Chapter 5

Entering Hyperspace

In a drafty monastery high in the Himalayas in northern India, during the winter of 1985, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks were seated quietly, deep in meditation. Although scantily clad, they appeared oblivious to the chilly indoor air temperature, which approached freezing. A fellow monk passed between them, draping each, in turn, in sheets drenched with cold water. Such extreme conditions would ordinarily shock the body and send the core temperature plummeting. If body temperature falls by only 12°F, within minutes a person will lose consciousness and all vital signs.

Instead of shivering, the monks began to sweat. Steam rose from the wet sheets; within an hour, they were thoroughly dry. The attendant replaced the dry sheets with new ones, also drenched in ice-cold water. By this time, the monks’ bodies had become the equivalent of a furnace. Those sheets were efficiently dried, as was a third batch.

A team of scientists led by Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, stood nearby, examining an array of medical equipment to which they had attached the monks for any clues as to what particular physiological mechanism might have enabled the body to generate this extraordinary level of heat. For years, Benson had explored the effects of meditation on the brain and the rest of the body. He’d embarked on an ambitious research program, studying Buddhists in various remote outposts around the world who had spent many years in disciplined practice. During one trip to the Himalayas, he also videotaped monks, dressed only in light shawls, as they spent a freezing February night outdoors on a mountain ledge 15,000 feet above sea level. Benson’s film showed that they had slept soundly through the night, without clothing or shelter.

During his travels, Benson had witnessed many extraordinary feats of intention—mastery over temperature and metabolic rate that could even produce a state resembling hibernation. Monks monitored by Benson’s team had raised the temperature of their extremities by up to 17°F and lowered their metabolism by more than 60 percent.¹ Benson realized that this represented the largest variation in resting metabolism ever reported. During sleep, by contrast, metabolism drops by only 10 to 15 percent; even experienced meditators can decrease it by only 17 percent, at best. But that day in the Himalayas, he had observed the impossible in terms of mental influence. The monks had used their bodies to boil freezing water simply through the power of their thoughts.²

 

Benson’s enduring enthusiasm for meditation ignited interest at major academic institutions across America. By the turn of the twenty-first century, monks had become the favorite guinea pigs of the neuroscience laboratory. Scientists from Princeton, Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California–Davis followed Benson’s lead by wiring up monks to state-of-the-art monitoring equipment and studying the effects of intensive, advanced meditation. Entire conferences were held on meditation and the brain.³

It was not the practice itself that fascinated these scientists, but its effect on the human body, particularly the brain, and the possibilities this suggested. By studying the biological effects in such detail, scientists hoped to understand the neurological processes that occur during feats of highly directed thought, such as the monks had displayed in the Himalayas.

Monks also offered scientists an opportunity to study whether years of focused attention stretch the brain beyond its usual limits. Did the brain of a monk become the equivalent of an Olympic athlete’s body—more highly developed and ultimately transformed after grueling discipline and practice? Do training and experience change the physiology of the brain over time? Would practice enable you to become a bigger and better transmitter of intention? The answers would in turn address a longstanding debate in neuroscience: is neural structure basically hard-wired from youth or plastic—changeable—depending on the nature of a person’s thoughts through life?

For me, the most intriguing question about this research on focused attention was the means by which a Buddhist monk could turn himself into a human boiler, and how these means compared with techniques and practices of other ancient traditions. Like Benson, I was intrigued by “masters” of intention: practitioners of ancient disciplines—Buddhism, Qigong, shamanism, traditional native healing—who had been trained to perform extraordinary acts through their thoughts. I wanted to work out their common denominators. Do the steps taken by a qigong master to send qi resemble those of a Buddhist monk during meditation? Which mental disciplines ensure that a healer will enter a state enabling him to repair another person’s body? Are “masters” of intention graced with special neurological gifts that enable them to use their minds more powerfully than the rest of us, or did they acquire a skill that ordinary people could learn as well? And perhaps most important, what did the neurological study of monks tell me about the effect of focused intention on the brain? Would practice enable you to become a bigger and better transmitter of intention?

