Certainly we would feel a great deal of
discomfort, and the physical sensation of pain would begin a
complex series  of psychological reactions to produce what is called
suering. Most people believe that pain and suering are more or
less identical. This was not true for Ray, who experienced immense
pain but never converted it into suering. He had an explanation for
this:
“I felt that a decision had been made in the split second while I
was falling, pulling me back from certain death—it didn’t have to
happen that way, but it did. It was a gift. My mind went back to
that moment many times, and I found that the memory triggered a
dierent awareness in me. I can only compare it to meditation: Iwas in a place pain couldn’t reach. I had a sense of oating and of
great calmness. “Sometimes the nurse would  be packing my knee wound, which
was very uncomfortable physically. I would see her doing it, and the
signal of pain registered, but instead of stinging my mind, so to
speak, it made me feel inten se—what?—not exactly pleasure but a
sensation hard to name, intensely sweet, very intimate. It was pain
turning to tingling joy. Every time that happened, I would wonder
at it and be very glad.”
Once he slipped into this privileged state of awareness, Ray could
divorce himsel f from his pain for hours at a time. Signicantly, he
had practiced meditation since he was eighteen, virtually all of his
adult life, and was familiar with settled states of awarenes s. He soon
showed that he was doing much more than evading pain. His sister
writes, “When  I rst saw the surgical wound around Ray’s right
knee, I was frightened at how much muscle they had been forced to
remove. Despite the grafts, there was nothing visible but tendon,
and when we returned to Seattle, several specialists advised that
muscle tissue be brought around from the back of his leg for a new
graft. “That meant major surgery, and Ray’s doctor decided to postpone
it. Keeping the tendon exposed raised the chance of infect ion, but he
wanted to wait and see for another month. In that time, Ray healed
himself amazin gly. We dressed his knee twice a day and showered it
with loving attention. (Ray would say afterwards that he could lie
back and literally feel this attention being soaked up by his body.) Ray meditated a great deal and was up and around, tendin g the new
colts and enjoying his life to the full. “When his doctors saw him four weeks later, they were in a state
of disbelief. New muscle had started to come up around the tendon
spontaneously, appearing in every gap, and new skin was rapidly
advancing to cover it.”
Muscle regeneration is a highly uncertain process, and there is no
guarantee that it will occur at all if the damage is this extensive. One would certainly not predict the rapid granulation of new tissue
that appeared in Ray’s destroyed knee. With undisguised wonder,one of his doctors exclaimed, “I don’t know why, but you’re a great
healer, Ray.” No further surgery was required. Much has been written about what makes certain people heal
better and faster than others. Ray embodied many of the most
desirable quali ties. He had the courage to get up out of his hospital
bed and walk on his leg within days after his accident. When his
arm had to be amputated, he immediately learned to tie his shoes
with one hand. He unhesitatingly and hungrily accepted love when
it was oered by his family and friends. These are rare qualities of
heart and mind. Although every doctor has seen such patients, “great healers”
have proved to be too rare and too individual to study as a class. Therefore, we do not really know their secret. I believe  that what
makes such people extraord inary is not anything they do: it is
something they are. We all are. That is, we all have the certainty that we exist. A
clever debater can make you doubt almost anything you ever
believed in, but not this. “I am” lies at the core of every  person, a
rock-solid certainty he has no reason to doubt. Unless you are caught in a tortured dilemma like Hamlet, to be or
not to be is not the question. Existence comes as inevitably as being
born. Strangely, some people  take more advantage of this state than
others. They do not do more or feel more or think more. Somehow,
like light passing through a crystal-clear lens, life comes through
them clearer, brighter, and sharper than through people who exist
dully. This fact has not been lost on psychiatry, though it is seen from
the opposite end. Very few people come to therapy exhibiting
clarity. They come feeling extremely needy and dependent, or
feeling so much anxiety that they can barely face up to the ordinary
challenges of existence. Sometimes they are so depressed that
nothing in their lives, howev er vivid and moving, registers as more
than a gray smudge. In all these cases, something has gone wrong,
not just in thinking and feeling, but in being. They have lost the gift
for living.The Feeling of Specialness
Where does the gift come from? In Ray’s case, it seems to express
itself rst and foremost as a bedrock sense of security: “I was sure
from the rst that I was going to recover. There’s no expla ining why
—it was like a secret I shared with God. I called it a gift because
there are no real words to describe it. I was given a chance to
remake myself . I didn’t know how to do that, only that it was going
to happen and nothing could stand in its way.”
By now almost everyone has read accounts of the brief near-death
experiences that occur to thousands of people every year. The
details change from story to story, but a common theme is the
sudden descent of a complete sense of security. People who come
back to life after their hearts stop beating frequently report that as
they “went into the light” or hovered above their bodies looking
down on themselves, they felt completely protected. Often this
feeling lingers  when they reluctantly take up the burden of their
bodies once more. They now nd it dicult to worry about the
things one is supposed to worry about, especially dying. It may be
that this is how we are meant to feel even without the near-death
experience. To be may not be a choice, but the way you feel about it certainly
is. Some people grow up nurturing a secret feeling that they are
somehow special. They feel guarded by providence, although they
may not reveal such a reckless belief to others. Dr. Irvin Yalom
writes about one such woman who believed in her specialness for
years, only to come out of it quite traumatically: she was deeply
shaken one day when she became the victim of a purse-snatcher in a
restaurant parking lot. Yalom writes, “Most of all, the robbery illuminated her
ordinariness, her ‘I never thought it could happen to me’ reecting
the loss of belief in her personal specialness.” He is not referring to
any special talents or gifts that this woman possessed. It is highly
rational for people to prize that kind of specialness. But we also
have an irratio nal sense of specialness, Yalom asserts, which serves
as “one of our chief methods  of denying death.” However, far fromdeeming it a valuable trait, psychiatrists tend to regard this way of
feeling special as undesirable, and when the woman came to Yalom
for treatment, his chief focus was to bring her to terms with her
ordinariness. This meant that he had to strip away her sense of
feeling protected against death. Here we are confronted with the ambiguous role of the psyche’s
need for self-pr otection. To feel safe from death is not something we
can easily do without; on the other hand, if the fear of death is
being forcibly suppressed in the depths of our subconscious, it could
be spreading underground terror that we ignore at our peril. As
Yalom goes on to say, “The part of our mind whose task it is to
mollify death terror genera tes the irrational belief that we are
invulnerable—that unpleasant things like aging and death may be
the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law, beyond
human and biological destiny.”
I grant that it is a worthwhi le goal to dispel delusions and even
more worthwh ile to rid the mind of hidden fear, but beyond the
goal of mental  health lies the goal of freedom. Where is freedom to
begin if not in “that sense of specialness, of being charme d, of being
the exception, of being eternally protected” that psychiatry wants to
stamp out? All of these feelings are ones that Yalom labels as self-
deceptions. However, to think that they are illusions may itself be a
greater illusion—or so the yogis declare. The starting point for Yoga is just this sense of being special or
charmed or protected. Witho ut it, the only sane course in life would
be to come to terms with the solid, sensible world before our eyes,
complete with its burden of pain, aging, and death. At best one
would put up an “ironica l struggle,” in a famous phrase by
Montaigne, ghting the enemy who is destined to win from the rst
moment of combat. Many people, perhaps all, would leap at the chance to feel special
again, but their conditioning atly closes o that possibility. Lawrence LeShan is a highly regarded psychologist who more than
thirty years ago pioneered the startling theory that cancer has a
personal component. He argued that becoming a cancer patient is
the end product of neurotic mechanisms that go back to childhood.LeShan was also among the rst to use psychotherapy as a means to
revive the cancer patient’s buried instincts, particularly the instinct
to heal. LeShan found that he had to begin by turning the methods of
conventional therapy on their head. If a breast cancer patient goes
to a conventi onal therapis t, he would focus primarily on her
symptoms. Confronted with her psychological pain, he would try to
identify the precise source of that pain and reduce it. LeShan, on the
other hand, attempts to make cancer a turning point, with the aim,
not of reducing symptoms,  but of pushing the patien t to new
heights. He focuses on the patient’s uniqueness and individuality: a
breast cancer patient coming  to him would be told that she has “a
special song to sing in life,” a source of joy that belongs only to her. On the rst day of therapy, when LeShan looks at his patients and
announces this goal, he very often gets a blast of hostility and
rejection in return. The following are some typical responses, taken
from his book Cancer as a Turning Point:
“If I found my own music, it would be so discordant that I
wouldn’t like it, and no one else could stand it either. My
own ‘natural’ way of being is ugly and repellent. I learned a
long time ago not to express it if I wanted to have any
relationships with others or to be able to live with myself.”
“If I found my own song and tried to sing it, I would nd that
there is no place in the world for anyone like me.”
“My own song would have such contradictions built into it
that it would be impossible.”
