(There is goodreason for all the ancie nt medicines to say that man is
made of earth, air, ﬁre, and water .) Because the body is
intelligent, it knows this fact, and when it returns home to
Nature, it feels free. With overﬂo wing joy it knows its
mother . That feeling of freedom and joy is vital—it allows
inner and outer nature to blend. The same is true of the
quantum mechanical body; it is just a doorway back to
Nature. One does not even need to explain it, except for the
sad fact that the intellect, going against Nature, has done
such a good job of blocking the door . —
There is a lot more to say about the quantum mechanical
body. I can think of nothing we need to know more about. Today, medic ine wants to make the leap beyond its present
dilemmas, but the wanting has turned into waiting. A fellow
student from my medical-school days in New Delhi has
risen meteorically as a research physician in the United
States, becoming a professor at Harvard Medical School
before he turned 45. Recently we sat after dinner in a
Boston restaurant and he predicted the future. “All the top
researchers met quietly in Washington,” he said glumly ,
“and we agreed that by the year 2010, no major cancer
would be cured, and there would be no breakthrough in
understanding AIDS .”
This gloomy prognostication must be avoided at all costs. It may be impeccable science, but it makes no sense from
the quantum perspective. We are all expert navigators in
the realm of ? zone, where science gropes with one small
light. Doesn’t this suggest a solution? The mysterious
breakdowns of the body’s intelligence that occur in cancer
and AIDS may all be traceable to a single distortion—a
wrong detour into the hidden regions of DNA’s intelligence. To see how the mind-body problem can be solved, we needto look more closely at these detours and their invisible
origin. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Reading this chapter almost three decades after I wrote it,
two impressions strike me, one theoretical, the other
medical. The theoretical part refers to a knowledge
explosion in all the sciences. The medical part has to do
with applying this new knowledge to healing diseases and
moving human evolution forward. There is a huge
mismatch between the two . By 2003, the Human Genome Project, considered the
greatest scientiﬁc triumph at the end of the twentieth
century , had mapped the three billion base pairs that
constitute human DNA. Yet the promise of quick major
advances in genetic medical treatments never materialized. Except for treating a handful of quite speciﬁc cancers (for
example, those where a single genetic mutation can be
targeted using a speciali zed “designer drug”), the general
medical applications have been nil. The vast majority of
designer drugs are also exorbitantly expensive. In physics, the rise of superstring theory from its roots in
the 1980s has been the main “advance” in understanding
the quantum domain since Quantum Healing  appeared. The
quotation marks refer to the fact that not a single
experiment has validated string theory , a purely
mathematical construct that so far doesn’t have practical
applications except to employ more physicists to invent
new variations on the theory . A third mismatch, which is in neuroscience, revolves
around the baﬄing dilemma known as the “hard problem,”
a term coined by the Australian philosopher David
Chalmers and which quickly took hold. The hard problem ishow to explain the mind as it relates to the brain. Despite a
ﬂood of new knowledge about how the brain works, none of
this fascinating data comes close to solving the hard
problem—the mind remains as elusive as ever. There isn’t
even a basic explanation for where thoughts come from. The deﬁnition of life oﬀered in this chapter , “intelligence
wrapped up in chemicals,” puts the dilemma in a nutshell. How did intelligence ever get associated with inert physical
lumps built from atoms, molecules, and subatomic
particles? I’ve put the whole state of mismatch in simple terms, but
I haven’t distorted it. Biology , genetics, physics, and
medicine are at once roaring successes and under threat of
reaching a dead end. The successes get a lot of publicity ,
the dead end almost none. Most people will shrug oﬀ the
news that despite decade s of deep thinking and billions of
dollars spent  on high-speed particle accelerators, physics is
no closer to a Theory of Everything and may actually have
moved backward. The discovery of so-calle d dark energy
and matter (“dark” means both invisible and outside the
parameters of accepted natural laws) has shaken physics to
the core. The public can also shrug oﬀ the frustratingly slow
progress of genetic medicine, although on the medical front
there is increasing awareness that highly touted drugs
either don’t  work well or fail to produce any of the
advertised results (a recent example being the revelation
that statin drugs, widely prescribed to lower cholesterol, in
fact don’t reduce the risk of having a heart attack). To actually grasp the devastating mismatch between
theory and application, you have to stand far, far back. Every single scientiﬁc fact has its source in the emergence
of matter and energy , space and time, from a hidden state
in the quantum domain. This is where  reality comes from. A
gene, a molecule of serotonin, the World Series, a rose, theAndromeda galaxy , and your next thought all arise from a
pre-created state. So-called quantum foam is the bubbling
up of the universe from a source that gives rise to space
and time without being in space and time. It serves as the
womb for matter and energy without itself being material
or exhibiting the traits of the four forces that “glue” the
universe together (gravity , electromagnetism, and the weak
and strong forces). Standing this far back, close to the source, all mysteries
converge. But the one mystery that would impact every
person’s life, the riddle that cannot be shrugged oﬀ as an
arcane scientiﬁc quest, is the hard problem. We must
discover whether mind or matter comes ﬁrst in creation. The other mysteries will all be answered once this one is
answered. Here is what’s at stake, depending on whether
“mind ﬁrst” or “matter ﬁrst” is correct. If mind  is primary and matter is secondary , then we live
in an intelligent universe. All the aspects of human
intelligence are invisibly wrapped up in every atom. We are
creative because the universe is creative. Our lives have
purpose and meaning because we emerged in a meaningful
cosmos. Matter arises, then, because cosmic intelligence
needed a way to express itself . Nothing abou t the unfolding
universe from  the instant of the Big Bang has been  random,
then. Randomness is a mere appearance, like the stirring of
water and ﬂour when a baker kneads his dough. Flour and
water molecules whirl around with no discernible order as
the kneading proceeds, yet we know that a completely
purposeful outcome—a loaf of bread—is being produced. On the other hand, if matter is primary in creation, then
mind arrived much later, after billions of years of random
interactions between atoms and molecules. There is no
underlying purpose or meaning to the emergence of mind. It just happened that the ﬁrst three atoms that coalesced
after the Big Bang—hydro gen, helium, and lithium —starteda journey on the way to becoming interstellar dust. The
dust randomly formed stars; some of these stars exploded
as supernov as, and the heavy atoms of iron and other
metals went on to gather into planets. On one planet, Earth, the same random process
continued to produce the chemicals necessary for life. From these primitive organic molecules DNA eventually
formed, and if we jump ahead three billion years, living
cells created a nervous system that evolved into the human
brain. Only at the end of this incredibly complex but always
random chain of events did mind emerge. I’ve skewed the choices in favor of the ﬁrst one, “mind
ﬁrst.” The second narrative, “matter ﬁrst,” seem s
unbelievable to me. The chance that human DNA evolved
from random processes over ten billion years is like the
chance that a hurricane can blow through a junkyard and
create a Boeing 747, to use a famous metaphor from the
British physicist Fred Hoyle. But by backing the “mind
ﬁrst” explanation, Quantum Healing  ange red as many
people as it inspired, because “matter ﬁrst” is the basis of
every natural science. Since science continues to produce
newer and better technologies (Quantum Healing  was
written in a world without iPhones, tablets,  Google,
Wikipedia, etc. ), how dare anyone suggest that science is
headed for a dead end? Time has proved the skeptics and defenders of the status
quo wrong. Across the spectrum of science new thinking
arose to close the gap between theory and application by
returning to the fundamental mystery of the mind and
where it came from. The hard problem has led, directly or
indirectly , to new ﬁelds like quantum biology , undreamed of
thirty years ago. Consciousness has become an area of
serious scien tiﬁc inquiry where it was arrogantly dismissed
when I was writing the book—consciousness was simply a
given, like the air we breathe. You can build a car withoutknowing how respiration works. You can’t explain the
cosmos, life, the brain, or evolution without unde rstanding
consciousness. This realization overturned the applecart. The apples are still scattered. Angry divisions exist
between total materialist s at one end of the spectrum and
proponents of panpsychi sm (the notion that everything in
existence is conscious) at the other end. Religion has been
hauled into the discuss ion, usually by militant atheists,
because claiming that intelligence is woven into the
universe implies a cosmic  mind. A cosm ic mind sounds a lot
like God, and God raises  the unholy specter of Intelligent
Design. People are now wrapping  their minds around how
design and intelligence can both exist without a Creator
God. (The dilemm a is less painful in the East, since the
philosophies derived from ancient India  didn’t
automatically connect cosmic mind with a God in human
form. India has always been comfortable with abstractions,
especially when it comes to higher consciousness.) It’s poignant to look around at a scene so ﬁlled with
confusion, divisiveness, and ill will. But the waters aren’t
actually muddy . The hard problem has forced amazing
creativity to emerge. Especially among the younger
generation, “mind ﬁrst” is being seen as the only viable
option. When Quantum Healing  was written, you risked your
scientiﬁc reputation to say that mind creates matter (even
though the brain performs this act of transformation every
time a thought creates a shift in the chemistry inside a
neuron). According to the prevailing worldview back then,
the body is a machine, the brain a “computer made of
meat,” the mind a second ary eﬀect, like the heat given oﬀ
by a bonﬁre. Now the tide has turned. None of those beliefs
hold water, even if they stick around as tenets of rigid
materialism. The reality, that we are thoughts that learnedto create a body, is far more miraculous, and it’s also the
truth. OceanofPDF .comNo one will ever see the quantum mechanical body. For
many people, this will be a problem. Not just scientists but
all of us are comfortable with things we can see and touch. The history of modern medicine consists largely of tracking
down solid objects that cause disease, although almost all
of them dwell in the realm  of the invisible, beyond anything
the naked eye can perceive. A canny observer in fourteenth-century Europe  might
have conjectured that a rat in the house portended the
danger of bubonic plague (in actuality , rats were so
common that the connection was never made); spotting a
ﬂea on the rat’s pelt gets one closer to the actual cause, but
only when you investigate the rat’s blood under a
microscope and ﬁnd the bacterium Pasteurella pestis  have
you actually solved the riddle of the Black Death, a nemesis
of mankind so ancient that it is credited with decimating
the Persian army when it marched against Greece in the
ﬁfth century B.C. Without a microscope, what would a bacterium be? Something invisible to the eye and yet as big as the world,since it reaches every locale on Earth, even the poles. It
would come and go like smoke, penetrating the tightest
sealed doors and windows—if you believed only in your
senses, the ability of such an organism to be nowhere and
everywhere at the same time would seem fantastic. In
essence, the quantum world is but another step down on
the scale of invisibility . Unlike the tiniest bacteria or
viruses, a single photon, electron, or any other object in the
quantum world can neve r be seen using any extension of
sight and touch. They are truly everywher e and nowhere at
the same time. This fact hardly concern ed medicine until very recently ,
because the smallest virus is still many millions of times
larger than an elementa ry particle. Also, germs are quite
stable in time and space, while quantum objects wink in
and out of existence unpredictably . If Pasteurella pestis
lurks in your blood, it is there, absolutely and deﬁnitely ,
unlike the ghostly mesons that leave faint ﬂashes on a
photographic plate for a few millionths of a second, only to
vanish out of material existence, and most unlike the
neutrino, which can pass undetected through the entire
Earth as though nothing stood in the way . The vast diﬀerence in scale between medicine and
quantum physics safely kept the two sciences on separate
ground until 1987, when a French immunologist, Jacques
Benveniste, performed an experiment that is outrageous to
all nonquantum views of the world. On the surface, the
experiment began innocuously . Dr. Benveniste took a
common antibody called IgE (standing for immunoglobulin
E type) and exposed it to certain white cells in the blood
called basophils. It is well known what happens when these
two interact—the IgE antibody clamps on ﬁrmly to speciﬁc
receptor sites and waits. What it is waiting for is an
invading molecule ﬂoating by in the bloodstream that needsto be defended against. In this case, the invader  is not a
germ but an antigen, a substance that causes allergies. If you are allergic to bee sting, the molecules of bee
venom would  not be in your body more than a few seconds
before they triggered the IgE antibody . It in turn would set
oﬀ a comple x chain reaction in the cell that throws the
body’s allergic response into high gear; the basophil would
release a chemical called histamine, which causes the
swelling, redness, itching, and shortness of breath typical
of an allergy attack. The mystery  in allergies is that the
antigens, the oﬀending substances entering the body, are
generally harmless—wool, pollen, dust—and yet the
immune system treats them like the deadliest enemy . To
ﬁnd their cause, allergies have been thoroughly studied at
the molecular level, and one of the results is a ﬁrm grasp of
IgE. This sets the stage for Dr. Benveniste’s dramatic
experiment. He took some human blood serum full of white
cells and IgE and mixed  it with a solution prepa red from
goat’s blood that was certain to trigger the release of
histamine. This second solution contained an anti-IgE
antibody , which represents bee venom, pollen, or other
antigen. When the IgE and the anti-IgE hit, the reaction in
the test tube went oﬀ exactly as it would in a person with a
bad allergy , and large  amounts of histami ne were
produced. Benveniste then diluted the anti-IgE tenfold and added it
again—still the same reaction. He kept on diluting, time
after time, and as before, about half of the IgE (40 to 60
percent) continued to react. This was extremely surprising,
because he was well past the limit where the solution
should be chemically active. He decided to dilute the anti-
IgE even more, making it a hundred times weaker each
time, until he knew that there was no anti-IgE at all. His
last dilution contained 1 part antibody to 10120 parts water;if written out, this number would be expressed as 10
followed by 120 zeroes. Using a constant called Avogadro’s
number , he conﬁrmed mathematically that it was
impossible for the water to contain a single molecule of
antibody . When he added this “solution,” which was now
just distilled water , the histamine reaction was set oﬀ with
the same power as before. (The classic Humphrey Bogart
movie, To Have and Have Not, contains the quirky line,
“Have you ever been stung by a dead bee?” In this case,
the bee is also invisible.) Although his result was an absurdity , Benveniste
duplicated it seventy times, and asked other research
teams to repeat it in Israel, Canada, and Italy—all  came up