I began studying scientific research about healing methods from a variety of traditions and then conducted my own questionnaire and interviews with healers and “master” intenders of all persuasions.⁴ I was aided in my research by the work of psychologist Stanley Krippner and his student Allan Cooperstein at Saybrook Graduate School. A clinical and forensic psychologist, Cooperstein had conducted a thorough study of the various techniques used by distant healers for his doctoral thesis, including an analysis of scholarly books on healing and an exhaustive written and verbal interviews with well-known practitioners who had scientific evidence of success in healing.⁵

In every instance, I discovered, the most important first step involved achieving a state of concentrated focus, or peak attention.

According to Krippner, an expert on shamanic and other native traditions, virtually all native cultures carry out remote healing during an altered state of consciousness and achieve a state of concentrated focus through a variety of means.⁶ Although the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as ayahuasca is common, many cultures use a strong repetitive rhythm or beat to create that state; the Native American Ojibwa wanbeno, for instance, use drumming, rattling, chanting, naked dancing, and handling of live coals.⁷ Drumming is particularly effective in producing a highly concentrated focus; a number of studies have shown that listening to the beat of a drum causes the brain to slow down into a trancelike state.⁸ As Native Americans discovered, even intense heat, as in a sweat lodge, can transport individuals to an altered state.

In my own study of intention “masters,” I spoke with Bruce Frantzis, arguably the greatest Qigong master in the West. A martial arts champion, with black belts in five Japanese martial arts, he also learned healing Qigong through years of study with Chinese masters. Frantzis’s powers of intention were legendary; he had been videoed sending people flying across the room simply by directing qi. In his fighting days, before he’d fully mastered his art, he had unintentionally put several people into wheelchairs. Now, knowing its extraordinary power, he reserved qi for healing. During my own meeting with him, Frantzis gave a short demonstration of the power of directed qi. After a moment of intense concentration, the plates of his skull began to undulate over the top of his head like a rolling surf.⁹

Frantzis taught his students how to develop peak attention gradually, through intense concentration on their breathing. Although they began with very short bursts of “longevity” breathing, they would work on extending these periods until eventually they could hold this focus continuously. They would also be taught methods of becoming acutely aware of all physical sensation.¹⁰

The healers I interviewed entered this focused state through a variety of means: meditation; prayer; intense attention on the person to be healed; symbolic or mythic ideas; strong mental images of a situation producing the desired change; verbal affirmations; mental imagery; even internal autosuggestions as a warm-up exercise. One healer established focused attention by saturating his awareness with the goal that he was trying to achieve.

Dr. Janet Piedilato, a shamanic healer, will often “gently hum or chant” or use a “rattle or other instrument.” Dr. Constance Johnson, a Reiki practitioner, can return to an altered state at will. Others need to work hard to achieve this transformation: The Reverend Francis Geddes, a spiritual healer, will meditate on a small object like a pebble, leaf, or twig in a “very concentrated manner for ten minutes.”

Still others use the patient as the object of meditation. As Dr. Judith Swack, a mind/body healer who has developed her own holistic psychotherapy system, says: “I look directly at the client and focus all of my senses forward toward the client and enter a receptive state where I pay internal attention to any subtle information and impression coming in like a kind of radar.” Many other healers likewise enter an altered state simply by “listening to the patient”—“audibly or otherwise.” “Just thinking of the need to help someone,” wrote Dr. Piedilato, “slows the blood in my veins.”

Initially, many healers experience a heightening of their cognitive processes, but most soon reach a point when inner chatter ceases, and they experience a falling away of all sensation but pure image. The focusing seems to dissolve their own boundaries. They suddenly become aware of the inner workings of the patient’s body and ultimately have a sense of being engulfed by the healee.

