention to alter the body. Ayurveda has made use of this principle for thousands of years. Indeed, since the basic premise of Vedic knowledge is that consciousness creates the body, it is only natural that techniques for focusing attention should have been discovered.
The bliss technique and primordial sound fall into this category. Consciousness is nothing but awareness. You can be aware that your hand is hot, which is passive awareness, but as the hypnosis research shows, you can also make your hand hot, which is active awareness, or attention. When you “pay attention” to something, you shift from passive to active awareness. Attention exerts far more control than people ordinarily realize. That is because we are victims of passive awareness. A person in pain is aware of the pain but not that he can make it increase, diminish, appear, or disappear. Yet all this is true. (People can walk on fire, for example, because they can control their level of pain; more remarkably, they can control whether their feet actually get burned—that too is under the control of attention.)
In Ayurveda, each and every symptom of disease, from a minor neck pain to a full-blown cancer, is under the control of attention. However, between us and the symptom lie barriers—the veils called Maya—that prevent us from exercising our attention in a therapeutic way. All mind-body medicine attempts to remove these obstacles so that healing can take place. Outside Ayurveda, the word Maya is not used, but any term that amounts to the same thing is applicable. I have used other phrases, such as “barriers in silence,” “the ghost of memory,” and “the mask of matter.” In the current environment, where mind-body medicine is just proving itself and has to beware of stepping on the toes of science, techniques for breaking through Maya are still rather rudimentary. Fortunately, nature has set up things so that mind-body approaches of all kinds will work. Laughter can defeat a fatal disease; so can drinking a glass of grape juice every day, if you believe strongly enough in it.
It would be much better, however, to have a science of awareness. Ayurveda supplies just that. It would also be helpful to have a theory that supplies this science with a firm grounding in philosophy; the Vedic knowledge supplies that. When I teach people Ayurvedic healing techniques, I am not inducting them into a Vedic world, or into some mystery. I am trying to let them realize that their own awareness creates, controls, and turns into their bodies. This is a fact, not just a Vedic view of things.
When the body is in pain, a distorted area of awareness is crying out to the rest of awareness for help. Our natural instinct is to bring the help. The way we mobilize the platelets and clotting factors in the blood to heal a cut is nothing more than awareness bringing in help. A bruise heals because intelligence goes to work on it. I think that much has become abundantly clear by now.
Some people are fortunate in being such natural creatures that when they get cancer, they do not block the innate urge to get well. No doubt there are thousands of such people in the world who have not come under scrutiny. Rather than being branded miraculous by religion or science, they stand as the mute, inglorious Miltons of the healing process.
Ayurveda extends their ability to everyone. The Ayurvedic approach is to take a process already going on in the body and assist it naturally and without strain. Any pain or disease you have is like an island of discomfort surrounded by an ocean of comfort, for in comparison to any one disease, your healthy awareness is as big as an ocean. Assuming that you are normally constituted, there is no innate reason why you cannot heal any disease with awareness. (In old age, or in cases of chronic illness, our inner abilities get depleted; therefore, Ayurveda cannot guarantee a cure because sometimes it is not there in nature’s scheme.)
The bliss technique gives the patient the experience of himself as pure awareness, the ocean of well-being that is our basic prop and sustenance. With this technique alone it is possible to “drown” a disease in awareness and cure it. However, like the hypnotic subjects who can focus their attention to make a blister appear, it is also useful to focus attention more precisely to heal. For that, the primordial sound technique exists. With it, a specific tumor or arthritic joint can be attended to; a weak heart or clogged arteries can be zeroed in on. You are not attacking the disorder with the primordial sound but paying closer attention to it—so close that the distortion of awareness lurking at the bottom of the disorder falls back into line. In earlier chapters I called this process banishing the ghost of memory.
Together, meditation, the bliss technique, and primordial sound are the practical application of all that I have been building up to, the tools of quantum healing. Let me illustrate them with a case study, and afterward I will explain their connection to bliss.
Laura is a young woman from Boston who contracted breast cancer in her mid-thirties. Confronted with her diagnosis, she elected for personal reasons not to undergo any conventional treatment, despite her doctor’s anxious insistence that without treatment she would be dead in less than two years. Today, three years later, she is still alive and on the surface appears perfectly normal. Her X rays reveal that the tumor has not shrunk, but its growth, if any, has been slight. This implies that Laura is still in considerable danger, but in her own mind, her present state is a great victory.
Although her cancer is still present, it has not followed what doctors call the “expected natural history” of the disease. Dr. Yujiro Ikemi, one of Japan’s leading experts in psychosomatic medicine, has surveyed sixty-nine patients whom he considers to have had spontaneous regressions of cancer. It is not necessary for the cancer cells to disappear entirely, Dr. Ikemi notes—he looks for other signs, such as that the tumor is growing abnormally slowly, the patient has not wasted away, and the malignancy has not spread to other parts of the body. These signs are enough to indicate a spontaneous regression in Ikemi’s view, and Laura fits them all.
