A neutrino zips through the
whole Earth with equal ease.) Using this insight, the rishis
went even further . They noticed that you do not have to
touch an object physically  to know how it feels. Answer this
question: Which is softer , a starched linen napkin or a rose
petal? You can easily compare the two in your mind, using
an image of touch, withou t having to go out and ﬁnd a real
napkin and a real rose. The reason why you can do this is that you have gone to a
subtler level of the sense of touch. Similarly , there are
subtle sound s, sights, smells, and tastes. However , this
level of the mind is not the end—in meditation, one can
reach even further back, beyond the ﬁve subtle senses
(called the Tanmatras  in Ayurveda), until one arrives at
consciousness in its uniﬁed state—the Vedic texts compare
this to following the hand’s ﬁve ﬁngers back to where they
join at the palm. Subjectively , the visual image of a rose
would grow fainter and fainter on the screen of the mind,
until nothing was left but the screen itself . Then one would
be at the true origin of the senses, the ﬁeld of intelligence
itself . In this way, the rishis reasoned, the whole world of
physical reality comes into being. We seem to be in deep philosophical waters here, but in
fact every layer of touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste
inﬂuences our ordinary lives. If you like to eat oysters and I
detest them, the diﬀerence is not in the oyster or in our
taste buds. The contact between the molecules of the
oyster and the taste receptors in our mouths is the same
for both of us. Yet, in the process of tasting, your delight
insinuates itself , and so does my disgust. All the raw data of
experience must pass through the ﬁlter of intelligence, and
no two people appraise it in exactly the same way . When someth ing seems to change in the world, the rishis
said, it is really you that is changing. A friend of mine, also
Indian, is a surgeon who has gained a reputation for beingrather a gourmet. His specialty is omelets, the more exotic
the better . The last time we had Sunday brunch together ,
however , he didn’t order an omelet. Curious, I asked him
about it, and he said, “I can’t stand the taste of an omelet
anymore.” It turned out that his liking for them had
changed instantly , earlier that week. He was stirring up an omelet at home while his 6-year-old
son, Arjun, looked on. As each egg was cracked , my friend
tossed the shell aside. By chance a few of them fell into a
small brown bag of birdseed that was going to be set out
for the sparrows. “Oh, don’t do that,” Arjun said seriously . “The birds will
think their babies have died, and they won’t want to eat.”
My friend is usually proud of his boy’s precocious remarks,
but all at once he couldn’t abide the taste of the omelet he
was making, or any other . Science would be at a loss to
measure the change that occurred in him, because it is too
ghostly and too individual. The idea that an omelet tastes
good has no more weight than that it tastes bad. The same
is true of every other sensation. Is a goose-down pillow
soft? Not to someone with a migraine, who groans with
pain when his head touches it. Does a jet move fast? Not if
you view it from the moon. In short, there is no end to the
way a sense impression can be interpreted, and no end to
the ways that the body can respond to it. —
The rishis said that life is built up by your participation in
it. Nothing is good or bad, hard or soft, painful or pleasant,
except as you live it. The same is true of disease. A disease
is not the molecular contact of some outside organism with
the molecules of your body. (As we saw, even if you put a
drop of concentrated cold virus into a person’s nose, his
chances of getting a cold are no more than one in eight.) It
is not even the ﬂow of toxins in your blood or the action ofrunaway cells. In the rishis’ view, a disease is a sequence of
moments that you live through, during which you appraise
every iota of the vast input that comes pouring in from all
quarters of your world, including your body . Your body is a world, too. When I ﬁrst came to Ayurveda,
I was deeply impressed  by the following verse in the
ancient texts:
As is the human body , so is the cosmic body . As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. —
These words are subject to many interpretations. What
they signify to me is that when I go about my everyday
existence, I am in charge of two worlds, the little one in me
and the big one around me. My appraisal of every minute
detail “out there”—the sun, the sky, the chances of rain, the
words other people say, the shadows cast by oﬀice
buildings—is matched by an event “in here.” Inﬁnite choice
is open at every second for me to alter the shape of the
world, for it has no shape other than what I give it. The
eminent neurologist Sir John Eccles stated this quite
clearly when he wrote, “I want you to realize that there is
no color in the natural world and no sounds—nothing of
this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty , no scent…”
In short, nothing is so important about the univers e as your
participation in it. The rishis’ subjective approach found an enormously
useful outlet in Ayurveda. Ayurveda is commonly classiﬁed
as a system of medicine,  but with equal justice you could
call it a syste m for curing delusions, for stripping away the
convincing quality of disease and letting a healthier reality
take its place. (The name itself suggest s that Ayurveda ismeant to be medicine in the broadest sense. It comes from
two Sanskrit roots, Ayus, or “life,” and Veda, which means
either “knowledge” or “science.” The literal meaning, then,
is “science of life.”)
Patients are curious to know what kinds of treatments are
speciﬁcally Ayurvedic—are there new pills to try, exercises,
diets, or more arcane Eastern therapies? I say yes to all of
these, but then with some embarrassment I have to add
that I spend much of my time just talking, trying to get
people not to be so convinced by their disease. In Ayurveda,
this is the ﬁrst and most important step in healing. As long
as the patien t is convinced by his symptoms, he is caught
up in a reality where “being sick” is the dominant input. The reason why meditati on is so important in Ayurveda is
that it leads the mind to a “free zone” that is not touched
by disease. Until you know that such a place exists, your
disease will seem to be taking over completely . This is the
principal delusion that needs to be shattered. It is undeniable that we all create scenarios and then
become convinced by them, down to our very cells. A young
girl from Boston who went to college in Vermont was
brought in to see me recently by her parents. They had
become quite  distraught when she showed up in the middle
of spring term with sharp chest pains. These had set in
while she was recovering  from a cold and over a period of a
week became alarmingly severe. One night the girl had a
bad attack—she began to experience shortness of breath,
palpitations, and dizziness, eventually grow ing so
frightened that her parents rushed her to the nearest
emergency room. By the time they got there, the whole family was in a
state of near panic. The ER doctor listened to the girl’s
heart, detect ed that she had a slight heart murmur , and
decided to run an EKG, or electrocardiogram. The EKG
read-out showed occasio nal ectopic beats, mean ing extrabeats that were outside the heart rhythm. He then used
ultrasound to perform a more sophisticated test, called an
echo-cardiogram, from which he discerned an actual heart
defect. “She has mitral valve prolapse,” he informed the family . This meant that when one of her heart valves closed, it
ballooned inward, toward the chamber of the heart. “I want
her to spend the night here in the intensive care unit,” he
continued, and within an hour the girl was taken upstairs,
hooked to an intravenous drip of morphine for her pain,
and supplied with extra oxygen through small tubes taped
to her nose. Around her were heart -attack and stroke
victims, some  of them obviously dying. She found the whole
experience highly distressing and began to hallucinate
from the morphine as she drifted oﬀ to sleep. The next morning, a careful examination of her tests led
the doctors to diagnose that her pain was probably due not
only to the mitral valve prolapse but to pericarditis, an
inﬂammation of the peric ardium, the covering around the
heart. She was released on strong anti-inﬂammatory agents
for this, as well as beta blockers to slow her heart rate. The
pain in her chest subsided; however , she found it
impossible to tolerate the beta blockers—besides aﬀecting
the heart, these drugs attach to receptors in the brain,
causing drowsiness and mental disorientation. Her medications were changed, only to bring on new side
eﬀects and expand her constellation of symptoms. The new
prescriptions were meant to dilate her blood vessels, but
this lowered her blood pressure too much, causing her to
feel dizzy and nauseated; at times she would faint without
warning. She managed to tolera te these side eﬀects,
largely becau se she wanted to stay in school at any cost. Every time she tried to cut back on her medication, even
slightly , the original chest pain returned in full force,
accompanied by her other symptoms. She came home forsummer vacation and horriﬁed her parents by clutching her
chest one evening at dinner. She started to hypervent ilate
so severely that her mother went scurrying to ﬁnd a paper
bag for her to breathe into. Within a few minutes, she felt
violent heart palpitations, began to vomit, and eventually
passed out. Her parents sat up with her all that night and
many nights to come. Since there was nothing more that her doctors could do,
the family cast about for other approaches. They hit upon a
news story about Ayurveda, and one July day all three,
mother , father , and daughter , came to the Lancaster clinic. I took a very detailed medical history from the girl, looked
at her EKGs, and found myself quite surprised. “Your pain isn’t from your heart,” I told her, and to prove
it I pressed ﬁrmly on her sternum, the bone in the middle of
the chest that covers the heart. She ﬂinched. “You’re still
tender because what you originally had was an
inﬂammation there, where the rib cartilage and the
sternum meet. It is a condition called costo-chondritis,
which can sometimes set in after a cold or other viral
infection.”