I was especially interested in the effect of this intense concentration on the activity of the brain. Does the brain slow down or speed up? The received wisdom is that during meditation the brain slows down. The bulk of the research examining the electrical activity of the brain during meditation indicates that meditation leads to a predominance of either alpha rhythms (slow, high-amplitude brain waves with frequencies of 8–13 hertz, or cycles per second), which also occur during light dreaming, or even the slower theta waves (4–7 hertz), which typify the state of consciousness during deep sleep.¹¹ During ordinary waking consciousness, the brain operates much faster, using beta waves (around 13–40 hertz). For decades, the prevailing view has been that the optimum state for manifesting intention is an “alpha” state.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, recently put this view to the test. Davidson was an expert in “affective processing”—the place where the brain processes emotion and the resulting communication between the brain and body. His work had come to the attention of the Dalai Lama, who invited him to visit Dharamsala, India, in 1992; a science buff, His Holiness wished to understand more about the biological effects of intensive meditation. Afterward, eight of the Dalai Lama’s most seasoned practitioners of Nyingmapa and Kagyupa meditation were flown to Davidson’s lab in Wisconsin. There, Davidson attached 256 EEG sensors to each monk’s scalp in order to record electrical activity from a large number of different areas in the brain. The monks were then asked to carry out compassionate meditation. As with Jerome Stone’s intention regime, the meditation entailed focusing on an utter readiness to help others and a desire for all living things to be free of suffering. For the control group, Davidson enlisted a group of undergraduates who had never practiced meditation and arranged for them to undergo a week’s training, then attached them to the same number of EEG sensors to monitor their brains during meditation.

After 15 seconds, according to the EEG readings, the monks’ brains did not slow down; they began speeding up. In fact, they were activated on a scale neither Davidson nor any other scientist had ever seen. The monitors showed sustained bursts of high gamma-band activity—rapid cycles of 25–70 hertz. The monks had rapidly shifted from a high concentration of beta waves to a preponderance of alpha, back to up beta, and finally up to gamma. Gamma band, the highest rate of brain-wave frequencies, is employed by the brain when it is working its hardest: at a state of rapt attention, when sifting through working memory, during deep levels of learning, in the midst of great flashes of insight. As Davidson discovered, when the brain operates at these extremely fast frequencies, the phases of brain waves (their times of peaking and troughing) all over the brain begin to operate in synchrony. This type of synchronization is considered crucial for achieving heightened awareness.¹² The gamma state is even believed to cause changes in the brain’s synapses, the junctions over which electrical impulses leap to send a message to a neuron, muscle, or gland.¹³

That the monks could achieve this state so rapidly suggested that their neural processing had been permanently altered by years of intensive meditation. Although the monks were middle-aged, their brain waves were far more coherent and organized than those of the robust young controls. Even during their resting state, the Buddhists showed evidence of a high rate of gamma-band activity, compared with that of the neophyte meditators.

Davidson’s study bolstered other pieces of preliminary research suggesting that certain advanced and highly focused forms of meditation produce a brain operating at peak intensity.¹⁴ Studies of yogis have shown that during deep meditation their brains produce bursts of high-frequency beta or gamma waves, which often are associated with moments of ecstasy or intense concentration.¹⁵ Those who can withdraw from external stimuli and completely focus their attention inward appear more likely to reach gamma-wave hyperspace. During peak attention of this nature, the heart rate also accelerates.¹⁶ Similar types of effects have been recorded during prayer. A study monitoring the brain waves of six Protestants during prayer found an increase in brain-wave speed during moments of the most intense concentration.¹⁷

Different forms of meditation may produce strikingly different brain waves. For instance, yogis strive for anuraga, or a sense of constant fresh perception; Zen Buddhists aim to eliminate their response to the outer world. Studies comparing the two find that anuraga produces heightened perceptual awareness—magnified outer focus—while Zen produces heightened inner absorption: magnified inner awareness.¹⁸ Most research on meditation has concerned the type that focuses on one particular stimulus, such as the breath or a sound, like a mantra. In Davidson’s study, the monks concentrated on having a sense of compassion for all living things. It may be that compassionate intention—as well as other similar, “expansive” concepts—produces thoughts that send the brain soaring into a supercharged state of heightened perception.

