Chapter 19

Evidence for Downward Causation in Spontaneous Mind-Body Healing

Of the many examples of mind-body healing, there is a subclass called spontaneous healing. This constitutes a spectacular example of a definitive signature of downward causation and, therefore, of the divine.

Spontaneous healing is healing without causal medical intervention. Healing may be triggered by a variety of stimuli, medical procedures, and sometimes just plain intention and faith. In science, unusual phenomena often give us more clues about a particular system. So what is the explanation of this particular unusual phenomenon?

Examples of spontaneous healing, some of them as dramatic as the overnight vanishing of a malignant tumor, are abundant in the literature (Chopra, 1990; Weil, 1995; Moss, 1984; O’regan, 1987).

What do the data say on the spontaneous remission of cancer? The Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Brendan O’regan (1987), who did perhaps the most extensive survey on the subject, categorizes the three kinds of spontaneous remission cases: 1) pure remission, with no allopathic treatment after the diagnosis is made; 2) remission with some treatment after diagnosis, but for which the treatment is clearly unsuccessful; and 3) the most unusual kind of remission, in which the “cures are sudden, complete, and without medical treatment,” associated with spiritual cures.

It is the third class of remission cases that offers us the most clear-cut evidence of downward causation—the creative quantum leap.

THE QUANTUM PHYSICS OF QUANTUM HEALING

First, let's explore a little theory by way of explanation. Mind-body disease consists of physical ailments in which the imposition of wrong mental meaning sets up disharmony in our vital and physical bodies. So mind-body healing must involve changes in the mind's meaning-context that result in the malfunctioning of the vital and the physical bodies. Sometimes this change in the context of meaning processing by the mind can be brought about simply by reshuffling old contexts. This is when the continuous techniques of mind-body medicine, such as biofeedback and meditation, are effective. But in cases of spontaneous healing, the contextual shift could not have taken place at the level of the mind itself. In those cases, mind-body healing is a misnomer for the healing that takes place.

The most profound contexts of mental thinking come from the supramental domain of consciousness; to change from an old context to a truly new one, we are required to leap to the supramental. This leap is a discontinuous quantum leap, which is why this type of healing is called quantum healing.

This term, quantum healing, which I have discussed earlier (chapter 13), was creatively intuited, albeit in rudimentary form, by the physician Deepak Chopra (1990). In the 1980s, Chopra was searching for an explanation of spontaneous self-healing. Somebody asked him about the cure for cancer, and he said, “If a patient could promote the healing process from within, that would be the cure for cancer.”

Earlier, the Christian Science pioneer Mary Baker Eddy had the similar idea that if the mind could discover that all disease is illusion, then healing would follow. In this way, both Chopra and Baker Eddy introduced the idea of healing as self-discovery. But Chopra, being part of the quantum age, was able to go one important step further. He said, “Many cures that share mysterious origins—faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the effective use of placebos, or ‘dummy drugs’—also point toward a quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a drastic jump—a quantum leap—in the healing mechanism.”

To see clearly the dynamic role that the quantum leap of insight plays, it may help to further analyze what is involved in these kinds of cancer cures (Weil, 1995). There is perpetual pressure on the cells of the body to become malignant—a condition in which they do not die at the expected time, do not stay in the same place, and in general do not conform to the regular cellular laws of behavior. But malignant cells are not cancer, only the seeds of cancer, and they distinguish themselves by displaying abnormal antigens (“not me”) on their surface membranes. A normally functioning immune system, whose job is to distinguish between “me” and “not me,” can recognize and destroy these malignant cells. Cancer takes hold only when for some reason this normal immune system function is inadequate, due to a physical or a vital body defect, or suppressed, for example, through an energy block at the heart chakra via excessive intellectualism.

For a healing, we have to boldly recognize the healing power of consciousness, of downward causation with freedom to choose. Consciousness has the requisite wisdom (in its supramental compartment) and the mechanism (choosing a new context for the mental processing of emotions). It also has the power to discover what is needed, to make the quantum leap of insight. And it can manifest the insight, by unblocking the vital feeling at the affected chakra, thus unblocking the movements of the associated vital blueprint and also reviving the correlated physical organ with proper organ function. The spontaneous healing of cancer is due to the sudden onset of such a dynamic surge in immune system activity that the cancerous growth is destroyed within days, sometimes even within hours.