She and her parents looked startled, but I went on, taking
apart the puzzle piece by piece. On the night they had
rushed her to the ER, her high anxiety caused her to
exhibit the occasional ectopic, or extra, heartbeats. Her
main diagnosis, mitral valve prolapse, may occur in as
many as 10 percent of young women with slender builds
like hers. The reason for this is not known, nor is there
conclusive evidence for why it should cause any pain,
although in some patients it does. Similarly , the heart
murmur that comes with it does not seem to be dangerous. Her pericarditis was a misreading of her EKG—the violence
of her attack had probabl y made the ER doctor overanxious
to ﬁnd something wrong. The remaining symptoms—
nausea, vomiting, heart palpitations, dizziness, fainting,shortness of breath, and hyperventilation—were brought on
either by the medications or directly by her . “I have tried to go back to the moment when your
condition was born,” I said, “to show you how it built itself
up, step by step. In its present form, your disease is a
reﬂex. It is being kept alive by your own expectations.”
At this point the girl’s parents looked quite oﬀended. I
knew the anxiety they felt sitting up all night, worr ying that
she might be in real dang er. To make the parents see that I
wasn’t blaming anybody , I told them about my experience
on the airplane when the No Smoking sign set my heart
going. Add a little more fear to the situation, and my
pounding heart could have been the start of a “heart
condition” just as convincing as their daughter’s. They were still uneasy . When their daughter suﬀered
stabbing chest pains, they thought of her as a victim of
illness; now I seemed to say that she was doing it to
herself . The era of mind-body medicine has made this an
extremely sore point. Life was simpler when a disease
without a germ was considered “all in your head.” The
germs have largely been pushed back, but instead of
leaving us free of disease, this has made disease far more
enigmatic. Am I waiting  for cancer to strike me, or is my
personality giving it to me? This girl’s case is a perfect
example; A cardiologist might point to her heart defect as
the cause of her pain; a psychiatrist could say that the
defect didn’t do anythin g—the girl simply panic ked. The
drugs she took induced vomiting, but she still vomits when
they are removed. Her low blood pressure  can cause
fainting, but so can anxiety . Modern medicine has swung
back and forth debating these points endlessly . The result, according to patient surveys, is a huge
increase in guilt. There is such a ﬁne line between probing
a patient’s fears and fueling them. I have sat for hours
counseling people with cancer . They listen attentivelybecause “the doctor is talking.” I tell them they can beat
the cancer , and they quickly , anxiously agree. But when I
am alone again, I am haunted by a terrible thought I see
lurking in their eyes: “You say I’m sick, but really I did it to
myself .”
The girl had not spoke n for quite a while. “So I’m
creating this thing?” she ﬁnally said. “No,” I replied, “but you are certainly participatin g in it. Try taking away your participation—I bet things will
change.”
“How do I do that?” she asked. “You have to break out of your own conditioning,”  I said. “The next time you have an attack, just stand back from it a
little; let the pain be there, as innocently as you can.” If she
could do this, I told her, the whole thing would probably
evaporate. She listened and thanked  me, then I heard nothing more
for two weeks. Perhaps I had touched too many nerves. I
had been making her disease more and more personal,
when what the family desperately hoped for was that it was
impersonal. Conventional medicine goes out of its way to
put diseases  into neat, classiﬁable boxes just so that the
personal element is eliminated. I had noticed while
interviewing her that this girl placed a huge importance on
her diagnosis. She would preface each episode by saying,
“When I get my mitral valve prolapse…” It was as if these
words explai ned everythi ng. They were like a net that drew
together all her symptoms and held them tight. When I
mentioned this, she looked very thoughtful. She had
invested so much in the words mitral valve prolapse  that
they had acquired a kind of magic for her. It was essential
to break the spell of this magic, which can be uncannily
powerful. I was wrong if I thought she hadn’t taken our session to
heart. Out of curiosity I phoned  the family to see how shewas doing. The news was very good: she was oﬀ all
medications and her attacks were now limited to occasional
bouts of chest pain. Her parents would some times see her
sitting with her eyes closed. When they asked what she was
doing, she said, “I just watch the pain until it goes away .”
The accom panying symptoms—dizziness, vomiting,
fainting, et cetera—have disappeared. —
In psychology there are certain extreme feelings—such as
loathing, dread, horror , and awe—that many peop le cannot
face. When these people grow horriﬁed or struck with awe,
they could swear that their emotion comes from outside
themselves. In cases of paranoia, the person might even
think that “they” are broadcasting such feelings into him
through some kind of magic. (“They” can be Martians,
communists, or next-door neighbors.) Freud called these
our “uncanny” emotions and spent many years observing
them in neurotic and psychotic patients. But uncanniness is always present, I think. It is nature’s
way of putting a veil over our most secret fears ; it hides
inner pain from us until the moment when the pain breaks
an invisible dam and comes pouring out. Then the twin
thought arises, “Is this happening to me, or am I doing it to
myself?” It doesn’t really matter  if the end result is a
disease or just a sense of extreme discomfort. The
important thing is to keep the patient from getting twisted
up in his doubts—that way lies total paralysis. Medicine has already paid a very high price for not
dealing adequately with the personal nature of disease. For
one thing, we have aroused guilt without being  able to
assuage it. People are horriﬁed at the idea that they are to
blame for their diseases. Doctors don’t think they are
stoking this guilt. Perhaps it was born out of being told
over and over that no one is to blame. But if you say thatliving right will help prevent a heart attack or cancer, don’t
you have to accept that living wrong will help bring on the
same diseases? The whole issue of blame and responsibility is painful to
untangle. When I had my private practice in endocrinology ,
I would see obese patients whose weight put them  at high
risk for becoming diabetic. I would warn them about the
danger of continuing to eat too much; at the same time, I
knew I was feeding their guilt, which would only lead to
more eating. If a patient was a chain-smoker , I would be
very ﬁrm and say, “My God, you know you have to quit
smoking—think of the risks you are running.” Many of
these patients were ex-servicemen I saw at the V.A. hospital
in Boston. After listening to me, they could go to the PX
upstairs, where government-subsidized cigarettes were
being sold at a steep discount. (I bought mine there, too,
having become a smoke r during my night shifts as an
intern.) In fact, no disease points up the paradoxes of blame and
responsibility better than lung cancer . The public is well
aware that this is almost exclusively a smoker’s illness. That puts the responsibility squarely on the patient, but
then a second thought enters. Aren’t these people addicted
to nicotine? A 1988 report by the surgeon general states
that they are, and that their addiction may be harder to
break than addiction to heroin or alcohol. This means that
one is not dealing with a rational situation. Sigmund Freud attempted for many years to stop
smoking after being informed by his doctor that twenty
cigars a day—Freud’s normal ration—was bad for his heart. He stopped once for seven weeks, but his heart went into
palpitations worse than before. He became intolerably
depressed and was forced back to his cigars. When he
didn’t smoke, Freud told his biographer , “the torture was
beyond human power to bear.” I have  witne ssed advance dlung cancer patients waiting for radiation who walk around
a corner to smoke a cigarette—this implies that prevention
may be impossible, beca use it would have to start before
the ﬁrst cigarette gets smoked. In every disease, not just lung cancer , the patients are
often too hooked, too guilty , or simply too convinced to be
helped. There is no denying the deeply irrational streak in
man. At the V.A. hospital we took in every variety of
alcoholic, including the dilapidated, malnourished ones that
were routinely swept in oﬀ the streets by the police. One of
the most frequent conditions in advanced alcoholism is
pancreatitis, or inﬂammation of the pancreas. Everyone
brought in with pancrea titis had to be treated with great
care. They could not eat or digest food, because calling  on
the pancreas only made it more inﬂamed and extremely
painful. Patients would vomit if they tried to eat even one
bite. We had to feed them by drip through an IV tube, insert
another tube into their stomachs to drain the digestive
juices that continued to inﬂame the pancreas, and inject
antibiotics to ﬁght the infection that was often present. It was all we could do to pull these men back from the
brink of death, but when  we had succeeded and they were
discharged back onto the street, we often saw the same
ritual. Looking out the second-ﬂoor window , we could see a
tavern across the street from the hospital. Our patients
walked out the door, barely tottered across the street, and
went into the bar. Their ﬁrst drink came ten minutes after
their cure. Compassion for these people has its limits. Anyone could  be forgiven for saying, “If you want to smoke
and drink, if you don’t exercise and insist on eating
cholesterol, then too bad for you.” Undeniably people do
say such things, or at least think them. But the essence of
compassion lies in recognizing how hard it is to be good. To
forgive someone is to let him be free, even if he abuses that
freedom beyond exasperation.There is a story in India about the sadhu and the
scorpion:
A man is walking down the road when he spots a sadhu
kneeling beside a ditch. He approaches and sees that the
sadhu is watching a scorpion. The scorpion wants to cross
the ditch, but when he gets into the muddy water , he
begins to drown. The sadhu carefully reaches down to pull
him out of the water , but as soon as he touches it, the
scorpion stings him. The scorpion goes into the water
again, again it begins to drown, and when the sadhu lifts it
out, he receives another sting. The man sees this happen three times. Finally he blurts,
“Why don’t you stop allowing yourself to be stung?” The
sadhu replies, “There is nothing I can do. It is the
scorpion’s nature to sting, but it is my nature to save.”
