Hard research was just uncovering the receptor sites on
the cell membrane, the “plug-ins” for messages from the
brain. One found exactly the same receptor sites
everywhere. The immune  system therefore became known
as a ﬂoating brain, and science had an explanation for gut
instincts—tissues remote from the brain were thinking, too,
in a chemical language. Yet the lifestyle advice that looks so promising for healing
the mind-bod y connection  doesn’t really penetrate into the
quantum domain. It remains in the domain of active
intelligence. We have to be a bit careful here. If you change
your diet, new messages will be sent to the cells of the
digestive tract, and from  there the messaging throughout
the body is altered (which is why, for example, you fall
asleep after eating too much at Thanksgiving). Because all
messages are produced in the gap, there is a quantum
dimension to every process in the body . What’s lacking is a direct telephone line, so that you can
speak to your own silent intelligence and hear what it says
in return. A direct line is opened through “second
attention.” With ﬁrst attention you live your life in the
world—working, eating, sleeping, relating. With second
attention you peer into the invisible domain that creates,
governs, and regulates the ﬂow of life. Let’s call silent
intelligence X, because it cannot be labeled or named. Labels belong to things, not to processes. What is X doingfrom its invisible station  behind the scene? Its range of
activity is quite astonishing:
It takes each  tiny event and weaves it into the tapestry of
life. It gives meaning and purpose to everything you
experience. It guides every action to its highest and best use. It breathes love into being. It favors evolution and progress. It promotes those outcomes that are the most life
supporting. If this sounds like a mystical laundry list, consider the
beating of a single heart cell. It meshes with every other
heart cell in perfect sync. It regis ters love, pain, hope, fear,
and every other emotion. It tells you without a doubt that
you are in love. It settles into wise contentment as you
mature. It looks out for the healt h of the entire body. I’ve
used slightly metaphorical language, but a cell biologist
could identify the receptor sites and messaging paths that
connect brain and heart so completely that every function
I’ve mentioned has a physiological basis. The deeper point, howe ver, is that every cell, all ﬁve
trillion or so, depends upon silent intelligence to keep itself
—and you—together . Intelligence is what prevents the
living structu res in the body from ﬂying apart into a cloud
of atoms. Such intelligence is far from incidental. As in the
piano metap hor I ﬁnd myself returning to, a piano doesn’t
make the music that comes out of it; a mind does. When a
cell commun icates with other cells, there is no message in
the chemicals that carry  the message until the mind puts
one inside.Second attention opens the lines of communication so
that any impulse—love, compassion, empathy , appreciation,
insight, intuition, imagination—is evolutionary and life
supporting. Here we must look beyond science, because to
a cell biologist, chemicals are chemicals. They are value
neutral. An impulse of hatred can be encoded as easily as
an impulse of love. But if you stand back and examine your
life from the perspective of second attention, you can see
value everywhere in the body. Cells cooper ate with one
another . They understand that the good of the whole body
is paramount. They live in the present moment and base
their lives on trusting that nourishment will always  come to
them. They know how to self -heal. Second attention promotes these values, not by analyzing
the activity of cells but by going to the source, from which
life is susta ined. Since writing Quantum Healing,  I’ve
become even  more convinced that consciousness holds the
key to the ﬂow of life whether you deﬁne life scientiﬁcally ,
mystically , or through any other label. While we argue over
labels, we are missing the opportunity to promote the silent
intelligence that is crucial to everything. A practical-minded reader will say, “Fine, but what do I
do?” Beyond making the positive lifestyle changes that
have become well-known, there are more subtle actions to
perform. These are mental actions, but they aren’t the
same as positive thinking, therapy , or even self-awareness. They focus instead on attention and intention. When you
have an intention to move your hand, there are no steps to
go through. The instant you want to move your hand, it
moves. But what about the intention to heal yourself or the
intention to promote peace in your surroundings? Science ﬁnds itself skeptical and largely baﬄed  when
such questions come up—they are barely considered
legitimate. Yet on the fringes of respectability there are
mounting research studies on the power of praye r to helpthe sick. Since Quantum Healing  appeared, other studies
have gone even deeper into the eﬀectiveness of intention. Especially intriguing is a pioneering study of native
Hawaiian healers led by the late Dr. Jeanne Achterberg, a
physiologist of the mind-body connection who was
fascinated by anecdotes that native healers often did their
work from a distance. Here’s how the Achterberg study
worked, as described in Super Brain,  which I wrote with
Rudolph E. Tanzi. In 2005, after a two-year search, she and her
colleagues gathered eleven Hawaiian healers. Each had pursued their native healing tradition
for an average of 23 years. The healers were
asked to select a person with whom they had
successfully worked in the past and with whom
they felt an empathic connection. This person
would be the recipient of healing in a controlled
setting. The healers described their methods in a
variety of ways—as prayer , sending energy , good
intentions, or simply thinking and wishing the
highest good for their subjects. Achterberg simply
called these eﬀorts distant intentionality (DI). Each recipie nt was isolated from the healer
while undergoing an fMRI of their brain activity . The healers were asked to randomly send DI at
two-minute intervals; the recipients could not
have anticipated when the DI was being sent. Yet
their brains did. Signiﬁcant diﬀerences were
found between the expe rimental (send) periods
and control (no-send) periods in ten out of eleven
cases. For the send periods, speciﬁc areas within
the subjects’ brains “lit up” on the fMRI scan,
indicating increased metabolic activity . This did
not occur during the no-send periods.Skeptics dism iss such studies without actually trying to
duplicate them or to understand the hidden mechanics of
intention. However , in the Vedic tradition, there has been a
sophisticated description  of the mechanics of intention
going back centuries. It was divided into three parts. First,
an eﬀective intention must arise in a deep level of the
mind, below  the stream of constant activity . The very
deepest state of awareness, which is calm, still, unmoved,
and all-wise, is known in Sanskrit as samadhi . What Helps Samadhi
•Meditation
•Calm, peaceful surroundings
•Lack of mental agitation
•Absence of stress
•Minimal distractions
•Self-acceptance
•Self-awareness
What Hurts Samadhi
The opposite of the above: anything that jangles the
mind, makin g it restless, overactive, stressed, and
outward gazing
The second part of the mechanics of intention is to have
the intention  be as clear and focused as possible. This gives
awareness a speciﬁc direction. The term for this in Sansk rit
is dharana .What Helps Dharana
•Clear thinking
•Acting purposefully
•Not losing sight of the goal
•Conﬁdence
•The ability to stick with a mental task
•Follow-through
•Diligence
What Hurts Dharana
•Multitasking
•Mental confusion
•Conﬂicted desires
•Lack of self -knowledge
•Fantasy and daydreaming
•Short attention span
•A craving to escape the self
The third part of the mechanics of intention is a state of
ﬂexibility where your mind is steady and active at the same
time. You can see this state when a child is totally
engrossed in playing with a toy. His attention is on nothing
else, and yet inside the play, he does all kinds of things
(pushing a toy truck, throwing ﬁnger paint on the walls). When you have an intention, your focus is sharp, but then
you let go and allow silent intelligence to take care of the
outcome. This isn’t the same as passive indiﬀerence. Youare open and alert, because there can be any response at
all. The term in Sanskrit for this is dhyana. What Helps Dhyana
•Being relaxed and easy
•Mindfulness
•Acceptance of things as they are
•Putting a value on being
•Trust
•Believing in the wisdom of uncertainty
•Allegiance to a higher level of intelligence that
organizes reality
What Hurts Dhyana
•Tension
•Anticipation
•Controlling yourself and others
•Rigidity
•Insistence on rules and routines
•Obsession
•Compulsive behavior
•Inability to believe that the universe supports you
I’ve gone into detail here because at the time of Quantum
Healing,  there were few action steps that pertained to
silent intelligence other than meditation, which remains the
most powerful and direct  means to connect with the mind’sdeeper levels. But meditation too often  lacks a purposeful
component. The toolbox is opened and the tools just lie
there. That’s why it’s important to master the mechanics of
intention. The paradox is that there’s nothing really to do
and yet everything to do. There’s nothing to do as far as
ﬁrst attention is concerned. You live your life, dealing with
its challenges as best you can. At the level of second attention, however , there’s
everything to do, because you are calling upon the
universe, to use a popular phrase, and activating hidden
forces unknown to the outward-looking mind. A now-
obscure Scottish writer and mountaineer , W. H. Murray , hit
upon the mechanics of intention with uncanny precision,
intuiting the same things that the V edic sages described. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of
which kills countless ideas and splendid plans;
that the mom ent one deﬁnitely commits oneself ,
then providence moves too . Having discovered the connection between what happens
“in here” (intention) and what happens “out there” (the
forces that an intention can move), Murray saw that these
awakened forces exist to support human aspirations. All sorts of things occur to help one that would
never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of
events issue s from the decision raising in one’s
favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings
and material assistance which no one could have
dreamed would have come their way . For quantum healing to be completely viable, the power
of intention must be harnessed, calling not upon“providence,” which many people don’t accept, but upon
the inner intelligence that more and more scientiﬁc
evidence supports. That the mind can move molecules is
just as wondrous as faith moving mountains. OceanofPDF .comOceanofPDF .comA boy in India never has to wish for a time machine. When I
was seven, a two-minute walk took me from Daddy’s army
hospital to the Poona grand bazaar . There the old smells
hung in the air—saﬀron, dust, sandalwood, and cooking
ﬁres (not that I noticed them then, being glued to the snake
charmers). In the hospital, the only smell was of Dettol, an
all-purpose cleanser that stung your nose like straight
formaldehyde. Physicists compare time to an arrow; in
India, the arrow got bent and meets itself going backward. We adjusted to it. If a soldier came in with a puncture
wound in his foot, my father gave him a tetanus shot, but if
the man wanted to hobble out and make an oﬀering to
Shiva, my father understood. Now when I go back home, I look out the airplane
window and see bullocks plowing within sight of the
tarmac. In the cities, it is not uncommon for businessmen
dressed in impeccable copies of English wool suits to step
around the bodies of sadhus, or holy men, who sit calmly in
the middle of the sidewalks clothed in loincloths and
orange robes. The daily scene is like an archaeological digwhose layers are hopelessly mixed up, or better yet, where
the layers have jumped out of the ground and come to life. Every dig has to have a bottom layer , though. In this case,
it is the sadhus. India’s holy men date from at least three
thousand years before the birth of Christ. Their words have
been recorded and passed on in the original Sanskrit,
which lays good claim to being man’s ﬁrst language. Their
traditional home is still the Himalayas, where they go to sit
in samadhi , or deep meditation, for days or weeks at a
time. For them, life is totally dedicated to inner silence. Very occasionally , the thought might enter their heads that
they should go on a pilgrimage. Picking up their begging
bowls, they then set oﬀ to the south, trusting to nature to
provide them with the necessary food and shelter . In
modern times, they can usually board any train or bus
without a ticket. As a child what I knew of sadhus came from one of my
uncles, my father’s older brother , who traveled all over the
country selling sports equipment. We called him Bara
Uncle, or “big uncle,” a name that set him apart from our
lesser relations. He inevitably  arrived at our door with ﬁeld
hockey sticks (India traditionally used to beat the rest of
the world in this minor sport), soccer balls, or badminton
shuttles as presents. Naturally , we couldn’t wait to see him. Bara Uncle was hugely aﬀable and gregarious. He spun
fabulous tales about the wonders he met on his way. The
most vivid happened in Calcutta. Bara Uncle was pushing
his way through the crowds when he almost stumbled over
an old sadhu sitting near the curb. Absentmindedly , my
uncle reached into his pocket, found two annas (about two
cents), and put them in the sadhu’s bowl. The sadhu shot
him a glance and said, “Make a wish for anything you
want.”
Taken aback, my uncle blurted, “I want some burﬁ .” Burﬁ
is an Indian candy , like fudge, that is usually made fromalmonds or coconut. Very calmly the sadhu reached his
right hand into the air, materialized two pieces of fresh
burﬁ, and gave them to Bara Uncle. Astounded, he stood
transﬁxed for a few seconds, just enough time for the
sadhu to rise and melt like a shadow into the crowd. My
uncle never  saw him again. In a way, he got a fair
exchange, since his two annas would have bought  him two
pieces of burﬁ from a sweetmeat vendor on the street. But
every time he told the story , my uncle would shake  his head
and mourn, “I am still thinking of all the things I could have
wished for .”