Laura was already meditating when I first saw her. In 1987 she went through two weeks of inpatient Ayurvedic treatment and was taught primordial sound and the bliss technique, both of which can be used during meditation. Let us say that the mind has settled down in meditation and is experiencing itself as silence. Bliss is in that silence, just as intelligence is. You cannot “feel” that you are intelligent, but you can feel bliss. The bliss technique brings it out for the mind to register in various ways—as warmth in some part of the body, tingling, a flowing sensation, or several other physical manifestations. Bliss remains abstract, but a sort of “afterglow” is being picked up during the technique. Primordial sound, on the other hand, is quite focused—it brings the awareness of bliss directly to the diseased area of the body. (One does not have to think of all this as happening separately. The bliss level of awareness is always present; the techniques simply draw the conscious mind to it. Once bliss is experienced, the mind-body connection has been made.)
As soon as she learned the techniques, Laura felt immediate positive effects. The primordial sounds went right to the breast area, she told me. At times they induced a throbbing feeling, heat, or even pain; most of the time, however, she would sit down with pain in that area and the technique would cause it to go away. The most dramatic results, subjectively, came from the introduction of bliss. I asked Laura to write out her experiences for me, whether joyful or painful or just indifferent, and she agreed to. The latest report says this:
The experiences during the bliss technique are not as profound as when I started one and a half years ago, but then there was such deep-rooted fear and sorrow, a feeling of helplessness and intense anxiety, so the contrast was quite great when I began to experience such joy and bliss.
At that time there were large black holes experienced in my awareness. I do not see the black holes anymore, and the feeling of constant happiness is more stable. Yet days still come when the joy and bliss are so powerful that I can hardly contain them. I rarely experience fear anymore, just some general anxiety that I can usually control with a little attention.
While other women in her position are devastated by their treatments and left with the deepest scars, physically and mentally, it is amazing that Laura, though still suspended between life and death, can end her letter this way:
A year and a half ago, I was only 99 percent sure that the cancer would be eliminated. It has only been in the last month that I have grown 100 percent sure. I have no doubts now. I feel confident in the support of nature. I still don’t know the exact form nature’s help will take, or the timing for it, but I am less concerned about the final manifestation than I am about the breakthrough in consciousness. I can see clearly in my awareness the perfect breast.
Laura is a sensitive observer of her own awareness, and she sees its flow very exactly. To her, there is a huge difference, from the inside, between being sick and becoming well. The techniques she is using do not call for visualization, but she says that she can see the tumor grow whenever she feels anxious or sorrowful. This image represents, I believe, a direct link between her awareness and the progress of the cancer.
What will the final outcome be? She and I agree that the process itself is the outcome; every day is a whole—not a step toward some dreamed-of recovery, but an end in itself, to be lived in its fullness as if no disease existed. Because I am much more indoctrinated by my past medical experiences with cancer than Laura is, I often think that she is far ahead of me in her joyful confidence.
Bliss is both objective and subjective. You can feel it as a sensation, but it also effects measurable change—it can alter the heart rate, blood pressure, hormone secretions, or anything else for that matter. This is what allows bliss to be useful medically. The patient is using the Ayurvedic techniques “in his head,” but the bliss being experienced is re-creating his body at the same time. What is happening is that the body is receiving a signal from its own blueprint, not a material blueprint but the one that exists in consciousness.
Because the blueprint is invisible, it has to find a way to cross over into material existence. To do that, nature employs bliss—it is a vibration that bridges mind and matter, allowing each bit of the body to be paired with a bit of intelligence:
This diagram shows the mind-body connection as being like a radio broadcast: mind is sending out impulses of intelligence, DNA receives them, and bliss is the carrier signal. On paper, these three elements have to be separated, but in reality they are completely fused. The message, the messenger, and the receiver are one. Of course, we have looked at the mind-body connection dozens of times before, but we didn’t have the “glue” that keeps mind and body from flying in separate directions—bliss.
DNA now takes on special importance. A single neuropeptide, or any other messenger molecule, carries only a tiny bit of the signal that mind is sending. Adrenaline, for example, is correlated to fear. This seems to imply that each thought activates one molecule, but that would be like saying that 101.5 on an FM radio receives only one song. In fact, the body can receive an infinite variety of signals, thanks to DNA.