When Davidson and his colleague Antoine Lutz wrote up their study, they realized that they were reporting the highest measures of gamma activity ever recorded among people who were not insane.¹⁹ In their results they noticed an association between level of experience and ability to sustain this extraordinarily high brain activity; those monks who had been performing meditation the longest recorded the highest levels of gamma activity. The heightened state also produced permanent emotional improvement, by activating the left anterior portion of the brain—the portion most associated with joy. The monks had conditioned their brains to tune in to happiness most of the time.

In later research, Davidson demonstrated that meditation alters brain-wave patterns, even among new practitioners. Neophytes who had practiced mindfulness meditation for only eight weeks showed increased activation of the “happy-thoughts” part of the brain and enhanced immune function.²⁰

In the past, neuroscientists imagined the brain as something akin to a complex computer, which was fully constructed in adolescence. Davidson’s results supported more recent evidence that the “hardwired” brain theory was outdated. The brain appeared to revise itself throughout life, depending on the nature of its thoughts. Certain sustained thoughts produced measurable physical differences and changed its structure. Form followed function; consciousness helped to form the brain.

Besides speeding up, brain waves also synchronize during meditation and healing. In fieldwork with indigenous and spiritual healers in five continents, Krippner suspected that, prior to healing, the healers all underwent brain “discharge patterns” that produce a coherence and synchronization of the two hemispheres of the brain, and integrate the limbic (the lower emotional center) with the cortical systems (the seat of higher reasoning).²¹ At least 25 studies of meditation have shown that, during meditation, EEG activity between the four regions of the brain synchronizes.²² Meditation makes the brain permanently more coherent—as might prayer. A study at the University of Pavia in Italy and John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford showed that saying the rosary had the same effect on the body as reciting a mantra. Both were able to create a “striking, powerful, and synchronous increase” in cardiovascular rhythms when recited six times a minute.²³

Another important effect of concentrated focus is the integration of both left and right hemispheres. Until recently, scientists believed that the two sides of the brain work more or less independently. The left side was depicted as the “accountant,” responsible for logical, analytical, linear thinking, and speech; and the right side as the “artist,” providing spatial orientation, musical and artistic ability, and intuition. But Peter Fenwick, consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, gathered evidence to show that speech and many other functions are produced in both sides of the brain and that the brain works best when it can operate as a totality. During meditation, both sides communicate in a particularly harmonious manner.²⁴

Concentrated attention appears to enlarge certain mechanisms of perception, while tuning out “noise.” Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, ²⁵ carried out research showing that the cortices of meditators “speed up,” but get cut off from the limbic emotional center. With practice, he concluded, anyone can carry out this “switching-off” process, enabling the single mode of the brain to experience heightened perception without an overlay of emotion or meaning.²⁶ During this process, all of the power of the brain is free to focus on a single thought: an awareness of what is happening at the present moment.

Meditation also appears to permanently enhance the brain’s reception. In several studies, meditators have been exposed to repetitive stimuli like light flashes or clicks. Ordinarily, a person will get used to the clicks, and the brain, in a sense, will switch off and stop reacting. But the brains of the meditators continued to react to the stimuli—an indication of heightened perception of every moment.²⁷

In one study, practitioners of mindfulness meditation—the practice of bringing heightened, nonjudgmental awareness of the senses’ perceptions to the present moment—were tested for visual sensitivity before and immediately after a three-month retreat, during which time they had practiced mindfulness meditation for 16 hours a day. The staff members who did not practice the meditation acted as a control group. The researchers were testing whether the participants could detect the duration of simple light flashes and the correct interval between successive ones. To those without mental training in focusing, these flashes would appear as one unbroken light. After the retreat, the practitioners were able to detect the single-light flashes and to differentiate between successive flashes. Mindfulness meditation enables its practitioners to become aware of unconscious processes, and to remain exquisitely sensitive to external stimuli.²⁸ As these studies indicate, certain types of concentrated focus, like meditation, enlarge the mechanism by which we receive information and clarify the reception. We turn into a larger, more sensitive radio.

