When first published, Quantum Healing was a provocative title based on a controversial idea. The idea was that the mind influences the body either to be sick or well. Twenty-five years ago the mind-body connection struck most doctors as weak science, bad science, or not science at all. Their medical school training taught them about systems, organs, tissues, and cells—end of story. Somewhere on the fringes lurked the placebo effect, a suspicious oddity few doctors paid attention to. Patients got better when given sugar pills they thought were drugs. Sometimes the placebo effect was just as effective as the drugs. Why?
Hardly anyone cared. Placebos were dismissed as psychosomatic. In other words, they weren’t “real medicine.” I vividly remember the reaction of hospital colleagues in Boston when they discovered my newfound interest in the mind-body connection. With a frown or a pitying smile they asked, “Do you really believe in such a thing?” Almost three decades later I can reply, “You don’t?”
Controversial ideas have a way of becoming mainstream, and that’s what happened to the mind-body connection. No longer does anyone have to defend their belief in meditation, yoga, stress reduction, anger management, and a host of positive lifestyle changes. These measures have one thing in common: Better messages are being sent from the mind to the body. With better messages a higher state of wellbeing is possible. No one disputes this anymore.
The floodgates have opened, and today Quantum Healing could be doubled in size by introducing just a fraction of the new evidence supporting the mind-body connection. Medical school training is still about systems, organs, tissues, and cells, but that’s no longer the end of the story. A new field known as integrative medicine has sprung up since 1989. It incorporates what used to be called alternative medicine, along with traditional healing modalities like Ayurveda, which played a large part in my own journey, as this book recounts.
Yet the mystery of healing is far from solved. I was baffled by Chitra, the first patient mentioned in the book, who somehow recovered from breast cancer without benefit of conventional treatment (only to die just as mysteriously). Such cases of spontaneous remission continue to occur. Just this month I encountered a young man who had struggled with stomach cancer for six years, finally giving up on chemotherapy because of its debilitating side effects.
His cancer had metastasized throughout his body, to the bones and liver. Given six months to live, he traveled to India, where his family originated, and renounced the hectic life of New York City for the peace and quiet of the rural countryside. He took up meditation and yoga. He became a strict vegetarian. He immersed himself in the most traditional practices of Ayurveda, practices that have roots going back thousands of years. As of three months ago his scans show that he is entirely free of cancer.
There are thousands of spontaneous remissions of cancer found in Western medical journals, and yet it’s fair to say that they make hardly any difference in the routine practice of oncology, not directly at least. Cancer treatment has advanced over the past quarter century, but the path it has followed—toward genetics, sharply focused drugs, and more precise statistics—has little to do with the mind-body connection.
Instead, the influence of spontaneous remissions has been indirect, by motivating research into healing itself. Genetics is a crucial key in cancer, and the mind can influence genes. Literally thousands of genetic markers are improved through meditation, for example. Inflammation could be just as crucial in the onset and spread of cancer, and inflammation is stress related. Stress is a reaction that begins in the mind, and a person’s mindset can be changed. Lifestyle choices that lead to obesity, lack of sleep, and distorted biorhythms are being connected to cancer, and these bad choices can be reversed.*1
In short, there’s nothing about cancer that is separate from the mind in one way or another. This realization led the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to announce the following in 2008: “Only 5–10% of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90–95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle.”*2 This represents an enormous shift in attitude. When I was in medical school, 95 percent of cancers were considered nonpreventable.
If Quantum Healing is to remain relevant, a new controversial idea is needed. What if all healing is quantum? Then every barrier separating mind and body would come down. Every cell would be conscious, not just brain cells. Beyond the boundary of the skin, all of life would be conscious, arising on a conscious planet in a conscious universe. To the five senses, body, planet, and universe are not one and the same. But at the quantum level they have a common source. To quote the great quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger, “To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless….In truth there is only one mind.”
You and I go through life assuming that we have individual minds and bodies. When one person burns his hand on a radiator, he says “Ouch,” not the person standing next to him. But at the quantum level this changes—you and I are imbedded in one mind, a cosmic intelligence that creates, governs, and controls reality. Where is this cosmic intelligence located? Schrödinger comes to our aid again by dissolving all the everyday barriers that keep us from seeing our cosmic status.
First, the barrier of separate minds: “Consciousness is a singular that has no plural.” Next, the barrier of past, present, and future: “Mind is always now. There is really no before and after for the mind.” Finally, the barrier between life and death: “Consciousness is pure, eternal and infinite: it does not arise nor cease to be. It is ever present in moving and unmoving creatures, in the sky, on the mountain, in fire and in air.”
This last quote doesn’t come from Schrödinger, however, but from one of the most ancient texts in the Indian spiritual tradition, the Yoga Vasistha. The fact that a sage living thousands of years ago could take an inner journey and make discoveries consistent with quantum physics wasn’t news when Quantum Healing came out. But the world of sages, seers, and saints felt closed off from ordinary life back then. All the ensuing research in mind-body medicine has helped to build a bridge between two worlds, and the sage Vasistha, like Buddha, could be our contemporary.
What would it take to turn all healing into quantum healing? I will address this, the most burning question facing modern medicine, in the expanded edition you’re now reading. After each chapter you’ll find a section titled “Expanding the Topic,” which approaches the mystery of healing as viewed by cutting-edge medical research and the world’s wisdom traditions.
Beyond the mind-body connection there is a deeper connection between now and eternity. The human brain knows only the now. Every electrical impulse or chemical reaction in your brain occurs right this second. The feedback between mind and body is being replenished thousands of times a minute. We can take great hope in this fact, because it means that the entire universe has conspired to bring about this very minute. Infinite creativity, intelligence, and power are supporting us once we open ourselves up to them.
When I wrote this book, I knew it was pointing in the right direction. If I felt the barbs of skeptics then (and there were many), I was confident that confirming studies were still to come. Now the idea of quantum healing has had nearly thirty years of supporting research. Let’s hope this expanded edition prompts open-minded readers to revisit this concept. Hope is born from impossible ideas. To the skeptical mind, the most impossible idea is this: We are children of the universe. Our source is beyond all boundaries. Seeing ourselves as isolated, limited physical creatures is merely an assumed identity. I suppose those are three ideas, but once they are fused into a new mindset, the era of true healing will have arrived.