In their acute distress, these patients feel the therapist’s helping
gesture as a huge threat. They reject his “impossible” goals and hold
on desperately  to the “unselsh” values they were taught as
children. These  values include being modest and polite, never losing
one’s temper, deferring to the wishes of others, and so forth. In our
society, every good child has learned them. Yet from the mouths of
LeShan’s patients, these values sound dreadful, as if someone’s soul
has been stied.Most of us accept the same values, however, and to some extent
we, too, do not feel that the world wants to hear our music—our
most personal expressions of feeling and desire—just because it is
ours. A profound lack of self-acceptance is being revealed in this
attitude. But since we are healthy enough to stay out of therapy or a
cancer ward, we have no occasion to defend our vulnerability quite
so nakedly as these women. Whenever people actually nd their own song to sing, their deep-
seated sense of self-doubt begins to be released, leaving a space for
creativity to ll. The song turns out to be beautiful; people nd that
they can sing it without being punished and even earn a living being
themselves. “In addition,” LeShan notes, “in every case the song was
socially positive and acceptable. I have never seen an exception to
this.” Beneath the fear of being unique, each of us has a powerful
craving for as much uniqueness and specialness as possible. In essen ce, LeShan is simply asking his patients to be themselves. Why is that prospect at rst so horrifying? Deep down, as much as
we might deny it, all of us have been hurt by having our childhood
wishes trample d on, but we accepted it “for our own good.” A child
needs and demands to be respected as a unique person,  but being
small and helplessly attached to his parent’s approva l, he will
sacrice his own feelings to win the reward of their love. For most
of us, our parents fed us their own concept of “being good,” and we
conformed to that even if it rankled our still-selsh childi sh egos. As
the noted Swiss psychoanaly st Alice Miller points out, we were all
taught to be good before we wanted  to be good. This may sound like a ne distinction, but in later life it makes all
the dierence between freedom and slavery. As an adult, I may be
rmly habituated to being good. Whenever I give to others, I feel
superior for being able to give and sorry for anyone who cannot. Yet
the acid test is how I feel when I am doing the giving. Am I joyful
about it or merely self-righteous? Do I expect something  in return,
such as gratitude, deference, and respect? Or do I let the other
person feel what he feels, whether it is anything or nothing? Giving
can be a mark of genuine freedom, the willingness to do with less so
that someone else may have more. But a person who has learned toput on a mask of giving is in total slavery. To what? To the memory
of what he must do to make his parents happy. Beginning with our desire to please our mothers, we have learned
to read like perfect scholars the faintest hints of acceptance and
rejection in other people. As we subtly mold ourselves to this
outside pattern, it becomes second nature, a kind of false self. A gap
is created between true and false emotions, between what I should
feel and what I actually feel. The process is subtle but treacherous. If
it goes on long enough, one forgets what it is like simply to be, to let
happiness and sadness come when they will, to give or keep as the
moment dictates. For the false self does not really feel; it calculates. A life lived truly is the joining of heart and mind. As feelings
come, the mind approves and delights in them. It is not dicult to
test if someone is leading such a life, because he will readily tell you
that the best time he has ever spent is the present. This is a sure sign
that the mind is not running ahead of the heart in anticipation or
lagging behind in nostalgia. The Chinese poet Wu-Men counsels:
Ten thousand owers in spring ,
the moon in autumn ,
A cool breeze in summer ,
snow in winter—
If your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things ,
this is the best season of your life . If the balance between heart  and mind is disturbed, especially if
the subtle feeling level has been destroyed, there begins a process
we call rationalization. Why am I not happy at this very moment? “I’m too busy now. I’ll be happy when I’m successful.”
“Today’s not a good day; I’ll be happy tomorrow.”
“I can’t be happy with you, you’re not up to my standards.”
“Others need me so much that I have to be responsible.”
“Life is less risky if you are good and measure up to the
norm.”
“I’ll be happy when I get what I want.”In each phrase  one hears the victory of the head over the heart. Being happy is no longer immediate; it has become a distant or near
prospect, an idea rather than a feeling. In meditation the yogi tries
to clear a path for feeling, removing “unnecessary things ” from his
mind so that he can actua lly experience the bedrock of inner
satisfaction that all the ancient scriptures declare to be our
birthright. Whenever a person succeeds in joining head and heart,
that is Yoga. The reward of this union is immense: every moment
will become the best in the person’s life. A yogi balance s the qualities of intellect and feeling, but I often
think of him as a protester on behalf of the heart. Surrounded by
people (even in India) who pursue achievement without gaining
fulllment, he chooses fulllment rst. He will not let the mind rob
him of the subtle feelings of joy that come as freely as leaves blown
by the wind and are as easily swept away. The Mystery of Elaine
I sat on the edge of the emergency stretcher looking down at
Elaine in baement. It was midnight, and we had just had her
rushed from our clinic to the hospital with uncontrollable vomiting
and severe abdominal bleed ing. The crisis had erupted with little
warning. When Elaine became my patient two weeks earlier, her complaint
had been menorrhagia, or excessive menstrual bleeding. This
condition, which caused acute pain during her periods and lasted
for as long as fteen days a month, had persisted for more than a
decade. There was also a secondary complaint, which, combined
with the rst, made her mysterious in my eyes. Althoug h she had
never given birth, Elaine spontaneously secreted milk from her
breasts, a condition called galactorrhea. Medically speaking, these two symptoms are contradic tions of
each other. A particular pituitary hormone, prolactin, could have
caused her milk secretions, but another major eect of prolactin is
to stop the period. To compound matters, Elaine’s tests failed to
reveal any abnormalities in her hormone levels. I had beenpondering various explanations for her condition when she suddenly
suered this midnight attack. The young Indian doctor who was on call at our clinic that night
had sounded panicky when he phoned me, reporting that Elaine had
vomited twenty times in less than three hours. He notice d a droop
in her left eyelid and a slight facial tic, which made him fear some
kind of brain incident. He guessed that a tiny tumor, probably in the
pituitary, was beginning to hemorrhage, and he therefore had had
no choice but to get her into an ambulance as fast as possible. Now Elaine was no longer in pain and lay on the stretcher
sedated. Her symptoms had receded as unexpectedly as they had
begun, and a CAT scan, much to my relief, disclosed no sign of a
brain tumor. Incredibly, her entire sheaf of test results still indicated
that she was perfectly healthy. Nothing made any sense. As Elaine slept, I looked down at her worn, drawn face. It
occurred to me that this was the most relaxed I had ever seen her. In
her rst oce visit she had presented herself as a secure, successful
businesswoman. She owned her own public relations rm, with
twenty employees under her (they were all men, she took pains to
inform me). Whatever lay beneath this condent persona, I wasn’t
going to nd it that night. I scheduled an oce appointm ent on her
chart and in the meantime called her family doctor in Houston to
see if he could clue me in. He was not encouraging. “Elaine?” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with her, not that I
have ever been able to nd. She has had about sixty of these attacks
in the past ten years”—Elaine had neglected to tell me that when
she came up to Boston—“and I recently told her that there was
nothing more I could do.”
I asked him for his best guess at an accurate diagnosis. “Hysteria,”
he shot back. “No doubt in my mind. You’ll never be able to shake
her of this thing, but good luck trying.” With obvious satisfaction he
abruptly ended the conversation. The next morning I asked Elaine about the previous attacks. Looking embarrassed, she admitted that these had occurred o and
on for fteen years, dating from when she rst got married. Did she
have a happy marriage? She turned red and looked away. “I wasraised a strict Catholic, and I feel I have a duty to remain in this
marriage. Happy? My husband treats me very well, and I respect
him as a good man.” It turned out that because of a preexisting
organic condition, her husband had never been able to have
intimate relations with her. She described their current relationship
as caring and close but platonic. “Do you know what your doctor in Houston thinks is wrong with
you?” I asked. She answered angrily, “He thinks I’m hysterical, of course. I’m
sure he told you that.”
“Do you know  what is mean t by the term hysteria?” I asked. She
admitted that she had only a vague idea. “I’m not a psychiatrist,” I
said, “but in layman’s terms, an hysteric is someone who is the
victim of self-deception. He presents all the signs of a physical
illness and is completely convinced by them, yet no one else can
nd a ‘real’ cause for his symptoms. On the other hand,  deceiving
yourself can also be considered a real cause in its own way.”
Whereas the word “hysteric” had deeply oended her, I noticed
that Elaine looked interested in the line of explanation we were now
pursuing. “People nd numerous reasons for deceiving themselves,”
I continued. “You’ve already mentioned that your marriage lacks
certain types of normal fulllment, such as having sexual relations
with your husband and becoming a mother. Your doctor has
concluded that your symptoms are basically born out of frustration. I don’t know how frankly you can talk to your husband, but I’m sure
you’ve made all these connections on your own already.”
She said nothing, which I took to be assent. She was extremely
startled, howe ver, by my next words. “You’re not an hysteric,
Elaine. I think there’s a aw in your doctor’s reasoning. The fact is
that you are quite conscious of what is missing in your life, which is
not true of a deeply deceived  person. I would feel more comfortable
if we dropped the psycholog ical jargon and looked at your problem
much more directly.”
