But actually changing the
aging process itself is another , far deeper matter .Oﬀicially , gerontology recognizes no means to reverse or
retard the aging process— a rather stringent positi on, when
you consider that aging has not even been adequately
deﬁned. The rishis would counter by saying that science
has failed to reach the level of awareness where aging can
be defeated. In 1980, a young Harvard psychologist,
Charles Alexander , went into three old-age homes outside
Boston and taught about sixty residents, all at least 80
years old, some mind-bod y techniques. Three were used: a
mainstream relaxation technique (the kind used in typical
stress-management progr ams), Transcendental Meditation,
and a set of creative word games performed every day to
keep the mind sharp. Each person learned only one technique, and the groups
were allowed to use them without supervision. When the
three groups were tested on follow-up, the meditators
scored highest on measures of improved learning ability ,
low blood pressure, and mental health—all of which should
decline with age. The people also reported that they felt
happier and not as old as before. But the really striking
result did not come to light until three years later. When
Alexander returned to the old-age homes, about one-third
of the residents had died since he left, including 24 percent
of the participants who had not learned meditation. Among
the meditative group, however , the death rate was zero . These people  had now lived to an average age of 84, one
of the rarest and loveliest instances where science has
performed an experiment that immediately conferred the
gift of life. Although limited in scope, this is one of the most
hopeful results in the whole aging ﬁeld and a victory for the
rishis’ shortcut. It says that expanding your awareness is
enough to extend your life. What will be the life span of
meditators who began in their twenties instead of their
eighties? Time will tell.—
The assumption that smothers life is to feel that you are a
prisoner in your body. The human body seems to work in a
mechanical fashion. One of the best studied of its
mechanisms is the homeostatic feedback loop, a self-
regulating device like that used in thermostats. A
thermostat is given a set point, such as 70 degrees F.,
which is like the set point of body temperature. The
apparatus is sensitive to a temperature range extending a
few degrees too high or too low. By turning the heat or air
conditioning on or oﬀ, it maintains a nearly even
temperature. The know-how in a thermostat is quite
limited; you could call it an intelligent switch, but it has
only one idea on its mind, whereas the body’s feedback
loops manage to balance not just body temperature but
blood pressure, water levels in the cells, glucose
metabolism, oxygen and carbon dioxide concen trations,
and on and on, not leavi ng out the thousands of separate
chemicals produced with exquisite precision every where in
the physiology . Since the thermostat always returns to its norm and so
does the body, isn’t this a kind of hard-wiring that cannot
be denied, that in fact is necessary to our existence? The
greatest of nineteenth-century physiologists, Claude
Bernard, made the famou s statement, “Free life is the ﬁxity
of our interior milieu”—i n other words, the ability of our
thermostats to hold their position makes us free. Brilliant
as this insight was, a drastic mistake has crept in with it. When a thermostat sense s that the room is 65 degrees or
75 instead of 70, those variations are mistakes;  only 70
degrees is right. In us, on the other hand , many settings
can be right; normal is just the point we return to most of
the time. If you ran a marathon without your blood
pressure, heart rate, glucose metabolism, and sweatproduction rising drastic ally above “normal,” you would
collapse. “Normal” is just the zone we like to live in. It is not a rule
but a preference. The Tarahumara Indians, perhaps
because they descend from ancient runners who carried
messages across the Andes to the Incan empire, have
adjusted to a “normal” that is diﬀerent from ours, more
suited to their way of life. In deﬁance of a meager diet,
what they wanted to do—to run ﬁfty miles a day—w as more
important than mere bodily norms. Their bodies adapted to
intelligence, no questions asked, and not the other way
around. Thanks to the habit of following one style of living,
it may be diﬀicult to adapt instantly when the mind desires
a change—o bese people should not jump from their
armchairs to join marathons—but the power of adaptation
can never be totally sacriﬁced. For all our internal “hard-
wiring” and thousands of homeostatic mechanism s, we can
change our skills, forget them, acquire new ones, and so
on. That is the ultimate glory of being a human being, and
it cannot be attained without total freedom. —
The West clearly has mixed feelings about the whole idea of
higher consciousness, compounded of longing, baﬄement,
and distaste. I travel at least two days a week, year round,
talking about Ayurveda to many kinds of audiences, both
medical and nonmedical, and very quickly I learned how
sensitive a chord I was striking. A CBC interviewer in
Canada introduced himself to me by demanding, “Can you
give me ﬁve reasons why you are not a fraud?”  A more
congenial interviewer in Los Angeles leaned toward me
with mystical anticipation and said, “Tell me, Doctor , have
you been here—before?” I was so startled I blurted, “We’re
all here all the time.”Since the 1960s, the proliferation of casual knowledge
about the East has been a blessing and a curse, for
although many people have picked up a few catch phrases
like nirvana, Atman,  and dharma, and almost everyone can
let the word karma  pass by in conversation without
blinking an eye, the actual sense of these words has been
garbled. I have tried to show that Vedic knowledge is
systematic and sound; that it is as far-reaching as our most
advanced science; and that many of the things we most
desire for ourselves, such as freedom from diseas e and an
unimpaired old age, can be approached through this great
body of understanding about human existence. But I would betray the rishis’ knowledge if I did not
present its ﬁnal expansion, which has no clearly deﬁned
precedent in the West—o r at best is conﬁned to religious
doctrine. The rishis were after a state of total awareness. For them, this was not philosophy or religion but a natural
form of human awareness. The fourth state, it turns out, is
not an end point but a doorway . And what is on the other
side? The only complete answer would have to come from
the thousands and thousa nds of pages of Vedic texts, which
function as the encyclopedia of experiences the rishis
recorded. The simplest answer is to say that what each
rishi encoun tered was the Self. An extremely accurate
depiction of meeting the Self was given by a meditator from
Connecticut:
One of the most regular experiences in my
meditation is of expanded awareness, of no longer
being conﬁne d to the inside of my head, but being
as inﬁnite or more inﬁnite than the universe. Sometimes I feel the boundaries of the mind
being push ed out, like the ever-widening
circumference of a circle, until the circle
disappears and only inﬁnity remains.It is a feeling of great freedom, but also one of
naturalness, far more real and natural than being
conﬁned to such a small space. Sometimes the
sense of inﬁnity is so strong that I lose the
sensation of body or matter—just inﬁnite,
unbounded awareness, an eternal, never-
changing continuum of consciousness. Everyone will have to respond to this in his own terms. I
hope that we have laid enough solid groundwor k so that
the account can appear  in its true light, not as a self-
delusion but as an actual encounter with the silent ﬁeld of
intelligence. Earlier , we noted that the body in its real
nature is non-change mixed with change. The reason why
that is so is that all of nature exhibits these two paradoxical
yet complementary states. As awareness expands, the huge
scope of change and the equally huge scope of non-change
dawn on the mind. An ancient Chinese poem  by Hsu Hsu
says:
The ﬁrst wave is receding
The second wave promptly arrives
So many layers of time
So many lives. Can we grant this beautiful openness of perception, at
once serene and all-encompassing, to an ordinary person
from Connecticut? I think we have to, for the same
biochemistry that sustains such an experience is available
to anyone, regardless of time. Our DNA has remembered
all the things that have ever happened to human beings. It
would be ridiculous to suppose that only Chinese or Indian
DNA can trigger higher states of consciousness; it would be
impoverished to claim that they are not real. Themeditator’s statement ends with this wonderfully exact
appreciation of quantum reality: “Sometimes there is an
interesting paradox of activity and rest all in one, and I feel
within my awareness that I am moving inﬁnitely fast and
remaining perfectly still at the same time. This is the
experience of the ever- changing along with the never-
changing.”
Anyone who wants to take the full beneﬁt of the Vedic
knowledge must come to grips with the fact that such
normally inconceivable states as inﬁnity , eternity , and
transcendence are real. These words  do not belong to the
vocabulary of the ordinary waking state, but they are not so
distant from it, either . We all have the power to make
reality . Why make it inside boun daries when the boundless
is so near? EXPANDING THE TOPIC
I often  refer  to skeptics in these expanded topics because
Quantum Healing  caused the skeptical beehive to buzz
rather violently . Skeptics view themselves as guardians of
scientiﬁc truth. They can just as easily be seen as the
society for the suppression of curiosity . Yet I sympathize
with anyone who can’t buy into Aham Brahmasmi,  the
Vedic assert ion that “I am the universe.” From the
viewpoint of everyday life, this simply seems impossible. At
best, Aham Brahmasmi  migh t be the otherworldly state
reached by enlightened sages long ago and far away . Yes and no. A person’s consciousness has to shift in order
to realize, in a higher state of awareness, that “I am the
universe.” But the statement can’t apply simply to these
few people. Only someone with medic al school training can
look through a microscope and identify T cells from the
immune system, yet everyone has T cells. So it’s not thetruth of Aham Brahmasmi  that we should doubt; either it’s
true or it isn’t. The real issue is how to arrive at the state of
consciousness that reveals this truth. A Buddhist maxim holds that it takes a thorn to remove a
thorn. In other words, the mind encloses us in boundaries,
but only the mind can get us beyond boundaries to
experience the unbounded. In modern terms, we can refer
this paradox to the brain. The brain is the receiver of mind,
the instrume nt whose physical processes parallel every
thought, feeling, sensatio n, and image that passes through
our minds. The Buddhist maxim applies to it, too. The brain
is a thorn in that it reduces reality to ﬁxed bound aries, but
it is capable at the same time of registering the unbounded. In this regard, I became fascinated by the work done by
the Polish-American mathematician Alfred Korzybski
(1879–1950), because he worked out what the brain does
when it processes reality . Billions of bits of data bombard
our sense organs every day, of which only a fraction gets
past the brain’s ﬁlterin g mechanism. When people say,
“You’re not hearing me” or, “You only see what you want to
see,” they are expressin g a truth that Korzybski tried to
quantify mathematically . Sometimes the things a person can’t see are simply
outside the range of human experience, like our inability to
see ultraviolet light. But a great deal more depends on
expectations, memories, biases, fears, and simple closed-
mindedness. If you go to a party and someone tells you that
you are about to meet a Nobel Prize winner , you will see a
diﬀerent person than if you had been told he is a reformed
maﬁa hit man. When all the ﬁltering and processing is
complete, there is no doubt that the brain doesn’t actually
experience reality but only a conﬁrmation of its model of
reality . The model of reality you are following right this minute is
wired into the synapses and neural pathways of your brain.Some of this is so-calle d hard wiring, which means it
belongs to the brain’s intrinsic structure, such as the
wiring that leads from your eyes to the visual cortex. Other
wiring is formed through personal experience and is much
more ﬂuid; this is known as soft wiring. Between them hard
and soft wiring deliver a model of reality to you, and
whatever is outside the model doesn’t exist. Korzybski was
one of the ﬁrst analysts who pointed out that if the brain is
capturing only a fraction of the raw data being fed to it, one
cannot claim that the brain is an accurate vehicle for
experiencing reality . Two interesting points follow:
1.All models are equal as viewed from the level of the
brain. 2.Reality transcends any model we can possibly make of
it. These two points allow God, the soul, and all other
spiritual experiences back into the picture. The ﬁrst point
demolishes the notion that science is superior to religion
because it gathers facts while religion deals in beliefs. In
truth, science ﬁlters out and discards a huge portion of
human expe rience—almost everything one would classify
as subjective—so its model is just as selective, if not more
so, than religion’s. As far as the brain is concerned, neural
ﬁltering is taking place in all models, whether they are
scientiﬁc, spiritual, artistic, or even distur bed and
psychotic. Seeing little green men is a brain phenomenon
just like seeing green trees. The brain is not a mirror of
reality . There is no way anyon e can claim to know what is
“really” real. You can’t step outside your brain to fathom
what lies beyond it. This limitation is much more severe
than people suppose. The brain operates in time and space.Your thoughts, for example, come one after another , like
boxcars in a train. So whatever is outside time and space is
inconceivable, and unﬁltered reality would probably blow
the brain’s circuits, or simply be blanked out. Yet here is where the Buddhist notion of using a thorn to
remove a thorn comes in, because the mind can look
beyond the brain’s ﬁltering process. Consider this short
poem by W illiam Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild ﬂower ,
Hold inﬁnity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour . This is a perspective that goes beyond everyday
perception. How did Blake arrive at it? His lines resonate
with me—I ﬁnd them quite thrilling—because Blake had
inner vision, which looks beyond the limited mode l that the
brain creates. People who are comple tely adapted to
constricted awareness still ﬁnd themselves confro nted with
glimpses of unbounded awareness. This came home to me
when Michael Shermer , founder of Skeptic  magazine, had
his worldview overturned by a mysterious event. Shermer , with whom I’ve had many debates, fell in love
with a German woman, who moved to the Unite d States
after they agreed to marry. On her wedding day she was
very happy , but with one deep regret. Her grandfather , with
whom she was very close, had died and therefore would
never witness her weddi ng day. The ceremony took place . Shermer and his bride returned home. That night over
dinner , there  was the sound of music coming from the next
room. The newlyweds followed the sound. A broken
transistor radio that belonged to the bride’s grandfather
had suddenl y come to life on its own—it was previouslydead—and it not only played music but classical music, her
grandfather’s favorite. Mystiﬁed and deeply moved, the
couple went to sleep hearing the radio play. The next day
the room was silent, and the radio returned to its previous
unusable state. Shermer published this anecdote on the back page of
Scientiﬁc American,  where he writes a regular column,
always from the skeptic al point of view. It took some
courage for him to admit that an inexplicable event had
shaken his skepticism, but what had happened to him was a
classic example of synchronicity , a meaningful
“coincidence” that is far too unlikely to be random. Predictably , Shermer’s skeptical followers weren’t buying
