However , very early on he realized that as diﬀerent as
each person was, their experiences fell onto a continuum. There wasn’t  a single enlightened state but rather  a sliding
scale. To ﬁnd neutral ground, and to ﬁt the accepted model
of what doctoral research must look like, he adopted the
cumbersome tag Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience. “There is a shift in what it feels like to be you,” Martin
notes. “You move away from an individual sense of sense,
which is considered normal, to something else.”
Deﬁning what “something else” is wasn’t easy, because
these people came from diﬀerent backgrounds and were
inﬂuenced by cultural factors. However , Martin was able to
identify four areas of change. If you found yourself shifting into Location 1, it would be
typical to report that you have fewer thoughts than before. “You might say something to me like ‘All of my thoughts are
gone,’ and the kinds of thoughts that go away are ones that
refer to the individual self,” says Martin. Which isn’t
surprising if you are experiencing a loss of “I” as a separate
isolated being.Putting ourselves in their shoes, these people don’t keep
a runn ing story in their heads about what’s happening to
“me.” When they think about themselves, it fades away as
soon as they notice it. The same is true for their emotions,
which are fewer and more spontaneous. When anger arises,
it fades almost immediately . Emotions were still positive
and negative but rarely if ever extreme. The person could
be irritated when stuck in traﬀic, yet they didn’t carry the
residue of stress around with them afterward, and it would
never build into road rage. They felt a sense of inner peace
that could be interrupted, but quite soon it would return. Such a person is operating in a bigger “self space,”
rather than being cramped inside the narrow conﬁnes of
the ego . They feel freer and more expanded. This applies to
their bodies as well; they often report that the body has no
ﬁxed boundaries but extends in all directions. Once they
arrived in Location 1, people usually kept progres sing—the
highest state Martin calls Location 4—and they rarely
slipped back  or jumped ahead. Everything happened
internally , and for many the shift wasn’t spiritual. It was
just the way they experienced themselves. “If you sat in a roomful of people and a small percentage
belong to this altered sense of self,” says Martin, “you
wouldn’t be able to spot them. To all outer appearances
they are just like you and me.”
At the outset, before Martin’s research began to expand
to many other universities and countries, his typical subject
was a white male from the United States or Europe,
because women, for unknown reasons, were not eager to
volunteer as enlightened or to discuss what their
experiences were. Religious backgrounds were diverse,
spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet most of the
subjects had done some kind of spiritual pract ice—they
wanted to be in a higher state of consciousness. Curiously ,
around 14 percent had done nothing of this kind. They hadspontaneously popped into higher consciousness or, more
typically , drifted into it. They reporte d being in their new
state anywhere from forty years to as little as two or three. Martin’s research base has expanded to more than a
thousand subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if
“normal” isn’t a ﬁxed state but a spectrum, with
consciousness evolving much further than anyone has
previously predicted. At the very least, higher
consciousness has become much less exotic. It’s no longer
the province of sadhus and yogis in the Himalayas. Martin’s
study focused on body, emotions, sense of self, and
thoughts, which are value neutral, making his work
acceptable in the academy . But he found that the spiritual
dimension had also opene d up. Some subjects reported the
kind of open, clear , silent awareness associated with
Buddhism; others experienced the bliss I discuss in this
chapter . Still others had no idea what to make of their state
of awareness. But they were amazed at the amount of
wellbeing they were experiencing, and this grew as they
moved furth er along the spectrum. (Paradoxically , in
Location 4, all emotion  fell away , even love, and the
richness of bliss was replaced by what Martin calls
complete freedom. Yet his subje cts report that they don’t
miss the experience of emotions and bliss, because in
freedom they have found the very highest state of
wellbeing.) If it is startlin g to realize that enlightenment is all around
us, and that it’s a natural progression, even more intriguing
is the prospect that enlightenment is personal. The way
that you create your own reality doesn’t suddenly  come to
an end; enlightenment isn’t like jumping oﬀ a divin g board. There are as many kinds of enlightenment as there are
people, one might suppose. In a word, evolution itself is
evolving, like everything else.“Normal” won’t be valid until it broadens to include
everyone on the spectrum of consciousness. We will also
need to revise the old deﬁnitions of enlightenment, in fact,
to conform to the present age. The West has almost no
formal institutions, outside monasteries and convents,
geared for people who want to pursue higher states of
consciousness or who have already arrived there. Here’s
what “normal” should encompass. Feeling unbounded
Being at peace
Having a loose attachment to your personal history
Living in the present
Becoming free of negative thought forms and emotions
Breaking away from traumas and wounds from the past
Accepting that higher consciousness is natural, part of
the human continuum
Experiencing more and more self-awareness as you
evolve
Living in a state of wellbeing that continues to grow and
deepen
A venerated  spiritual teacher was once asked,  “What
does it take to be enlightened?” His reply: “You no longer
have a personal stake in the world.” If you identify with the
boundaries erected by “I, me, and mine,” this sounds like a
death sentence. Having a personal stake in the world is
what life is all about, isn’t it? But with a longer view, across
the entire spectrum of consciousness, the opposite is true. When you no longer identify with “I, me, and mine,” you
are ushered into a new world of experience that transcends
the individual. This is the second birth that the Vedas extol
as the true beginning of life.Finally , I ﬁnd it very touching that Martin’s enlightened
subjects, as amazed as they were by their new state,
thought that nothing could be better . “This is as real as it
gets” was a common reaction. But they were wrong. Reality
is inﬁnite, and what makes it inﬁnite isn’t the edge of the
universe racing away faster than the speed of light. The
universe matches human aspirations, and its inﬁnity
reﬂects the inﬁnity inside  us once we wake up and realize
that it exists. * Adapted from Robert K eith W allace’s The Physiology of Consciousness  (M.I.U . Press, 1993). OceanofPDF .comIf asked for an exact deﬁnition of quantum healing , I would
say this: quantum healin g is the ability of one mode of
consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the
mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body). It is
a completely self-enclosed process. If pressed for a shorter
deﬁnition, I would say simply that quantum healing makes
peace. When consciousness is fragmented, it starts a war in
the mind-body system. This war lies behind many diseases,
giving rise to what modern medicine calls their
psychosomatic component. The rishis might call it “the fear
born of duality ,” and they would consider it not a
component but the chief cause of all illness. The body will send many  signals to indicate that a war is
going on. Recently a young French-Canadian woman came
to see me suﬀering from Crohn’s disease, a severe
intestinal disorder characterized by chronic and
uncontrollable diarrhea, accompanied by painful
inﬂammation. Although the cause of Crohn’s disease is
unknown, it strikes mostl y among young adults and may be
connected to a deﬁciency in the immune system. What iswell known is that the intestinal tract is highly sensitive to
emotional states; in this patient’s case, it was not
surprising to hear that she worked long hours under the
high pressure of a downtown Boston advertising ﬁrm. After talking to her for a while, I discovered that she had
learned to meditate several years before. I asked her if she
still kept it up. No, she answ ered, there wasn’t much time
for it; when she did sit down to meditate, it didn’t do much
good, because she usually fell asleep in a few minutes. I then asked if she had adjusted her diet to help her
condition, slowed down the pace of her life, or considered
moving on to a job with less stress. Looking somewhat
impatient, she said no again—she wasn’t going to allow her
disease, which caused her many diﬀiculties, to rule her life. “Look,” I said, “you have  a very serious condition. If this
inﬂammation persists, you may have to have parts of your
intestine surgically remo ved. What are you going to do
about that?” She was quite knowled geable about her
disease, and I didn’t have to tell her that some grim choices
lay ahead. The surgery in question  involves considerable
disﬁguration, since with part of the intestine removed, a
tube has to be extended  out of the abdomen to handle
elimination. Even then, the disease is not cured and tends
to recur in other parts of the intestine. “That’s why I’m here,” she answered. “I want a mental
technique to help me continue to lead a normal life.”