As a boy, I ﬁrmly believed Bara Uncle’s story , but in
contemporary India, people are more likely to see a sadhu
and skeptically wonder if he is real. Starting in the 1920s,
scientists from Europe and America began to visit India to
observe the various swamis, yogis, and sadhus of every
description. Some had attained remarkable degrees of
control over their bodies—they could apparently stop
breathing for minutes at a time or bring their heartbeats
down almost to zero. A typical procedure woul d consist of
taking one of those “saints,” as holy men are commonly
called in India, and burying him in a box six feet
underground. This was supposedly a scientiﬁc experiment,
but of a very crude sort. After a few days, when the box
was unearthed, you either had a result or you didn’t. The
desired result would be that the saint was still alive. Almost
all the physiological studies from the early days are very
shallow in their approach, and many reﬂect this weird
combination of science and sideshow . A sadhu’s control over his body, however , is still physical
and misses the point of his existence. Such people are out
to break through the mask of physical appearance s; in our
terms, they want to leave  the world “above the line” to ﬁnd
out what lies beneath. Indian life, in fact, has traditionally
been arranged to make this quest possible. After a man hasbeen educate d, raised a family , and enjoyed the rewards of
material existence, he is expected to take sanyasa —that is,
he renounces the householder life, takes up the begging
bowl, and goes oﬀ in search of something else. If you say
that he is searching for God, for truth, for reality , or for
himself , all of these would not be quite right, because the
essence of the quest is that the goal is unknown. He is
setting oﬀ into another world that cannot be tracked from
this one. To use our terms again, he is setting out across
the gap. I grew up to put on a Western-style suit and step around
saints on the sidewalk, but as I looked deeper into the
issues of mind-body medicine, I kept returning to India’s
ancient traditions. The second part of this book centers on
what I have found. The known world of our senses, of
atoms and molecules, does not just break oﬀ abruptly; it
shades imper ceptibly into a diﬀerent reality . At some point,
however , one reality ﬂips into another . Time and space
acquire a diﬀerent meaning; the neat divisions between
inner and outer reality disappear . We ﬁnd ourselves in a
world that has never been explored as well as in India. In
his purest form, the sadhu is an investigator into the
transcendental reality lying beyond the gap—th at is the
tradition he upholds, one of the longest and wisest on our
planet. To understand his ﬁndin gs will take us on a new
road, away from physics, but still on much the same track,
in search of ourselves. —
In the West, before the advent of the theory of relativity ,
there was no question that time, space, matter , and energy
occupied separate compartments of reality . Our senses
detect a tree as entirely diﬀerent from a beam of light or a
spark of electricity; we may feel that time is a more
mysterious entity , capable of slowing down, speeding up, oreven standing still, but we would never say, “I like New
York better than Monday .” It seems self-evident that time
and space, matter and energy , are opposite pairs, for the
simple reaso n that none can be turned into the others. The
normal world of the senses can be diagrammed in our
familiar manner:
After Einstei n published the equation E=mc2, this simple,
commonsense view had to change, for it was now possible
(as the atomic bomb proved) for matter to be transformed
into huge amounts of energy . The general theory of
relativity did the same thing for the separation between
time and space. Now physics deals in a fused entity called
space-time, which can be bent to ﬁt certain circumstances
(whenever an object travels near the speed of light, for
example). After proving that nature was much less
compartmentalized than science had previously thought,
relativity opened another , even more surprising possibility . Einstein suggested that one underlying ﬁeld exists as the
background for all transfo rmations of space-time and mass-
energy . This implies a level of nature that is totally fused; in
other words, there is a region of space-time-matter-energy . Einstein was intuitively convinced of this possibility—the
ultimate demolition of the world of the senses—at a time
when no one else had the vision to consider it seriously . Beginning in the 1920s, he spent the last thirty years of hislife, isolated from the other physicists of his generation and
largely ignored, trying to compute the mathematics for a
“uniﬁed ﬁeld theory .” His theory would unite all the basic
forces in creation and thereby explain the unive rse as a
whole. Instead of four compartments, there would be one. “To unite,” in the sense that physicists use the word,
means to prove that two things that appear to be totally
diﬀerent can transform into each other at a deeper level of
nature. The photon and the light wave are classic examples
of this: they appear to be entirely diﬀerent, yet at an
inﬁnitesimal level of nature, called the Planck scale, which
is more than a billion billion times smaller than the smallest
atom, the photon and the light wave can be united . No one
has yet solved the math ematics for a uniﬁed ﬁeld. That
would be as much as solving the entire hidden zone we
have labeled  with a ?. (A new theory , however , called the
superstring may have cracked the problem at last, thirty
years after Einstein’s death.) In the face of a problem that rational thought cannot
solve, science necessarily stops, but other routes may be
open. Thousands of years ago, the ancient rishis,  or seers,
of India also contemplated this question of whether nature
is ultimately uniﬁed. A rishi is like a sadhu in that his life is
devoted to silence and the inner life, but rishis lived much
further in the past—they were responsible for writing the
most ancient texts of Veda, or revealed truth, such as Rig
Veda, which may predate the Egyptian pyramids by several
thousand years. If you ask a modern India n what the Veda is, he will point
to the books that contai n the rishis’ words, but in truth
Veda is the content of the rishis’ consciousness,  which is
alive. A rishi has seen deep enough into the nature of
things that even God sits at his feet to learn—th e lesson
can be found in the Yoga Vasishtha, in which the youngLord Rama, a divine incarnation, begs the sage Vasishtha
for instruction. I am not emphasizing the spiritual value of the rishi and
his knowledge here. Until very recently in human history ,
all cultures freely blende d religion, psychology , philosophy ,
and art into one homogeneous whole. But individual
strands can be pulled out; in this case, I am interested in
what the rishis had to say about the fundamental nature of
reality (in the Yoga Vasishtha, God also showed a lively
interest in this subject). The rishis were just as capable as
we are of dividing nature up into space, time, matter , and
energy , but they turned their backs on such an approach,
which so totally dominates our way of seeing and thinking
about the world. They chose instead to solve the problem in the most
practical way imaginable . They decided to cross the gap
and actually enter the ? zone, where thinking cannot go. They used a simple twist in their awareness, but one that
has profound consequences—it was like turning the
objective world inside out. To do that, the rishis had to
analyze nature in an unexpected way, which can be
represented by another diagram:
This diagram is just as valid as the one on page 206, but
it looks on the world from a purely subjective viewpoint. Rather than seeing time, space, matter , and energy “outthere,” the rishis observed that reality begins “in here,”
with our conscious awareness. At any particular time, they
reasoned, a person must be in one of three states of
subjective awareness—waking, sleeping, or dreaming. What he perceives in these states constitutes his reality . The ancients assumed that reality was thus diﬀerent in
diﬀerent states of consciousness—a tiger in the dream state
is not a tiger in the waking state. It obeys entirely diﬀerent
laws, and similarly , the laws of the sleep state, although not
known to the conscious mind, must be distinct from those
of the waking and dreaming states. The rishis looked closer and detected between each of
these states a gap that acts like a pivot as one reality turns
into another . For example, just before falling asleep, the
mind gradually leaves the waking state, withdra wing the
senses, shutting out the waking world, but at the junction
point before the mind actually falls asleep, a brief gap is
opened, identical to the one that ﬂashes by between each
thought: it is like a little window into the ﬁeld that is
beyond either wakefulness or sleep. This realization opened
the possibility for leaving behind the usual boundaries of
the ﬁve senses by diving through the gap. Considering that the West is supposed to be practi cal and
the East mystical, it is fascinating to ﬁnd that the rishis
were much more avid for direct experience than any
quantum physicist. Their subjective approach was called
Yoga, the Sanskrit word for “union.” (The various exercises
taught in yoga classes belong to just one of its branches,
called Hatha Yoga; we will be looking at Yoga’s most
powerful approach, which is mental.) Because both are
looking for an underlying  layer of unity in nature , one can
immediately see the resemblance between Yoga and
Einstein’s quest for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory . The major
diﬀerence between the two is that the rishis, not being
theoretical, declared that the uniﬁed ﬁeld exists in the realworld—it is an experience and not merely a mental
construct. From the rishis’ subjective viewpoint, the only thing that
the uniﬁed ﬁeld could be is another state of consc iousness. They called it simply turiya,  or the fourth, to denote that it
was not part of the three states of waking, sleeping, and
dreaming. They also referred to it as para,  or beyond,
meaning that it transcended ordinary experience. But how
could a fourth state even  exist? The answer was twofold . First, the seers said that the fourth state exists everywhere
but is hidden by the other three states as if by a screen. (Some ancient texts declare that the fourth state has been
mixed into the other three like milk into water , and ﬁnding
it is as diﬀicult as separating milk from water .) Second,
they said that the fourth state can be directly experienced
only after the mind has transcended its normal activity ,
which requires the special technique of meditation. The word rishi itself stands for a person who has learned
to enter the fourth state at will and observe what  is there. This ability is not “thinkin g” as we use the term—t he whole
phenomenon is an immediate experience, like recognizing
the fragrance  of lilacs or the sound of a friend’s voice. It is
immediate, nonverbal, and, unlike a ﬂower’s fragrance,
totally transforming. As they sat in meditation, deeply
absorbed in their own subjective awareness, the rishis
explored turiya the way we would look at the Grand
Canyon. As individuals, these seers have names, but going
into the transcendent blurred the edges of what we
consider personal identity . Vasishtha, for example, is not
just the name of one of the greatest of the ancient  rishis; it
stands for an integra l part of Veda—transc endental
knowledge—which the man Vasishtha ﬁrst cognized; to
truly know that part of Veda, one would have to be in
“Vasishtha consciousness.” In short, these sages observed
existence in its purest form.—
For all intents and purposes, there was no way for the West
to systematically test the existence of the fourth state. Lacking the right techniq ue, the scientiﬁc comm unity has
ignored turiya. In fact, many scientists would consider it
irrelevant or threatening. The very notion of “union” brings
undesirable images to mind: dissolving into a state of
nothingness, or losing one’s identity like a drop of water
disappearing into the ocean. Despite occasional bursts of
enthusiasm for Eastern ideas, the progress of knowledge in
the West has overwhe lmingly depended on outward
observation, not inner . But if there is a state that transcends the usua l three,
then it seems likely that it would show up from time to
time, if only by accident. For example, Charles Lindbergh
reported one experience that took place in 1927, during the
most critical  moments of his life. When he was into the
second day of his histor ic solo ﬂight across the Atlantic,
Lindbergh found that he had passed the limits of physical
exhaustion. Fearing that he would lose control of his craft,
he skirted disaster by ﬁtfully dozing oﬀ and hoping that he
remained on course. Then, as Lindbergh recounts in his
autobiography , a remarkable change of awareness took
place:
Over and over again on the second day of my
ﬂight, I would return to mental alertness
suﬀiciently to realize that I had been ﬂying while I
was neither asleep nor awake. My eyes had been
open. I had responded to my instruments’
indications and held generally to compass course,
but I had lost sense of circumstance and time. During imme asurable periods, I seemed to extend
outside my plane and body, independent ofworldly values, appreciative of beauty , form, and
color without depending upon my eyes. As a child, Lindbergh had lain in the cornﬁelds on his
father’s farm  and felt a similar sense of being “beyond
mortality” as he gazed into the sky. But the episode over
the North Atlantic went further . What Lindbergh concluded
about it was this: “It was an experience in which  both the
intellect and senses were replaced by what might be
termed a matterless awareness….I recognized that vision
and reality interchange, like energy and matter .”
