Praise for Dr. Chopra and Unconditional Life
“Brilliant, provocative, and poetic  … Dr. Chopra’s kindness and deep caring for
people, and his desire for their liberat ion from suering, shine through on every
page.”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Director, Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program,
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and author of Full Catastrophe Living
“Inspiring reading  … Dr. Chopra presents a rare perspective—that of a scientist
and a healer. Through beautifully told stories of his clinical experience, he
demonstrates the possibilities of medicine with heart and spirit.”
—Stephan Rechtschaen, M.D., President, Omega Institute
And for His National Bestseller  
Quantum Healing
“Dr. Chop ra is a ne, evocative writer who maneuvers his way suavely through
medicine, physics, and metaphysics. For anyone who has awaited a Tao of
medicine, this book is a most welcome arrival.”
—The New England Journal of Medicine
“Dazzling.”
—The Washington Post
“Brilliant and entertaining.”
—The London Daily Telegraph
“A profound investigation of consciousness and health.”
—Yoga Journal
“Drawing on both modern science and ancient wisdom, here is a model of health
and illness that can stand the test of scientic scrutiny because of one simple  fact:
It works.”
—Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Space, Time & Medicine
“A beautifully balanced web of dramatic examples and reasoned speculation.”
—Craig A. Lambert, Ph.D., Harvard Magazine“His case histories  … take the old ‘mind-body’ controversy to new levels of
complexity and fascination.”
—San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner
“Illuminating and inspiring.”  
—East West
OceanofPDF.comOther books by Deepak Chopra, M.D. CREATING HEALTH
RETURN OF THE RISHI
QUANTUM HEALING
PERFECT HEALTH
AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND
OceanofPDF.comOceanofPDF.comUNCONDITIONAL LIFE 
A Bantam Book  
PUBLISHING HISTORY  
Bantam hardcover edition published October 1991  
Bantam trade paperback edition/October 1992
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from  The Enlightened
Heart by Stephen Mitchell. Copyright  © 1989 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers . All rights reserved . Copyright  © 1991 by Deepak Chopra, M.D. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-
10038. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books . eISBN: 978-0-307-79919-7
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing
Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a
rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Oce and in other countries. Marca
Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036 . v3.1
OceanofPDF.comContents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Part One  
The Mystery of Personal Reality
  1 The Man Who Would Be Healed
  2 The Lens of Perception
  3 Magical Thinking
  4 Bending the Arrow of Time
Part Two  
Beyond Boundaries
  5 A Mirage of Molecules
  6 Thread to Freedom
  7 The Importance of Feeling Special
  8 The True Self
Part Three  
Unconditional Life
  9 “Why Aren’t I Real Anymore?”
10 Paradise Remembered
11 The Field of Power
12 What It Means to Be Whole
Recommended ReadingAbout the Author
OceanofPDF.comPart One
The Mystery of 
Personal Reality
OceanofPDF.com1
The Man Who  
Would Be Healed
“How much more  of this do you think I can stand?” the patient
demanded. He slumped in his chair, and his face darkened. “Six
months ago all I could think about was staying alive. I listened to
anyone who held out hope for a cure. They’re all scared to come out
and use the word ‘cure,’ of course, but I’ve been prom ised every
kind of rose garden you can grow. It all sounds pretty funny now,
doesn’t it?”
“No,” I said quietly, “I know how hard you have worked to get
well.” I put my hand on his shoulder, but the man stiened and
drew back. “Let’s drop it,” he muttered. “Only a fool would keep on
like this.”
“A condition like yours is going to have its ups and downs. That’s
only to be expected,” I said gingerly, “but instead of being so
disappointed about your white counts—”
“No,” he interrupted bitterly, “no more white counts. I don’t want
that anymore.”
“What do you want?” I asked. “A way out.”
“Meaning what?”
“Believe me, if I knew that— ” There was a long, tense  silence. The man kept staring at the oor, his face set in a hard mask. We
both waited to hear what I would say next. My patient’s name was Robert Amis. He was thirty-seven and had
worked for a small computer  rm on the outskirts of Boston. A yearearlier his company had urged all employees to undergo a complete
blood screenin g as part of a stepped-up emphasis on health. Robert
complied without qualms. He was surprised when the test results
came back showing a suspicious rise in his white blood cell count. Follow-up tests were run, and a few weeks later an oncologist
somberly informed him that he had an incurable form of leukemia. Robert was deeply shaken. The average life expectancy for his
particular disorder, called chronic myelocytic leukemia, or CML,
was uncertain,  but it could be as short as two to four years. With so
little time left, he knew he had to act. “The minute I left the doctor’s oce, it was as if a switch
clicked,” he told me at our rst meeting. “I knew that my priorities
had to change.” He propos ed to his live-in girlfriend and very
quickly got married. Next he gave up his job in Boston and bought a
condo in Miami. But the main thing that happened was that Robert
threw himself with abandon  into the project of curing himself. “I
kept reading that there’s an inner healer,” he said, “and I was
determined to nd it.”
He discovered no lack of channels for reaching his goal: self-
hypnosis, visualization, psychotherapy, deep massage, and
progressive relaxation were just the beginning. He started attending
support group meetings with other leukemia patients and weekend
seminars on self-healing, at which he heard inspiring stories from
patients who had recovered  from incurable illnesses. When I met
him, he brandi shed the latest in a series of audiotapes he mailed out
every month to update friends and family on developments in his
life—meaning his disease, for that had become so nearly all-
consuming that there was very little of Robert’s life outside it. After six months, when he was at the height of his new existence,
Robert felt more emotionally secure than he ever had. He
condently went in for his next blood test, only to nd that, far
from coming under control, his white cell count had skyrocketed. His disorder seemed to be accelerating dangerously, and his
oncologist took a stern tone, advising him either to start intensive
chemotherapy or to take the more drastic step of having a bonemarrow transp lant. Neither course of action was likely to lead to a
permanent cure, but conventional medicine had little else to oer. Robert tried to remain resolute and refused both options. Soon
afterward, however, he began to tailspin into a deep depression. He
lost his appetite and found it increasingly dicult to sleep. By the
time he was referred to me, he was bitter, lonely, and all but cut o
from other people by his desperation. He sat slumped in his chair in front of me, and I pondered  what to
tell him. Although everything he had pursued was “right”—his
search for an inner healer, his attempt to break old, unfullling
habits, his decision to avoid stressful situations—he had not really
changed himself in any profound way. “Let me make clear that what I want isn’t for you to ‘think’
yourself into getting well,” I said. “It’s not a question of hoping hard
enough that this disease will go away—every patien t in your
position despe rately wants to get better. Why do some people have
it happen?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “A stronger body, good genes, luck. Maybe God loves them more than other people.”