I was seeing  the result of what the rishis called Pragya
aparadh,  the mistake of the intellect. This woman’s body
was crying out for healin g, and it was telling her so every
time she had an attack. She couldn’t even close her eyes to
meditate without her body desperately grabbing some
relief in the form of sleep. Yet, her mind interpreted these
attempts at healing as either irrelevant or troublesome. She insisted on leading a “normal life” of high stress that
her system wasn’t equipped to cope with.“This is not the kind of disease you can ﬁght,” I said,
“because there’s no one on the other side but you.” I
explained that the same neuropeptides that registered
stress in her brain were produced in her intestines. When
she felt fear, frustration, and worry , the identical emotions
were being experienced in her abdomen. I told her that in my opinion she didn’t need any new
mental techn ique—she needed to let her body do what it
wanted to do, which was to get well. The best way to
cooperate with that was to give her body the rest it was
demanding, continue to meditate, change her diet, and
realize that no rewards from her job could possibly
outweigh the danger she had put herself in. Nature was
trying to tell her something very important, and once she
paid attention, her problems would correct themselves. “In a case like yours,” I said, “you already have the best
medicine you could possibly hope for—it’s your own
attention. Right now, the quality of that attention is fearful
and tense, which is why you aren’t getting better . But as
soon as your awareness becomes settled and loses its fear,
your body will recover—it’s up to you.”
She listened to me with interest, but I sensed that she
resented hearing these things. The mistake of the intellect
is insidious. The intellect refuses to believe that everything
is happening inside one mind-body reality; it creates the
ﬁction that the sick body is somewhere else, anyw here else
but in the same situation as itself . Illness is obviously a sign that there is a war going on. According to Ayurveda, the conﬂict is being waged “in
here,” contra ry to the germ theory of disease, which tries
to tell us that the war was started “out there” by invaders
of every kind—bacteria, viruses, carcinogens, et cetera—
which are lying in wait to attack us. Yet, healthy people live
amid these dangers quite safely . Only when the immune
system collapses, as in the case of AIDS , do we realize thatour skin, lungs, mucous linings, intestines, and many other
organs have learned to coexist with outside organ isms in a
delicate balance. The pneumo nia that an AIDS patient
typically catches is caused by a variety of Pneumocystis
that is prese nt in everybody’s lungs all the time. The AIDS
virus activates such diseases from the inside by
demolishing one part of the immune system (the helper T-
cells), thus breaking apart the network of information that
holds us together . In fact, we are this network, which projects itself into the
world as our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Nor
does the network stop with us. The simplistic idea that
germs are our deadly enemy is a half-truth, because germs
are part of the network , too. The whole living world is
bound up in DNA, which has evolved along one channel as
bacteria, along another as plants and animals, and along
still another as man. The environment “out there”
cooperates with the one “in here” like two polarities, in one
sense totally opposed but in another totally comple mentary . If you look at reality from the viewpoint of all DNA, not just
ours, then there is an entire global information network
that has to be kept alive and healthy . Viruses, for example, are capable of mutating very
quickly—that is why a shot that immunizes you from this
year’s ﬂu will usually not be eﬀective next year. The ﬂu
virus will have mutated somewhere around the world into a
completely diﬀerent strain. (One of the AIDS virus’s many
unprecedented talents is its ability to mutate a hundred
times faster than a typical ﬂu virus.) Researchers have
recently speculated that the reason why viruses mutate so
rapidly is to keep pace with new variants of bacteria, thus
carrying to all parts of the globe the news that life is
changing. Getting the ﬂu, therefore , is like getting a news update. Your own DNA learns about alterations in the world’s DNAthat are challenging it, and your DNA then meets the
challenge, not passively but actively . It must prove its
viability by surviving the virus. The immune system rushes
to meet the invader , and they engage in battle, molecule
against molecule. The whole operation is timed to the split
second and leaves no room for error . The macrophages
rush to discover the identity of this new life form, probe it
for vital weaknesses, and then mobilize the genetic
material in their own DNA that will collapse the molecules
of the virus, rendering them harmless. At the same time, the immune cells also destroy  any of
your own cells that have played host to the invader . These
infected host cells have not yet died from the ﬂu. They are
engorged with living viruses that pose a threat after the
immune cells have wiped out all the ﬂu that is gushing
through the bloodstream. To kill an infected host cell,
certain immune cells (killer T-cells) latch onto it from the
outside and puncture holes in the cell wall. Like a deﬂating
tire, the host cell spills out its liquid content, collapses into
an empty bag, and dies. But the host cell is not just eliminated; its DNA is actually
dismantled by other signals from the attacking  immune
cells. This is an absolutely fascinating aspect of the whole
process. What is really happening is that one bit of your
DNA (the immune cell) is dismantling another bit of your
DNA (the host cell), which in fact is just a copy of itself! The only diﬀerence betw een the two is that the second bit
of DNA, in the host cell, has made the mistake of
cooperating with the ﬂu virus. No one knows why this
occurs. As we saw in the last chapter , our cells
mysteriously allow themselves to be killed from within
when viruses attack them. Physically , the virus is no match
for the cell, being thousands of times smaller and less
complex—as one medical writer put it, it is as if abasketball came through the window of a skyscraper and
the whole building fell down. You would think that such mistakes show the
imperfection of the body’s intelligence, but that is too
superﬁcial. What is actually happening here is an exquisite
example of quantum healing at work; in fact, the idea that a
war is going on is just another half-truth, for when one bit
of DNA dismantles another , we are witnessing a totally self-
enclosed process. Every part of a disease reaction, from the
scavenger cells that ﬁrst meet the invader , to the host cells
that take it in, to the macrophages, killer T-cells, helper T-
cells, B-cells, and so on, are all the same DNA expressing
its various abilities. In other words, the DNA has decided to
stage for its own beneﬁt a drama in which every part is
played by itself . Why should DNA put on one mask to succumb to the ﬂu
virus and another to rush in and destroy it? No one has
answered this profound question, but it must have its logic
in the whole scheme of life, the larger drama enacted by all
the DNA in the world. I can make a speculation that we are
watching DNA enrich life by adding as many variations as
can possibly exist on one planet. Nothing that happens to DNA is lost; it all stays within
the self-enclosed system. Once the ﬂu virus is defeated, the
DNA records  the encounter by producing new antibodies
and specialized “memory cells” that ﬂoat around in the
lymph system  and bloodstream for years afterward, adding
to the immense storehouse of information that DNA has
been accum ulating since life began. This is how DNA
makes you a player on the world scene. If I look out my window , I can see a multilane highway
with cars rushing by. Occasionally a jet ﬂies over, sending a
ﬂock of birds twittering into the sky. Gulls circle overhead,
thirty miles inland from  the sea, and in the air is the
distinct smell of the ocean, rich with marine life. All of thisspectacle, including me, is the play of DNA. It has been
projected from a molecule whose responsibility is to unfold
new life without ever compromising life as a whole. Someone once estimated that all the separate DNA of every
person who has ever lived would ﬁt comforta bly in a