In 2000, Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an expert in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), confirmed that this process produces actual physical changes. Conventional MRI employs radio frequency waves and a powerful magnetic field to view the soft tissues of the body, including the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, on the other hand, measures the minuscule changes in the brain during critical functions. It confirms where and when stimuli and language are being processed by measuring the increase in blood flow in the fine network of arteries and veins of the brain when certain neural networks are engaged. For scientists like Lazar, the fMRI is the closest science can get to observing a brain at work in real time.

Herbert Benson had enlisted Lazar to map the brain regions that are active during simple forms of meditation. Rather than scrutinizing more monks or other meditation “athletes” who had devoted themselves to the contemplative life, Lazar preferred to study the effect of meditation on the millions of ordinary Americans who performed meditation for just 20–60 minutes a day. She and Benson recruited five volunteers, who had practiced kundalini meditation for at least four years. This kind of meditation employs two different sounds to focus and still the mind while observing inhalation and exhalation of the breath. Lazar asked volunteers to alternate between intervals of meditation and control states, during which they silently ticked off a mental list of animals. Throughout the experiment, Lazar also monitored the biological activity of her subjects—heart rate, breathing, oxygen saturation levels, levels of exhaled CO₂, and EEG levels.

Lazar discovered that during meditation, the volunteers had a significant increase of signaling in the neural structures of the brain involved in attention: the frontal and parietal cortex, or the “new” part of the brain where higher cognition takes place, and the amygdala and hypothalamus, portions of the “old” brain that govern arousal and autonomic control.

This finding was another contradiction of the received wisdom that meditation is always a state of quiescence. Her results offered yet more evidence that during certain types of meditation, the brain is engaged in a state of rapt attention.

Lazar also discovered that the signaling in certain areas of the brain and the neural activity during meditation evolved over time and increased with meditative experience. Her subjects themselves had the impression that their states of mind continued to change during each individual meditation and as they grew more experienced.²⁹

These results suggested to Lazar that highly concentrated focus over time might enlarge certain parts of the brain. To test this, she gathered 20 long-term practitioners of Buddhist mindfulness meditation, five of whom were meditation teachers, with an average of nine years of meditation experience. Fifteen nonmeditators acted as controls. Participants meditated in turn inside an ordinary MRI scanner while she took detailed images of their neural structures.

Lazar discovered that those portions of the brain associated with attention, awareness of sensation, sensory stimuli, and sensory processing were thicker in the meditators than in the controls. The effects of meditation definitely were “dose-dependent”: increases in cortical thickness were proportional to the overall amount of time the participant had spent meditating.

Lazar’s research offered some of the first evidence that meditation causes permanent alterations in brain structure. Up until the time of her experiment, this type of increase in cortical volume had been linked only to certain repetitive mechanical practices requiring a high degree of attention, such as playing an instrument or juggling. Here was some of the first evidence that thinking certain thoughts exercises the “attention” portion of the brain and makes it grow larger. Indeed, the cortical thickness of these regions was even more pronounced in the older participants. Ordinarily, cortical thickness deteriorates as a result of aging. Regular meditation appears to reduce or reverse the process.

Besides increasing cognitive processing, meditation also appears to integrate emotional and cognitive processes. In the fMRI study, Lazar found evidence of activation of the limbic brain—the primitive, so-called “instinctive” part of the brain involved with primitive emotion. Meditation appears to affect not only the brain’s reasonable, analytical “upstairs” but also the unconscious and intuitive “downstairs.” She had discovered a greater activation of the part of the brain responsible for what is usually called “the gut instinct.” Here was physical evidence that meditation increases not only our ability to receive intuitive information, but also our conscious awareness of it.

Davidson had shown increases in the “approach” portion of the brain—the part that wants to help—in his monks, who were attempting to help humanity by meditating on compassion. They had increased the “can I help you” portion of their brains. Sara’s meditators, however, were working on mindfulness, a state of peak attention, and that part of the brain responsible for attention had grown larger. The brain’s powers of observation had increased, allowing in more information, even the kind that is received intuitively.