with the same result. They all discovered that you can
trigger the immune system with an antibody that isn’t
there. In our terms, Benveniste had uncovered the ghost of
memory—he himself speculates whether water contains the
phantom imprint of the molecules that were once in it. His
results were reluctantly published in the June 1988 issue of
the prestigious British journal Nature . Its editors frankly
declared their repugnance at the result, stating quite
rightly that “there is no physical basis” for it. The human
white cells were acting as if the anti-IgE was attacking
them from everywhere when in fact it was nowhere. —
Medicine is reluctant to walk through the quantum door,
even though this experiment clearly opens it. * It was widely
held that Benveniste was lending credence to the methods
of homeopathy , a medic al system invented two hundred
years ago by a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann, and
still popular throughout Europe. The term homeopathy
comes from two Greek roots that mean “similar suﬀering”;
this points to the fundam ental homeopathic principle that“like treats like.” Homeopathy approaches  all diseases
using Benve niste’s meth od: tiny amounts of antagonistic
substances are taken by the patient to build up immunity or
to drive out a disease if it is already present. When conve ntional medicine administers a smallpox
vaccine, it appears that homeopathic logic is at work—the
dead virus in the vaccine stimulates anti-smallpox
antibodies in the body. (This method of ﬁghting smallpox
goes back to ancient China, where doctors knew to take
scabs from the sores of smallpox victims and rub them on
small cuts in the arms of those they wanted to protect from
the disease.) Unlike vaccination, however , homeopathy is
based on symptoms rather than on the actual organisms
that cause a disease. Using an elaborate system of poisons and toxic herbs that
mimic the symptoms of true disease, the homeopath gives
the body a taste of what he wants to cure. Ground-up Nux
vomica  seeds, for example, which contain strychnine,
would be given to counteract chronic fatigue and
irritability , because they produce these symptoms
themselves. Benveniste’s experimen t in fact did not
endorse homeopathic logic as a whole but only a corner of
it, by showin g that the body can react to a micro dose of a
foreign substance. The rest of homeopathy remains
ambiguous. (The principle of “like treats like” is accepted
in Ayurveda, and even broadened to say that every part of
the body is matched by herbs, minerals, and even colors
and sounds that can be used to treat it. However , Ayurveda
does not follow the homeopathic logic that the body should
be made sick in order to make it well.) The deeper import of Benveniste’s experiment, I believe,
is brought out by one of the quantum diagrams from the
last chapter:A bodily process, we noted, is like a bucket brigade, a
chain of events passing from one step to another , with the
exception of the ﬁrst bucket (B). This bucket appears as if
out of nowhere, even though we can obviously see that it is
triggered by some initial impulse (A). What Benveniste did
so beautifull y was to strip this model down to its barest
essentials:
We continually cross over from the state of no molecules
to one. If you try to remember the ﬁrst time you ever drove
a car, the brain chemicals  present on that occasion have by
now vanished. (Most of them disappeared before the drive
was over.) When you re-create that memory today , seeing
the car and feeling the steering wheel in your hands, you
are triggering cellular reactions that begin “nowhere,”
since your brain cells are as empty of the old molecules as
Benveniste’s water .If you can explain how the bodymind gets from no
molecules to one, then a great many mysteries about the
brain will be cleared up. After that ﬁrst tiny bit of matter ,
the rest of the sequence follows laws of nature that are well
known. Aside from homeopathy , I see a much clearer
example in the strange psychiatric cases known as multiple
personalities. Nothing in the mind-body ﬁeld seems quite
so inexplicable, for when a person with multiple
personalities shifts from one to the other , his body shifts
too. One personality might have diabetes, for example, and
the person will be insulin-deﬁcient as long as that
personality is in force. Yet the other personalitie s may be
completely free of diabetes, recording the same blood
sugar levels as a normal person. Daniel Goleman, a
psychologist and frequent reporter on mind-body topics,
describes a child named Timmy who adopts nearly  a dozen
separate personalities. One of these breaks out into hives if he drinks orange
juice. “The hives will occur ,” Goleman writes, “even if
Timmy drink s orange juice and another personality  appears
while the juice is still being digested. What is more, if
Timmy comes back while the allergic reaction is present,
the itching of the hives  will cease immediately , and the
water-ﬁlled blisters will begin to subside.”
When I ﬁrst read these words, I felt very excited. Medical
texts do not say that allergic reactions can be turned oﬀ
and on at will. How could they? The white cells of the
immune system, coated with antibodies like IgE, merely
wait for the contact of an antigen. When contact occurs,
they are automatically triggered to react. Yet, in Timmy’s
body, one has to envision the orange-juice molecules
approaching the white cell, and then a decision  is made
whether to react. This implies that the cell itself is
intelligent, just as I have been arguing. Moreover , itsintelligence is wrapped up in every molecule, not doled out
to a special one like DNA, for the antibody and the orange
juice meet end to end with very ordinary atoms of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen. To say that molecules make decisions deﬁes current
physical science—it is as if salt sometimes feels like being
salty and sometimes not. But to cross over from one event
in the bodymind to another is always a projection of
intelligence; it is only the remarkable swiftness and
intensity of Timmy’s case that stuns us. Once we absorb the
fact that he is choosing to be allergic—for how else could
he turn his hives oﬀ and on?—then we confront the
possibility that we, too, are choosing our own diseases. We
are not aware of this choice, because it takes place below
the level of our conscious thoughts. But if it is present, we
should be able to change it. All of us can shift the biology of our bodies from one
extreme to the other . When you are wildly happy , you are
not the same person, physiologically speaking, as when you
are deeply depressed. The multiple personalities
demonstrate that this ability to change from the inside is
under precis e control. I’d like to relate a bit of Chopra
family lore that relates to this and also, curiously enough,
to the IgE antibody . My father is a cardiologist in India. For many years he
served as an army doctor , which required us to move from
post to post throughout the country . While I was an infant,
he was sent to Jammu, far away to the north in the state of
Kashmir . I remember nothing of our stay there, but for
years I heard about the terrible allergies my mother
suﬀered in that place. Her tormentor was the pollen of a
native ﬂower that covered the ground when it blossomed
every spring. It caused her to have severe asthma attacks;
her body swelled, and on her skin appeared large red weltsand blisters (her condition is known as angioneurotic
edema). My father is very devo ted to my mother , and out of
compassion he drove her every spring to Srinigar , the
capital of Kashmir . The air in Srinigar is free of this
particular pollen, and she was delighted to ﬁnd herself in a
mountain valley that is one of the most beautiful places on
Earth. One spring the heavy rains had made the road
impassable, and my father decided that they should ﬂy
back home early . They boarded  the plane, and after an hour
it touched down. He put his hand reassuringly on my
mother’s arm, but he could already see the red spots on her
skin and the eﬀort it took for her just to breathe. My
mother’s allergy was so severe that the steward ran up and
asked what was wrong. “There’s nothing you can do,” my father said. “It’s the
pollen in Jammu.”
“Jammu?” The steward looked puzzled. “We haven’t
landed there yet—this is Udhampur , our ﬁrst stop. Didn’t
they tell you?”
My father was quite startled. When he looked at my
mother , her wheezing had subsided and her sores were
vanishing on the spot. For years afterward he would shake
his head and mutter , “All you have to do is say the word
Jammu  and your mother breaks out.” When I told him about
the IgE experiment, he was very relieved—now he had a
scientiﬁc answer , of sorts, to our family mystery . My mother
has only one personality , but this shift was both extreme
and swift. Many multip le-personality cases have been studi ed and
veriﬁed, particularly by Dr. Bennett Braun, a research
psychiatrist and specialist in the ﬁeld. When the patient’s
personality shifts, warts, scars, and rashes have been seen
to appear and disappear , along with hypertension andepilepsy . A speciﬁc personality can be color blind, only to
return to normal sight when the personality changes back. Almost as a rule, such patients have at least one
personality that is a child, and when it emerges, their
bodies respond to lower doses of drugs. In one case, 5
milligrams of a tranquilizer made the patient relaxed and
sleepy when he was a child, while a dose twenty times
stronger had no eﬀect on the adult. Mystiﬁed researchers are looking for a mechan ism to
explain these seemingly impossible occurrences; it will be
found, I believe, only by seeing that a quantum shift has
taken place. A personality has no molecules in it, being
composed only of memories and psychological tendencies;
yet these are more permanent than the cells being aﬀected. This is not a huge mystery—every molecule in your own
body is wrapped up, as we saw, with a bit of invisible
intelligence. Memory is not a term used by physicists, and yet it is
easy to ﬁnd it in the quantum world—particles that are
separated by immense distances of space-time know what
one another are doing. When an electron jumps into a new
orbit on the outside of an atom, the anti-electron (or
positron) paired with it must react, no matter where it lives
in the cosm os. In fact, the entire universe is knitted
together by this kind of memory network. To a physicist, the only puzzle in Benveniste’s experiment
is that no one has ever believed that quantum events take
place at the level of molecules. A photon sits on the
quantum threshold, where faint, random vibrations are the
rule. Some of these vibrations die oﬀ into nothingne ss;
others wake up and enter material reality as matter or
energy . Because the photon is almost nothing to begin with,
it can wink in and out of existence. A molecule like IgE,
however , is tremendously more substantial than these
ﬂuctuating vibrations. If it weren’t,  molecules might jumpin and out of existence without warning—along with things
made out of molecules, like blue whales and skyscrapers. Since this does not happen, it has not been deemed
necessary to invest molecules with memory . To understand how such memory works, one has to know
more about the quantum level of nature. Its peculiarity ,
setting it aside from all other states of matter and energy ,
is its emptiness. We have already seen that at its heart, an
atom is almost totally empty , being proportionately as void
as intergalac tic space. The same must hold true for us,
since obviously we are made of atoms. That means we are
made out of a void; more than anything else, it is our raw
material. Instead of seeing the space among the stars as bleak,
cold, and lifeless, one should look through a physicist’s
eyes and see it packed  with unseen energy waiting to
coalesce into atoms. Every cubic centimeter of space teems
with energy , nearly inﬁnit e amounts of it, although much of
this energy is in “virtual” form, meaning that it is locked up
and plays no active part in material reality . (A wonderful
line from an ancient Indian Upanishad declares, “The
power penetrating the universe is much more than what,
shines through.” In terms of quantum objects, most of
which are locked up in virtual form, this is true literally .) Our senses are not prepared to see emptiness as the
womb of reality , being tuned in to a grosser level of nature
populated with ﬂowers, rocks, trees, and our families. It is
said that the human eye can distinguish 2 million shades of
color , each of which occupies a narrow band of light energy ,
but our optical mechanism nevertheless doesn’t register
these energy  vibrations as vibrations. Much less do we
register a chunk of solid marble as vibrations, although at
bottom that is what it is, just the same as color . As light shifts from color to color , each small gradation
exerts an enormous inﬂuence. Visible light,  for example,gives the world shape and deﬁnition as perceive d by our
eyes. If you shift down just slightly to the infrared band, the
human eye would feel warm from the light but be blind; if
you shift up to X rays, the eye would be destroyed. Every
quantum gradation is slight, but it implies a completely
new reality at the grosser level of molecules and living
things. The spectrum of light is like a long, continuous
string, vibrating slower at one spot and faster at another . We make our home on a tiny part of the spectru m, but it
takes the entire length for us to exist. Beginning at zero
vibration, shakes of the string are responsible for the light,
heat, magnetism, and countless other discrete energy
forms that ﬁll the unive rse. It is just a few steps on the
ladder of creation from empty space to intergalact ic dust to
a sun and ﬁnally the living Earth. What this shows is that
emptiness, the point of zero vibration, is not a void but the
starting point for everything that exists. And this starting
point is always in contact with every other point—there are
no breaks in continuity . The reason for discussin g the subatomic void is that we
experience the void every time we think. Just as in the
universe at large, someth ing material—the neuropeptide—
springs out of nowhere. In this case it is not the atoms of
the neuropep tide that are created, because the necessary
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so forth are already present
in the glucose that the brain uses as fuel. What is created
out of nowhere is the conﬁguration of the neuropeptide,
but that is magical enough. At the very instant that you think, “I am happy ,” a
chemical messenger translates your emotion, which has no
solid existenc e whatever in the material world, into a bit of
matter so perfectly attuned to your desire that literally
every cell in your body learns of your happiness and joins
in. The fact that you can instantly talk to 50 trillion cells intheir own language is just as inexplicable as the moment
when nature created the ﬁrst photon out of empty space. These brain chemicals are so small that it has taken
science several centuries to identify them. Yet if we look at
the messeng er molecules as being the ﬁnest material
expression of intelligence the brain can produce, we have
to admit that they are still not quite ﬁne enough to build a
secure bridg e between mind and body. In fact, nothing
could be ﬁne enough, because one shore we want to
bridge, the mind, is not small in any physical sense—to
think that a thought has a size is absurd. Mind is not
“hanging out” in space taking up room, even the
inﬁnitesimal room needed for an electron. The obvious
nonsense of putting mind into a box was one of the chief
reasons why science separated mind and matter to begin
with, since all matter can ﬁt into a box. Fortunately ,
quantum physics comes to the bridge builder’s rescue. It
was born to explore these nonsensical-seeming regions on
the fringes of space-time. Quantum physics has taken responsibility for measuring
things that are as small  as possible. The atom, although
very small, was found around 1900 to have a nucleus, and
when that was sliced apart, its smallest unit seemed to be
the proton, until further atom-smashing reveale d, at the
edge of material existence, still ﬁner particles called
quarks. Beyond the quark, howev er, the smashing seems to
stop. One would think that there has to be something material
out there that the quark is built from. Strangely enough,
this does not seem to be true. In ancient Greece, the
philosopher Democritus ﬁrst proposed that the material
world was composed of minute, invisible particle s, which
he named atoms, from the Greek word for “not divisible.”