We are used to thinking of DNA as an unchanging blueprint, albeit “the blueprint of life.” DNA is nowhere near so static. I was sitting quietly two days ago when I had a glimpse of DNA in my mind’s eye. I saw DNA speeded up so that one human lifetime, from the moment of inception to the moment of death, fit into the space of a few minutes.
What I saw wasn’t a chemical but a process of incredible richness and dynamism. Everything in life pours out of DNA—flesh, bones, blood, heart, and nervous system; a baby’s first word and a toddler’s first step; the maturing of reason in the brain’s cortex; the play of emotions, thoughts, and desires that flicker like summer lightning through every cell. All of this is DNA. To call it a blueprint is to take the husk and miss the fruit. Imagine yourself going to a Mercedes dealer, paying thirty thousand dollars, and having him hand over a car’s blueprint instead of a car. Now imagine the blueprint actually turning into the car—not only that, but starting itself, driving down the road, and replacing its own spare parts. Then the blueprint would be equal to DNA. (It would also need another quite amazing talent: any part—the carburetor, the tires, even a chip of paint on the door—would have to know how to turn into a whole car.)
Whatever it is that makes DNA so dynamic is not visible in its material makeup; molecules themselves are passive participants in time. They can change, as oxygen and hydrogen change when they combine to form water, but DNA actively shapes the course of time. This is such an important feature that I need to explain it at length; otherwise, the real miracle of DNA will be lost on us.
In the past few years, researchers have been intrigued by one particular gene, called the per gene, in the DNA of a fruit fly. As part of their inherited behavior, fruit flies sing in the evening to call their mates. Normally, they repeat their call quite rhythmically, once every 60 seconds.
Ronald Konopka, a research professor at Clarkson University, first linked the rhythm of the fruit fly’s song to the per (for “periodic”) gene. He also found that the rhythm could change. When the per gene mutates, it produces faster or slower intervals between calls: one fly sings every 40 seconds, another every 80 seconds.
What is so fascinating about this discovery is that each kind of fly times its existence to a different length of day. The normal, 60-second fly follows a 24-hour day; the faster, 40-second fly a shorter day of 18 to 20 hours; and the slower, 80-second fly a long day of 28 to 30 hours. The conventional interpretation is that the per gene establishes the insect’s daily rhythm. A similar effect is seen in us; if confined to a cave where he cannot see the sun and is not allowed to look at a clock, a man will sleep and wake up on a regular cycle, not of 24 hours but generally of 25 hours—this seems to be the daily, or circadian, rhythm that our DNA has built into us. Similarly, the fruit fly does not care when the sun rises or sets; when its song changes, the day changes. That means that its sense of time comes from within, activated by the per gene.
This is a far more stunning conclusion than the conventional one. The conventional one says that DNA is controlling a rhythm inside the cell, but I am saying that it controls time itself. The per gene is the link between time “out there” and DNA “in here”; it literally creates time as the fruit fly knows it. In physics, Einstein demonstrated that there is no fixed yardstick for time in the relative world; a space traveler would think that the clock on his spaceship is ticking normally, just as it does on Earth. But if he attained a velocity near the speed of light, the clock would in fact be going slower than Earth-bound clocks. This would not be an illusion; every biological process, including how fast the space traveler ages, would also slow down. Aren’t these fruit flies the insect equivalent of Einstein’s space travelers? They are experiencing time as either slow or fast, not from traveling near the speed of light but simply from their own internal signals.
A fast-singing fruit fly would have no way of knowing that it is living in “fast time” (assuming that it is isolated from the other kinds of flies). It emits the same number of calls per “day” as either the normal or the slow singers, without realizing that its day (18 to 20 hours) is entirely determined inside itself. But what is the per gene actually doing?
Another investigator, Michael Young of Rockefeller University, joined Konopka and discovered that the per gene works by coding certain proteins in the cell that regulate rhythm. It is these proteins, coming and going in cycles, that make the day seem long or short to the fly. Similar genes and coded proteins have also been found in mice, chickens, and human beings. This brings us remarkably close to seeing how the DNA is creating all of reality. It is manipulating the molecules into rhythms, or vibrations, that we decode into time. Other vibrations are decoded into light, sound, texture, smells, et cetera. Sir Arthur Eddington calls all of these “fancies of the mind,” for essentially none of our sensory input is anything but a signal transmitted to us via DNA—pure, abstract vibrations that we turn into “real” events in time and space. If a gene can regulate time, then it is only a step away from regulating space, too. There is nothing to time and space, from a subjective point of view, except one’s own participation in it. Like the fruit fly, we measure an hour by the clock, and the clock is in us.