“I’m not discounting any of these factors, and we can go into
them one by one. But what I hear you asking for,” I said, “is not just
a cure but a reason why this has happened to you.” Robert’s
expression remained frozen, but his eyes seemed to soften a little. I
continued, “It would be easy for me to claim that your sickness is
meaningless, that it is just the result of some random disruption in
your body. That is more or less what medical training drums into us. “It would also be easy to tell you exactly the opposite, that your
disease has a simplistic emotional cause, that you don’t love yourself
enough or that some form of repressed psychic pain is making you
sick. But that, too, is a half-truth. Both are prepackaged answers.”
“What else is there?” he asked bitterly. In that question, which
hung in the air between us with so much reproach and hopelessness,
we both came to a turning point. He was at the limit of what he
could ask for. I was at the limit of what medicine said I could oer. Yet it was absolutely clear, in human rather than medical terms,
what was being demanded. The old questions—“What does lifemean? Why can’t I have what I want?”—had come back up to the
surface of Robert’s mind, triggered by the crisis of his disease. A Cry for Meaning
Over the past ten or twenty years, medicine has had to open itself
to issues that it never felt comfortable facing in the past. Patients
want to know why they hurt, which is certainly not new, but as they
aim the questi on, its deeper implications refuse to remain buried. They are not content just to be told why the stomach, the intestines,
or the breast hurts. “Why do I hurt?” is their dilemma, and even
after you salve the ulcer, unblock the intestine, or cut out the breast
tumor, the patient returns with trouble in his eyes. Pushed to the edge of my so-called expertise, I have thought
about this hurt and tried to observe as closely as possible the people
who are honest enough to confront me with it. I have made some
surprising discoveries. There seems to be a hole in the middle of
everyday life, as if a rock had been thrown through a plate-glass
window. But instead of being a physical hole, one could  call this a
“meaning hole,” an absence  that cannot be dened except to say
that it hurts. Even if they cannot analyze the eect that lack of
meaning is having on their lives, people feel it, and as a result a sick
sadness hangs over things, even the best things. How many people
experience love, freedom, faith, or devotion as deeply as they really
want to? How many cannot feel these things at all and are left with
guilt and blame instead? On the surface , all my patien ts are seeking help because they are
ill, sometimes gravely ill. But what often shocks me is that many
seem, in some barely concealed way, relieved . In the midst of all his
struggle, Robert showed an undercurrent of this feeling . He hated
his disease, but it had also opened up opportunities denied to him
by ordinary life. “I didn’t believe in God until I got this cancer,” one
woman in her sixties said, “but now He feels very close.” I cannot
judge her experience; certain ly I am glad that she has found solace
near the end of her life rather than being shattered by bitterness.But her words also seem to say, “My life didn’t mean much until I
was forced out of it.”
One of the strangest phenomena of postmodern cultur e is this
optimism over death: doctors and therapists are urging us to make
death, not just a positive experience, but the positive experience of a
lifetime. Sickness has always  had an element of escapism in it. As
children we were coddled by our mothers whenever, we ran a fever,
and seriously ill adults are still given “intensive care.” But if a
terminal illnes s is seen as escapism carried to its ultimate, one
cannot help but ask, “Is this life so terrible that escape is its greatest
reward?” A patient of mine with multiple metastatic colon cancer
attended a seminar on “the will to live,” which is said to help people
recover from incurable illness. She opened her program book and
was horried to see that the main sponsors for the event were six
funeral homes. No one else seemed to notice, or at least comment
upon, this savage irony. I do not want to parody this issue, having strong beliefs of my
own that the fear of death is very crippling and needs to be
overcome at the deepest level. But it is disturbing to think that our
culture provid es us with so little opportunity to confront the basic
meaning of life that sickness and death have lled the void by
becoming conversion experiences. Robert was desperat e to have
such an experience and furious that it was denied to him. Other
patients of mine, however, have found their conversion and
embraced it with disquieting results. One of these patients was Barbara. The minute she walked into
my oce, it was hard not to be bewitched. Even though I knew she
was consulting  me about a serious illness, she looked radiant, with
sparkling eyes and a perfect complexion. A native Californian, she
had own to the East Coast for our appointment, and when she saw
me staring as we shook hands, she laughed and told me a story:
“I tried to y to Boston to see you last week, but a family
emergency made me miss my ight. I asked my doctor in San Diego
to write a medical excuse so I could get a refund on my ticket. On
the phone I simply told his secretary to ask for a note stating that I
had the u.“When I got to the airport and handed over the note, the counter
attendant turned white. My doctor had written, ‘This unfortunate
woman is being extensively treated for a terminal case of metastatic
breast cancer.’ ”
I was as taken aback as the ticket agent. It was hard to credit that
this woman, so young and alive, had been undergoing surgery,
radiation, and chemotherapy for over a year to combat a
malignancy that had spread beyond her breasts and invaded many
areas of her bones. As I probed deeper into her medic al history,
Barbara began  to reveal in bits and pieces her present frame of
mind, which was extraordinarily peaceful. “You see, I have been spending twenty years in a drive  toward
success. As a young woman I set up certain totally articial goals for
myself. I wanted it all: a beautiful house, adoring husband and
children, and nancial indep endence by age forty so that I could
quit working and enjoy my family. These goals were set in my mind
before I was out of college, and I never lost sight of them. “I nished law school and launched myself twenty-ve hours a
day into achieving what I wanted. By last year, it was all within my
grasp. I do have the house, husband, and children, and at my legal
practice I have risen to full partner. Then I was diagnosed with
breast cancer. Mentally, I knew that I had been told something
terrible, but within a few days I found that I was falling into an
extremely strange mood. I began to feel very happy and contented.”
I agreed that this was quite an unpredictable reaction. “I have always  believed that you get what you wish for in life,”
she explained. “And I asked myself why I had gotten breast cancer. Was there a secret wish at work? For many people that is a scary
question, full of guilt and denial, but for me it was quite reasonable
to ask. And you know what the answer was?”
I told her I was very curious to nd out. “Cancer allowed me to achieve my nal goal,” she said with a
note of triump h in her voice . “I had wanted to retire at forty, and
now here I am, on a full disability pension. I am a woman  of leisure
at last.”“You don’t seem to think that you’ve paid a very high price for
achieving nan cial security,” I said. I couldn’t help but suspect that
Barbara’s amazing self-possession must be masking fears she
couldn’t confront. “Let me nish,” she replied excitedly. “Soon after my original
diagnosis my oncologist came to see me in the hospital looking
extremely upset. He said, ‘I’m very, very sorry to have to tell you
this, Barbara, but the malign ancy has spread to several other areas
in your body. In my profess ional opinion, you are now a terminal
case.’
“Without any hesitation I replied, ‘Well, if I am a terminal case, so
are you, doctor , and so is everyone around me. He was shocked. But
as I saw it, if he lived thirty or forty years longer than me, that
made no real dierence. Dying is inevitable; it is a natural part of
life, and what I had realized,  what gave me such peace of mind, was
that dying can be an adventure. “When I quit worrying about my inated and totally articial
goals, goals that had weighed me down for my entire adult life, the
experience of liberation was also a kind of death—and yet it was the
greatest thing that ever happ ened to me. More and more  I began to
realize that ‘dying’ every day would be an ideal way to live, because
every morning would be new. How can life ever be new unless you
learn to die?”