teaspoon, and yet if the tightly wound DNA in even a single
cell nucleus of your body  were uncoiled and the pieces laid
end to end, they would stretch out to ﬁve feet. This means
that the genetic thread contained in the body’s 50 trillion
cells is 50 billion miles long—enough to reach the moon
and back 100,000 times. The Veda says that the universe’s
intelligence extends “from smaller than the smallest to
larger than the largest,” and DNA is the physical proof of it. Therefore, it must be wrong to think that conﬂict is the
norm. In general, a state of peace exists between your DNA
and the other DNA “out there.” For every time that you
actually have to ﬁght oﬀ a disease by getting sick, there are
dozens, if not hundreds , of times when your body has
warded oﬀ sickness without any overt symptom. It is only
when there is a distortion “in here” that the immune
system loses its ability to silently defend, heal, and
remember . We tend to forget that peace is the norm. Psychiatrists
and sociolog ists take it as a given that modern man is
deeply divided in his psyche. The rise of stress-related
disorders, depression, anxiety , chronic fatigue, and “the
disease of being in a hurry” is a sign of the times. The
hectic pace of work, and life in general, has accustomed us
to turmoil. By now, peop le are thoroughly indoctrinated by
the idea that a certain degree of internal conﬂict is normal. The war, it seems, was started by us, and it is taking its toll
in a frighteningly ordinary way . —All of this is what I wish I could have expressed to Chitra,
the young woman with breast cancer whose story opened
this book. She was fortunate enough to receive a cure that
seemed miraculous, but as I was writing these chapters,
her case became very diﬀerent. The cancer cells had been
defeated but not their memory . Because Chitra remained
extremely anxious about having her cancer recur , she and I
agreed that conventiona l therapy should continu e. At the
same time, she promised to keep up her meditatio n and the
bliss techniq ue I had taught her. I heard nothing for a
month, then she called with bad news: her doctors had
detected a dozen small shadows in her CAT scan that they
interpreted as brain cancer . In a state of extreme fear, she
began an intensive course of radiation, this time
accompanied by experimental chemotherapy . Weakened by the earlier bout with breast cancer , Chitra
endured severe side eﬀects, including depression. She
stopped meditating and no longer returned for Ayurvedic
treatment. Her platelet count dropped severely—platelets
are blood cells critical in the clotting process—which meant
that it was too dangerous to continue the chemotherapy . Chitra’s doctors determined that her bone marrow was
producing antibodies that attacked her own platelets
(probably in reaction to the many transfusions she had
received). They considered a bone marrow transplant, but
tried ﬁrst to exchange the blood plasma. During the
procedure, she had a seizure and soon developed severe
anemia and various infections. At this point Chitra’s case was turning into a mounting
disaster . She refused a blood trans fusion, being horriﬁed at
the thought of getting AIDS . Because of her agitation, she
had to be placed on an intravenous drip of morp hine and
Valium. Her awareness became duller and duller , and she
slipped into a coma, probably induced by shock, followed
by the onset of pneum onia. The doctors informed herhusband that she would probably not recover , and a day
later, without regaining consciousness, Chitra died. She
was the victim not of her cancer but of her treatm ent, and I
cannot help but think death from cancer would perhaps
have been more humane. The passing of this beautifully innocent and devoted
young woman came as a great blow. Although I had no
consolation to oﬀer, I immediately called Raman, her
husband, who was completely shattered. For months we
had both watched Chitra pass into the light of life and back
into the shadow of death, sharing extremes of joy and
despair . Sincere eﬀorts had been made to save her, yet I
cannot expel the bitter taste that comes from knowing, as
all doctors know , the barbarity of our current approach to
cancer . Every day, a physician in practice sees patients who have
undergone some devast ating cancer treatment that has
been declare d a success because the cancer cells are now
gone, disregarding the weakening of the entire body, the
looming danger of recurrent cancer caused  by the
treatment itself , and the state of lasting fear and
depression that so often comes with the cure. To live in
constant fear, even without cancer in your body, is not a
good state of health. The war is not over; it has merely
moved from open skirmishes to underground terrorism. The underlying philosophy in cancer treatment is that the
mind will just have to stand by while the body endures
devastation. In other words, an open clash is actually
encouraged in the mind-body system. How can this be
called healing? In a clash between mind and body, the
patient is ﬁghting on both sides—there is only his body and
his mind. Isn’t it obvio us that when a loser emerges, it will
be he? The vital issue is not how to win the war but how to keep
peace in the ﬁrst place. The West has not arrived at thisinsight, or comprehended  that the physical manifestation of
a disease is a phantom. The cancer cells that patients dread
and physicians battle against are just such phantoms—they
will come and go, raising hopes and despair , while the real
culprit, the persistent memory that creates the cancer cell,
goes undetected. Ayurveda gives us the means to go
directly to the level of consciousness that exorcises this
memory . Thinking of Chitra, I wonder how long it will be
before we broaden our outlook. We ask for heroism from
patients at a time when they have little of it to give, or else
we treat them as statistics, turning survival into a game of
numbers. Ayurveda tells us to place the responsibility for
disease at a deeper level of consciousness, where a
potential cure could also be found. To say that a patient’s awareness is responsible for his
cancer is very troublesome to many people—and so it
should be. Ayurveda as I view it does not agree that there is
a so-called cancer personality , nor does it accept that
superﬁcial emotions, styles of behavior , and attitud es cause
cancer . Some resear chers are convinced that patients who
react with helplessness and depression to their cancer are
more likely to die from the disease than those patients who
have a strong component in their personalities called “the
will to live.” This seems unarguable, but is it any help? A person aﬄicted with cancer naturally goes through
cycles of emotion; his will to live is susceptible to wild
swings from one extrem e to the other; and there is no
reason to expect that any “typical cancer personality”
proﬁle should emerge. (Some of the original research that
supposedly veriﬁed the “typical cancer personality” was
based on insigniﬁcantly small patient groups, as few as
twenty-ﬁve subjects, all of whom had only one type of
cancer—typically breas t cancer .) Why should the
psychologically healthy , who already have such a great
advantage, be the only hopeful cases?This is not an empty question. Recently I was on a plane
and happened to sit beside a very lively woman in her
sixties. She struck me immediately as a Yankee of the
classic type— very vigorous, no-nonsense, and full of strong
opinions. Her family had lived in Maine for generations and
had become quite prosperous. Since my head was full of all
the issues involved in cancer treatment, we bega n to talk
about them. The old lady lifted her chin. “I don’t believe any of these
doctors know what they’re talking about,” she declared. “My mother was diagnose d with breast cancer in 1947. She
went and had the lump removed and then came  home to
look after her four children. My father begged her to return
to Boston for a mastectom y, but she said she was too busy
for it, and she was too busy to be sick, too. She went on
perfectly normally like that. After a while my father won
out, and she did go back for the mastectomy , but there
wasn’t any radiation or chemotherapy back then.”
“What happened to her?” I asked. “Nothing happened,” the woman answered. “She lived
twelve more years, until she was over seventy , when she
contracted pneumonia. The whole family gathered around
her bed, she told us goodbye, and three days later she
died.”