When Plato heard of this theory (which of course could not
be tested experimentally), he oﬀered an objection thatuncannily predicts quantum physics. If we think of an atom
as a thing, Plato argued, then it must take up some space;
therefore, it can be cut in half to occupy a smaller space. Anything that can be cut in half is not the smallest
constituent of the material world. By this impeccable reasoning, Plato demolished all solid
particles as contenders for nature’s basic buildi ng block,
not just the atom, but the proton, electron, and quark. All of
these can be cut in half, even if we can’t actually do it,
without end. Whatever it is that builds the world, it must be
something so tiny that it occupies no space. Plato
contended that the world was born out of invisible , perfect
forms, simila r to geometric shapes. In its turn, modern
physics has turned to somewhat more tangible alternatives,
such as invisible matter called “Virtual” particles, as well
as to energy ﬁelds. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2
proved that energy could be transformed into matter , and
this allowed physics to go beyond the barrier that is
“smaller than small.”
No one can conﬁdently say what builds a quark, but it is
certainly not a piece of matter in solid form—the quark is
already outside the limit of anything that one can “see” or
“touch,” even using scientiﬁc instruments to extend our
senses; its building block may well be merely a vibration
that has the potential to turn into matter . Therefore, it is
smaller than small. To a physicist, all size stops at a speciﬁc
number , 10–33 cubic centimeters, an inconceivable fraction
that can be written out as 1⁄10 follow ed by 32 zeros; this is
known as Planck’s limit, a kind of absolute zero for space,
just as there is an absolute zero for temperature. Once this barrier is reached, however , what lies beyond? Here physical science stands mute. But it is fascinating to
discover that all the founders of quantum physics were
basically Platonists. That is, they believed that the world of
things is a shadowy proje ction of a vaster , invisible realitythat is nonmaterial. Some, like Einstein, stood  in awe at the
orderliness of nature without ascribing intelligen ce to it. Others, like Eddington, ﬂatly declared that the raw
material of the whole universe is “mind-stuﬀ .” Eddington
defends his position with a logical argument as elegant as
Plato’s. Our picture of the world,  he points out, is basically
a form ation of brain impulses. This is forme d in turn out of
impulses traveling up and down the nerves. These in turn
come from vibrations of energy at the ends of the nerves. At the basis of the energ y is emptiness, the quantum void. Which part is real? The answer is none, because every step
along the way, from energy vibrations to nerve impulses to
brain formation, is just a code. No matter where you look, the visible universe is
fundamentally a set of signals. Yet these signals all hold
together , turning totally meaningless vibrations into full-
blown exper iences that have human meaning. The love
between man and wife can be broken down into raw
physical data, but to do that is to lose its reality . Therefore,
Eddington says, all these codes must stand for something
more real, something beyond our senses. At the same time,
this something is very intimate to us, for all of us can read
the code, turning random quantum vibrations  into an
orderly reality . A good image for this would be a pianist playing a Chopin
etude. Where is the music? You can ﬁnd it at many levels—
in the vibrating strings, the trip of the hammers, the ﬁngers
striking the keys, the black marks on the paper , or the
nerve impulses produced in the player’s brain. But all of
these are just codes; the reality of music is the shimmering,
beautiful, invisible form that haunts our memories without
ever being present in the physical world. —To be like the quantum, the body does not have to banish
its molecules to another dimension; it has only to learn to
re-form them into new chemical patterns. It is these
patterns that jump in and out of existence, paralleling what
happened in Benveniste’s test tubes. If you think hard
about leaping  oﬀ a cliﬀ and your heart starts to pound, you
have generated adrenaline using a stimulus that is just as
invisible as the anti-IgE in the experiment. Similarly , one of
Timmy’s personalities remembers how to be allergic to
orange juice, even though that personality may hide in
some invisible realm for days at a time. As soon as it
returns, the body must obey its commands. I have tried to make all of this sound reasonable, contrary
to one of the editors at Nature,  who said that the IgE
experiment, if true, throws out two hundred years of
rational thought in biology . But biology will have to change
now, and medicine with it. Contrary to what physicians
currently suppose, the abnormal pancreas of a diabetic is
not as real as the distorted memory that has wrapped itself
inside the pancreatic cells. This realization opens the door for quantum healing. The
mental techniques used by Ayurveda depend on being able
to control the invisible patterns that order the body. Recently I saw a patient, an elderly woman, who was
suﬀering from dull chest pains; they had previously been
diagnosed as angina pectoris, one of the most common
symptoms of advanced heart disease. Between January and
May of that year, she had recorded sixty attacks of angina,
which were relieved by taking a nitroglycerine tablet. I
instructed her in the “primordial sound technique” for
heart disease, and she left to practice it on her own. In July, about two months later, my patient wrote me a
letter stating that her attacks had stopped on the day she
received the technique and have never recurred. She feels
comfortable in activity now—most angina suﬀerers areextremely anxious about exerting themselves, even slightly . On her own she has discontinued the use of her medication,
and she recently enrolled as a full-time college student. She
was very proud to write this last piece of news, since she is
88 years old. In my own mind, I explain this result by saying that the
mind-body connection is coming under control. I would also
say that the Ayurvedic technique is not magical; it is only
imitating nature. Is there any diﬀerence  between my
patient making her angina disappear and a multiple
personality doing the same thing? A skeptical doctor might object that angina usually has
two causes. One is spasm of the coronary arteries, the
blood vessels that feed oxygen to the heart. If these go into
spasm and squeeze shut, then the oxygen-depriv ed heart
muscle screams out in pain. My patient must have had this
kind of angina, a skeptic would say. The other kind is
caused by fatty blockages in the coronary arteries and
couldn’t possibly be cured by a mental technique. I would
have to answer that both examples involve memory . The
fatty blockages are not as substantial as they appear . If you
perform a heart-bypass graft and replace the old clogged
arteries with open ones, the new replacements will often
clog up in a matter of months. This is because the vessel
has changed but the ghost of memory has not—it still wants
to load fatty plaque into that artery . On the reverse side, many bypass patients don’t feel the
return of their agonizing, frightening chest pain, even with
clogged arteries, because they are sure that their surgery
cured them. Surgeons have even experimented with
placebo operations, doing nothing more than opening the
chest and closing it again—a good percentage of those
patients felt relief from their angina. In fact, my patient did
not have blocked coronary arteries, but the mechanism
behind her angina was physically real nonethe less; herbrain did not X-ray her blood vessels before reacting with
pain. If I have a patient who is afraid, I can grasp his hand
reassuringly and he will feel better; this happens even
under anesthesia. You can grasp the patient’s hand at a
diﬀicult mom ent in surgery and see the monitors for blood
pressure and heartbeat register the calming eﬀect. The
heart and the brain, it seems, are connected much deeper
than where molecules are. One sees the truth of this
whenever a baby is cradled in its mother’s arms. Within a
few minutes, the two of them will be breathing together ,
even if the baby is asleep, and their heartbeats will start to
synchronize (they will not match beat for beat, since the
child’s heart rate is faster than the mother’s). This
bodymind connection is invisible, but who would call it
unreal? It has been passed on silently from generation to
generation. Perhaps it still wraps us all in a bond of
sympathy . Out of separate beings, trapped in their own
concerns, it helps to mold one human race. —
Once science recovers from its shock over the IgE
experiment, a new domain will need to be explored, the
domain of emptiness. Quantum physics has discovered
something mysteriously rich about empty space. Now we
are on the verge of extending this richness into the human
dimension. The universe in its primordial state has been likened to
energy soup that turned into particles of matter . I would
liken us, then, to intelligence soup—except that we aren’t
soup at all but intelligence that has learned to crystallize
into beautifu l, precise, powerful, organic particle s we call
thoughts. This makes the void inside us far more
fascinating than the one that gave birth to the universe.EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Revealing the strangene ss of “nowhere and everywhere”
was important when getting at the true nature of reality . But it probably left readers wondering how to navigate
such bizarre territory . The temptation is to fall back on a
default position that takes the world of the ﬁve senses as is. Even physicists who understand that physical objects are
reducible to invisible clouds of energy in an inﬁnite
quantum ﬁeld still drive their Honda or bicycle to work, not
an energy cloud. Since this chapter was written,
experiments about water having memory seem to be
largely discredited, yet the debate about homeopathy
hasn’t been settled. It’s inevitable that studies showing that home opathic
treatments for the ﬂu actually work are balanced by studies
showing that they don’t. The prestigi ous British medical
journal The Lancet  has weighed in several times on the
issue, endorsing homeopathy as being only as eﬀective as a
placebo, while generally  dismissing the whole approach. And yet The Lancet  also reviewed studies of ﬂu vaccines in
elderly peop le and found no eﬀectiveness either in
preventing the disease or lowering hospital admissions due
to complications. Going further , after analyzing “every
study published in any language,” The Lancet  “could not
ﬁnd a single study that showed a ﬂu vaccine led to the
reduction in mortality or serious complications from the
ﬂu.” Disease, it seems, keeps pushing the mystery of mind
and body into our lives. But my mind always returns to the practical side—how
can we learn to navigate quantum reality when it’s invisible
and totally counterintuitive, where everythin g solid,
tangible, ﬁxed, and reliable dissolves in our hands? The
answer isn’t to return to school and get an advanceddegree in physics. Either the quantum domain makes a
diﬀerence in daily life, here and now , or it’s irrelevant. I actually did ﬁnd two physicists who helped guide me
through the morass: Amit Goswami, then at the University
of Oregon, and Menas Kafatos at Chapman University in
Orange, California. They became  close colleagues, a source
of far-reaching ideas, and sometime coauthors. (The
skeptical assault is relentless, and it was necessary to
present highly credentialed scientists as allies and
defenders.) It was Kafatos who ﬁrst showed me the
breakthrough I was seeki ng when it came to navigating the
quantum domain. To see where our thinking  led us, stop the clock this very
minute. What are you doing? You are participating in
reality . In what way? By perceiving  what’s around you. Your
eyes see this page, but out of the corner of your eyes you
are aware of the room you’re sitting in. Smells and sounds
are ﬂoating your way. The air brushing past your skin is
warm or cool. These are the qualities of life. Thanks to
Newton’s theory of optics, sunlight can be broken down
into the colors that compose it, but this analysis isn’t the
same as seeing a rainbow in the sky, and very far from how
you feel while gazing at it. We participate in the world through experience. Winnowing the experience of a rainbow down to
wavelengths of light, weather conditions, time of day, the
refractive power of raindrops—all of that is
nonparticipatory . The mind has to stand apart to collect
data and make measurements leading to more data. By
standing apart, science can reveal a host of facts, but as
the poet William Wordsworth astutely observed, “we
murder to dissect.” Once you cut an experie nce up into
measurements, data, and facts, the life has gone out of it. The dissecting mind is as deadly as a scalpel.In the name of objectivity , science excludes subjective
experience, on the grounds that subjectivity is ﬁckle,
unpredictable, prone to biases, etc. But this attitude, pure
as its motives may be, forgets that life is what we live. The
universe is what we participate in. Experience is what we
have. Even doing science is another kind of experience. So it follows that to explain the universe, it’s just as
viable to begin with our experience of it. More viable,
actually , because attempting to be totally objective about
the world is a chimera. Too much is happening “under the
table,” to use a phrase in earlier chapters. The domain of
ﬁxed physical objects that can be measured and cut like a
tailor making  a suit excludes most of what makes life worth
living—love, beauty , creativity , insight, gratitude,
reverence, art, music, and intuition. These, too, are the ﬁts
we gain by participating in the universe rather than staring
at it with our noses pressed up against the glass, like
children pressing up to a bakery window . The building blocks of experience are known as qualia,
related to the Latin word for quality . An apple has the
qualities of sweet, red, crunchy , and tart. Those qualia are
what the brain processes  in order for an apple to exist. My
inner respon se to eating an apple is also qualia. “Out
there” the apple’s qualia  seem to be physical and beyond
my inﬂuence. “In here” my response to eating an apple—
whether I like apples or not, ﬁnding this one too sweet or
overripe, and so on—is also a world of qualia. Both kinds of
experience, inner and outer, are created in consciousness. For that reason, subjecti vity is no longer the elephant in
the room. A science based on qualia can have the best of
objectivity and subjectivity . Let’s transla te these points into personal terms. How do
you experience your body? You have external experie nces—
looking at yourself in the mirror , jogging around the park,
ordering dessert in a restaurant. You also have innerexperiences—feeling your muscles grow tired while you
jog, thinking  you look old when you see yourself in the
mirror , wrestling with your conscience about ordering
dessert in a restaurant. Clearly all of these experiences are
linked, and they begin “in here.”
