If asked for an exact definition of quantum healing, I would say this: quantum healing is the ability of one mode of consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body). It is a completely self-enclosed process. If pressed for a shorter definition, I would say simply that quantum healing makes peace. When consciousness is fragmented, it starts a war in the mind-body system. This war lies behind many diseases, giving rise to what modern medicine calls their psychosomatic component. The rishis might call it “the fear born of duality,” and they would consider it not a component but the chief cause of all illness.
The body will send many signals to indicate that a war is going on. Recently a young French-Canadian woman came to see me suffering from Crohn’s disease, a severe intestinal disorder characterized by chronic and uncontrollable diarrhea, accompanied by painful inflammation. Although the cause of Crohn’s disease is unknown, it strikes mostly among young adults and may be connected to a deficiency in the immune system. What is well known is that the intestinal tract is highly sensitive to emotional states; in this patient’s case, it was not surprising to hear that she worked long hours under the high pressure of a downtown Boston advertising firm.
After talking to her for a while, I discovered that she had learned to meditate several years before. I asked her if she still kept it up. No, she answered, there wasn’t much time for it; when she did sit down to meditate, it didn’t do much good, because she usually fell asleep in a few minutes.
I then asked if she had adjusted her diet to help her condition, slowed down the pace of her life, or considered moving on to a job with less stress. Looking somewhat impatient, she said no again—she wasn’t going to allow her disease, which caused her many difficulties, to rule her life.
“Look,” I said, “you have a very serious condition. If this inflammation persists, you may have to have parts of your intestine surgically removed. What are you going to do about that?” She was quite knowledgeable about her disease, and I didn’t have to tell her that some grim choices lay ahead. The surgery in question involves considerable disfiguration, since with part of the intestine removed, a tube has to be extended out of the abdomen to handle elimination. Even then, the disease is not cured and tends to recur in other parts of the intestine.
“That’s why I’m here,” she answered. “I want a mental technique to help me continue to lead a normal life.”
I was seeing the result of what the rishis called Pragya aparadh, the mistake of the intellect. This woman’s body was crying out for healing, and it was telling her so every time she had an attack. She couldn’t even close her eyes to meditate without her body desperately grabbing some relief in the form of sleep. Yet, her mind interpreted these attempts at healing as either irrelevant or troublesome. She insisted on leading a “normal life” of high stress that her system wasn’t equipped to cope with.
“This is not the kind of disease you can fight,” I said, “because there’s no one on the other side but you.” I explained that the same neuropeptides that registered stress in her brain were produced in her intestines. When she felt fear, frustration, and worry, the identical emotions were being experienced in her abdomen.
I told her that in my opinion she didn’t need any new mental technique—she needed to let her body do what it wanted to do, which was to get well. The best way to cooperate with that was to give her body the rest it was demanding, continue to meditate, change her diet, and realize that no rewards from her job could possibly outweigh the danger she had put herself in. Nature was trying to tell her something very important, and once she paid attention, her problems would correct themselves.
“In a case like yours,” I said, “you already have the best medicine you could possibly hope for—it’s your own attention. Right now, the quality of that attention is fearful and tense, which is why you aren’t getting better. But as soon as your awareness becomes settled and loses its fear, your body will recover—it’s up to you.”
She listened to me with interest, but I sensed that she resented hearing these things. The mistake of the intellect is insidious. The intellect refuses to believe that everything is happening inside one mind-body reality; it creates the fiction that the sick body is somewhere else, anywhere else but in the same situation as itself.
Illness is obviously a sign that there is a war going on. According to Ayurveda, the conflict is being waged “in here,” contrary to the germ theory of disease, which tries to tell us that the war was started “out there” by invaders of every kind—bacteria, viruses, carcinogens, et cetera—which are lying in wait to attack us. Yet, healthy people live amid these dangers quite safely. Only when the immune system collapses, as in the case of AIDS, do we realize that our skin, lungs, mucous linings, intestines, and many other organs have learned to coexist with outside organisms in a delicate balance. The pneumonia that an AIDS patient typically catches is caused by a variety of Pneumocystis that is present in everybody’s lungs all the time. The AIDS virus activates such diseases from the inside by demolishing one part of the immune system (the helper T-cells), thus breaking apart the network of information that holds us together.