The reason that society  has set up the institution of
medicine is to ensure that our instinct to save one another
never dies. It is the same instinct that sees no blame in
another person’s weakne ss; it freely takes responsibility for
troubles that are not its own. If I ever walked into a
hospital and detected there that the spark of compassion
had gone out, I could write the end of medicine— darkness
will have won. —
Modern medicine is still dominated by the notion that
disease is caused by objective agents. A sophisticated
analysis shows that this is only partly true. A disease
cannot take hold without  a host who accepts it, hence the
current attempts to understand our immune system. Historically , both Greek medicine and Ayurveda were
founded on the idea that the host is all-important. The
Greeks believed that there was a ﬂuid called physis  that
ﬂowed in, out, and through all of life. The ﬂow of physistied the organs inside the body with the world outside, and
as long as the two were  in balance, the body would be
healthy . (This premise is still reﬂected in our use of the
word physics  to explain the outer world and the related
physiology  to explain the inner .) In Ayurveda, it takes the
balance of three eleme nts, called doshas,  to maintain
health. The point is not whether physis or doshas exist, but
that one’s own state of balance determines whether one is
sick or well. Medicine is coming back  to this notion, the oldest in all
the healing arts, but I notice that an impersona l air still
hangs over everything. We are settin g up a concrete thing
called the immune syste m and pinning our hopes onto it. The original idea, as voice d by the Greeks and by Ayurveda,
was much more organic. A patie nt was not a colle ction of
host cells but someone who ate, drank, thought, and acted. If a doctor wanted to change someone’s doshas or his
physis, he changed his habits. In this way, he got right to
the root of the patient’s participation in the world. There are dozens of medical systems in the world, many
of them deeply in conﬂict with one another . How can they
cure people and yet disag ree so completely? What is poison
to me is cure to a homeopath. I think the answer is that all
medicine works by helping a patient live through his
disease, moment by moment, until the balance swings away
from sickness toward cure. I cannot be more speciﬁc,
because the process does not happen in books but in living
persons. People have drunk grape juice and recovered from
cancer . If you can successfully restore balance to the
bodymind, then the patient’s immune system will respond. The immune cells do not judge whether the doctor  believes
in convention al medicine,  homeopathy , or Ayurved a. Insofar
as it can change our participation in disease, every system
is capable of working. I think Ayurveda will rise toprominence, however , because it recognizes the need to
cure patients by curing their reality ﬁrst. More and more I feel the importance of the patient’s
personal reality . A middle-age d doctor , a radiologist, came
to see me after he was diagnosed with leukemia. He was
extremely sophisticated in his knowledge of the disease, an
unpredictable form called chronic myelogenous leukemia,
meaning that it aﬀected the white blood cells called
myelocytes. As yet he felt nothing beyond some fatigue
during the day, but the mortality statistics, which he also
knew well, were grim. They said that the averag e survival
was thirty-six to forty-fo ur months. On the other hand,
because the disease is unpredictable, he could live much
longer . Before coming to me, he had consulted the leading
cancer institu te in New York City. They had made extensive
tests on his blood and oﬀered him a choice of half a dozen
experimental drug protocols. No single accepted treatm ent
for his leukemia exists; none of the experimental ones came
with any promises that his life expectancy would be
lengthened. Upon reﬂection, he had rejected treatment and began to
read up voraciously on spontaneous remissions, including
something I had written. He had sought me out for that
reason. As we talked , I saw that one particular detail was a
huge stumbling block for him. “I want to believe I will recover from this,” he told me,
“but someth ing really worries me. I read about a lot of
remissions from cancer , but I didn’t run across any
spontaneous remissions from leukemia.”
One could see how his medical mind was working. The
variety of leukemia he has is linked to a genetic component,
called the Philadelphia chromosome. He had tested positive
for this chromosome, and being a physician, that was the
end of the story—he was genetically marked for doom. Theonly chance for Ayurveda  would be if it promoted a miracle. But he couldn’t ﬁnd any reports of leukemia mirac les in the
journals. “Look,” I said, “you are obsessed with the statistics on
this disease. Don’t think about them—what you want to do
is beat the statistics, don’t you?”
“I know , I know,” he said abstractedly , “but I can’t ﬁnd a
single spontaneous remission in the whole literature. I
could be the ﬁrst, of course, but…” His voice trailed oﬀ . I had a brainstorm. “Why don’t you tell yourself you have
some other cancer ,” I suggested. “Then at least you would
have hope for a remission.”
His face brightened, and he leaped at my suggestion. Then I had more good news for him. I had just stumbled
across a review article that connected childhood leukemia
and stress. This man had a totally diﬀerent disease, but he
also led an incredibly stressful life. His wife was divorcing
him, his medical partners had ﬁled a lawsuit against him,
his children,  now grown, did not speak to him anymore,
and he had to support two houses and three Mercedeses. It
was in the midst of his rancorous divorce that his diagnosis
had been made, quite by accident, and now his wife
insisted on staying with him. The reason she gave was her
fear of being left alone after he died. “I just read that stress is linked to childhood leukemia,” I
oﬀered. He beamed when he heard this, because the
scientist in him made a causal link between stress, the
activation of “stress hormones” like cortisol, and ﬁnally a
suppression of the immune system. Maybe that was
happening to him. No one had actually shown a link
between stress and his disease, but now he had one more
straw to grasp. He went away and continued to do well. The next time he
came in, he asked me if he should go for a blood test. Leukemia causes a disastrous elevation in the number ofwhite blood cells; a lower count would prove to him that he
was really getting better . “If the counts are bad,” I reasoned, “then you will get
depressed and put more stress on yourself . If they are
good, then you will be getting better anyway . Why not
postpone the blood test until you feel some symptoms?” He
agreed to this and went away again. The last time I saw him was last week. He told me that
believing he has cancer instead of leukemia was working
out well. “You know ,” I said, “why bother to call it cance r? You
could tell yourself that you have a chronic disease that has
no name. If it doesn’t have a name, then you won’t have to
worry about any statistics. People live a long time with
mysterious diseases.”
This ﬁnal twist absolutely delighted him. With
tremendous relief he shook my hand, and for the ﬁrst time
he agreed to come to the clinic to start Ayurveda. So far, I
have done nothing for this man except change the label on
his disease, but from that he changed his whole appraisal. Now we have a chance to witness the birth of a cure. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
It was hard enough thirty  years ago to ﬂoat the proposition
that every disease is personal. In medical school, docto rs
learn about the natural history of diseases, the course an
illness norma lly takes in the average patient. (As the hoary
medical student joke goes, “It takes seven days to get over
a cold, but if you really take care of yourself , you’ll get over
it in a week.” Imbedded in the punch line is the certainty
that hard medical facts come ﬁrst; personal diﬀerencescome second and are largely a nuisance, because they skew
the statistical sample.) Now there’s a new propo sition to ﬂoat that’s even harder
for doctors to swallow: All disease is personal. In fact, it
has to be. This isn’t blatant overcon ﬁdence on my part. The
reason that all disease is personal is that reality is
personal, and being sick or well is part of reality . The fact
that a cold virus interacts with your immune system on a
schedule that matches your neighbor when he has a cold is
just a rough approximation. Some colds linger for a month. Viruses constantly mutate, and when they do, your immune
system responds in kind—it learns what the virus has to
teach. Quantum Healing  was written before the microbiome was
explored, but I felt conﬁdent in saying that a bacterium or
virus traveling around the world is the play of DNA talking
to itself . DNA is sending messages constantly that pass in,
out, around, and throu gh the body. With present-day
knowledge, we know that the microbiome isn’t a camp of
squatters who have parked themselves in our bodies. These
microbes are the message, and it’s constantly in ﬂux. In
2014 a team headed by Dr. Patrick Schloss at the
University of Michigan analyzed microbes gathered from
three hundred people, in eighteen areas of their bodies. It
was found that these microbes varied greatly . They
changed, sometimes radically , for no known reaso n. There
could be total population shifts in the course of a single
day. In a sense the microbiome is the only bodily organ that
can be replaced without  surgery; in another sense it is a
portable ecology , duplicating Earth’s ecology
microscopically . Every atom in your body came from soil,
air, and water . Your microbiome retains the memory of this. Even with the present imperfect understanding, everyone
concedes that the trillions of microorganisms that interface
with the outside world are major players in how life evolvedand keeps evolving. No one has to catch a cold to
participate in the self-interaction of life with life. In
computer science (and rightly or wrongly), the brain itself
is just an information processor . So when you catch a cold
—or interact  with any microorganism—you and the world
are thinking as one. What’s your conversation like? You’ll never hear a cold
virus talking to you, but the exchange of messages isn’t
mysterious; it’s just very, very complicated. I’m constantly
astonished at how much meaning is contained in catching a
cold. To let you in on this astonishment, I’d like to use a
cold as the template for your entire life. So many ﬁle
headings are needed just for this one experience. Biology:  The newly mutated cold virus is a new biological
creation. Environment:  The new strain of cold was born at a
certain place and time somewhere in the world. Relationships:  The virus’s genes dema nd an interaction
with your genome. In return, your genetic material has
something to say about that. Society:  The cold hits a lot of people at nearly the same
time, creating social implications, like a rise in sick days
from work. Core beliefs:  When you catch a cold, your reaction to it
depends on how tough or fragile you think you are, how
dangerous or innocuous it is to get sick, and other personal
beliefs. Desires:  Catching a cold aﬀects what you wanted to do
that week if you hadn’t gotten sick. You may have to put
some desires on hold, such as going on a vacation. Memories:  In your immune system, the virus awakens the
memory of colds you’ve had in the past. Antibodies are
released coded by these past illnesses.Psychological conditioning:  You have personal memories
of catching a cold over the years, and your reaction this
time is likely to be almo st identical to your reaction last
winter . Microbiome:  The new arrival in the virus family interacts