the story . They told him to take the transistor radio to a
good electronics shop, where he’d ﬁnd a rational
explanation. Just as predictably , these  commenters ignored
the timing of the inciden t, the congruence with what his
bride wanted , and the fact that a radio suddenly turned on
and was tuned to a station playing music her grandfather
loved. As the philosopher Leibniz pointed out, theories are
correct about what they include but wrong about what they
exclude. In this case, the radio is the least of it. The really
important parts are excluded if you stubbornly view the
event through skeptical spectacles. Perhaps not as dramatica lly, we all get glimpses of reality
that defy the limited model residing in our brains. Experiences that go beyond everyday reality are wide-
ranging. Ask yourself if any of the following have occurred
to you. You felt that your awareness extended beyond your body . You felt safe in your own being. You had a sudden insight that came out of nowhere. Your body felt physically light and buoyant.You felt at home in the world. You knew with certainty that you are loved. You felt energy bubbling through your body . You had a random thought, and it materialized. Events came  together perfectly to reach a goal you set
for yourself . You felt intuitively that everything happens for a reason. You felt a connection with a higher intelligence. You experienced the presence of God or the soul. These are moments when reality peeks through the iron
grille. No ﬁlter is ever perfect; no censor can catch every
infraction. When Buddhism speaks of using a thorn to
remove a thorn, nothing is more important than paying
attention to glimpses like these, where expanded
awareness takes over, if only brieﬂy , from constricted
awareness. As esoteric as spirituality can be, to escape
from the brain’s limitations all you need to do is say “yes”
to moments of expanded awareness instead of “no .” You are
the one who ultimately decides how much reality you want
to expe rience, and every time you say “yes,” you are giving
instructions to your brain. In time, it will adapt to any level
of awareness you want. This point was validated by studies of the brain function
of a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had meditated
for years on the value of compassion (one name for the
Buddha is “the compassi onate one”), and if this value had
grown in their lives, some change should appear  in their
brains. In fact it did. The monks showed increased delta
waves, representing so-called slow-wave sleep. Considered
to be unconscious activity in most people, slow-wave sleep
is associated with remaining self-aware even when you are
in deep sleep. This is a noted attainment in yoga. In
addition, the monks showed unprecedented activ ity in theprefrontal lobes, especially in regions associated with
higher emotions like compassion. As startling as these ﬁndings were, they could have been
predicted once you accept that the brain must follow where
the mind goes. Meditation creates beneﬁcial changes in
brain functions you would never be aware of, because such
things as heart rate and blood pressure don’t register in
our minds as conscio us choices. Saying “yes” to
experiences of expanded awareness is diﬀerent. You make
a conscious choice to favor a range of experiences that
your brain either ignores, shuts down, or censors. I wish in hindsight that I had emphasized how faulty
every model of reality , including the quantum model, must
be. Korzybski held that even mathematics was a model,
subject to the limitation s of all models that the brain
constructs. Not everyon e would agree—holding on to
mathematics as a universal truth gives advanced physics its
toehold on the quantum world. But I am not using any of
these ideas as bludgeons to bash science with. Korzybski
simply pointed out, using the language of science, that
whatever reality is, it transcends the brain. * The Sanskrit literally says, “I am Brahman.” Brahman is an all-inclusive term
and therefore untranslatable; it signiﬁes all things in creation—physical,
mental, and spiritual—as well as their uncreated source. OceanofPDF .comThere is no more beautiful experience than when the world
expands beyond its accustomed limits. These are the
moments when reality takes on splendor . The Veda calls
such an experience Ananda,  or bliss; it is said to be another
quality inherent in the human mind but covered over by
layers of dulled awareness. Bliss  is an uncomfortable word
in the West; like transcen dence, it needs to be demystiﬁed. Let’s start with a persona l reaction to what bliss feels like. A beautiful ﬁrst-person account is given by physiologist
Robert Keith Wallace. The scene is Nepal, where Wallace
went in 1974, taking a break from a conference being held
in India:
Along with a physicist friend, I made my way up
from Katmandu, the capital, to be nearer the
Himalayas. We found a beautiful alpine lake,
which Nepalese princes once favored as a
summer retreat. For less than a dollar , we rented
a boat and pushed out onto the water . It was a
windy day with clearing skies, a perfect day to ﬂykites. I had bought one at the bazaar , painted a
ﬁerce red and built for acrobatics. I stood up, and
it jump ed out of my hand  as I let it loose on the
wind. The tiny kite ﬂoated up into the high, thin air. I
stood looking up toward the great mountains
around us. Though they hid their heads in the
clouds, they gave oﬀ an aura of grandeur and
peace. As I watched, the clouds lifted all at once. I
was absolutely in awe. What I had taken for
mountains were only foothills! Beyond them, like
ancient gods, rose the true Himalayas,
unbelievably mighty and majestic. We could hardly speak,  so much power and
beauty was concentrate d in that breathtaking
scene. The sense of having a small, isolated self
disappeared, and in its place was the delicious
sensation of ﬂowing out into everything I beheld. I felt a sense of complete  fullness contained in my
own silence. Fittingly , the tallest peak  before us
was Annapurna, whose name means “fullness of
life.”
Standing there on the lake, I saw directly into
the reality where time really is timeless. The same
power that reared these mountains was ﬂowing
through me. If I wanted to ﬁnd the source of time
and space, I only needed to place my ﬁngers over
my heart. The single adequate word to describe
my sensations at that moment is bliss. *
What stands out unmistakably in this experience is its
sense of revelation. People who have been directly touched
by bliss feel that they are suddenly being exposed to life as
it really is. By comparison, their ordinary view was ﬂat anddistorted; they had been accepting a dingy image for the
real thing. To experience bliss every hour of the day would
be a sign of complete enlightenment, but even  a brief
encounter is signiﬁcant— it permits you to actually feel
waves of consciousness as they well up from the ﬁeld of
silence, cross  the gap, and are infused into every cell. This
is the body’s own awakening. In Ayurveda, bliss is the basis for three extremely
powerful healing techniq ues. The ﬁrst is meditation, which
we have already discussed. Its importance is that it takes
the mind out of its boundaries and exposes it to an
unbounded state of consciousness. The other two
techniques are more speciﬁc. The ﬁrst is the Ayurvedic
psycho-physiological technique—the term psycho-
physiological  simply means “mind-bod y” (we often use an
informal name, the bliss technique). The second healing
technique is called primordial sound. To explain how such healing works, let me take an
example from  hypnosis. One of the most surprising ﬁndings
of hypnosis research is that subjects can make their hands
warm or cold, raise rashes on their skin, and even form
blisters in a matter of a few minutes after the hypnotic
suggestion is introduced . This is not, strictly speaking, a
peculiarity of the hypnotic trance—subjects hook ed up to
biofeedback machines can do similar things in their normal
state of awar eness. What is being demonstra ted here is the
power of attention to alter the body. Ayurveda has made
use of this principle for thousands of years. Indeed, since
the basic premise of Vedic knowledge is that consciousness
creates the body, it is only natural that techn iques for
focusing attention should have been discovered. The bliss technique and primordial sound fall into this
category . Consciousness is nothing but awareness. You can
be aware that your hand is hot, which is passive awareness,
but as the hypnosis research shows, you can also makeyour hand hot, which is active awareness, or attention. When you “pay attention” to something, you shift from
passive to active awareness. Attention exerts far more
control than people ordinarily realize. That is beca use we
are victims of passive awareness. A person in pain is aware
of the pain but not that he can make it increase, diminish,
appear , or disappear . Yet all this is true. (People can walk
on ﬁre, for example, because they can control their level of
pain; more remarkably , they can control whether their feet
actually get burned—that too is under the control of
attention.) In Ayurveda,  each and every symptom of disease, from a
minor neck pain to a full-blown cancer , is under the control
of attention. However , between us and the symptom lie
barriers—the veils called Maya—that prevent us from
exercising our attention in a therapeutic way. All mind-body
medicine attempts to remove these obstacles so that
healing can take place. Outside Ayurveda, the word Maya is
not used, but any term that amounts to the same  thing is
applicable. I have used other phrases, such as “barriers in
silence,” “the ghost of memory ,” and “the mask of matter .”
In the curren t environment, where mind-body medicine is
just proving itself and has to beware of stepping on the toes
of science, techniques for breaking through Maya are still
rather rudimentary . Fortunately , nature has set up things so
that mind-body approaches of all kinds will work. Laughter
can defeat a fatal disease ; so can drinking a glass of grape
juice every day , if you believe strongly enough in it. It would be much better , however , to have a science of
awareness. Ayurveda supplies just that. It would also be
helpful to have a theory  that supplies this science with a
ﬁrm groundin g in philosophy; the Vedic knowledge  supplies
that. When I teach people Ayurvedic healing techniques, I
am not inducting them into a Vedic world, or into some
mystery . I am trying to let them  realize that their ownawareness creates, controls, and turns into their bodies. This is a fact, not just a V edic view of things. When the body is in pain, a distorted area of awareness is
crying out to the rest of awareness for help. Our natural
instinct is to bring the help. The way we mobilize the
platelets and clotting factors in the blood to heal a cut is
nothing more than awareness bringing in help. A bruise
heals because intelligence goes to work on it. I think that
much has become abundantly clear by now . Some people are fortunate in being such natural
creatures that when they get cancer , they do not block the
innate urge to get well. No doubt there are thousands of
such people in the world who have not come under
scrutiny . Rather than being branded miraculous by religion
or science, they stand as the mute, inglorious Miltons of the
healing process. Ayurveda extends their ability to everyone. The Ayurvedic
approach is to take a process already going on in the body
and assist it naturally and without strain. Any pain or
disease you have is like an island of discomfort surrounded
by an ocean  of comfort, for in comparison to any one
disease, your healthy awareness is as big as an ocean. Assuming that you are normally constituted, there is no
innate reason why you cannot heal any disease with
awareness. (In old age, or in cases of chronic illness, our
inner abilities get depleted; therefore, Ayurveda cannot
guarantee a cure because sometimes it is not there in
nature’s scheme.) The bliss technique gives the patient the experience of
himself as pure awareness, the ocean of well-being that is
our basic prop and susten ance. With this technique alone it
is possible to “drown” a disease in awareness and cure it. However , like the hypnotic subjects who can focus their
attention to make a bliste r appear , it is also usefu l to focus
attention more precisely to heal. For that, the primordialsound techni que exists. With it, a speciﬁc tumor or arthritic
joint can be attended to; a weak heart or clogged arteries
can be zeroed in on. You are not attacking the disorder with
the primordial sound but paying closer attention to it—so
close that the distortion of awareness lurking at the bottom
of the disorder falls back into line. In earlier chapters I
called this process banishing the ghost of memory . Together , meditation, the bliss technique, and primordial
sound are the practical application of all that I have been
building up to, the tools of quantum healing. Let me
illustrate them with a case study , and afterward I will
explain their connection to bliss. Laura is a young woman from Boston who contracted
breast cance r in her mid-thirties. Confronted with her
diagnosis, she elected for personal reasons not to undergo
any conventional treatment, despite her doctor’s anxious
insistence that without treatment she would be dead in less
than two years. Today, three years later, she is still alive
and on the surface appears perfectly normal. Her X rays
reveal that the tumor has not shrunk, but its growth, if any,
has been slight. This implies that Laura is still in
considerable danger , but in her own mind, her present
state is a great victory . Although her cancer is still present, it has not followed
what doctors call the “expected natural history” of the
disease. Dr. Yujiro Ikemi, one of Japan’s leading experts in
psychosomatic medicine, has surveyed sixty-nine patients
whom he considers to have had spontaneous regressions of
cancer . It is not necessary for the cancer cells to disappear
entirely , Dr. Ikemi notes— he looks for other signs, such as
that the tumor is growing abnormally slowly , the patient
has not wasted away , and the malignancy has not spread to
other parts of the body. These signs are enough to indicate
a spontaneous regression in Ikemi’s view, and Laura ﬁts
them all.Laura was already meditating when I ﬁrst saw her. In
1987 she went through two weeks of inpatient Ayurvedic
treatment and was taught primordial sound and the bliss
technique, both of which can be used during meditation. Let us say that the mind has settled down in meditation and
is expe riencing itself as silence. Bliss is in that silence, just
as intelligenc e is. You cannot “feel” that you are intelligent,
but you can feel bliss. The bliss technique bring s it out for
the mind to register in various ways—as warmth in some
part of the body, tingling, a ﬂowing sensation, or several
other physical manifestations. Bliss remains abstract, but a
sort of “after glow” is being picked up during the technique. Primordial sound, on the other hand, is quite focused—it
brings the awareness of bliss directly to the diseased area
of the body. (One does not have to think of all this as
happening separately . The bliss level of awareness is
always present; the techniques simply draw the conscious
mind to it. Once bliss is experienc ed, the mind-body
connection has been made.) As soon as she learned the techniques, Laura felt
immediate positive eﬀec ts. The primord ial sounds went
right to the breast area, she told me. At times they induced
a throbbing feeling, heat, or even pain; most of the time,
however , she would sit down with pain in that area and the
technique would cause it to go away . The most dramatic
results, subjectively , came from the introduction of bliss. I
asked Laura to write out her experiences for me, whether
joyful or painful or just indiﬀerent, and she agreed to. The
latest report says this:
The experien ces during the bliss technique are
not as profound as when  I started one and a half
years ago, but then there was such deep-rooted
fear and sorrow , a feeling of helplessness andintense anxiety , so the contrast was quite great
when I began to experience such joy and bliss. At that time there were large black holes