“In here” is the source of sensations, images, feelings,
and thoughts, reducible to the acronym SIFT, devised by
Daniel J. Siegel, professor of psychiatry at the University of
California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. In his clinical
work, Dr. Siegel has made important breakthroughs
matching subjective states with areas of the brain in a
healing relationship. A patient who claims to have no
emotions, for example, is subjectively describing a state of
numbness that won’t be purely subjective. In the amygdala,
the area of the brain devoted to emotions, there will be a
parallel—the objective and subjective domains merge. Materialists claim that the amygdala creates emotions,
putting the objective evidence ﬁrst and foremost. No doubt
a brain scan will show increased or decreased activity in
areas of the amygdala that correlate with what a patient
feels. But neurons don’t laugh and cry; people do. Medicine
isn’t out to make the amygdala feel better; it aims to make
the patient feel better . What Dr. Siegel perceived is that he
could work from both ends of the spectrum—and this leads
to an extraordinary conclusion. We don’t have to say that the brain creates the mind or
that the mind creates the brain. In a continuous feedback
loop, emotions are always creating molecules in the brain,
and these chemicals inﬂuence the next emotion. Nature
crosses the mind-body barrier all the time, revealing that it
was constructed arbitrarily to ﬁt a certain worldview . With
a shift in worldview , everything changes. The redness of an
apple doesn’ t have to be “out there” while its sweetness is
“in here.” In fact, there is no such thing as “out there” and“in here.” There is only the quantum ﬁeld producing
diﬀerent aspects of experience. In the Bhaga vad-Gita (the Song of the Lord from ancient
India), Lord Krishna declares, “I am the ﬁeld and the
knower of the ﬁeld.” This carries us deeper into reality . Instead of talking about the quantum ﬁeld, we can simply
refer to “the” ﬁeld—reali ty itself . Here, knowe r and known
are not separate. They are fused into a holistic experience. To bring this back to your body , you experience your hand
as a thing, a pink, ﬂeshy appendage you can wave in front
of your face. You also experience it as a tool when you
hammer in a nail, a source of Eros when you stroke the skin
of your beloved, the extension of your imagination when
you pick up a paintbrush, a calculating instrument when
you count on your ﬁngers, and much more. Life ﬂows
through this pink ﬂeshy appendage according to what the
mind desires. Therefore, to say that you exist inside your body is
entirely untrue. The truth is that your body exists in you,
inside your consciousness. Nothing about your hand—
movement, touch, pain, dexterity , et cetera—exists
anywhere except in consciousness. And since every quality
you experien ce comes from the ﬁeld, you can echo Lord
Krishna: You are the ﬁeld and the knower of the ﬁeld . Now you no longer have to travel under the assumed
identity of “I,” the limited ego trapped inside a package of
skin and bone. Your actual identity takes you to the level of
the quantum  mechanical human body. From there no one
can predict the kind of power , creativity , and control that’s
available. Particularly in the West, getting past the
boundary of the ego is new territory . We are condi tioned by
materialism and the scientiﬁc attachment to facts, data,
and objectivity . Fortunately , participating  in the universe isn’t Eastern or
Western. I’ve come to believe that it’s more reliable to feelone’s way through life than to try to ﬁgure everything out
mentally . Bringing medicine back to a patient’s personal
reality , ﬁlled  with unique experiences, memories, likes and
dislikes, core beliefs, and expectations—that will be the key
to quantum healing on a scale my book only hinted at. * In July 1988, a month after publishing his ﬁndings, Nature  sent a team of
investigators to France to view Benveniste’s experiment and clear up their
disbelief . Unfortunately , he was unable to consistently duplicate his results in
their presence; some trials worked, others didn’t. Subsequently , Nature
repudiated his work, calling his results a “delusion.” A heated controversy
arose that has not been settled to date. Benveniste still stands behind his
work (his original paper was signed by twelve other researchers in four
countries). Since the ability of water to remember is inexplicable, its ability to
forget can hardly be held against it! These may be two sides of the same coin. OceanofPDF .comThe pressing need for a quantum medicine is well
illustrated, I think, by the following case study . A young Israeli named Aaron, 24 years old, called me at
my oﬀice and said, “I feel perfectly healthy , but my doctor
has given me ninety days to live. He took some tests which
showed that I have an incurable blood disorder—that was
exactly twenty-three days ago .”
Barely mana ging to suppress his emotions, he told me a
story that had taken several strange turns. His diagnosis
had come about entirely by accident. Because of an old
soccer injury , he had a deviated septum, which  made it
diﬀicult for him to breathe. He visited a surgeon in Chicago
who could repair his nose—Aaron had moved to the United
States several years earlier to attend business school—and
the surgeon asked him to have a routine blood test. When the results came back from the lab, the doctor was
very disturbed. They showe d that Aaron was severely
anemic: his hemoglobin count had fallen from a normal of
14 to 6 (a count of 12 would be considered borderline
anemic); hemoglobin is the chemical componen t of theblood that carries oxygen throughout the body. His
hematocrit had plummeted to 16; this means that when his
blood was spun in a centrifuge to separate the red blood
cells from the plasma, the red cells occupied  only 16
percent of the total volum e. In normal blood, this shou ld be
closer to 40 percent. Aaron was immediately referred to a blood specialist, a
hematologist, who asked him a standard series of
questions. “Have you been feeling short of breath lately?”
“No,” Aaron answered. “Do you wake up in the middle of the night feeling
suﬀocated?”
“No.”
“Have your ankles been swelling up?”
“No.”
The hematol ogist looked  at him very hard. “Look,” he
said, “you’re pretty tired  all the time, aren’t you?” Aaron
shook his head. “That’s amazing!” the doctor exclaimed. “With your hemoglobin counts, you should be in congestive
heart failure by now .”
Aaron was shocked. Looking at the blood tests, however ,
his doctor had a right to be amazed. In severe anemia, the
heart has to work much harder than normal to supply
enough oxygen to the rest of the body. This, combined with
its own oxygen deprivation, causes the heart muscle to
swell, leading to congestive heart failure. The patient
begins to wake up at night feeling that he is suﬀo cating to
death, and eventually that is what happens. Mystiﬁed, the hematologist took a sample of Aaron’s
bone marrow . The body typically contains only 9 ounces of
bone marrow , but that is enough to manufacture our total
supply of red blood corpu scles, at a rate of 200 billion new
cells per day. Under examination, Aaron’s marrow showedno signs of the red-cell precursors that should have been
present. The hematologist now knew that at the root of
Aaron’s condition was a shutdown of the bone marrow
(called aplastic anemia), but he could not determine any
cause for it. Even without symptoms, Aaron was very sick. “No one knows for sure how long a red blood cell lives,”
the doctor said. “The accept ed ﬁgure is one hundred
twenty days, but it could be as short as a month. Since you
are not replacing your current red cells, I’m afraid you
cannot live much longer than ninety days.”
As Aaron listened numbly , the doctor told him that
medicine could do very little for him—the suggested
treatment was a bone marrow transplant, a major
operation that he might not survive and that probably
would not save him. He could be given a blood transfusion
to raise his red-cell count, but the sudden incursion of
another person’s blood would further dampen his bone
marrow function; moreo ver, when the marrow detected
that the blood count was up again, it might interpret that
as a sign to roll back even further . Because he felt no symptoms, Aaron hesitated to undergo
the transplant. The hematologist gave him two weeks to
decide. He also said that it was his legal duty to advise the
young man to settle his aﬀairs as quickly as possible. (Aaron was not exactly treated with compassion at any step
of the way. At one point, he divulged to his doctor that his
older sister had died suddenly and tragically in law school. The cause of death, though vague, was thought to be a rare
blood disorder , perhaps inherited. On hearing this, the
hematologist enthusiastically asked Aaron to try to ﬁnd out
precisely what his sister had died of, since together he and
she would make an excellent article for the journals. When
Aaron later recounted this incident, I found myself growing
extremely angry . )Within a day of his diagno sis, Aaron began to feel short of
breath and found himse lf unable to sleep. He sought in
desperation for a way to cure himself . Almost by chance he
took up meditation and heard about our Ayurvedic clinic. Within a month, he had become my patient in Lancaster . “The most hopeful thing,” I said, “is that you felt healthy
before you found out what was wrong with you. Let’s go on
the assumption that you are controlling this disorder and
do everything we can to allow your body to heal itself .”