Listening to this story , I suddenly saw, with a comb ination
of wonder and sadness, what it was about—the paradox of
being normal. It is absolutely normal to be too busy to be
sick, for that is exactly the kind of awareness that the
immune system thrives on. When you are just yourse lf and
not a “cancer patient,” then the complicated chain of the
immune response, with its hundreds of precise ly timed
operations, goes to work with a vengeance. But once you give in to helplessness and fear, this chain
breaks apart. You start sending out the neuropeptides
associated with negative emotions, these latch onto theimmune cells, and the immune response loses its eﬀiciency . (Exactly how this happens is not known, but the decreased
immune status of depressed patients is well docu mented.) Here is where the paradox comes in: if you reacted to
cancer as no great threat, the way you react to the ﬂu, you
would have the best chance of recovering, yet a diagnosis
of cancer makes every patient feel totally abnormal. The
diagnosis itself sets up the vicious circle, like a snake biting
its tail until there is no more snake. The reason I felt sadness and wonder at the same  time is
that it sudde nly dawned on me how inﬁnitely beautiful the
immune system is and how terribly vulnerable at the same
time. It forges our link with life and yet can break it at any
moment. The immune system knows all our secrets, all our
sorrows. It know s why a mother who has lost a child can
die of grief, because the immune system has died of grief
ﬁrst. It knows every moment a cancer patient spends in the
light of life or the shadow of death, because it turns those
moments into the body’s physical reality . Cancer , or any other disease, is nothing more than the
sequence of these ﬂeeting moments, each with its own
emotions, its own mind-b ody chemistry . In other words, the
diseased cells are but one ingredient out of countless
others; the others are just more intangible. Ayurveda
maintains that many diﬀerent conditions interact to create
disease—the disease organism plays one part, aided by the
patient’s immune resistance, age, diet, habits, the time of
year, and many other factors that contribute to the eventual
clinical result. Western medical studies have also
abundantly proved that a person’s lifestyle and emotional
makeup are implicated in his state of health, but we lack
the omniscience to evaluate all these factors. A cancer
patient has a whole life behind him, populated by thoughts,
actions, and emotions that no other person shares exactly .The fact that emotions lie so deep does not mean that
cancer patients cannot alter them. People can be rescued
from their feelings of helplessness and despair by going to
a still deeper level. It does not matter if one is caught in the
throes of either despair or huge self-conﬁdence. Either one
could be a phantom. Ayurveda therefore pays much less
attention to surface emot ions than does current mind-body
medicine. The whole rationale for treating cancer (or AIDS)
with primordial sound and bliss techniques is that they
reach the deep levels of consciousness common to
everyone, the weak as much as the strong. The following  case study is the most complete success to
date of treating cancer with these techniques. The patient
is a woman in her late thirties named Eleanor . In 1983,
while living in Colorado and working for a computer
company there, Eleanor was diagnosed with advanced
breast cancer that had metastasized to the lymph nodes
under her arm. She underwent one radical mastectomy ,
followed by a second; her reaction to chemotherapy
afterward was extremely poor. Finding the side eﬀects
intolerable, she abandoned conventional treatment
altogether , even though her doctors made her well aware
that the cancer had now spread to her bones. Patients in
this category of metastasis have about a 1 percent chance
of survival. As it happens, Eleanor was advised by her family doctor
to start meditating in 1986, in the middle of her disease. Through her meditatio n practice, she heard about
Ayurveda. She came to Lancaster for inpatient treatment,
where I met her and instructed her in the primordial sound
for treating cancer . The results were remarkable. Her
severe bone pain disappe ared (this incident was mentioned
earlier , in chapter 9), and whenever she returned home to
be X-rayed, her radiologist found fewer and fewer pockets
of bone cancer .It was far too late for these regressions to have been
caused by her earlier treatment. Generally , if a tumor is
being bombarded with radiation or chemotherapy , it
shrinks very quickly . If Eleanor survives for two more years,
she will enter the privileged ranks of patients who beat all
the odds. But what I want to portray here is the overall
change she has undergone. I asked her to write down the
history of her disease as seen from the inside. What she
sent me is a very remarkable document. It begins at the
most harrowing moment of her life, when she is about to
enter the operating room to have breast surgery:
Undrugged, I am lying in the pre-op holding area
by the doors of the O.R. at City of Hope Hospital. A nurse walks by carrying  a huge breast in a clear
plastic bag. My breasts seem so small, helpless,
and innocent. I had nursed my baby sons and felt
so good about my breas ts; they were feminine,
soft, and pretty—I truste d them. Now I am just
lying here, waiting for someone to cut away at
least one of them. I am scared  and shaking. Every nerve in my
body seems to be screaming for action, wanting
to run away before it is too late and I am pushed
through the doors to the O.R. I feel like I am
betraying my body to a rape of degradation. I am
35 years old, and this whole thing is going against
my sense of what is right. When it’s over, the emotional impact starts to
set in. My image of my body is bad—I don’t want
the doctors to see me, let alone my husband. I am
past naked. I am stripping oﬀ my feminine shape,
infected for weeks afterward, hooked to drains
whose tubes are sewn to my body. The red-topped
glass tubes rattle whenever I try to walk.Eventually Eleanor healed enough to begin six months of
chemotherapy . She was told that her chances of recovery
were high, but when a mammogram was taken of the
remaining breast, it was found to be cancerous as well. A
second mastectomy was scheduled:
Now I really want to escape. For months I have
heard that I had cancer , then didn’t have cancer ,
then had cancer again. I am so wear y of surgeries
and uncertainty . I am sick from fever , horrible
night sweats, pain, humiliation, doubt about my
body, my spirit, my gender—everything. All that I
have trusted has let me down. Bilateral breast cancer , bilateral mastectomies,
and eventually bilateral breast reconstruction. I
hope this is the end, and I can get on to
recovering from my other symptoms. Then on to
wellness again, despite my odds. Soon afterwa rd, Eleanor  began to practice meditation. At
ﬁrst she approached her meditation with reserva tions and
even outrigh t skepticism, but these gave way to “a sense of
inner acceptance.” Four months later, in June 1986, she
found that she was accidentally pregnant. Eleanor’s
doctors had told her that her chemotherapy had made her
sterile, which happens to about 25 percent of younger
women, rising to 85 percent for women over 40. For those
who are not rendered sterile, giving birth is extremely
risky, but to Eleanor , the idea of having another child held a
special importance:
This pregnancy was symbolic to me of wholeness
and blending with nature. It was a miracle, and I
was happy . Then when my doctors said that I
should abort  this child to save my own life, itseemed like a nightmare. As the pregnancy
continued, I got even sicker . I was told that my
tests now indicated estro gen positive cancer , and
my chances for survival were slim. I protested
these facts and carried the baby, a decision that I
lived with in peace. After the successful delivery of a baby boy, Eleanor
discovered that her cancer had returned, this time to her
bones:
Back to cancer , and the roller-coaster ride began
all over again. The City of Hope doctors predicted
that I would live “perhaps six more months, but
probably not more than two years.” (This was
fourteen months ago, in March 1987.) The cancer
had advanced well into my bones (the X rays
revealed a dozen cancerous sites, principally in
the ribs and vertebrae), and I felt very sick,
literally to the bone. The treatment plan was full
doses of chemo “for the rest of your life.” That
didn’t sound like I’d be around too long. Eleanor responded poorly to chemotherapy , and on the
recommendation of her family doctor , who had suggested
meditation before, she visited Lancaster for Ayurvedic
treatment in June. When I reviewed her case, I recognized
that she was gravely ill; I couldn’t promise her a cure, but I
told Eleanor that there were more possibilities than she
realized—the inner core of herself had not been violated by
cancer , and we would try to bring her in touch with that
core. After two weeks, she began to feel much better , both
physically and mentally , and she left with no bone pain. Apparently this was the turning point:After returning back to work, to chemotherapy
and doubts, a special thing happened. A wild dove
had ﬂown inside the company warehouse one
morning and would not leave. Two or three  hours
later, when I came in, the bird followed my path
upstairs, through the halls leading toward my