experienced in my awareness. I do not see the
black holes anymore, and the feeling of constant
happiness is more stable. Yet days still come
when the joy and bliss are so powerful that I can
hardly contain them. I rarely experience fear
anymore, just some general anxiety that I can
usually control with a little attention. While other women in her position are devastated by
their treatments and left with the deepest scars, physically
and mentally , it is amazing that Laura, though still
suspended between life and death, can end her letter this
way:
A year and a half ago, I was only 99 percent sure
that the cancer would be eliminated. It has only
been in the last month that I have grown 100
percent sure. I have no doubts now. I feel
conﬁdent in the support of nature. I still don’t
know the exact form nature’s help will take, or
the timing for it, but I am less concerned about
the ﬁnal manifestation than I am about the
breakthrough in consciousness. I can see clearly
in my awareness the perfect breast. Laura is a sensitive observer of her own awareness, and
she sees its ﬂow very exactly . To her, there is a huge
diﬀerence, from the inside, between being sick and
becoming well. The techniques she is using do not call for
visualization, but she says that she can see the tumor grow
whenever she feels anxious or sorrowful. This imagerepresents, I believe, a direct link between her awareness
and the progress of the cancer . What will the ﬁnal outcome be? She and I agree that the
process itself is the outcome; every day is a whole—not a
step toward some dreame d-of recovery , but an end in itself ,
to be lived in its fullness as if no disease existed. Because I
am much more indoctrinated by my past medical
experiences with cancer than Laura is, I often think that
she is far ahead of me in her joyful conﬁdence. —
Bliss is both objective and subjective. You can feel it as a
sensation, but it also eﬀects measurable change—it can
alter the heart rate, blood pressure, hormone secretions, or
anything else for that matter . This is what allows bliss to be
useful medically . The patient  is using the Ayurvedic
techniques “in his head,” but the bliss being experienced is
re-creating his body at the same time. What is happ ening is
that the body is receivin g a signal from its own blueprint,
not a material blueprint but the one that exists in
consciousness. Because the blueprint is invisible, it has to ﬁnd a way to
cross over into material existence. To do that, nature
employs bliss—it is a vibration that bridges mind and
matter , allowing each bit of the body to be paired with a bit
of intelligence:
This diagram shows the mind-body connection as being like
a radio broadcast: mind is sending out impulses of
intelligence, DNA receives them, and bliss is the carrier
signal. On paper , these three elements have to be
separated, but in reality they are completely fused. The
message, the messenger , and the receiver are one. Of
course, we have looked at the mind-body connection dozens
of times before, but we didn’t have the “glue” that keeps
mind and body from ﬂying in separate directions—bliss. DNA now takes on special importance. A single
neuropeptide, or any other messenger molecule, carries
only a tiny bit of the signal that mind is sending. Adrenaline, for example, is correlated to fear. This seems to
imply that each thought activates one molecule, but that
would be like saying that 101.5 on an FM radio  receives
only one song. In fact, the body can receive an inﬁnite
variety of signals, thanks to DNA. We are used to thinkin g of DNA as an unchanging
blueprint, albeit “the blueprint of life.” DNA is nowhere
near so static. I was sitting quietly two days ago when I had
a glimpse of DNA in my mind’s eye. I saw DNA speeded up
so that one human lifetime, from the moment of inception
to the moment of death, ﬁt into the space of a few minutes. What I saw wasn’t a chem ical but a process of incredible
richness and dynamism. Everything in life pours  out of
DNA—ﬂesh, bones, blood, heart, and nervous system; a
baby’s ﬁrst word and a toddler’s ﬁrst step; the maturing of
reason in the brain’s cortex; the play of emotions, thoughts,
and desires that ﬂicker like summer lightning  through
every cell. All of this is DNA. To call it a blueprint is to take
the husk and miss the fruit. Imagine yourself going to a
Mercedes dealer , paying thirty thousand dollars, and
having him hand over a car’s blueprint instead of a car. Now imagine the blueprint actually turning into the car—
not only that, but starting  itself , driving down the road, andreplacing its own spare parts. Then the blueprint would be
equal to DNA. (It would also need another quite amazing
talent: any part—the carburetor , the tires, even a chip of
paint on the door—would  have to know how to turn into a
whole car .) Whatever it is that make s DNA so dynamic is not visible
in its material makeup; molecules themselves are passive
participants in time. They can change, as oxygen and
hydrogen change when they combine to form water , but
DNA actively  shapes the course of time. This is such an
important feature that I need to explain it at length;
otherwise, the real miracle of DNA will be lost on us. In the past few years, researchers have been intrigued by
one particular gene, called the per gene, in the DNA of a
fruit ﬂy. As part of their inherited behavior , fruit ﬂies sing
in the evening to call their mates. Normally , they repeat
their call quite rhythmically , once every 60 seconds. Ronald Konopka, a research professor at Clarkson
University , ﬁrst linked the rhythm of the fruit ﬂy’s song to
the per (for “periodic”) gene. He also found that the rhythm
could change. When the per gene mutates, it produces
faster or slower intervals  between calls: one ﬂy sings every
40 seconds, another every 80 seconds. What is so fascinating about this discovery is that each
kind of ﬂy times its existence to a diﬀerent length of day. The normal, 60-second ﬂy follows a 24-hour day; the faster ,
40-second ﬂy a shorter day of 18 to 20 hours;  and the
slower , 80-se cond ﬂy a long day of 28 to 30 hours. The
conventional interpretation is that the per gene establishes
the insect’s daily rhythm. A similar eﬀect is seen in us; if
conﬁned to a cave where  he cannot see the sun and is not
allowed to look at a clock , a man will sleep and wake up on
a regular cycle, not of 24 hours but generally of 25 hours—
this seems to be the daily, or circadian, rhythm that our
DNA has built into us. Similarly , the fruit ﬂy does not carewhen the sun rises or sets; when its song changes, the day
changes. That means that its sense of time comes from
within, activated by the per gene. This is a far more stunning conclusion than the
conventional one. The convent ional one says that DNA is
controlling a rhythm inside the cell, but I am saying that it
controls time itself . The per gene is the link between time
“out there” and DNA “in here”; it literally creates time as
the fruit ﬂy knows it. In physics, Einstein demonstrated
that there is no ﬁxed yardstick for time in the relative
world; a space traveler would think that the clock on his
spaceship is ticking norm ally, just as it does on Earth. But if
he attained a velocity near the speed of light, the clock
would in fact be going slower than Earth-bound clocks. This
would not be an illusion; every biological process, including
how fast the space traveler ages, would also slow down. Aren’t these fruit ﬂies the insect equivalent of Einstein’s
space travelers? They are experiencing time as either slow
or fast, not from travel ing near the speed of light but
simply from their own internal signals. A fast-singing fruit ﬂy would have no way of knowing that
it is living in “fast time” (assuming that it is isolated from
the other kinds of ﬂies). It emits the same number of calls
per “day” as either the normal or the slow singers, without
realizing that its day (18 to 20 hours) is entirely determined
inside itself . But what is the per gene actually doing? Another investigator , Michael Young of Rockefeller
University , joined Konop ka and discovered that the per
gene works by coding certain proteins in the cell that
regulate rhythm. It is these proteins, coming and going in
cycles, that make the day seem long or short to the ﬂy. Similar genes and coded  proteins have also been found in
mice, chickens, and human beings. This brings us
remarkably close to seeing how the DNA is creating all of
reality . It is manipu lating the molecules into rhythms, orvibrations, that we decode into time. Other vibrations are
decoded into light, sound, texture, smells, et cetera. Sir
Arthur Eddin gton calls all of these “fancies of the mind,”
for essentiall y none of our sensory input is anything but a
signal transmitted to us via DNA—pure, abstract vibrations
that we turn into “real” events in time and space. If a gene
can regulate  time, then it is only a step away from
regulating space, too. There is nothing to time and space,
from a subjective point of view, except one’s own
participation in it. Like the fruit ﬂy, we measure an hour by
the clock, and the clock is in us. Here we come to a fork in the road. Biologists realize that
if the protei ns in a cell regulate the cell’s rhyth ms, then
something must regulate them. What is it? One road leads
to a materialistic explanation. Naturally , this is the one
science prefers. Some biolog ists believe that the cell wall
lets chemicals through only at a certain rate, and this rate
is our yardstick for time, our molecular clock. Others say
that the clock is actually a chemical code imprinted on the
DNA, which  is read in sequence from the moment of
conception until death. Neither explanation has been
worked out in satisfactory detail. If the rishis are right, they
never will be—no answe r exists on the level of molecules
alone. As is obvious by now, the rishis would take a diﬀerent
road and say that the clock inside us is intelligence. The
per gene is just a mechanical part, a wire or tube in DNA’s
radio . Through it, time expresses itself , just as an emotion
expresses itself through a neuropeptide. Time is riding on a
molecule, and once again we mustn’t mistake the rider for
the horse. The signals for time, space, motion, texture,
smells, sights, and all the rest of the world come  from the
level of silent intelligence. That is wher e we really live, and
the miracle of DNA is that it can turn so many totally
abstract messages into life itself .If you go walking through the woods on a warm autumn
day, feeling the fallen oak leaves under your feet, smelling
the ripe, dank earth, and watching the October light as it
plays in the branches overhead, you are experiencing the
world through your DNA. It impo ses a deﬁnite selection on
things. You are not smelling the argon and xenon gases in
the air or seeing the sun’s ultraviolet emissions. You can
walk through leaves but not through the wood of the trees. The incredible complexity of green moss registers on your
mind as a patch of fuzz; and of the pollen, spores,  bacteria,
viruses, and other microb es that ﬁll the air by the hundreds
in every cubic centimeter , you register nothing. The reason
for this special focus resides in you. Those are humanized
leaves, trees, smells, and light. If your sense s were reﬁned enough, you would go even
further and realize that you are the woods. It is not just
sending signals to you from “out there”; rather , you are
blending your own signals with its. None of your sense
organs is separated from nature’s continuum. Your eye is a
specialized light receptor that merges into the light it
perceives. If the light failed, your eye would atrophy as
surely as the blind cave-ﬁsh’s eye; if your eye’s structure
changed—for example, if each eye swiveled independently ,
like a chame leon’s—every object would acquire completely
diﬀerent relations in space. That would be your experience,
and nothing in the relative world exists outside experience. A bee approaching a ﬂower sees the nectar and blocks
out the petals—as far as the bee’s eye is concerne d, this is
what exists. For us, to see a bar magnet means seeing the
sharp outline of the iron but not the radiating magnetic
ﬁeld around it. Therefore, the iron is what exists, as far as
vision goes. Add in all the other senses, and you have the
world that you are creating. It was built up over 600 million
years by your DNA; ultimately , however , this world
expresses your inner intelligence, with DNA the adroitservant. It serves you in your way, as it serves other
creatures in theirs. DNA turns the vibrations of light into eyes and sound into
ears. It turns time into a matin g song for fruit ﬂies and into
the march of history for man. It gives bats their sonar and
snakes their sensitivity to infrared light. In each  and every
case, however , the DNA is merely the radio . One will never
discover the secret of space-time looking at DNA, or any
other materi al thing. The attempt is just as doomed as
tearing apart a radio’s wiring to ﬁnd where the music is. The rishis found the level of music—it is bliss. Bliss is the vibration that intelligence sends into the
world. In fact, we can map our existence in terms of a
single diagram that compresses mind, body, DNA, and bliss
into one undivided whole:
With good reason one could call this picture the circle of
life. In it we see bliss as a continuous signal, a loop thatconnects mind, body, and DNA in a lifelong conversation. All three participants share equally in what gets said—what
the mind knows is also known by the body and DNA. Your
experiences resonate on all three levels. You cannot be
happy or sad, sick or well, awake or asleep,  without
sending a message everywhere in inner space. You may not think that you can “talk” to your DNA
(another prejudice that comes from seeing DNA as only a
material blueprint), but in fact you do continually . The
ﬂeeting chem icals that race through you at the touch of
thought, the receptors hanging out on the cell wall waiting
for their messages, and every other speck of life are
manufactured by DNA. (I realize that I am truncating a
long process. DNA directly manufactures only genetic
material, but using its active twin, RNA, it gives rise to all
the proteins, cells, and tissues we have.) Thinking happens
at the level of DNA, because without the brain cell sending
out a neuropeptide or other messenger , there can be no
thought. The Ayurvedic technique called primordial sound takes
direct advantage of this. I drew  bliss as a circle to
represent a constant, unbroken signal. However , there can
be breaks in the circle. These occur when the DNA, the
mind, and the body are not perfectly synchronized. Ayurveda would say that many diseases begin where there
is such a break—bliss slips out of its groove, so to speak,
throwing oﬀ the cell’s intelligence. To repair the break, a
speciﬁc signal needs to be inserted back into the circle—a
primordial sound. In this way, a vibration is used to cure a
vibration. —
Treating disease with a mental sound is highly unusual, I
know . To understand it, we need to make a closer
connection between bliss and the quantum ﬁeld. By the1970s, the world’s atom smashers had been busy for forty
years, and now there were hundreds of “hadrons ,” a class
of subatomic particles that were proliferating far too
abundantly to be conside red elementary by any standard. Didn’t the universe have simpler building blocks than this? The way out of the dilemma was found by theorizing that
all of these particles were variations not on a smaller
particle but on an underlying wave form. This wave form was dubbed a “superstring,” because it
behaves very much like a violin string. The superstring
theory holds that billions upon billions of unseen strings
pervade the universe, and their diﬀerent frequencies give
rise to all the matter and energy in creation. Certain
vibrations also turn into time and space—the preﬁx super
indicates that these strings actually reside far beyond our
limited four-dimensional reality . No one will ever see them ,
no matter how powerful our instruments become. To clarify what a superstring is, physicist Michio Kaku
gives an analogy to music: imagine that a violin is enclosed
out of sight in a box. As its strings vibrate, diﬀerent
pitches, chords, sequences of notes, and timbres are