“What do you mean?” she asked nervously. “Let’s start with a very basic thing,” I replied. “How do you feel at
this moment?”“Right now?”
“Yes. What word would describe Elaine right now?”
“Empty,” she said without hesitation. “But I have lived with that
for a long, long time.”
“Why?” I asked. She looked at me hard. “Do you think I have a choice? That’s just
the way I feel.”
“Does feeling that way make you happy?” I asked. “You may not believe this,” she said, “but I think I’m basically as
happy as the next person.”
“Really?” I asked. “You just said you feel empty much of the time. A lot of people  feel that way, or are afraid that they feel that way,
but a lot of people don’t.”
“How do you feel?” she asked. “Can’t you tell?”
“Well, no. How could I?”
“I’m giving it o.”
“You are?”
“Sure,” I said. “In my tone of voice, the look in my eyes, and in
many other subtle ways, I give o feelings, just as you and all other
people do. We are having a conversation in feelings, though it may
be taking place below the verbal level. Right now I feel interested in
you. I am worried about why we can’t explain what is happening to
you, and at the same time I must admit that I am excited by
exploring your emotions. It’s an intimate moment.”
Elaine didn’t comment. “Can’t you sense those feelings?” I urged. “Don’t you have much the same ones?” She nodded her head
reluctantly. “Like an underground stream, the life of feeling keeps running
on,” I said, “even when the mind denies it. You aren’t empty, but
you have an idea that you are. This is the split that is causing so
much confusion. We know that you have a full range of feelings,
both powerful and subtle, because your body is expressing them as
symptoms. However, these feelings have not registered clearly in
your mind. Perhaps there is too much frustration for you to easilycope with, or on the other hand too much happiness. Have you ever
considered that?”
She looked completely disbelieving. “Too much happiness? Are
you joking?”
“The feelings we are told not to have as children become  lost on
us as adults. The child inside you could be roaring with laughter or
wild with ecstasy, but if you have learned that roaring and going
wild are not permitted, you won’t experience those feelings directly
—you will nd a substitute feeling that is more acceptable, like
being proud of your work.”
“But I am proud of my work.”
“It’s very right and good that you are,” I said, “but by opening up
that one channel so wide, you may be cutting o others, equally
valid but more dicult for you to experience.”
A guarded look came over her face. We were on the edge of a
psychological precipice, but I had no intention of pushing  her over. Elaine’s intimate life had to be healed at a pace that was
comfortable to her. What I wanted her to see at the moment was
something much more general. Sometime in the past she had made
a fatal choice common to many people. She had decided to control
her unhappine ss instead of expressing it and letting it go. Humans
seem to be unique in facing this choice. If a cat stalks a sparrow in
the grass, pounces, and misses, its whole body reacts with
frustration. The cat paces, twitches its tail, licks itself, and then falls
asleep. These various reexes manage to clear the slate of the cat’s
nervous system , and the next time it stalks a bird, there will be no
shadow of the earlier failure. The human nervous system, although equipped with similar
automatic reexes, is far more elaborate, and it gives us much more
complex reacti ons in the face of frustration. If a cat thought like a
person, it might resort to denial (“I was just practicing”), blame
(“Someone’s been scaring the game around here”), self-
recrimination (“I knew I should have sharpened my claws this
morning”), or guilt (“Why can’t I stay away from those sparrows?”). As things stand, human life is inconceivable without these reactions. They are part of our nature, however much we suer from them. Ina psychologica lly healthy person, guilt, shame, self-recr imination,
and blame serve as sympt oms of unease. When the unease is
corrected—when we face our guilt, confess our shame, or confront
the person we have blamed—a feeling of ease returns. An illness is a localized form of unease (as the term “disease”
implies), and it is not surprising to nd that for many people, a
much broader unease underl ies it. What I try to do with patients is
to reveal this very general unease, just enough so that they are not
entirely caught up in the narrow boundaries of their symptoms. In
Elaine’s case, there were intimate details of her life invol ved in her
illness; I am sure a knowi ng psychiatrist could probe into her
fundamental feelings of guilt and shame. (To begin with, why did
she remain devoted to a man who had failed to tell her of his sexual
incapacity before their marriage? Did she deny her anger because
she felt too guilty to demand sexual satisfaction as her rightful
reward?) It would be foolhardy and cruel to explore a patient’s defenses
simply to expose them. These boundaries exist for good reason: the
person is trying to salvage shreds of happiness by isolating himself
from areas of distress. This is what I meant by saying that we choose
to control our unhappiness instead of letting it go. If, like a cat, we
could wipe clean the slate of our memory, then living with guilt,
shame, disappointment, and self-recrimination might not be
inevitable. As nature made us, however, we turn our distress into
ourselves, just as we turn food into ourselves. What can we do but
try to devise the best defense s we can? If anything, a compassionate
doctor would try to reinforc e them, limiting his treatment to the
local problem while mercifully ignoring the general one. Unless,
that is, he understands how to reveal a deeper mercy. I have no illusion that my words are enough to change a person’s
deep unease. Each of us is a walking universe. Our inner space spans
huge distances, with unreachable horizons in all directions. We
contain black holes of lost memory and white holes of erupting joy. A mysterious center of gravity keeps all our mental processes in
delicate balance. To change this vast, intricate, ever-ev olving
system, you must know how to overturn worlds. The only personwho can do that is the god who presides over this inner cosmos, and
when I presume to break into a patient’s mind, it is to implant the
idea that he is that god. By thinking, feeling, and acting, he is
altering the universe that is himself. If a person can gain that
insight, even in a brief glimpse, anything in his life can change. Here I am thinking of a woman in Canada whom I have never met
but who wrote me a fascinating letter. At the age of twenty-four she
married a man she had loved for six years. Because the couple had
very little money, they waited four more years before trying to have
a child. The woman was unable to conceive, however, and it was
eventually discovered that her husband was completely sterile due
to a testicular disorder. The woman was bitterly disappointed, but she remained caring
and considerate toward her husband, whose psycholo gical state
became very fragile. A few months later she woke up in bed one
night and found a lump in her abdomen that was hard to the touch. By morning it had swollen so large that her belly was distended. She
rushed to a doctor, who informed her that she was at least ve
months pregnant. The woman carefully explained why this was
impossible. For some inexplicable reason, the doctor then advised
her that the problem might be a bladder infection, and she was sent
home with a two-week prescription for antibiotics. When the swelling refused to subside, she returned to the clinic,
and a second doctor made a careful physical examinatio n. He, too,
conrmed that she was pregnant. The woman had no choice but to
assume that a miracle had occurred. She started wearing loose
dresses and spent her time in maternity shops. But then the swelling
became tender, and she experienced vaginal bleeding. She returned
to the clinic, where she was met with harsh skepticism. Her doctor
assumed that she had been having an extramarital aair and was
now trying to induce a miscarriage. Various tests were performed,
and at last the mystery was solved: she was suering from a massive
ovarian tumor. The woman immediately entered the hospital, where
one ovary was removed and the other repaired. The letter ends: “My surgeon insisted that such a large growth
must have taken at least ve years to reach that size. I am the onlyone who believes that it appeared overnight. Although I was bitterly
disappointed to be deprived of a child for the rest of my life, I have
gained something, too. I realized that nothing—or everything—is as
real as what I make it. If getting sick is in my power, so is getting
well. To this day, more than ten years later, I have not allowed
myself to catch so much as a cold.”
I nd myself moved by this story, not just because of its
poignancy, but because a veil has parted. Whenever reality shows
itself, even in the midst of crisis, there is the hint of joy, and if we
could see further, there would be no limit to it. That was in my
mind when I was talking to Elaine. “Look at that tree out there,” I
said to her, and pointed to a huge old copper beech outside the
window. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see a large tree with purple leaves and gnarled bark,” she
began. “It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” I interrupted. “Yes,” she agreed. “Now can you look further and see more?” We both paused and
she continued to look. “Do you have a sense of its gloriousness? Do
you see the living light being tossed o by each leaf? Doesn’t that
old tree seem to possess the air around it like a monarch?”
Elaine laughed. “Sure, I can sort of see all that.”
“But you notice that we had to work at it a little,” I said. “The
rst tree you saw was not so glorious. If that tree had looked truly
glorious to you, you would have stared at it from the moment you
walked in. Gloriousness is pretty hard to ignore. Now tell me, what
do you see when you look at Elaine?”
She gave a startled jerk of her head. “Are you glorious?” I asked. She looked embarrassed, and in a
gentler voice I said, “It migh t take a little work to see yourself as
glorious, and right now it’s not your rst reaction, just as it wasn’t
to that copper beech. All the same, the gloriousness could be there. It really could.”