“Yes, yes,” I murmured, holding myself back from saying, “How
can life ever be new unless you learn to live?”  But I could feel
exactly what Barbara meant. She was escaping the threat of death
by “dying” to her old habit s and false values. Having “died,” she
discovered that new life rushed in to ll the vacuum. The great
Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore gave a beautiful image for this:
“When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies spring forth
from the heart.”
Even though Barbara may be harboring buried feelings of threat
that she has not really resolved, I am happy to report that her
“death” has been as life-giving as she hoped. Her oncologist
informed me that she is now responding extraordinari ly well totreatment. The pockets of metastasis have started to shrink, and her
side eects remain well within the acceptable range. Despite Barbara’s sense of jubilant conversion, I have to insist that
something has gone awry here. Disease is no way to solve the core
issues of life. We are weakest when sick, least able to summon the
resources that are needed for real transformation. The beauty of
Barbara’s conversion experience does not automatically cancel the
suering that went with it. Nor does it settle the crucial issue of
whether suering was neede d in the rst place. An age-old belief
says that suering is inevita ble, deeply human, and even a grace. Barbara felt that she had learned from her pain, and took pride in
that. “I’d rather live six mont hs with this cancer,” she told me at one
point, “than seven years the way I was.”
Under the circumstances, she had little other choice than to feel
this way; the alternative was to be crushed by the forces set against
her. But whatever meaning people feel can be derived from their
personal suering, to live without pain would, I believe, be even
more meaningful, even more  human. People have to be transformed
before  the crisis. If not, they may nd themselves with not enough
time to enjoy the life that suddenly seems so worthwhile. Chaos in the Heart
Having got this far in my observations, I was obliged to take my
thoughts outside medicine, even outside the expanded boundaries of
mind-body medicine. Only in a very limited sense are any doctors I
know willing to approach their patients as fully human. “Mind-body
medicine” is a nebulous label for a eld that is still searching for its
proper methods and values. What mainly holds it together is one
key insight, that thoughts and feelings cannot be rigidly
compartmentalized from the physical eects they create. Medical
science was not being true to reality until it conceded that illness is
connected to a person’s emotions, beliefs, and expectations. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be glib about medical science having  made the
concession. The newsletter of the American Medical Association
queried AMA members in 1990 and found that only ten percent“believed” in the mind-body connection. A cardiologist friend of
mine thrust the article at me and grumbled, “How do the other 90
percent think they wiggle their toes?”)
Having made its big breakthrough, mind-body medicine has not
gone on to uncover the answer to why people hurt. Instead, we nd
ourselves staring into even deeper confusion. This confus ion has to
do with the nature of life itself, and therefore it is extrem ely hard to
express. In childhood we all asked our parents pressing meaningful
questions: “Who am I? What will happen to me when I die? Why do
things turn out the way they do?” Few, if any, parents provided
answers that were good enough to settle the disturbing fears that lie
behind such questions, so we stopped asking them. But they
continue to linger inside us, burning more intensely than ever. Having reached adulthood ourselves, we tend to dismiss these as
“ultimate questions,” a label that makes them sound very abstract. Actually, they are the most primary questions, and as long as they
remain unreso lved, the hole that they leave creates much of the
misery we struggle with—physical illness, emotional malaise, a
pervasive sense of restlessness, and a nagging lack of happiness. I nd it revealing that the most secure people I know, materially
as well as psychologically, are fascinated by the homeless . They are
not merely concerned or distressed; they see specters of themselves
in the most hopeless outsider s on the street. They feel that they, too,
could be dispossessed at any moment. This fear is a very real one if
you consider that the home they are afraid to lose is basically inside
themselves. It is their center,  which is so uncertain that they wonder
whether it ever really existed. Intellectually, the same mixture of fascination and fear has tinged
a young branch of physics called chaos theory, which  goes far
beyond the neat, stable mathematical models of Newto n or even
Einstein into the domain of constant change, where instability is the
rule. Chaos is the absence of predictable patterns and connections. Swirling water , pus of smok e, and dancing dust motes in a beam of
sunlight exem plify chaos. They are all unpredictable , random
phenomena; if patterns seem to emerge inside them, these dissolve
as quickly as they are created. To a nonscientist, the behavior ofchaos sounds disturbing and all too human. Colliding dust motes
translate into the lonely crowd; swirling smoke translates into
personal relationships that cannot hold for long before vanishing
into thin air. In purely rational terms, physics has long been intrigued by the
fact that the universe, which in many respects functions like a well-
knit machine, lacks the wires, pulleys, and rods that hold a machine
together. The primordial stars were ung apart from each other at
the mom ent of the Big Bang,  when they were unformed, ery gases,
and the inging has continued ever since. Where  are the
connections, the principles of order? Why do eld daisies and bats’
wings and the planetary crust hold together so precisely when the
whole machine—the cosmos—seems to have its parts strewn in
every direction? Chaos theory tries to unriddle the deeper orderliness that might
underlie nature’s ceaseless play of creation and destructi on. In that
sense, it is an optimistic science, because every new layer of
orderliness comes as a reassurance, at least to the lay person, that
nature makes sense. On the other hand, why won’t this orderliness
hold still? Because that is not how nature apparently works. For
every layer of order, there  is another layer that collapses into
disorder. An exploding nova is sheer chaos, yet its individual atoms
are models of orderliness. A human skin cell performs its myriad
biological functions with such astonishing orderliness that medicine
just barely knows its secrets, but after three weeks, when the skin
cell dies, it disintegrates into chaos. Nature seems unwilling to
demonstrate that either order or disorder is nally preeminent. Physicists are sometimes scornful of the popular images their
theories give rise to, yet lay people have been deeply aected to
learn that nothing in nature  can stand rm against the ravages of
change. The most fearsome  diseases left to be cured, including
cancer, seem to be rooted in the probability  that DNA will make a
mistake. Under normal conditions, DNA is self-correcting; that is, it
knows how to repair itself when it is damaged, how to dismantle
aberrant genetic material, how to nullify even the most drastic
errors to preserve the delicate balance of normal life functions.But since each of our 50 trillion cells contains a complete set of 3
billion genetic  bits, perfection in this area is impossible. An
unknown number of mistakes slip by (probably millions of them per
year); some of these aberrations run out of control, and the result
can become a wildly proliferating cancer. Diabetes, arthritis, and
heart disease are all hypothe sized to have a genetic component as
well. The triggering mechani sm would be dierent for each of them,
and all are unlike cancer, but the underlying uncertainty is just as
dreadful. It is not only disease that creates a sense of groundlessness. The
body itself is not a xed package of atoms and molecules—it is a
process, or rather billion s of simultaneous proces ses being
coordinated together. I once watched with fascination as a
beekeeper reached into a swarm of bees and, by gently enfolding the
queen in his hands, moved the whole hive, a living globe of insects
suspended in midair. What was he moving? There was no solid
mass, but only an image of hovering, darting, ever-changing life,
which had centered itself around a focal point. The swarm exists as
an outcome of bee behavior. It is an illusion of shape behind which
the reality is pure change. Such are we, too. We are a swarm of molecules hovering around a
center, but with diminishing  condence. The old queen, the soul,
has decamped, and the new queen seems reluctant to hatch from her
cell. The great dierence between us and a swarm of bees is that we
nd it hard to attribute reality to the unseen center that holds us
together. It is obvious that one does, for otherwise we would be