produced. If you were an alien who did not know what
music is, you would ﬁnd each of these things completely
diﬀerent from one another—the note C might be like a
hydrogen atom, while E-ﬂat was a photon. Only by opening
the box and seeing that indeed every sound came from one
violin would you be convinced that they had a uniﬁed
source. In the same way, nature’s fundamental ﬁeld is constantly
vibrating and producing variations upon the same “notes,”
but our senses are set up so that they turn this sameness
into diﬀerences. We perceive iron as a solid note, hydrogen
as a gaseous note, gravit y as a heavy note, and so on. Only
by exposing the superstrings would the underlying unity be
evident. They are exposed not by opening the box but bymathematical formulas that show that all forms of matter
and energy ﬁt the super-s tring model—as so far they all do. Therefore, quantum physics now has its ﬁrst good
candidate for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory , justifying Einstein’s
faith in the order of the cosmos. Amazingly enough, the Vedic rishis also perceived that
the cosmos was pervaded by strings. These strings were
called sutras,  from which surgeons get the word suture . In
Sanskrit, sutra can mean  a stitch (or suture), but also a
thread or a verbal phrase. If you think of a sutra as a
thread, then the whole universe is woven like gossamer
from threads of intelligence, billions and billions of them. Like notes played on the unseen violin, the fundamental
level of the whole world, according to the Vedic rishis, is
made of sounds. Because they arise before anything else,
they are primordial—hence the term primordial sound . It takes more than one sound to make the universe. However , the rishis did have just one sound to begin with, a
vibration called Om, which appeared at the time we would
call the Big Bang. Om is a meaningless syllable—it simply
stands for the ﬁrst wave that breaks the cosmic silence. As
it breaks up into many tinier waves, Om subdivides into
diﬀerent subfrequencies  that compose the matter and
energy in our universe. Once you open your mind to the possibility , it is no more
surprising that stars, galaxies, and human beings can be
created from Om than from a superstring. Both are
abstract. Going back to the hidden violin, Kaku wrote, “The
tones create d by the vibrating string, such as C or B-ﬂat,
are not in themselves any more fundamental than any other
notes. What is fundamental, however , is the fact that a
single concept, vibrating strings, can explain the laws of
harmony”—or in the case of the universe, the laws of
nature.Om can be pictured as a straight line whose pitch rises
into inﬁnity , like the most super of superstrings. It is no
accident that the syllable Om sounds like the English
“hum”; when the rishis  tuned in to the sound of the
universe, they actually heard it as a cosmic hum. If you
were enlight ened, you would be able to hear the vibration
that is your own signatu re; for instance, you could “hear”
your DNA as a speciﬁc frequency vibrating in your
awareness. Likewise, each neuropeptide would grow out of
a sound, as would every other chemical. Starting with DNA, the whole body unfolds into many
levels, and at each one the sutra, or sequence of sound,
comes ﬁrst. Therefore, putting a primordial sound back into
the body is like remindin g it of what station it should be
tuned in to . On that basis, Ayurveda does not treat the body
as a lump of matter but as a web of sutras. —
Needless to say, it has taken me some time to explain all of
this to myself . When I ﬁrst began to administer the
Ayurvedic programs at the inpatient facility in Lancaster , I
kept one foot ﬁrmly planted in my private endocrinology
practice—although I felt in tune with Ayurvedic theory , I
was still nervous about its results. Every week I shuttled
back and forth from my oﬀice to the clinic. One October
day I walked into the dining hall and noticed one of the
cancer patients, a middle-aged man who was sitting quietly
in the corner , eating lunch with his wife. He had cancer of
the pancreas, a fatal condition that is also extremely
painful. When he had come in the door ﬁve days earlier , his
face was gray and creased after months of suﬀering. I
walked over now to say a few words. As I approac hed, he
casually looked up at me. It was one of those moments that
stops the heart. His face looked peaceful and relaxed; his
eyes were unmistakably touched with bliss. I asked himhow he felt. He said that he had no pain at all; after four
days of Ayurvedic treatment, he had taken hims elf oﬀ all
his pain medication. A few days later he left, and until the
time he died, he remained largely free of drugs. This is not yet a cure, but it is a huge step towa rd one. Consciousness would be curing people today, I am
convinced, except that we diagnose disease too late, after
years of stress have hardened the physiology and made it
diﬀicult for bliss to penet rate. But the gate is always open,
even if only by a crack. All the Ayurvedic healing
techniques operate on the premise that one treats the
patient ﬁrst, the disease second. The prospect of becoming a well person again, as
opposed to ﬁghting against a disorder known to be
incurable, gives hope to people who otherwise have
nothing to hold on to but grim statistics. One AIDS patient
in Germany has been treated with Ayurveda for two years
as part of a pilot program  conducted in Europe. Diagnosed
in 1984, he is still alive at the time of this writing in August
1988 (80 percent of AIDS  patients die within two years of
diagnosis); he leads a normal life and is without overt
symptoms. A similar program is under way in California, treating
AIDS patients under clinical observation to see if both the
latent and active phases  of the disease can be aﬀected. Both groups are small, and the subjects know that
Ayurveda is not promising a cure, but the supervising
physicians feel that they are seeing improvements,
particularly in the patients’ ability to withstand the
debilitating fatigue that saps the strength and will of AIDS
patients. Just to extend the latency period, giving a patient more
years before the disease produces symptoms, would be a
major breakthrough. However , I met one patient, not
connected with the clinic, who seems to have done betterthan that. A musician from Los Angeles in his early forties
came to be taught the bliss technique two years ago; I did
not see him again until this year, when he came to learn
primordial sound. I asked how he was doing, and he
answered that he had something important to tell me—he
had AIDS . The diagnosis had been made four years earlier after he
came down with pneumonia. Rather than the typical
pneumonia caused by the pneumococcus bacteria,  his came
from a protozoa known  as Pneumocystis carinii;  this
disease is one of the most common that strike AIDS
patients when their immune systems collapse. He
recovered from the attack and decided to change  his life. He learned to meditate, and for the ﬁrst time in his adult
life he gave up the habit ual routine of long nights, heavy
drinking, pills, smoking, and promiscuity that had been
attached to his career . (Interestingly , a survey of long-term
AIDS survivo rs shows that all of them have made this kind
of “take charge” decisi on over their disease. Standard
medicine cannot explain why this should be such a
lifesaver , but it is.) By the time he learned the bliss technique, two years
later, his health had improved to the point where he looked
totally normal. The bliss technique becam e a major focus of
his determination to overcome AIDS . “I don’t think of myself as ﬁghting my sickness,” he
remarked. “I’m just learning that all the unhappiness and
anguish I used to live with was wrong.” Inside, he began to
experience a much more  positive range of emotions—he
told me that he had never suspected that he could get
hooked on happiness. Today, four years after the original
diagnosis, he looks completely healthy , and except for a
certain amou nt of fatigue, he lives as if the AIDS were not
there.Each year’s international symposium on AIDS discloses
deeper gloom about defea ting it. AIDS is caused by the HIV
virus, plus its related mutations, which are a researcher’s
nightmare, because they belong to a particularly  baﬄing,
elusive class of organis ms called retroviruses. Even a
normal virus, such as the one responsible for colds, has
remarkable powers to elude the body’s immune system. Contrary to the way it responds to bacteria, our DNA
mysteriously forgets how to ﬁght against an invading virus
—in fact, it actually appears to cooperate with it. When a
virus comes near the cell wall, it melts through,
penetrating as if without resistance; it is next ushered
directly to the cell’s nucleus, where the DNA obligingly
shuts down normal operations and begins to manufacture
the proteins for making new viruses. A cold or ﬂu virus is content to let DNA build proteins for
it, but a retrovirus like HIV goes one better by blending
into the DNA’s own chemical strands, masking itself as the
host’s genetic material. There it sleeps until the day, which
may come years later, when the DNA is triggered to ﬁght
another disease. Then the retrovirus awak ens and begins to
replicate itself by the millions, using the host cell as an
incubator and eventually resulting in the host cell’s death. The cell bursts open, loosing a horde of lethal viruses into
the bloodstream. Every step of the cycle is so mysterious
and complica ted that the AIDS virus has quickly earned a
reputation for being the most complex disease organism
ever discovered. No drug is capable of treating it; AZT,
which helps postpone the active phase, is riddled with
major side eﬀects, making it impossible for some patients
to take the drug. This is not to deny Western medicine its own approach. When a life-threatening disease arises, it is necessary to
take drastic  measures —on this point there is no
disagreement. But I believe that viewing disease as adistortion of intelligence might represent a move toward a
deeper level of understanding, and therefore of treatment. Both cancer and AIDS seem to be cases where the proper
sequence of sutras must be unraveling at the deepest level. In other words, they are failures of intelligence, like “black
holes” where  bliss gets distorted out of its normal pattern. What makes both diseases so intractable is that the
distortion runs so deep— it is locked inside the DNA’s own
structure. This causes the cell’s self-repair mechanism
either to break down or turn against itself . In the case of
cancer , DNA actually seems to want to commit suicide by
ignoring its knowledge of proper cell division. In both diseases the distortion apparently penetrates as
far as the very force ﬁelds that hold DNA together . (Cell
physics is a complex ﬁeld, but it is believed that a cell
senses and interacts with viruses in the ﬁrst place by
detecting their chemical and electromagnetic resonances;
such signals are interpreted by the DNA and presumably
can also fool it.) From the perspective of the sutras, or Vedic sounds,
there must be a distor tion in the proper sequence of
intelligence as it unfolds into the relative world. “Hearing”
the virus in its vicinity , the DNA mistakes it for a friendly or
compatible sound, like the ancient Greek sailors who heard
the siren’s song and were lured to their destruction. This is
a believable explanation once one realizes that DNA, which
the virus is exploiting, is itself a bundle of vibrations. If this explanation is valid , then the remedy is to reshape
the improper sequence of sounds, using Ayurveda’s
primordial sound (known as Shruti  in the Sanskrit texts,
from the verb that means “to hear”). These sounds are
basically like pottery molds—by placing the mold back over
the distorted sequence, one guides the disrupted DNA back
into line. This treatment is subtle and gentle in its eﬀects,
but some preliminary results have been quite dramatic.Once the sequence of sound is restored, the tremendous
structural rigidity of the DNA should again protec t it from
future disruptions. In the near future Ayurveda will blossom, I believe, and
help us to create a new medicine, one of knowledge and
compassion. At its best, current medi cine already contains
these ingredients—the medical system is in trouble, but its
woes are transcended by caring individuals. They will be
the ﬁrst to see that Ayurveda is not in conﬂict with their
work as doctors; it can only help the process of recovery
and bring healing under our control. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Looking back, I realize that the concept of a universe based
on vibrations, leading to the concept of the human body as
a bundle of vibrations, was a bridge too far for many . There
have been “vibrational healers” in every culture, if by
vibration we include light, sound, music, mantras, chants,
and shamanistic rituals. Probably the most comprehensive
“science of vibrations” is found in the area of Vedic
knowledge known as shabda,  the Sanskrit word for
“speech.” The intriguing feature of shabda  is that it ﬁts the
demand of Western science for a reductionist model—every
phenomenon is reducible to a unique vibrational state—
while at the same time ﬁtting the “top-down” Eastern
approach, which sees all phenomena emerging from the
ﬁeld of consciousness. Yet anyone in a gotcha state of mind would ﬁnd it easy to
accuse vibrational healing of being a sham—the underlying
concept is too alien to materialistic thinking. Once again
quantum theory may bolster speculation, since there are
physicists now toying with the idea that if the universe
exists in Hilbert space (a strictly mathematical concept)and if Schrödinger’s equation holds true (the classic
equation that accounts for quantum probabilities
throughout the universe), there may be an elegan t way to
reduce creation to a single wave function. (The legendary
physicist Richard Feynm an long ago speculated that all
electrons may be reducible to one electron.) Once again
this would be pure mathematics, yet by reducing the
physical universe to a single wave function that gets
entangled with itself to break down into the inﬁnite waves
that underlie inﬁnite particles, something unique happens. There is no longer a split between reductionism and a top-
down approach. One wave would give us a singular source
from which everything else can be derived. The
entanglement of the wave into countless subdivided waves
would satisfy the demand  for speciﬁc data that can be built
up into complex explanations for higher-order forms like
atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and so forth. Anyone who isn’t fully conversant in advanced
mathematics can only watch from the sidelines before such
a theory is accepted or rejected. Shabda  gives everyo ne a
chance to get back in the game, however , because of its
practical extension into healing and the power of
consciousness in general. A thought “in here” is
vibrationally connected to a result “out there,” and so two
worlds, mind  and matter , are bridged. A gotcha mentality is
rarely fair, but skepticism has no rebuttal to the unshakable
fact, stated by Sir John Eccles in an earlier chapter , that
every thought performs telekinesis by inﬂuencing the
chemical state of the brain: We cross the mind-body barrier
every time we think. Shabda  also says that higher states of consciousness are
vibrational. This greatly simpliﬁes the whole issue of
enlightenment, making it a natural phenomenon like
weather , the stars, and hydrogen atoms. Vibration is the
great leveler . Therefore it fascinated me when Dr. Jeﬀery A.Martin started publishing results from his Ph.D . work in
psychology showing that higher consciousness is so natural
that it exists all around us. Martin posted an online message asking for responses
from people who thought they were enlightened. He got
more than 2,500 replies,  and from this pool he intensively
interviewed around ﬁfty subjects. At ﬁrst it was hard to ﬁnd
a common language. Feeling that you are enlightened is
personal, and it also sets you apart from normal society . Martin found that his subjects often were sensitized by
being outsiders, and revealing their unusual mental state
had led to such things as being sent to a psychia trist, put
on medication, or even being committed to a mental
hospital.