Without knowing what caused his disease, I found as I
was interviewing Aaron that there were many points of
concern. The ﬁrst was the frightening diagnosis itself ,
which had thrown him into a panic. In such a condition, it is
diﬀicult to see how the bodymind could begin to ﬁnd a
route toward  healing. In addition, Aaron seem ed a tense
and driven person. He had worked four jobs at a time while
he was in school, pushing himself to the limit in order to
buy a car and keep ahead of school debts. The pressure of
school itself was enormous. He routinely took huge doses of
vitamins, plus an anti-ulcer medication to soothe his
chronic stomach pain. A few months earlier he’d had
tendonitis from playing tennis too hard and had taken an
anti-inﬂammatory agent to bring down the swelli ng—such
drugs are known to suppress bone marrow function. I
asked him to discontinue all medication. He stayed two weeks at the clinic and for the ﬁrst time
lived in an environment free of “normal” stress. He
continued to meditate, ate a simple vegetarian diet suited
to his particular body type, and received a course of
massage treatments that Ayurveda prescribes to purify the
physiology . I also instructed him in the primordial sound
technique suitable for his condition. One night a nurse
caught him walking down the hall with wet hair, and he
sheepishly confessed that he had sneaked oﬀ the property
to go swimming. When I heard this, I was very happy—another patient with Aaron’s blood count could easily have
been on oxygen and blood transfusions. The signs were
more than encouraging. On the day he left, I asked Aaron not to have any more
blood tests for at least two weeks. A blood sample drawn at
Lancaster had disclosed that his supply of immature red
blood cells, called reticulocytes, was four times higher than
when he entered. Since these are the cells that later
mature into red corpusc les, I felt that his condition had
turned around. As I write, Aaron has just outlived his
original prognosis. He is still severely anemic, but on the
other hand he has not gone into the serious decline
expected of someone whose blood count is heading toward
zero. In fact, his anemia has slightly improved. —
In my mind, Aaron stands  on the dividing line between two
kinds of medicine. The ﬁrst is standard scientiﬁc medicine,
whose methods are deepl y ingrained in me, but which I can
no longer trust absolutely . It is not that standard medicine
has failed. Aaron’s doctors expertly tracked down his
disease at every level of the body, from tissues to cells to
molecules—in Aaron’s case, the tissue was bone  marrow ,
the cells were red blood corpuscles, and the molecule was
hemoglobin. To a doctor trained in conventional medicine,
this is the end of the route, a route that has taken two
centuries of painstaking ly rational investigation to ﬁnd. Once you know what is wrong with a person’s very
molecules, what else can be known? This logic is impeccable science, but it is dangerously
divorced from  the ordinary input of life. By “ordinary input”
I mean  what a person eats and how he sleeps, the thoughts
that go through his head,  and all the sights, smells , sounds,
and textures that enter through his senses. You can say
that the body is made out of molecules, but with equaljustice you could say that it is made out of experiences. That deﬁnition matches our own self-image, which is not
scientiﬁc but ﬂuid, changeable, and alive. Out of ordinary
experiences, the second medicine, which is quantum, takes
its origin. We might casually think that everyday life is too
commonplace and simple for science to bother with. In
truth, it is far too complex. Although a molecule of
hemoglobin is structured out of 10,000 separate atoms, it
can be isolated and mapp ed—a feat that has led to several
Nobel prizes. However , to trace what hemoglobin is doing
when you take in a single breath would be impossible,
because each red blood cell contains 280 million molecules
of hemoglobi n, each of which picks up 8 atoms of oxygen. Considering that the lungs expose about one quart of blood
to the air per breath, containing 5 trillion red cells, the
total number  of chemical exchanges is astronom ical. The
whole process quickly disintegrates into a swirling chaos of
activity . When you open the human body during surgery , what
confronts you is not the well-deﬁned map of textbook
anatomy , with the nerves in blue, blood vessels in red, and
a green liver neatly set apart from a yellow gallbladder . Instead, an uneducated eye sees a jumble of tissu e that is
mostly undiﬀerentiated—almost all of it is pink and moist;
one organ slides imperceptibly into another . The great
wonder is that scientiﬁc medicine has learned as much as it
has about this pulsating chaos. But in return for its
knowledge, science has paid a high price by having to
abandon ordinary experi ence. A breath of air, after all, is
not chaos, except to a molecular biologist. Breathing is the
basic rhythm of life, upon which all other rhythms are
based. Eric Cassell, a professor of physiology at Cornell, astutely
points out that when a doctor asks his patient questions, heis not trying to ﬁnd out what is wrong with him; he is trying
to ﬁnd out what symptoms he might have that match a
known, classiﬁed disease. This is a subtle but very
important distinction. It reminds us that the whole system
of organs, tissues, and so on was set up intellectually to
make the body easier to classify . There must be other views
that are truer to nature, in that they rely on ordinary
experience, defying nature’s disorderly exterior in order to
understand its real meaning. Chaos is just an appearance, a mask, and with a diﬀerent
eye it metam orphoses into pure order . Until its code was
cracked, a honeybee’s dance looked like chaos, a random
display of twitches and turns. Now we see it as a precise
set of direct ions leading the other bees in the hive to a
source of nectar . This does not mean that the dance
changed from chaos to order , only that its appearance
changed in our eyes. Similarly , if you take a few blood
pressure readings from a heart patient, it is unlikely that
they will form any pattern, but if you monitor him
constantly , a deﬁnite wave pattern emerges, with peaks and
valleys that occur over the space of one or two days. This
fact, which was only recently uncovered, has allowed
cardiologists to detect hypertension in patients who have
deceptively normal press ure in a doctor’s oﬀice because
their peaks occur only at night. Clearly some kind of tidal
swing is at work, but no one yet knows its signiﬁca nce. The
mask of chaos is too freshly broken. The two medicines do not have to be antagonists, but for
the moment they clearly face in opposite directions. To a
hematologist, it is largely irrelevant if Aaron is tense,
driven, full of dubious substances, and panicked at the
thought of dying. To an Ayurvedic doctor , these are primary
inputs to his sickness—they have entered on the quantum
level, where he turns  into the person he is. The
hematologist is not being heartless; he may care verydeeply about Aaron, but he cannot prove a connection
between bone marrow dysfunction and working four jobs at
a time.
Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        (There is goodreason for all the ancie nt medicines to say that man is
made of earth, air, ﬁre, and water. ) Because the body is
intelligent, it knows this fact, and when it returns home to
Nature, it feels free. With overﬂo wing joy it knows its
mother. That feeling of freedom and joy is vital—it allows
inner and outer nature to blend. The same is true of the
quantum mechanical body; it is just a doorway back to
Nature. One does not even need to explain it, except for the
sad fact that the intellect, going against Nature, has done
such a good job of blocking the door. —
There is a lot more to say about the quantum mechanical
body. I can think of nothing we need to know more about. Today, medic ine wants to make the leap beyond its present
dilemmas, but the wanting has turned into waiting. A fellow
student from my medical-school days in New Delhi has
risen meteorically as a research physician in the United
States, becoming a professor at Harvard Medical School
before he turned 45. Recently we sat after dinner in a
Boston restaurant and he predicted the future. “All the top
researchers met quietly in Washington,” he said glumly,
“and we agreed that by the year 2010, no major cancer
would be cured, and there would be no breakthrough in
understanding AIDS. ”
This gloomy prognostication must be avoided at all costs. It may be impeccable science, but it makes no sense from
the quantum perspective. We are all expert navigators in
the realm of. zone, where science gropes with one small
light. Doesn’t this suggest a solution. The mysterious
breakdowns of the body’s intelligence that occur in cancer
and AIDS may all be traceable to a single distortion—a
wrong detour into the hidden regions of DNA’s intelligence. To see how the mind-body problem can be solved, we needto look more closely at these detours and their invisible
origin. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Reading this chapter almost three decades after I wrote it,
two impressions strike me, one theoretical, the other
medical. The theoretical part refers to a knowledge
explosion in all the sciences. The medical part has to do
with applying this new knowledge to healing diseases and
moving human evolution forward. There is a huge
mismatch between the two. By 2003, the Human Genome Project, considered the
greatest scientiﬁc triumph at the end of the twentieth
century, had mapped the three billion base pairs that
constitute human DNA. Yet the promise of quick major
advances in genetic medical treatments never materialized. Except for treating a handful of quite speciﬁc cancers (for
example, those where a single genetic mutation can be
targeted using a speciali zed “designer drug”), the general
medical applications have been nil. The vast majority of
designer drugs are also exorbitantly expensive. In physics, the rise of superstring theory from its roots in
the 1980s has been the main “advance” in understanding
the quantum domain since Quantum Healing  appeared. The
quotation marks refer to the fact that not a single
experiment has validated string theory, a purely
mathematical construct that so far doesn’t have practical
applications except to employ more physicists to invent
new variations on the theory. A third mismatch, which is in neuroscience, revolves
around the baﬄing dilemma known as the “hard problem,”
a term coined by the Australian philosopher David
Chalmers and which quickly took hold. The hard problem ishow to explain the mind as it relates to the brain. Despite a
ﬂood of new knowledge about how the brain works, none of
this fascinating data comes close to solving the hard
problem—the mind remains as elusive as ever. There isn’t
even a basic explanation for where thoughts come from. The deﬁnition of life oﬀered in this chapter, “intelligence
wrapped up in chemicals,” puts the dilemma in a nutshell. How did intelligence ever get associated with inert physical
lumps built from atoms, molecules, and subatomic
particles. I’ve put the whole state of mismatch in simple terms, but
I haven’t distorted it. Biology, genetics, physics, and
medicine are at once roaring successes and under threat of
reaching a dead end. The successes get a lot of publicity,
the dead end almost none. Most people will shrug oﬀ the
news that despite decade s of deep thinking and billions of
dollars spent  on high-speed particle accelerators, physics is
no closer to a Theory of Everything and may actually have
moved backward. The discovery of so-calle d dark energy
and matter (“dark” means both invisible and outside the
parameters of accepted natural laws) has shaken physics to
the core. The public can also shrug oﬀ the frustratingly slow
progress of genetic medicine, although on the medical front
there is increasing awareness that highly touted drugs
either don’t  work well or fail to produce any of the
advertised results (a recent example being the revelation
that statin drugs, widely prescribed to lower cholesterol, in
fact don’t reduce the risk of having a heart attack). To actually grasp the devastating mismatch between
theory and application, you have to stand far, far back. Every single scientiﬁc fact has its source in the emergence
of matter and energy, space and time, from a hidden state
in the quantum domain. This is where  reality comes from. A
gene, a molecule of serotonin, the World Series, a rose, theAndromeda galaxy, and your next thought all arise from a
pre-created state. So-called quantum foam is the bubbling
up of the universe from a source that gives rise to space
and time without being in space and time. It serves as the
womb for matter and energy without itself being material
or exhibiting the traits of the four forces that “glue” the
universe together (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak
and strong forces). Standing this far back, close to the source, all mysteries
converge. But the one mystery that would impact every
person’s life, the riddle that cannot be shrugged oﬀ as an
arcane scientiﬁc quest, is the hard problem. We must
discover whether mind or matter comes ﬁrst in creation. The other mysteries will all be answered once this one is
answered. Here is what’s at stake, depending on whether
“mind ﬁrst” or “matter ﬁrst” is correct. If mind  is primary and matter is secondary, then we live
in an intelligent universe. All the aspects of human
intelligence are invisibly wrapped up in every atom. We are
creative because the universe is creative. Our lives have
purpose and meaning because we emerged in a meaningful
cosmos. Matter arises, then, because cosmic intelligence
needed a way to express itself. Nothing abou t the unfolding
universe from  the instant of the Big Bang has been  random,
then. Randomness is a mere appearance, like the stirring of
water and ﬂour when a baker kneads his dough. Flour and
water molecules whirl around with no discernible order as
the kneading proceeds, yet we know that a completely
purposeful outcome—a loaf of bread—is being produced. On the other hand, if matter is primary in creation, then
mind arrived much later, after billions of years of random
interactions between atoms and molecules. There is no
underlying purpose or meaning to the emergence of mind. It just happened that the ﬁrst three atoms that coalesced
after the Big Bang—hydro gen, helium, and lithium —starteda journey on the way to becoming interstellar dust. The
dust randomly formed stars; some of these stars exploded
as supernov as, and the heavy atoms of iron and other
metals went on to gather into planets. On one planet, Earth, the same random process
continued to produce the chemicals necessary for life. From these primitive organic molecules DNA eventually
formed, and if we jump ahead three billion years, living
cells created a nervous system that evolved into the human
brain. Only at the end of this incredibly complex but always
random chain of events did mind emerge. I’ve skewed the choices in favor of the ﬁrst one, “mind
ﬁrst. ” The second narrative, “matter ﬁrst,” seem s
unbelievable to me. The chance that human DNA evolved
from random processes over ten billion years is like the
chance that a hurricane can blow through a junkyard and
create a Boeing 747, to use a famous metaphor from the