Here we come to a fork in the road. Biologists realize that if the proteins in a cell regulate the cell’s rhythms, then something must regulate them. What is it? One road leads to a materialistic explanation. Naturally, this is the one science prefers. Some biologists believe that the cell wall lets chemicals through only at a certain rate, and this rate is our yardstick for time, our molecular clock. Others say that the clock is actually a chemical code imprinted on the DNA, which is read in sequence from the moment of conception until death. Neither explanation has been worked out in satisfactory detail. If the rishis are right, they never will be—no answer exists on the level of molecules alone.
As is obvious by now, the rishis would take a different road and say that the clock inside us is intelligence. The per gene is just a mechanical part, a wire or tube in DNA’s radio. Through it, time expresses itself, just as an emotion expresses itself through a neuropeptide. Time is riding on a molecule, and once again we mustn’t mistake the rider for the horse. The signals for time, space, motion, texture, smells, sights, and all the rest of the world come from the level of silent intelligence. That is where we really live, and the miracle of DNA is that it can turn so many totally abstract messages into life itself.
If you go walking through the woods on a warm autumn day, feeling the fallen oak leaves under your feet, smelling the ripe, dank earth, and watching the October light as it plays in the branches overhead, you are experiencing the world through your DNA. It imposes a definite selection on things. You are not smelling the argon and xenon gases in the air or seeing the sun’s ultraviolet emissions. You can walk through leaves but not through the wood of the trees. The incredible complexity of green moss registers on your mind as a patch of fuzz; and of the pollen, spores, bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that fill the air by the hundreds in every cubic centimeter, you register nothing. The reason for this special focus resides in you. Those are humanized leaves, trees, smells, and light.
If your senses were refined enough, you would go even further and realize that you are the woods. It is not just sending signals to you from “out there”; rather, you are blending your own signals with its. None of your sense organs is separated from nature’s continuum. Your eye is a specialized light receptor that merges into the light it perceives. If the light failed, your eye would atrophy as surely as the blind cave-fish’s eye; if your eye’s structure changed—for example, if each eye swiveled independently, like a chameleon’s—every object would acquire completely different relations in space. That would be your experience, and nothing in the relative world exists outside experience.
A bee approaching a flower sees the nectar and blocks out the petals—as far as the bee’s eye is concerned, this is what exists. For us, to see a bar magnet means seeing the sharp outline of the iron but not the radiating magnetic field around it. Therefore, the iron is what exists, as far as vision goes. Add in all the other senses, and you have the world that you are creating. It was built up over 600 million years by your DNA; ultimately, however, this world expresses your inner intelligence, with DNA the adroit servant. It serves you in your way, as it serves other creatures in theirs.
DNA turns the vibrations of light into eyes and sound into ears. It turns time into a mating song for fruit flies and into the march of history for man. It gives bats their sonar and snakes their sensitivity to infrared light. In each and every case, however, the DNA is merely the radio. One will never discover the secret of space-time looking at DNA, or any other material thing. The attempt is just as doomed as tearing apart a radio’s wiring to find where the music is. The rishis found the level of music—it is bliss.
Bliss is the vibration that intelligence sends into the world. In fact, we can map our existence in terms of a single diagram that compresses mind, body, DNA, and bliss into one undivided whole:
With good reason one could call this picture the circle of life. In it we see bliss as a continuous signal, a loop that connects mind, body, and DNA in a lifelong conversation. All three participants share equally in what gets said—what the mind knows is also known by the body and DNA. Your experiences resonate on all three levels. You cannot be happy or sad, sick or well, awake or asleep, without sending a message everywhere in inner space.
You may not think that you can “talk” to your DNA (another prejudice that comes from seeing DNA as only a material blueprint), but in fact you do continually. The fleeting chemicals that race through you at the touch of thought, the receptors hanging out on the cell wall waiting for their messages, and every other speck of life are manufactured by DNA. (I realize that I am truncating a long process. DNA directly manufactures only genetic material, but using its active twin, RNA, it gives rise to all the proteins, cells, and tissues we have.) Thinking happens at the level of DNA, because without the brain cell sending out a neuropeptide or other messenger, there can be no thought.
The Ayurvedic technique called primordial sound takes direct advantage of this. I drew bliss as a circle to represent a constant, unbroken signal. However, there can be breaks in the circle. These occur when the DNA, the mind, and the body are not perfectly synchronized. Ayurveda would say that many diseases begin where there is such a break—bliss slips out of its groove, so to speak, throwing off the cell’s intelligence. To repair the break, a specific signal needs to be inserted back into the circle—a primordial sound. In this way, a vibration is used to cure a vibration.
Treating disease with a mental sound is highly unusual, I know. To understand it, we need to make a closer connection between bliss and the quantum field. By the 1970s, the world’s atom smashers had been busy for forty years, and now there were hundreds of “hadrons,” a class of subatomic particles that were proliferating far too abundantly to be considered elementary by any standard. Didn’t the universe have simpler building blocks than this? The way out of the dilemma was found by theorizing that all of these particles were variations not on a smaller particle but on an underlying wave form.