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:

        But actually changing the
aging process itself is another, far deeper matter. Oﬀicially, gerontology recognizes no means to reverse or
retard the aging process— a rather stringent positi on, when
you consider that aging has not even been adequately
deﬁned. The rishis would counter by saying that science
has failed to reach the level of awareness where aging can
be defeated. In 1980, a young Harvard psychologist,
Charles Alexander, went into three old-age homes outside
Boston and taught about sixty residents, all at least 80
years old, some mind-bod y techniques. Three were used: a
mainstream relaxation technique (the kind used in typical
stress-management progr ams), Transcendental Meditation,
and a set of creative word games performed every day to
keep the mind sharp. Each person learned only one technique, and the groups
were allowed to use them without supervision. When the
three groups were tested on follow-up, the meditators
scored highest on measures of improved learning ability,
low blood pressure, and mental health—all of which should
decline with age. The people also reported that they felt
happier and not as old as before. But the really striking
result did not come to light until three years later. When
Alexander returned to the old-age homes, about one-third
of the residents had died since he left, including 24 percent
of the participants who had not learned meditation. Among
the meditative group, however, the death rate was zero. These people  had now lived to an average age of 84, one
of the rarest and loveliest instances where science has
performed an experiment that immediately conferred the
gift of life. Although limited in scope, this is one of the most
hopeful results in the whole aging ﬁeld and a victory for the
rishis’ shortcut. It says that expanding your awareness is
enough to extend your life. What will be the life span of
meditators who began in their twenties instead of their
eighties. Time will tell. —
The assumption that smothers life is to feel that you are a
prisoner in your body. The human body seems to work in a
mechanical fashion. One of the best studied of its
mechanisms is the homeostatic feedback loop, a self-
regulating device like that used in thermostats. A
thermostat is given a set point, such as 70 degrees F. ,
which is like the set point of body temperature. The
apparatus is sensitive to a temperature range extending a
few degrees too high or too low. By turning the heat or air
conditioning on or oﬀ, it maintains a nearly even
temperature. The know-how in a thermostat is quite
limited; you could call it an intelligent switch, but it has
only one idea on its mind, whereas the body’s feedback
loops manage to balance not just body temperature but
blood pressure, water levels in the cells, glucose
metabolism, oxygen and carbon dioxide concen trations,
and on and on, not leavi ng out the thousands of separate
chemicals produced with exquisite precision every where in
the physiology. Since the thermostat always returns to its norm and so
does the body, isn’t this a kind of hard-wiring that cannot
be denied, that in fact is necessary to our existence. The
greatest of nineteenth-century physiologists, Claude
Bernard, made the famou s statement, “Free life is the ﬁxity
of our interior milieu”—i n other words, the ability of our
thermostats to hold their position makes us free. Brilliant
as this insight was, a drastic mistake has crept in with it. When a thermostat sense s that the room is 65 degrees or
75 instead of 70, those variations are mistakes;  only 70
degrees is right. In us, on the other hand, many settings
can be right; normal is just the point we return to most of
the time. If you ran a marathon without your blood
pressure, heart rate, glucose metabolism, and sweatproduction rising drastic ally above “normal,” you would
collapse. “Normal” is just the zone we like to live in. It is not a rule
but a preference. The Tarahumara Indians, perhaps
because they descend from ancient runners who carried
messages across the Andes to the Incan empire, have
adjusted to a “normal” that is diﬀerent from ours, more
suited to their way of life. In deﬁance of a meager diet,
what they wanted to do—to run ﬁfty miles a day—w as more
important than mere bodily norms. Their bodies adapted to
intelligence, no questions asked, and not the other way
around. Thanks to the habit of following one style of living,
it may be diﬀicult to adapt instantly when the mind desires
a change—o bese people should not jump from their
armchairs to join marathons—but the power of adaptation
can never be totally sacriﬁced. For all our internal “hard-
wiring” and thousands of homeostatic mechanism s, we can
change our skills, forget them, acquire new ones, and so
on. That is the ultimate glory of being a human being, and
it cannot be attained without total freedom. —
The West clearly has mixed feelings about the whole idea of
higher consciousness, compounded of longing, baﬄement,
and distaste. I travel at least two days a week, year round,
talking about Ayurveda to many kinds of audiences, both
medical and nonmedical, and very quickly I learned how
sensitive a chord I was striking. A CBC interviewer in
Canada introduced himself to me by demanding, “Can you
give me ﬁve reasons why you are not a fraud. ”  A more
congenial interviewer in Los Angeles leaned toward me
with mystical anticipation and said, “Tell me, Doctor, have
you been here—before. ” I was so startled I blurted, “We’re
all here all the time. ”Since the 1960s, the proliferation of casual knowledge
about the East has been a blessing and a curse, for
although many people have picked up a few catch phrases
like nirvana, Atman,  and dharma, and almost everyone can
let the word karma  pass by in conversation without
blinking an eye, the actual sense of these words has been
garbled. I have tried to show that Vedic knowledge is
systematic and sound; that it is as far-reaching as our most
advanced science; and that many of the things we most
desire for ourselves, such as freedom from diseas e and an
unimpaired old age, can be approached through this great
body of understanding about human existence. But I would betray the rishis’ knowledge if I did not
present its ﬁnal expansion, which has no clearly deﬁned
precedent in the West—o r at best is conﬁned to religious
doctrine. The rishis were after a state of total awareness. For them, this was not philosophy or religion but a natural
form of human awareness. The fourth state, it turns out, is
not an end point but a doorway. And what is on the other
side. The only complete answer would have to come from
the thousands and thousa nds of pages of Vedic texts, which
function as the encyclopedia of experiences the rishis
recorded. The simplest answer is to say that what each
rishi encoun tered was the Self. An extremely accurate
depiction of meeting the Self was given by a meditator from
Connecticut:
One of the most regular experiences in my
meditation is of expanded awareness, of no longer
being conﬁne d to the inside of my head, but being
as inﬁnite or more inﬁnite than the universe. Sometimes I feel the boundaries of the mind
being push ed out, like the ever-widening
circumference of a circle, until the circle
disappears and only inﬁnity remains. It is a feeling of great freedom, but also one of
naturalness, far more real and natural than being
conﬁned to such a small space. Sometimes the
sense of inﬁnity is so strong that I lose the
sensation of body or matter—just inﬁnite,
unbounded awareness, an eternal, never-
changing continuum of consciousness. Everyone will have to respond to this in his own terms. I
hope that we have laid enough solid groundwor k so that
the account can appear  in its true light, not as a self-
delusion but as an actual encounter with the silent ﬁeld of
intelligence. Earlier, we noted that the body in its real
nature is non-change mixed with change. The reason why
that is so is that all of nature exhibits these two paradoxical
yet complementary states. As awareness expands, the huge
scope of change and the equally huge scope of non-change
dawn on the mind. An ancient Chinese poem  by Hsu Hsu
says:
The ﬁrst wave is receding
The second wave promptly arrives
So many layers of time
So many lives. Can we grant this beautiful openness of perception, at
once serene and all-encompassing, to an ordinary person
from Connecticut. I think we have to, for the same
biochemistry that sustains such an experience is available
to anyone, regardless of time. Our DNA has remembered
all the things that have ever happened to human beings. It
would be ridiculous to suppose that only Chinese or Indian
DNA can trigger higher states of consciousness; it would be
impoverished to claim that they are not real. Themeditator’s statement ends with this wonderfully exact
appreciation of quantum reality: “Sometimes there is an
interesting paradox of activity and rest all in one, and I feel
within my awareness that I am moving inﬁnitely fast and
remaining perfectly still at the same time. This is the
experience of the ever- changing along with the never-
changing. ”
Anyone who wants to take the full beneﬁt of the Vedic
knowledge must come to grips with the fact that such
normally inconceivable states as inﬁnity, eternity, and
transcendence are real. These words  do not belong to the
vocabulary of the ordinary waking state, but they are not so
distant from it, either. We all have the power to make
reality. Why make it inside boun daries when the boundless
is so near. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
I often  refer  to skeptics in these expanded topics because
Quantum Healing  caused the skeptical beehive to buzz
rather violently. Skeptics view themselves as guardians of
scientiﬁc truth. They can just as easily be seen as the
society for the suppression of curiosity. Yet I sympathize
with anyone who can’t buy into Aham Brahmasmi,  the
Vedic assert ion that “I am the universe. ” From the
viewpoint of everyday life, this simply seems impossible. At
best, Aham Brahmasmi  migh t be the otherworldly state
reached by enlightened sages long ago and far away. Yes and no. A person’s consciousness has to shift in order
to realize, in a higher state of awareness, that “I am the
universe. ” But the statement can’t apply simply to these
few people. Only someone with medic al school training can
look through a microscope and identify T cells from the
immune system, yet everyone has T cells. So it’s not thetruth of Aham Brahmasmi  that we should doubt; either it’s
true or it isn’t. The real issue is how to arrive at the state of
consciousness that reveals this truth. A Buddhist maxim holds that it takes a thorn to remove a
thorn. In other words, the mind encloses us in boundaries,
but only the mind can get us beyond boundaries to
experience the unbounded. In modern terms, we can refer
this paradox to the brain. The brain is the receiver of mind,
the instrume nt whose physical processes parallel every
thought, feeling, sensatio n, and image that passes through
our minds. The Buddhist maxim applies to it, too. The brain
is a thorn in that it reduces reality to ﬁxed bound aries, but
it is capable at the same time of registering the unbounded. In this regard, I became fascinated by the work done by
the Polish-American mathematician Alfred Korzybski
(1879–1950), because he worked out what the brain does
when it processes reality. Billions of bits of data bombard
our sense organs every day, of which only a fraction gets
past the brain’s ﬁlterin g mechanism. When people say,
“You’re not hearing me” or, “You only see what you want to
see,” they are expressin g a truth that Korzybski tried to
quantify mathematically. Sometimes the things a person can’t see are simply
outside the range of human experience, like our inability to
see ultraviolet light. But a great deal more depends on
expectations, memories, biases, fears, and simple closed-
mindedness. If you go to a party and someone tells you that
you are about to meet a Nobel Prize winner, you will see a
diﬀerent person than if you had been told he is a reformed
maﬁa hit man. When all the ﬁltering and processing is
complete, there is no doubt that the brain doesn’t actually
experience reality but only a conﬁrmation of its model of
reality. The model of reality you are following right this minute is
wired into the synapses and neural pathways of your brain. Some of this is so-calle d hard wiring, which means it
belongs to the brain’s intrinsic structure, such as the
wiring that leads from your eyes to the visual cortex. Other
wiring is formed through personal experience and is much
more ﬂuid; this is known as soft wiring. Between them hard
and soft wiring deliver a model of reality to you, and
whatever is outside the model doesn’t exist. Korzybski was
one of the ﬁrst analysts who pointed out that if the brain is
capturing only a fraction of the raw data being fed to it, one
cannot claim that the brain is an accurate vehicle for
experiencing reality. Two interesting points follow:
1. All models are equal as viewed from the level of the
brain. 2. Reality transcends any model we can possibly make of
it. These two points allow God, the soul, and all other
spiritual experiences back into the picture. The ﬁrst point
demolishes the notion that science is superior to religion
because it gathers facts while religion deals in beliefs. In
truth, science ﬁlters out and discards a huge portion of
human expe rience—almost everything one would classify
as subjective—so its model is just as selective, if not more
so, than religion’s. As far as the brain is concerned, neural
ﬁltering is taking place in all models, whether they are
scientiﬁc, spiritual, artistic, or even distur bed and
psychotic. Seeing little green men is a brain phenomenon
just like seeing green trees. The brain is not a mirror of
reality. There is no way anyon e can claim to know what is
“really” real. You can’t step outside your brain to fathom
what lies beyond it. This limitation is much more severe
than people suppose. The brain operates in time and space. Your thoughts, for example, come one after another, like
boxcars in a train. So whatever is outside time and space is
inconceivable, and unﬁltered reality would probably blow
the brain’s circuits, or simply be blanked out. Yet here is where the Buddhist notion of using a thorn to
remove a thorn comes in, because the mind can look
beyond the brain’s ﬁltering process. Consider this short
poem by W illiam Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild ﬂower,
Hold inﬁnity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. This is a perspective that goes beyond everyday
perception. How did Blake arrive at it. His lines resonate
with me—I ﬁnd them quite thrilling—because Blake had
inner vision, which looks beyond the limited mode l that the
brain creates. People who are comple tely adapted to
constricted awareness still ﬁnd themselves confro nted with
glimpses of unbounded awareness. This came home to me
when Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic  magazine, had
his worldview overturned by a mysterious event. Shermer, with whom I’ve had many debates, fell in love
with a German woman, who moved to the Unite d States
after they agreed to marry. On her wedding day she was
very happy, but with one deep regret. Her grandfather, with
whom she was very close, had died and therefore would
never witness her weddi ng day. The ceremony took place. Shermer and his bride returned home. That night over
dinner, there  was the sound of music coming from the next
room. The newlyweds followed the sound. A broken
transistor radio that belonged to the bride’s grandfather
had suddenl y come to life on its own—it was previouslydead—and it not only played music but classical music, her
grandfather’s favorite. Mystiﬁed and deeply moved, the
couple went to sleep hearing the radio play. The next day
the room was silent, and the radio returned to its previous
unusable state. Shermer published this anecdote on the back page of
Scientiﬁc American,  where he writes a regular column,
always from the skeptic al point of view. It took some
courage for him to admit that an inexplicable event had
shaken his skepticism, but what had happened to him was a
classic example of synchronicity, a meaningful
“coincidence” that is far too unlikely to be random. Predictably, Shermer’s skeptical followers weren’t buying
the story. They told him to take the transistor radio to a
good electronics shop, where he’d ﬁnd a rational
explanation. Just as predictably, these  commenters ignored
the timing of the inciden t, the congruence with what his
bride wanted, and the fact that a radio suddenly turned on
and was tuned to a station playing music her grandfather
loved. As the philosopher Leibniz pointed out, theories are
correct about what they include but wrong about what they
exclude. In this case, the radio is the least of it. The really
important parts are excluded if you stubbornly view the