In fact, we are this network, which projects itself into the world as our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Nor does the network stop with us. The simplistic idea that germs are our deadly enemy is a half-truth, because germs are part of the network, too. The whole living world is bound up in DNA, which has evolved along one channel as bacteria, along another as plants and animals, and along still another as man. The environment “out there” cooperates with the one “in here” like two polarities, in one sense totally opposed but in another totally complementary. If you look at reality from the viewpoint of all DNA, not just ours, then there is an entire global information network that has to be kept alive and healthy.
Viruses, for example, are capable of mutating very quickly—that is why a shot that immunizes you from this year’s flu will usually not be effective next year. The flu virus will have mutated somewhere around the world into a completely different strain. (One of the AIDS virus’s many unprecedented talents is its ability to mutate a hundred times faster than a typical flu virus.) Researchers have recently speculated that the reason why viruses mutate so rapidly is to keep pace with new variants of bacteria, thus carrying to all parts of the globe the news that life is changing.
Getting the flu, therefore, is like getting a news update. Your own DNA learns about alterations in the world’s DNA that are challenging it, and your DNA then meets the challenge, not passively but actively. It must prove its viability by surviving the virus. The immune system rushes to meet the invader, and they engage in battle, molecule against molecule. The whole operation is timed to the split second and leaves no room for error. The macrophages rush to discover the identity of this new life form, probe it for vital weaknesses, and then mobilize the genetic material in their own DNA that will collapse the molecules of the virus, rendering them harmless.
At the same time, the immune cells also destroy any of your own cells that have played host to the invader. These infected host cells have not yet died from the flu. They are engorged with living viruses that pose a threat after the immune cells have wiped out all the flu that is gushing through the bloodstream. To kill an infected host cell, certain immune cells (killer T-cells) latch onto it from the outside and puncture holes in the cell wall. Like a deflating tire, the host cell spills out its liquid content, collapses into an empty bag, and dies.
But the host cell is not just eliminated; its DNA is actually dismantled by other signals from the attacking immune cells. This is an absolutely fascinating aspect of the whole process. What is really happening is that one bit of your DNA (the immune cell) is dismantling another bit of your DNA (the host cell), which in fact is just a copy of itself! The only difference between the two is that the second bit of DNA, in the host cell, has made the mistake of cooperating with the flu virus. No one knows why this occurs. As we saw in the last chapter, our cells mysteriously allow themselves to be killed from within when viruses attack them. Physically, the virus is no match for the cell, being thousands of times smaller and less complex—as one medical writer put it, it is as if a basketball came through the window of a skyscraper and the whole building fell down.
You would think that such mistakes show the imperfection of the body’s intelligence, but that is too superficial. What is actually happening here is an exquisite example of quantum healing at work; in fact, the idea that a war is going on is just another half-truth, for when one bit of DNA dismantles another, we are witnessing a totally self-enclosed process. Every part of a disease reaction, from the scavenger cells that first meet the invader, to the host cells that take it in, to the macrophages, killer T-cells, helper T-cells, B-cells, and so on, are all the same DNA expressing its various abilities. In other words, the DNA has decided to stage for its own benefit a drama in which every part is played by itself.
Why should DNA put on one mask to succumb to the flu virus and another to rush in and destroy it? No one has answered this profound question, but it must have its logic in the whole scheme of life, the larger drama enacted by all the DNA in the world. I can make a speculation that we are watching DNA enrich life by adding as many variations as can possibly exist on one planet.
Nothing that happens to DNA is lost; it all stays within the self-enclosed system. Once the flu virus is defeated, the DNA records the encounter by producing new antibodies and specialized “memory cells” that float around in the lymph system and bloodstream for years afterward, adding to the immense storehouse of information that DNA has been accumulating since life began. This is how DNA makes you a player on the world scene.