oﬀice, and landed quietly on my desk in front of
me. I gently picked him up and all at once felt
overwhelmed as we shared each other’s comfort. A few months passed after we turned him loose
in the country . In September , I found that my
bone scans were not good, but not worse either . Chemotherapy was causing multiple side eﬀects. I
didn’t really mean to quit chemo, but I had
consistently bad blood counts, and that meant
that the chemo tempo rarily had to stop. I
immediately started feeling better and realized
that I wanted  no more chemo, even at the risk of
dying. In December  I visited Lancaster again. My time
there was wonderful; some special herbs had
come in for me, and I was given a primordial
sound technique to use at home. At the end of
December , another bone scan showed no change. This conﬁrmed my belief that chemo was
superﬁcial. I conti nued my technique s, and when
I returned in March, three months later, the bone
scan showed that all but one tiny pocket was
gone. The radiologist smiled and said he didn’t know
how this could have happened without chemo . He
hugged me, and when I left, he said, “This will
make history .” My family doctor called the
radiologist for a full interpretation of the scans;he got oﬀ the phone and told me that I was almost
completely recovered. As I got the news, I couldn’t stop the tears from
welling up. I wondered how I could  have ever
doubted this result. Touched by love and nature’s
perfection, I had one quiet, soft desire, to go sit
again against the earth, surrounded by peace in a
celebration of spring ﬂowers, and to enjoy all that
has happened and all that I am. In closing, I have to add that I am realistic; I
understand the typical Western approach to this
event. I also know that there are great
possibilities here. All the truths of my expe rience
somehow add up to one truth, but when I think
I’ve grasped it, it slips away . It leaves me feeling
humble and rather silly for trying to take apart
the wholeness. But I am very, very peaceful and
comfortable, having been assured again and
again that the wholeness is perfection. Eleanor has come a very long way. Last year she was in
the worst category for surviving her disease; now many
authorities like Dr. Ikemi would consider her case a
spontaneous regression. Her general health is good; there
is no sign of the body wasting away . Eight months after
undergoing the last chemotherapy , her bone cancer has
dwindled until there is only one small shadow on her X
rays, and this has not deﬁnitely proven to be cancerous. Her blood chemistry , which became abnormal as the result
of active disease, has now returned to the normal range—
this is much stronger proof than the X rays that Eleanor is
getting well. I have no fear for her now, even if she had to begin her
battle again. Eleanor is beyond battles—she radiates the
peacefulness she writes about, and spending time with hermakes me feel happy and secure, all the more because I
understand how rare her peace is. From the despair of
disease she has discover ed joy. At the moment when the
memory of health returned, it brought her enough power to
last a lifetime. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
The simple deﬁnition of quantum healing given in this
chapter is that quantum healing brings peace. I believe this
is still true, perhaps more than ever. At the time I was
writing, inﬂammation hadn’t been connected to cancer ,
heart disease, and a host of lifestyle disorders. Inﬂammation is a mystifying phenomenon, because it’s
needed as a crucial part of the healing system (bringing
extra blood to the disea sed or injured area, triggering a
cascade of complex chemical interactions at the site) while
in its most acute state , such as the inﬂammation that
occurs during severe burns, it can be fatal. The most troubling kind of inﬂammation is chronic and
low level, which is one reason it took medical science so
long to identify it as a culprit. But the internal war I wrote
about is chronic, too, whether we are speaking of
inﬂammation, stress, or imbalances that lie below the level
of producing  symptoms. (In my view, inﬂamed emotions are
likely to be just as damaging to cells.) Western medicine is
catching up with Ayurveda in this regard. Thousands of
years ago Ayurvedic physicians focused on subtle
imbalances that pushed the body out of its natural balance
and ease. Saying that your body needs to be aligned with Nature
sounds very nonmedic al. It’s more like homespun
philosophy . In the ﬁfteen years I practiced endocrinology
before lookin g into meditation and alternative therapies, Iwould have shrugged oﬀ this piece of advice. Thirty years
later, it resonates very deeply . I see the human body as
having cosm ic implicatio ns. It is the interface between a
single individ ual and Nature as a whole. In the early part of
the twentieth century a poor boy from India named Jiddu
Krishnamurti was scooped up by spiritually minded
Westerners and for a time declared to be the next “world
teacher” after Buddha and Jesus. Krishnamurti’s life story is fascinating, because although
he renounced the grandiose title being foisted upon him, he
seems to have been some one Jeﬀery Wright would  place in
Location 4, where consciousness becomes free of
boundaries. At the very end of his long life—he died in
1986, at age ninety—Krishnamurti became a public ﬁgure
for a second time. Now he was a white-ha ired ﬁgure of
wisdom, an image that ﬁt a little awkwardly . He was too
tart and impatient, too rational and inquisitive, to be
anyone’s idea of a comforting, otherworldly guru. You can see a YouTube video* from Madras, India, in
1980 where a very frail but alert Krishnamurti is asked a
written question. “You often switch over from mind to
brain. Is there any diﬀere nce between them?”
Krishnamurti’s reply begins with an apology . If he used the
words mind  and brain  interc hangeably , it was a slip of the
tongue. He muses for a second before answering the
question with a question. “Is the mind something
untouched by the brain? Is the mind not the result of time,
while the brain is?”
In a nutshell  he has described the mystery of time and
the timeless. As creatures  of the brain , human beings live
in the realm of time, and yet our minds keep returning to
the timeless. Quantum physics oﬀers one lens for
examining how spacetime came about, but ultim ately, the
investigations of science run into a contradiction. The
brain, in trying to examine the quantum ﬁeld, is itself aquantum phenomenon. Every atom in the brain is reducible
to a quivering vibration in the quantum ﬁeld, and each
wave vanishes into multi dimensional Hilbert space, whose
existence is purely mathematical. In other words, relying on a quantum object to explain
quantum reality is like asking a robot to build itself from
scattered parts lying around the ﬂoor. You have to have a
plan—instructions, a blueprint, a conception—for the robot
to follow before it can do anything. If someone produced a
robot that could build itself from scratch, the machine
would be a hoax or a delusion. Somewhere behind the
physical apparatus, a mind must set the agenda. The same
is true of the brain. It is just a thing in a world of things,
with no privileged position. The atoms in your cerebral
cortex aren’t  smarter than the atoms in a lump of sugar or
in the dust picked up by a vacuum cleaner , because atoms
aren’t smart to begin with. Only mind is. It’s not hard to grasp that a robot can’t build itself from
scratch without instructions, but the human brain doesn’t
come with a manual, and we witness it doing all kinds of
things on its own, like a player piano that produces the
inﬁnite variety of music without anyone touching the keys. For this reason, neuroscience will continue to be
materialistic for quite a while longer; it’s much easier to
take apart a player piano than to explain the invisible
pianist. Krishnamurti, like the ancient Vedic sages, found a way
beyond the duality of mind and brain. It begins with self-
awareness. If you look at how your brain is operating, he
says, you’ll see what a narrow groove your thinking follows
and how mechanical it is. Our education and careers, the
perspective of science and engineering, our mem ories—all
contribute to conditioning our thoughts. (In a wry aside,
Krishnamurti remarks that neuroscience is beginning to
view all of life as conditioned by the brain, “which  we havebeen talking about endlessly .” He spent decades trying to
get his listeners to break away from the conditioning of the
brain, but few understood what he meant.) “A thought is a material process. There is nothing sacred
about thought,” Krishnamurti points out. When you go to a
temple, when you project a happy future, when you
entertain idealistic hopes, all of this is a material  process. Saying such things is quite ruthless. Krishnamurti’s
audiences frequently found themselves squirming under his
barbed challenges. Perhaps it was futile for someone who
had arrived at the freed om and clarity of Location 4 to
explain what he saw to people who hadn’t even
experienced Location 1. Yet in the simplest everyday words,
he wanted them to see what was really happening:
“thought has created the architecture and everything
inside the building.”
If we are aware of this, he says, we must move in a totally
diﬀerent direction. The past is constantly being repeated in
the present. Tradition, however noble, oﬀers no help. “If we
accept tradition, it makes the mind extraordinarily dull.”