This wave form was dubbed a “superstring,” because it behaves very much like a violin string. The superstring theory holds that billions upon billions of unseen strings pervade the universe, and their different frequencies give rise to all the matter and energy in creation. Certain vibrations also turn into time and space—the prefix super indicates that these strings actually reside far beyond our limited four-dimensional reality. No one will ever see them, no matter how powerful our instruments become.
To clarify what a superstring is, physicist Michio Kaku gives an analogy to music: imagine that a violin is enclosed out of sight in a box. As its strings vibrate, different pitches, chords, sequences of notes, and timbres are produced. If you were an alien who did not know what music is, you would find each of these things completely different from one another—the note C might be like a hydrogen atom, while E-flat was a photon. Only by opening the box and seeing that indeed every sound came from one violin would you be convinced that they had a unified source.
In the same way, nature’s fundamental field is constantly vibrating and producing variations upon the same “notes,” but our senses are set up so that they turn this sameness into differences. We perceive iron as a solid note, hydrogen as a gaseous note, gravity as a heavy note, and so on. Only by exposing the superstrings would the underlying unity be evident. They are exposed not by opening the box but by mathematical formulas that show that all forms of matter and energy fit the super-string model—as so far they all do. Therefore, quantum physics now has its first good candidate for a unified field theory, justifying Einstein’s faith in the order of the cosmos.
Amazingly enough, the Vedic rishis also perceived that the cosmos was pervaded by strings. These strings were called sutras, from which surgeons get the word suture. In Sanskrit, sutra can mean a stitch (or suture), but also a thread or a verbal phrase. If you think of a sutra as a thread, then the whole universe is woven like gossamer from threads of intelligence, billions and billions of them. Like notes played on the unseen violin, the fundamental level of the whole world, according to the Vedic rishis, is made of sounds. Because they arise before anything else, they are primordial—hence the term primordial sound.
It takes more than one sound to make the universe. However, the rishis did have just one sound to begin with, a vibration called Om, which appeared at the time we would call the Big Bang. Om is a meaningless syllable—it simply stands for the first wave that breaks the cosmic silence. As it breaks up into many tinier waves, Om subdivides into different subfrequencies that compose the matter and energy in our universe.
Once you open your mind to the possibility, it is no more surprising that stars, galaxies, and human beings can be created from Om than from a superstring. Both are abstract. Going back to the hidden violin, Kaku wrote, “The tones created by the vibrating string, such as C or B-flat, are not in themselves any more fundamental than any other notes. What is fundamental, however, is the fact that a single concept, vibrating strings, can explain the laws of harmony”—or in the case of the universe, the laws of nature.
Om can be pictured as a straight line whose pitch rises into infinity, like the most super of superstrings. It is no accident that the syllable Om sounds like the English “hum”; when the rishis tuned in to the sound of the universe, they actually heard it as a cosmic hum. If you were enlightened, you would be able to hear the vibration that is your own signature; for instance, you could “hear” your DNA as a specific frequency vibrating in your awareness. Likewise, each neuropeptide would grow out of a sound, as would every other chemical.
Starting with DNA, the whole body unfolds into many levels, and at each one the sutra, or sequence of sound, comes first. Therefore, putting a primordial sound back into the body is like reminding it of what station it should be tuned in to. On that basis, Ayurveda does not treat the body as a lump of matter but as a web of sutras.
Needless to say, it has taken me some time to explain all of this to myself. When I first began to administer the Ayurvedic programs at the inpatient facility in Lancaster, I kept one foot firmly planted in my private endocrinology practice—although I felt in tune with Ayurvedic theory, I was still nervous about its results. Every week I shuttled back and forth from my office to the clinic. One October day I walked into the dining hall and noticed one of the cancer patients, a middle-aged man who was sitting quietly in the corner, eating lunch with his wife. He had cancer of the pancreas, a fatal condition that is also extremely painful. When he had come in the door five days earlier, his face was gray and creased after months of suffering. I walked over now to say a few words. As I approached, he casually looked up at me. It was one of those moments that stops the heart. His face looked peaceful and relaxed; his eyes were unmistakably touched with bliss. I asked him how he felt. He said that he had no pain at all; after four days of Ayurvedic treatment, he had taken himself off all his pain medication. A few days later he left, and until the time he died, he remained largely free of drugs.
This is not yet a cure, but it is a huge step toward one. Consciousness would be curing people today, I am convinced, except that we diagnose disease too late, after years of stress have hardened the physiology and made it difficult for bliss to penetrate. But the gate is always open, even if only by a crack. All the Ayurvedic healing techniques operate on the premise that one treats the patient first, the disease second.