Doctors to whom I mention meditation generally assure
me, whether they “believ e” in it or not, that meditation is
for relaxation. It is only in the light of Veda that one can
understand why this view is so shortsighted. —
Veda represents an immense expansion of the human mind. The best way to describe it is that Veda is the total content
of the cosmic computer . All the input of nature is channeled
into it, and out of it ﬂows all natural phenom ena. The
control over this comput er is located in the human brain,
whose billio ns of neural connections give it enough
complexity to mirror the complexity of the universe. The brain is not important as an object, the rishis
contend. It is important because our own subjectivity
shines through it; when our brains show us the world, they
are really showing us ourselves. By analogy , when an image
falls upon a mirror , a blending takes place. The mirror is
the reﬂection; the reﬂection is the mirror . In the same way,
the only reality we can know anything about is the one that
is being mirrored in the brain—everything that exists is
therefore inside our subjectivity .A physicist would not normally agree with this, since he
cherishes the objective method and looks on subjectivity as
virtually his enemy . A physicist says, “This is a proton,” not,
“This is my feeling for what a proton is.” Actually , Veda is
not devoid of objective knowledge—it gave rise to its own
sciences of botany , physiology , astronomy , medicine, et
cetera—but the rishis did not feel that objectivity was the
most reliable way to know things, particularly once you
investigate deeper than nature’s surface. The truth, they
said, is that subjectivity can be either narrow or expanded. Nature is like a radio band. When you pay attention to an
isolated object—a rock, a star, or an entire galaxy—you
select one channel on the band. The rest obviously has to
be excluded—but only for that level of consciousness. It may be that other levels of consciousness receiv e more
bands, or more than one band at a time. Right now,
physicists estimate that our senses choose less than one-
billionth of the energy waves and particles that surround
us. We live in an “energy soup” incredibly larger than the
world we see. The visible universe itself is now thought to
be but a minuscule version of the original creation, the
residue of a much larger reality that collapsed somewhere
before time began, reducing its original ten dimensions to
our four. (I apologize for using the phrase “before time
began,” which is a blatant paradox, but there is no way to
state verbally how pre–Big Bang events occurred.) Also, it
appears that at the moment of creation our universe was
ﬁlled with a billion times more energy than we now observe
with radio telescopes; the remainder was reabso rbed into
the same hidden ﬁeld where the other six dimensions went. The rishis declared that through expanded
consciousness, even this inconceivable lost reality  could be
made available to us. Theoretical physics agrees that the
lost dimensions and invisible energy ﬁelds have not actually
gone anywhe re; they have only sunk back to “sleep” in theprimordial ﬁeld. Similarly , the transcendental level of
awareness is available everywhere; you need not go
anywhere special to ﬁnd it. It only needs to wake up. William James expressed this idea in a famous passage:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type
of consciousness, whilst all around it, parted from
it by the ﬂimsiest of screens, there lie potential
forms of consciousness entirely diﬀerent. We may
go through  life without suspecting their
existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at
a touch they are there in all their completeness. If so much more reality is nearby , why can’t we touch it? Researchers found a clue to the answer , curiously enough,
by experime nting with newborn kittens. Kittens are born
with their eyes shut and their optic nerves undeveloped. When they open their eyes, the mechanism for sight
matures at the same time; these two events always go hand
in hand. However , it was found in the mid-1970s that if you
blindfold a kitten during the two or three days when it ﬁrst
opens its eyes, the animal will be blind for life. During thus
brief but critical period, the experience of seeing actually
shapes the inter-neuronal connections in the brain that
make sight possible. This was an important ﬁnding, for biologists continue to
disagree over whether genetics or experience is more
important in behavior . This is the old question of whether a
trait is innate or acquired. Does a robin  learn to sing from
its mother , or will it sing if raised in isolation? The
experiment with the blind kittens showed that both
“nature” and “nurture” are essential; the kitten’s brain is
programmed for sight, yet it requires seeing for the
programming to unfold properly . There is a deeperimplication to all this, however . Our own brains could be
limited in just this way. Many things “out there” don’t exist
for us, not because they are unreal, but because “in here”
we have not shaped the brain to perceive them. We are like
radios that appear to have all the channels when actually
they are stuck on three—waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Because your brain is the only radio you have, you can
never know whether the fourth state exists unless your
nervous system is prepared for it. It is entirely possible that
we are literally bathed and surrounded by the transcendent
and yet have not tuned it in. The Veda gives a supporting analogy: thoughts are like
ocean waves. Rising and falling, they see only their own
motion. They say, “I am a wave ,” but the greater truth,
which they do not see, is, “I am ocean.” There is no
separation between the two, whatever the wave might
suppose. When a wave settles down, then it instantly
recognizes that its source in ocean—inﬁnite, silent, and
unchanging—was always there. The same holds true for the mind. When it is thinking, it
is all activity; when it stops thinking, it returns to its source
in silence. Only then, when the mind touches pure
awareness, will the real storehouse of Veda be located. The
experience of Veda therefore is not ancient or even
particularly Indian. It is universal and can be had at any
moment by any person. The whole trick is not to move
horizontally , which is how the stream of consc iousness
normally moves, but to sink vertically . This vertical descent
is transcend ing, meditation, dhyan, “going beyond”—all
manifestations of a mind that ceases to identify with waves
and begins to identify with ocean. If this argument is right, then the nature of the mind and
the mind-body connection have to be reconside red. The
point that Archimedes was looking for—a place to stand on
and move the world—actu ally exists. It is inside us, coveredup by the fascinating but misleading moving-picture show
of the waking state. This may explain why mind-body medicine has proved so
inconsistent. We casually assume that a person who
survives cancer or can cure himself of a fatal disease
operates with the same mental machinery as anyone else,
but this is not true: mental processes can be deep or
shallow . To go deep means to contact the hidden blueprint
of intelligence and change it—only then can visualization of
ﬁghting cancer , for example, be strong enough to defeat
the disease. But most people cannot do that; their thought
power is too weak to trigger the appropriate mechanisms. —
The practical question is whether meditation is strong
enough to radically improve our thought power . Several
studies cond ucted by scientists have shown that meditation
may in fact induce profound change, far beyond the simple
relaxation that most people use it for in the West, even
beyond the medical applications of relieving stress,
reducing blood pressure, and so on. The ﬁrst Western scientist to make any major
breakthrough with the fourth state was an American
physiologist, Robert Keith Wallace, who proved  that it
existed. In 1967, Wallace was a doctoral student at UCLA,
where he began his Ph.D. research on the physiological
changes that take place during Transcendental Meditation
(a form of mantra meditation). Using the methods of
modern biomedical research, he compiled data from
meditators over a period of several years. Without causing
any discomfort, he wired  them up to measure their brain
waves, blood pressure, heart rate, and other indices of
physical change.Wallace soon began to build a considerable body of
unique results. First, he discovered that something real
was indeed happening to the body in meditation. Within a
few minutes of beginning their practice, his subjects
entered a state of deep relaxation, marked by slower
breathing and heartbeat, by the appearance of alpha waves
in their EEGs (electroe ncephalograms), and decreased
oxygen consumption detected in the breath. This last
measure was particularly  important because it showed that
the body’s metabolic rate, tied to the total consumption of
fuel in the cells, had dropped—physiologists refer to this
metabolic reduction as a “hypometabolic” state. Meditators achieved their deepest relaxation quickly . It
takes four to six hours after falling asleep to reach the
period where oxygen consumption falls to its lowest levels,
while medita tors took only a few minutes. Moreover , in
sleep the drop is usuall y less than 16 percent, whereas
meditators achieved relative reductions that momentarily
dipped almo st twice as low. Wallace was impressed by
these ﬁgures because such a deep state of relaxation had
never been recorded before. What this showed was that the
subjective feelings reported during meditation—inner
silence, peac efulness, and relaxation—had a real physical
basis. It was also very important that these subjects had
not fallen asleep or gone into a trance. They were fully
awake insid e, even feeling a sense of heightened
awareness. Wallace concluded therefore that meditation
was a state of “hypometabolic wakefulness.” Since his
measurements were diﬀerent from any seen in waking,
dreaming, or sleeping, he concluded that he had veriﬁed an
entirely new state of consciousness—the fourth state. Certain of the meditators had exhibited physical changes
that went far beyond the average. As with the yogis
measured in India and the Himalayas, their breathing
seemed to stop for long stretches. At the subjective level,these deeper states were experienced as absolute inner
silence, a feeling of vast expansion, and a profound
knowingness. The mind was emptie d of all speciﬁc
thoughts but left with the clear awareness of “I know
everything.” No one could explain these experiences,
because scientiﬁc instruments are too crude to analyze or
even detect them. To anyone versed in the Vedic literature, however , it was
obvious that these subjects were experiencing
transcendental awarene ss of a deep sort. The Yoga
Vasishtha, one of the greatest sources on direct experience
of the transcendent, says of the fourth state, “When there
is eﬀortless suspension of breath, that is the supreme state. It is the Self. It is pure, inﬁnite consc iousness. He who
reaches this does not grieve.” It would be hard to ﬁnd a
better descr iption of what the physiologists were seeing. Wallace looked at physical measurements made with Zen
meditators in Japan and found comparable results; what
was astonish ing, howeve r, was that his American subjects,
most of them young, posthippie, and new to meditation,
were achieving the same scores as Zen adepts who had
practiced meditating for ten years. Seen in a diﬀerent light, what Wallace did was to
legitimize the mind-body connection. It is now accepted
fact that one’s body spontaneously responds to one’s state
of awareness , just as the rishis said. The paradox is that we
have to learn to dive inside at all. Meditation teaches us to
control a process that is constantly inﬂuencing us every
day, whether we realize it or not. Recently I saw a Boston woman in her sixties who for
several years had been suﬀering from a slow degeneration
of the heart muscle called cardiomyopathy . There are
various kinds of cardio myopathy; hers was considered
idiopathic, meaning that no cause could be found for it. Her
main symptom at the time of diagnosis was shortness ofbreath whenever she exerted herself—she was
experiencing heart failure from the enlargemen t of her
heart. Medicine can do little or nothing for this disease,
which greatly worried her, but when she had last seen her
cardiologist two months earlier , he had suggested that she
go into the hospital for an angiogram. The purpose of an angiogram is to determine if the
coronary arteries, the vessels sending oxygen to the heart,
are blocked. The cardiolo gist was reasoning that if there
was any blockage, some  of her problem might be due to
arterial disease, which is treatable. Apprehensively she
underwent the test. The angiogr apher , who was also a
physician, came to her room afterward. “I have good news,” he said. “Your vessels are clean— you
don’t have coronary artery disease. As far as I’m
concerned, there is no need for surgery .” As he was
leaving, he turned to her and remarked, “If your condition
gets any worse, the only thing that really can be done is to
have a heart transplant.”
The woman had never been told this before, and within a
few days she began to have shortness of breath not just on
exertion but whenever she lay down. Unable to sleep and
getting more and more anxious, she returned to her
cardiologist, who could ﬁnd no reason for the worsening of
her symptoms. Finally he confronted her one day, and she
told him she was afraid of having a heart transplant. He
assured her that her fears were groundless—her condition
was by no means advanced enough for such a drastic
procedure. From that day on, her new symptoms
disappeared. —
Once again we see that subjective reality and objective
reality are tightly bound  together . When the mind shifts,the body cannot help but follow . Objective reality looks
obviously more ﬁxed than our subjective moods, ﬂeeting
desires, and swings of emotion. Yet perhaps it is not; it is
more like a violin string that can hold one pitch but also
change pitch as your ﬁnger slides along it—that image
occurred to me thinking about Chitra’s case at the
beginning of this book, but it holds true for all of us. What the pitch on the string stands for is your level of
consciousness. This is a very basic inner attribute, like a
focal point on which all your thoughts, emotions, and
desires conve rge, or a pair of green glasses that makes the
whole world look green. Most people don’t realize how
consistent their pitch is, but others are quite aware of it—a
depressed person radiates depression, even when he forces
himself to act positive; a hostile person can set a whole
room on edge, even if he says the most harmless things. One’s level of consciousness ﬁts into broad guidelines. Nobody is absolutely hostile or joyful, intelligent or dull,
satisﬁed or discontent; dozens of subtle gradations exist in
every personality . The important point is that everything you think and do is
determined by this point—you cannot think yourself to a
higher or lower level of consciousness. This helps explain
why meditat ion is not simply another kind of thinking or
introspection, a mistake Westerners tend to make. It is
actually a way to slide to a new pitch. The process of
transcending, or “going beyond,” detaches the mind from
its ﬁxed level and allows it to exist, if only for a moment,
without any level at all. It simply experiences silence,
devoid of thoughts, emotions, drives, wishes, fears, or
anything at all. Afterward, when the mind returns to its
usual pitch (level of consciousness), it has acquired a little
freedom to move. From a medical standpoint, a disease may represent a
place on the violin string  that is out of tune. Yet, for somereason, the mind-body system cannot ﬁnd a way to let go,
to slide to a healthier pitch. If that is so, then medita tion
may be a powerful therapeutic tool, allowing the body to
get unstuck from the disease. Meditation researchers
caught on to this poten tial in the late 1960s when they
discovered that many college-age meditators who used
alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs spon taneously
quit their habit within a few months of beginning to
meditate. We can call this getting unstuck from an old level
of consciousness that needed the drug; in terms of
neuropeptides, it may be that the meditation freed up
certain receptor sites by oﬀering molecules that were more
satisfying than alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana. —
By 1978, Robert Keith Wallace had spent more than a
decade validating separate mind-body eﬀects on
meditators. He decided to follow a new lead and investigate
a more complex, holistic  area, human aging. The aging
process has traditionally been accepted without question as
an inevitable  aspect of normal life, and variations in it have
been considered largely individual. Some people live longer
than others owing to privileged genes, a strong immune
system, or good luck, but there is no anti-aging factor that
can be applied to everyone. If there were, then 70-year-olds
would be more uniformly healthy in their bodily functions,
just as most 20-year-olds are. However , there is no scientiﬁc proof that aging is normal
—it is just something we all happen to do. So many stresses
are involved in “normal” living that the physiology  might be
considered under abnor mal pressure all the time—from
noise, pollu tion, negative emotions, improper diet,
smoking, alcohol, and so on. Just “the disease of being in a
hurry” hastens aging in almost everyone today . Ifmeditation counters these factors, then it might reveal
something entirely new about the aging process. Wallace set out to measure a group of adult meditators
for what is called biological age. Biological age shows how
well a person’s body is functioning compared to the norms
of the whole population. It gives a truer measure of how
the aging process is progressing than does chronological or
calendar age, because any two people who are both 55
years old by the calendar  will generally have very diﬀerent
bodies. Initially all that Wallace needed to test were three
rather simple variables: blood pressure, acuteness of
hearing, and near-point vision (the ability to see objects
close-up). All three steadily deteriorate as the body
biologically ages and therefore serve as convenient