 

Some people are born with a larger-than-normal antenna and better reception than usual. This appears to be the case with the psychic Ingo Swann. Swann’s psychic gifts extended to remote viewing, the ability to perceive objects or events beyond normal human vision. He’d helped to develop a remote viewing program used by the American government and was widely regarded as one of the best remote viewers in the world. Swann once had allowed the peculiar workings of his brain to be monitored and analyzed by Dr. Michael Persinger, professor of psychology at Laurentian University in Canada. Wired to an EEG machine, Swann was asked to use his skills to identify items in a distant room. At the very moment that he was able to “see” the items remotely, his brain showed bursts of fast activity in the high beta and gamma range, similar to that of Benson’s Tibetan monks. Those bursts of activity occurred primarily over the right occipital region, the portion of the brain relating to sight. According to the results of brain-wave monitoring, Swann had entered a superconscious state, enabling him to receive information impossible to access during normal waking consciousness.

When examined by MRI, Swann also showed that he had an unusually large parieto-occipital right-hemisphere lobe, the portion of the brain involved with sensory and visual input. Persinger had found a similar neural aberration in another gifted psychic called Sean Harribance.³⁰ When monitored with EEG and single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) equipment during his psychic activities, Harribance evidenced an increase in firing of the right parietal lobe. Both he and Swann had been graced with a greater capacity than normal to “see” beyond the limits of time, distance, and the five major senses.

Science has demonstrated that by thinking certain thoughts it is possible for us to alter and enlarge portions of our brains to become a larger, more powerful receiver. But is it also possible to develop a larger transmitter? To discover some of the qualities that enhance transmission, I would have to study “masters” of intention who were particularly gifted at transmitting. The best place to look seemed to be among talented healers.

Cancer specialist and psychologist Dr. Lawrence LeShan, who has studied how gifted healers work, discovered that they share two important practices, besides entering an altered state of consciousness: they visualize themselves as uniting with the person to be healed and imagine themselves and that person as being united with what they often describe as the absolute.³¹

Cooperstein’s healers had also described turning off the ego and eliminating their sense of self and separateness. They had the sense of assuming the body and vantage point of the person to be healed. One healer actually felt his body changing, with shifts of patterns and distributions of energy. Although the healers did not take on the disease or pain, they sensed it once they had visualized themselves as being at one with the person being healed. At this point of union, the healers’ perception markedly altered and their motor skills diminished. They were suffused by an expanded sense of pure present, and grew unaware of the passage of time. They lost awareness of the boundaries of their own bodies, and even experienced an altered sense of bodily image. They felt taller, lighter—almost as though they were out of their physical being—engulfed by a sense of unconditional love. They began to observe themselves, according to one healer, only as “a kind of a core that remains”:

I’m aware of the process just being beyond me…My intent is obviously with the person—my conscious control is completely side-stepped, like I’m standing, watching. Then something else takes over…I don’t think that I ever lose complete awareness that I’m sitting there.³²

Other healers experienced a more profound loss of identity; to carry out their work, they had to be at one with the person they were healing: to become that person, complete with his or her physical and emotional history. Their own personal identity and memory receded and they entered into some space of joint consciousness, where an impersonal self carried out the actual healing. Some of the healers took on a mystical identification with guardian spirits or guides, and the spiritual alter ego took over.

In Krippner’s experience, certain personalities are more susceptible to merging identities than others: those who, according to a psychological test, possess “thin boundaries.” According to the Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire test, developed by Tufts University psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann to test a person’s psychological armament, people with thick boundaries are well organized, dependable, defensive, and, as Hartmann himself liked to put it, “well armored,” with a sturdy sense of self that remains locked around them like a chain-link fence. People with “thin” boundaries tend to be open, unguarded, and undefended.³³ Sensitive, vulnerable, and creative, they tend to get involved quickly in relationships, experience altered states, and easily flit between fantasy and reality. Sometimes, they are not sure which state they are in.³⁴ They do not repress uncomfortable thoughts or separate feelings from thoughts. They tend to be more comfortable than thick-boundaried people with the use of intention to control or change things around them. In a study by Marilyn Schlitz of musicians and artists, for instance, creative individuals with thin boundaries also scored best in remote influence.³⁵

Krippner demonstrated the relationship between thin boundaries and intention with students at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington. Many of the techniques taught at the school—for example, focusing on a desired outcome and excluding all external stimuli, and blindfolding students and having them find their way around a labyrinth—were designed to help students release their usual boundaries. The school encouraged students to engage in imaginative fantasy, claiming that it opened untapped areas in the brain.³⁶ Krippner and several colleagues performed psychological tests on six of the longtime students who claimed to have developed keen skills in manifesting intention.