For the rst time, her face softened and she looked genuinely
touched. “Feeling the glory of life means feeling it in yourself and
about yourself,” I said. “You can look at beautiful trees and listen tobeautiful music, but these substitutes, however gratifying, are still
substitutes. The fact that you can appreciate them means that your
own inner beauty wants to come out. It is seeking its own kind. “What is that tree’s glory but your own, seen in nature’s mirror? If
you wanted to, you could turn the mirror around and see yourself
directly. The glory in you is not painful to see. It is the opposite of
pain. Shall we try to bring it out?” With obvious pleasu re, Elaine
shyly agreed. The Polished Mirror
Turning the mirror inward is a metaphor for the actual process I
wanted Elaine to discove r, meditation. Medically speaking,
meditation has proved particularly helpful in cases like hers where
the patient’s physical and mental states have become severely
disjointed. I advised her to seek instruction in primordial sound
meditation, the technique that I myself practice and which we teach
at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, in California. In my eyes, the primary advantage of meditation lies in the fact
that it is an entirely natural process—it allows the mind to discover
its own subtlest layers witho ut force, just as they are discovered in
moments of calm quietness  in normal life. To unveil  the most
delicate feeling level of the mind, a meditation technique  has to be
as eortless as possible; otherwise, one is just forcing the mind into
a preco nceived mold. (The opposite of a natural meditation would
be one where intense concentration is used.) In English, the classic description of a natural state of meditation
is provided in the poems of William Wordsworth. As an adult,
Wordsworth could no longe r see the celestial light that made his
childhood so glorious, but his mind was acutely attuned to itself—
he had turned  the mirror inward. In a contemplative passage from
his great poem “Tintera Abbey,” he describes with marvelous
precision
 … that serene and blessed mood ,
In which the aections gently lead us on—Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy ,
We see into the life of things . Reading these lines, I alway s get a sense of reassurance from one
particularly telling touch: the use of “us” and “our.” Wordsworth is
making clear that all of us share his inner experience. We may lack
his gift for expressing it so beautifully, but that does not matter. We
all exist on the basis of one common being, immersed in “harmony
and the deep power of joy.”
These experien ces sound beautiful, but until thirty years ago, no
one had understood that they are crucial for human development. It
was widely thought in the East and in the West alike that yogis and
swamis were hermits who wanted no part of the vanity of the world. The most magical thing about them—that they renounced the world
in order to regain it anew—was entirely missed. It has taken hundreds of research studies into the physiology of
meditation to reverse this mistake, and to dispel the Western belief
that meditation is some vague mixture of mysticism, psychological
illusion, and religious faith. In fact, it is quite the opposite: an
objective, repeatable phenomenon that can be validated by scientic
means. During the Sixties and Seventies, doctors and physiologists tested
thousands of college-age meditators. After monitoring heartbeat,
blood pressure, respiration rate, oxygen consumption, brain waves,
and all the other bodily signs that change during meditation,
Western researchers soon agreed that they were seeing something
real in their own terms, a new phenomenon that was not just a
variant of ordinary sleep or hypnotic trance. Measurements of subjects as they enter into deep meditation
indicate that they are recrea ting the state Wordsworth so carefully
described. There is a gradual suspension of respiration anddecreased heart rate (a stilling of “the breath of this corporeal
frame” and “the motion of our human blood”), the body approaches
the lower metabolic rate associated with sleep, and yet the mind
remains alert, even heightene d in its clarity (the “eye made quiet by
the power of harmony”). And the mind feels secure, at peace, and
protected (united with the “deep power of joy”). No two people meditate exactly alike, since the byways of every
mind are dierent. But if taught a natural, correct technique,
everyone, I believe, would experience inner glory. The human
nervous system  is innately capable of seeing directly into “the life of
things,” as Wordsworth tells us, so long as the brain is not clouded
by disease or toxic substances. In time, meditation makes the
nervous system  extremely sensitive, so that it registers every subtle
impression vividly and without prejudice; then the world itself
changes. The change might prove to be much more far-reaching than
anyone supposes. To modern ears, the seers of the ancient Vedic
scriptures sound almost otherworldly because they took it for
granted that human life is essentially perfect. A typical verse from
the Veda says of humanity that we exist in bliss, or pure joy: “Of
bliss these beings are born, in bliss they are sustained, and to bliss
they go and merge again.”
The true yogi stands apart from ordinary experience by seeing
that suering is a completely false state. As we really are, we are
creatures of bliss, but this reality is totally dependent upon
experiencing it. All bliss vanishes when the mind takes on suering;
all suering vanishes when the mind takes on bliss. The reason this
must be so is that our inner mirror, unlike one made of glass,
actually becomes  the image it reects. What the yogi proposes is that each of us should locate the level
of pure joy that is behind the mirror. It cannot be expressed in
words, because language is another image in the mind’s mirror. Once the experience of bliss is achieved, it may spill over into
words, as it did for Wordswo rth. The crucial point is that bliss is not
our goal but our starting point. Unless it is present, one has no
foundation for climbing to any of the higher spiritual states.The deeper nature of the world is barely guessed at in our present
situation. I was reminded of this fact by a breast cancer patient of
mine, a longtime meditator who recently sent me her latest progress
report. It begins,
January to August have been completely pain-free months. I continue to rise above all the old routines that remind me of
being a cancer patient. During this whole period I have
enjoyed increased energy and activity. Finally I felt I had the
time to enjoy myself, doing what I wanted to do, eating what
I wanted to eat, and leading a normal life. At the height of this happy period, the freest she had experienced
in seven  years , this woman noticed the return of chest pain and a
feeling of pressure in her lungs. A recurrence was strongly
suspected, and her oncologist resumed the course of chemotherapy. However, her discomfort continued to increase, to the point that she
had diculty walking or even sitting up in bed. Then something
new happened:
Despite the discomfort, my husband and I decided to camp
out in the woods one night—we live in Alaska now. It was a
starry night, absolutely clear. Around midnight the aurora
borealis unfurled across the sky. We woke up the next
morning and did our usual meditation sitting cross-legged on
the mossy forest oor. When I opened my eyes, the trees all around me had
changed from their ordinary at brown and green to
pinpoints of sparkling golden light, then gradually back
again. In awe I watched this transformation repeat itself, as
the forest pulsated with energy, turning to light and back
again, in and out. Everything around me was intensely alive,
and I felt so intimately connected to it, as I had never felt
before.Her whole body was suused  with the gentle, living quali ty of the
scene she looked at: “It was not an experience of joy but of sublime
peace.” Without warning, she had fallen into a special state in which
the rough reality we all accept had turned into a ow of pure light
and divine feelings:
I have said that I felt peace rather than joy. The joy came
later, intensely, when we walked back through the forest,
caressed by the soft air, listening to the birds and watch ing
the antics of the squirrels. There were signs of wildlife
everywhere—we saw bear tracks and many ptarmigan. At
one point a large red fox walked across our path without
showing any sign of alarm. On her return home, she noticed how tired the two-hour walk had
made her, but at the same time she felt something very gratifying. There was no longer any chest pain or pressure in her lungs; her
breathing was completely clear for the rst time in a month. The
next night she sat up in bed talking to her husband, and a new
phrase slipped out in passing, “I had breast cancer.” Always before,
she automatically said, “I have breast cancer.” She was surprised but
greatly relieved at this change:
After I said it, I realized how spontaneously the words had
come out. Most importantly, they felt like the truth. The
words were strong and clear, spoken without hesitation. At
the same time, a new feeling began to rise in me, a deep
sense of gratitude for all the gifts I had received in such
simple ways. I have little to add, except for one caution: the sense of fulllment
that surfaces when the inner mirror is polished must be spontaneous
to be true. The dull mirage of the world “out there” does not change
to glory all at once; the personality is not instantly  lifted to
sainthood; the body does not lose all its imperfections. (This woman
was not miraculously healed; she continues to undergo regulartreatment for her cancer and calmly accepts whatever outcome the
future holds.) The whole process of renewa l happens in one’s consciousness, at a
level deeper than thought. It does no good to try to be newer,
better, more insightful, and so forth. Rather, the nervous system
undertakes the metamorphosis deep inside itself, using its own
recuperative powers. As the Upanishads declare, the yogi “dies and
lives again” with each meditation, which is another way of saying
that he cleans the mirror and holds it up to reect a dierent light. The light will surely come through, even under conditions that
seem to be overwhelmed by darkness. One of my friends is a
meditation teacher who has taught extensively in prisons, and
because he speaks uent Spanish, he has helped start meditation
programs for prisoners in Central America. On one trip he found
himself walkin g into the courtyard of an old governor’s palace from
the days of the conquistadors. A moldering ruin now, it was built
like a medieval fortress, with several thick stone walls nested inside
each other. “The gloom and oppression  of that place were terrible, even
compared to other places like it,” he remembers. “I got inside the
third wall and then the fourth, and when the guards let me through
the last gate, do you know what I saw? “Very high up near the roof was a single small barred window. Sticking out of it was a man’s arm. His hand was open, and he was
reaching, as hard as he could , for the sky. The arm didn’t move the
whole time I passed through the yard. More than words ever could,
it told me the dread of being in there.”