markers. Wallace discovered that the meditators, as a group, were
signiﬁcantly younger biologically than their chronological
age. The diﬀerence between the two was not small, either—
the female subject who scored the best was fully twenty
years younger than her chronological age. Strikingly , how
much younger a person tested was closely correlated to
how long he had kept up his meditation practice. Wallace
found a dividing line between those who had meditated
fewer than ﬁve years and those who had meditated ﬁve
years or more. The ﬁrst group averaged ﬁve years younger
biologically , while the second averaged twelve years
younger . A backup study condu cted in England later
calculated that each year of regular meditation takes oﬀ
roughly one year of aging . Another ﬁnding that particularly
impressed Wallace’s team was that their older subjects
showed as good results as much younger people. A typical
60-year-old meditating ﬁve years or more would have the
physiology of a 48-year-old. Another important point raised by this remarkable study
is that the subjects were not trying  to age more slowly .They were simply removing an invisible barrier , and then
the desirable physical changes took place of their own
accord. This spontaneous ﬂowering seems to be quite
nonspeciﬁc; a 1986 Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance
study based on two thousand meditators in Iowa showed
that they were much healthier than the American
population as a whole in seventeen major areas of serious
disease, both mental and physical. This was a very
signiﬁcant improvement. For example, the meditation
group was hospitalized 87 percent less often than
nonmeditators for heart disease and 50 percent less often
for all kinds of tumors. There were equally impressive
reductions in disorders of the respiratory system, the
digestive tract, clinical depression, and so forth. Although
the study was limited to one group, this is very encouraging
news for anyone who wants to follow a holistic program of
prevention. —
The fourth state may play an important role in our future. At the source of human awareness lies a super-normal level
of consciousness—it can become normal, however , once we
have accustomed ourselves to experiencing it. If turiya is
the mind’s birthplace, then why can’t it be the mind’s
permanent home? This is the next area to explore,
investigating whether nature is uniﬁed not just in Einstein’s
hypothetical model but in ourselves. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
In hindsight, the practical side of this chapter , connecting
meditation with positive changes in the brain, has only
expanded. * Rese arch into medita tion continues apace,following the same lines I described thirty years ago. Vital
signs are seen to improve, and various eﬀects on brain
function can be observed with ever-increasing accuracy . Skeptics have been thoro ughly driven out of the debate on
these issues, but not on the notion of unbounded
awareness. Recognition of a fourth state of consciousness,
beyond waking, dreamin g, and sleeping, arous es ﬁerce
opposition because “unb ounded” would mean that mind
exists outside the brain. The path to proving the reality of unbounded awareness
isn’t by introducing cosmic mind, not if you want to
convince anyone who would suspect that God’s in the
wings. It’s more convincing, especially to doctors, if you
direct them to the intima te scale of the human body. When
someone asks, “Where is the mind located?” they will
automatically point to their heads. Why? Is it because  we
automatically expect to experience our thoughts in our
heads? That seems to be the case. When dream ing at night,
it gets a bit more ambiguous, since we feel that we are
“inside” our dreams. But for most of us, most of the time,
“my head” is where “my mind” is located. This response may feel true simply because so many
sense organs are located there: eyes, ears, nose, tongue. But we can easily undermine the commonsense model of
sight and sound taking place in the head. When a car
backﬁres behind you, the sound can’t be felt entering the
ear canal, being processe d in the inner ear and then in the
brain’s auditory center . There is no noise in the brain. Quite
clearly the sound of the backﬁring car comes from outside
you. In some cultures, hearing is a faculty that goes from
inside to outside, the opposite of what we assume. Think
about driving down the highway and suddenly noticing the
driver in front of you hitting the brakes. Your attention goes
out in order to see his rear lights go on. The senses follow
attention, which makes it plausible to say your mind wentoutside your body when you spotted the brake lights. We
casually adopt this model for vision when we say that
someone “shoots a glance” at someone else. Babies, we are told, have  a much more diﬀuse experience
of the ﬁve senses, perhaps mixing them up in what are
called synesthesias (for example, experiencing sounds as
colors or tastes as shapes, an experience reported from
hallucinogenic drugs and in deep meditative states). Some
researchers contend that babies therefore have  a poor
sense of the boundary between themselves and the world. But infants turn into toddlers, and the separation between
self and the world starts to harden. Society and family
reinforce this habit as the toddler grows up, and eventually
the mind takes its seat in our heads, or so it seems. In
altered states, whether induced by drugs or in deep
meditation, there are countless reports, echoed by Charles
Lindbergh in his transatlantic ﬂight, of the mind extending
in all direct ions. There are even subjective reports of
sitting in a chair and reaching out to touch some velvet
drapes far across the room—the senses literally go where
they are directed. Neuroscientists would call such experiences anomalies,
declaring resolutely that mind and brain have taken up
residence together in a box called the skull. But it is
undeniably possible to literally “think outside the box,”
beginning with the message system discussed in this book
that connect s every cell in the body with whatever is
occurring in the brain. “Fine,” a neuroscientist would
argue, “but the brain is still the machine that makes mind. Take away the brain, and there is no mind.” But this is the
same as saying that if you turn oﬀ the radio, there is no
music. You haven’t destroyed the music, only the receiver . One must be open to asking some culturally radical
questions, including the most radical of all: Is a brain evennecessary for “thinking”? There are diﬀerent ways to
explore this issue. First, let’s consider whether only human brains  create
minds. Few people who have pets or live on farms would
say that the animals they encounter don’t have minds. There is already abun dant evidence that the genes,
receptors, and neurotran smitters involved in human brain
function are present in animals. Saying that diﬀerent kinds
of animal brains create minds is not so troublesome if you
insist that the mind is rooted in these shared processes and
chemicals. We aren’t able to describe what animal minds
are like (some may lack anything like human self-
awareness), but we shouldn’t have a problem conceiving
that these creatures have one. Second, there are nervo us systems on the evolutionary
ladder than don’t require a central brain. Some creatures,
like jellyﬁsh, have neuron al nets distributed throug hout the
body. We, too, have such systems. Your gastrointestinal
tract sends and receives signals from the peripheral nerves
that branch out from the spinal cord. But digestion can
function quite well when severed from the peripheral
nervous system. As in the jellyﬁsh, your gut constitutes a
weblike intestinal nervous system. In the language of cell
biology , specialized ganglion cells are located between
muscle layer s in the intestinal wall that act like a local
brain. If one severs any peripheral nerves, these ganglion
cells continue to instruct the intestine to move and absorb
and secrete, working quite autonomously as a self-
contained functional unit. It turns out that the intestinal tract only takes advice
from the rest of the body. It harbors its own reactions. When bad news gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of
your stomach, you are experiencing an emotion as surely as
you experience it in your head. In fact, your gut reaction
precedes the thought. Does this mean that your intestinalnervous system creates such reactions on its own? That’s
unclear , but it’s tempting to think so. Certainly many
people trust their gut reactions over the confused and
compromised responses that the brain is often  saddled
with. The muscles of your face are directly linked to your brain. While we assume that the brain is telling the mouth and
lips to smile when we’re  feeling happy , the reverse is also
true. Seeing a smile on someo ne else’s face can make you
happy , and children are taught to smile as a way to break
out of a sad mood. Whether this works or not varies from
person to person, but it could be argued that the face is
controlling the brain in those instances. Findings about brainlike processes outside the skull have
become common. The conduction system inside the heart,
including pacemaker cells, which organizes your heartbeat,
can be thoug ht of as the heart’s brain in the same  way the
ganglion cells in the gut are the brain of the intest ines. The
independence of the conduction system is shown when a
transplanted heart keeps beating even though the nerves
that connected it to the donor’s central and peripheral
nervous systems have been severed. The interaction
between the heart’s independent processing and the
brain’s is complex and not fully understood. Still more mysterious are the trillions of bacteria that
outnumber the body’s cells by ten to one, living mostly
inside the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the
brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as
invaders, but over eons these microorganisms have actually
been incorporated into vast stretches along the double
helix of human DNA. The implications for what we call
“being huma n” are enormous and largely uncharted. Taken
as a whole, the bacterial component of the body is known
as the microbiome. It doesn’t sit passively on the skin or in
the gut, nor does it invade the body. Instead, themicrobiome is the border between “in here” and “out
there,” possessed of genes, receptors, and chemical
messaging that make the same things possible for the
brain. The function  of the microbial DNA that is woven into
our genes isn’t known, but at the very least this is ancestral
information we’ve assimilated as our own. More
suggestively , this once-foreign DNA may be the switching
agent for the genes in all higher life-forms. These discoveries prove that our intelligence extends to
the entire ecology . Mind has a physical basis everywhere. Any attempt  to isolate it in the skull runs into serious
objections. Instead of viewing unbou nded awareness with
skepticism, we need to see that every thought is
unbounded. You cannot see, hear, or touch anything in the
world without reaching beyond the illusory boundary of the
isolated body. To watch a sunset is literally like watching
yourself . * As an example of today’s sophisticated measurements, a November 2013
survey in Scientiﬁc American  of the eﬀects of meditation cited the following:
Meditation not only changes brain neuronal interconnections, but it also
increases brain tissue volume, decreases the volume of the amygdala,
increases telomerase activity , and diminishes inﬂammation and other
biological stresses that occur at the molecular level. OceanofPDF .comThe rishis took a simple position in the mind-body debate. Everything, they said, comes from the mind. It projects the
world exactly as a movie projector does. Our bodies are
part of the movie, and so is everything that happe ns to the
body. To a rishi, the wonder was not that we can make
ourselves sick or well, but that we don’t see ourselves
doing it. If we could silently witness ourselves, we would
see this and more. The very sky, ocean, mountains, and
stars would be pouring out of our brains—they all belong in
the movie, too. If the rishis’ views are right, then we have
been wrong to put so much faith in objective reality . And
yet our objective frame of reference doesn’t seem wrong. It
serves us very well, on the whole; the sky and the stars
seem to exist  “out there,” totally independent of us. Are we
being fooled by our own movie? To make the rishis’ case, you have to adop t their
perspective, which means stepping outside ordinary
waking-state reality , at least slightly . If you can do that,
then you begin to appreciate that the mind is indeed a
powerful creator . I caught a small but revealing glimpse ofthis recently . I was in a crowded plane taking oﬀ from
Bombay . Everything seemed completely normal except that
the No Smoking/F asten Your Seatbelt sign came back on at
the same moment as the steward dashed furiously down
the aisle toward the front of the cabin. The pilot announced
over the intercom, “Ladies and gentlemen, pleas e remain
seated. We are going to return to Bombay for an emergency
landing.” His voice betrayed a tremor, and as we all sat
tensely silen t, a young Indian stewardess started sobbing
loudly . A few minutes later we bounced onto the runw ay, and
three ﬁre trucks sped to our side; we could hear their
sirens wailing above the engine roar. Nothing else
happened. No explanation was ever given for the incident. The passengers were quickly reboarded onto a diﬀerent jet;
about half elected to stay on the ground. I didn’ t feel too
disturbed during the incident and got on the second plane. The next time I caught a ﬂight, about ten days later, my
mind was at ease. However , as soon as they ﬂashed on the
sign, No Smoking/F asten Your Seatbelt, accompanied by
that ding sound, my heart started to pound. At ﬁrst I
couldn’t put two and two together; then I realized that I
had created a small conditioned reﬂex in myself . Pavlov’s
dogs salivated at the sound of a bell, and I sped up my
heart at almo st the same thing. I then notice d that as soon
as this explanation dawned on me, my heartbeat went back
to normal. For a few seconds I was present at the birth of one
impulse that shaped my reality . It is plausible that I have
unwittingly created myself by piling up millions of impulses
just like it. These come too fast and furious for me to
analyze them—as well ask a waterfall to analyze its drops—
but the real sticking point is that they are so abstract. To
the rishis, the whole world has been built up, layer  by layer ,
out of sheer abstraction. Because you willingly giveyourself over to it, a John Wayne western seems real, even
though you know it is just beams of light bouncing oﬀ a ﬂat
white surface. A dream consists entire ly of neurological
impulses ﬁring in your brain, but as long as you are in it,
you are convinced by its reality . (Everyone is familiar with
that faint, disappointing  moment that comes when the
dream stops being convincing. Instead of ﬂying through the
air, you begin to sense that “it is only a dream,” and after a
brief struggle, the waking world comes back.) In the same way, the reality you accept in the waking
state is known to you only from impulses ﬁring  in your
brain. When you touch a ﬂower , the act of touching brings
together the force and matter ﬁelds in your hand with the
force and matter ﬁelds in the ﬂower . All of these ﬁelds are
highly abstra ct, yet touch does not seem abstract to you. You are convinced by it. The rishis placed a huge emphasis
on how much we all convince ourselves. A famous parable
for this was given by Shankara, the greatest philosophical
mind in the V edic tradition:
A man is walking down the road in the evening and sees a
large snake coiled in the dust. He runs away terriﬁed and
stirs up everyone with his cries of “Snake, snake!” The
people of his village are also terriﬁed; the women and
children don’t want to go outside because of the snake, and
normal life begins to be overshadowed by everyone’s
apprehension. Then a brave person resolves to look at this
snake. He asks the ﬁrst man to take him to it, and when
they get there, what they ﬁnd is not a snake but a rope
coiled in the middle of the road. All our fears, Shankara
said, have been built up from just such a delusion. In fact,
nothing real can be separated from what we tell ourselves
is real. —This line of reasoning is not speciﬁcally Indian— it can be
easily adapted to a modern frame of reference. Think of
what happens when two bar magnets come together with
their north poles facing each other . The magnetic ﬁeld
repels them apart. If these were thinking magnets, they
would “feel” something solid in between themsel ves. They
would create touch out of an abstraction, just as we all do . The reason why, when you touch it, an object feels soft,
hard, ragged, smooth, et cetera, is that such an
interpretation is made in your brain. Essentially , the ﬁve
senses are just tools. Touch is really the brain reaching out
into the world, using specialized nerve cells to register
certain information—a very narrow band, we must
remember , which is entirely diﬀerent from what a snake
“touches” when its tongue ﬂicks the air . Similarly , the nerve endings coating the retina of your
eye are also extensions of the brain. Structurally , the retina
is just a pool of nerve endings fanning out like the frayed
end of a rope, the rope being the optic nerve, which
gathers a million separate nerve ﬁbers into one bundled
cord. Even though they are located deeper inside you than
the nerve endings under  your skin, the eye’s sensory cells
are also “touching” the outside world. There is no intrinsic
diﬀerence between the ﬁeld of light contacted by your eye
and the energy ﬁeld you touch with your ﬁngers—the real
distinction between seeing and touching is made in the
brain. And so it goes for every other sense: hearing,
smelling, and tasting involve specialized cells that send
impulses directly to the brain for interpretation, and
without that interpretation nothing could exist. All things in existence are tied to our senses, and our
senses are tied to our brains. The commonsense notion that
“this chair is hard to the touch” is not true, until you
restate it as “this chair is hard because my brain  made it
that way.” (The chair is not hard at all to a cosmic ray,which zips through it like air.