Suppose the immune system malfunction is due to the suppression of feelings in the heart chakra, arising from faulty mental processing of love-related meaning. A quantum leap to the supramental is accompanied by a contextual shift of the processing of mental meaning. This frees the blockage of feelings that correspond to our consciously experiencing the movements of the vital blueprint of the immune system, at the heart chakra. This then can have the desired dynamic effect on the immune system, in the form of reactivating its program of hunting down and killing cancerous malignant cells with such vigor as to effect very rapid healing.

EXPLORING THE CREATIVE POWER OF DOWNWARD CAUSATION THROUGH SELF-HEALING

Conservatives in the medical profession sometimes dismiss cases of spontaneous remission of disease, labeling them as the placebo effect. In truth, faith in a doctor's word, as in the placebo effect, gives a patient only a glimpse of his or her own healing capacity. To truly manifest this capacity, one must use the entire program of creativity, going through all the stages of the creative process that culminates in a complete change of the context of one's living.

In this way, as both Mary Baker Eddy and the philosopher Ernest Holmes (1938) indicated, a life-threatening disease not only poses a danger but also provides an opportunity to explore the transformative power of downward causation. Said Holmes, “Healing is not accomplished through will power but by knowing the Truth. This truth is that man is already Perfect, no matter what the appearance may be.” Quantum healing is about regaining wholeness; it is transformative.

For the remainder of this chapter, I will closely follow the exposition in my book The Quantum Doctor.

If quantum healing really involves creativity of the mind, can we develop a program of action for healing ourselves based on this idea? It is true that creativity is acausal. But it is also true that engaging in the creative process—with its four stages of preparation, incubation, insight, and manifestation—helps bring about creative acts. What would fully engaging in the creative process entail in the case of mind-body healing?

Suppose that, instead of thinking they are getting some sort of medicine that activates the placebo effect, patients operate under the “burning” conviction that they already have the requisites for healing, which they need to discover and manifest through creativity.

The first step of such a creative endeavor is preparation. Patients would research their diseases (with help from their physicians, of course) and meditate on what they find. Such meditation would readily expose the habits of suppression or expression of emotions, as the case may be, that contributed to each disease. Some of the root causes of mental stress accumulation would also become clear. The speed of mental processing—hurrying and rushing—is one. Augmenting the pursuit of desires with accomplishments, anxieties, and daydreaming is another. So the purpose of the preparation stage would be to slow down the mind and to make it open and receptive, especially in its response to feelings.

In the next stage, the patients would try various new (to them) techniques of mind-body medicine. Here, collaboration with their personal physicians would be, a tangled-hierarchical collaboration, of course, that serves the quantum creative process much better than simple hierarchy. This is the stage of creativity in which we use unlearned stimuli to generate uncollapsed possibility waves of the mind and the supramental, but we don't choose among the possibilities. Since only choice can create an event of conscious awareness, what I am referencing is unconscious processing without awareness.

There are well-known cases of “art therapy” in which people are able to heal themselves by submersion into beautiful, spiritual healing art, but this does not work for everybody. How does art therapy work? These people must be visual, capable of visual imagination. For them, the mental imagination of healing inspired by the artwork very soon gives way to unconscious processing that opens up to a new vista of healing possibilities. Sooner or later, a seemingly inconsequential trigger precipitates the quantum leap of insight: simultaneously the new supramental context and its mental gestalt appear manifest in conscious awareness. The insight leads to the corrective contextual shift in how the mind handles emotions. Manifestation of the insight begins at once: freed from the shackles of habitual mentalization, feelings and vital energy movements at the affected chakras become unblocked, leading to healing of the correlated organ, sometimes quite dramatically.

There are some reported successes in treating cancer patients via the use of creative visualization (Simonton et al., 1978), for which the above scenario applies. Here is a particularly poignant description of one person's quantum healing through visualization:

When I was in Mexico, I had started having pain in my chest. I went across the border and got an MRI scan, which showed a mass on my thymus connecting to the aorta. I decided just to wait, but a scan six months later showed it was still there.

I decided to spend a week at Carl Simonton's healing center in California, and I imaged “sharks eating cancer cells” as they recommended. But toward the end of the week, I had this extremely vivid, spontaneous vision that wasn't on the program. I saw a mass on my thymus as a piece of ice that just started to melt in these big, amazing drops. I've never in my life had this kind of clear image just come up by itself. And I knew instantly the drops are just teardrops. My whole life, through all the losses, I'd never been able to cry. Now there was this melting away of the oppression I'd been feeling; the deaths and the abuse in my childhood, the unresolved relationship with my ex-husband. The emotion was suddenly available, and it felt so powerful.