The prospect of becoming a well person again, as opposed to fighting against a disorder known to be incurable, gives hope to people who otherwise have nothing to hold on to but grim statistics. One AIDS patient in Germany has been treated with Ayurveda for two years as part of a pilot program conducted in Europe. Diagnosed in 1984, he is still alive at the time of this writing in August 1988 (80 percent of AIDS patients die within two years of diagnosis); he leads a normal life and is without overt symptoms.
A similar program is under way in California, treating AIDS patients under clinical observation to see if both the latent and active phases of the disease can be affected. Both groups are small, and the subjects know that Ayurveda is not promising a cure, but the supervising physicians feel that they are seeing improvements, particularly in the patients’ ability to withstand the debilitating fatigue that saps the strength and will of AIDS patients.
Just to extend the latency period, giving a patient more years before the disease produces symptoms, would be a major breakthrough. However, I met one patient, not connected with the clinic, who seems to have done better than that. A musician from Los Angeles in his early forties came to be taught the bliss technique two years ago; I did not see him again until this year, when he came to learn primordial sound. I asked how he was doing, and he answered that he had something important to tell me—he had AIDS.
The diagnosis had been made four years earlier after he came down with pneumonia. Rather than the typical pneumonia caused by the pneumococcus bacteria, his came from a protozoa known as Pneumocystis carinii; this disease is one of the most common that strike AIDS patients when their immune systems collapse. He recovered from the attack and decided to change his life. He learned to meditate, and for the first time in his adult life he gave up the habitual routine of long nights, heavy drinking, pills, smoking, and promiscuity that had been attached to his career. (Interestingly, a survey of long-term AIDS survivors shows that all of them have made this kind of “take charge” decision over their disease. Standard medicine cannot explain why this should be such a lifesaver, but it is.)
By the time he learned the bliss technique, two years later, his health had improved to the point where he looked totally normal. The bliss technique became a major focus of his determination to overcome AIDS.
“I don’t think of myself as fighting my sickness,” he remarked. “I’m just learning that all the unhappiness and anguish I used to live with was wrong.” Inside, he began to experience a much more positive range of emotions—he told me that he had never suspected that he could get hooked on happiness. Today, four years after the original diagnosis, he looks completely healthy, and except for a certain amount of fatigue, he lives as if the AIDS were not there.
Each year’s international symposium on AIDS discloses deeper gloom about defeating it. AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, plus its related mutations, which are a researcher’s nightmare, because they belong to a particularly baffling, elusive class of organisms called retroviruses. Even a normal virus, such as the one responsible for colds, has remarkable powers to elude the body’s immune system.
Contrary to the way it responds to bacteria, our DNA mysteriously forgets how to fight against an invading virus—in fact, it actually appears to cooperate with it. When a virus comes near the cell wall, it melts through, penetrating as if without resistance; it is next ushered directly to the cell’s nucleus, where the DNA obligingly shuts down normal operations and begins to manufacture the proteins for making new viruses.
A cold or flu virus is content to let DNA build proteins for it, but a retrovirus like HIV goes one better by blending into the DNA’s own chemical strands, masking itself as the host’s genetic material. There it sleeps until the day, which may come years later, when the DNA is triggered to fight another disease. Then the retrovirus awakens and begins to replicate itself by the millions, using the host cell as an incubator and eventually resulting in the host cell’s death. The cell bursts open, loosing a horde of lethal viruses into the bloodstream. Every step of the cycle is so mysterious and complicated that the AIDS virus has quickly earned a reputation for being the most complex disease organism ever discovered. No drug is capable of treating it; AZT, which helps postpone the active phase, is riddled with major side effects, making it impossible for some patients to take the drug.
This is not to deny Western medicine its own approach. When a life-threatening disease arises, it is necessary to take drastic measures—on this point there is no disagreement. But I believe that viewing disease as a distortion of intelligence might represent a move toward a deeper level of understanding, and therefore of treatment.
Both cancer and AIDS seem to be cases where the proper sequence of sutras must be unraveling at the deepest level. In other words, they are failures of intelligence, like “black holes” where bliss gets distorted out of its normal pattern. What makes both diseases so intractable is that the distortion runs so deep—it is locked inside the DNA’s own structure. This causes the cell’s self-repair mechanism either to break down or turn against itself. In the case of cancer, DNA actually seems to want to commit suicide by ignoring its knowledge of proper cell division.
In both diseases the distortion apparently penetrates as far as the very force fields that hold DNA together. (Cell physics is a complex field, but it is believed that a cell senses and interacts with viruses in the first place by detecting their chemical and electromagnetic resonances; such signals are interpreted by the DNA and presumably can also fool it.)