If I look out my window, I can see a multilane highway with cars rushing by. Occasionally a jet flies over, sending a flock of birds twittering into the sky. Gulls circle overhead, thirty miles inland from the sea, and in the air is the distinct smell of the ocean, rich with marine life. All of this spectacle, including me, is the play of DNA. It has been projected from a molecule whose responsibility is to unfold new life without ever compromising life as a whole. Someone once estimated that all the separate DNA of every person who has ever lived would fit comfortably in a teaspoon, and yet if the tightly wound DNA in even a single cell nucleus of your body were uncoiled and the pieces laid end to end, they would stretch out to five feet. This means that the genetic thread contained in the body’s 50 trillion cells is 50 billion miles long—enough to reach the moon and back 100,000 times. The Veda says that the universe’s intelligence extends “from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest,” and DNA is the physical proof of it.
Therefore, it must be wrong to think that conflict is the norm. In general, a state of peace exists between your DNA and the other DNA “out there.” For every time that you actually have to fight off a disease by getting sick, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of times when your body has warded off sickness without any overt symptom. It is only when there is a distortion “in here” that the immune system loses its ability to silently defend, heal, and remember.
We tend to forget that peace is the norm. Psychiatrists and sociologists take it as a given that modern man is deeply divided in his psyche. The rise of stress-related disorders, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and “the disease of being in a hurry” is a sign of the times. The hectic pace of work, and life in general, has accustomed us to turmoil. By now, people are thoroughly indoctrinated by the idea that a certain degree of internal conflict is normal. The war, it seems, was started by us, and it is taking its toll in a frighteningly ordinary way.
All of this is what I wish I could have expressed to Chitra, the young woman with breast cancer whose story opened this book. She was fortunate enough to receive a cure that seemed miraculous, but as I was writing these chapters, her case became very different. The cancer cells had been defeated but not their memory. Because Chitra remained extremely anxious about having her cancer recur, she and I agreed that conventional therapy should continue. At the same time, she promised to keep up her meditation and the bliss technique I had taught her. I heard nothing for a month, then she called with bad news: her doctors had detected a dozen small shadows in her CAT scan that they interpreted as brain cancer. In a state of extreme fear, she began an intensive course of radiation, this time accompanied by experimental chemotherapy.
Weakened by the earlier bout with breast cancer, Chitra endured severe side effects, including depression. She stopped meditating and no longer returned for Ayurvedic treatment. Her platelet count dropped severely—platelets are blood cells critical in the clotting process—which meant that it was too dangerous to continue the chemotherapy. Chitra’s doctors determined that her bone marrow was producing antibodies that attacked her own platelets (probably in reaction to the many transfusions she had received). They considered a bone marrow transplant, but tried first to exchange the blood plasma. During the procedure, she had a seizure and soon developed severe anemia and various infections.
At this point Chitra’s case was turning into a mounting disaster. She refused a blood transfusion, being horrified at the thought of getting AIDS. Because of her agitation, she had to be placed on an intravenous drip of morphine and Valium. Her awareness became duller and duller, and she slipped into a coma, probably induced by shock, followed by the onset of pneumonia. The doctors informed her husband that she would probably not recover, and a day later, without regaining consciousness, Chitra died. She was the victim not of her cancer but of her treatment, and I cannot help but think death from cancer would perhaps have been more humane.
The passing of this beautifully innocent and devoted young woman came as a great blow. Although I had no consolation to offer, I immediately called Raman, her husband, who was completely shattered. For months we had both watched Chitra pass into the light of life and back into the shadow of death, sharing extremes of joy and despair. Sincere efforts had been made to save her, yet I cannot expel the bitter taste that comes from knowing, as all doctors know, the barbarity of our current approach to cancer.
Every day, a physician in practice sees patients who have undergone some devastating cancer treatment that has been declared a success because the cancer cells are now gone, disregarding the weakening of the entire body, the looming danger of recurrent cancer caused by the treatment itself, and the state of lasting fear and depression that so often comes with the cure. To live in constant fear, even without cancer in your body, is not a good state of health. The war is not over; it has merely moved from open skirmishes to underground terrorism.
The underlying philosophy in cancer treatment is that the mind will just have to stand by while the body endures devastation. In other words, an open clash is actually encouraged in the mind-body system. How can this be called healing? In a clash between mind and body, the patient is fighting on both sides—there is only his body and his mind. Isn’t it obvious that when a loser emerges, it will be he?