Ian Wickramasekera, a psychologist who participated in some of the Yelm research, had developed a battery of psychological tests based on his High-Risk Model of Threat Perception.³⁷ Wickramasekera claimed the tests identify people most likely to have psychic experiences or to be susceptible to hypnosis. Although the test was originally developed to pinpoint people at high risk of psychological problems during times of major life changes, Krippner believed that Wickramasekera’s model could also be used to evaluate mediums and healers. Krippner and his associates found they could readily use the test to identify people whose inflexible sense of reality blocked them from perceiving or acknowledging intuitive information. Wickramasekera’s model predicted that individuals would best perform healing if they were able to block the sense of a threat when they let go of their separatist notions of self.

 

According to their scores, the Ramtha students had extraordinarily thin boundaries. Hartmann’s own mean score, derived from tests on 866 individuals, was 273. The Ramtha students scored 343. The only other groups Hartmann had identified with boundaries this thin were music students and people suffering from frequent nightmares. The Ramtha students also showed a high degree of what psychologists call a type of “dissociation”—the ability to undergo profound disruptions in their attention—and a high degree of absorption: a tendency to lose themselves in ongoing activity such as hypnosis and a readiness to accept other aspects of reality.³⁸

In my own examination of healers, I had come across two types. Some regarded themselves as the water (the source of healing); others saw themselves as the hose (the channel for healing energy to travel through). The first group believed the power resulted from their own gift. By far the largest group, however, consisted of the channelers—those who acted as vehicles for a greater force beyond themselves.

Elisabeth Targ’s AIDS project had recruited 40 healers of every persuasion.³⁹ Approximately 15 percent were traditional Christian religious healers, who used the rosary or prayer. Others were members of nontraditional healing schools, such as the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, or those taught by Joyce Goodrich or Lawrence LeShan. Some worked on modifying complex energy fields through changing colors or vibrations or the patient’s energy field. More than half the healers concentrated on healing a patient’s chakras, or energy centers of the body; others worked with tones, reattuning their patients with audible vibrations. A Qigong master from China sent harmonizing qi to the patients. One man working in the Native American tradition went into a trance during a traditional drumming and chanting pipe ceremony on the deserted ridges of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and claimed to have contacted spirits on behalf of the patients. Much of the imagery the healers used to describe what they did was framed in terms of relaxing, releasing, or allowing in spirit, light, or love. For some healers, the spirit was Jesus; for others, Starwoman, a healing Native American grandmother image.

Targ had interviewed the healers about their work, and I spoke with her before she died about the common threads she had discovered among their diverse approaches.⁴⁰ She found that a quality of loving compassion or kindness was essential in sending out a positive intention to heal. But no matter what their approach, most of them agreed on a single point: the need to get out of the way. They surrendered to a healing force. They had framed their intention essentially as a request—please may this person be healed—and then stepped back. When Targ examined those patients whose illness had most improved, and analyzed which healers they had been exposed to, those healers who were the most successful were the “channelers”—the ones who had moved aside to allow the greater force in. None of the healers who had been successful believed he possessed the power himself.⁴¹

Psychiatrist Daniel Benor, who has accumulated and cataloged virtually every study of healing in four volumes⁴² as well as on a website,⁴³ has examined the statements and writings of the most famous healers describing how they work. One of the most remarkable and best-studied healers, Harry Edwards, wrote that a healer worked by handing over his will and his request for healing to a greater power:

This change may be described (inadequately) as the healer feeling a sense or condition enshrouding him, as if a blind had been drawn over his normal alert mind. In its place he experiences the presence of a new personality—one with an entirely new character—which imbues him with a super-feeling of confidence and power.