with the massive colony of microorganisms that are already
present in and on our body . Gene expression:  Depending on everything listed above,
genes in your brain, immune system, and various organs
respond to all the changes occurring or threatening to
occur . It’s a little exhausting to contemplate this list, but that
doesn’t mean that the possible implications of catching a
cold have been exhausted. For that, you’d have to interview
trillions of cells, each of which has its own story . Yet if we
back away to a larger perspective, the point is simple: All
disease is personal because reality is personal. No one, not
even identical twins who begin life with the same genetic
scorecard, inhabits a reality that’s the same as another
person’s. How could they? The messages delivered by the
common cold are like one grain of sand on the beach, and
the tide never stops coming in, depositing new grains of
information. Colds take care of themselves, but what about cancer ,
heart disease , diabetes, and other severe disorde rs? They
are inﬂuence d by everything on the list, too, and it seems
utterly blind to ignore them. A mate rialist can’t duck out of
the argument by reverting to medical school textbooks. A
liver enzyme may be a fact, but so are the recepto rs on the
outer membr ane of a liver cell, and these are responsive to
every single inﬂuence I’ve listed. There’s no such thing as
being halfway in the game; your total being is committed to
participating. How you see yourself is perhaps the most important
inﬂuence on your state of wellbeing, or its absence. Life onthis planet goes back about 3.5 billion years, and your body
retains all the evolutionary knowledge accumulated over
the eons. So you can justiﬁably see yourself as all life,
which means that every interaction with the world is
actually an interaction with yourself . What then? “Who am
I?” becomes a very diﬀerent question. In Quantum Healing  I oﬀered a better way to manage
personal reality . As much as I delighted in discovering
countless new facts, simplicity held the key. (I recall a guru
saying there are a thousa nd reasons to pick a pin up oﬀ the
ﬂoor and a thousand reasons not to—no one can live like
that.) At some point you simply have to accept the reality of
cosmic intelligence and surrender to it. Surrender connotes defea t to some people, who therefore
hate the idea. It connotes drifting through life carelessly to
other people, who there fore love the idea. But when it
comes to managing your personal reality , surrender
involves speciﬁc choices, and each must be tested to ﬁnd
out if it’s viable. 1.You relax and relinquish the desire to control. 2.You trust that you are cherished in creation, and you
act on this trust. 3.You accept your own being as a source of inﬁnite
intelligence. 4.You approach every problem as having a level of
solution that can be found. 5.You focus on personal growth, which is eternal, and
minimize personal setbacks, which are temporary . 6.You ask for and receive support from Nature. 7.You resist the endless demands and unceasing
insecurity of the ego .That’s the agenda, not just for the spiritually inclined or
the mystically gifted, but for anyone who grasps how
personal reality really is. A supreme intelligence is
responsible for creating order out of chaos, shaping every
waking mom ent into “my” life. The paradox  is that if you
really want reality to be entirely yours, a unique creation,
you must oﬀer it up as a gift from the cosmos. OceanofPDF .comWhen pressed for the ultimate truth, the Vedic seers
uttered two words that overturn all our accepted notions of
reality: Aham Brahmasmi . A free translation would be, “I
am everything, created and uncreated,” or more succinctly ,
“I am the universe.”* To be everything, or even something
beyond the conﬁnes of one’s physical body, sounds very
strange to the Western ear. A story is told about an English
lady traveling through northern India who was taken to the
caves along the Ganges where yogis sat in deep meditation. She was pleasantly recei ved by one yogi outside his cave. At the end of the visit, she said, “Perhaps you don’t leave
here very often, but I would be happy to show you around
London.”
“Madam,” the yogi calmly replied, “I am London.”
In their teaching stories,  the rishis also showed a talent
for beguiling the intellect. One of the most famous
concerns a youth named Svetaketu, who was sent away
from home to study the Veda. In ancient India, this entailed
staying with the priests and memorizing long stretches of
sacred text. Svetaketu stays away for twelve years. Whenhe at last comes home, he is very puﬀed up with his own
learning, and his father , half-dismayed and half-amused,
decides to deﬂate him. Here is an excerpt from the
dialogue that ensues:
“Go and pick a fruit from  that banyan tree,” Svetaketu’s
father said. “Here it is, sir .”
“Split it open and tell me what you see inside.”
“Many tiny seeds, sir .”
“Take one of them and split it open and tell me what you
see inside.”
“Nothing at all, sir .”
Then his father said, “The subtlest essence of this fruit
appears as nothing to you, my son, but believe me, from
that nothing, this mighty banyan tree has sprung. “That Being, which is the subtlest essence of everything,
the supreme reality , the Self of all that exists, That art thou,
Svetaketu.”
This is quite a quantum story, actually . The universe, like
the huge banyan, springs from a seed that contains
nothing. Without a metaphor like the seed and the tree, our
minds cannot even grasp what such a nothingness  is, since
it is smaller than small and earlier than the Big Bang. The
deeper myst ery of the tale is that Svetaketu himself is
composed of this same all-pervading, unim aginable
essence. To ﬁnd out what Svetaketu’s father means, one
has to explore the expanded sense of awareness that is
central to the rishis’ knowledge. —
“I am everything” implies an ability to transcend the
normal ﬂow of time and the normal conﬁnes of space. Despite his intuitive brilliance, Einstein did not step outsidethe river of time, excep t mentally . He said that he had
experiences of self-expansion in which there was “neither
evolution nor destiny , only Being,” but such episodes did
not enter his scientiﬁc work directly . Like all physicists, he
adhered to the objective method and scrupulously excluded
his own consciousness from his theories. His search for a
uniﬁed ﬁeld that would embrace all of time and space was
a strictly mathematical enterprise. To the rishis, this is the very attitude that makes physics
incomplete. We are not onlookers peering into the uniﬁed
ﬁeld, they said—we are the uniﬁed ﬁeld. Every person  is an
inﬁnite being, unlimited by time and space. To reach
beyond the physical body, we extend the inﬂuence of
intelligence. As you sit in your chair , every thought you are
thinking creates a wave in the uniﬁed ﬁeld. It ripples
through all the layers of ego, intellect, mind, senses, and
matter , spreading out in wider and wider circles. You are
like a light radiating not photons but consciousness. As they radiate, your thoughts have an eﬀect on
everything in nature. Physics already recognizes this fact
for sources of physical energy: any light, whether  a star or
a cand le, sends its waves throughout the quantum  ﬁeld of
electromagnetism, going as far as inﬁnity in all directions. The rishis took this principle and made it human. Their
nervous systems actually registered the distant eﬀect that a
thought produces; this was as real for them as seeing light
is for us. But we are bounded in our awareness; being
conﬁned to the waking state keeps us from perceiving the
subtle changes we are producing everywhere. Yet these changes are always present. For thousands of
years, the rishis declared that man lives, breathes, and
moves in the cosmic body. If this is so, then nature  is as
alive as we are; the whole distinction between “in here”
and “out there” is a false one, as if the heart cellsdisregarded the skin cells because they were not on the
inside. Knowing this, the rishis became extremely powerful
individuals, but not in the ordinary sense. Where most men
are interested in material power , the rishis were interested
in the power of awareness. To them, the material level of
the world was quite crude. The real power in nature lies
closer to the source, and the ultimate power must lie right
at the source. Favoring mind over matte r is not a mystical notion. If you
want to build a skyscraper today , you don’t start by piling
up concrete and steel; you go to an architect, whose
intellect prepares the plan that must exist before
construction begins. His plan contains more of the power to
build a building than is contained in the labor . Certain
ﬁelds, such as music, mathematics, and quantum physics,
can make almost no progress without geniuses who work
deep in silence—Einstein’s preferred method of
investigation was not to work in a lab but to perform
thought expe riments in his head. He was in the habit of
doing this long before he achieved any degree of fame and
position. He was placing clocks around the universe, he
once recalled, before he could aﬀord to buy a real one for
his house. To the rishis, it would seem peculiar that we portion out
our intelligence into so many small, isolated ﬁelds of
knowledge. Our social conditioning forbids the cosmic
perspective, not by condemning it but by providing so much
distracting busy-work. If you are caught up in bricks and
mortar , it is diﬀicult to learn architecture. A ﬁeld like
medicine is now so incredibly complicated that if you say,
“This patient can be treated through the ﬂow of
intelligence,” sheer momentum would be agains t you as
much as disbelief .The unbounded state is not frequently seen in our society ,
while its opposite is absolutely epidemic. Psychiatrists see
patients every day who are crippled by boundaries, people
who have programmed guilt, anxiety , and unnameable
insecurities into themselves. Those who have acquired
phobias are extreme examples of this, since their deadly
fear is out of all proportion to any actual danger . If you take
an agoraphobe—someone who fears open spaces— out for a
drive, he will show inten se anxiety . If you stop in an open
ﬁeld and ask him to step out of the car, he will be as
paralyzed as a normal person who is asked to jump oﬀ a
cliﬀ. Try to force him and he will struggle for his life,
literally . The keenest anguish of a phobic is knowing that he has
created his own conditio n, but his will is not enough to
break the pattern he has programmed into his physiology . (One agoraphobe in England grew so misera ble and
ashamed of his phobia that he decided to end his life. The
method he chose was to drive two miles in his car, an
action he was sure would be lethal! When this failed, he felt
terriﬁed at ﬁrst, but then he discovered that his phobia had
lessened. He had accidentally hit upon the therapy called
“ﬂooding,” which psychi atrists sometimes use to wrench
far-gone phobics out of unreality .) Boundaries created in silence are the most conﬁning. People who have never heard of Veda generally know the
word Maya,  or illusion—in Sanskrit, it literally means “that
which is not.” Maya is greatly misunderstood—the rishis
did not call the world Maya to say that it does not exist, like
some mirage. Maya is the illusion of boundaries, the
creation of a mind that has lost the cosmic perspective. It
comes from seeing a million things “out there” and missing
one thing, the invisible  ﬁeld that is the origin of the
universe. Reading the great rishis, it is no wonder that they
considered Maya a poor substitute for the cosmicperspective. The Yoga Vasishtha said, “In the inﬁnite
consciousness, in every atom of it, universes come and go,
like particles  of dust in a beam of sunlight shining  through
a hole in the roof .”