The vital issue is not how to win the war but how to keep peace in the first place. The West has not arrived at this insight, or comprehended that the physical manifestation of a disease is a phantom. The cancer cells that patients dread and physicians battle against are just such phantoms—they will come and go, raising hopes and despair, while the real culprit, the persistent memory that creates the cancer cell, goes undetected. Ayurveda gives us the means to go directly to the level of consciousness that exorcises this memory. Thinking of Chitra, I wonder how long it will be before we broaden our outlook. We ask for heroism from patients at a time when they have little of it to give, or else we treat them as statistics, turning survival into a game of numbers. Ayurveda tells us to place the responsibility for disease at a deeper level of consciousness, where a potential cure could also be found.
To say that a patient’s awareness is responsible for his cancer is very troublesome to many people—and so it should be. Ayurveda as I view it does not agree that there is a so-called cancer personality, nor does it accept that superficial emotions, styles of behavior, and attitudes cause cancer. Some researchers are convinced that patients who react with helplessness and depression to their cancer are more likely to die from the disease than those patients who have a strong component in their personalities called “the will to live.” This seems unarguable, but is it any help?
A person afflicted with cancer naturally goes through cycles of emotion; his will to live is susceptible to wild swings from one extreme to the other; and there is no reason to expect that any “typical cancer personality” profile should emerge. (Some of the original research that supposedly verified the “typical cancer personality” was based on insignificantly small patient groups, as few as twenty-five subjects, all of whom had only one type of cancer—typically breast cancer.) Why should the psychologically healthy, who already have such a great advantage, be the only hopeful cases?
This is not an empty question. Recently I was on a plane and happened to sit beside a very lively woman in her sixties. She struck me immediately as a Yankee of the classic type—very vigorous, no-nonsense, and full of strong opinions. Her family had lived in Maine for generations and had become quite prosperous. Since my head was full of all the issues involved in cancer treatment, we began to talk about them.
The old lady lifted her chin. “I don’t believe any of these doctors know what they’re talking about,” she declared. “My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1947. She went and had the lump removed and then came home to look after her four children. My father begged her to return to Boston for a mastectomy, but she said she was too busy for it, and she was too busy to be sick, too. She went on perfectly normally like that. After a while my father won out, and she did go back for the mastectomy, but there wasn’t any radiation or chemotherapy back then.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Nothing happened,” the woman answered. “She lived twelve more years, until she was over seventy, when she contracted pneumonia. The whole family gathered around her bed, she told us goodbye, and three days later she died.”
Listening to this story, I suddenly saw, with a combination of wonder and sadness, what it was about—the paradox of being normal. It is absolutely normal to be too busy to be sick, for that is exactly the kind of awareness that the immune system thrives on. When you are just yourself and not a “cancer patient,” then the complicated chain of the immune response, with its hundreds of precisely timed operations, goes to work with a vengeance.
But once you give in to helplessness and fear, this chain breaks apart. You start sending out the neuropeptides associated with negative emotions, these latch onto the immune cells, and the immune response loses its efficiency. (Exactly how this happens is not known, but the decreased immune status of depressed patients is well documented.) Here is where the paradox comes in: if you reacted to cancer as no great threat, the way you react to the flu, you would have the best chance of recovering, yet a diagnosis of cancer makes every patient feel totally abnormal. The diagnosis itself sets up the vicious circle, like a snake biting its tail until there is no more snake.
The reason I felt sadness and wonder at the same time is that it suddenly dawned on me how infinitely beautiful the immune system is and how terribly vulnerable at the same time. It forges our link with life and yet can break it at any moment. The immune system knows all our secrets, all our sorrows. It knows why a mother who has lost a child can die of grief, because the immune system has died of grief first. It knows every moment a cancer patient spends in the light of life or the shadow of death, because it turns those moments into the body’s physical reality.