From the perspective of the sutras, or Vedic sounds, there must be a distortion in the proper sequence of intelligence as it unfolds into the relative world. “Hearing” the virus in its vicinity, the DNA mistakes it for a friendly or compatible sound, like the ancient Greek sailors who heard the siren’s song and were lured to their destruction. This is a believable explanation once one realizes that DNA, which the virus is exploiting, is itself a bundle of vibrations.
If this explanation is valid, then the remedy is to reshape the improper sequence of sounds, using Ayurveda’s primordial sound (known as Shruti in the Sanskrit texts, from the verb that means “to hear”). These sounds are basically like pottery molds—by placing the mold back over the distorted sequence, one guides the disrupted DNA back into line. This treatment is subtle and gentle in its effects, but some preliminary results have been quite dramatic. Once the sequence of sound is restored, the tremendous structural rigidity of the DNA should again protect it from future disruptions.
In the near future Ayurveda will blossom, I believe, and help us to create a new medicine, one of knowledge and compassion. At its best, current medicine already contains these ingredients—the medical system is in trouble, but its woes are transcended by caring individuals. They will be the first to see that Ayurveda is not in conflict with their work as doctors; it can only help the process of recovery and bring healing under our control.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Looking back, I realize that the concept of a universe based on vibrations, leading to the concept of the human body as a bundle of vibrations, was a bridge too far for many. There have been “vibrational healers” in every culture, if by vibration we include light, sound, music, mantras, chants, and shamanistic rituals. Probably the most comprehensive “science of vibrations” is found in the area of Vedic knowledge known as shabda, the Sanskrit word for “speech.” The intriguing feature of shabda is that it fits the demand of Western science for a reductionist model—every phenomenon is reducible to a unique vibrational state—while at the same time fitting the “top-down” Eastern approach, which sees all phenomena emerging from the field of consciousness.
Yet anyone in a gotcha state of mind would find it easy to accuse vibrational healing of being a sham—the underlying concept is too alien to materialistic thinking. Once again quantum theory may bolster speculation, since there are physicists now toying with the idea that if the universe exists in Hilbert space (a strictly mathematical concept) and if Schrödinger’s equation holds true (the classic equation that accounts for quantum probabilities throughout the universe), there may be an elegant way to reduce creation to a single wave function. (The legendary physicist Richard Feynman long ago speculated that all electrons may be reducible to one electron.) Once again this would be pure mathematics, yet by reducing the physical universe to a single wave function that gets entangled with itself to break down into the infinite waves that underlie infinite particles, something unique happens. There is no longer a split between reductionism and a top-down approach. One wave would give us a singular source from which everything else can be derived. The entanglement of the wave into countless subdivided waves would satisfy the demand for specific data that can be built up into complex explanations for higher-order forms like atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and so forth.
Anyone who isn’t fully conversant in advanced mathematics can only watch from the sidelines before such a theory is accepted or rejected. Shabda gives everyone a chance to get back in the game, however, because of its practical extension into healing and the power of consciousness in general. A thought “in here” is vibrationally connected to a result “out there,” and so two worlds, mind and matter, are bridged. A gotcha mentality is rarely fair, but skepticism has no rebuttal to the unshakable fact, stated by Sir John Eccles in an earlier chapter, that every thought performs telekinesis by influencing the chemical state of the brain: We cross the mind-body barrier every time we think.
Shabda also says that higher states of consciousness are vibrational. This greatly simplifies the whole issue of enlightenment, making it a natural phenomenon like weather, the stars, and hydrogen atoms. Vibration is the great leveler. Therefore it fascinated me when Dr. Jeffery A. Martin started publishing results from his Ph.D. work in psychology showing that higher consciousness is so natural that it exists all around us.
Martin posted an online message asking for responses from people who thought they were enlightened. He got more than 2,500 replies, and from this pool he intensively interviewed around fifty subjects. At first it was hard to find a common language. Feeling that you are enlightened is personal, and it also sets you apart from normal society. Martin found that his subjects often were sensitized by being outsiders, and revealing their unusual mental state had led to such things as being sent to a psychiatrist, put on medication, or even being committed to a mental hospital.
However, very early on he realized that as different as each person was, their experiences fell onto a continuum. There wasn’t a single enlightened state but rather a sliding scale. To find neutral ground, and to fit the accepted model of what doctoral research must look like, he adopted the cumbersome tag Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience. “There is a shift in what it feels like to be you,” Martin notes. “You move away from an individual sense of sense, which is considered normal, to something else.”
Defining what “something else” is wasn’t easy, because these people came from different backgrounds and were influenced by cultural factors. However, Martin was able to identify four areas of change.