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:

        Hard research was just uncovering the receptor sites on
the cell membrane, the “plug-ins” for messages from the
brain. One found exactly the same receptor sites
everywhere. The immune  system therefore became known
as a ﬂoating brain, and science had an explanation for gut
instincts—tissues remote from the brain were thinking, too,
in a chemical language. Yet the lifestyle advice that looks so promising for healing
the mind-bod y connection  doesn’t really penetrate into the
quantum domain. It remains in the domain of active
intelligence. We have to be a bit careful here. If you change
your diet, new messages will be sent to the cells of the
digestive tract, and from  there the messaging throughout
the body is altered (which is why, for example, you fall
asleep after eating too much at Thanksgiving). Because all
messages are produced in the gap, there is a quantum
dimension to every process in the body. What’s lacking is a direct telephone line, so that you can
speak to your own silent intelligence and hear what it says
in return. A direct line is opened through “second
attention. ” With ﬁrst attention you live your life in the
world—working, eating, sleeping, relating. With second
attention you peer into the invisible domain that creates,
governs, and regulates the ﬂow of life. Let’s call silent
intelligence X, because it cannot be labeled or named. Labels belong to things, not to processes. What is X doingfrom its invisible station  behind the scene. Its range of
activity is quite astonishing:
It takes each  tiny event and weaves it into the tapestry of
life. It gives meaning and purpose to everything you
experience. It guides every action to its highest and best use. It breathes love into being. It favors evolution and progress. It promotes those outcomes that are the most life
supporting. If this sounds like a mystical laundry list, consider the
beating of a single heart cell. It meshes with every other
heart cell in perfect sync. It regis ters love, pain, hope, fear,
and every other emotion. It tells you without a doubt that
you are in love. It settles into wise contentment as you
mature. It looks out for the healt h of the entire body. I’ve
used slightly metaphorical language, but a cell biologist
could identify the receptor sites and messaging paths that
connect brain and heart so completely that every function
I’ve mentioned has a physiological basis. The deeper point, howe ver, is that every cell, all ﬁve
trillion or so, depends upon silent intelligence to keep itself
—and you—together. Intelligence is what prevents the
living structu res in the body from ﬂying apart into a cloud
of atoms. Such intelligence is far from incidental. As in the
piano metap hor I ﬁnd myself returning to, a piano doesn’t
make the music that comes out of it; a mind does. When a
cell commun icates with other cells, there is no message in
the chemicals that carry  the message until the mind puts
one inside. Second attention opens the lines of communication so
that any impulse—love, compassion, empathy, appreciation,
insight, intuition, imagination—is evolutionary and life
supporting. Here we must look beyond science, because to
a cell biologist, chemicals are chemicals. They are value
neutral. An impulse of hatred can be encoded as easily as
an impulse of love. But if you stand back and examine your
life from the perspective of second attention, you can see
value everywhere in the body. Cells cooper ate with one
another. They understand that the good of the whole body
is paramount. They live in the present moment and base
their lives on trusting that nourishment will always  come to
them. They know how to self -heal. Second attention promotes these values, not by analyzing
the activity of cells but by going to the source, from which
life is susta ined. Since writing Quantum Healing,  I’ve
become even  more convinced that consciousness holds the
key to the ﬂow of life whether you deﬁne life scientiﬁcally,
mystically, or through any other label. While we argue over
labels, we are missing the opportunity to promote the silent
intelligence that is crucial to everything. A practical-minded reader will say, “Fine, but what do I
do. ” Beyond making the positive lifestyle changes that
have become well-known, there are more subtle actions to
perform. These are mental actions, but they aren’t the
same as positive thinking, therapy, or even self-awareness. They focus instead on attention and intention. When you
have an intention to move your hand, there are no steps to
go through. The instant you want to move your hand, it
moves. But what about the intention to heal yourself or the
intention to promote peace in your surroundings. Science ﬁnds itself skeptical and largely baﬄed  when
such questions come up—they are barely considered
legitimate. Yet on the fringes of respectability there are
mounting research studies on the power of praye r to helpthe sick. Since Quantum Healing  appeared, other studies
have gone even deeper into the eﬀectiveness of intention. Especially intriguing is a pioneering study of native
Hawaiian healers led by the late Dr. Jeanne Achterberg, a
physiologist of the mind-body connection who was
fascinated by anecdotes that native healers often did their
work from a distance. Here’s how the Achterberg study
worked, as described in Super Brain,  which I wrote with
Rudolph E. Tanzi. In 2005, after a two-year search, she and her
colleagues gathered eleven Hawaiian healers. Each had pursued their native healing tradition
for an average of 23 years. The healers were
asked to select a person with whom they had
successfully worked in the past and with whom
they felt an empathic connection. This person
would be the recipient of healing in a controlled
setting. The healers described their methods in a
variety of ways—as prayer, sending energy, good
intentions, or simply thinking and wishing the
highest good for their subjects. Achterberg simply
called these eﬀorts distant intentionality (DI). Each recipie nt was isolated from the healer
while undergoing an fMRI of their brain activity. The healers were asked to randomly send DI at
two-minute intervals; the recipients could not
have anticipated when the DI was being sent. Yet
their brains did. Signiﬁcant diﬀerences were
found between the expe rimental (send) periods
and control (no-send) periods in ten out of eleven
cases. For the send periods, speciﬁc areas within
the subjects’ brains “lit up” on the fMRI scan,
indicating increased metabolic activity. This did
not occur during the no-send periods. Skeptics dism iss such studies without actually trying to
duplicate them or to understand the hidden mechanics of
intention. However, in the Vedic tradition, there has been a
sophisticated description  of the mechanics of intention
going back centuries. It was divided into three parts. First,
an eﬀective intention must arise in a deep level of the
mind, below  the stream of constant activity. The very
deepest state of awareness, which is calm, still, unmoved,
and all-wise, is known in Sanskrit as samadhi. What Helps Samadhi
•Meditation
•Calm, peaceful surroundings
•Lack of mental agitation
•Absence of stress
•Minimal distractions
•Self-acceptance
•Self-awareness
What Hurts Samadhi
The opposite of the above: anything that jangles the
mind, makin g it restless, overactive, stressed, and
outward gazing
The second part of the mechanics of intention is to have
the intention  be as clear and focused as possible. This gives
awareness a speciﬁc direction. The term for this in Sansk rit
is dharana. What Helps Dharana
•Clear thinking
•Acting purposefully
•Not losing sight of the goal
•Conﬁdence
•The ability to stick with a mental task
•Follow-through
•Diligence
What Hurts Dharana
•Multitasking
•Mental confusion
•Conﬂicted desires
•Lack of self -knowledge
•Fantasy and daydreaming
•Short attention span
•A craving to escape the self
The third part of the mechanics of intention is a state of
ﬂexibility where your mind is steady and active at the same
time. You can see this state when a child is totally
engrossed in playing with a toy. His attention is on nothing
else, and yet inside the play, he does all kinds of things
(pushing a toy truck, throwing ﬁnger paint on the walls). When you have an intention, your focus is sharp, but then
you let go and allow silent intelligence to take care of the
outcome. This isn’t the same as passive indiﬀerence. Youare open and alert, because there can be any response at
all. The term in Sanskrit for this is dhyana. What Helps Dhyana
•Being relaxed and easy
•Mindfulness
•Acceptance of things as they are
•Putting a value on being
•Trust
•Believing in the wisdom of uncertainty
•Allegiance to a higher level of intelligence that
organizes reality
What Hurts Dhyana
•Tension
•Anticipation
•Controlling yourself and others
•Rigidity
•Insistence on rules and routines
•Obsession
•Compulsive behavior
•Inability to believe that the universe supports you
I’ve gone into detail here because at the time of Quantum
Healing,  there were few action steps that pertained to
silent intelligence other than meditation, which remains the
most powerful and direct  means to connect with the mind’sdeeper levels. But meditation too often  lacks a purposeful
component. The toolbox is opened and the tools just lie
there. That’s why it’s important to master the mechanics of
intention. The paradox is that there’s nothing really to do
and yet everything to do. There’s nothing to do as far as
ﬁrst attention is concerned. You live your life, dealing with
its challenges as best you can. At the level of second attention, however, there’s
everything to do, because you are calling upon the
universe, to use a popular phrase, and activating hidden
forces unknown to the outward-looking mind. A now-
obscure Scottish writer and mountaineer, W. H. Murray, hit
upon the mechanics of intention with uncanny precision,
intuiting the same things that the V edic sages described. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of
which kills countless ideas and splendid plans;
that the mom ent one deﬁnitely commits oneself,
then providence moves too. Having discovered the connection between what happens
“in here” (intention) and what happens “out there” (the
forces that an intention can move), Murray saw that these
awakened forces exist to support human aspirations. All sorts of things occur to help one that would
never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of
events issue s from the decision raising in one’s
favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings
and material assistance which no one could have
dreamed would have come their way. For quantum healing to be completely viable, the power
of intention must be harnessed, calling not upon“providence,” which many people don’t accept, but upon
the inner intelligence that more and more scientiﬁc
evidence supports. That the mind can move molecules is
just as wondrous as faith moving mountains. OceanofPDF. comOceanofPDF. comA boy in India never has to wish for a time machine. When I
was seven, a two-minute walk took me from Daddy’s army
hospital to the Poona grand bazaar. There the old smells
hung in the air—saﬀron, dust, sandalwood, and cooking
ﬁres (not that I noticed them then, being glued to the snake
charmers). In the hospital, the only smell was of Dettol, an
all-purpose cleanser that stung your nose like straight
formaldehyde. Physicists compare time to an arrow; in
India, the arrow got bent and meets itself going backward. We adjusted to it. If a soldier came in with a puncture
wound in his foot, my father gave him a tetanus shot, but if
the man wanted to hobble out and make an oﬀering to
Shiva, my father understood. Now when I go back home, I look out the airplane
window and see bullocks plowing within sight of the
tarmac. In the cities, it is not uncommon for businessmen
dressed in impeccable copies of English wool suits to step
around the bodies of sadhus, or holy men, who sit calmly in
the middle of the sidewalks clothed in loincloths and
orange robes. The daily scene is like an archaeological digwhose layers are hopelessly mixed up, or better yet, where
the layers have jumped out of the ground and come to life. Every dig has to have a bottom layer, though. In this case,
it is the sadhus. India’s holy men date from at least three
thousand years before the birth of Christ. Their words have
been recorded and passed on in the original Sanskrit,
which lays good claim to being man’s ﬁrst language. Their
traditional home is still the Himalayas, where they go to sit
in samadhi, or deep meditation, for days or weeks at a
time. For them, life is totally dedicated to inner silence. Very occasionally, the thought might enter their heads that
they should go on a pilgrimage. Picking up their begging
bowls, they then set oﬀ to the south, trusting to nature to
provide them with the necessary food and shelter. In
modern times, they can usually board any train or bus
without a ticket. As a child what I knew of sadhus came from one of my
uncles, my father’s older brother, who traveled all over the
country selling sports equipment. We called him Bara
Uncle, or “big uncle,” a name that set him apart from our
lesser relations. He inevitably  arrived at our door with ﬁeld
hockey sticks (India traditionally used to beat the rest of
the world in this minor sport), soccer balls, or badminton
shuttles as presents. Naturally, we couldn’t wait to see him. Bara Uncle was hugely aﬀable and gregarious. He spun
fabulous tales about the wonders he met on his way. The
most vivid happened in Calcutta. Bara Uncle was pushing
his way through the crowds when he almost stumbled over
an old sadhu sitting near the curb. Absentmindedly, my
uncle reached into his pocket, found two annas (about two
cents), and put them in the sadhu’s bowl. The sadhu shot
him a glance and said, “Make a wish for anything you
want. ”
Taken aback, my uncle blurted, “I want some burﬁ. ” Burﬁ
is an Indian candy, like fudge, that is usually made fromalmonds or coconut. Very calmly the sadhu reached his
right hand into the air, materialized two pieces of fresh
burﬁ, and gave them to Bara Uncle. Astounded, he stood
transﬁxed for a few seconds, just enough time for the
sadhu to rise and melt like a shadow into the crowd. My
uncle never  saw him again. In a way, he got a fair
exchange, since his two annas would have bought  him two
pieces of burﬁ from a sweetmeat vendor on the street. But
every time he told the story, my uncle would shake  his head
and mourn, “I am still thinking of all the things I could have
wished for. ”
As a boy, I ﬁrmly believed Bara Uncle’s story, but in
contemporary India, people are more likely to see a sadhu
and skeptically wonder if he is real. Starting in the 1920s,
scientists from Europe and America began to visit India to
observe the various swamis, yogis, and sadhus of every
description. Some had attained remarkable degrees of
control over their bodies—they could apparently stop
breathing for minutes at a time or bring their heartbeats
down almost to zero. A typical procedure woul d consist of