He found horrendous conditions inside. The cells were huge open
rooms, each holding a hundred men, whose rope hammocks were
stacked in layers up to the ceiling. The cramped room set aside for
my friend’s lectures had wide cracks between the plank ooring. When he looke d down he could see the prisoners milling in the cells
below. “We taught large groups of these men, who seemed very eager to
learn to meditate. They had good experiences, too, because of the
huge contrast between their present condition and the quietness wewere giving them inside. I gathered together the rst thirty who had
learned and asked them to volunteer what they were getting out of
it. There was a general stir, but no one really wanted to volunteer. Then Juan Gonzalez raised his hand, and everybody laughed
raucously. “You see, Juan Gonzalez had the lowest status in the entire
prison. He was an old peasan t who seemed to be mentally retarded. He shued along with his head bent down and rarely spoke. All he
did was take care of the prison chapel, a tiny, bare room with
nothing in it except a few wooden benches and a rough-hewn cross
on the wall. All the decoratio ns and altar pieces had been removed
long ago, or stolen. “ ‘Don’t  mind them,’ I said to Juan Gonzalez. ‘Stand up and tell
me what you feel in your meditation.’ He slowly stood up and
climbed onto his chair—I will never forget it—then he spread out
his arms as wide as possible, tilted back his head, and said, ‘Mas
amor, señor, mas amor.’
“ ‘Do you know what that means?’ my friend asked me. “ ‘I do,’ I said, seeing Juan Gonzalez in my mind’s eye and
wondering at our kinship although he was so far away. ‘It means,
“More love, sir, more love.” ’ ”
OceanofPDF.com8
The True Self
When my old friend Liam woke up one morning, got out of bed,
and had a heart attack, he didn’t bother to tell me. I only found out
a week  later when another doctor casually asked, “How’s our man
Liam enjoying his bypass?”
“What?” I stammered, dumbfounded. He stopped being so lighthearted. “You didn’t know? He was
admitted for a triple bypass last week. Don’t worry, I understand it
was a minor infarction”—meaning that only a small portion of the
heart muscle had suered permanent damage. “If you ask me, he
was lucky to nd out the way he did. He could have walked around
with three vessels blocked and dropped dead tomorrow.”
I was relieved that Liam was safe but at the same time hurt that
he had left me out. Our friendship went back more than fteen
years. We had both just immigrated to this country—he from
Ireland, I from India—burni ng to make a career for ourselves in
Boston medicine. We shared the exhausting grind young residents
are put through, seeing more of each other at the veteran’s hospital
than we saw of our families at home. Liam was a star even back then. When the rest of us were slumped
in the residents’ lounge at four A.M., too tired to lift our fth cup of
coee, he would be retell ing the day’s clinical ndings with
undiminished enthusiasm. His brilliant mind never rested, it
seemed, and his store of medical knowledge was bottomless. All he
could think of was internal medicine, and his way with duller, lesscommitted colleagues was merciless. He had all the senior residents
cowed, and more than one department head gave him a wide berth. The ip side of this diamondlike hardness of mind was Liam’s soft
way with patie nts. If a sleepy  intern took thirty seconds too long to
come up with a proper diagnosis, Liam would be jumping  down his
throat, but a burned-out alcoholic could ramble on for half an hour
and still hold his undivided  attention. In return for his ability to
truly listen, Liam won his patients’ adoration. One ominous detail
stands out in my recollection, however—Liam was alread y a heavy
chain-smoker, working his way from two to three packs a day. When I started writing books, Liam had already made his way
into mainstrea m medicine, operating a ourishing oncolo gy practice
in Atlan ta. Whenever he called, he took care never to refer to my
involvement in alternative medicine. One night, however, he
announced that his four partners, all senior oncologists, had passed
around one of my books. Their reaction was violent . “They’re
outraged, Deepak,” he said. “They don’t believe in these
spontaneous cures. They think your patients will have recurrences
sooner or later, and they say that you are undermining the
legitimate practice of medicine. You’ve blown them out!”
After Liam had reported their reaction in great detail, I hung up
feeling depress ed. It wasn’t the hostile skepticism of four strangers
that upset me—I suspected that Liam was speaking his own mind
indirectly through them. Now it was two months later, and Liam had had a premature
heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. I reached him at home. “Sorry
to be so mysterious, Deepak. It wasn’t a big deal,” Liam started o,
sounding weak  and gloomy. He was reluctant to share any details of
his attack. Yes, the infarcted area was minimal, localized to the
posterior of the left ventricle. The bypass had gone very well; he
was steadily recuperating, and there were no complications. In the midst of this rather impersonal exchange, Liam suddenly
blurted out, “I know exactly  why this thing happened, you know. It’s not the smoking, not really. For two years I’ve been growing
disenchanted with oncology. I don’t feel like doing my job anymore,and the prospect of seeing another cancer patient lls me with
revulsion. But what are my options? I feel trapped.”
I was caught o guard, but Liam rushed on without taking a
breath. “Cancer shakes peopl e up, Deepak. Some of my patients are
sti with fear. ‘I just don’t want chemotherapy,’ they insist. You and
I know that chemo is eectiv e a lot of the time. When it isn’t, I don’t
feel like pushing it, but if I don’t push it, of course I don’t get paid. A docto r can’t make a living just talking to patients, not nowadays. You have to run the procedu res that insurance companies reimburse
you for. My conscience hurts me, but I push chemo anyway. “I mean, look, all I’m trained  to do is give chemo. If I don’t, the
patient’s relatives start screaming, lawyers get involved. It becomes
very complicated very quickly. You get swallowed up in a system
that you didn’t invent. And everybody is very skeptical, every step
of the way.”
I began to sense a Liam very dierent from the one I had known
—guiltier and more vulnerable, but potentially far more self-aware. At the moment, however, this budding self-awareness came out
sounding very confused. “I’m caught in a terrible dilemm a,” he said
as his outpour ing was winding down. “I don’t want to go back to
work. As far as I’m concerned, work gave me this heart attack. But
my cardiologis t says my vessels are open. I passed the treadmill
stress test, I can walk three miles without chest pain. So I’m cured—
the fact that I hate my job and can’t stand to go back doesn’t count.”
The immediat e need was to calm the panic I kept hearing in
Liam’s voice. “Look, you’re not really trapped,” I began. “You could
make a new start tomorrow if you wanted to.”
“Deepak, everybody treats cancer this way.”
“You wouldn’t be the rst oncologist to change elds,” I replied. I
reminded Liam that he was selling his brilliant clinical abilities far
too short. “I can think of half a dozen internists who would give
their eyeteeth to have you for a partner,” I said, mentioning a
mutual friend of ours who had abandoned the city for a rural
practice in Maine. “He’d love to have you join him. You would be
doing the small town up there a service, and taking the pressure o
yourself can only help your heart.”“You’re right, you’re right,” Liam kept saying in respons e to my
encouragements. He thanked me profusely, promising to pursue the
lead, and we hung up. This incident preyed on my mind for the rest of the day and for
days afterward. What did I think about Liam now? My reaction was
not simple. When someone feels psychologically trapped, his body
can often speak louder than words. Liam was basically apologizing
for being so heartless as to have “pushed chemo” on frightened,
resistant patients. Perhaps he had to have a heart attack to prove
that he still had a heart. I felt very sorry for him if it had come to
that. I berated  myself too for not having more insight when he rst
called venting his partners’ complaints. Was he trying unconsciously
to ask for help? It certainly looked that way in retrospect. And what would happen now? People who nd themselves caught
at the crossroads of a life-threatening disease also face many deep,
painful choice s in their psyches and must make them with no
guarantee that they will choose right. It is much easier to settle for
the bypass. Patch up your heart, pay the bills, and hope the pain
stays away. This is the common tactic, but it is a perilous one. Being
a doctor, Liam knew that his fresh new graft was not a cure. It was
basically a stopgap, and in ve years or so he would probably have
to go in for another patch up, with possibly a third one ve years
after that. Would his bypassed emotions be any more merciful? After Liam did not call for a month, I heard—again at secondhand
—that he had returned to his oncology practice. I also got a call
from our mutual friend in Maine. “By the way, have you heard from Liam recently?” I asked in the
middle of our conversation. “Liam? No,” he said. “Don’t tell me he was thinking of coming up
here.”
“I don’t  know,” I said, feeling more disappointed than I had any
right to be. “Why should he?”