event through skeptical spectacles. Perhaps not as dramatica lly, we all get glimpses of reality
that defy the limited model residing in our brains. Experiences that go beyond everyday reality are wide-
ranging. Ask yourself if any of the following have occurred
to you. You felt that your awareness extended beyond your body. You felt safe in your own being. You had a sudden insight that came out of nowhere. Your body felt physically light and buoyant. You felt at home in the world. You knew with certainty that you are loved. You felt energy bubbling through your body. You had a random thought, and it materialized. Events came  together perfectly to reach a goal you set
for yourself. You felt intuitively that everything happens for a reason. You felt a connection with a higher intelligence. You experienced the presence of God or the soul. These are moments when reality peeks through the iron
grille. No ﬁlter is ever perfect; no censor can catch every
infraction. When Buddhism speaks of using a thorn to
remove a thorn, nothing is more important than paying
attention to glimpses like these, where expanded
awareness takes over, if only brieﬂy, from constricted
awareness. As esoteric as spirituality can be, to escape
from the brain’s limitations all you need to do is say “yes”
to moments of expanded awareness instead of “no. ” You are
the one who ultimately decides how much reality you want
to expe rience, and every time you say “yes,” you are giving
instructions to your brain. In time, it will adapt to any level
of awareness you want. This point was validated by studies of the brain function
of a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks. They had meditated
for years on the value of compassion (one name for the
Buddha is “the compassi onate one”), and if this value had
grown in their lives, some change should appear  in their
brains. In fact it did. The monks showed increased delta
waves, representing so-called slow-wave sleep. Considered
to be unconscious activity in most people, slow-wave sleep
is associated with remaining self-aware even when you are
in deep sleep. This is a noted attainment in yoga. In
addition, the monks showed unprecedented activ ity in theprefrontal lobes, especially in regions associated with
higher emotions like compassion. As startling as these ﬁndings were, they could have been
predicted once you accept that the brain must follow where
the mind goes. Meditation creates beneﬁcial changes in
brain functions you would never be aware of, because such
things as heart rate and blood pressure don’t register in
our minds as conscio us choices. Saying “yes” to
experiences of expanded awareness is diﬀerent. You make
a conscious choice to favor a range of experiences that
your brain either ignores, shuts down, or censors. I wish in hindsight that I had emphasized how faulty
every model of reality, including the quantum model, must
be. Korzybski held that even mathematics was a model,
subject to the limitation s of all models that the brain
constructs. Not everyon e would agree—holding on to
mathematics as a universal truth gives advanced physics its
toehold on the quantum world. But I am not using any of
these ideas as bludgeons to bash science with. Korzybski
simply pointed out, using the language of science, that
whatever reality is, it transcends the brain. * The Sanskrit literally says, “I am Brahman. ” Brahman is an all-inclusive term
and therefore untranslatable; it signiﬁes all things in creation—physical,
mental, and spiritual—as well as their uncreated source. OceanofPDF. comThere is no more beautiful experience than when the world
expands beyond its accustomed limits. These are the
moments when reality takes on splendor. The Veda calls
such an experience Ananda,  or bliss; it is said to be another
quality inherent in the human mind but covered over by
layers of dulled awareness. Bliss  is an uncomfortable word
in the West; like transcen dence, it needs to be demystiﬁed. Let’s start with a persona l reaction to what bliss feels like. A beautiful ﬁrst-person account is given by physiologist
Robert Keith Wallace. The scene is Nepal, where Wallace
went in 1974, taking a break from a conference being held
in India:
Along with a physicist friend, I made my way up
from Katmandu, the capital, to be nearer the
Himalayas. We found a beautiful alpine lake,
which Nepalese princes once favored as a
summer retreat. For less than a dollar, we rented
a boat and pushed out onto the water. It was a
windy day with clearing skies, a perfect day to ﬂykites. I had bought one at the bazaar, painted a
ﬁerce red and built for acrobatics. I stood up, and
it jump ed out of my hand  as I let it loose on the
wind. The tiny kite ﬂoated up into the high, thin air. I
stood looking up toward the great mountains
around us. Though they hid their heads in the
clouds, they gave oﬀ an aura of grandeur and
peace. As I watched, the clouds lifted all at once. I
was absolutely in awe. What I had taken for
mountains were only foothills. Beyond them, like
ancient gods, rose the true Himalayas,
unbelievably mighty and majestic. We could hardly speak,  so much power and
beauty was concentrate d in that breathtaking
scene. The sense of having a small, isolated self
disappeared, and in its place was the delicious
sensation of ﬂowing out into everything I beheld. I felt a sense of complete  fullness contained in my
own silence. Fittingly, the tallest peak  before us
was Annapurna, whose name means “fullness of
life. ”
Standing there on the lake, I saw directly into
the reality where time really is timeless. The same
power that reared these mountains was ﬂowing
through me. If I wanted to ﬁnd the source of time
and space, I only needed to place my ﬁngers over
my heart. The single adequate word to describe
my sensations at that moment is bliss. *
What stands out unmistakably in this experience is its
sense of revelation. People who have been directly touched
by bliss feel that they are suddenly being exposed to life as
it really is. By comparison, their ordinary view was ﬂat anddistorted; they had been accepting a dingy image for the
real thing. To experience bliss every hour of the day would
be a sign of complete enlightenment, but even  a brief
encounter is signiﬁcant— it permits you to actually feel
waves of consciousness as they well up from the ﬁeld of
silence, cross  the gap, and are infused into every cell. This
is the body’s own awakening. In Ayurveda, bliss is the basis for three extremely
powerful healing techniq ues. The ﬁrst is meditation, which
we have already discussed. Its importance is that it takes
the mind out of its boundaries and exposes it to an
unbounded state of consciousness. The other two
techniques are more speciﬁc. The ﬁrst is the Ayurvedic
psycho-physiological technique—the term psycho-
physiological  simply means “mind-bod y” (we often use an
informal name, the bliss technique). The second healing
technique is called primordial sound. To explain how such healing works, let me take an
example from  hypnosis. One of the most surprising ﬁndings
of hypnosis research is that subjects can make their hands
warm or cold, raise rashes on their skin, and even form
blisters in a matter of a few minutes after the hypnotic
suggestion is introduced. This is not, strictly speaking, a
peculiarity of the hypnotic trance—subjects hook ed up to
biofeedback machines can do similar things in their normal
state of awar eness. What is being demonstra ted here is the
power of attention to alter the body. Ayurveda has made
use of this principle for thousands of years. Indeed, since
the basic premise of Vedic knowledge is that consciousness
creates the body, it is only natural that techn iques for
focusing attention should have been discovered. The bliss technique and primordial sound fall into this
category. Consciousness is nothing but awareness. You can
be aware that your hand is hot, which is passive awareness,
but as the hypnosis research shows, you can also makeyour hand hot, which is active awareness, or attention. When you “pay attention” to something, you shift from
passive to active awareness. Attention exerts far more
control than people ordinarily realize. That is beca use we
are victims of passive awareness. A person in pain is aware
of the pain but not that he can make it increase, diminish,
appear, or disappear. Yet all this is true. (People can walk
on ﬁre, for example, because they can control their level of
pain; more remarkably, they can control whether their feet
actually get burned—that too is under the control of
attention. ) In Ayurveda,  each and every symptom of disease, from a
minor neck pain to a full-blown cancer, is under the control
of attention. However, between us and the symptom lie
barriers—the veils called Maya—that prevent us from
exercising our attention in a therapeutic way. All mind-body
medicine attempts to remove these obstacles so that
healing can take place. Outside Ayurveda, the word Maya is
not used, but any term that amounts to the same  thing is
applicable. I have used other phrases, such as “barriers in
silence,” “the ghost of memory,” and “the mask of matter. ”
In the curren t environment, where mind-body medicine is
just proving itself and has to beware of stepping on the toes
of science, techniques for breaking through Maya are still
rather rudimentary. Fortunately, nature has set up things so
that mind-body approaches of all kinds will work. Laughter
can defeat a fatal disease ; so can drinking a glass of grape
juice every day, if you believe strongly enough in it. It would be much better, however, to have a science of
awareness. Ayurveda supplies just that. It would also be
helpful to have a theory  that supplies this science with a
ﬁrm groundin g in philosophy; the Vedic knowledge  supplies
that. When I teach people Ayurvedic healing techniques, I
am not inducting them into a Vedic world, or into some
mystery. I am trying to let them  realize that their ownawareness creates, controls, and turns into their bodies. This is a fact, not just a V edic view of things. When the body is in pain, a distorted area of awareness is
crying out to the rest of awareness for help. Our natural
instinct is to bring the help. The way we mobilize the
platelets and clotting factors in the blood to heal a cut is
nothing more than awareness bringing in help. A bruise
heals because intelligence goes to work on it. I think that
much has become abundantly clear by now. Some people are fortunate in being such natural
creatures that when they get cancer, they do not block the
innate urge to get well. No doubt there are thousands of
such people in the world who have not come under
scrutiny. Rather than being branded miraculous by religion
or science, they stand as the mute, inglorious Miltons of the
healing process. Ayurveda extends their ability to everyone. The Ayurvedic
approach is to take a process already going on in the body
and assist it naturally and without strain. Any pain or
disease you have is like an island of discomfort surrounded
by an ocean  of comfort, for in comparison to any one
disease, your healthy awareness is as big as an ocean. Assuming that you are normally constituted, there is no
innate reason why you cannot heal any disease with
awareness. (In old age, or in cases of chronic illness, our
inner abilities get depleted; therefore, Ayurveda cannot
guarantee a cure because sometimes it is not there in
nature’s scheme. ) The bliss technique gives the patient the experience of
himself as pure awareness, the ocean of well-being that is
our basic prop and susten ance. With this technique alone it
is possible to “drown” a disease in awareness and cure it. However, like the hypnotic subjects who can focus their
attention to make a bliste r appear, it is also usefu l to focus
attention more precisely to heal. For that, the primordialsound techni que exists. With it, a speciﬁc tumor or arthritic
joint can be attended to; a weak heart or clogged arteries
can be zeroed in on. You are not attacking the disorder with
the primordial sound but paying closer attention to it—so
close that the distortion of awareness lurking at the bottom
of the disorder falls back into line. In earlier chapters I
called this process banishing the ghost of memory. Together, meditation, the bliss technique, and primordial
sound are the practical application of all that I have been
building up to, the tools of quantum healing. Let me
illustrate them with a case study, and afterward I will
explain their connection to bliss. Laura is a young woman from Boston who contracted
breast cance r in her mid-thirties. Confronted with her
diagnosis, she elected for personal reasons not to undergo
any conventional treatment, despite her doctor’s anxious
insistence that without treatment she would be dead in less
than two years. Today, three years later, she is still alive
and on the surface appears perfectly normal. Her X rays
reveal that the tumor has not shrunk, but its growth, if any,
has been slight. This implies that Laura is still in
considerable danger, but in her own mind, her present
state is a great victory. Although her cancer is still present, it has not followed
what doctors call the “expected natural history” of the
disease. Dr. Yujiro Ikemi, one of Japan’s leading experts in
psychosomatic medicine, has surveyed sixty-nine patients
whom he considers to have had spontaneous regressions of
cancer. It is not necessary for the cancer cells to disappear
entirely, Dr. Ikemi notes— he looks for other signs, such as
that the tumor is growing abnormally slowly, the patient
has not wasted away, and the malignancy has not spread to
other parts of the body. These signs are enough to indicate
a spontaneous regression in Ikemi’s view, and Laura ﬁts
them all. Laura was already meditating when I ﬁrst saw her. In
1987 she went through two weeks of inpatient Ayurvedic
treatment and was taught primordial sound and the bliss
technique, both of which can be used during meditation. Let us say that the mind has settled down in meditation and
is expe riencing itself as silence. Bliss is in that silence, just
as intelligenc e is. You cannot “feel” that you are intelligent,
but you can feel bliss. The bliss technique bring s it out for
the mind to register in various ways—as warmth in some
part of the body, tingling, a ﬂowing sensation, or several
other physical manifestations. Bliss remains abstract, but a
sort of “after glow” is being picked up during the technique. Primordial sound, on the other hand, is quite focused—it
brings the awareness of bliss directly to the diseased area
of the body. (One does not have to think of all this as
happening separately. The bliss level of awareness is
always present; the techniques simply draw the conscious
mind to it. Once bliss is experienc ed, the mind-body
connection has been made. ) As soon as she learned the techniques, Laura felt
immediate positive eﬀec ts. The primord ial sounds went
right to the breast area, she told me. At times they induced
a throbbing feeling, heat, or even pain; most of the time,
however, she would sit down with pain in that area and the
technique would cause it to go away. The most dramatic
results, subjectively, came from the introduction of bliss. I
asked Laura to write out her experiences for me, whether
joyful or painful or just indiﬀerent, and she agreed to. The
latest report says this:
The experien ces during the bliss technique are
not as profound as when  I started one and a half
years ago, but then there was such deep-rooted
fear and sorrow, a feeling of helplessness andintense anxiety, so the contrast was quite great
when I began to experience such joy and bliss. At that time there were large black holes
experienced in my awareness. I do not see the
black holes anymore, and the feeling of constant
happiness is more stable. Yet days still come
when the joy and bliss are so powerful that I can
hardly contain them. I rarely experience fear
anymore, just some general anxiety that I can
usually control with a little attention. While other women in her position are devastated by
their treatments and left with the deepest scars, physically
and mentally, it is amazing that Laura, though still
suspended between life and death, can end her letter this
way:
A year and a half ago, I was only 99 percent sure
that the cancer would be eliminated. It has only
been in the last month that I have grown 100
percent sure. I have no doubts now. I feel
conﬁdent in the support of nature. I still don’t
know the exact form nature’s help will take, or
the timing for it, but I am less concerned about
the ﬁnal manifestation than I am about the
breakthrough in consciousness. I can see clearly
in my awareness the perfect breast. Laura is a sensitive observer of her own awareness, and
she sees its ﬂow very exactly. To her, there is a huge
diﬀerence, from the inside, between being sick and
becoming well. The techniques she is using do not call for
visualization, but she says that she can see the tumor grow