Quantum reality leaps from Vasishtha’s pages, because
he found the perspective which showed him, “In every
atom, there are worlds within worlds.” Demolishing one’s
own boundaries does not make the relative world vanish; it
adds anothe r dimension of reality to it—reality becomes
unbounded. When the walls are down, the world can
expand. And that, according to the rishis, makes all the
diﬀerence between a world that could be a heaven and one
that becomes a hell. —
The mechanism behind phobias can be used in exactly the
opposite way, to take down a wall rather than build  one. We
could just as easily , and far more happily , talk about people
who overcome fears that are supposed to be normal. The
construction workers on skyscrapers used to include a
large propor tion of Mohawk Indians, who were raised
without a fear of heights. The same courage can be
gradually built into oneself by practice—for example, by
walking a tightrope. Such ﬂexibility is not limited to psychological states. Nutritionists have abundant scientiﬁc evidence to show
that the body must be given certain vitamins and minerals
every day in order not to fall prey to deﬁciency diseases—
the classic instance is scurvy , which aﬄicted the British
navy when sailors were fed solely on hardtack biscuits and
grog and deprived of the vitamin C in fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, native cultures around the world have
existed for centuries without rigorous daily vitamin
requirements and have adapted perfectly well. TheTarahumara Indians of northern Sonora in Mexico have
become famous in physi ological circles because they can
run twenty-ﬁve to ﬁfty miles a day in high altitudes without
discomfort. Whole tribes run these marathons every week;
when the winner of one race was tested two minutes after
crossing the ﬁnish line, an American physiologist
discovered that his heart rate was slower than when he
began. What ampliﬁes this inexplicable feat is that the
Tarahumara typically live on two hundred pounds of corn a
year for the average family , half of which is made into corn
beer. Other sources of nutrition, such as root vegetables,
become available in small quantities during the limited
growing season. By being able to thrive on an absurdly
substandard diet, these people show the nearl y inﬁnite
ﬂexibility of the mind-body system. Ironically , their
adaptation is so perfect that when placed on a “balanced”
diet fortiﬁed  with vitamins and minerals, many native
people devel op heart disease, hypertension, skin disorders,
and rotten teeth, none of which they had before, in
epidemic proportions. Obviously , these examples throw down a challenge to our
whole conception of what is normal. We have ample
evidence in our own culture that what is most normal about
us is our ability to create our own reality . As Sir John Eccles
told the parapsychologists, it is incomprehensible that our
thoughts can move molecules, and yet we live quite
comfortably with this impossibility all the time. The rishis
simply exten d our comfort zone all the way, into the
normality of the inﬁnite. We already know that if an impulse of intelligence  wants
to do something, then it does it, using intelle ct, mind,
senses, and matter to ﬁnd its outlet. Intelligence can create
a physiology  where healing thoughts take place, but it can
also create the reverse. If we were “hard-wired”  like acomputer , then every physiology would be predictable; in
reality , no physiology is. Intelligence creates new circuitry
at will, and this makes each person unique. Every
experience in life changes the brain’s anatomy . The new
dendrites created in the brain cells of active old people are
just one instance. Even more extraordinary  is the following experiment: Dr.
Herbert Spector of the National Institutes of Health took a
group of mice and gave them poly-I:C , a chemical known to
stimulate the activity of natural killer T-cells in the immune
system and thus strengt hen the animal’s defens e against
disease. Every time a mouse received his dose of poly-I:C ,
the smell of camphor was released in the vicinity at the
same time. For a few weeks the pattern continued, injecting the
chemical and releasing the camphor smell. When the
chemical was taken away , Spector exposed the mice to only
the camphor , and he found that their immune-cell count
again increased, even without the chemical. In other words,
the smell alone made them stronger against disease. Could
he have done the reverse and lowered their immunity with
a smell? A team at the University of Rochester later showed that
this is possible. They took a group of rats and fed them
cyclophosphamide, a chemical known to diminish the
eﬀiciency of the immune  response. At the same time, the
rats were given saccharine-sweetened water , which
substituted for camphor as the neutral agent. When the
drug was withdrawn, the animals still dropp ed their
immune-cell count just by tasting the water . What excited
the research ers at the time was the realization  that the
immune system has learn ing ability . It directly responds to
outside stimuli, not just to the internal environme nt of the
bloodstream.In a larger sense, however , these experiments tell us that
the body is not tied to predictable responses. The
intelligence of a cell is creative. The predictable
mechanism that responds positively to poly-I:C and
negatively to cyclophosp hamide can transform itself and
respond to anything. Moreover , it can turn around and
respond with opposite results—the smell of camphor could
have been associated with either drug. There is no ﬁxed connection, then, between what kind of
experience you put into the body and the result that comes
out—your nervous system is set up for unboundedness. The
more we dwell on this, the more remarkable the
implications are. The smell of camphor did not do anything
to cause the change in immune cells: the mice could have
smelled roses or listened to a Mozart quartet. What
actually happened inside them was the creation of an
impulse of intelligence , a totally ﬂuid entity that
coordinates a piece of the nonmaterial world with a piece
of the material world. The ancient rishis understood this
very well. A verse from the Veda says, “What you see, you
become.” In other words, just the experience of perceiving
the world makes you what you are. This is a quite literal
statement. Children growing up in homes where there is
inadequate love can show a variety of symptoms—they may
be unhappy , neurotic, schizophrenic, sickly , angry, or any
number of other responses. But one of the strangest  is a
condition called psychosocial dwarﬁsm. Such children do
not grow up; they induce in themselves a deﬁciency of
growth hormone from the pituitary , and as a result, they
remain small and undeveloped in their physiques. Ignoring the biological clock, the onset of puberty  can be
delayed; so can the acquisition of mental skills associated
with older children, which is not directly controlled by the
pituitary . It is not a dysfunction of the pituitary that is at
fault, for when these children are placed in lovingsurroundings, their condition can spontaneously  reverse,
and they quickly catch up with their peers in size. Growing up is a built-in, genetically programmed
outcome of being born—yet these children defy it simply
because they feel unloved. Even if a doctor injects them
with growth hormone, many refuse to grow . A study with
adult male victims of heart attacks showed that the most
signiﬁcant factor in their recovery—meaning whether they
lived or died—was not anything to do with diet, exercise,
smoking, or a will to live. The men who lived felt that their
wives loved them, while those who felt unloved tended not
to survive; no other correlation the researchers could ﬁnd
was as strong. For years I have been haunted by the memory of one of
my ﬁrst patients, an Indian villager named Laxman
Govindass. I was still a medical student in New Delhi,
conﬁned to the drudgery  of working up physicals on the
patients whom the hospital staﬀ doctors were too busy to
see. The hospita l in question was a teaching hosp ital
attached to my school, the All-India Medical Institute, and
the academic doctors there had scant interest in a broken-
down alcoholic like Laxman Govindass. He was a peasant farmer whose drinking had gotten out
of hand to the point where his family deserted him. One son
had bundled him oﬀ to the door of our hospital and left him
there with the words, “Here’s where you will probably die.”