ung apart into chaos. But a queen looks like any other  bee, only
larger, while we cannot hope to nd a lump of cells that contains
what we consider to be central to us—love, hope, trust, and belief. Chaos may provide compelling science, but it is no way to live. The lack of meaning hurts too much. The great scientic explorers
who marched into the heart of nature, intent on dismantling the
nucleus of hydrogen atoms and measuring the farthest horizons of
space-time, overlooked that for every marching in there is a
marching out. To get somewh ere you have to leave somew here. This
means that the deeper one explores into nature “out there,” thegreater the danger that our own human nature, the reality “in here”
that we live with privately, gets abandoned. We are deep into that danger at the present moment. Freud made
a strong point about the mixed blessings of material progress when
he was musing about the telephone, an invention that came into
general use during his youth. It was undoubtedly true that thanks to
the telephone,  he could talk to his daughter far away in another
city. However,  if there were no telephones, Freud said, she might
not have moved away. This is not to imply that machines are evil,
however, or intrinsically antihuman. It is just that the technological
march forward  needs to be balanced in such a way that the anti-
human backlash does not occur. I don’t want to dwell on this backlash, except to give one indelible
example. A journal article in the May 1986 issue of Pediatrics
appraised the medical benets of “tactile/kinesthetic stimulation on
preterm neonates.” Doctors at the University of Miami medical
school divided into two groups forty premature babies—“preterm
neonates” in medical jargon—who had been delivered after an
average of only thirty-one weeks of pregnancy, not quite eight
months. One group was given normal treatment in the hospital’s intensive
care unit for neonates. The other was scheduled for fteen minutes
of special attention, in which someone reached in through the
portholes of their sealed cribs to stroke them and gently wiggle their
arms and legs—this was their “tactile/kinesthetic stimulation,”
which was repeated three times a day. The results of such a simple addition to the usual hospital routine
were striking. Although fed on demand with the same formula, the
stroked babies gained 47 percent more weight every day than the
control group; they were more alert and started to act like normally
delivered babies sooner. Finally, they left the hospital a week ahead
of schedule, allowing the authors of the study to note a savings of
$3,000 per infant in the nal bill. Here, the contrast between  life and antilife seems almost too
obvious to point out. Scientic medicine has reached  the stage
where it is not respectable to call stroking by its right name—muchless love and aection. Stroking has to go by the Orwellian
“tactile/kinesthetic stimulat ion.” It is even more Orwellian to
perform controlled experiments to see if babies need loving
attention, meted out in doses like cough syrup or iodine. My deepest emotions, however, are aroused by the group of
babies who were not stroked . When  I think of them lying alone in
their closed Lucite cribs (called “isolettes”), stranded in the weird
ICU environment that numbs adult patients and frequently induces
psychotic breaks, my heart cries out in protest. Not just premature
babies but everyone suers when our belief in truth falters. We lose
the words for basic values, and then the possibility arises that we
may lose the values themselves. Personal Reality
Over and over, we are pulled back to the world “in here,” which
our culture has not properly understood in so many ways. When I
was a young doctor, I often  found myself surprised by how two
patients with identical diagnoses could react so dierently to their
illness. After all, a diagnosis is meant to be an impersonal tag for a
clinically dened disease entity. But it is rarely that simple. I recently heard from one cancer patient whose disease had
metastasized to her bones, causing intense pain. This woman also
happened to be mired in a bad marriage, and one day, utterly weary
of the constant conict with her husband, she decided once and for
all that their relationship had come to an end. The day after she
asked him for a separation, her bone pain inexplicably disappeared. “Suddenly the phrase ‘weary to the bone’ came to mind,” she says,
“and I saw in a ash that my disease was my body’s way of
expressing the same concept. ” Having released some of her bottled-
up weariness, this woman relieved herself of the pain that was its
literal double. Now she wonders, as do I, if the cancer itself will be
forced to retreat. Was her entire illness just a metaphor? Our culture chooses to believe that disease is basically created on
the material level. After you inhale it, an asbestos ber can lodge in
the smallest crevices of your lung tissue, and over time there is adenite small probability that it can cause a specic form of lung
cancer. But by the same token, cancer rates have been found to
increase among newly widow ed men. Grief, too, lodges deep inside
a person, and even though a molecule of asbestos from “out there”
is not at all like a grief-stricken mood “in here,” at some  deep level
of the self, they can be identical. We nourish our bodies with every
impulse of trust and love, we poison them with distrust and hate. Physically, you and I may have very similar hearts; if you inject
enough potassium chloride into our veins, both of us will suer
cardiac arrest. But our experiences are completely individual. We
have walked through dieren t gardens and knelt at dierent graves. Your sad memories make you heart-weary or heartsick, while I am
perfectly immune to them. Likewise, the joyful images that gladden
our hearts may closely resemble each other, but your memories
have a personal avor that I cannot taste. “Reality” is a word that we generally apply in the most
impersonal sense. The trees, sky, clouds, buildings, and social
institutions that dene what is real seem to exist without much
regard for our personal thoughts and feelings. Yet the neat division
between the inner and outer world, between “me” and things “out
there,” is not accurate. Everything a person experiences  must pass
through a mental lter befor e it registers as real, which means that
we are constantly engaged in making  reality. Let me return to Robert, with whom I discussed these ideas at
length. In one of our later meetings, I asked him, “Have you ever
had the experience of waking up at night, usually about two or
three in the morning, feeling very afraid? Do you know that feeling,
call it cold dread, free-oat ing anxiety, or whatever you will?” I
didn’t wait for his answer—we both knew it already. “The next time it occurs, you might be able to notice something
very curious. Almost the instant that you awaken with this sensation
of dread, your mind nds something, usually a sound, to be afraid
of. The drip of a faucet, the wind in the trees, the ticking of the
clock: any innocuous everyday sound can suddenly seem absolutely
horrifying.“You have caught yourself in the act of giving a personal avor to
things by projecting yourself onto them. How does this happen? The
mind does not naturally dwell in abstractions. It prefers
concreteness. So when an impulse of fear arises, the mind  attaches it
to something tangible. This is a kind of automatic reex that keeps
going of its own accord because there is always somethi ng—losing
one’s money, failure at work , dying of a dreaded disease —that we
accept as a genuine cause for anxiety. If you wake up feeling dread
about having cancer, it seems so reasonable that you miss the
essential point: cancer is not scaring you, the mind’s reex is. “Next time, stay on the looko ut and watch this amorphous fear as
it gropes for something to hang on to. You may notice, as you lie
there in bed, that your mind races from one pretext to another, like
a beggar being turned away from several houses, before a good
excuse takes it in. Your initial focus might be on the rattle of a
windowpane. Just at the instant the mind is about to grab this
pretext, it will say, ‘What am I doing being afraid of the wind? For
God’s sake, I have cancer, and that’s something to really worry
about.’ ”
Despite himself, Robert had to smile. “You see,” I went on, “sitting here you catch on to the ridiculous
element in all this. Why does the mind need to indulge in this habit? For security—like a climber pulling himself hand over hand up a
rope, the mind  pulls itself along from one minute to the next by
identifying with sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, and above
all, memories. “In this way life remains continuous, but the conditioned mind
leaves little room for anythin g new. Once you start seeing that your
most cherished  thoughts may just be reexes, the urge to break free
cannot help but arise. Rather  than being so convinced by the stimuli
of pain and pleasure, you will begin to see the possibility of a new
perspective.”