The Song of TruthNo one knows why people make sudden breakthroughs into self-
awareness, but when they do, the eect is often shortlived. The
moment of liberation may be earthshaking, but it passes quickly,
leaving no deep or lasting transformation in its wake. There is no
great mystery to this. The forces that uphold our familiar world
have returned with renewed  tenacity. Inertia, fear, the pull of old
habits—they all warn us to remain where we are. Who knows what
the unknown might bring? Could a completely new self even survive in this rough world? As
children we all learned not to be too sensitive, too open, too
vulnerable. We saw the obvious advantages of being as tough as
possible, of getting what you want from other people. In this way
there arose a very troubling conict—the clash between love and
power—that found lodgings deep inside each of us. Liam found himself confront ing this conict head on. Instead of
his having power over his patients because he could make life-or-
death decisions for them, their pain was starting to have power over
him. He was being put in a very awkward position: one part of him
keenly wanted  to retain control over others, while another just as
keenly wanted  to feel compa ssion for them. Compassion is a form of
love; it takes others as they are, without judgment or a sense of
superiority. It is therefore not the easiest feeling for the ego to
adjust to. On the other hand, compassion is true, and that is its great
attraction. By “true,” I mean that compassion is found at the core of human
nature, underneath the covering layers of selshness. In our time,
psychology has dwelt on selshness as a fundamental drive in the
human character, but in the yogi’s eyes, this is a profound
misjudgment. To him, compassion and its root feeling, love, are
primary in humankind. Whenever they appear, even in a ash, it is
our true self appearing, like the sun breaking through clouds. To the
yogi, love and nonlove are not striving for dominance. Love is
eternal; nonlove is temporary, a twist of the psyche that the small,
limited, fearful self falls prey to. I am not sure this position can be proved, but one can certainly
witness that love is welcomed with relief and joy whenever it issincerely given. This joy is the self’s natural response when it sees
its truthful reection. The same cannot be said for nonlove: to
achieve enormous power is rarely a joyful event. In Love and Will, Rollo May portrays a young patient who fell
victim to the unloving inue nce that power generally wields. This
boy, whose father was treasurer of a large European corporation,
entered psycho therapy with May during his early years at college. When therapy  was about to begin, the father called up to discuss
“maximizing the eectiveness of my son’s treatment,” exactly as if
he were conducting a corpora te board meeting. He had a controlling
interest in his son, although he would have called it paternal love. When the boy fell ill at school, his father ew out immediately to
take charge of the situation, but at the same time he became furious
when his son held hands with his girlfriend on the front lawn of
their resort house. May points out that the fathe r was superb at taking care of people
but had never learned to care for them, could give them his money
but not his heart, could direct them but never listen to them: “The
strong ‘will power’ which the father thought solved all his problems,
actually served at the same time to block his sensitivity, to cut o
his capacity to hear other persons, even, or perhaps especially, his
own son.”
This man exercised power over others casually , even
unthinkingly. At dinner one night he proudly told how he was
negotiating to buy a small business owned by one of his son’s
friends, but when the negotiations went too slowly, he irritably
canceled the deal, showing no remorse about driving someone into
bankruptcy with the snap of his ngers. It is no wonder that his son
had great diculty nishing school and spent years of anguish
before he could accomplish anything worthwhile on his own. One of the reasons that the yogi can endure our false world with
so much patience is that he believes in the eventual triumph of
truth. Despite the endless display of selshness in every society, he
is able to witness the possible emergence of love in everyone. Like
gravity to a physicist, love is the primordial energy in the yogi’suniverse, which no lesser force can abolish or successfully oppose,
not in the nal unfoldment of time. But it is not necessary for the millennium to creep on before the
truth triumphs . The yogi is living proof that inner unfol dment can
be hastened; the pure joy of love can be achieved in one lifetime. So
our only choice is how long to delay the moment when we
transform ourselves. The bound, ego-driven self has much to oer—
comfort, security, continuity, power—but the truth sings its own
song, and for some mysterious reason, we are tuned to hear it. I remember a tender, beckoning line from Rumi, the great Su
poet: “Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.”
This is the change that must happen. Right now, everything we
know about ourselves as individuals has been built up over time;
therefore time is also our psychological enemy, reinforcing the
boundaries that keep love out. One must go beyond time to
experience the real value of oneself, which is what a breakthrough
accomplishes. It is not a bad sign when a breakthrough makes one feel
vulnerable and undefended, as Liam so acutely felt. These are
actually desirable emotions, because they announce the possibility
of a new life. They are not safe emotions, however. To be new is to
feel terribly exposed, like a fragile hatchling. A spiritual teacher was
once giving a talk on going beyond the connement of time, seeking
the timeless in every moment, when a member of the audience
anxiously interrupted, “But if I go beyond time, won’t I miss my
morning train? ” One’s rst reaction to the unknown is often like
that: a worried anticipation that the familiar world, with its trains
that run on time, will be pulled out from under. However, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson armed that for him the
feeling of being totally free of boundaries was “not a confused state
but the cleares t of the clear,  the surest of the sure, utterly beyond
words—where death was an almost laughable impossib ility.” This
certainty was a tribute to the clarity of his experiences. In keeping
with many others who have transcended the waking state, Tennyson
concluded that those rare instances when individuality “seemed todissolve and melt away into boundless being” had shown him “the
only true self.”
If Tennyson was right, then each of us is living outside his true
self. We are not clear and sure; we are trapped in time and the pain
it bring s; we are mortally afraid of death. One might surmise that
the intensity of “the only true self” must be reserved for saints and
poets. But ordinary experien ce, the kind all of us have, is much
more profound than we give it credit for. To begin with, we spend a large part of every day in the
supremely creative act of constructing our self. If this self has aws,
it is not because we are incom petent builders; rather, the problem is
that our past mistakes have turned into us. Since adulthood, the
process of making a self has been left in our own hands, but its roots
go back to earliest childhood , when we had no choice but to imbibe
our parent’s version of selfho od. Without knowing it, we started to
be shaped. In an ideal childhood, we would have been nurtured, in Alice
Miller’s words, “by the presence of a person who was completely
aware of us, who took us seriously, who admired and followed us.”
Awareness is the prime prere quisite here; it is much more  important
than the words and actions  in themselves that a parent directs
toward a child. The words “Mommy loves you” or “You’re a good
boy” mean very little outside the look and tone of voice that
accompany them. A loving gaze turns the words into nourishment; a
troubled, hesitant, or angry gaze can turn the same words to poison. Life has proceeded, of course, on a less than ideal basis for
generation after generation. Alice Miller describes a Greek man, a
restaurant owner in his thirties, who told her very proudly one day
that he never drank alcohol and had his father to thank for it. When
he was fteen and came home one night extremely drunk , his father
beat him so severely that he could not move for a week. From that
time on he could not stand to taste so much as a drop of liquor. This
man was on the verge of getting married when Miller talked to him,
and she asked if he intended to beat his own children. “Of course,”
he replied, “beatings are necessary in bringing up a child properly:
they are the best way to make him respect you. I would neversmoke in my father’s presenc e, for example—and that is the sign of
my respect for him.”
This man was oblivious to what he was actually proposing, that it
is good to break a child’s spirit. Without a qualm, he felt it
necessary for a child to live in fear of severe punishment. After all,
for him the word “respect” basically meant “terror.” This sort of
untruth gets passed on because one generation fails to solve the
problem of the false self and then has no choice but to pass the
problem on. Broken spirits do not see anything wrong in breaking
the spirits of their children. The ideal parent would serve as a sensitive extension of the child’s
psyche. As father and mother mirrored the child’s feelings, he would
see the reection coming back to him, and conforming to it, he
would be shaped by both his own psyche and theirs. A cry of rage
would meet, for example, with an understanding look that said, “I
know why you are angry,” and in that unspoken compassion, anger
would run its course and dissolve. It is our checked feelings, the
ones that our parents labeled “bad” in their eyes, that cause so much
hidden conict later. Without this sensitive, loving interaction,
which must begin from birth, we walk through the rest of our lives
wounded, unable to accept ourselves but never fully knowing why. Having missed  the ideal upbringing, one can still repair the lack
of a totally aware parent by becoming totally aware oneself. The
ancient Indian texts often compare Yoga to becoming your own
parent. The image of “dying  to your father and mother, ” which is
frequently found in the Upanishads, does not mean running away or
turning your back on them. Rather, it means taking on their role
yourself, developing inside your own heart the give-and-take of
awareness that fashions a complete person out of the raw material
of existence. The Art of Not Doing
The morning sun sends bright shafts of light onto the Oriental
carpet in my bedroom, but I do not see them. I am sitting in an
armchair, my eyes closed, meditating. Thoughts run through myhead; I hear the sparrows squabbling outside my window and the
clicking digital  clock in the room; I scratch my ear or shue in my
seat as the spirit moves me. The picture of meditation that many
Westerners have in their mind’s eye is not this. It is of an austere,
disciplined setting, with saron-robed monks sitting row upon row
at sti attention. The room is dark, silent, and unbearably  cold. The
watchful eye of an old abbot is xed on the novice monks; he is
ready to strike them with a bamboo stick if they nod their heads or
slump their shoulders. This aura of renunciation tends to overawe most people. As much
as they might respect the inner fortitude being displayed,
Westerners are very reluctant to endure the same rigors themselves. Yet the outer picture is deceiving; the inner experience of
meditation can be had without any kind of forced discipline. The
outer trappings—how one sits, breathes, dresses, and so forth—are
really irrelevant. When I sit down to meditat e, my inner experience can best be
described by what I am not doing: I am not focusing my mind or
contemplating any idea. I am not in a spiritual or introspective
mood.