Like all villagers consign ed to us, Mr. Govindass was very
apprehensive and totally out of his element. The interns
took good enough care of his cirrhosis of the liver, but
without spending any time to become acquainted with him
personally . I got to know  him only because as a student I
had most of the day free; I made a habit of following the
orderly who brought around the evening curry so that I
could chat with the patients.I struck up a rapport with Mr. Govindass, sitting by his
bed and exchanging an occasional word; mostly we just
looked out the window together . Day by day he wasted
away a little more, and nobody gave him longe r than a
week or two at most, including me. In a short while it was
time for me to rotate from the city to a village dispensary
sixty miles away , so I came in to wish him good-bye. To
keep up a good front, I told him that I would be back to see
him in thirty days. In reply , he looked at me very seriously and said, “Now
that you are leaving, I have nothing more to live for—I will
die.” Without thinking, I blurted, “Don’t be silly. You can’t
die until I come back to see you again.” Since Mr.
Govindass was extremely  emaciated—he weighed less than
eighty pounds—his doctors were surprised that he was
even alive. I left for my posting in the country and in a little while
had no more thoughts about him. A month later, on my
return to New Delhi, I was walking down the hospital
corridor and saw the name Laxman Govindass on one of the
doors. I rushed in, feeling strangely apprehensive, and
there he was, curled on his bed outside the sheets in a fetal
position. There was nothing left of him but skin and bones,
but when I gently touched him, he turned his huge eyes
toward me. “You have come back,” he muttered. “You said I
could not die without seeing you again—now I see you.”
Then he closed his eyes and died. I recounted this incident,  one of the most importan t in my
life, once before; at that time, I felt two emotions—a
lingering guilt that I had sentenced this man to so much
protracted suﬀering and a deep respect for the mind-body
connection that had kept him alive. Now I realize  that I was
seeing the truth of unboundedness, the ability of our
impulses of intelligence to do what they want, despite all
the rules that might have to be broken. The impulse that Ishared with Laxman Govindass was love. Though it arose in
a wasted body, his love had the power that love always has
—it gave new life. It pierced through the Maya of his body
and deﬁed death to claim him. On the delicacy of that
impulse, a gossamer thread as strong as steel, a new
medicine could be founded. —
The possibility that each person is an inﬁnite being is
becoming more real now. Gifted with total ﬂexibilit y in our
nervous systems, we all have the choice to build boundaries
or tear them down. Every person is continually
manufacturing an inﬁnite array of thoughts, memories,
desires, objects, and so on. These impulses, rippling
through the ocean of consciousness, become your reality . If
you knew how to control the creation of impulses of
intelligence, you would be able not only to grow new
dendrites but anything else. “What you see, you become” is a truth that shapes the
whole physiology , including the brain. This was brought
home by an ingenious experiment devised by psychologists
Joseph Hubel and David  Weisel, again involving newborn
kittens. Three batches of kittens were placed in carefully
controlled environments as they were opening their eyes. The ﬁrst was a white box painted with horizontal black
stripes; the second was a white box painted with vertical
black stripes; the third box was simply left white. After being exposed to these conditions during the
critical few days when sight develops, the kittens’ brains
conformed to them for life. The animals raised in a world
with horizon tal stripes could not correctly see anything
vertical—they would run into chair legs, whose verticality
had little or no reality  for them. The batch from the
vertical-stripe box had exactly the opposite proble m, being
unable to perceive horizontal lines. The kittens from all-white surroundings had a larger disorientation and could
not relate to any objects correctly . These anima ls became what they saw, because the
neurons responsible for sight were now rigidly
programmed. In the case of humans, too, the brain
sacriﬁces some of its unbounded awareness every time it
perceives the world through boundaries. Without the ability
to transcend, this partial blindness is inescapable. For each
of the senses, not just sight, impressions are constantly
being laid down on our neurons. Although we customarily
call the heavier impressions “stress,” in fact all impressions
create some limitation. To illustrate: researchers at M.I.T . in the early 1980s
were probin g into how human hearing works. Hearing
appears to be passive, but actually every person listens to
the world quite selectively and puts his own interpretation
on the raw data that come into his ears. (A trained
musician hears pitch and harmony , for instanc e, where
someone who is tone-deaf hears noise.) One experiment
involved having people listen to short, simple rhythms (1-2-
3 and 1-2-3 and 1-2-3),  then training them to hear the
rhythm in a diﬀerent way (1, 2, 3-and-l, 2, 3-and-l, 2). After
they started to hear the rhythms diﬀerently , the subjects
reported that the sounds seemed livelier and fresher . Clearly , the experiment had taught people to slightly alter
their invisible boundaries. However , the really interesting
result was that when they went home, these people found
that colors looked brighter , music sounded happier , the
taste of food was suddenly more delicious, and everyone
around them appeared lovable. Just the slightest opening of awareness caused a reality
shift. Meditation, because it opens more channels of
awareness and opens them to a deeper level, causes a
bigger shift. The change does not depart far from the
normal way we use our awareness. Building boundaries willstill be a fact of life. The twist the rishis gave was to infuse
this activity with freedom, raising it to a level that
transcends the petty thoughts and desires of the isolated
ego. Ordinarily , the ego has no choice but to spend life
desperately erecting one boundary after another . It does
this for the same reason as medieval cities erected walls—
for protection. The ego ﬁnds the world a dangerous, hostile place,
because everything that exists is separate from “I.” This is
the condition known as duality , and it is a great source of
fear—the Veda calls it the only source of fear. As we look
“out there,” we see every kind of potential threat, all the
trauma and pain that life can inﬂict. The ego’s logical
defense is to wall itself in with the friendlier things—family ,
pleasures, happy memories, familiar places and activities. The rishis did not propose tearing down these defensive
boundaries, although many people believe that was their
intention. In both East and West, the idea that Indian sages
condemned the “illusion of life” has taken root, and yet,
Vedic reality was not based on such an absurdity . Duality does exist, and because of its existence the
recognition of a higher unity is made meaningful. Two polar
opposites fuse into a whole—this principle puts the silent
and active ﬁelds of life into proper perspective. When the
rishis found unity , the silent ﬁeld of intelligence, they found
the other pole that makes life complete. The ancient texts
explain this as Purnam adah, purnam idam —“This is full,
that is full.”
The highest goal of existence, then, is to achieve “two
hundred percent of life.” The human nervous system can
accomplish this because it is ﬂexible enough to appreciate
both the diversity of life, which is inﬁnite but full of
boundaries, and the uniﬁed state, which is equally inﬁnite,
but completely unbounded. Just from a logical standpoint,
no other possibility could  exist. No one was given a cosm iccomputer and told, “Rem ember , you can use only half of it.”
No one gave us any limitations on the patterns of
intelligence we can make, change, blend, expand, and
inhabit. Life is a ﬁeld of unlimited  possibilities. Such is the
glory of total ﬂexibility in the human nervous system. This is a tremendously important point. It says that we
can bypass the limited, bounded choices that we are used
to making and go directl y to the solution of any problem. The basis for this assertion is that nature has already
structured the solution in our consciousness. The problems
are in the ﬁeld of diversity , while the solutions are in the
ﬁeld of unity . Going straight to the ﬁeld of unity
automatically hits upon the solution, which the mind-body
system then carries out—that was the rishis’ shortcut. Robert Keith Wallace’s studies on aging are an excellent
example of how the shortcut works. The current scientiﬁc
wisdom holds that aging is a complicated, poorly
understood area. Gerontology , the study of old age, has
become a specialization only since the 1950s, when the
mapping of DNA made it possible to consider that there
might be special genes for aging (none have appeared so
far, although certain aging mechanisms are known to be
genetically coded in lower animals). Now that gerontology
is in high gear, it is swam ped with conﬂicting theories and
huge data banks amassed from research projects that will
take decades to ﬁnish. This intensive research eﬀort has not made people age
more slowly . The major advance in the ﬁeld has been to
document that healthy people do not have to deteriorate
automatically as they grow older , a point that has been
made for centuries without data banks. Gerontology has
had some valuable medical applications, such as the
recognition that many senile symptoms once thought
permanent are reversible. They are not signs of brain decay
but the by-pr oduct of poor nutrition, isolation, dehydration,and other factors in the person’s environment. Otherwise,
gerontology proceeds bit by bit, forging tiny links in
theories that are conjectural to begin with. As for getting
the American people to eat better , exercise sensibly , and
practice disease prevention, the whole ﬁeld is in agreement
with the rest of medicine. Wallace’s research, however , proceeded on the
assumption that people do not age by bits and pieces but as
whole human beings. Therefore, aging contains a large
element of choice. If old people can retain  their mental
faculties by continually using them, then the practice of
meditation, which opens the awareness completely , should
do even more. Wallace’s basic ﬁnding, as mentioned earlier ,
was that long-term meditators did decrease their biological
age by ﬁve to twelve years. (High levels of a little-
understood hormone called DHEA
[dehydroepiandrosterone] were also found; it has been
speculated that DHEA somehow helps to retard aging and
perhaps inhibit the onset and growth of cancer .) This research suggests that aging is controlled by
consciousness. Operating at the usual level of superﬁcial,
confused thinking, we speed up the aging proce ss in our
cells, but as we move to the silent region of the
transcendent, mental activity stops, and apparently cell
activity follows accordingly . If this is true, then aging can
be programmed from diﬀerent levels of awareness. If we
program ourselves to deteriorate, which was the rule in
earlier generations, then that becomes the reality . Programming of this kind is not a matter of simply  thinking
or believing. Positive attitudes, mental  alertness, the will to
survive, and other psychological traits can ease old age;
they certainly help crack the rigid social conditioning that
old people are often trapped by.