British physicist Fred Hoyle. But by backing the “mind
ﬁrst” explanation, Quantum Healing  ange red as many
people as it inspired, because “matter ﬁrst” is the basis of
every natural science. Since science continues to produce
newer and better technologies (Quantum Healing  was
written in a world without iPhones, tablets,  Google,
Wikipedia, etc. ), how dare anyone suggest that science is
headed for a dead end. Time has proved the skeptics and defenders of the status
quo wrong. Across the spectrum of science new thinking
arose to close the gap between theory and application by
returning to the fundamental mystery of the mind and
where it came from. The hard problem has led, directly or
indirectly, to new ﬁelds like quantum biology, undreamed of
thirty years ago. Consciousness has become an area of
serious scien tiﬁc inquiry where it was arrogantly dismissed
when I was writing the book—consciousness was simply a
given, like the air we breathe. You can build a car withoutknowing how respiration works. You can’t explain the
cosmos, life, the brain, or evolution without unde rstanding
consciousness. This realization overturned the applecart. The apples are still scattered. Angry divisions exist
between total materialist s at one end of the spectrum and
proponents of panpsychi sm (the notion that everything in
existence is conscious) at the other end. Religion has been
hauled into the discuss ion, usually by militant atheists,
because claiming that intelligence is woven into the
universe implies a cosmic  mind. A cosm ic mind sounds a lot
like God, and God raises  the unholy specter of Intelligent
Design. People are now wrapping  their minds around how
design and intelligence can both exist without a Creator
God. (The dilemm a is less painful in the East, since the
philosophies derived from ancient India  didn’t
automatically connect cosmic mind with a God in human
form. India has always been comfortable with abstractions,
especially when it comes to higher consciousness. ) It’s poignant to look around at a scene so ﬁlled with
confusion, divisiveness, and ill will. But the waters aren’t
actually muddy. The hard problem has forced amazing
creativity to emerge. Especially among the younger
generation, “mind ﬁrst” is being seen as the only viable
option. When Quantum Healing  was written, you risked your
scientiﬁc reputation to say that mind creates matter (even
though the brain performs this act of transformation every
time a thought creates a shift in the chemistry inside a
neuron). According to the prevailing worldview back then,
the body is a machine, the brain a “computer made of
meat,” the mind a second ary eﬀect, like the heat given oﬀ
by a bonﬁre. Now the tide has turned. None of those beliefs
hold water, even if they stick around as tenets of rigid
materialism. The reality, that we are thoughts that learnedto create a body, is far more miraculous, and it’s also the
truth. OceanofPDF. comNo one will ever see the quantum mechanical body. For
many people, this will be a problem. Not just scientists but
all of us are comfortable with things we can see and touch. The history of modern medicine consists largely of tracking
down solid objects that cause disease, although almost all
of them dwell in the realm  of the invisible, beyond anything
the naked eye can perceive. A canny observer in fourteenth-century Europe  might
have conjectured that a rat in the house portended the
danger of bubonic plague (in actuality, rats were so
common that the connection was never made); spotting a
ﬂea on the rat’s pelt gets one closer to the actual cause, but
only when you investigate the rat’s blood under a
microscope and ﬁnd the bacterium Pasteurella pestis  have
you actually solved the riddle of the Black Death, a nemesis
of mankind so ancient that it is credited with decimating
the Persian army when it marched against Greece in the
ﬁfth century B. C. Without a microscope, what would a bacterium be. Something invisible to the eye and yet as big as the world,since it reaches every locale on Earth, even the poles. It
would come and go like smoke, penetrating the tightest
sealed doors and windows—if you believed only in your
senses, the ability of such an organism to be nowhere and
everywhere at the same time would seem fantastic. In
essence, the quantum world is but another step down on
the scale of invisibility. Unlike the tiniest bacteria or
viruses, a single photon, electron, or any other object in the
quantum world can neve r be seen using any extension of
sight and touch. They are truly everywher e and nowhere at
the same time. This fact hardly concern ed medicine until very recently,
because the smallest virus is still many millions of times
larger than an elementa ry particle. Also, germs are quite
stable in time and space, while quantum objects wink in
and out of existence unpredictably. If Pasteurella pestis
lurks in your blood, it is there, absolutely and deﬁnitely,
unlike the ghostly mesons that leave faint ﬂashes on a
photographic plate for a few millionths of a second, only to
vanish out of material existence, and most unlike the
neutrino, which can pass undetected through the entire
Earth as though nothing stood in the way. The vast diﬀerence in scale between medicine and
quantum physics safely kept the two sciences on separate
ground until 1987, when a French immunologist, Jacques
Benveniste, performed an experiment that is outrageous to
all nonquantum views of the world. On the surface, the
experiment began innocuously. Dr. Benveniste took a
common antibody called IgE (standing for immunoglobulin
E type) and exposed it to certain white cells in the blood
called basophils. It is well known what happens when these
two interact—the IgE antibody clamps on ﬁrmly to speciﬁc
receptor sites and waits. What it is waiting for is an
invading molecule ﬂoating by in the bloodstream that needsto be defended against. In this case, the invader  is not a
germ but an antigen, a substance that causes allergies. If you are allergic to bee sting, the molecules of bee
venom would  not be in your body more than a few seconds
before they triggered the IgE antibody. It in turn would set
oﬀ a comple x chain reaction in the cell that throws the
body’s allergic response into high gear; the basophil would
release a chemical called histamine, which causes the
swelling, redness, itching, and shortness of breath typical
of an allergy attack. The mystery  in allergies is that the
antigens, the oﬀending substances entering the body, are
generally harmless—wool, pollen, dust—and yet the
immune system treats them like the deadliest enemy. To
ﬁnd their cause, allergies have been thoroughly studied at
the molecular level, and one of the results is a ﬁrm grasp of
IgE. This sets the stage for Dr. Benveniste’s dramatic
experiment. He took some human blood serum full of white
cells and IgE and mixed  it with a solution prepa red from
goat’s blood that was certain to trigger the release of
histamine. This second solution contained an anti-IgE
antibody, which represents bee venom, pollen, or other
antigen. When the IgE and the anti-IgE hit, the reaction in
the test tube went oﬀ exactly as it would in a person with a
bad allergy, and large  amounts of histami ne were
produced. Benveniste then diluted the anti-IgE tenfold and added it
again—still the same reaction. He kept on diluting, time
after time, and as before, about half of the IgE (40 to 60
percent) continued to react. This was extremely surprising,
because he was well past the limit where the solution
should be chemically active. He decided to dilute the anti-
IgE even more, making it a hundred times weaker each
time, until he knew that there was no anti-IgE at all. His
last dilution contained 1 part antibody to 10120 parts water;if written out, this number would be expressed as 10
followed by 120 zeroes. Using a constant called Avogadro’s
number, he conﬁrmed mathematically that it was
impossible for the water to contain a single molecule of
antibody. When he added this “solution,” which was now
just distilled water, the histamine reaction was set oﬀ with
the same power as before. (The classic Humphrey Bogart
movie, To Have and Have Not, contains the quirky line,
“Have you ever been stung by a dead bee. ” In this case,
the bee is also invisible. ) Although his result was an absurdity, Benveniste
duplicated it seventy times, and asked other research
teams to repeat it in Israel, Canada, and Italy—all  came up
with the same result. They all discovered that you can
trigger the immune system with an antibody that isn’t
there. In our terms, Benveniste had uncovered the ghost of
memory—he himself speculates whether water contains the
phantom imprint of the molecules that were once in it. His
results were reluctantly published in the June 1988 issue of
the prestigious British journal Nature. Its editors frankly
declared their repugnance at the result, stating quite
rightly that “there is no physical basis” for it. The human
white cells were acting as if the anti-IgE was attacking
them from everywhere when in fact it was nowhere. —
Medicine is reluctant to walk through the quantum door,
even though this experiment clearly opens it. * It was widely
held that Benveniste was lending credence to the methods
of homeopathy, a medic al system invented two hundred
years ago by a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann, and
still popular throughout Europe. The term homeopathy
comes from two Greek roots that mean “similar suﬀering”;
this points to the fundam ental homeopathic principle that“like treats like. ” Homeopathy approaches  all diseases
using Benve niste’s meth od: tiny amounts of antagonistic
substances are taken by the patient to build up immunity or
to drive out a disease if it is already present. When conve ntional medicine administers a smallpox
vaccine, it appears that homeopathic logic is at work—the
dead virus in the vaccine stimulates anti-smallpox
antibodies in the body. (This method of ﬁghting smallpox
goes back to ancient China, where doctors knew to take
scabs from the sores of smallpox victims and rub them on
small cuts in the arms of those they wanted to protect from
the disease. ) Unlike vaccination, however, homeopathy is
based on symptoms rather than on the actual organisms
that cause a disease. Using an elaborate system of poisons and toxic herbs that
mimic the symptoms of true disease, the homeopath gives
the body a taste of what he wants to cure. Ground-up Nux
vomica  seeds, for example, which contain strychnine,
would be given to counteract chronic fatigue and
irritability, because they produce these symptoms
themselves. Benveniste’s experimen t in fact did not
endorse homeopathic logic as a whole but only a corner of
it, by showin g that the body can react to a micro dose of a
foreign substance. The rest of homeopathy remains
ambiguous. (The principle of “like treats like” is accepted
in Ayurveda, and even broadened to say that every part of
the body is matched by herbs, minerals, and even colors
and sounds that can be used to treat it. However, Ayurveda
does not follow the homeopathic logic that the body should
be made sick in order to make it well. ) The deeper import of Benveniste’s experiment, I believe,
is brought out by one of the quantum diagrams from the
last chapter:A bodily process, we noted, is like a bucket brigade, a
chain of events passing from one step to another, with the
exception of the ﬁrst bucket (B). This bucket appears as if
out of nowhere, even though we can obviously see that it is
triggered by some initial impulse (A). What Benveniste did
so beautifull y was to strip this model down to its barest
essentials:
We continually cross over from the state of no molecules
to one. If you try to remember the ﬁrst time you ever drove
a car, the brain chemicals  present on that occasion have by
now vanished. (Most of them disappeared before the drive
was over. ) When you re-create that memory today, seeing
the car and feeling the steering wheel in your hands, you
are triggering cellular reactions that begin “nowhere,”
since your brain cells are as empty of the old molecules as
Benveniste’s water. If you can explain how the bodymind gets from no
molecules to one, then a great many mysteries about the
brain will be cleared up. After that ﬁrst tiny bit of matter,
the rest of the sequence follows laws of nature that are well
known. Aside from homeopathy, I see a much clearer
example in the strange psychiatric cases known as multiple
personalities. Nothing in the mind-body ﬁeld seems quite
so inexplicable, for when a person with multiple
personalities shifts from one to the other, his body shifts
too. One personality might have diabetes, for example, and
the person will be insulin-deﬁcient as long as that
personality is in force. Yet the other personalitie s may be
completely free of diabetes, recording the same blood
sugar levels as a normal person. Daniel Goleman, a
psychologist and frequent reporter on mind-body topics,
describes a child named Timmy who adopts nearly  a dozen
separate personalities. One of these breaks out into hives if he drinks orange
juice. “The hives will occur,” Goleman writes, “even if
Timmy drink s orange juice and another personality  appears
while the juice is still being digested. What is more, if
Timmy comes back while the allergic reaction is present,
the itching of the hives  will cease immediately, and the
water-ﬁlled blisters will begin to subside. ”
When I ﬁrst read these words, I felt very excited. Medical
texts do not say that allergic reactions can be turned oﬀ
and on at will. How could they. The white cells of the
immune system, coated with antibodies like IgE, merely
wait for the contact of an antigen. When contact occurs,
they are automatically triggered to react. Yet, in Timmy’s
body, one has to envision the orange-juice molecules
approaching the white cell, and then a decision  is made
whether to react. This implies that the cell itself is
intelligent, just as I have been arguing. Moreover, itsintelligence is wrapped up in every molecule, not doled out
to a special one like DNA, for the antibody and the orange
juice meet end to end with very ordinary atoms of carbon,
hydrogen, and oxygen. To say that molecules make decisions deﬁes current
physical science—it is as if salt sometimes feels like being
salty and sometimes not. But to cross over from one event
in the bodymind to another is always a projection of
intelligence; it is only the remarkable swiftness and
intensity of Timmy’s case that stuns us. Once we absorb the
fact that he is choosing to be allergic—for how else could
he turn his hives oﬀ and on. —then we confront the
possibility that we, too, are choosing our own diseases. We
are not aware of this choice, because it takes place below
the level of our conscious thoughts. But if it is present, we
should be able to change it. All of us can shift the biology of our bodies from one
extreme to the other. When you are wildly happy, you are
not the same person, physiologically speaking, as when you
are deeply depressed. The multiple personalities
demonstrate that this ability to change from the inside is
under precis e control. I’d like to relate a bit of Chopra
family lore that relates to this and also, curiously enough,
to the IgE antibody. My father is a cardiologist in India. For many years he
served as an army doctor, which required us to move from