_OceanofPDF.com_Unconditional_Life_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Certainly we would feel a great deal of
discomfort, and the physical sensation of pain would begin a
complex series  of psychological reactions to produce what is called
suering. Most people believe that pain and suering are more or
less identical. This was not true for Ray, who experienced immense
pain but never converted it into suering. He had an explanation for
this:
“I felt that a decision had been made in the split second while I
was falling, pulling me back from certain death—it didn’t have to
happen that way, but it did. It was a gift. My mind went back to
that moment many times, and I found that the memory triggered a
dierent awareness in me. I can only compare it to meditation: Iwas in a place pain couldn’t reach. I had a sense of oating and of
great calmness. “Sometimes the nurse would  be packing my knee wound, which
was very uncomfortable physically. I would see her doing it, and the
signal of pain registered, but instead of stinging my mind, so to
speak, it made me feel inten se—what. —not exactly pleasure but a
sensation hard to name, intensely sweet, very intimate. It was pain
turning to tingling joy. Every time that happened, I would wonder
at it and be very glad. ”
Once he slipped into this privileged state of awareness, Ray could
divorce himsel f from his pain for hours at a time. Signicantly, he
had practiced meditation since he was eighteen, virtually all of his
adult life, and was familiar with settled states of awarenes s. He soon
showed that he was doing much more than evading pain. His sister
writes, “When  I rst saw the surgical wound around Ray’s right
knee, I was frightened at how much muscle they had been forced to
remove. Despite the grafts, there was nothing visible but tendon,
and when we returned to Seattle, several specialists advised that
muscle tissue be brought around from the back of his leg for a new
graft. “That meant major surgery, and Ray’s doctor decided to postpone
it. Keeping the tendon exposed raised the chance of infect ion, but he
wanted to wait and see for another month. In that time, Ray healed
himself amazin gly. We dressed his knee twice a day and showered it
with loving attention. (Ray would say afterwards that he could lie
back and literally feel this attention being soaked up by his body. ) Ray meditated a great deal and was up and around, tendin g the new
colts and enjoying his life to the full. “When his doctors saw him four weeks later, they were in a state
of disbelief. New muscle had started to come up around the tendon
spontaneously, appearing in every gap, and new skin was rapidly
advancing to cover it. ”
Muscle regeneration is a highly uncertain process, and there is no
guarantee that it will occur at all if the damage is this extensive. One would certainly not predict the rapid granulation of new tissue
that appeared in Ray’s destroyed knee. With undisguised wonder,one of his doctors exclaimed, “I don’t know why, but you’re a great
healer, Ray. ” No further surgery was required. Much has been written about what makes certain people heal
better and faster than others. Ray embodied many of the most
desirable quali ties. He had the courage to get up out of his hospital
bed and walk on his leg within days after his accident. When his
arm had to be amputated, he immediately learned to tie his shoes
with one hand. He unhesitatingly and hungrily accepted love when
it was oered by his family and friends. These are rare qualities of
heart and mind. Although every doctor has seen such patients, “great healers”
have proved to be too rare and too individual to study as a class. Therefore, we do not really know their secret. I believe  that what
makes such people extraord inary is not anything they do: it is
something they are. We all are. That is, we all have the certainty that we exist. A
clever debater can make you doubt almost anything you ever
believed in, but not this. “I am” lies at the core of every  person, a
rock-solid certainty he has no reason to doubt. Unless you are caught in a tortured dilemma like Hamlet, to be or
not to be is not the question. Existence comes as inevitably as being
born. Strangely, some people  take more advantage of this state than
others. They do not do more or feel more or think more. Somehow,
like light passing through a crystal-clear lens, life comes through
them clearer, brighter, and sharper than through people who exist
dully. This fact has not been lost on psychiatry, though it is seen from
the opposite end. Very few people come to therapy exhibiting
clarity. They come feeling extremely needy and dependent, or
feeling so much anxiety that they can barely face up to the ordinary
challenges of existence. Sometimes they are so depressed that
nothing in their lives, howev er vivid and moving, registers as more
than a gray smudge. In all these cases, something has gone wrong,
not just in thinking and feeling, but in being. They have lost the gift
for living. The Feeling of Specialness
Where does the gift come from. In Ray’s case, it seems to express
itself rst and foremost as a bedrock sense of security: “I was sure
from the rst that I was going to recover. There’s no expla ining why
—it was like a secret I shared with God. I called it a gift because
there are no real words to describe it. I was given a chance to
remake myself. I didn’t know how to do that, only that it was going
to happen and nothing could stand in its way. ”
By now almost everyone has read accounts of the brief near-death
experiences that occur to thousands of people every year. The
details change from story to story, but a common theme is the
sudden descent of a complete sense of security. People who come
back to life after their hearts stop beating frequently report that as
they “went into the light” or hovered above their bodies looking
down on themselves, they felt completely protected. Often this
feeling lingers  when they reluctantly take up the burden of their
bodies once more. They now nd it dicult to worry about the
things one is supposed to worry about, especially dying. It may be
that this is how we are meant to feel even without the near-death
experience. To be may not be a choice, but the way you feel about it certainly
is. Some people grow up nurturing a secret feeling that they are
somehow special. They feel guarded by providence, although they
may not reveal such a reckless belief to others. Dr. Irvin Yalom
writes about one such woman who believed in her specialness for
years, only to come out of it quite traumatically: she was deeply
shaken one day when she became the victim of a purse-snatcher in a
restaurant parking lot. Yalom writes, “Most of all, the robbery illuminated her
ordinariness, her ‘I never thought it could happen to me’ reecting
the loss of belief in her personal specialness. ” He is not referring to
any special talents or gifts that this woman possessed. It is highly
rational for people to prize that kind of specialness. But we also
have an irratio nal sense of specialness, Yalom asserts, which serves
as “one of our chief methods  of denying death. ” However, far fromdeeming it a valuable trait, psychiatrists tend to regard this way of
feeling special as undesirable, and when the woman came to Yalom
for treatment, his chief focus was to bring her to terms with her
ordinariness. This meant that he had to strip away her sense of
feeling protected against death. Here we are confronted with the ambiguous role of the psyche’s
need for self-pr otection. To feel safe from death is not something we
can easily do without; on the other hand, if the fear of death is
being forcibly suppressed in the depths of our subconscious, it could
be spreading underground terror that we ignore at our peril. As
Yalom goes on to say, “The part of our mind whose task it is to
mollify death terror genera tes the irrational belief that we are
invulnerable—that unpleasant things like aging and death may be
the lot of others but not our lot, that we exist beyond law, beyond
human and biological destiny. ”
I grant that it is a worthwhi le goal to dispel delusions and even
more worthwh ile to rid the mind of hidden fear, but beyond the
goal of mental  health lies the goal of freedom. Where is freedom to
begin if not in “that sense of specialness, of being charme d, of being
the exception, of being eternally protected” that psychiatry wants to
stamp out. All of these feelings are ones that Yalom labels as self-
deceptions. However, to think that they are illusions may itself be a
greater illusion—or so the yogis declare. The starting point for Yoga is just this sense of being special or
charmed or protected. Witho ut it, the only sane course in life would
be to come to terms with the solid, sensible world before our eyes,
complete with its burden of pain, aging, and death. At best one
would put up an “ironica l struggle,” in a famous phrase by
Montaigne, ghting the enemy who is destined to win from the rst
moment of combat. Many people, perhaps all, would leap at the chance to feel special
again, but their conditioning atly closes o that possibility. Lawrence LeShan is a highly regarded psychologist who more than
thirty years ago pioneered the startling theory that cancer has a
personal component. He argued that becoming a cancer patient is
the end product of neurotic mechanisms that go back to childhood. LeShan was also among the rst to use psychotherapy as a means to
revive the cancer patient’s buried instincts, particularly the instinct
to heal. LeShan found that he had to begin by turning the methods of
conventional therapy on their head. If a breast cancer patient goes
to a conventi onal therapis t, he would focus primarily on her
symptoms. Confronted with her psychological pain, he would try to
identify the precise source of that pain and reduce it. LeShan, on the
other hand, attempts to make cancer a turning point, with the aim,
not of reducing symptoms,  but of pushing the patien t to new
heights. He focuses on the patient’s uniqueness and individuality: a
breast cancer patient coming  to him would be told that she has “a
special song to sing in life,” a source of joy that belongs only to her. On the rst day of therapy, when LeShan looks at his patients and
announces this goal, he very often gets a blast of hostility and
rejection in return. The following are some typical responses, taken
from his book Cancer as a Turning Point:
“If I found my own music, it would be so discordant that I
wouldn’t like it, and no one else could stand it either. My
own ‘natural’ way of being is ugly and repellent. I learned a
long time ago not to express it if I wanted to have any
relationships with others or to be able to live with myself. ”
“If I found my own song and tried to sing it, I would nd that
there is no place in the world for anyone like me. ”