taking one of those “saints,” as holy men are commonly
called in India, and burying him in a box six feet
underground. This was supposedly a scientiﬁc experiment,
but of a very crude sort. After a few days, when the box
was unearthed, you either had a result or you didn’t. The
desired result would be that the saint was still alive. Almost
all the physiological studies from the early days are very
shallow in their approach, and many reﬂect this weird
combination of science and sideshow. A sadhu’s control over his body, however, is still physical
and misses the point of his existence. Such people are out
to break through the mask of physical appearance s; in our
terms, they want to leave  the world “above the line” to ﬁnd
out what lies beneath. Indian life, in fact, has traditionally
been arranged to make this quest possible. After a man hasbeen educate d, raised a family, and enjoyed the rewards of
material existence, he is expected to take sanyasa —that is,
he renounces the householder life, takes up the begging
bowl, and goes oﬀ in search of something else. If you say
that he is searching for God, for truth, for reality, or for
himself, all of these would not be quite right, because the
essence of the quest is that the goal is unknown. He is
setting oﬀ into another world that cannot be tracked from
this one. To use our terms again, he is setting out across
the gap. I grew up to put on a Western-style suit and step around
saints on the sidewalk, but as I looked deeper into the
issues of mind-body medicine, I kept returning to India’s
ancient traditions. The second part of this book centers on
what I have found. The known world of our senses, of
atoms and molecules, does not just break oﬀ abruptly; it
shades imper ceptibly into a diﬀerent reality. At some point,
however, one reality ﬂips into another. Time and space
acquire a diﬀerent meaning; the neat divisions between
inner and outer reality disappear. We ﬁnd ourselves in a
world that has never been explored as well as in India. In
his purest form, the sadhu is an investigator into the
transcendental reality lying beyond the gap—th at is the
tradition he upholds, one of the longest and wisest on our
planet. To understand his ﬁndin gs will take us on a new
road, away from physics, but still on much the same track,
in search of ourselves. —
In the West, before the advent of the theory of relativity,
there was no question that time, space, matter, and energy
occupied separate compartments of reality. Our senses
detect a tree as entirely diﬀerent from a beam of light or a
spark of electricity; we may feel that time is a more
mysterious entity, capable of slowing down, speeding up, oreven standing still, but we would never say, “I like New
York better than Monday. ” It seems self-evident that time
and space, matter and energy, are opposite pairs, for the
simple reaso n that none can be turned into the others. The
normal world of the senses can be diagrammed in our
familiar manner:
After Einstei n published the equation E=mc2, this simple,
commonsense view had to change, for it was now possible
(as the atomic bomb proved) for matter to be transformed
into huge amounts of energy. The general theory of
relativity did the same thing for the separation between
time and space. Now physics deals in a fused entity called
space-time, which can be bent to ﬁt certain circumstances
(whenever an object travels near the speed of light, for
example). After proving that nature was much less
compartmentalized than science had previously thought,
relativity opened another, even more surprising possibility. Einstein suggested that one underlying ﬁeld exists as the
background for all transfo rmations of space-time and mass-
energy. This implies a level of nature that is totally fused; in
other words, there is a region of space-time-matter-energy. Einstein was intuitively convinced of this possibility—the
ultimate demolition of the world of the senses—at a time
when no one else had the vision to consider it seriously. Beginning in the 1920s, he spent the last thirty years of hislife, isolated from the other physicists of his generation and
largely ignored, trying to compute the mathematics for a
“uniﬁed ﬁeld theory. ” His theory would unite all the basic
forces in creation and thereby explain the unive rse as a
whole. Instead of four compartments, there would be one. “To unite,” in the sense that physicists use the word,
means to prove that two things that appear to be totally
diﬀerent can transform into each other at a deeper level of
nature. The photon and the light wave are classic examples
of this: they appear to be entirely diﬀerent, yet at an
inﬁnitesimal level of nature, called the Planck scale, which
is more than a billion billion times smaller than the smallest
atom, the photon and the light wave can be united. No one
has yet solved the math ematics for a uniﬁed ﬁeld. That
would be as much as solving the entire hidden zone we
have labeled  with a. (A new theory, however, called the
superstring may have cracked the problem at last, thirty
years after Einstein’s death. ) In the face of a problem that rational thought cannot
solve, science necessarily stops, but other routes may be
open. Thousands of years ago, the ancient rishis,  or seers,
of India also contemplated this question of whether nature
is ultimately uniﬁed. A rishi is like a sadhu in that his life is
devoted to silence and the inner life, but rishis lived much
further in the past—they were responsible for writing the
most ancient texts of Veda, or revealed truth, such as Rig
Veda, which may predate the Egyptian pyramids by several
thousand years. If you ask a modern India n what the Veda is, he will point
to the books that contai n the rishis’ words, but in truth
Veda is the content of the rishis’ consciousness,  which is
alive. A rishi has seen deep enough into the nature of
things that even God sits at his feet to learn—th e lesson
can be found in the Yoga Vasishtha, in which the youngLord Rama, a divine incarnation, begs the sage Vasishtha
for instruction. I am not emphasizing the spiritual value of the rishi and
his knowledge here. Until very recently in human history,
all cultures freely blende d religion, psychology, philosophy,
and art into one homogeneous whole. But individual
strands can be pulled out; in this case, I am interested in
what the rishis had to say about the fundamental nature of
reality (in the Yoga Vasishtha, God also showed a lively
interest in this subject). The rishis were just as capable as
we are of dividing nature up into space, time, matter, and
energy, but they turned their backs on such an approach,
which so totally dominates our way of seeing and thinking
about the world. They chose instead to solve the problem in the most
practical way imaginable. They decided to cross the gap
and actually enter the. zone, where thinking cannot go. They used a simple twist in their awareness, but one that
has profound consequences—it was like turning the
objective world inside out. To do that, the rishis had to
analyze nature in an unexpected way, which can be
represented by another diagram:
This diagram is just as valid as the one on page 206, but
it looks on the world from a purely subjective viewpoint. Rather than seeing time, space, matter, and energy “outthere,” the rishis observed that reality begins “in here,”
with our conscious awareness. At any particular time, they
reasoned, a person must be in one of three states of
subjective awareness—waking, sleeping, or dreaming. What he perceives in these states constitutes his reality. The ancients assumed that reality was thus diﬀerent in
diﬀerent states of consciousness—a tiger in the dream state
is not a tiger in the waking state. It obeys entirely diﬀerent
laws, and similarly, the laws of the sleep state, although not
known to the conscious mind, must be distinct from those
of the waking and dreaming states. The rishis looked closer and detected between each of
these states a gap that acts like a pivot as one reality turns
into another. For example, just before falling asleep, the
mind gradually leaves the waking state, withdra wing the
senses, shutting out the waking world, but at the junction
point before the mind actually falls asleep, a brief gap is
opened, identical to the one that ﬂashes by between each
thought: it is like a little window into the ﬁeld that is
beyond either wakefulness or sleep. This realization opened
the possibility for leaving behind the usual boundaries of
the ﬁve senses by diving through the gap. Considering that the West is supposed to be practi cal and
the East mystical, it is fascinating to ﬁnd that the rishis
were much more avid for direct experience than any
quantum physicist. Their subjective approach was called
Yoga, the Sanskrit word for “union. ” (The various exercises
taught in yoga classes belong to just one of its branches,
called Hatha Yoga; we will be looking at Yoga’s most
powerful approach, which is mental. ) Because both are
looking for an underlying  layer of unity in nature, one can
immediately see the resemblance between Yoga and
Einstein’s quest for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory. The major
diﬀerence between the two is that the rishis, not being
theoretical, declared that the uniﬁed ﬁeld exists in the realworld—it is an experience and not merely a mental
construct. From the rishis’ subjective viewpoint, the only thing that
the uniﬁed ﬁeld could be is another state of consc iousness. They called it simply turiya,  or the fourth, to denote that it
was not part of the three states of waking, sleeping, and
dreaming. They also referred to it as para,  or beyond,
meaning that it transcended ordinary experience. But how
could a fourth state even  exist. The answer was twofold. First, the seers said that the fourth state exists everywhere
but is hidden by the other three states as if by a screen. (Some ancient texts declare that the fourth state has been
mixed into the other three like milk into water, and ﬁnding
it is as diﬀicult as separating milk from water. ) Second,
they said that the fourth state can be directly experienced
only after the mind has transcended its normal activity,
which requires the special technique of meditation. The word rishi itself stands for a person who has learned
to enter the fourth state at will and observe what  is there. This ability is not “thinkin g” as we use the term—t he whole
phenomenon is an immediate experience, like recognizing
the fragrance  of lilacs or the sound of a friend’s voice. It is
immediate, nonverbal, and, unlike a ﬂower’s fragrance,
totally transforming. As they sat in meditation, deeply
absorbed in their own subjective awareness, the rishis
explored turiya the way we would look at the Grand
Canyon. As individuals, these seers have names, but going
into the transcendent blurred the edges of what we
consider personal identity. Vasishtha, for example, is not
just the name of one of the greatest of the ancient  rishis; it
stands for an integra l part of Veda—transc endental
knowledge—which the man Vasishtha ﬁrst cognized; to
truly know that part of Veda, one would have to be in
“Vasishtha consciousness. ” In short, these sages observed
existence in its purest form. —
For all intents and purposes, there was no way for the West
to systematically test the existence of the fourth state. Lacking the right techniq ue, the scientiﬁc comm unity has
ignored turiya. In fact, many scientists would consider it
irrelevant or threatening. The very notion of “union” brings
undesirable images to mind: dissolving into a state of
nothingness, or losing one’s identity like a drop of water
disappearing into the ocean. Despite occasional bursts of
enthusiasm for Eastern ideas, the progress of knowledge in
the West has overwhe lmingly depended on outward
observation, not inner. But if there is a state that transcends the usua l three,
then it seems likely that it would show up from time to
time, if only by accident. For example, Charles Lindbergh
reported one experience that took place in 1927, during the
most critical  moments of his life. When he was into the
second day of his histor ic solo ﬂight across the Atlantic,
Lindbergh found that he had passed the limits of physical
exhaustion. Fearing that he would lose control of his craft,
he skirted disaster by ﬁtfully dozing oﬀ and hoping that he
remained on course. Then, as Lindbergh recounts in his
autobiography, a remarkable change of awareness took
place:
Over and over again on the second day of my
ﬂight, I would return to mental alertness
suﬀiciently to realize that I had been ﬂying while I
was neither asleep nor awake. My eyes had been
open. I had responded to my instruments’
indications and held generally to compass course,
but I had lost sense of circumstance and time. During imme asurable periods, I seemed to extend
outside my plane and body, independent ofworldly values, appreciative of beauty, form, and
color without depending upon my eyes. As a child, Lindbergh had lain in the cornﬁelds on his
father’s farm  and felt a similar sense of being “beyond
mortality” as he gazed into the sky. But the episode over
the North Atlantic went further. What Lindbergh concluded
about it was this: “It was an experience in which  both the
intellect and senses were replaced by what might be
termed a matterless awareness…. I recognized that vision
and reality interchange, like energy and matter. ”
Doctors to whom I mention meditation generally assure
me, whether they “believ e” in it or not, that meditation is
for relaxation. It is only in the light of Veda that one can
understand why this view is so shortsighted. —
Veda represents an immense expansion of the human mind. The best way to describe it is that Veda is the total content
of the cosmic computer. All the input of nature is channeled
into it, and out of it ﬂows all natural phenom ena. The
control over this comput er is located in the human brain,
whose billio ns of neural connections give it enough
complexity to mirror the complexity of the universe. The brain is not important as an object, the rishis
contend. It is important because our own subjectivity
shines through it; when our brains show us the world, they
are really showing us ourselves. By analogy, when an image
falls upon a mirror, a blending takes place. The mirror is
the reﬂection; the reﬂection is the mirror. In the same way,
the only reality we can know anything about is the one that
is being mirrored in the brain—everything that exists is
therefore inside our subjectivity. A physicist would not normally agree with this, since he
cherishes the objective method and looks on subjectivity as
virtually his enemy. A physicist says, “This is a proton,” not,
“This is my feeling for what a proton is. ” Actually, Veda is
not devoid of objective knowledge—it gave rise to its own
sciences of botany, physiology, astronomy, medicine, et
cetera—but the rishis did not feel that objectivity was the
most reliable way to know things, particularly once you
investigate deeper than nature’s surface. The truth, they
