By the time I started writing this memoir of Chris, I’d learned to see that his life had been far from incomplete or unfulfilled. He’d lived it flawlessly, always true to his purpose as a teacher, and he had a great deal to teach me. As I thought about his surprising revelations, I realized that they were no more accidental than his life had been, and they weren’t intended for me alone. They expressed ancient knowledge, held sacred in many traditions. Even his methods had deep roots. In all cultures, there have been spiritual teachers who were outsiders, jesters, not gurus or professors. They taught by confounding the assumptions and expectations of others. I realized that Christopher had been one of those.
I thought about the moment of his death, when his Spirit appeared to Christina and me. I analyzed what we’d seen: an oblong form with Christopher’s face. Encounters with Spirits had been reported before. Had anyone else described a vision like this? I discovered that Christopher’s Spirit was identical in form to Rudolph Steiner’s depiction of the human soul. Steiner claimed that ancient sages had been able to see this form, which he referred to as “the astral body,” and that the ability to see it had been lost in modern cultures as psychic abilities withered away. The last part was an opinion I could wholeheartedly support. I had not a trace of psychic ability. It was only Christopher’s determination to reach me that had opened my mind.
I wondered if Christopher had been able to see the Spirit in everyone, while they were still alive. Was that how he could instantly identify what each person needed from him? He showed no self-awareness of any special ability, let alone psychic abilities. He never said anything that would indicate he was seeing things that other people weren’t. I wondered if the fragmentation of his vision, explained to us by Dick Apell, was actually a gift. It must have made the world look like a cubist painting. I thought about the purpose of cubism. It’s a representation of figures and objects from different perspectives—not just the side facing the viewer—all at the same time. Cubism was an artistic movement intended to present a more complete vision of the world than so-called realism. In a way, it’s based on opposites. You don’t see just one surface, you see the opposite surface in the same image. Did Christopher’s visual handicaps allow him to see opposites in the same image? Did disability help confer on him a unique ability? That would be so Christopher!
Or . . . maybe I was overthinking. Maybe Chris simply saw people with his mind more clearly than with his eyes and perceived the soul more strongly than the body.
I wondered what other knowledge lay hidden within the folds of Christopher’s revelations. Was he calling on me to plumb the depths of his teachings for secret insights? It seemed such a strange path for me to follow. I’d built a successful career as a physician and scholar. I was completing my second book, The Four Pillars of Healing, a scientific treatise on the nature of health and illness. Four Pillars presented concepts of clinical medicine that I’d spent two decades developing and several years writing. It was strongly grounded in scientific research and clinical experience, and filled with citations to the peer-reviewed medical literature. Was Chris asking me to change my path, or helping me hew to it more truly?
As I analyzed Chris’s way of being, I found three themes that would guide me through the labyrinth of my mind to the simple truth he wanted me to grasp:
The Gift of the Opposite
The Gift of Presence
The Gift of Timelessness
Opposition—the Gift of the Opposite—lay at the core of Christopher’s MO. When it interfered with our plans, it was annoying and sometimes infuriating. When its effects were inconsequential, it just seemed silly. But I’d seen him bestow it with skill and precision to challenge others in ways that could help them grow, emotionally and spiritually. I approached the task of understanding the Gift of the Opposite in the same way I’d approached the vision of Christopher’s Spirit. I looked for a precedent, and I realized that the Gift of the Opposite is a lens that focuses an ancient vision of human experience.
I’d learned about the importance of opposites even before Chris was born, during my first year of medical school. We rely on opposites to describe the world in which we live. We understand the qualities we experience by contrasting them with their opposites. High vs. low. Higher vs. lower. Dark vs. light. Up vs. down. Inside vs. outside. Strong vs. weak and stronger vs. weaker. More, less. Expanding, contracting. Better, worse. Opposites supply the building blocks of our consciousness. Knowing how people use opposites is vitally important to understanding what patients experience.
I’d discovered the functional importance of opposites when I’d learned to ski. It’s an analogy I sometimes use with patients who are afraid of a treatment I think they need. If you feel that you’re skiing too fast and fear that you may lose control, your normal instinct is to hold back, try to slow down. That spells disaster, because holding back shifts your weight backward, allowing your skis to lose contact with the snow and move faster, getting away from your control. The best way to slow down on skis is for your brain to tell your body, “Go faster.” Then your shins push forward, your center of gravity shifts forward, your skis grip the snow, and you have more control, not less.
But opposites are not just a product of the human mind. The material world functions through opposites: left vs. right, mass vs. energy, positive vs. negative charges, protons vs. electrons, acid vs. alkaline, oxidation vs. reduction. Opposites lay the foundation for chemistry and physics.
Opposites can be found in nature even when they’re not obvious. I’m not sure what the opposite of a tree would be, but the basic structure of a tree revolves around opposites: roots vs. branches. The broader the canopy of branches, the wider and deeper the root structure. They’re almost mirror images, and for a good reason. As the branches expand into the air, they lose more water and are more vulnerable to wind, so the roots must expand into the soil to draw more water and to better anchor the entire plant, so it’s less likely to be uprooted in a storm. If you’re a tree, these opposites are essential for your survival.