If you found yourself shifting into Location 1, it would be typical to report that you have fewer thoughts than before. “You might say something to me like ‘All of my thoughts are gone,’ and the kinds of thoughts that go away are ones that refer to the individual self,” says Martin. Which isn’t surprising if you are experiencing a loss of “I” as a separate isolated being.
Putting ourselves in their shoes, these people don’t keep a running story in their heads about what’s happening to “me.” When they think about themselves, it fades away as soon as they notice it. The same is true for their emotions, which are fewer and more spontaneous. When anger arises, it fades almost immediately. Emotions were still positive and negative but rarely if ever extreme. The person could be irritated when stuck in traffic, yet they didn’t carry the residue of stress around with them afterward, and it would never build into road rage. They felt a sense of inner peace that could be interrupted, but quite soon it would return.
Such a person is operating in a bigger “self space,” rather than being cramped inside the narrow confines of the ego. They feel freer and more expanded. This applies to their bodies as well; they often report that the body has no fixed boundaries but extends in all directions. Once they arrived in Location 1, people usually kept progressing—the highest state Martin calls Location 4—and they rarely slipped back or jumped ahead. Everything happened internally, and for many the shift wasn’t spiritual. It was just the way they experienced themselves.
“If you sat in a roomful of people and a small percentage belong to this altered sense of self,” says Martin, “you wouldn’t be able to spot them. To all outer appearances they are just like you and me.”
At the outset, before Martin’s research began to expand to many other universities and countries, his typical subject was a white male from the United States or Europe, because women, for unknown reasons, were not eager to volunteer as enlightened or to discuss what their experiences were. Religious backgrounds were diverse, spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet most of the subjects had done some kind of spiritual practice—they wanted to be in a higher state of consciousness. Curiously, around 14 percent had done nothing of this kind. They had spontaneously popped into higher consciousness or, more typically, drifted into it. They reported being in their new state anywhere from forty years to as little as two or three.
Martin’s research base has expanded to more than a thousand subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if “normal” isn’t a fixed state but a spectrum, with consciousness evolving much further than anyone has previously predicted. At the very least, higher consciousness has become much less exotic. It’s no longer the province of sadhus and yogis in the Himalayas. Martin’s study focused on body, emotions, sense of self, and thoughts, which are value neutral, making his work acceptable in the academy. But he found that the spiritual dimension had also opened up. Some subjects reported the kind of open, clear, silent awareness associated with Buddhism; others experienced the bliss I discuss in this chapter. Still others had no idea what to make of their state of awareness. But they were amazed at the amount of wellbeing they were experiencing, and this grew as they moved further along the spectrum. (Paradoxically, in Location 4, all emotion fell away, even love, and the richness of bliss was replaced by what Martin calls complete freedom. Yet his subjects report that they don’t miss the experience of emotions and bliss, because in freedom they have found the very highest state of wellbeing.)
If it is startling to realize that enlightenment is all around us, and that it’s a natural progression, even more intriguing is the prospect that enlightenment is personal. The way that you create your own reality doesn’t suddenly come to an end; enlightenment isn’t like jumping off a diving board. There are as many kinds of enlightenment as there are people, one might suppose. In a word, evolution itself is evolving, like everything else.
“Normal” won’t be valid until it broadens to include everyone on the spectrum of consciousness. We will also need to revise the old definitions of enlightenment, in fact, to conform to the present age. The West has almost no formal institutions, outside monasteries and convents, geared for people who want to pursue higher states of consciousness or who have already arrived there. Here’s what “normal” should encompass.
Feeling unbounded
Being at peace
Having a loose attachment to your personal history
Living in the present
Becoming free of negative thought forms and emotions
Breaking away from traumas and wounds from the past
Accepting that higher consciousness is natural, part of the human continuum
Experiencing more and more self-awareness as you evolve
Living in a state of wellbeing that continues to grow and deepen
A venerated spiritual teacher was once asked, “What does it take to be enlightened?” His reply: “You no longer have a personal stake in the world.” If you identify with the boundaries erected by “I, me, and mine,” this sounds like a death sentence. Having a personal stake in the world is what life is all about, isn’t it? But with a longer view, across the entire spectrum of consciousness, the opposite is true. When you no longer identify with “I, me, and mine,” you are ushered into a new world of experience that transcends the individual. This is the second birth that the Vedas extol as the true beginning of life.
Finally, I find it very touching that Martin’s enlightened subjects, as amazed as they were by their new state, thought that nothing could be better. “This is as real as it gets” was a common reaction. But they were wrong. Reality is infinite, and what makes it infinite isn’t the edge of the universe racing away faster than the speed of light. The universe matches human aspirations, and its infinity reflects the infinity inside us once we wake up and realize that it exists.