“But it’s not the worrying that scares me,” Robert objected, “it’s
my disease.”
“The worrying  grows from your viewpoint,” I insisted, “not from
your disease. Your inner awareness has primary importance in thereality you are experiencing.” Robert continued to look doubtful. “Two people can ride the same roller coaster,” I pointed out. “One is
terried, and his body is ooded with stress hormones, causing his
immune response to plumme t. The other loves roller coasters, and
he produces a ood of chemi cals, such as interferon and interleukin,
that strengthen his immune system. Same input, opposite results, all
because of a dierent point of view.”
I waited to let this sink in and then said, “What I want to propose
to you is that it is possible  to achieve the freedom to have any
viewpoint you choose and therefore any reality. To be the maker of
your reality is in fact your basic viewpoint, although it may be
nearly impossible for you to see that now. Once you return to this
basic viewpoint, however, you will no longer see yourself as a
passive victim of life—you stand at the very center of life and have
the power to renew it at every moment.”
“This is beginning to sound very mystical,” Robert said hesitantly. “Not once you actually have the experience,” I replied. “Who am I
talking to now? If I were talking only to a collection of habits and
memories, you would be a totally predictable quantity , but you
aren’t. The old scenes and events that have piled up inside you are
not you; you are their arranger and overseer. You give every iota of
sense data its meaning, and without you, everything would lapse
into chaos.”
This brings us to what Robert was pleading for—a way out of his
deep-seated hurt. Frustratio n and pain are trapped inside us by
conditioning that tells us they are inescapable; therefore, to heal the
pain, you have to go beyond  the conditioning. We are all beset by
limitations. The mind is structured around the impressions held
inside it, and trying to deny or escape them is futile. Every day, a
person thinks approximately 50,000 dierent thoughts, or so
someone has calculated—a bewildering cascade of wildly mixed and
conicting impulses. In and of itself, this turmoil can be extremely
painful. We feel true love and true hatred for the people closest to
us, with seemingly no possibility of nally sorting one from the
other. The most destructive emotions—doubt, fear, guilt, shame,and loneliness—roam the mind at will, beyond our conscious
control. It is truer to say that they control us. But this prison has an air of illusion about it once you realize that
you built it and locked yourself inside. Having erected the barriers it
feels trapped by, the mind should be able to take them down. From
that viewpoint, it becomes every person’s choice to take
responsibility for his own inner reality. On one side, the old
conditioning tells us that we will hurt worse if we try to break free. On the other, the impulse toward freedom is urging us to discover
that all limitations are at bottom false. What makes this impulse so
hard to obey is that it is shrouded in pain. In the presenc e of pain, people inch, as though drawing back
from enemy attack. But pain is basically a signal of where healing
should begin. My purpose, then, is to calm people’s fears and let
them realize that a healed life is the most natural way to live. Once
a person has even a little courage to confront his old conditioning,
he will nd that turning inward starts to dissolve that conditioning. Presently, the prospect of turning inward is extremely intimidating
to most people, but it is the only way the mind can conquer its
built-in resistances. There is no cure from the outside. The lack of
meaning we presently endur e will only become worse, and in time
humanity might get too sick of itself to recover. Better Brain Pictures? So far, I have painted a grim picture, of people who hurt without
knowing the cause and seek relief without ultimately nding it. But
that perspective is much too limited, for if we look at matters
dierently, the situation changes completely. If you turn the
telescope around, nature is nothing if not healing. Stars explode, but
they are also constantly created; cells die but they also divide and
produce ospr ing to carry DNA onward (and upward: for all my
sorrows, I greatly prefer being human to being an amoeba or even
the most attractive chimp). In this light, life shows itself as a miracle of renewal. All the order
that dissolves into chaos comes back as another kind of order. Allthe life that surrenders to death is continually being reborn. The
dance of sunlight on the sea, the lush greenness of alpine valleys,
the simple goodness of children, the frail hands of an old woman
that retain their grace despite the scars of age—all these things exist
independently of our moods, waiting to be acknowledged for the joy
they in fact contain. When patients go through a conversion
experience, what changes is their viewpoint about these matters, not
reality itself. Once we realize that nature contains healing and destruction
entwined together, the suspicion arises that all the misery people
are feeling is basically self-inicted. We see the clouds instead of the
rainbow and blame them for the depression they cause. I have come
to think  that this is a valid way of looking at the problem, but in the
same breath I must admit that I share the resistance that people feel
when they are asked to perceive a brighter reality. Their mind
violently rejects any suggestion that its pain, so intense and
uncontrollable, has been self-induced. Yet all pain comes to us
through the mind-body connection. It only stands to reason that the
connection works both ways . If you have proof that certain brain
chemicals make people feel a sense of well-being, the ones that
make them feel depressed, sick, and hopeless cannot be denied. The catch-22 is that the brains that need the most healing are
entrenched in wrong brain chemistry to begin with. Because it is
conditioned to see the world as sad and hopeless, a depressed brain
will react to any idea, including its own healing, as more cause for
depression. We may invoke the inner healer as if it were a thing,
like a dose of penicillin, but it is abstract, a child of words and
memories. It elusively abides in the private world that each one of
us builds inside himself, changing shape from person to person and
minute to minute. And so the matter might stand—the brain’s picture of reality is
ruled by its chemistry—exce pt that we now have drugs that can
drastically alter that chemistry, which means that they can
fundamentally alter our picture of the world. A depressed person
swallows a pill, and suddenly  other people appear friendlier and less
threatening; situations seem  less hopeless; colors look brighter,sounds become more vivid. Such a dramatic transformatio n does not
always occur, but the eld of mind-altering drugs has expanded so
rapidly that for the rst time, science may be able to hand us our
desired reality in a bottle. Peter Kramer, a psychiatrist in private practice in Providence,
Rhode Island, recounts the case of a woman who saw him several
years ago in a state of chronic depression. She was a well-placed
executive, so hardworking and intent on the details of her job that
she had almost no time for socializing. Her personal life, when she
gave it any attention, was wrapped up in a hopeless long-term aair
with a married man. If any new men tried to come near, she gave
o signals that kept them at arm’s length. Kramer was not asked to treat this woman, who was making
progress in therapy with an outside psychologist; he was simply
needed to prescribe medication for her, which he did in the form of
a conventional  antidepressan t. The drug seemed to help. There was
a marked decline in her symptoms; she slept and ate better; she had
fewer crying jags than before. Still, no one would have said that this
woman led a normal life. Kramer marked her case down as a partial
remission and continued to hope that something more could be
done for her. Two years later a new antidepressant called Prozac—the trade