whenever she feels anxious or sorrowful. This imagerepresents, I believe, a direct link between her awareness
and the progress of the cancer. What will the ﬁnal outcome be. She and I agree that the
process itself is the outcome; every day is a whole—not a
step toward some dreame d-of recovery, but an end in itself,
to be lived in its fullness as if no disease existed. Because I
am much more indoctrinated by my past medical
experiences with cancer than Laura is, I often think that
she is far ahead of me in her joyful conﬁdence. —
Bliss is both objective and subjective. You can feel it as a
sensation, but it also eﬀects measurable change—it can
alter the heart rate, blood pressure, hormone secretions, or
anything else for that matter. This is what allows bliss to be
useful medically. The patient  is using the Ayurvedic
techniques “in his head,” but the bliss being experienced is
re-creating his body at the same time. What is happ ening is
that the body is receivin g a signal from its own blueprint,
not a material blueprint but the one that exists in
consciousness. Because the blueprint is invisible, it has to ﬁnd a way to
cross over into material existence. To do that, nature
employs bliss—it is a vibration that bridges mind and
matter, allowing each bit of the body to be paired with a bit
of intelligence:
This diagram shows the mind-body connection as being like
a radio broadcast: mind is sending out impulses of
intelligence, DNA receives them, and bliss is the carrier
signal. On paper, these three elements have to be
separated, but in reality they are completely fused. The
message, the messenger, and the receiver are one. Of
course, we have looked at the mind-body connection dozens
of times before, but we didn’t have the “glue” that keeps
mind and body from ﬂying in separate directions—bliss. DNA now takes on special importance. A single
neuropeptide, or any other messenger molecule, carries
only a tiny bit of the signal that mind is sending. Adrenaline, for example, is correlated to fear. This seems to
imply that each thought activates one molecule, but that
would be like saying that 101. 5 on an FM radio  receives
only one song. In fact, the body can receive an inﬁnite
variety of signals, thanks to DNA. We are used to thinkin g of DNA as an unchanging
blueprint, albeit “the blueprint of life. ” DNA is nowhere
near so static. I was sitting quietly two days ago when I had
a glimpse of DNA in my mind’s eye. I saw DNA speeded up
so that one human lifetime, from the moment of inception
to the moment of death, ﬁt into the space of a few minutes. What I saw wasn’t a chem ical but a process of incredible
richness and dynamism. Everything in life pours  out of
DNA—ﬂesh, bones, blood, heart, and nervous system; a
baby’s ﬁrst word and a toddler’s ﬁrst step; the maturing of
reason in the brain’s cortex; the play of emotions, thoughts,
and desires that ﬂicker like summer lightning  through
every cell. All of this is DNA. To call it a blueprint is to take
the husk and miss the fruit. Imagine yourself going to a
Mercedes dealer, paying thirty thousand dollars, and
having him hand over a car’s blueprint instead of a car. Now imagine the blueprint actually turning into the car—
not only that, but starting  itself, driving down the road, andreplacing its own spare parts. Then the blueprint would be
equal to DNA. (It would also need another quite amazing
talent: any part—the carburetor, the tires, even a chip of
paint on the door—would  have to know how to turn into a
whole car. ) Whatever it is that make s DNA so dynamic is not visible
in its material makeup; molecules themselves are passive
participants in time. They can change, as oxygen and
hydrogen change when they combine to form water, but
DNA actively  shapes the course of time. This is such an
important feature that I need to explain it at length;
otherwise, the real miracle of DNA will be lost on us. In the past few years, researchers have been intrigued by
one particular gene, called the per gene, in the DNA of a
fruit ﬂy. As part of their inherited behavior, fruit ﬂies sing
in the evening to call their mates. Normally, they repeat
their call quite rhythmically, once every 60 seconds. Ronald Konopka, a research professor at Clarkson
University, ﬁrst linked the rhythm of the fruit ﬂy’s song to
the per (for “periodic”) gene. He also found that the rhythm
could change. When the per gene mutates, it produces
faster or slower intervals  between calls: one ﬂy sings every
40 seconds, another every 80 seconds. What is so fascinating about this discovery is that each
kind of ﬂy times its existence to a diﬀerent length of day. The normal, 60-second ﬂy follows a 24-hour day; the faster,
40-second ﬂy a shorter day of 18 to 20 hours;  and the
slower, 80-se cond ﬂy a long day of 28 to 30 hours. The
conventional interpretation is that the per gene establishes
the insect’s daily rhythm. A similar eﬀect is seen in us; if
conﬁned to a cave where  he cannot see the sun and is not
allowed to look at a clock, a man will sleep and wake up on
a regular cycle, not of 24 hours but generally of 25 hours—
this seems to be the daily, or circadian, rhythm that our
DNA has built into us. Similarly, the fruit ﬂy does not carewhen the sun rises or sets; when its song changes, the day
changes. That means that its sense of time comes from
within, activated by the per gene. This is a far more stunning conclusion than the
conventional one. The convent ional one says that DNA is
controlling a rhythm inside the cell, but I am saying that it
controls time itself. The per gene is the link between time
“out there” and DNA “in here”; it literally creates time as
the fruit ﬂy knows it. In physics, Einstein demonstrated
that there is no ﬁxed yardstick for time in the relative
world; a space traveler would think that the clock on his
spaceship is ticking norm ally, just as it does on Earth. But if
he attained a velocity near the speed of light, the clock
would in fact be going slower than Earth-bound clocks. This
would not be an illusion; every biological process, including
how fast the space traveler ages, would also slow down. Aren’t these fruit ﬂies the insect equivalent of Einstein’s
space travelers. They are experiencing time as either slow
or fast, not from travel ing near the speed of light but
simply from their own internal signals. A fast-singing fruit ﬂy would have no way of knowing that
it is living in “fast time” (assuming that it is isolated from
the other kinds of ﬂies). It emits the same number of calls
per “day” as either the normal or the slow singers, without
realizing that its day (18 to 20 hours) is entirely determined
inside itself. But what is the per gene actually doing. Another investigator, Michael Young of Rockefeller
University, joined Konop ka and discovered that the per
gene works by coding certain proteins in the cell that
regulate rhythm. It is these proteins, coming and going in
cycles, that make the day seem long or short to the ﬂy. Similar genes and coded  proteins have also been found in
mice, chickens, and human beings. This brings us
remarkably close to seeing how the DNA is creating all of
reality. It is manipu lating the molecules into rhythms, orvibrations, that we decode into time. Other vibrations are
decoded into light, sound, texture, smells, et cetera. Sir
Arthur Eddin gton calls all of these “fancies of the mind,”
for essentiall y none of our sensory input is anything but a
signal transmitted to us via DNA—pure, abstract vibrations
that we turn into “real” events in time and space. If a gene
can regulate  time, then it is only a step away from
regulating space, too. There is nothing to time and space,
from a subjective point of view, except one’s own
participation in it. Like the fruit ﬂy, we measure an hour by
the clock, and the clock is in us. Here we come to a fork in the road. Biologists realize that
if the protei ns in a cell regulate the cell’s rhyth ms, then
something must regulate them. What is it. One road leads
to a materialistic explanation. Naturally, this is the one
science prefers. Some biolog ists believe that the cell wall
lets chemicals through only at a certain rate, and this rate
is our yardstick for time, our molecular clock. Others say
that the clock is actually a chemical code imprinted on the
DNA, which  is read in sequence from the moment of
conception until death. Neither explanation has been
worked out in satisfactory detail. If the rishis are right, they
never will be—no answe r exists on the level of molecules
alone. As is obvious by now, the rishis would take a diﬀerent
road and say that the clock inside us is intelligence. The
per gene is just a mechanical part, a wire or tube in DNA’s
radio. Through it, time expresses itself, just as an emotion
expresses itself through a neuropeptide. Time is riding on a
molecule, and once again we mustn’t mistake the rider for
the horse. The signals for time, space, motion, texture,
smells, sights, and all the rest of the world come  from the
level of silent intelligence. That is wher e we really live, and
the miracle of DNA is that it can turn so many totally
abstract messages into life itself. If you go walking through the woods on a warm autumn
day, feeling the fallen oak leaves under your feet, smelling
the ripe, dank earth, and watching the October light as it
plays in the branches overhead, you are experiencing the
world through your DNA. It impo ses a deﬁnite selection on
things. You are not smelling the argon and xenon gases in
the air or seeing the sun’s ultraviolet emissions. You can
walk through leaves but not through the wood of the trees. The incredible complexity of green moss registers on your
mind as a patch of fuzz; and of the pollen, spores,  bacteria,
viruses, and other microb es that ﬁll the air by the hundreds
in every cubic centimeter, you register nothing. The reason
for this special focus resides in you. Those are humanized
leaves, trees, smells, and light. If your sense s were reﬁned enough, you would go even
further and realize that you are the woods. It is not just
sending signals to you from “out there”; rather, you are
blending your own signals with its. None of your sense
organs is separated from nature’s continuum. Your eye is a
specialized light receptor that merges into the light it
perceives. If the light failed, your eye would atrophy as
surely as the blind cave-ﬁsh’s eye; if your eye’s structure
changed—for example, if each eye swiveled independently,
like a chame leon’s—every object would acquire completely
diﬀerent relations in space. That would be your experience,
and nothing in the relative world exists outside experience. A bee approaching a ﬂower sees the nectar and blocks
out the petals—as far as the bee’s eye is concerne d, this is
what exists. For us, to see a bar magnet means seeing the
sharp outline of the iron but not the radiating magnetic
ﬁeld around it. Therefore, the iron is what exists, as far as
vision goes. Add in all the other senses, and you have the
world that you are creating. It was built up over 600 million
years by your DNA; ultimately, however, this world
expresses your inner intelligence, with DNA the adroitservant. It serves you in your way, as it serves other
creatures in theirs. DNA turns the vibrations of light into eyes and sound into
ears. It turns time into a matin g song for fruit ﬂies and into
the march of history for man. It gives bats their sonar and
snakes their sensitivity to infrared light. In each  and every
case, however, the DNA is merely the radio. One will never
discover the secret of space-time looking at DNA, or any
other materi al thing. The attempt is just as doomed as
tearing apart a radio’s wiring to ﬁnd where the music is. The rishis found the level of music—it is bliss. Bliss is the vibration that intelligence sends into the
world. In fact, we can map our existence in terms of a
single diagram that compresses mind, body, DNA, and bliss
into one undivided whole:
With good reason one could call this picture the circle of
life. In it we see bliss as a continuous signal, a loop thatconnects mind, body, and DNA in a lifelong conversation. All three participants share equally in what gets said—what
the mind knows is also known by the body and DNA. Your
experiences resonate on all three levels. You cannot be
happy or sad, sick or well, awake or asleep,  without
sending a message everywhere in inner space. You may not think that you can “talk” to your DNA
(another prejudice that comes from seeing DNA as only a
material blueprint), but in fact you do continually. The
ﬂeeting chem icals that race through you at the touch of
thought, the receptors hanging out on the cell wall waiting
for their messages, and every other speck of life are
manufactured by DNA. (I realize that I am truncating a
long process. DNA directly manufactures only genetic
material, but using its active twin, RNA, it gives rise to all
the proteins, cells, and tissues we have. ) Thinking happens
at the level of DNA, because without the brain cell sending
out a neuropeptide or other messenger, there can be no
thought. The Ayurvedic technique called primordial sound takes
direct advantage of this. I drew  bliss as a circle to
represent a constant, unbroken signal. However, there can
be breaks in the circle. These occur when the DNA, the
mind, and the body are not perfectly synchronized. Ayurveda would say that many diseases begin where there
is such a break—bliss slips out of its groove, so to speak,
throwing oﬀ the cell’s intelligence. To repair the break, a
speciﬁc signal needs to be inserted back into the circle—a
primordial sound. In this way, a vibration is used to cure a
vibration. —
Treating disease with a mental sound is highly unusual, I
know. To understand it, we need to make a closer
connection between bliss and the quantum ﬁeld. By the1970s, the world’s atom smashers had been busy for forty
years, and now there were hundreds of “hadrons,” a class
of subatomic particles that were proliferating far too
abundantly to be conside red elementary by any standard. Didn’t the universe have simpler building blocks than this. The way out of the dilemma was found by theorizing that
all of these particles were variations not on a smaller
particle but on an underlying wave form. This wave form was dubbed a “superstring,” because it
behaves very much like a violin string. The superstring
theory holds that billions upon billions of unseen strings
pervade the universe, and their diﬀerent frequencies give
rise to all the matter and energy in creation. Certain
vibrations also turn into time and space—the preﬁx super
indicates that these strings actually reside far beyond our
limited four-dimensional reality. No one will ever see them,
no matter how powerful our instruments become. To clarify what a superstring is, physicist Michio Kaku
gives an analogy to music: imagine that a violin is enclosed
out of sight in a box. As its strings vibrate, diﬀerent
pitches, chords, sequences of notes, and timbres are
produced. If you were an alien who did not know what
music is, you would ﬁnd each of these things completely
diﬀerent from one another—the note C might be like a
hydrogen atom, while E-ﬂat was a photon. Only by opening
the box and seeing that indeed every sound came from one
violin would you be convinced that they had a uniﬁed
source. In the same way, nature’s fundamental ﬁeld is constantly
vibrating and producing variations upon the same “notes,”
but our senses are set up so that they turn this sameness
into diﬀerences. We perceive iron as a solid note, hydrogen
as a gaseous note, gravit y as a heavy note, and so on. Only
by exposing the superstrings would the underlying unity be
evident. They are exposed not by opening the box but bymathematical formulas that show that all forms of matter
and energy ﬁt the super-s tring model—as so far they all do. Therefore, quantum physics now has its ﬁrst good
candidate for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory, justifying Einstein’s
faith in the order of the cosmos. Amazingly enough, the Vedic rishis also perceived that
the cosmos was pervaded by strings. These strings were
called sutras,  from which surgeons get the word suture. In
Sanskrit, sutra can mean  a stitch (or suture), but also a
thread or a verbal phrase. If you think of a sutra as a
thread, then the whole universe is woven like gossamer
from threads of intelligence, billions and billions of them. Like notes played on the unseen violin, the fundamental
level of the whole world, according to the Vedic rishis, is
made of sounds. Because they arise before anything else,
they are primordial—hence the term primordial sound. It takes more than one sound to make the universe. However, the rishis did have just one sound to begin with, a
vibration called Om, which appeared at the time we would
call the Big Bang. Om is a meaningless syllable—it simply
stands for the ﬁrst wave that breaks the cosmic silence. As
it breaks up into many tinier waves, Om subdivides into
diﬀerent subfrequencies  that compose the matter and