Cancer, or any other disease, is nothing more than the sequence of these fleeting moments, each with its own emotions, its own mind-body chemistry. In other words, the diseased cells are but one ingredient out of countless others; the others are just more intangible. Ayurveda maintains that many different conditions interact to create disease—the disease organism plays one part, aided by the patient’s immune resistance, age, diet, habits, the time of year, and many other factors that contribute to the eventual clinical result. Western medical studies have also abundantly proved that a person’s lifestyle and emotional makeup are implicated in his state of health, but we lack the omniscience to evaluate all these factors. A cancer patient has a whole life behind him, populated by thoughts, actions, and emotions that no other person shares exactly.
The fact that emotions lie so deep does not mean that cancer patients cannot alter them. People can be rescued from their feelings of helplessness and despair by going to a still deeper level. It does not matter if one is caught in the throes of either despair or huge self-confidence. Either one could be a phantom. Ayurveda therefore pays much less attention to surface emotions than does current mind-body medicine. The whole rationale for treating cancer (or AIDS) with primordial sound and bliss techniques is that they reach the deep levels of consciousness common to everyone, the weak as much as the strong.
The following case study is the most complete success to date of treating cancer with these techniques. The patient is a woman in her late thirties named Eleanor. In 1983, while living in Colorado and working for a computer company there, Eleanor was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer that had metastasized to the lymph nodes under her arm. She underwent one radical mastectomy, followed by a second; her reaction to chemotherapy afterward was extremely poor. Finding the side effects intolerable, she abandoned conventional treatment altogether, even though her doctors made her well aware that the cancer had now spread to her bones. Patients in this category of metastasis have about a 1 percent chance of survival.
As it happens, Eleanor was advised by her family doctor to start meditating in 1986, in the middle of her disease. Through her meditation practice, she heard about Ayurveda. She came to Lancaster for inpatient treatment, where I met her and instructed her in the primordial sound for treating cancer. The results were remarkable. Her severe bone pain disappeared (this incident was mentioned earlier, in chapter 9), and whenever she returned home to be X-rayed, her radiologist found fewer and fewer pockets of bone cancer.
It was far too late for these regressions to have been caused by her earlier treatment. Generally, if a tumor is being bombarded with radiation or chemotherapy, it shrinks very quickly. If Eleanor survives for two more years, she will enter the privileged ranks of patients who beat all the odds. But what I want to portray here is the overall change she has undergone. I asked her to write down the history of her disease as seen from the inside. What she sent me is a very remarkable document. It begins at the most harrowing moment of her life, when she is about to enter the operating room to have breast surgery:
Undrugged, I am lying in the pre-op holding area by the doors of the O.R. at City of Hope Hospital. A nurse walks by carrying a huge breast in a clear plastic bag. My breasts seem so small, helpless, and innocent. I had nursed my baby sons and felt so good about my breasts; they were feminine, soft, and pretty—I trusted them. Now I am just lying here, waiting for someone to cut away at least one of them.
I am scared and shaking. Every nerve in my body seems to be screaming for action, wanting to run away before it is too late and I am pushed through the doors to the O.R. I feel like I am betraying my body to a rape of degradation. I am 35 years old, and this whole thing is going against my sense of what is right.
When it’s over, the emotional impact starts to set in. My image of my body is bad—I don’t want the doctors to see me, let alone my husband. I am past naked. I am stripping off my feminine shape, infected for weeks afterward, hooked to drains whose tubes are sewn to my body. The red-topped glass tubes rattle whenever I try to walk.
Eventually Eleanor healed enough to begin six months of chemotherapy. She was told that her chances of recovery were high, but when a mammogram was taken of the remaining breast, it was found to be cancerous as well. A second mastectomy was scheduled:
Now I really want to escape. For months I have heard that I had cancer, then didn’t have cancer, then had cancer again. I am so weary of surgeries and uncertainty. I am sick from fever, horrible night sweats, pain, humiliation, doubt about my body, my spirit, my gender—everything. All that I have trusted has let me down.
Bilateral breast cancer, bilateral mastectomies, and eventually bilateral breast reconstruction. I hope this is the end, and I can get on to recovering from my other symptoms. Then on to wellness again, despite my odds.