name for the chemical uoxetine—came on the market,
accompanied by remarkable stories about its eectiveness. Structurally, Prozac is not a radical departure from other drugs in
the class called  tricyclics, but it is more specic. It helps normalize
the action of a brain chemical called serotonin, one of the basic
messenger molecules, or neurotransmitters, by which one neuron
communicates with another. Kramer decide d to place his patient on Prozac for a trial period,
and a dramatic transformation occurred. After at rst becoming
frenzied and euphoric, the woman settled down into a state that was
just a bit more  energized and optimistic than before. This slight shift
was enough to turn her life around. She became more exible at her
work. She stopped giving o hostile signals and began treating men
in a less businesslike manne r. As a result, her social life took o.“Three dates a weekend!” she exclaimed as she walked into
Kramer’s oce . “I must be wearing a sign on my forehead.” She
outgrew her old friends, who basically related to her on the level of
her depression, and found new friends who were as lively as she. It was a classic example of changing someone’s reality by
changing his brain chemistry, and Kramer had very mixed feelings. “The patient’s judgment rema ined good, the slight extra pep did not
seem to endan ger her daily functioning—quite the oppo site in her
view—but I was left uneasy. I saw the medication as having given
my patient a personal style that came from outside her.” Kramer
could only articulate his uneasiness by saying that Prozac had
somehow impacted this woman’s “character,” but that is an
amorphous kind of judgment. Was it part of her character to suer? If so, can’t we toss out a little character to allow her to suer less? Other psychiatrists stand by the pharmacy door with worried
expressions on their faces, but clearly we have reached a turning
point. The day may come when being clinically depress ed will no
longer be a prerequisite for taking such drugs. A prominent New
York physician commented, “The fact is, we’re all depressed. The
whole world is depressed. I don’t know a human being who isn’t.”
Are we supposed to prescribe Prozac to the whole world? In fact, the main reason we have not been handing people reality
in a bottle is largely tactical. Most mind-altering drugs are highly
toxic, habit-forming, or have other unacceptable side eects. Amphetamines may give a sense of heightened alertness,
concentration, and creative intensity, but they also induce paranoia. Valium and related tranquilizers erase low-level anxiety but are
addictive. LSD and a wide variety of other hallucinogens deliver
visionary experiences, sometimes of a very high order, but they so
wildly distort perception that few people can walk around under
their inuence and still remain normal. In all these cases, feeling
good comes with the high penalty of also having to feel very bad. In his old age the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre admitted
that he had written his last book under the inuence of
amphetamines. Even though he realized that he was destroying his
brain and shortening his life, he preferred the added brilliance thatthe drug imparted. In America, where physicians keep a tighter hold
upon dangerous drugs, Sartre would not have been allowed to make
such a decision; the doctor who denied him amphetamines would
take responsibility for losing  a book but saving a life. Can we deny
anyone his extra measure of genius once there is no price to pay? Now that the toxicity of mind -altering drugs is being reduced, the
picture emerges more clearl y. A brighter, more alert brain is an
obvious advantage in life; in order to deny it to people, we have to
have a very good reason. Prozac is said to alter the sense of self so
subtly that some patients have to set an alarm clock to remember to
take it. Otherw ise, they forget that the happy, energized person they
have turned into was not originally there. Although they may have ethical objections today, it is likely that
doctors will gradually give way, eventually supplying chemical
brain enhance ment more or less on demand. The only justiable
reason I can think of for denying people a happier brain picture is
that they might be missing something better. What is better than
happiness and creativity? The answer is true happiness and
creativity, the kind that will not go away if you forget to set the
timer. Instead of viewing the brain as a series of chemical relays that can
be brightened or dimmed like a TV monitor, we should explore
much more deeply its role as a creator. If we are all co-creators of
reality, then our goal in life is not just to be bright, alert, or
imaginative, but to shape existence itself. If the brain could do that,
then it would achieve real meaningfulness, far beyond the chemical
boost of a mind-altering pill. What really matters is not things “out there,” no matter how
cheerful you can make them  look, but the experiencer sitting inside
ourselves. Without the experiencer there is no light, no sound, no
touch, smell, or taste. To create these things is each person’s private
brand of magic, so spellbinding that it is all we can do to remember
that we are the magician and not just the audience. This book carries the subtitle “Discovering the Power to Fulll
Your Dreams.” Such a premise cannot be fullled until people are
taught to master the forces that now shape their persona l reality. Ithas taken me a long time to think through and articulate  what such
mastery means. It does not mean manipulating one’s psychology or
rising to superhuman heights of willpower. Both avenues have failed
to change our situation. We live in a culture dedicated to the belief
that you have to work to survive and the harder you work, the more
you will be rewarded. That assumption makes it nearly impossible
to see that certain things require no work and yet bring enormous
rewards. Heali ng is one such thing. You cannot make it happen, and
yet it happens. And when healing is deep enough, it solves much
worse problems than physical illness. The search for meaning is
brought to an end, and nature’s immense ability to purify and
restore balance asserts itself once more. It hurts  inside  when pressure is put on us, even the pressure to
heal. As soon as the pressure  is removed, the mind begins to heal by
itself. This is not an experie nce many people immediately accept. They prefer to struggle against their pain, ghting o grief,
depression, and fear, despite the overwhelming evidence that if
these emotions ever resolve themselves, it is of their own accord. Struggle only slows down the process and makes it more painful. Complete healing depends upon your ability to stop struggling. I
will explain more fully what this means in the following chapters. They have been arranged to present the principal stages that take a
person away from conditioning toward freedom. As each barrier
falls, a new possibility opens  up in its place. Reading a book cannot
make you free or heal a deep hurt or restore meaning to your
existence, but it can provide  the understanding of what is holding
you back. Understanding and experience are the two legs of healing,
marching side by side. Thus the self that was crippled by fear
discovers, without strain or pressure, the repressed power of truth
that has been denied for so long. OceanofPDF.com2
The Lens of Perception
One time a man died because of something I said to him. He was
an emergency patient I’ll call Arthur Elliott, a lawyer in his thirties
who showed up at the emergency room outside Boston after
midnight, alone and dressed in rumpled pajamas. Visibly frightened,
Mr. Elliott announced at the nurses’ station that he had just been
waked up from a sound sleep by a sudden, excruciating pain in the
middle of his chest. He had waited, hardly daring to breathe. After a
few minutes the pain receded, but he leapt out of bed and headed
for the nearest hospital. The young ER doctor on duty that night quickly performed an
examination but found nothing amiss. Having ascertained that Mr.