Within the spectrum of visible light waves, red and green are opposites. Together they create “white” light. Subtract one from sunlight and the other appears. Before computers changed everything, Christina and I spent several years enjoying the pleasure of black-and-white photography. We’d use red filters to darken greens and green filters to darken reds, in order to enhance contrast.
The most important aspect of opposites, I realized, is not that they exist, but that they always exist together. Everything in the universe contains its opposite at all times, even if the opposite is only a potential. That’s what Christopher saw in people and struggled so hard to show us. “You see in Carson a mute, severely disabled, brain-damaged, self-injurious creature. I see a human being who deserves the same love and respect as any other person, not just custodial care. You see Luke as a loser who can’t find his path in life. I see him as a man who can take care of another human being when the conditions are right. You see yourself as smart and reasonable and compassionate. I can show you how stupid, irrational, and intolerant you are.” Christopher’s mastery of opposites placed him right in the middle of an understanding of the world that’s thousands of years old.
In traditional Chinese culture, this essential understanding is expressed through the relational principles of yin and yang. Yang is that aspect of being that is warm, expansive, bright, or unfolding. Yin is that aspect of being that is cool, receding, dark, or infolding. Every action, every state, every function is determined by the dance of yin and yang, which creates and permeates all existence. Growth, death, stasis, and change all result from their interplay. At every stage and every moment, one predominates and then recedes as the other dominates.
Writing The Four Pillars of Healing, a book that I dedicated to Christopher, I described how the rhythms of yin and yang as they play through the cells and tissues of the human body determine the state of health. Each function of every cell is subject to the influence of yin and yang, a balance of opposites that says, “Calm down. Do less” or “Get active. Do more.” In Four Pillars, I showed how everyday decisions, such as the food you eat, impact that balance.
In Western culture, the notion of balance among opposites is usually traced back to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived about 2,500 years ago. He viewed the universe as constantly changing while maintaining an underlying consistency: “Cold things warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet.” In cryptic sentences, often debated, he compared life to a river. The water flowing through a river is constantly changing, but the river maintains its unique identity. To be a river, in fact, it must consist of water that flows, constantly changing.
This is the unity of opposites, the equivalent of yin and yang. It suffuses the philosophies of the Aztecs and the Lakota Sioux and the Dogon people of West Africa. It appears in the New Testament, in statements like “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” an attitude that Christopher seemed to live by. It is the essence of the Prayer of Saint Francis, which meant so much to Chris: “Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” Help me be an agent of change who brings out the opposite.
Despite its importance in the New Testament, the unity of opposites was relegated to the sidelines of Western thought for almost 2,000 years, reemerging in the early 19th century through the writings of German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, under the name Dialectics. After talking with Christopher, I traced it forward from there to—of all people—Rudolph Steiner.
In a short essay explaining how readers could develop psychic abilities, Steiner offered surprising advice: Take a walk down a country lane and pay close attention to what you see. Observe nature. Everything is either growing or withering. Perceiving that, advises Steiner, is the first step in elevating your consciousness. Steiner’s gentle directions reminded me of Bob Dylan’s angry lyrics telling us that whatever’s not busy being born is busy dying. Christopher went one step further. He revealed that everything is being born and busy dying at the same time. Knowing that is a way to understand God’s moment.
So, teaching by example, Christopher had enriched my understanding with the Gift of the Opposite. I’d recognized its ancient roots and its pivotal role in our experience as humans living in the world. I’d found it to be the fundamental organizing principle of biology, chemistry, and physics. I’d used it to better analyze illness and teach my approach to healing. I knew that Chris had applied it masterfully in all his encounters. It made all things possible and warned against complacency. Everything I knew about the Gift of the Opposite felt very satisfying, in an intellectual way. But I wasn’t sure how to apply it practically in my own life outside my work.
“Where do I start?” I asked Christopher. “Could you give me a clue?”
He didn’t respond, but I saw that the question itself was the answer. I’d approached understanding Christopher’s revelations the same way I approached everything else: analyze it, research its history, and define the problem in a way that might lead to a rational solution. By adopting Chris’s question to Dr. Apell—“Can you give me a clue?”—I was admitting that my way of doing things was not up to the task, just as Christopher’s cubist sense of vision could not help him begin to describe the two-dimensional drawing Apell had flashed on the screen in front of him.
I remembered the words of a psychiatry professor who’d been my preceptor in medical school: “If you want to understand a person’s weaknesses, start by looking at their strengths. If you rely on your strengths too much—as people usually do, because that’s what works for them—they create your weakness.” There it was again, the force of the Opposite. So I made a mental list of my strengths, and I realized that my overreliance on them could have a paralyzing effect.
First came intellect and the analytic strength of my mind. Second came stamina and my ability to keep working and working, physically and mentally, pushing the limits of endurance. Third was objectivity, my desire to see all sides of every problem and find rational solutions based on balancing pros and cons. These were useful professional attributes, but in order to fully live Christopher’s teachings, I’d have to stop relying on them and make room for their opposites.