Imagine the shock to audiences who thought that
Krishnamurti himself belongs to the tradition of Hinduism
and gurus and enlightened sages—he swept all of that
away . With so much pain, disorder , and chaos in the world,
he says, how can we simply turn to tradition? He even
torches the sacred Bhagavad-Gita: Reading it is repetitive
and convenient, but meanwhile the brain becom es dull,
routine, and stupid. So what was his totally diﬀerent direction? Taking the
mind to its source in the timeless. This begins by observing
your own actions and behavior . In a word, Krishnamurti
asks his listeners to stop looking at the content of their
consciousness and instead at consciousness itself . In the
Gita, Lord Krishna declares, “Curving back on myself , I
create again and again.” To understand this passage, youmust substit ute “pure consciousness” for “Lord Krishna,”
and then a seemingly religious statement makes universal
sense. The whole of creation is consciousness working
within itself . It never stands apart from its creation. How
could it? There is nowhere else to go . This realizat ion, the very foundation of Eastern wisdom
traditions, has recently become a hot idea in cosmology ,
under the name of panpsychism, which holds that the
universe is conscious. If you accep t panpsychis m, you no
longer have to explain how matter learned to think. You
aren’t limite d by the notion that consciousness is a late
arrival in the cosmos, coming on the scene only when the
human brain  evolved. A host of dilemmas is solved when
mind is everywhere. But a nifty theory that has caught
everyone’s fancy doesn’t meet the challenge posed by
Krishnamurti: How do we deal with a world in chaos and
disorder? There must be peace at every level—body , mind, and
world—for healing to be complete. When you’re sick,
getting well isn’t theoretical. The same holds true in a
Middle East battle zone or in a conﬂicted soul. “Is love, is
compassion, the product of thought?” Krishnamurti asks at
the end. By implication, it isn’t, but he wants every listener
to look inside and discover this truth on their own. Accepting it blindly amounts to no more than another nod
to tradition, which dulls the mind. Every spiritual tradition
extols love and compass ion, but we don’t live in a world
where they’ve taken root to defeat hatred and discord. For the truth to set us free, it must happen one person at
a time, through a journey of self-awareness. The gurus,
sages, and seers cry, “Wake up!” with one voice. But they
can’t walk the path for us. Since the appearance of
Quantum Healing  I believe I’ve witnessed a wave of
interest in waking up, and it continues to swell. Krishnamurti wasn’t optimistic, however . “I’m afraid thatlove doesn’t exist in this country ,” he mourns, referring to
India. When asked  if there was a spiritual revival in the
New Age, he conceded only that perhaps there were more
good beginners. The problem  with love, he pointed out, is that “the word
is not the thing….That which is the product of time, of
thought, which is not the material process is the mind.” If
this one idea seizes hold of people, one at a time, there is a
way out of our distress and the chaotic world produced by
the worst in human natur e. The brain can be trained in any
direction, for better or worse. Healing results when it is
trained for better . But only by ﬁnding our source in the
timeless will we reach the level where all solutions emerge. If you need to be inspire d by the prospect of waking up,
look as I do, to the poets. I’ll let Rumi,  then, have the last
word. Oh God,
I have discovered love! How marvelous, how good, how beautiful it is! I oﬀer my salutation
To the spirit of passion that aroused
and excited this whole universe,
And all it contains. * https://www .youtube.com/ watch? v=FqGXEFhsjtA&list=UU88A5W9XyWx7WSwthd5ykhw
OceanofPDF .comTo Gautama, Mallika, and Rita for their unconditional love
and acceptance of all I do . To Carla Linton for her dedication to create a better
world. To Muriel Nellis, who inspired my conﬁdence as a writer
from the very beginning. To Toni Burbank, whose editing brought clarity to my
thinking and improved every chapter of this book. And especial ly to Huntley Dent—our deep friendsh ip, the
insights we shared together , and his literary guidance were
all evolutionary experiences for me. OceanofPDF .comI felt that readers would appreciate a short list of highly
readable books on the major subjects I refer to in this book:
physics, mind-body medicine, and Veda. I enthusiastically
recommend the following nine books, all of which entered
into my own education on these fascinating subjects. Davies, P aul. God and the New Physics . New York: Simon &
Schuster , 1984. Dossey , Larry , M.D. Space, Time , and Medicine . Boston:
Shambhala, 1982. Franklin, Jon. Molecules of the Mind . New York: Atheneum,
1987. Hawking, Stephen M. A Brief History of Time . New York:
Bantam, 1988. Kaku, Michio , Ph.D ., and Jennifer Trainer . Beyond Einstein . New Y ork: Bantam, 1987. Locke, Steph en, M.D., and Douglas Colligan. The Healer
Within. New Y ork: Dutton, 1986. Murchie, Guy. The Seven Mysteries of Life. Boston:
Houghton Miﬄin, 1978. Smith, Anthony . The Body . New Y ork: V iking, 1986. Wilber, Ken, ed. Quantum Questions . Boston: Shambhala,
1984. OceanofPDF .comThe literatur e devoted to every topic in this book, once
scarce and scattered, has ballooned into something vast. As
the era of the Internet dawned, numerous websites and
blogs arose to address mind, body , and spirit. I bega n to write books  that focused on topics ﬁrst
addressed in Quantum Healing . Here are some selected
titles. Perfect Health  (1990 ) oﬀers a practical guide to Ayurveda,
adapted to the daily needs of modern life in the W est. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind  (1993) explores the mind-
body connection as the best way to prevent premature
aging and reverse the eﬀects of the aging process. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success  (1994) is a pocket
guide to the principles of yoga, adapted for everyday
use. The Book of Secrets  (2004) goes deeply into the teachings
of Vedanta and the wisdom tradition of consciousness. Reinventing the Body , Resurrecting the Soul (2009)
describes the process of self-transformation from the
deepest level of consciousness, the soul. In the intervening years since Quantum Healing
appeared, I eagerly embr aced these new opportun ities. You
will ﬁnd extensive , updated discussions atwww .deepakchopra.com  and wide-reaching sites like
www .huﬀingtonpost.com , wher e I’ve contributed weekly for
several years. These posts are completely indexed,
although not divided into topics yet. The most comprehensive cataloging of spontaneous
remissions is also available online. It was compiled by
Caryle Hirschberg and Brendan O’Regan for the Institute
of Noetic Sciences, with literally thousands of references. Available in hard copy, the text is online at the institute’s
website, http://noetic.org/ library/ publication-books/ 
spontaneous-remission-annotated-bibliography/ . Finally , as my exploration into quantum healing
deepened, I felt that I should coauthor papers with
credentialed scientists who understood the implications of
the mind-body connection as applied to medicine, biology ,
genetics, and physics. Following is a list of collaborations
with one of my most admired and widely published
colleagues, physicist Menas Kafatos, in the form of peer-
reviewed articles. I’m enduringly grateful that he and the
other scientists have coauthored posts and blogs with me in
recent years—see the index at Huﬀington P ost. Deepak Chopra, Menas C . Kafatos, and Co-workers’
Papers
1. Kafatos, Menas, Rudolph E. Tanzi, and Deepak Chopra. “How Consc iousness Becomes the Physical Unive rse.”
Cosmology  14 (2011): 1318–28,
http://journalofcosmology .com/ Consciousness140.html . 2. Attila Grandpierre, Deepak Chopra, P. Murali
Doraiswamy , Rudolph E. Tanzi, and Menas C. Kafatos. “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Mind and
Consciousness.” NeuroQuantology  11, no. 4 (2013):
607–17, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.14704/ nq.2013.11.4.703 .3. Chopra, Deepak, and Menas C. Kafatos. “From Quanta to
Qualia: How a Paradigm Shift Turns into Science.”