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:

        A neutrino zips through the
whole Earth with equal ease. ) Using this insight, the rishis
went even further. They noticed that you do not have to
touch an object physically  to know how it feels. Answer this
question: Which is softer, a starched linen napkin or a rose
petal. You can easily compare the two in your mind, using
an image of touch, withou t having to go out and ﬁnd a real
napkin and a real rose. The reason why you can do this is that you have gone to a
subtler level of the sense of touch. Similarly, there are
subtle sound s, sights, smells, and tastes. However, this
level of the mind is not the end—in meditation, one can
reach even further back, beyond the ﬁve subtle senses
(called the Tanmatras  in Ayurveda), until one arrives at
consciousness in its uniﬁed state—the Vedic texts compare
this to following the hand’s ﬁve ﬁngers back to where they
join at the palm. Subjectively, the visual image of a rose
would grow fainter and fainter on the screen of the mind,
until nothing was left but the screen itself. Then one would
be at the true origin of the senses, the ﬁeld of intelligence
itself. In this way, the rishis reasoned, the whole world of
physical reality comes into being. We seem to be in deep philosophical waters here, but in
fact every layer of touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste
inﬂuences our ordinary lives. If you like to eat oysters and I
detest them, the diﬀerence is not in the oyster or in our
taste buds. The contact between the molecules of the
oyster and the taste receptors in our mouths is the same
for both of us. Yet, in the process of tasting, your delight
insinuates itself, and so does my disgust. All the raw data of
experience must pass through the ﬁlter of intelligence, and
no two people appraise it in exactly the same way. When someth ing seems to change in the world, the rishis
said, it is really you that is changing. A friend of mine, also
Indian, is a surgeon who has gained a reputation for beingrather a gourmet. His specialty is omelets, the more exotic
the better. The last time we had Sunday brunch together,
however, he didn’t order an omelet. Curious, I asked him
about it, and he said, “I can’t stand the taste of an omelet
anymore. ” It turned out that his liking for them had
changed instantly, earlier that week. He was stirring up an omelet at home while his 6-year-old
son, Arjun, looked on. As each egg was cracked, my friend
tossed the shell aside. By chance a few of them fell into a
small brown bag of birdseed that was going to be set out
for the sparrows. “Oh, don’t do that,” Arjun said seriously. “The birds will
think their babies have died, and they won’t want to eat. ”
My friend is usually proud of his boy’s precocious remarks,
but all at once he couldn’t abide the taste of the omelet he
was making, or any other. Science would be at a loss to
measure the change that occurred in him, because it is too
ghostly and too individual. The idea that an omelet tastes
good has no more weight than that it tastes bad. The same
is true of every other sensation. Is a goose-down pillow
soft. Not to someone with a migraine, who groans with
pain when his head touches it. Does a jet move fast. Not if
you view it from the moon. In short, there is no end to the
way a sense impression can be interpreted, and no end to
the ways that the body can respond to it. —
The rishis said that life is built up by your participation in
it. Nothing is good or bad, hard or soft, painful or pleasant,
except as you live it. The same is true of disease. A disease
is not the molecular contact of some outside organism with
the molecules of your body. (As we saw, even if you put a
drop of concentrated cold virus into a person’s nose, his
chances of getting a cold are no more than one in eight. ) It
is not even the ﬂow of toxins in your blood or the action ofrunaway cells. In the rishis’ view, a disease is a sequence of
moments that you live through, during which you appraise
every iota of the vast input that comes pouring in from all
quarters of your world, including your body. Your body is a world, too. When I ﬁrst came to Ayurveda,
I was deeply impressed  by the following verse in the
ancient texts:
As is the human body, so is the cosmic body. As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. —
These words are subject to many interpretations. What
they signify to me is that when I go about my everyday
existence, I am in charge of two worlds, the little one in me
and the big one around me. My appraisal of every minute
detail “out there”—the sun, the sky, the chances of rain, the
words other people say, the shadows cast by oﬀice
buildings—is matched by an event “in here. ” Inﬁnite choice
is open at every second for me to alter the shape of the
world, for it has no shape other than what I give it. The
eminent neurologist Sir John Eccles stated this quite
clearly when he wrote, “I want you to realize that there is
no color in the natural world and no sounds—nothing of
this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent…”
In short, nothing is so important about the univers e as your
participation in it. The rishis’ subjective approach found an enormously
useful outlet in Ayurveda. Ayurveda is commonly classiﬁed
as a system of medicine,  but with equal justice you could
call it a syste m for curing delusions, for stripping away the
convincing quality of disease and letting a healthier reality
take its place. (The name itself suggest s that Ayurveda ismeant to be medicine in the broadest sense. It comes from
two Sanskrit roots, Ayus, or “life,” and Veda, which means
either “knowledge” or “science. ” The literal meaning, then,
is “science of life. ”)
Patients are curious to know what kinds of treatments are
speciﬁcally Ayurvedic—are there new pills to try, exercises,
diets, or more arcane Eastern therapies. I say yes to all of
these, but then with some embarrassment I have to add
that I spend much of my time just talking, trying to get
people not to be so convinced by their disease. In Ayurveda,
this is the ﬁrst and most important step in healing. As long
as the patien t is convinced by his symptoms, he is caught
up in a reality where “being sick” is the dominant input. The reason why meditati on is so important in Ayurveda is
that it leads the mind to a “free zone” that is not touched
by disease. Until you know that such a place exists, your
disease will seem to be taking over completely. This is the
principal delusion that needs to be shattered. It is undeniable that we all create scenarios and then
become convinced by them, down to our very cells. A young
girl from Boston who went to college in Vermont was
brought in to see me recently by her parents. They had
become quite  distraught when she showed up in the middle
of spring term with sharp chest pains. These had set in
while she was recovering  from a cold and over a period of a
week became alarmingly severe. One night the girl had a
bad attack—she began to experience shortness of breath,
palpitations, and dizziness, eventually grow ing so
frightened that her parents rushed her to the nearest
emergency room. By the time they got there, the whole family was in a
state of near panic. The ER doctor listened to the girl’s
heart, detect ed that she had a slight heart murmur, and
decided to run an EKG, or electrocardiogram. The EKG
read-out showed occasio nal ectopic beats, mean ing extrabeats that were outside the heart rhythm. He then used
ultrasound to perform a more sophisticated test, called an
echo-cardiogram, from which he discerned an actual heart
defect. “She has mitral valve prolapse,” he informed the family. This meant that when one of her heart valves closed, it
ballooned inward, toward the chamber of the heart. “I want
her to spend the night here in the intensive care unit,” he
continued, and within an hour the girl was taken upstairs,
hooked to an intravenous drip of morphine for her pain,
and supplied with extra oxygen through small tubes taped
to her nose. Around her were heart -attack and stroke
victims, some  of them obviously dying. She found the whole
experience highly distressing and began to hallucinate
from the morphine as she drifted oﬀ to sleep. The next morning, a careful examination of her tests led
the doctors to diagnose that her pain was probably due not
only to the mitral valve prolapse but to pericarditis, an
inﬂammation of the peric ardium, the covering around the
heart. She was released on strong anti-inﬂammatory agents
for this, as well as beta blockers to slow her heart rate. The
pain in her chest subsided; however, she found it
impossible to tolerate the beta blockers—besides aﬀecting
the heart, these drugs attach to receptors in the brain,
causing drowsiness and mental disorientation. Her medications were changed, only to bring on new side
eﬀects and expand her constellation of symptoms. The new
prescriptions were meant to dilate her blood vessels, but
this lowered her blood pressure too much, causing her to
feel dizzy and nauseated; at times she would faint without
warning. She managed to tolera te these side eﬀects,
largely becau se she wanted to stay in school at any cost. Every time she tried to cut back on her medication, even
slightly, the original chest pain returned in full force,
accompanied by her other symptoms. She came home forsummer vacation and horriﬁed her parents by clutching her
chest one evening at dinner. She started to hypervent ilate
so severely that her mother went scurrying to ﬁnd a paper
bag for her to breathe into. Within a few minutes, she felt
violent heart palpitations, began to vomit, and eventually
passed out. Her parents sat up with her all that night and
many nights to come. Since there was nothing more that her doctors could do,
the family cast about for other approaches. They hit upon a
news story about Ayurveda, and one July day all three,
mother, father, and daughter, came to the Lancaster clinic. I took a very detailed medical history from the girl, looked