Elliott had no prior history of heart disease, he told him that the
pain might have been caused by a cramp in his chest muscles. “But it was like being stabbed!” Mr. Elliott protested. The ER doctor reassured him that a heart attack typicall y begins
with a dull, squeezing pain, not a sharp stab. Nor did Mr. Elliott
have any dizziness, nausea, sudden weakness, or loss of breath—
signs that a heart attack might be in progress. Mr. Elliott was
advised to return in the morning when a complete battery of tests
could be run. He reluctantly went home, but within an hour the stabbi ng chest
pain struck again. He frantically rushed back to the ER, and as the
senior physician on call, I was waked up and asked to see him. In
passing, the ER doctor mentioned that Mr. Elliott was “sort of
belligerent.”The man I confronted in the examining room appeared pale and
anxious. He jumped back as soon as I laid my stethoscope against
his chest. “Relax, now,” I said gently. “This is probably nothing we have to
worry about.”
“We?” he shot back, nailing  me with a glare. “I’m the one who
could die here.”
Without replyi ng, I bent down to listen to his heart. It sounded a
little fast but otherwise normal. To make sure, I had Mr. Elliott
hooked up for an EKG reading; it too showed no evident
abnormalities. Nevertheless, I decided to admit him to the hospital
for observation, largely because he was displaying so much
emotional agitation. The next morning, after a new EKG was run, I had ambiguous
news. “I asked some of our cardiologists to take a look at both of
your EKGs, and there is a very slight change since last night. It
could indicate that your heart muscle suered minor damage during
your two episodes of pain.”
I was about to say that Mr. Elliott did not appear to be in
imminent danger. A healthy heart is quite capable of compensating
for such small injuries. Some wounds simply heal, others are sealed
o and the heart operates around them. But before I could inform
him of this, he exploded. His eyes popped with rage, and he lashed
out violently. “This is outrag eous! You don’t give a damn about me. For all you
care I could have dropped dead, but you’re not getting away with it. I’ll take you for everything you’ve got!” He was practically
incoherent with fury, but it was clear enough that he intended to
slap me with a massive malpractice suit on the spot, and the entire
ER sta in the bargain. To make good on his threat, he grabbed the
bedside telephone and began calling up his legal colleagues,
growing more and more agitated in the process. I pleaded with him
to try and calm down. As his blood pressure skyrocketed, we
administered the strongest antihypertensives and tranquilizers on
hand. Nothing helped. He had spun out of control into a world of
his own.An hour later, still ranting on the phone, he felt the stabbi ng chest
pains return again, this time with such violence that he collapsed. The nurse who found him detected no pulse. In two minutes a
cardiac unit arrived on the scene with a crash cart and electric
paddles, but all attempts at resuscitation were fruitless. My immediate  reaction, once I knew that we had lost him, was
total bewilderm ent. Of course, it is upsetting for any patient to hear
that he has had a possible heart attack. Yet a phrase that seemed
gentle to me—“minor damag e to your heart”—became catastrophic
when Mr. Elliott took it in. It set o a chain reaction that nobody
could control, least of all he. Whenever a sudden death occurs inside a hospital, a detailed
autopsy is performed. In this case the cause of death was
pronounced as myocardial rupture—a necrotic, or dead, part of the
heart muscle had torn open, presumably as the result of a violent
spasm of the coronary arteries, with fatal results. The necrotic tissue was not scarred over, which implied that the
damage to the heart had occurred recently. However, there was no
way of determining if his two bouts of pain had created any of this
injury. Accordi ng to the autopsy, Mr. Elliott’s coronary arteries were
clean. We already knew that he did not smoke or have high blood
pressure, two primary risks for a heart attack. The heart muscle
exhibited no intrinsic defect, such as a damaged valve, and there
were no signs of an infection. In other words, he was as safe as one could reasonably hope to be
—until his heart decided to rip itself apart. It had never occurred to me that a word could kill. Physically, a
word is just a faint sound, so to call it the cause of heart failure is
absurd, unless you are willing to radically expand your belief
system. I have read that New Guinea islanders can fell a tree by
standing in a ring and shouti ng at it at the top of their voices. They
depart, and when they return in a few weeks, the tree has toppled of
its own accord. The Old Testament records that Joshu a won the
battle of Jericho by comma nding his troops to blast their rams’
horns until the city’s walls tumbled down. Thinking about Mr.
Elliott, I began to believe that a similar wonder had overtaken him.One reason that a very faint stimulus might kill someon e is that
the human heart already harnesses more than enough  power to
destroy itself. Although no larger than a man’s clenche d st, the
heart does enough work in a day to raise a one-ton weight to the
height of a ve-story oce building. Ordinarily, this enormous
power is disciplined for good. Yet seen at close range, the gentlest
beat of the heart is poised on the very edge of violence— the heart
literally tries to jump out of the chest cavity with every beat it takes,
being stopped only when its pointed end, or apex, strikes abruptly
against the inside of the chest wall. Fortunately, built into every one’s body is a formidable array of
safety features. Nature safegu ards our hearts against self-destruction
particularly well, beginning in the tiny region of the brain called the
hypothalamus. Though barely bigger than the tip of one’s little
nger, the hypothalamus carefully regulates dozens of bodily
functions, including blood pressure and heartbeat. In addition, one
of the ten cranial nerves, the vagus, is responsible for slowing down
a racing heart and bringing it back to normal. The heart is protected
internally by its own indep endent pacemaker cells and a built-in
electrical system, just in case the brain becomes incapacitated by
disease or trauma. Yet, elaborate as it is, in Mr. Elliott’s case this
fail-safe machi nery did break down, battered by the nothing of a
thought. Seeing Yourself in the World
The coroner’s precise and objective phrase, “Cause of death:
myocardial rupture,” did not even begin to hint at how this disaster
happened. It only put a conventional label on the outco me. If the
report had read, “Cause of death: distorted perception of the
situation,” we would have come closer to the truth. A camera records an event by taking in light signals and turning
them into a literal image, but this is not at all how our senses
operate—we perceive , which means that we add meaning to every
signal coming our way. It does not matter to a camera if a bus is
painted yellow, but when we see it, we know children are aboardand certain precautions must be taken. Perception is the rst and
most importan t step in turning the raw data of the universe into
reality. Seeing the world is far from the passive act it appears to be,
for when we look at somethi ng, we see it colored by our own set of
unique experiences. If I am looking at the dawn  and feel depressed, my mood seeps
into the dawn, making it look sad and lonely. If I am joyful, the
same dawn reects my joy back at me. This fusing of “me” and
things “out there” is what makes the lens of perception magical. Just
by listening, looking, smellin g, tasting, and feeling, I turn the world
into my world. Nor is there any limit to how much sense we can read into the
data we are interpreting. It is entirely possible to have a love-hate
relationship with a string of random numbers, as a Harvard
psychology team once proved. They asked students to play a
gambling game  with a partn er. The rules of the game were simple:
“You and your partner will be given two buttons to push, marked 1
and 0,” the experimenters said. “If you both press 0, you will both
be given nothing. If you both press 1, you will both be given one
dollar. Howev er, if you press 0 while your partner presses 1, you
will win two dollars, and he will get nothing.”