Philosophy Study  4, no. 4 (2014): 287–301,
http://www .davidpublishing.com/ show .html?16636 . 4. Kafatos, Menas C. “The Conscious Universe.” In Deepak
Chopra, ed., Brain, Mind, Cosmos: The Nature of Our
Existence and the Universe,  ebook. New York: Deepak
Chopra, c/o Trident Media Group, 2014. 5. Chopra, Deepak, Menas C. Kafatos, and Rudolph E.
Tanzi. “A Consciousness-Based Science: From Quanta
to Qualia.” In Deepak Chopra, ed., Brain, Mind,
Cosmos: The Nature of Our Existence and the Universe . ebook. New York: Deepak Chopra, c/o Trident Media
Group, 2014. 6. Chopra, Deepak, Murali P. Doraiswamy , Rudolph E.
Tanzi, and Menas C. Kafatos. “Your Brain Is the
Universe.” In Deepak Chopra, ed., Brain, Mind,
Cosmos: The Nature of Our Existence and the Universe . ebook. New York: Deepak Chopra, c/o Trident Media
Group, 2014. 7. Kafatos, Menas C., and Deepak Chopra. “The Time
Machine of Consciousness, Cosmology of Time,
Quantum Physics of Time Travel.” Cosmology  18
(2014), http://cosmology .com/ Contents18.html . 8. Kak, Subhash, Deepak Chopra, and Menas C. Kafatos. “Perceived Reality , Quantum Mechanics, and
Consciousness.” Cosmology 18 (2013): 231–45,
http://cosmology .com/ ConsciousTime107.html . 9. Kafatos, Menas C., and Deepak Chopra. “The Nature of
Reality , the Self, Time, Space and Experience.”
Cosmology  18 (2014): 456–60, http://cosmology .com/ 
ConsciousTime115.html . 10. Grandpierre, Attila, Deepak Chopra, and Menas C.
Kafatos. “The Universal Principle of Biology .”NeuroQuantology  12, no. 3 (2014): 364–73,
http://www .neuroquantology .com/ index.php/ journal/ 
article/ view/ 747/ 667. 11. Kafatos, Menas C., Gaetan Chevalier , Deepak Chopra,
John J. Hubacher , Subhash Kak, and Neil D. Theise. “Current Physics Perspe ctives.” Global Advances in
Health and Medicine,  forthcoming. OceanofPDF .comBESTSELLERS B Y DEEP AK CHOPRA
Ageless Body , Timeless Mind
The Book of Secrets
Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment
The Future of God
Grow Y ounger , Live Longer  (with coauthor David Simon)
How to Know God
Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
Life A fter Death
Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet
The P ath to Love
Peace Is the W ay
Perfect Health
Quantum Healing
Reinventing the Body , Resurrecting the Soul
The Return of Merlin
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
The Shadow Eﬀect  (with coauthors Debbie F ord and
Marianne W illiamson)
Spiritual Solutions
Super Brain  (with coauthor Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D .) The Third Jesus
War of the W orldviews  (with coauthor Leonard Mlodinow)
The W ay of the W izard
What Are Y ou Hungry F or? ALSO B Y DEEP AK CHOPRAThe Angel Is Near
Ask Deepak About Death and Dying
Ask Deepak About Health
Ask Deepak About Love and Relationships
Ask Deepak About Meditation and Higher Consciousness
Ask Deepak About Spirituality
Ask Deepak About Success
Ask the Kabala  (with coauthor Michael Zapolin)
Boundless Energy
Brain, Mind, Cosmos: The Nature of Our Existence and the
Universe  (edited by Deepak Chopra with contributions from
notable scientists and philosophers)
Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny , and the American Dream
(with coauthor Sanjiv Chopra)
The Chopra Center Cookbook  (with coauthors David Simon
and Leanne Backer)
The Chopra Center Herbal Handbook  (with coauthor David
Simon)
Consciousness and the Universe  (with coauthors Stuart
Hameroﬀ and Sir Roger P enrose)
Creating Aﬄuence
Creating Health
The Daughters of Joy
The Deeper W ound
The Essential Ageless Body , Timeless Mind
The Essential How to Know God
The Essential Spontaneous Fulﬁllment of Desire
Everyday Immortality
Fire in the Heart
God: A Story of Revelation
Golf for EnlightenmentHealing the Heart
Journey into Healing
Kama Sutra
Lords of Light
The Love P oems of Rumi  (edited by Deepak Chopra;
translated by Deepak Chopra and F ereydoun Kia)
Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives  (with coauthors
David Simon and V icki Abrams)
Manifesting Good Luck
On the Shores of Eternity
Overcoming Addictions
Perfect Digestion
Perfect W eight
Power , Freedom, and Grace
Raid on the Inarticulate
Restful Sleep
Return of the Rishi
The Seven Spiritual Laws for P arents
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A P ocketbook Guide
to Fulﬁlling Y our Dreams
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes  (with coauthor
Gotham Chopra)
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Y oga (with coauthor David
Simon)
The Soul in Love
The Soul of Leadership
Soulmate
The Spontaneous Fulﬁllment of Desire
Teens Ask Deepak
The Ultimate Happiness Prescription
Unconditional LifeWalking W isdom  (contributor; authored by Gotham Chopra)
Why Is God Laughing? FOR CHILDREN
On My W ay to a Happy Life  (with coauthor Kristina Tracy;
illustrated by Rosemary W oods)
You with the Stars in Y our Eyes  (illustrated by Dave
Zaboski)
DEEP AK CHOPRA IMPRINT
Inﬁnite P otential,  by Lothar Schäfer
Science Set Free,  by Rupert Sheldrake
Supernormal: Science, Y oga, and the Evidence for
Extraordinary P sychic Abilities,  by Dean R adin
The Generosity Network,  by Jennifer McCrea, Jeﬀrey
Walker , and Karl W eber
OceanofPDF .comAs a global leader and pioneer in the ﬁeld of mind-body
medicine, DEEPAK CHOPRA  has been transforming the way
the world views physical , mental, emotional, spiritual, and
social wellness. Known as a proliﬁc author of more than
eighty books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers
in both ﬁction and nonﬁction, his works have been
published in more than forty-three languages. With medic al training  in internal medicin e and
endocrinology , he is a Fellow of the American College of
Physicians and a member of the American Association of
Clinical Endocrinologists. He serves as the Founder of the
Chopra Foundation; co-founder and chairman of the Board
of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing; founder of The Chopra
Well on YouTube; adjunct professor of Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University; adjunct professor
at Columbia Business School, Columbia University;
assistant clinical professor in the Family and Preventive
Medicine Department at UC San Diego Health Sciences;
faculty at Walt Disney Imagineering; and senior scientist
with The Gallup Organization. GlobeIn acknowledges
Chopra as “one of the top ten most inﬂuential spiritual
leaders around the world.” Time  magazine has described
Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the
century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative
medicine.” The World Post and The Huﬀington Post global
Internet survey ranked Dr. Chopra #40 inﬂuential thinker
in the world and #1 in medicine.deepakchopra.com
OceanofPDF .comOceanofPDF .comWat’s next on 
your reading list? Discover your next 
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Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
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        However, very early on he realized that as diﬀerent as
each person was, their experiences fell onto a continuum. There wasn’t  a single enlightened state but rather  a sliding
scale. To ﬁnd neutral ground, and to ﬁt the accepted model
of what doctoral research must look like, he adopted the
cumbersome tag Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience. “There is a shift in what it feels like to be you,” Martin
notes. “You move away from an individual sense of sense,
which is considered normal, to something else. ”
Deﬁning what “something else” is wasn’t easy, because
these people came from diﬀerent backgrounds and were
inﬂuenced by cultural factors. However, Martin was able to
identify four areas of change. If you found yourself shifting into Location 1, it would be
typical to report that you have fewer thoughts than before. “You might say something to me like ‘All of my thoughts are
gone,’ and the kinds of thoughts that go away are ones that
refer to the individual self,” says Martin. Which isn’t
surprising if you are experiencing a loss of “I” as a separate
isolated being. Putting ourselves in their shoes, these people don’t keep
a runn ing story in their heads about what’s happening to
“me. ” When they think about themselves, it fades away as
soon as they notice it. The same is true for their emotions,
which are fewer and more spontaneous. When anger arises,