Soon afterward, Eleanor began to practice meditation. At first she approached her meditation with reservations and even outright skepticism, but these gave way to “a sense of inner acceptance.” Four months later, in June 1986, she found that she was accidentally pregnant. Eleanor’s doctors had told her that her chemotherapy had made her sterile, which happens to about 25 percent of younger women, rising to 85 percent for women over 40. For those who are not rendered sterile, giving birth is extremely risky, but to Eleanor, the idea of having another child held a special importance:
This pregnancy was symbolic to me of wholeness and blending with nature. It was a miracle, and I was happy. Then when my doctors said that I should abort this child to save my own life, it seemed like a nightmare. As the pregnancy continued, I got even sicker. I was told that my tests now indicated estrogen positive cancer, and my chances for survival were slim. I protested these facts and carried the baby, a decision that I lived with in peace.
After the successful delivery of a baby boy, Eleanor discovered that her cancer had returned, this time to her bones:
Back to cancer, and the roller-coaster ride began all over again. The City of Hope doctors predicted that I would live “perhaps six more months, but probably not more than two years.” (This was fourteen months ago, in March 1987.) The cancer had advanced well into my bones (the X rays revealed a dozen cancerous sites, principally in the ribs and vertebrae), and I felt very sick, literally to the bone. The treatment plan was full doses of chemo “for the rest of your life.” That didn’t sound like I’d be around too long.
Eleanor responded poorly to chemotherapy, and on the recommendation of her family doctor, who had suggested meditation before, she visited Lancaster for Ayurvedic treatment in June. When I reviewed her case, I recognized that she was gravely ill; I couldn’t promise her a cure, but I told Eleanor that there were more possibilities than she realized—the inner core of herself had not been violated by cancer, and we would try to bring her in touch with that core. After two weeks, she began to feel much better, both physically and mentally, and she left with no bone pain. Apparently this was the turning point:
After returning back to work, to chemotherapy and doubts, a special thing happened. A wild dove had flown inside the company warehouse one morning and would not leave. Two or three hours later, when I came in, the bird followed my path upstairs, through the halls leading toward my office, and landed quietly on my desk in front of me. I gently picked him up and all at once felt overwhelmed as we shared each other’s comfort.
A few months passed after we turned him loose in the country. In September, I found that my bone scans were not good, but not worse either. Chemotherapy was causing multiple side effects. I didn’t really mean to quit chemo, but I had consistently bad blood counts, and that meant that the chemo temporarily had to stop. I immediately started feeling better and realized that I wanted no more chemo, even at the risk of dying.
In December I visited Lancaster again. My time there was wonderful; some special herbs had come in for me, and I was given a primordial sound technique to use at home. At the end of December, another bone scan showed no change. This confirmed my belief that chemo was superficial. I continued my techniques, and when I returned in March, three months later, the bone scan showed that all but one tiny pocket was gone.
The radiologist smiled and said he didn’t know how this could have happened without chemo. He hugged me, and when I left, he said, “This will make history.” My family doctor called the radiologist for a full interpretation of the scans; he got off the phone and told me that I was almost completely recovered.
As I got the news, I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up. I wondered how I could have ever doubted this result. Touched by love and nature’s perfection, I had one quiet, soft desire, to go sit again against the earth, surrounded by peace in a celebration of spring flowers, and to enjoy all that has happened and all that I am.
In closing, I have to add that I am realistic; I understand the typical Western approach to this event. I also know that there are great possibilities here. All the truths of my experience somehow add up to one truth, but when I think I’ve grasped it, it slips away. It leaves me feeling humble and rather silly for trying to take apart the wholeness. But I am very, very peaceful and comfortable, having been assured again and again that the wholeness is perfection.
Eleanor has come a very long way. Last year she was in the worst category for surviving her disease; now many authorities like Dr. Ikemi would consider her case a spontaneous regression. Her general health is good; there is no sign of the body wasting away. Eight months after undergoing the last chemotherapy, her bone cancer has dwindled until there is only one small shadow on her X rays, and this has not definitely proven to be cancerous. Her blood chemistry, which became abnormal as the result of active disease, has now returned to the normal range—this is much stronger proof than the X rays that Eleanor is getting well.
I have no fear for her now, even if she had to begin her battle again. Eleanor is beyond battles—she radiates the peacefulness she writes about, and spending time with her makes me feel happy and secure, all the more because I understand how rare her peace is. From the despair of disease she has discovered joy. At the moment when the memory of health returned, it brought her enough power to last a lifetime.