said, is that subjectivity can be either narrow or expanded. Nature is like a radio band. When you pay attention to an
isolated object—a rock, a star, or an entire galaxy—you
select one channel on the band. The rest obviously has to
be excluded—but only for that level of consciousness. It may be that other levels of consciousness receiv e more
bands, or more than one band at a time. Right now,
physicists estimate that our senses choose less than one-
billionth of the energy waves and particles that surround
us. We live in an “energy soup” incredibly larger than the
world we see. The visible universe itself is now thought to
be but a minuscule version of the original creation, the
residue of a much larger reality that collapsed somewhere
before time began, reducing its original ten dimensions to
our four. (I apologize for using the phrase “before time
began,” which is a blatant paradox, but there is no way to
state verbally how pre–Big Bang events occurred. ) Also, it
appears that at the moment of creation our universe was
ﬁlled with a billion times more energy than we now observe
with radio telescopes; the remainder was reabso rbed into
the same hidden ﬁeld where the other six dimensions went. The rishis declared that through expanded
consciousness, even this inconceivable lost reality  could be
made available to us. Theoretical physics agrees that the
lost dimensions and invisible energy ﬁelds have not actually
gone anywhe re; they have only sunk back to “sleep” in theprimordial ﬁeld. Similarly, the transcendental level of
awareness is available everywhere; you need not go
anywhere special to ﬁnd it. It only needs to wake up. William James expressed this idea in a famous passage:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type
of consciousness, whilst all around it, parted from
it by the ﬂimsiest of screens, there lie potential
forms of consciousness entirely diﬀerent. We may
go through  life without suspecting their
existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at
a touch they are there in all their completeness. If so much more reality is nearby, why can’t we touch it. Researchers found a clue to the answer, curiously enough,
by experime nting with newborn kittens. Kittens are born
with their eyes shut and their optic nerves undeveloped. When they open their eyes, the mechanism for sight
matures at the same time; these two events always go hand
in hand. However, it was found in the mid-1970s that if you
blindfold a kitten during the two or three days when it ﬁrst
opens its eyes, the animal will be blind for life. During thus
brief but critical period, the experience of seeing actually
shapes the inter-neuronal connections in the brain that
make sight possible. This was an important ﬁnding, for biologists continue to
disagree over whether genetics or experience is more
important in behavior. This is the old question of whether a
trait is innate or acquired. Does a robin  learn to sing from
its mother, or will it sing if raised in isolation. The
experiment with the blind kittens showed that both
“nature” and “nurture” are essential; the kitten’s brain is
programmed for sight, yet it requires seeing for the
programming to unfold properly. There is a deeperimplication to all this, however. Our own brains could be
limited in just this way. Many things “out there” don’t exist
for us, not because they are unreal, but because “in here”
we have not shaped the brain to perceive them. We are like
radios that appear to have all the channels when actually
they are stuck on three—waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Because your brain is the only radio you have, you can
never know whether the fourth state exists unless your
nervous system is prepared for it. It is entirely possible that
we are literally bathed and surrounded by the transcendent
and yet have not tuned it in. The Veda gives a supporting analogy: thoughts are like
ocean waves. Rising and falling, they see only their own
motion. They say, “I am a wave,” but the greater truth,
which they do not see, is, “I am ocean. ” There is no
separation between the two, whatever the wave might
suppose. When a wave settles down, then it instantly
recognizes that its source in ocean—inﬁnite, silent, and
unchanging—was always there. The same holds true for the mind. When it is thinking, it
is all activity; when it stops thinking, it returns to its source
in silence. Only then, when the mind touches pure
awareness, will the real storehouse of Veda be located. The
experience of Veda therefore is not ancient or even
particularly Indian. It is universal and can be had at any
moment by any person. The whole trick is not to move
horizontally, which is how the stream of consc iousness
normally moves, but to sink vertically. This vertical descent
is transcend ing, meditation, dhyan, “going beyond”—all
manifestations of a mind that ceases to identify with waves
and begins to identify with ocean. If this argument is right, then the nature of the mind and
the mind-body connection have to be reconside red. The
point that Archimedes was looking for—a place to stand on
and move the world—actu ally exists. It is inside us, coveredup by the fascinating but misleading moving-picture show
of the waking state. This may explain why mind-body medicine has proved so
inconsistent. We casually assume that a person who
survives cancer or can cure himself of a fatal disease
operates with the same mental machinery as anyone else,
but this is not true: mental processes can be deep or
shallow. To go deep means to contact the hidden blueprint
of intelligence and change it—only then can visualization of
ﬁghting cancer, for example, be strong enough to defeat
the disease. But most people cannot do that; their thought
power is too weak to trigger the appropriate mechanisms. —
The practical question is whether meditation is strong
enough to radically improve our thought power. Several
studies cond ucted by scientists have shown that meditation
may in fact induce profound change, far beyond the simple
relaxation that most people use it for in the West, even
beyond the medical applications of relieving stress,
reducing blood pressure, and so on. The ﬁrst Western scientist to make any major
breakthrough with the fourth state was an American
physiologist, Robert Keith Wallace, who proved  that it
existed. In 1967, Wallace was a doctoral student at UCLA,
where he began his Ph. D. research on the physiological
changes that take place during Transcendental Meditation
(a form of mantra meditation). Using the methods of
modern biomedical research, he compiled data from
meditators over a period of several years. Without causing
any discomfort, he wired  them up to measure their brain
waves, blood pressure, heart rate, and other indices of
physical change. Wallace soon began to build a considerable body of
unique results. First, he discovered that something real
was indeed happening to the body in meditation. Within a
few minutes of beginning their practice, his subjects
entered a state of deep relaxation, marked by slower
breathing and heartbeat, by the appearance of alpha waves
in their EEGs (electroe ncephalograms), and decreased
oxygen consumption detected in the breath. This last
measure was particularly  important because it showed that
the body’s metabolic rate, tied to the total consumption of
fuel in the cells, had dropped—physiologists refer to this
metabolic reduction as a “hypometabolic” state. Meditators achieved their deepest relaxation quickly. It
takes four to six hours after falling asleep to reach the
period where oxygen consumption falls to its lowest levels,
while medita tors took only a few minutes. Moreover, in
sleep the drop is usuall y less than 16 percent, whereas
meditators achieved relative reductions that momentarily
dipped almo st twice as low. Wallace was impressed by
these ﬁgures because such a deep state of relaxation had
never been recorded before. What this showed was that the
subjective feelings reported during meditation—inner
silence, peac efulness, and relaxation—had a real physical
basis. It was also very important that these subjects had
not fallen asleep or gone into a trance. They were fully
awake insid e, even feeling a sense of heightened
awareness. Wallace concluded therefore that meditation
was a state of “hypometabolic wakefulness. ” Since his
measurements were diﬀerent from any seen in waking,
dreaming, or sleeping, he concluded that he had veriﬁed an
entirely new state of consciousness—the fourth state. Certain of the meditators had exhibited physical changes
that went far beyond the average. As with the yogis
measured in India and the Himalayas, their breathing
seemed to stop for long stretches. At the subjective level,these deeper states were experienced as absolute inner
silence, a feeling of vast expansion, and a profound
knowingness. The mind was emptie d of all speciﬁc
thoughts but left with the clear awareness of “I know
everything. ” No one could explain these experiences,
because scientiﬁc instruments are too crude to analyze or
even detect them. To anyone versed in the Vedic literature, however, it was
obvious that these subjects were experiencing
transcendental awarene ss of a deep sort. The Yoga
Vasishtha, one of the greatest sources on direct experience
of the transcendent, says of the fourth state, “When there
is eﬀortless suspension of breath, that is the supreme state. It is the Self. It is pure, inﬁnite consc iousness. He who
reaches this does not grieve. ” It would be hard to ﬁnd a
better descr iption of what the physiologists were seeing. Wallace looked at physical measurements made with Zen
meditators in Japan and found comparable results; what
was astonish ing, howeve r, was that his American subjects,
most of them young, posthippie, and new to meditation,
were achieving the same scores as Zen adepts who had
practiced meditating for ten years. Seen in a diﬀerent light, what Wallace did was to
legitimize the mind-body connection. It is now accepted
fact that one’s body spontaneously responds to one’s state
of awareness, just as the rishis said. The paradox is that we
have to learn to dive inside at all. Meditation teaches us to
control a process that is constantly inﬂuencing us every
day, whether we realize it or not. Recently I saw a Boston woman in her sixties who for
several years had been suﬀering from a slow degeneration
of the heart muscle called cardiomyopathy. There are
various kinds of cardio myopathy; hers was considered
idiopathic, meaning that no cause could be found for it. Her
main symptom at the time of diagnosis was shortness ofbreath whenever she exerted herself—she was
experiencing heart failure from the enlargemen t of her
heart. Medicine can do little or nothing for this disease,
which greatly worried her, but when she had last seen her
cardiologist two months earlier, he had suggested that she
go into the hospital for an angiogram. The purpose of an angiogram is to determine if the
coronary arteries, the vessels sending oxygen to the heart,
are blocked. The cardiolo gist was reasoning that if there
was any blockage, some  of her problem might be due to
arterial disease, which is treatable. Apprehensively she
underwent the test. The angiogr apher, who was also a
physician, came to her room afterward. “I have good news,” he said. “Your vessels are clean— you
don’t have coronary artery disease. As far as I’m
concerned, there is no need for surgery. ” As he was
leaving, he turned to her and remarked, “If your condition
gets any worse, the only thing that really can be done is to
have a heart transplant. ”
The woman had never been told this before, and within a
few days she began to have shortness of breath not just on
exertion but whenever she lay down. Unable to sleep and
getting more and more anxious, she returned to her
cardiologist, who could ﬁnd no reason for the worsening of
her symptoms. Finally he confronted her one day, and she
told him she was afraid of having a heart transplant. He
assured her that her fears were groundless—her condition
was by no means advanced enough for such a drastic
procedure. From that day on, her new symptoms
disappeared. —
Once again we see that subjective reality and objective
reality are tightly bound  together. When the mind shifts,the body cannot help but follow. Objective reality looks
obviously more ﬁxed than our subjective moods, ﬂeeting
desires, and swings of emotion. Yet perhaps it is not; it is
more like a violin string that can hold one pitch but also
change pitch as your ﬁnger slides along it—that image
occurred to me thinking about Chitra’s case at the
beginning of this book, but it holds true for all of us. What the pitch on the string stands for is your level of
consciousness. This is a very basic inner attribute, like a
focal point on which all your thoughts, emotions, and
desires conve rge, or a pair of green glasses that makes the
whole world look green. Most people don’t realize how
consistent their pitch is, but others are quite aware of it—a
depressed person radiates depression, even when he forces
himself to act positive; a hostile person can set a whole
room on edge, even if he says the most harmless things. One’s level of consciousness ﬁts into broad guidelines. Nobody is absolutely hostile or joyful, intelligent or dull,
satisﬁed or discontent; dozens of subtle gradations exist in
every personality. The important point is that everything you think and do is
determined by this point—you cannot think yourself to a
higher or lower level of consciousness. This helps explain
why meditat ion is not simply another kind of thinking or
introspection, a mistake Westerners tend to make. It is
actually a way to slide to a new pitch. The process of
transcending, or “going beyond,” detaches the mind from
its ﬁxed level and allows it to exist, if only for a moment,
without any level at all. It simply experiences silence,
devoid of thoughts, emotions, drives, wishes, fears, or
anything at all. Afterward, when the mind returns to its
usual pitch (level of consciousness), it has acquired a little
freedom to move. From a medical standpoint, a disease may represent a
place on the violin string  that is out of tune. Yet, for somereason, the mind-body system cannot ﬁnd a way to let go,
to slide to a healthier pitch. If that is so, then medita tion
may be a powerful therapeutic tool, allowing the body to
get unstuck from the disease. Meditation researchers
caught on to this poten tial in the late 1960s when they
discovered that many college-age meditators who used
alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs spon taneously
quit their habit within a few months of beginning to
meditate. We can call this getting unstuck from an old level
of consciousness that needed the drug; in terms of
neuropeptides, it may be that the meditation freed up
certain receptor sites by oﬀering molecules that were more
satisfying than alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana. —
By 1978, Robert Keith Wallace had spent more than a
decade validating separate mind-body eﬀects on
meditators. He decided to follow a new lead and investigate