“My own song would have such contradictions built into it
that it would be impossible. ”
In their acute distress, these patients feel the therapist’s helping
gesture as a huge threat. They reject his “impossible” goals and hold
on desperately  to the “unselsh” values they were taught as
children. These  values include being modest and polite, never losing
one’s temper, deferring to the wishes of others, and so forth. In our
society, every good child has learned them. Yet from the mouths of
LeShan’s patients, these values sound dreadful, as if someone’s soul
has been stied. Most of us accept the same values, however, and to some extent
we, too, do not feel that the world wants to hear our music—our
most personal expressions of feeling and desire—just because it is
ours. A profound lack of self-acceptance is being revealed in this
attitude. But since we are healthy enough to stay out of therapy or a
cancer ward, we have no occasion to defend our vulnerability quite
so nakedly as these women. Whenever people actually nd their own song to sing, their deep-
seated sense of self-doubt begins to be released, leaving a space for
creativity to ll. The song turns out to be beautiful; people nd that
they can sing it without being punished and even earn a living being
themselves. “In addition,” LeShan notes, “in every case the song was
socially positive and acceptable. I have never seen an exception to
this. ” Beneath the fear of being unique, each of us has a powerful
craving for as much uniqueness and specialness as possible. In essen ce, LeShan is simply asking his patients to be themselves. Why is that prospect at rst so horrifying. Deep down, as much as
we might deny it, all of us have been hurt by having our childhood
wishes trample d on, but we accepted it “for our own good. ” A child
needs and demands to be respected as a unique person,  but being
small and helplessly attached to his parent’s approva l, he will
sacrice his own feelings to win the reward of their love. For most
of us, our parents fed us their own concept of “being good,” and we
conformed to that even if it rankled our still-selsh childi sh egos. As
the noted Swiss psychoanaly st Alice Miller points out, we were all
taught to be good before we wanted  to be good. This may sound like a ne distinction, but in later life it makes all
the dierence between freedom and slavery. As an adult, I may be
rmly habituated to being good. Whenever I give to others, I feel
superior for being able to give and sorry for anyone who cannot. Yet
the acid test is how I feel when I am doing the giving. Am I joyful
about it or merely self-righteous. Do I expect something  in return,
such as gratitude, deference, and respect. Or do I let the other
person feel what he feels, whether it is anything or nothing. Giving
can be a mark of genuine freedom, the willingness to do with less so
that someone else may have more. But a person who has learned toput on a mask of giving is in total slavery. To what. To the memory
of what he must do to make his parents happy. Beginning with our desire to please our mothers, we have learned
to read like perfect scholars the faintest hints of acceptance and
rejection in other people. As we subtly mold ourselves to this
outside pattern, it becomes second nature, a kind of false self. A gap
is created between true and false emotions, between what I should
feel and what I actually feel. The process is subtle but treacherous. If
it goes on long enough, one forgets what it is like simply to be, to let
happiness and sadness come when they will, to give or keep as the
moment dictates. For the false self does not really feel; it calculates. A life lived truly is the joining of heart and mind. As feelings
come, the mind approves and delights in them. It is not dicult to
test if someone is leading such a life, because he will readily tell you
that the best time he has ever spent is the present. This is a sure sign
that the mind is not running ahead of the heart in anticipation or
lagging behind in nostalgia. The Chinese poet Wu-Men counsels:
Ten thousand owers in spring,
the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer,
snow in winter—
If your mind is not clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life. If the balance between heart  and mind is disturbed, especially if
the subtle feeling level has been destroyed, there begins a process
we call rationalization. Why am I not happy at this very moment. “I’m too busy now. I’ll be happy when I’m successful. ”
“Today’s not a good day; I’ll be happy tomorrow. ”
“I can’t be happy with you, you’re not up to my standards. ”
“Others need me so much that I have to be responsible. ”
“Life is less risky if you are good and measure up to the
norm. ”
“I’ll be happy when I get what I want. ”In each phrase  one hears the victory of the head over the heart. Being happy is no longer immediate; it has become a distant or near
prospect, an idea rather than a feeling. In meditation the yogi tries
to clear a path for feeling, removing “unnecessary things ” from his
mind so that he can actua lly experience the bedrock of inner
satisfaction that all the ancient scriptures declare to be our
birthright. Whenever a person succeeds in joining head and heart,
that is Yoga. The reward of this union is immense: every moment
will become the best in the person’s life. A yogi balance s the qualities of intellect and feeling, but I often
think of him as a protester on behalf of the heart. Surrounded by
people (even in India) who pursue achievement without gaining
fulllment, he chooses fulllment rst. He will not let the mind rob
him of the subtle feelings of joy that come as freely as leaves blown
by the wind and are as easily swept away. The Mystery of Elaine
I sat on the edge of the emergency stretcher looking down at
Elaine in baement. It was midnight, and we had just had her
rushed from our clinic to the hospital with uncontrollable vomiting
and severe abdominal bleed ing. The crisis had erupted with little
warning. When Elaine became my patient two weeks earlier, her complaint
had been menorrhagia, or excessive menstrual bleeding. This
condition, which caused acute pain during her periods and lasted
for as long as fteen days a month, had persisted for more than a
decade. There was also a secondary complaint, which, combined
with the rst, made her mysterious in my eyes. Althoug h she had
never given birth, Elaine spontaneously secreted milk from her
breasts, a condition called galactorrhea. Medically speaking, these two symptoms are contradic tions of
each other. A particular pituitary hormone, prolactin, could have
caused her milk secretions, but another major eect of prolactin is
to stop the period. To compound matters, Elaine’s tests failed to
reveal any abnormalities in her hormone levels. I had beenpondering various explanations for her condition when she suddenly
suered this midnight attack. The young Indian doctor who was on call at our clinic that night
had sounded panicky when he phoned me, reporting that Elaine had
vomited twenty times in less than three hours. He notice d a droop
in her left eyelid and a slight facial tic, which made him fear some
kind of brain incident. He guessed that a tiny tumor, probably in the
pituitary, was beginning to hemorrhage, and he therefore had had
no choice but to get her into an ambulance as fast as possible. Now Elaine was no longer in pain and lay on the stretcher
sedated. Her symptoms had receded as unexpectedly as they had
begun, and a CAT scan, much to my relief, disclosed no sign of a
brain tumor. Incredibly, her entire sheaf of test results still indicated
that she was perfectly healthy. Nothing made any sense. As Elaine slept, I looked down at her worn, drawn face. It
occurred to me that this was the most relaxed I had ever seen her. In
her rst oce visit she had presented herself as a secure, successful
businesswoman. She owned her own public relations rm, with
twenty employees under her (they were all men, she took pains to
inform me). Whatever lay beneath this condent persona, I wasn’t
going to nd it that night. I scheduled an oce appointm ent on her
chart and in the meantime called her family doctor in Houston to
see if he could clue me in. He was not encouraging. “Elaine. ” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with her, not that I
have ever been able to nd. She has had about sixty of these attacks
in the past ten years”—Elaine had neglected to tell me that when
she came up to Boston—“and I recently told her that there was
nothing more I could do. ”
I asked him for his best guess at an accurate diagnosis. “Hysteria,”
he shot back. “No doubt in my mind. You’ll never be able to shake
her of this thing, but good luck trying. ” With obvious satisfaction he
abruptly ended the conversation. The next morning I asked Elaine about the previous attacks. Looking embarrassed, she admitted that these had occurred o and
on for fteen years, dating from when she rst got married. Did she
have a happy marriage. She turned red and looked away. “I wasraised a strict Catholic, and I feel I have a duty to remain in this
marriage. Happy. My husband treats me very well, and I respect
him as a good man. ” It turned out that because of a preexisting
organic condition, her husband had never been able to have
intimate relations with her. She described their current relationship
as caring and close but platonic. “Do you know what your doctor in Houston thinks is wrong with
you. ” I asked. She answered angrily, “He thinks I’m hysterical, of course. I’m
sure he told you that. ”
“Do you know  what is mean t by the term hysteria.
Ray experienced immense pain, but it did not turn into suffering. He instead felt a sense of calmness and security, which helped him heal his knee wound without the need for further surgery.
What did Ray experience during his accident, and how did it affect him?
Elaine was hesitant and reluctant to agree, possibly due to her past experiences and conditioning.
What was Elaine's initial reaction to the doctor's suggestion to meditate?
The doctor advised Elaine to seek instruction in primordial sound meditation, and she eventually agreed to try it, leading to her newfound sense of peace and connection with nature.
What did the doctor suggest to Elaine, and how did she respond?
The author is highlighting the importance of acknowledging and addressing the underlying fear of death, which is often suppressed, and the need to confront and overcome it to achieve true self-awareness.
What is the author suggesting about the role of the psyche's need for self-protection?
The author believes that self-acceptance is crucial for true freedom and that it is not about achieving a specific goal, but rather about being aware of one's true nature and accepting oneself.
What is the author's opinion on the concept of self-acceptance?