EXPANDING THE TOPIC
The simple definition of quantum healing given in this chapter is that quantum healing brings peace. I believe this is still true, perhaps more than ever. At the time I was writing, inflammation hadn’t been connected to cancer, heart disease, and a host of lifestyle disorders. Inflammation is a mystifying phenomenon, because it’s needed as a crucial part of the healing system (bringing extra blood to the diseased or injured area, triggering a cascade of complex chemical interactions at the site) while in its most acute state, such as the inflammation that occurs during severe burns, it can be fatal.
The most troubling kind of inflammation is chronic and low level, which is one reason it took medical science so long to identify it as a culprit. But the internal war I wrote about is chronic, too, whether we are speaking of inflammation, stress, or imbalances that lie below the level of producing symptoms. (In my view, inflamed emotions are likely to be just as damaging to cells.) Western medicine is catching up with Ayurveda in this regard. Thousands of years ago Ayurvedic physicians focused on subtle imbalances that pushed the body out of its natural balance and ease.
Saying that your body needs to be aligned with Nature sounds very nonmedical. It’s more like homespun philosophy. In the fifteen years I practiced endocrinology before looking into meditation and alternative therapies, I would have shrugged off this piece of advice. Thirty years later, it resonates very deeply. I see the human body as having cosmic implications. It is the interface between a single individual and Nature as a whole. In the early part of the twentieth century a poor boy from India named Jiddu Krishnamurti was scooped up by spiritually minded Westerners and for a time declared to be the next “world teacher” after Buddha and Jesus.
Krishnamurti’s life story is fascinating, because although he renounced the grandiose title being foisted upon him, he seems to have been someone Jeffery Wright would place in Location 4, where consciousness becomes free of boundaries. At the very end of his long life—he died in 1986, at age ninety—Krishnamurti became a public figure for a second time. Now he was a white-haired figure of wisdom, an image that fit a little awkwardly. He was too tart and impatient, too rational and inquisitive, to be anyone’s idea of a comforting, otherworldly guru.
You can see a YouTube video* from Madras, India, in 1980 where a very frail but alert Krishnamurti is asked a written question. “You often switch over from mind to brain. Is there any difference between them?” Krishnamurti’s reply begins with an apology. If he used the words mind and brain interchangeably, it was a slip of the tongue. He muses for a second before answering the question with a question. “Is the mind something untouched by the brain? Is the mind not the result of time, while the brain is?”
In a nutshell he has described the mystery of time and the timeless. As creatures of the brain, human beings live in the realm of time, and yet our minds keep returning to the timeless. Quantum physics offers one lens for examining how spacetime came about, but ultimately, the investigations of science run into a contradiction. The brain, in trying to examine the quantum field, is itself a quantum phenomenon. Every atom in the brain is reducible to a quivering vibration in the quantum field, and each wave vanishes into multidimensional Hilbert space, whose existence is purely mathematical.
In other words, relying on a quantum object to explain quantum reality is like asking a robot to build itself from scattered parts lying around the floor. You have to have a plan—instructions, a blueprint, a conception—for the robot to follow before it can do anything. If someone produced a robot that could build itself from scratch, the machine would be a hoax or a delusion. Somewhere behind the physical apparatus, a mind must set the agenda. The same is true of the brain. It is just a thing in a world of things, with no privileged position. The atoms in your cerebral cortex aren’t smarter than the atoms in a lump of sugar or in the dust picked up by a vacuum cleaner, because atoms aren’t smart to begin with. Only mind is.
It’s not hard to grasp that a robot can’t build itself from scratch without instructions, but the human brain doesn’t come with a manual, and we witness it doing all kinds of things on its own, like a player piano that produces the infinite variety of music without anyone touching the keys. For this reason, neuroscience will continue to be materialistic for quite a while longer; it’s much easier to take apart a player piano than to explain the invisible pianist.