…

[While engaged in his healing] the healer may be only dimly aware of normal movement, speech, etc., taking place around him. If a question is addressed to him about the patients” condition, he will find himself able to respond with extraordinary ease and without mental effort—in other words, the more knowledgeable personality of the Guide provides the answer. Thus does the healer “tune-in”—it is the subjection of his physical sense to the spirit part of himself, the latter becoming for the time being the superior self under the control of the director.⁴⁴

To Edwards, the most important act was moving aside, shedding the personal ego, making a conscious attempt to get out of the way.

Cooperstein’s healers described their experience as a sense of total surrender to a higher being or even to the process. All believed that they were a part of a larger whole. To gain access to the cosmic, nonlocal entity of true consciousness, they had to set aside the limiting boundaries of the self and personal identity, and merge with the higher entity. With this change of consciousness and expanded awareness, the healers felt they got onto an open line to this larger information field, which offered them flashes of information, symbols, and images. Words would appear, seemingly from nowhere, giving them a diagnosis. Something beyond their conscious thought would carry out the healing for them.

Although the lead up to healing was accomplished through consciously directed thought, the actual healing often was not. In giving a 2-minute treatment, for instance, they might have a minute and a half of rational thought and then “a five-second thing that would be an irrational thing, a space that may be the apex, the key to the whole experience.”⁴⁵ The most important aspect of the healers’ process was undoubtedly their surrender—their willingness to give up their sense of cognitive control of the process and allow themselves to become pure energy.

But was this capacity to move aside important in all types of intention? I found an interesting answer in a study of people with brain damage. Investigators at the Behavioral Neurology Program and Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto attempted to replicate the work of the Princeton PEAR lab using random-event generators, but with one important twist: they had enlisted several patients with frontal-lobe damage. The patients who had suffered right-frontal-lobe damage, which probably affected their ability to focus and maintain attention, had no effect on the machines. The only person to have a greater than normal effect was a volunteer who had a damaged left frontal lobe but whose right frontal lobe was intact. The investigators speculated that the volunteer’s particular handicap could have given him a reduced sense of self, but a normal state of attention. Achieving a state of a reduced self-awareness—a difficult state for an ordinary person to achieve—might allow for greater effects of intention on the machines.⁴⁶

Krippner suspects that during some altered states of consciousness, the body naturally “switches off” certain neural connections, including an area near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person’s spatial orientation, the sense of where one’s body ends and the external world begins. During a transpersonal or transcendent experience, when this region becomes inactive, the boundary in the relationship between the self and the other blurs; you no longer know where you end and someone else begins.

Eugene d’Aquili, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Newberg, a medical doctor at the university hospital’s nuclear medicine program, demonstrated this in a study of Tibetan monks. Moments of meditative experience showed up as more activity in the brain’s frontal lobes with less activity in the parietal lobes.⁴⁷ Meditation and other altered states can also affect the temporal lobes, which house the amygdala, a cluster of cells responsible for the sense of “I” and our emotional response to the world: whether we like or dislike what we perceive. Stimulation of the temporal lobes or disorder in them may create familiarity or strangeness—common features of a transcendent experience. Intense focus with intention on some other being appears to “switch off” the amygdala and so remove the neural sense of self.

 

Davidson, Krippner, and Lazar demonstrated that we can remodel particular portions of our own brains, depending on our different types of focus and indeed different thoughts. It became clear to me that the intense focus of certain types of meditation can be a portal to hyperspace and peak awareness, transporting the meditator to a different layer of reality. It can also be an energizing practice more than a calming one, that can help us rewire our brains to improve our reception and transmission of intention. I had assumed that intention was like a strong “oomph,” or mental push, through which you project your thoughts to another person to ensure that your wishes are carried out. But the healers described a very different process: intention requires initial focus, but then a type of surrender, a letting go of the self as well as of the outcome.