post to post throughout the country. While I was an infant,
he was sent to Jammu, far away to the north in the state of
Kashmir. I remember nothing of our stay there, but for
years I heard about the terrible allergies my mother
suﬀered in that place. Her tormentor was the pollen of a
native ﬂower that covered the ground when it blossomed
every spring. It caused her to have severe asthma attacks;
her body swelled, and on her skin appeared large red weltsand blisters (her condition is known as angioneurotic
edema). My father is very devo ted to my mother, and out of
compassion he drove her every spring to Srinigar, the
capital of Kashmir. The air in Srinigar is free of this
particular pollen, and she was delighted to ﬁnd herself in a
mountain valley that is one of the most beautiful places on
Earth. One spring the heavy rains had made the road
impassable, and my father decided that they should ﬂy
back home early. They boarded  the plane, and after an hour
it touched down. He put his hand reassuringly on my
mother’s arm, but he could already see the red spots on her
skin and the eﬀort it took for her just to breathe. My
mother’s allergy was so severe that the steward ran up and
asked what was wrong. “There’s nothing you can do,” my father said. “It’s the
pollen in Jammu. ”
“Jammu. ” The steward looked puzzled. “We haven’t
landed there yet—this is Udhampur, our ﬁrst stop. Didn’t
they tell you. ”
My father was quite startled. When he looked at my
mother, her wheezing had subsided and her sores were
vanishing on the spot. For years afterward he would shake
his head and mutter, “All you have to do is say the word
Jammu  and your mother breaks out. ” When I told him about
the IgE experiment, he was very relieved—now he had a
scientiﬁc answer, of sorts, to our family mystery. My mother
has only one personality, but this shift was both extreme
and swift. Many multip le-personality cases have been studi ed and
veriﬁed, particularly by Dr. Bennett Braun, a research
psychiatrist and specialist in the ﬁeld. When the patient’s
personality shifts, warts, scars, and rashes have been seen
to appear and disappear, along with hypertension andepilepsy. A speciﬁc personality can be color blind, only to
return to normal sight when the personality changes back. Almost as a rule, such patients have at least one
personality that is a child, and when it emerges, their
bodies respond to lower doses of drugs. In one case, 5
milligrams of a tranquilizer made the patient relaxed and
sleepy when he was a child, while a dose twenty times
stronger had no eﬀect on the adult. Mystiﬁed researchers are looking for a mechan ism to
explain these seemingly impossible occurrences; it will be
found, I believe, only by seeing that a quantum shift has
taken place. A personality has no molecules in it, being
composed only of memories and psychological tendencies;
yet these are more permanent than the cells being aﬀected. This is not a huge mystery—every molecule in your own
body is wrapped up, as we saw, with a bit of invisible
intelligence. Memory is not a term used by physicists, and yet it is
easy to ﬁnd it in the quantum world—particles that are
separated by immense distances of space-time know what
one another are doing. When an electron jumps into a new
orbit on the outside of an atom, the anti-electron (or
positron) paired with it must react, no matter where it lives
in the cosm os. In fact, the entire universe is knitted
together by this kind of memory network. To a physicist, the only puzzle in Benveniste’s experiment
is that no one has ever believed that quantum events take
place at the level of molecules. A photon sits on the
quantum threshold, where faint, random vibrations are the
rule. Some of these vibrations die oﬀ into nothingne ss;
others wake up and enter material reality as matter or
energy. Because the photon is almost nothing to begin with,
it can wink in and out of existence. A molecule like IgE,
however, is tremendously more substantial than these
ﬂuctuating vibrations. If it weren’t,  molecules might jumpin and out of existence without warning—along with things
made out of molecules, like blue whales and skyscrapers. Since this does not happen, it has not been deemed
necessary to invest molecules with memory. To understand how such memory works, one has to know
more about the quantum level of nature. Its peculiarity,
setting it aside from all other states of matter and energy,
is its emptiness. We have already seen that at its heart, an
atom is almost totally empty, being proportionately as void
as intergalac tic space. The same must hold true for us,
since obviously we are made of atoms. That means we are
made out of a void; more than anything else, it is our raw
material. Instead of seeing the space among the stars as bleak,
cold, and lifeless, one should look through a physicist’s
eyes and see it packed  with unseen energy waiting to
coalesce into atoms. Every cubic centimeter of space teems
with energy, nearly inﬁnit e amounts of it, although much of
this energy is in “virtual” form, meaning that it is locked up
and plays no active part in material reality. (A wonderful
line from an ancient Indian Upanishad declares, “The
power penetrating the universe is much more than what,
shines through. ” In terms of quantum objects, most of
which are locked up in virtual form, this is true literally. ) Our senses are not prepared to see emptiness as the
womb of reality, being tuned in to a grosser level of nature
populated with ﬂowers, rocks, trees, and our families. It is
said that the human eye can distinguish 2 million shades of
color, each of which occupies a narrow band of light energy,
but our optical mechanism nevertheless doesn’t register
these energy  vibrations as vibrations. Much less do we
register a chunk of solid marble as vibrations, although at
bottom that is what it is, just the same as color. As light shifts from color to color, each small gradation
exerts an enormous inﬂuence. Visible light,  for example,gives the world shape and deﬁnition as perceive d by our
eyes. If you shift down just slightly to the infrared band, the
human eye would feel warm from the light but be blind; if
you shift up to X rays, the eye would be destroyed. Every
quantum gradation is slight, but it implies a completely
new reality at the grosser level of molecules and living
things. The spectrum of light is like a long, continuous
string, vibrating slower at one spot and faster at another. We make our home on a tiny part of the spectru m, but it
takes the entire length for us to exist. Beginning at zero
vibration, shakes of the string are responsible for the light,
heat, magnetism, and countless other discrete energy
forms that ﬁll the unive rse. It is just a few steps on the
ladder of creation from empty space to intergalact ic dust to
a sun and ﬁnally the living Earth. What this shows is that
emptiness, the point of zero vibration, is not a void but the
starting point for everything that exists. And this starting
point is always in contact with every other point—there are
no breaks in continuity. The reason for discussin g the subatomic void is that we
experience the void every time we think. Just as in the
universe at large, someth ing material—the neuropeptide—
springs out of nowhere. In this case it is not the atoms of
the neuropep tide that are created, because the necessary
hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so forth are already present
in the glucose that the brain uses as fuel. What is created
out of nowhere is the conﬁguration of the neuropeptide,
but that is magical enough. At the very instant that you think, “I am happy,” a
chemical messenger translates your emotion, which has no
solid existenc e whatever in the material world, into a bit of
matter so perfectly attuned to your desire that literally
every cell in your body learns of your happiness and joins
in. The fact that you can instantly talk to 50 trillion cells intheir own language is just as inexplicable as the moment
when nature created the ﬁrst photon out of empty space. These brain chemicals are so small that it has taken
science several centuries to identify them. Yet if we look at
the messeng er molecules as being the ﬁnest material
expression of intelligence the brain can produce, we have
to admit that they are still not quite ﬁne enough to build a
secure bridg e between mind and body. In fact, nothing
could be ﬁne enough, because one shore we want to
bridge, the mind, is not small in any physical sense—to
think that a thought has a size is absurd. Mind is not
“hanging out” in space taking up room, even the
inﬁnitesimal room needed for an electron. The obvious
nonsense of putting mind into a box was one of the chief
reasons why science separated mind and matter to begin
with, since all matter can ﬁt into a box. Fortunately,
quantum physics comes to the bridge builder’s rescue. It
was born to explore these nonsensical-seeming regions on
the fringes of space-time. Quantum physics has taken responsibility for measuring
things that are as small  as possible. The atom, although
very small, was found around 1900 to have a nucleus, and
when that was sliced apart, its smallest unit seemed to be
the proton, until further atom-smashing reveale d, at the
edge of material existence, still ﬁner particles called
quarks. Beyond the quark, howev er, the smashing seems to
stop. One would think that there has to be something material
out there that the quark is built from. Strangely enough,
this does not seem to be true. In ancient Greece, the
philosopher Democritus ﬁrst proposed that the material
world was composed of minute, invisible particle s, which
he named atoms, from the Greek word for “not divisible. ”
When Plato heard of this theory (which of course could not
be tested experimentally), he oﬀered an objection thatuncannily predicts quantum physics. If we think of an atom
as a thing, Plato argued, then it must take up some space;
therefore, it can be cut in half to occupy a smaller space. Anything that can be cut in half is not the smallest
constituent of the material world. By this impeccable reasoning, Plato demolished all solid
particles as contenders for nature’s basic buildi ng block,
not just the atom, but the proton, electron, and quark. All of
these can be cut in half, even if we can’t actually do it,
without end. Whatever it is that builds the world, it must be
something so tiny that it occupies no space. Plato
contended that the world was born out of invisible, perfect
forms, simila r to geometric shapes. In its turn, modern
physics has turned to somewhat more tangible alternatives,
such as invisible matter called “Virtual” particles, as well
as to energy ﬁelds. Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2
proved that energy could be transformed into matter, and
this allowed physics to go beyond the barrier that is
“smaller than small. ”
No one can conﬁdently say what builds a quark, but it is
certainly not a piece of matter in solid form—the quark is
already outside the limit of anything that one can “see” or
“touch,” even using scientiﬁc instruments to extend our
senses; its building block may well be merely a vibration
that has the potential to turn into matter. Therefore, it is
smaller than small. To a physicist, all size stops at a speciﬁc
number, 10–33 cubic centimeters, an inconceivable fraction
that can be written out as 1⁄10 follow ed by 32 zeros; this is
known as Planck’s limit, a kind of absolute zero for space,
just as there is an absolute zero for temperature. Once this barrier is reached, however, what lies beyond. Here physical science stands mute. But it is fascinating to
discover that all the founders of quantum physics were
basically Platonists. That is, they believed that the world of
things is a shadowy proje ction of a vaster, invisible realitythat is nonmaterial. Some, like Einstein, stood  in awe at the
orderliness of nature without ascribing intelligen ce to it. Others, like Eddington, ﬂatly declared that the raw
material of the whole universe is “mind-stuﬀ. ” Eddington
defends his position with a logical argument as elegant as
Plato’s. Our picture of the world,  he points out, is basically
a form ation of brain impulses. This is forme d in turn out of
impulses traveling up and down the nerves. These in turn
come from vibrations of energy at the ends of the nerves. At the basis of the energ y is emptiness, the quantum void. Which part is real. The answer is none, because every step
along the way, from energy vibrations to nerve impulses to
brain formation, is just a code. No matter where you look, the visible universe is
fundamentally a set of signals. Yet these signals all hold
together, turning totally meaningless vibrations into full-
blown exper iences that have human meaning. The love
between man and wife can be broken down into raw
physical data, but to do that is to lose its reality. Therefore,
Eddington says, all these codes must stand for something
more real, something beyond our senses. At the same time,
this something is very intimate to us, for all of us can read
the code, turning random quantum vibrations  into an
orderly reality. A good image for this would be a pianist playing a Chopin
etude. Where is the music. You can ﬁnd it at many levels—
in the vibrating strings, the trip of the hammers, the ﬁngers
striking the keys, the black marks on the paper, or the
nerve impulses produced in the player’s brain. But all of
these are just codes; the reality of music is the shimmering,
beautiful, invisible form that haunts our memories without
ever being present in the physical world. —To be like the quantum, the body does not have to banish
its molecules to another dimension; it has only to learn to
re-form them into new chemical patterns. It is these
patterns that jump in and out of existence, paralleling what
happened in Benveniste’s test tubes. If you think hard
about leaping  oﬀ a cliﬀ and your heart starts to pound, you
have generated adrenaline using a stimulus that is just as
invisible as the anti-IgE in the experiment. Similarly, one of
Timmy’s personalities remembers how to be allergic to
orange juice, even though that personality may hide in
some invisible realm for days at a time. As soon as it
returns, the body must obey its commands. I have tried to make all of this sound reasonable, contrary
to one of the editors at Nature,  who said that the IgE
experiment, if true, throws out two hundred years of
rational thought in biology. But biology will have to change
now, and medicine with it. Contrary to what physicians
currently suppose, the abnormal pancreas of a diabetic is
not as real as the distorted memory that has wrapped itself
inside the pancreatic cells. This realization opens the door for quantum healing. The
mental techniques used by Ayurveda depend on being able
to control the invisible patterns that order the body. Recently I saw a patient, an elderly woman, who was
suﬀering from dull chest pains; they had previously been
diagnosed as angina pectoris, one of the most common
symptoms of advanced heart disease. Between January and
May of that year, she had recorded sixty attacks of angina,
which were relieved by taking a nitroglycerine tablet. I
instructed her in the “primordial sound technique” for
heart disease, and she left to practice it on her own. In July, about two months later, my patient wrote me a
letter stating that her attacks had stopped on the day she