energy in our universe. Once you open your mind to the possibility, it is no more
surprising that stars, galaxies, and human beings can be
created from Om than from a superstring. Both are
abstract. Going back to the hidden violin, Kaku wrote, “The
tones create d by the vibrating string, such as C or B-ﬂat,
are not in themselves any more fundamental than any other
notes. What is fundamental, however, is the fact that a
single concept, vibrating strings, can explain the laws of
harmony”—or in the case of the universe, the laws of
nature. Om can be pictured as a straight line whose pitch rises
into inﬁnity, like the most super of superstrings. It is no
accident that the syllable Om sounds like the English
“hum”; when the rishis  tuned in to the sound of the
universe, they actually heard it as a cosmic hum. If you
were enlight ened, you would be able to hear the vibration
that is your own signatu re; for instance, you could “hear”
your DNA as a speciﬁc frequency vibrating in your
awareness. Likewise, each neuropeptide would grow out of
a sound, as would every other chemical. Starting with DNA, the whole body unfolds into many
levels, and at each one the sutra, or sequence of sound,
comes ﬁrst. Therefore, putting a primordial sound back into
the body is like remindin g it of what station it should be
tuned in to. On that basis, Ayurveda does not treat the body
as a lump of matter but as a web of sutras. —
Needless to say, it has taken me some time to explain all of
this to myself. When I ﬁrst began to administer the
Ayurvedic programs at the inpatient facility in Lancaster, I
kept one foot ﬁrmly planted in my private endocrinology
practice—although I felt in tune with Ayurvedic theory, I
was still nervous about its results. Every week I shuttled
back and forth from my oﬀice to the clinic. One October
day I walked into the dining hall and noticed one of the
cancer patients, a middle-aged man who was sitting quietly
in the corner, eating lunch with his wife. He had cancer of
the pancreas, a fatal condition that is also extremely
painful. When he had come in the door ﬁve days earlier, his
face was gray and creased after months of suﬀering. I
walked over now to say a few words. As I approac hed, he
casually looked up at me. It was one of those moments that
stops the heart. His face looked peaceful and relaxed; his
eyes were unmistakably touched with bliss. I asked himhow he felt. He said that he had no pain at all; after four
days of Ayurvedic treatment, he had taken hims elf oﬀ all
his pain medication. A few days later he left, and until the
time he died, he remained largely free of drugs. This is not yet a cure, but it is a huge step towa rd one. Consciousness would be curing people today, I am
convinced, except that we diagnose disease too late, after
years of stress have hardened the physiology and made it
diﬀicult for bliss to penet rate. But the gate is always open,
even if only by a crack. All the Ayurvedic healing
techniques operate on the premise that one treats the
patient ﬁrst, the disease second. The prospect of becoming a well person again, as
opposed to ﬁghting against a disorder known to be
incurable, gives hope to people who otherwise have
nothing to hold on to but grim statistics. One AIDS patient
in Germany has been treated with Ayurveda for two years
as part of a pilot program  conducted in Europe. Diagnosed
in 1984, he is still alive at the time of this writing in August
1988 (80 percent of AIDS  patients die within two years of
diagnosis); he leads a normal life and is without overt
symptoms. A similar program is under way in California, treating
AIDS patients under clinical observation to see if both the
latent and active phases  of the disease can be aﬀected. Both groups are small, and the subjects know that
Ayurveda is not promising a cure, but the supervising
physicians feel that they are seeing improvements,
particularly in the patients’ ability to withstand the
debilitating fatigue that saps the strength and will of AIDS
patients. Just to extend the latency period, giving a patient more
years before the disease produces symptoms, would be a
major breakthrough. However, I met one patient, not
connected with the clinic, who seems to have done betterthan that. A musician from Los Angeles in his early forties
came to be taught the bliss technique two years ago; I did
not see him again until this year, when he came to learn
primordial sound. I asked how he was doing, and he
answered that he had something important to tell me—he
had AIDS. The diagnosis had been made four years earlier after he
came down with pneumonia. Rather than the typical
pneumonia caused by the pneumococcus bacteria,  his came
from a protozoa known  as Pneumocystis carinii;  this
disease is one of the most common that strike AIDS
patients when their immune systems collapse. He
recovered from the attack and decided to change  his life. He learned to meditate, and for the ﬁrst time in his adult
life he gave up the habit ual routine of long nights, heavy
drinking, pills, smoking, and promiscuity that had been
attached to his career. (Interestingly, a survey of long-term
AIDS survivo rs shows that all of them have made this kind
of “take charge” decisi on over their disease. Standard
medicine cannot explain why this should be such a
lifesaver, but it is. ) By the time he learned the bliss technique, two years
later, his health had improved to the point where he looked
totally normal. The bliss technique becam e a major focus of
his determination to overcome AIDS. “I don’t think of myself as ﬁghting my sickness,” he
remarked. “I’m just learning that all the unhappiness and
anguish I used to live with was wrong. ” Inside, he began to
experience a much more  positive range of emotions—he
told me that he had never suspected that he could get
hooked on happiness. Today, four years after the original
diagnosis, he looks completely healthy, and except for a
certain amou nt of fatigue, he lives as if the AIDS were not
there. Each year’s international symposium on AIDS discloses
deeper gloom about defea ting it. AIDS is caused by the HIV
virus, plus its related mutations, which are a researcher’s
nightmare, because they belong to a particularly  baﬄing,
elusive class of organis ms called retroviruses. Even a
normal virus, such as the one responsible for colds, has
remarkable powers to elude the body’s immune system. Contrary to the way it responds to bacteria, our DNA
mysteriously forgets how to ﬁght against an invading virus
—in fact, it actually appears to cooperate with it. When a
virus comes near the cell wall, it melts through,
penetrating as if without resistance; it is next ushered
directly to the cell’s nucleus, where the DNA obligingly
shuts down normal operations and begins to manufacture
the proteins for making new viruses. A cold or ﬂu virus is content to let DNA build proteins for
it, but a retrovirus like HIV goes one better by blending
into the DNA’s own chemical strands, masking itself as the
host’s genetic material. There it sleeps until the day, which
may come years later, when the DNA is triggered to ﬁght
another disease. Then the retrovirus awak ens and begins to
replicate itself by the millions, using the host cell as an
incubator and eventually resulting in the host cell’s death. The cell bursts open, loosing a horde of lethal viruses into
the bloodstream. Every step of the cycle is so mysterious
and complica ted that the AIDS virus has quickly earned a
reputation for being the most complex disease organism
ever discovered. No drug is capable of treating it; AZT,
which helps postpone the active phase, is riddled with
major side eﬀects, making it impossible for some patients
to take the drug. This is not to deny Western medicine its own approach. When a life-threatening disease arises, it is necessary to
take drastic  measures —on this point there is no
disagreement. But I believe that viewing disease as adistortion of intelligence might represent a move toward a
deeper level of understanding, and therefore of treatment. Both cancer and AIDS seem to be cases where the proper
sequence of sutras must be unraveling at the deepest level. In other words, they are failures of intelligence, like “black
holes” where  bliss gets distorted out of its normal pattern. What makes both diseases so intractable is that the
distortion runs so deep— it is locked inside the DNA’s own
structure. This causes the cell’s self-repair mechanism
either to break down or turn against itself. In the case of
cancer, DNA actually seems to want to commit suicide by
ignoring its knowledge of proper cell division. In both diseases the distortion apparently penetrates as
far as the very force ﬁelds that hold DNA together. (Cell
physics is a complex ﬁeld, but it is believed that a cell
senses and interacts with viruses in the ﬁrst place by
detecting their chemical and electromagnetic resonances;
such signals are interpreted by the DNA and presumably
can also fool it. ) From the perspective of the sutras, or Vedic sounds,
there must be a distor tion in the proper sequence of
intelligence as it unfolds into the relative world. “Hearing”
the virus in its vicinity, the DNA mistakes it for a friendly or
compatible sound, like the ancient Greek sailors who heard
the siren’s song and were lured to their destruction. This is
a believable explanation once one realizes that DNA, which
the virus is exploiting, is itself a bundle of vibrations. If this explanation is valid, then the remedy is to reshape
the improper sequence of sounds, using Ayurveda’s
primordial sound (known as Shruti  in the Sanskrit texts,
from the verb that means “to hear”). These sounds are
basically like pottery molds—by placing the mold back over
the distorted sequence, one guides the disrupted DNA back
into line. This treatment is subtle and gentle in its eﬀects,
but some preliminary results have been quite dramatic. Once the sequence of sound is restored, the tremendous
structural rigidity of the DNA should again protec t it from
future disruptions. In the near future Ayurveda will blossom, I believe, and
help us to create a new medicine, one of knowledge and
compassion. At its best, current medi cine already contains
these ingredients—the medical system is in trouble, but its
woes are transcended by caring individuals. They will be
the ﬁrst to see that Ayurveda is not in conﬂict with their
work as doctors; it can only help the process of recovery
and bring healing under our control. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Looking back, I realize that the concept of a universe based
on vibrations, leading to the concept of the human body as
a bundle of vibrations, was a bridge too far for many. There
have been “vibrational healers” in every culture, if by
vibration we include light, sound, music, mantras, chants,
and shamanistic rituals. Probably the most comprehensive
“science of vibrations” is found in the area of Vedic
knowledge known as shabda,  the Sanskrit word for
“speech. ” The intriguing feature of shabda  is that it ﬁts the
demand of Western science for a reductionist model—every
phenomenon is reducible to a unique vibrational state—
while at the same time ﬁtting the “top-down” Eastern
approach, which sees all phenomena emerging from the
ﬁeld of consciousness. Yet anyone in a gotcha state of mind would ﬁnd it easy to
accuse vibrational healing of being a sham—the underlying
concept is too alien to materialistic thinking. Once again
quantum theory may bolster speculation, since there are
physicists now toying with the idea that if the universe
exists in Hilbert space (a strictly mathematical concept)and if Schrödinger’s equation holds true (the classic
equation that accounts for quantum probabilities
throughout the universe), there may be an elegan t way to
reduce creation to a single wave function. (The legendary
physicist Richard Feynm an long ago speculated that all
electrons may be reducible to one electron. ) Once again
this would be pure mathematics, yet by reducing the
physical universe to a single wave function that gets
entangled with itself to break down into the inﬁnite waves
that underlie inﬁnite particles, something unique happens. There is no longer a split between reductionism and a top-
down approach. One wave would give us a singular source
from which everything else can be derived. The
entanglement of the wave into countless subdivided waves
would satisfy the demand  for speciﬁc data that can be built
up into complex explanations for higher-order forms like
atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and so forth. Anyone who isn’t fully conversant in advanced
mathematics can only watch from the sidelines before such
a theory is accepted or rejected. Shabda  gives everyo ne a
chance to get back in the game, however, because of its
practical extension into healing and the power of
consciousness in general. A thought “in here” is
vibrationally connected to a result “out there,” and so two
worlds, mind  and matter, are bridged. A gotcha mentality is
rarely fair, but skepticism has no rebuttal to the unshakable
fact, stated by Sir John Eccles in an earlier chapter, that
every thought performs telekinesis by inﬂuencing the
chemical state of the brain: We cross the mind-body barrier
every time we think. Shabda  also says that higher states of consciousness are
vibrational. This greatly simpliﬁes the whole issue of
enlightenment, making it a natural phenomenon like
weather, the stars, and hydrogen atoms. Vibration is the
great leveler. Therefore it fascinated me when Dr. Jeﬀery A. Martin started publishing results from his Ph. D. work in
psychology showing that higher consciousness is so natural
that it exists all around us. Martin posted an online message asking for responses
from people who thought they were enlightened. He got
more than 2,500 replies,  and from this pool he intensively
interviewed around ﬁfty subjects. At ﬁrst it was hard to ﬁnd
a common language. Feeling that you are enlightened is
personal, and it also sets you apart from normal society. Martin found that his subjects often were sensitized by
being outsiders, and revealing their unusual mental state
had led to such things as being sent to a psychia trist, put
on medication, or even being committed to a mental
hospital. Section summary: 

Please provide a concise description of approximately 150-word limit summarizing key concepts mentioned throughout this passage. Avoid repetition whenever feasible, ensure accuracy preserves crucial specifics numbers/figures presented. Please summarize sections focusing primarily on discussing ayurverdic principles emphasizing enhanced cognitive potentialities achieved through transcendental practices involving "silent" realms and infinite possibilities. " Explain briefly discuss aspects relevant matters addressed regarding 'May' described

    Note : Be precise & avoid unnecessary elaborative descriptions and keep   approximation error below +/-10%. *



Here's a summarized version of roughly **145** characters:


Summary :

* Aging reversal/fight requires recognizing that official stance acknowledges lack of reversibility/stability. Charles Alexander teaches seniors mindfulness techniques improving cognition/mood/circulatory issues). No defined lifespan expected among practitioners vs others due unknown/untested ("here"). Unbound awareness shifts priorities/values aligning w/intelligence; adapting enables evolution/personhood ('non-duality', etc. ). Brain filters info limiting perceptions; acknowledge imperfections in filtering/outcome. Mentioned: Quantum entanglements, SuperString Theory/Richard Feynmann/Einstein/Schr&odinger/Hilbert Space


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Note: Accuracy checks < /+/- 10%) Ensure summaries adhere closely to primary sources referenced.
Gerontology recognizes no means to reverse or retard the aging process.
According to the text, what is the stance of gerontology on reversing or retarding the aging process?
The meditators showed improved learning ability, lower blood pressure, and better mental health, and none of the participants died, whereas 24% of the non-meditators had passed away.
What was the outcome of the study on the effects of meditation on the elderly participants?
The bliss technique is used to treat disease by re-establishing the proper sequence of vibrations in the body, which is believed to be the key to healing.
What is the significance of the "bliss" technique in Ayurveda?
The Tarahumara Indians have adapted to a different "normal" that is more suitable to their lifestyle, whereas Westerners have a more limited perspective.
What is the primary difference between the way the Tarahumara Indians and Westerners perceive reality?
The primordial sound technique is used to "remind" the body of its natural connection to the universe and its underlying vibrations, allowing it to heal itself by re-establishing the proper sequence of sounds.
What is the purpose of the "primordial sound" technique in Ayurveda?