Krishnamurti, like the ancient Vedic sages, found a way beyond the duality of mind and brain. It begins with self-awareness. If you look at how your brain is operating, he says, you’ll see what a narrow groove your thinking follows and how mechanical it is. Our education and careers, the perspective of science and engineering, our memories—all contribute to conditioning our thoughts. (In a wry aside, Krishnamurti remarks that neuroscience is beginning to view all of life as conditioned by the brain, “which we have been talking about endlessly.” He spent decades trying to get his listeners to break away from the conditioning of the brain, but few understood what he meant.)
“A thought is a material process. There is nothing sacred about thought,” Krishnamurti points out. When you go to a temple, when you project a happy future, when you entertain idealistic hopes, all of this is a material process. Saying such things is quite ruthless. Krishnamurti’s audiences frequently found themselves squirming under his barbed challenges. Perhaps it was futile for someone who had arrived at the freedom and clarity of Location 4 to explain what he saw to people who hadn’t even experienced Location 1. Yet in the simplest everyday words, he wanted them to see what was really happening: “thought has created the architecture and everything inside the building.”
If we are aware of this, he says, we must move in a totally different direction. The past is constantly being repeated in the present. Tradition, however noble, offers no help. “If we accept tradition, it makes the mind extraordinarily dull.” Imagine the shock to audiences who thought that Krishnamurti himself belongs to the tradition of Hinduism and gurus and enlightened sages—he swept all of that away. With so much pain, disorder, and chaos in the world, he says, how can we simply turn to tradition? He even torches the sacred Bhagavad-Gita: Reading it is repetitive and convenient, but meanwhile the brain becomes dull, routine, and stupid.
So what was his totally different direction? Taking the mind to its source in the timeless. This begins by observing your own actions and behavior. In a word, Krishnamurti asks his listeners to stop looking at the content of their consciousness and instead at consciousness itself. In the Gita, Lord Krishna declares, “Curving back on myself, I create again and again.” To understand this passage, you must substitute “pure consciousness” for “Lord Krishna,” and then a seemingly religious statement makes universal sense. The whole of creation is consciousness working within itself. It never stands apart from its creation. How could it? There is nowhere else to go.
This realization, the very foundation of Eastern wisdom traditions, has recently become a hot idea in cosmology, under the name of panpsychism, which holds that the universe is conscious. If you accept panpsychism, you no longer have to explain how matter learned to think. You aren’t limited by the notion that consciousness is a late arrival in the cosmos, coming on the scene only when the human brain evolved. A host of dilemmas is solved when mind is everywhere. But a nifty theory that has caught everyone’s fancy doesn’t meet the challenge posed by Krishnamurti: How do we deal with a world in chaos and disorder?
There must be peace at every level—body, mind, and world—for healing to be complete. When you’re sick, getting well isn’t theoretical. The same holds true in a Middle East battle zone or in a conflicted soul. “Is love, is compassion, the product of thought?” Krishnamurti asks at the end. By implication, it isn’t, but he wants every listener to look inside and discover this truth on their own. Accepting it blindly amounts to no more than another nod to tradition, which dulls the mind. Every spiritual tradition extols love and compassion, but we don’t live in a world where they’ve taken root to defeat hatred and discord.
For the truth to set us free, it must happen one person at a time, through a journey of self-awareness. The gurus, sages, and seers cry, “Wake up!” with one voice. But they can’t walk the path for us. Since the appearance of Quantum Healing I believe I’ve witnessed a wave of interest in waking up, and it continues to swell. Krishnamurti wasn’t optimistic, however. “I’m afraid that love doesn’t exist in this country,” he mourns, referring to India. When asked if there was a spiritual revival in the New Age, he conceded only that perhaps there were more good beginners.
The problem with love, he pointed out, is that “the word is not the thing….That which is the product of time, of thought, which is not the material process is the mind.” If this one idea seizes hold of people, one at a time, there is a way out of our distress and the chaotic world produced by the worst in human nature. The brain can be trained in any direction, for better or worse. Healing results when it is trained for better. But only by finding our source in the timeless will we reach the level where all solutions emerge. If you need to be inspired by the prospect of waking up, look as I do, to the poets. I’ll let Rumi, then, have the last word.
Oh God,
I have discovered love!
How marvelous, how good, how beautiful it is!
I offer my salutation
To the spirit of passion that aroused
and excited this whole universe,
And all it contains.