received the technique and have never recurred. She feels
comfortable in activity now—most angina suﬀerers areextremely anxious about exerting themselves, even slightly. On her own she has discontinued the use of her medication,
and she recently enrolled as a full-time college student. She
was very proud to write this last piece of news, since she is
88 years old. In my own mind, I explain this result by saying that the
mind-body connection is coming under control. I would also
say that the Ayurvedic technique is not magical; it is only
imitating nature. Is there any diﬀerence  between my
patient making her angina disappear and a multiple
personality doing the same thing. A skeptical doctor might object that angina usually has
two causes. One is spasm of the coronary arteries, the
blood vessels that feed oxygen to the heart. If these go into
spasm and squeeze shut, then the oxygen-depriv ed heart
muscle screams out in pain. My patient must have had this
kind of angina, a skeptic would say. The other kind is
caused by fatty blockages in the coronary arteries and
couldn’t possibly be cured by a mental technique. I would
have to answer that both examples involve memory. The
fatty blockages are not as substantial as they appear. If you
perform a heart-bypass graft and replace the old clogged
arteries with open ones, the new replacements will often
clog up in a matter of months. This is because the vessel
has changed but the ghost of memory has not—it still wants
to load fatty plaque into that artery. On the reverse side, many bypass patients don’t feel the
return of their agonizing, frightening chest pain, even with
clogged arteries, because they are sure that their surgery
cured them. Surgeons have even experimented with
placebo operations, doing nothing more than opening the
chest and closing it again—a good percentage of those
patients felt relief from their angina. In fact, my patient did
not have blocked coronary arteries, but the mechanism
behind her angina was physically real nonethe less; herbrain did not X-ray her blood vessels before reacting with
pain. If I have a patient who is afraid, I can grasp his hand
reassuringly and he will feel better; this happens even
under anesthesia. You can grasp the patient’s hand at a
diﬀicult mom ent in surgery and see the monitors for blood
pressure and heartbeat register the calming eﬀect. The
heart and the brain, it seems, are connected much deeper
than where molecules are. One sees the truth of this
whenever a baby is cradled in its mother’s arms. Within a
few minutes, the two of them will be breathing together,
even if the baby is asleep, and their heartbeats will start to
synchronize (they will not match beat for beat, since the
child’s heart rate is faster than the mother’s). This
bodymind connection is invisible, but who would call it
unreal. It has been passed on silently from generation to
generation. Perhaps it still wraps us all in a bond of
sympathy. Out of separate beings, trapped in their own
concerns, it helps to mold one human race. —
Once science recovers from its shock over the IgE
experiment, a new domain will need to be explored, the
domain of emptiness. Quantum physics has discovered
something mysteriously rich about empty space. Now we
are on the verge of extending this richness into the human
dimension. The universe in its primordial state has been likened to
energy soup that turned into particles of matter. I would
liken us, then, to intelligence soup—except that we aren’t
soup at all but intelligence that has learned to crystallize
into beautifu l, precise, powerful, organic particle s we call
thoughts. This makes the void inside us far more
fascinating than the one that gave birth to the universe. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Revealing the strangene ss of “nowhere and everywhere”
was important when getting at the true nature of reality. But it probably left readers wondering how to navigate
such bizarre territory. The temptation is to fall back on a
default position that takes the world of the ﬁve senses as is. Even physicists who understand that physical objects are
reducible to invisible clouds of energy in an inﬁnite
quantum ﬁeld still drive their Honda or bicycle to work, not
an energy cloud. Since this chapter was written,
experiments about water having memory seem to be
largely discredited, yet the debate about homeopathy
hasn’t been settled. It’s inevitable that studies showing that home opathic
treatments for the ﬂu actually work are balanced by studies
showing that they don’t. The prestigi ous British medical
journal The Lancet  has weighed in several times on the
issue, endorsing homeopathy as being only as eﬀective as a
placebo, while generally  dismissing the whole approach. And yet The Lancet  also reviewed studies of ﬂu vaccines in
elderly peop le and found no eﬀectiveness either in
preventing the disease or lowering hospital admissions due
to complications. Going further, after analyzing “every
study published in any language,” The Lancet  “could not
ﬁnd a single study that showed a ﬂu vaccine led to the
reduction in mortality or serious complications from the
ﬂu. ” Disease, it seems, keeps pushing the mystery of mind
and body into our lives. But my mind always returns to the practical side—how
can we learn to navigate quantum reality when it’s invisible
and totally counterintuitive, where everythin g solid,
tangible, ﬁxed, and reliable dissolves in our hands. The
answer isn’t to return to school and get an advanceddegree in physics. Either the quantum domain makes a
diﬀerence in daily life, here and now, or it’s irrelevant. I actually did ﬁnd two physicists who helped guide me
through the morass: Amit Goswami, then at the University
of Oregon, and Menas Kafatos at Chapman University in
Orange, California. They became  close colleagues, a source
of far-reaching ideas, and sometime coauthors. (The
skeptical assault is relentless, and it was necessary to
present highly credentialed scientists as allies and
defenders. ) It was Kafatos who ﬁrst showed me the
breakthrough I was seeki ng when it came to navigating the
quantum domain. To see where our thinking  led us, stop the clock this very
minute. What are you doing. You are participating in
reality. In what way. By perceiving  what’s around you. Your
eyes see this page, but out of the corner of your eyes you
are aware of the room you’re sitting in. Smells and sounds
are ﬂoating your way. The air brushing past your skin is
warm or cool. These are the qualities of life. Thanks to
Newton’s theory of optics, sunlight can be broken down
into the colors that compose it, but this analysis isn’t the
same as seeing a rainbow in the sky, and very far from how
you feel while gazing at it. We participate in the world through experience. Winnowing the experience of a rainbow down to
wavelengths of light, weather conditions, time of day, the
refractive power of raindrops—all of that is
nonparticipatory. The mind has to stand apart to collect
data and make measurements leading to more data. By
standing apart, science can reveal a host of facts, but as
the poet William Wordsworth astutely observed, “we
murder to dissect. ” Once you cut an experie nce up into
measurements, data, and facts, the life has gone out of it. The dissecting mind is as deadly as a scalpel. In the name of objectivity, science excludes subjective
experience, on the grounds that subjectivity is ﬁckle,
unpredictable, prone to biases, etc. But this attitude, pure
as its motives may be, forgets that life is what we live. The
universe is what we participate in. Experience is what we
have. Even doing science is another kind of experience. So it follows that to explain the universe, it’s just as
viable to begin with our experience of it. More viable,
actually, because attempting to be totally objective about
the world is a chimera. Too much is happening “under the
table,” to use a phrase in earlier chapters. The domain of
ﬁxed physical objects that can be measured and cut like a
tailor making  a suit excludes most of what makes life worth
living—love, beauty, creativity, insight, gratitude,
reverence, art, music, and intuition. These, too, are the ﬁts
we gain by participating in the universe rather than staring
at it with our noses pressed up against the glass, like
children pressing up to a bakery window. The building blocks of experience are known as qualia,
related to the Latin word for quality. An apple has the
qualities of sweet, red, crunchy, and tart. Those qualia are
what the brain processes  in order for an apple to exist. My
inner respon se to eating an apple is also qualia. “Out
there” the apple’s qualia  seem to be physical and beyond
my inﬂuence. “In here” my response to eating an apple—
whether I like apples or not, ﬁnding this one too sweet or
overripe, and so on—is also a world of qualia. Both kinds of
experience, inner and outer, are created in consciousness. For that reason, subjecti vity is no longer the elephant in
the room. A science based on qualia can have the best of
objectivity and subjectivity. Let’s transla te these points into personal terms. How do
you experience your body. You have external experie nces—
looking at yourself in the mirror, jogging around the park,
ordering dessert in a restaurant. You also have innerexperiences—feeling your muscles grow tired while you
jog, thinking  you look old when you see yourself in the
mirror, wrestling with your conscience about ordering
dessert in a restaurant. Clearly all of these experiences are
linked, and they begin “in here. ”
“In here” is the source of sensations, images, feelings,
and thoughts, reducible to the acronym SIFT, devised by
Daniel J. Siegel, professor of psychiatry at the University of
California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. In his clinical
work, Dr. Siegel has made important breakthroughs
matching subjective states with areas of the brain in a
healing relationship. A patient who claims to have no
emotions, for example, is subjectively describing a state of
numbness that won’t be purely subjective. In the amygdala,
the area of the brain devoted to emotions, there will be a
parallel—the objective and subjective domains merge. Materialists claim that the amygdala creates emotions,
putting the objective evidence ﬁrst and foremost. No doubt
a brain scan will show increased or decreased activity in
areas of the amygdala that correlate with what a patient
feels. But neurons don’t laugh and cry; people do. Medicine
isn’t out to make the amygdala feel better; it aims to make
the patient feel better. What Dr. Siegel perceived is that he
could work from both ends of the spectrum—and this leads
to an extraordinary conclusion. We don’t have to say that the brain creates the mind or
that the mind creates the brain. In a continuous feedback
loop, emotions are always creating molecules in the brain,
and these chemicals inﬂuence the next emotion. Nature
crosses the mind-body barrier all the time, revealing that it
was constructed arbitrarily to ﬁt a certain worldview. With
a shift in worldview, everything changes. The redness of an
apple doesn’ t have to be “out there” while its sweetness is
“in here. ” In fact, there is no such thing as “out there” and“in here. ” There is only the quantum ﬁeld producing
diﬀerent aspects of experience. In the Bhaga vad-Gita (the Song of the Lord from ancient
India), Lord Krishna declares, “I am the ﬁeld and the
knower of the ﬁeld. ” This carries us deeper into reality. Instead of talking about the quantum ﬁeld, we can simply
refer to “the” ﬁeld—reali ty itself. Here, knowe r and known
are not separate. They are fused into a holistic experience. To bring this back to your body, you experience your hand
as a thing, a pink, ﬂeshy appendage you can wave in front
of your face. You also experience it as a tool when you
hammer in a nail, a source of Eros when you stroke the skin
of your beloved, the extension of your imagination when
you pick up a paintbrush, a calculating instrument when
you count on your ﬁngers, and much more. Life ﬂows
through this pink ﬂeshy appendage according to what the
mind desires. Therefore, to say that you exist inside your body is
entirely untrue. The truth is that your body exists in you,
inside your consciousness. Nothing about your hand—
movement, touch, pain, dexterity, et cetera—exists
anywhere except in consciousness. And since every quality
you experien ce comes from the ﬁeld, you can echo Lord
Krishna: You are the ﬁeld and the knower of the ﬁeld. Now you no longer have to travel under the assumed
identity of “I,” the limited ego trapped inside a package of
skin and bone. Your actual identity takes you to the level of
the quantum  mechanical human body. From there no one
can predict the kind of power, creativity, and control that’s
available. Particularly in the West, getting past the
boundary of the ego is new territory. We are condi tioned by
materialism and the scientiﬁc attachment to facts, data,
and objectivity. Fortunately, participating  in the universe isn’t Eastern or
Western. I’ve come to believe that it’s more reliable to feelone’s way through life than to try to ﬁgure everything out
mentally. Bringing medicine back to a patient’s personal
reality, ﬁlled  with unique experiences, memories, likes and
dislikes, core beliefs, and expectations—that will be the key
to quantum healing on a scale my book only hinted at. * In July 1988, a month after publishing his ﬁndings, Nature  sent a team of
investigators to France to view Benveniste’s experiment and clear up their
disbelief. Unfortunately, he was unable to consistently duplicate his results in
their presence; some trials worked, others didn’t. Subsequently, Nature
repudiated his work, calling his results a “delusion. ” A heated controversy
arose that has not been settled to date. Benveniste still stands behind his
work (his original paper was signed by twelve other researchers in four
countries). Since the ability of water to remember is inexplicable, its ability to
forget can hardly be held against it. These may be two sides of the same coin.
The author does not agree with the idea that the body is a machine, as it is a complex, intelligent system that can create and respond to various stimuli.
What is the author's opinion on the idea that the body is a machine?
The author believes that the main problem in medicine is the mismatch between the rapid advancement in genetics and the lack of significant progress in treating diseases.
According to the author, what is the main problem in the field of medicine?
The author suggests that the hard problem is not a puzzle that can be solved by focusing solely on the physical world, but rather it requires an understanding of the quantum level and the interconnectedness of the mind and body.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of the "hard problem" in neuroscience?
The author believes that the body can be controlled through meditation and other mental techniques, as demonstrated by the case study of Aaron, who recovered from a life-threatening anemia through Ayurvedic treatment.
What is the author's stance on the idea that the body can be controlled through meditation and mental techniques?
The author argues that the mind and body are not separate entities, but are interconnected and interdependent, and that the mind can influence the body and vice versa.
What is the author's view on the relationship between the mind and the body?