at her EKGs, and found myself quite surprised. “Your pain isn’t from your heart,” I told her, and to prove
it I pressed ﬁrmly on her sternum, the bone in the middle of
the chest that covers the heart. She ﬂinched. “You’re still
tender because what you originally had was an
inﬂammation there, where the rib cartilage and the
sternum meet. It is a condition called costo-chondritis,
which can sometimes set in after a cold or other viral
infection. ”
She and her parents looked startled, but I went on, taking
apart the puzzle piece by piece. On the night they had
rushed her to the ER, her high anxiety caused her to
exhibit the occasional ectopic, or extra, heartbeats. Her
main diagnosis, mitral valve prolapse, may occur in as
many as 10 percent of young women with slender builds
like hers. The reason for this is not known, nor is there
conclusive evidence for why it should cause any pain,
although in some patients it does. Similarly, the heart
murmur that comes with it does not seem to be dangerous. Her pericarditis was a misreading of her EKG—the violence
of her attack had probabl y made the ER doctor overanxious
to ﬁnd something wrong. The remaining symptoms—
nausea, vomiting, heart palpitations, dizziness, fainting,shortness of breath, and hyperventilation—were brought on
either by the medications or directly by her. “I have tried to go back to the moment when your
condition was born,” I said, “to show you how it built itself
up, step by step. In its present form, your disease is a
reﬂex. It is being kept alive by your own expectations. ”
At this point the girl’s parents looked quite oﬀended. I
knew the anxiety they felt sitting up all night, worr ying that
she might be in real dang er. To make the parents see that I
wasn’t blaming anybody, I told them about my experience
on the airplane when the No Smoking sign set my heart
going. Add a little more fear to the situation, and my
pounding heart could have been the start of a “heart
condition” just as convincing as their daughter’s. They were still uneasy. When their daughter suﬀered
stabbing chest pains, they thought of her as a victim of
illness; now I seemed to say that she was doing it to
herself. The era of mind-body medicine has made this an
extremely sore point. Life was simpler when a disease
without a germ was considered “all in your head. ” The
germs have largely been pushed back, but instead of
leaving us free of disease, this has made disease far more
enigmatic. Am I waiting  for cancer to strike me, or is my
personality giving it to me. This girl’s case is a perfect
example; A cardiologist might point to her heart defect as
the cause of her pain; a psychiatrist could say that the
defect didn’t do anythin g—the girl simply panic ked. The
drugs she took induced vomiting, but she still vomits when
they are removed. Her low blood pressure  can cause
fainting, but so can anxiety. Modern medicine has swung
back and forth debating these points endlessly. The result, according to patient surveys, is a huge
increase in guilt. There is such a ﬁne line between probing
a patient’s fears and fueling them. I have sat for hours
counseling people with cancer. They listen attentivelybecause “the doctor is talking. ” I tell them they can beat
the cancer, and they quickly, anxiously agree. But when I
am alone again, I am haunted by a terrible thought I see
lurking in their eyes: “You say I’m sick, but really I did it to
myself. ”
The girl had not spoke n for quite a while. “So I’m
creating this thing. ” she ﬁnally said. “No,” I replied, “but you are certainly participatin g in it. Try taking away your participation—I bet things will
change. ”
“How do I do that. ” she asked. “You have to break out of your own conditioning,”  I said. “The next time you have an attack, just stand back from it a
little; let the pain be there, as innocently as you can. ” If she
could do this, I told her, the whole thing would probably
evaporate. She listened and thanked  me, then I heard nothing more
for two weeks. Perhaps I had touched too many nerves. I
had been making her disease more and more personal,
when what the family desperately hoped for was that it was
impersonal. Conventional medicine goes out of its way to
put diseases  into neat, classiﬁable boxes just so that the
personal element is eliminated. I had noticed while
interviewing her that this girl placed a huge importance on
her diagnosis. She would preface each episode by saying,
“When I get my mitral valve prolapse…” It was as if these
words explai ned everythi ng. They were like a net that drew
together all her symptoms and held them tight. When I
mentioned this, she looked very thoughtful. She had
invested so much in the words mitral valve prolapse  that
they had acquired a kind of magic for her. It was essential
to break the spell of this magic, which can be uncannily
powerful. I was wrong if I thought she hadn’t taken our session to
heart. Out of curiosity I phoned  the family to see how shewas doing. The news was very good: she was oﬀ all
medications and her attacks were now limited to occasional
bouts of chest pain. Her parents would some times see her
sitting with her eyes closed. When they asked what she was
doing, she said, “I just watch the pain until it goes away. ”
The accom panying symptoms—dizziness, vomiting,
fainting, et cetera—have disappeared. —
In psychology there are certain extreme feelings—such as
loathing, dread, horror, and awe—that many peop le cannot
face. When these people grow horriﬁed or struck with awe,
they could swear that their emotion comes from outside
themselves. In cases of paranoia, the person might even
think that “they” are broadcasting such feelings into him
through some kind of magic. (“They” can be Martians,
communists, or next-door neighbors. ) Freud called these
our “uncanny” emotions and spent many years observing
them in neurotic and psychotic patients. But uncanniness is always present, I think. It is nature’s
way of putting a veil over our most secret fears ; it hides
inner pain from us until the moment when the pain breaks
an invisible dam and comes pouring out. Then the twin
thought arises, “Is this happening to me, or am I doing it to
myself. ” It doesn’t really matter  if the end result is a
disease or just a sense of extreme discomfort. The
important thing is to keep the patient from getting twisted
up in his doubts—that way lies total paralysis. Medicine has already paid a very high price for not
dealing adequately with the personal nature of disease. For
one thing, we have aroused guilt without being  able to
assuage it. People are horriﬁed at the idea that they are to
blame for their diseases. Doctors don’t think they are
stoking this guilt. Perhaps it was born out of being told
over and over that no one is to blame. But if you say thatliving right will help prevent a heart attack or cancer, don’t
you have to accept that living wrong will help bring on the
same diseases. The whole issue of blame and responsibility is painful to
untangle. When I had my private practice in endocrinology,
I would see obese patients whose weight put them  at high
risk for becoming diabetic. I would warn them about the
danger of continuing to eat too much; at the same time, I
knew I was feeding their guilt, which would only lead to
more eating. If a patient was a chain-smoker, I would be
very ﬁrm and say, “My God, you know you have to quit
smoking—think of the risks you are running. ” Many of
these patients were ex-servicemen I saw at the V. A. hospital
in Boston. After listening to me, they could go to the PX
upstairs, where government-subsidized cigarettes were
being sold at a steep discount. (I bought mine there, too,
having become a smoke r during my night shifts as an
intern. ) In fact, no disease points up the paradoxes of blame and
responsibility better than lung cancer. The public is well
aware that this is almost exclusively a smoker’s illness. That puts the responsibility squarely on the patient, but
then a second thought enters. Aren’t these people addicted
to nicotine. A 1988 report by the surgeon general states
that they are, and that their addiction may be harder to
break than addiction to heroin or alcohol. This means that
one is not dealing with a rational situation. Sigmund Freud attempted for many years to stop
smoking after being informed by his doctor that twenty
cigars a day—Freud’s normal ration—was bad for his heart. He stopped once for seven weeks, but his heart went into
palpitations worse than before. He became intolerably
depressed and was forced back to his cigars. When he
didn’t smoke, Freud told his biographer, “the torture was
beyond human power to bear. ” I have  witne ssed advance dlung cancer patients waiting for radiation who walk around
a corner to smoke a cigarette—this implies that prevention
may be impossible, beca use it would have to start before
the ﬁrst cigarette gets smoked. In every disease, not just lung cancer, the patients are
often too hooked, too guilty, or simply too convinced to be
helped. There is no denying the deeply irrational streak in
man. At the V.
The individual, as they believe that disease is a sequence of moments that one lives through, and that one's own state of balance is crucial in determining one's health.
According to the rishis, who is responsible for creating disease?
Changing the patient's perception and reality, rather than just treating the physical symptoms of the disease.
What is the focus of Ayurveda, according to the author?
The failure to recognize the personal and subjective nature of disease, and the emphasis on treating the physical symptoms rather than the root cause.
What is the main issue with modern medicine, according to the author?
That disease is not an objective fact, but rather a subjective experience that is influenced by the individual's perception and reality.
What is the author suggesting about the concept of disease?
To transcend the boundaries of the ego and achieve a unified state of consciousness, where the individual can influence the physical world.
What is the ultimate goal of the rishis, according to the text?