a more complex, holistic  area, human aging. The aging
process has traditionally been accepted without question as
an inevitable  aspect of normal life, and variations in it have
been considered largely individual. Some people live longer
than others owing to privileged genes, a strong immune
system, or good luck, but there is no anti-aging factor that
can be applied to everyone. If there were, then 70-year-olds
would be more uniformly healthy in their bodily functions,
just as most 20-year-olds are. However, there is no scientiﬁc proof that aging is normal
—it is just something we all happen to do. So many stresses
are involved in “normal” living that the physiology  might be
considered under abnor mal pressure all the time—from
noise, pollu tion, negative emotions, improper diet,
smoking, alcohol, and so on. Just “the disease of being in a
hurry” hastens aging in almost everyone today. Ifmeditation counters these factors, then it might reveal
something entirely new about the aging process. Wallace set out to measure a group of adult meditators
for what is called biological age. Biological age shows how
well a person’s body is functioning compared to the norms
of the whole population. It gives a truer measure of how
the aging process is progressing than does chronological or
calendar age, because any two people who are both 55
years old by the calendar  will generally have very diﬀerent
bodies. Initially all that Wallace needed to test were three
rather simple variables: blood pressure, acuteness of
hearing, and near-point vision (the ability to see objects
close-up). All three steadily deteriorate as the body
biologically ages and therefore serve as convenient
markers. Wallace discovered that the meditators, as a group, were
signiﬁcantly younger biologically than their chronological
age. The diﬀerence between the two was not small, either—
the female subject who scored the best was fully twenty
years younger than her chronological age. Strikingly, how
much younger a person tested was closely correlated to
how long he had kept up his meditation practice. Wallace
found a dividing line between those who had meditated
fewer than ﬁve years and those who had meditated ﬁve
years or more. The ﬁrst group averaged ﬁve years younger
biologically, while the second averaged twelve years
younger. A backup study condu cted in England later
calculated that each year of regular meditation takes oﬀ
roughly one year of aging. Another ﬁnding that particularly
impressed Wallace’s team was that their older subjects
showed as good results as much younger people. A typical
60-year-old meditating ﬁve years or more would have the
physiology of a 48-year-old. Another important point raised by this remarkable study
is that the subjects were not trying  to age more slowly. They were simply removing an invisible barrier, and then
the desirable physical changes took place of their own
accord. This spontaneous ﬂowering seems to be quite
nonspeciﬁc; a 1986 Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance
study based on two thousand meditators in Iowa showed
that they were much healthier than the American
population as a whole in seventeen major areas of serious
disease, both mental and physical. This was a very
signiﬁcant improvement. For example, the meditation
group was hospitalized 87 percent less often than
nonmeditators for heart disease and 50 percent less often
for all kinds of tumors. There were equally impressive
reductions in disorders of the respiratory system, the
digestive tract, clinical depression, and so forth. Although
the study was limited to one group, this is very encouraging
news for anyone who wants to follow a holistic program of
prevention. —
The fourth state may play an important role in our future. At the source of human awareness lies a super-normal level
of consciousness—it can become normal, however, once we
have accustomed ourselves to experiencing it. If turiya is
the mind’s birthplace, then why can’t it be the mind’s
permanent home. This is the next area to explore,
investigating whether nature is uniﬁed not just in Einstein’s
hypothetical model but in ourselves. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
In hindsight, the practical side of this chapter, connecting
meditation with positive changes in the brain, has only
expanded. * Rese arch into medita tion continues apace,following the same lines I described thirty years ago. Vital
signs are seen to improve, and various eﬀects on brain
function can be observed with ever-increasing accuracy. Skeptics have been thoro ughly driven out of the debate on
these issues, but not on the notion of unbounded
awareness. Recognition of a fourth state of consciousness,
beyond waking, dreamin g, and sleeping, arous es ﬁerce
opposition because “unb ounded” would mean that mind
exists outside the brain. The path to proving the reality of unbounded awareness
isn’t by introducing cosmic mind, not if you want to
convince anyone who would suspect that God’s in the
wings. It’s more convincing, especially to doctors, if you
direct them to the intima te scale of the human body. When
someone asks, “Where is the mind located. ” they will
automatically point to their heads. Why. Is it because  we
automatically expect to experience our thoughts in our
heads. That seems to be the case. When dream ing at night,
it gets a bit more ambiguous, since we feel that we are
“inside” our dreams. But for most of us, most of the time,
“my head” is where “my mind” is located. This response may feel true simply because so many
sense organs are located there: eyes, ears, nose, tongue. But we can easily undermine the commonsense model of
sight and sound taking place in the head. When a car
backﬁres behind you, the sound can’t be felt entering the
ear canal, being processe d in the inner ear and then in the
brain’s auditory center. There is no noise in the brain. Quite
clearly the sound of the backﬁring car comes from outside
you. In some cultures, hearing is a faculty that goes from
inside to outside, the opposite of what we assume. Think
about driving down the highway and suddenly noticing the
driver in front of you hitting the brakes. Your attention goes
out in order to see his rear lights go on. The senses follow
attention, which makes it plausible to say your mind wentoutside your body when you spotted the brake lights. We
casually adopt this model for vision when we say that
someone “shoots a glance” at someone else. Babies, we are told, have  a much more diﬀuse experience
of the ﬁve senses, perhaps mixing them up in what are
called synesthesias (for example, experiencing sounds as
colors or tastes as shapes, an experience reported from
hallucinogenic drugs and in deep meditative states). Some
researchers contend that babies therefore have  a poor
sense of the boundary between themselves and the world. But infants turn into toddlers, and the separation between
self and the world starts to harden. Society and family
reinforce this habit as the toddler grows up, and eventually
the mind takes its seat in our heads, or so it seems. In
altered states, whether induced by drugs or in deep
meditation, there are countless reports, echoed by Charles
Lindbergh in his transatlantic ﬂight, of the mind extending
in all direct ions. There are even subjective reports of
sitting in a chair and reaching out to touch some velvet
drapes far across the room—the senses literally go where
they are directed. Neuroscientists would call such experiences anomalies,
declaring resolutely that mind and brain have taken up
residence together in a box called the skull. But it is
undeniably possible to literally “think outside the box,”
beginning with the message system discussed in this book
that connect s every cell in the body with whatever is
occurring in the brain. “Fine,” a neuroscientist would
argue, “but the brain is still the machine that makes mind. Take away the brain, and there is no mind. ” But this is the
same as saying that if you turn oﬀ the radio, there is no
music. You haven’t destroyed the music, only the receiver. One must be open to asking some culturally radical
questions, including the most radical of all: Is a brain evennecessary for “thinking”. There are diﬀerent ways to
explore this issue. First, let’s consider whether only human brains  create
minds. Few people who have pets or live on farms would
say that the animals they encounter don’t have minds. There is already abun dant evidence that the genes,
receptors, and neurotran smitters involved in human brain
function are present in animals. Saying that diﬀerent kinds
of animal brains create minds is not so troublesome if you
insist that the mind is rooted in these shared processes and
chemicals. We aren’t able to describe what animal minds
are like (some may lack anything like human self-
awareness), but we shouldn’t have a problem conceiving
that these creatures have one. Second, there are nervo us systems on the evolutionary
ladder than don’t require a central brain. Some creatures,
like jellyﬁsh, have neuron al nets distributed throug hout the
body. We, too, have such systems. Your gastrointestinal
tract sends and receives signals from the peripheral nerves
that branch out from the spinal cord. But digestion can
function quite well when severed from the peripheral
nervous system. As in the jellyﬁsh, your gut constitutes a
weblike intestinal nervous system. In the language of cell
biology, specialized ganglion cells are located between
muscle layer s in the intestinal wall that act like a local
brain. If one severs any peripheral nerves, these ganglion
cells continue to instruct the intestine to move and absorb
and secrete, working quite autonomously as a self-
contained functional unit. It turns out that the intestinal tract only takes advice
from the rest of the body. It harbors its own reactions. When bad news gives you a sinking feeling in the pit of
your stomach, you are experiencing an emotion as surely as
you experience it in your head. In fact, your gut reaction
precedes the thought. Does this mean that your intestinalnervous system creates such reactions on its own. That’s
unclear, but it’s tempting to think so. Certainly many
people trust their gut reactions over the confused and
compromised responses that the brain is often  saddled
with. The muscles of your face are directly linked to your brain. While we assume that the brain is telling the mouth and
lips to smile when we’re  feeling happy, the reverse is also
true. Seeing a smile on someo ne else’s face can make you
happy, and children are taught to smile as a way to break
out of a sad mood. Whether this works or not varies from
person to person, but it could be argued that the face is
controlling the brain in those instances. Findings about brainlike processes outside the skull have
become common. The conduction system inside the heart,
including pacemaker cells, which organizes your heartbeat,
can be thoug ht of as the heart’s brain in the same  way the
ganglion cells in the gut are the brain of the intest ines. The
independence of the conduction system is shown when a
transplanted heart keeps beating even though the nerves
that connected it to the donor’s central and peripheral
nervous systems have been severed. The interaction
between the heart’s independent processing and the
brain’s is complex and not fully understood. Still more mysterious are the trillions of bacteria that
outnumber the body’s cells by ten to one, living mostly
inside the digestive tract but also on the skin and in the
brain and other organs. We think of these bacteria as
invaders, but over eons these microorganisms have actually
been incorporated into vast stretches along the double
helix of human DNA. The implications for what we call
“being huma n” are enormous and largely uncharted. Taken
as a whole, the bacterial component of the body is known
as the microbiome. It doesn’t sit passively on the skin or in
the gut, nor does it invade the body. Instead, themicrobiome is the border between “in here” and “out
there,” possessed of genes, receptors, and chemical
messaging that make the same things possible for the
brain. The function  of the microbial DNA that is woven into
our genes isn’t known, but at the very least this is ancestral
information we’ve assimilated as our own. More
suggestively, this once-foreign DNA may be the switching
agent for the genes in all higher life-forms. These discoveries prove that our intelligence extends to
the entire ecology. Mind has a physical basis everywhere. Any attempt  to isolate it in the skull runs into serious
objections. Instead of viewing unbou nded awareness with
skepticism, we need to see that every thought is
unbounded. You cannot see, hear, or touch anything in the
world without reaching beyond the illusory boundary of the
isolated body. To watch a sunset is literally like watching
yourself. * As an example of today’s sophisticated measurements, a November 2013
survey in Scientiﬁc American  of the eﬀects of meditation cited the following:
Meditation not only changes brain neuronal interconnections, but it also
increases brain tissue volume, decreases the volume of the amygdala,
increases telomerase activity, and diminishes inﬂammation and other
biological stresses that occur at the molecular level.
Silent intelligence is the unseen, unnamable, and unseeable force that guides every action to its highest and best use, giving meaning and purpose to all experiences.
What is the concept of "silent intelligence" and its significance in the body?
The second attention is a state of awareness that allows one to connect with the universe and harness the power of intention. It is distinct from the first attention, which focuses on the external world, as it allows one to tap into the inner self and communicate with the body.
What is the purpose of the second attention, and how does it differ from first attention?
The diagram represents the idea that the universe is a unified, interconnected web, and it is not just a collection of separate components. This concept is not limited to Vedic tradition but is a fundamental aspect of the universe, as seen in the experiments with kittens and the study on the power of intention.
What is the significance of the diagram in the Vedic tradition, and how does it relate to the concept of a unified field?
The rishis did not believe in separating the world into compartments, whereas modern scientists have been trained to approach reality in a compartmentalized manner, which limits their understanding of the interconnectedness of all things.
What is the main difference between the rishis' approach and that of modern scientists?
The study shows that meditation can have a profound impact on the body, as it can induce profound changes in the brain, heart rate, and other physiological processes. The implications of this study suggest that the mind is not just in the brain, but is a fundamental aspect of the universe, and its influence on the body is crucial for our well-being.
What is the significance of the study on the effects of meditation on the body, and what are the implications of this study?