The point of this game, they said, was to see if people will
cooperate to gain a small reward rather than trying to outwit each
other in hopes of getting more. The students were told they would
be in separate rooms so that they could not see their partners—this
was to prevent them from signaling or showing their feelings as the
game went on. The game commenced, and after the allotted time
each student emerged. “On the basis of this game,” they were asked,
“can you tell what kind of a person your partner is?”
“He’s very devious!” came the typical reply. “At rst I pressed 1
all the time so we both could benet, but he got greedy, and after
only a few moves he would press 0, just when I least expected it. So
I started pressing 0, too.”
“But then you both got nothing,” the experimenters pointed out. “What could I do?” the students said. “He was trying to cheat me. I had to teach him a lesson.”Every subject had a tale to tell, of treachery and greed,  of brief
lapses back into cooperation, followed by a streak of vengeful
behavior or sheer irrationalit y. You may have guessed by now that
there was in fact no partner. Each student was playing  against a
sequence of random 0s and 1s spouted by a compute r. No one
caught on to the trick, however; instead, each player emerged with
a full-b lown psychological portrait of a partner whose behavior was
everything from “sadistic” to “brilliantly manipulative.”
This raises a disturbing question: if my perception is just a bundle
of random experiences in response to a basically random world, how
real am I? Perhaps my full-blown personality has no xed core at
all. I may just be a collectio n of accumulated habits and tastes, a
walking interpretation that likes spinach, dislikes okra, feels
attracted to jazz, repelled by Wagnerian opera, and so on. There is no doubt that we all have built ourselves up from the
merest wisps of experience that come our way. Mr. Elliott was given
no more than a wisp and he died of it. What I said to him was not
earthshaking, but it didn’t have to be. It only had to be one wisp too
many. The words “minor damage to your heart” seemed to propel
him into a chaotic private reality. In truth he was already in it chin-
deep. The violence of his reaction depended on the pent-up violence
that was seething in his self. The self’s hidden anger and pain often escape notice even when
they are build ing up enormous pressure to be expressed. Holding
negative feelin gs back, as most of us do, causes inner reality to
become warped, because no matter how hard the mind pushes this
energy down, its presence is constantly felt. I was in the midst of examining a young woman who had been
diagnosed a few months earlier as having lung cancer. I was asking
her about her childhood illnesses when she suddenly blurted out,
quite deantly, “Whatever you tell me to do, don’t tell me to give up
smoking.”
“Why not?” I asked, taken aback. The woman replied, “Because the type of lung cancer I have isn’t
related to smoking.”Since she had oat-cell carcinoma, her statement was technically
correct; this disease is not the squamous-cell carcinoma linked to
cigarettes. Before I could tell her that I didn’t care whether she
smoked or not—under the circumstances, this was the least of her
problems—she added, “Life’s not worth living if you can’t enjoy it,
and smoking is what I enjoy.”
Something snapped in me that is not supposed to snap when a
doctor talks to a seriously ill patient. “You enjoy not tasting your
food?” I asked, “not being able to smell the owers anymore, having
a const ant reek on your breath, half-numbed ngertips, and blood
pressure climbing so high that it is potentially as dangerous as
cancer?” As soon as my outburst ended I felt ashamed, but I was
deeply frustrated at the same time. How do people “enjoy” things
that they know perfectly well are bad for them? On the verge of tears, she had an answer: “Don’t dictate to me. I
know what I like.” She was throwing her self, her indisputable right
to be “I,” in my face. Just the way she leaned on the word “I” made
me cringe—it was like an appeal to a court of last resort. This lost
self had suered so much, had made such bad mistakes, and was
going to enter into an inesca pably grim future. Yet what else could
she cling to? “I” was her anchor to reality, and no one willingly
surrenders that, unless he is so desperate that his mind must unmoor
itself and undertake what Freud called “the perilous journey of
psychosis.”
The self has a troubling way of acting against its own interests, of
twisting good into bad and bad into good. It seems to be human
nature for the mind to divide itself into one region that is conscious
and another that is uncons cious, to subdivide both regions into
many smaller layers, and nally to create thousands of
compartments within each layer. Like an ambitious king who builds
his palace too fast to actually enter each room, our minds have lost
track of their own labyrinths, secret chambers, and ghost-lled
attics. Certain compartments, moreover, hold things that are clearly too
painful to express or even confront. We seal them o in order to
avoid conicts  that would be unbearable. Like a baby smothered inswaddling clothes, our perce ption of reality gets covered by layers
of experience, until “I” becomes quite confused about who “me”
really is. No Light Without the Eye
Up to this point I have done everything I can to make perception
seem highly personal, changeable, illusory, arbitrary, and
untrustworthy.
_OceanofPDF.com_Unconditional_Life_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Praise for Dr. Chopra and Unconditional Life
“Brilliant, provocative, and poetic  … Dr. Chopra’s kindness and deep caring for
people, and his desire for their liberat ion from suering, shine through on every
page. ”
—Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph. D. , Director, Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program,
University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and author of Full Catastrophe Living
“Inspiring reading  … Dr. Chopra presents a rare perspective—that of a scientist
and a healer. Through beautifully told stories of his clinical experience, he
demonstrates the possibilities of medicine with heart and spirit. ”
—Stephan Rechtschaen, M.
The author of the book is not specified in the text, but it is mentioned that the book is written by Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Who wrote the book "Unconditional Life"?
The main theme of the book appears to be the exploration of the connection between a person's thoughts, emotions, and physical health, with a focus on the idea that one's perception of reality can be changed to achieve healing and well-being.
What is the main theme of the book "Unconditional Life"?
The text does not mention the title of the book being compared to, but it does mention "Full Catastrophe Living" as a book written by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
What is the title of the book that Dr. Chopra is being compared to in the text?
The author seems to be skeptical of the idea that such drugs can provide a permanent solution to one's problems, and suggests that true healing comes from within.
What is the author's opinion on the use of mind-altering drugs like Prozac?
The author emphasizes the importance of taking responsibility for one's own reality and perception, and encourages his patients to confront their inner selves to achieve true healing and freedom.
What is the author's message to his patients?