Four months later, I had another MRI, and the mass was gone—there was no sign of it. I had no new treatment. Whatever this mass had been, they said the only way they could tell it had ever been there was from the previous two tests. (Quoted in Barasch, 1993, pp. 273-274)

Clearly, the experience released the depression of emotions accumulated through a lifetime. And there is no doubt that the experience was sudden and unexpected, a genuine quantum leap.

A spontaneous remission, in this way of looking at things, is the result of a creative insight, of our ability to choose “the healing path” out of the myriad possibilities generated by unconscious processing. This choosing is the work of downward causation of quantum consciousness—God.

How does one experience this choosing of healing insight, the associated quantum self experience? Experiences vary. The example quoted above was a vision.

The physician Richard Moss (1981, 1984) talks of a cancer patient who attended one of his workshops. During the workshop, she was tired and defiant and was not responding to the various attempts by Moss to energize her. But at some point Moss broke through her shell and she responded by spontaneously participating in a group dance. This led her to a tremendous aha! experience. The following morning, the patient woke up feeling so good that Moss felt compelled to send her for a checkup. Miracle of miracles—tests showed that her cancer was gone.

The patient in Moss's anecdote experienced the more usual “aha!” of creative insight. But patients also report the experience of making the choice itself, the moment when the purity of the healing intention is crystallized. As an example, here is the physician Deepak Chopra's (Chopra, 1990) account of the healing of a cancer patient through sudden insight:

…A quiet woman in her fifties [,] came to me about ten years ago complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suffering from gallstones, I had her admitted for immediate surgery, but when she was opened up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer throughout her abdominal cavity.

Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the incision without taking further action. Because the woman's daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had been successfully removed. I rationalized that her family would break the news to her in time….

Eight months later I was astonished to see the same woman back in my office. She had returned for a routine physical exam, which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no detectable sign of cancer. Only after another year passed did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, “Doctor, I was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick another day in my life.” Her cancer never returned.

This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears, through her deep-seated resolve, and that was good enough. This case…I must call a quantum event, because of the fundamental transformation that went deeper than organs, tissues, cells, or even DNA, directly to the source of the body's existence in time and space. (Chopra, 1990, pp. 102-103)

The final stage of the creative process—manifestation—is also important. Manifestation is not complete with only the reactivation of the glands that are needed for the normal functioning of the organ(s) involved. After the remission takes place, the patient has to bring to manifestation some of the lifestyle changes that are commensurate with the shift of mental context and the processing of feelings, if the remission is to be stable and permanent. For example, a lifestyle that produces excessive intellectualism and defensive reactions must give way to a more balanced one of integrated head and heart.

Let's discuss the case of the former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins and his self-healing from a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative disease that causes the connective tissue in the spine to wither away. According to experts, Cousins’ chance of recovery was only one in 500. In desperation, the patient stopped standard medication and substituted mega doses of vitamin C, all in full consultation with his physician. But most important, the patient decided to submerge himself in happiness; he watched funny movies (for example, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers) and read his favorite comic books for a time. And miraculously, Cousins completely recovered from his condition and resumed his very productive life.

I am convinced that Cousins went from a serious disease to healing more or less by following the stages of the creative process. The first stage, his hobnobbing with standard medicine and getting its concept of the disease, was preparation. The second stage, watching funny movies and reading comic books, allowed him the all-important relaxation of the “being” mode of creativity alternating with the “doing” mode of taking vitamin C (“do-be-do-be-do”). Eventually he got his quantum leap, which led to recovery. And from all accounts, he did make lifestyle changes—manifestation of his insight.

There is a lot of similarity between what I am advocating here and what Christian Scientists already practice. However, there is one important difference. In the strict application of Christian Science, no medical intervention is permitted. There is nothing in creative quantum healing to suggest that we cannot simultaneously apply the techniques of conventional and alternative medicine. Sometimes, as in the case of cancer, this may be necessary to keep the physical body alive to allow time for the creative quantum leap to take place. It is reported that even Norman Cousins, in the case cited above, used homeopathy while he precipitated his quantum healing.