it fades almost immediately. Emotions were still positive
and negative but rarely if ever extreme. The person could
be irritated when stuck in traﬀic, yet they didn’t carry the
residue of stress around with them afterward, and it would
never build into road rage. They felt a sense of inner peace
that could be interrupted, but quite soon it would return. Such a person is operating in a bigger “self space,”
rather than being cramped inside the narrow conﬁnes of
the ego. They feel freer and more expanded. This applies to
their bodies as well; they often report that the body has no
ﬁxed boundaries but extends in all directions. Once they
arrived in Location 1, people usually kept progres sing—the
highest state Martin calls Location 4—and they rarely
slipped back  or jumped ahead. Everything happened
internally, and for many the shift wasn’t spiritual. It was
just the way they experienced themselves. “If you sat in a roomful of people and a small percentage
belong to this altered sense of self,” says Martin, “you
wouldn’t be able to spot them. To all outer appearances
they are just like you and me. ”
At the outset, before Martin’s research began to expand
to many other universities and countries, his typical subject
was a white male from the United States or Europe,
because women, for unknown reasons, were not eager to
volunteer as enlightened or to discuss what their
experiences were. Religious backgrounds were diverse,
spanning Eastern and Western faiths, yet most of the
subjects had done some kind of spiritual pract ice—they
wanted to be in a higher state of consciousness. Curiously,
around 14 percent had done nothing of this kind. They hadspontaneously popped into higher consciousness or, more
typically, drifted into it. They reporte d being in their new
state anywhere from forty years to as little as two or three. Martin’s research base has expanded to more than a
thousand subjects, which means we must ask ourselves if
“normal” isn’t a ﬁxed state but a spectrum, with
consciousness evolving much further than anyone has
previously predicted. At the very least, higher
consciousness has become much less exotic. It’s no longer
the province of sadhus and yogis in the Himalayas. Martin’s
study focused on body, emotions, sense of self, and
thoughts, which are value neutral, making his work
acceptable in the academy. But he found that the spiritual
dimension had also opene d up. Some subjects reported the
kind of open, clear, silent awareness associated with
Buddhism; others experienced the bliss I discuss in this
chapter. Still others had no idea what to make of their state
of awareness. But they were amazed at the amount of
wellbeing they were experiencing, and this grew as they
moved furth er along the spectrum. (Paradoxically, in
Location 4, all emotion  fell away, even love, and the
richness of bliss was replaced by what Martin calls
complete freedom. Yet his subje cts report that they don’t
miss the experience of emotions and bliss, because in
freedom they have found the very highest state of
wellbeing. ) If it is startlin g to realize that enlightenment is all around
us, and that it’s a natural progression, even more intriguing
is the prospect that enlightenment is personal. The way
that you create your own reality doesn’t suddenly  come to
an end; enlightenment isn’t like jumping oﬀ a divin g board. There are as many kinds of enlightenment as there are
people, one might suppose. In a word, evolution itself is
evolving, like everything else. “Normal” won’t be valid until it broadens to include
everyone on the spectrum of consciousness. We will also
need to revise the old deﬁnitions of enlightenment, in fact,
to conform to the present age. The West has almost no
formal institutions, outside monasteries and convents,
geared for people who want to pursue higher states of
consciousness or who have already arrived there. Here’s
what “normal” should encompass. Feeling unbounded
Being at peace
Having a loose attachment to your personal history
Living in the present
Becoming free of negative thought forms and emotions
Breaking away from traumas and wounds from the past
Accepting that higher consciousness is natural, part of
the human continuum
Experiencing more and more self-awareness as you
evolve
Living in a state of wellbeing that continues to grow and
deepen
A venerated  spiritual teacher was once asked,  “What
does it take to be enlightened. ” His reply: “You no longer
have a personal stake in the world. ” If you identify with the
boundaries erected by “I, me, and mine,” this sounds like a
death sentence. Having a personal stake in the world is
what life is all about, isn’t it. But with a longer view, across
the entire spectrum of consciousness, the opposite is true. When you no longer identify with “I, me, and mine,” you
are ushered into a new world of experience that transcends
the individual. This is the second birth that the Vedas extol
as the true beginning of life. Finally, I ﬁnd it very touching that Martin’s enlightened
subjects, as amazed as they were by their new state,
thought that nothing could be better. “This is as real as it
gets” was a common reaction. But they were wrong. Reality
is inﬁnite, and what makes it inﬁnite isn’t the edge of the
universe racing away faster than the speed of light. The
universe matches human aspirations, and its inﬁnity
reﬂects the inﬁnity inside  us once we wake up and realize
that it exists. * Adapted from Robert K eith W allace’s The Physiology of Consciousness  (M. I. U. Press, 1993). OceanofPDF. comIf asked for an exact deﬁnition of quantum healing, I would
say this: quantum healin g is the ability of one mode of
consciousness (the mind) to spontaneously correct the
mistakes in another mode of consciousness (the body). It is
a completely self-enclosed process. If pressed for a shorter
deﬁnition, I would say simply that quantum healing makes
peace. When consciousness is fragmented, it starts a war in
the mind-body system. This war lies behind many diseases,
giving rise to what modern medicine calls their
psychosomatic component. The rishis might call it “the fear
born of duality,” and they would consider it not a
component but the chief cause of all illness. The body will send many  signals to indicate that a war is
going on. Recently a young French-Canadian woman came
to see me suﬀering from Crohn’s disease, a severe
intestinal disorder characterized by chronic and
uncontrollable diarrhea, accompanied by painful
inﬂammation. Although the cause of Crohn’s disease is
unknown, it strikes mostl y among young adults and may be
connected to a deﬁciency in the immune system. What iswell known is that the intestinal tract is highly sensitive to
emotional states; in this patient’s case, it was not
surprising to hear that she worked long hours under the
high pressure of a downtown Boston advertising ﬁrm. After talking to her for a while, I discovered that she had
learned to meditate several years before. I asked her if she
still kept it up. No, she answ ered, there wasn’t much time
for it; when she did sit down to meditate, it didn’t do much
good, because she usually fell asleep in a few minutes. I then asked if she had adjusted her diet to help her
condition, slowed down the pace of her life, or considered
moving on to a job with less stress. Looking somewhat
impatient, she said no again—she wasn’t going to allow her
disease, which caused her many diﬀiculties, to rule her life. “Look,” I said, “you have  a very serious condition. If this
inﬂammation persists, you may have to have parts of your
intestine surgically remo ved. What are you going to do
about that. ” She was quite knowled geable about her
disease, and I didn’t have to tell her that some grim choices
lay ahead. The surgery in question  involves considerable
disﬁguration, since with part of the intestine removed, a
tube has to be extended  out of the abdomen to handle
elimination. Even then, the disease is not cured and tends
to recur in other parts of the intestine. “That’s why I’m here,” she answered. “I want a mental
technique to help me continue to lead a normal life. ”
I was seeing  the result of what the rishis called Pragya
aparadh,  the mistake of the intellect. This woman’s body
was crying out for healin g, and it was telling her so every
time she had an attack. She couldn’t even close her eyes to
meditate without her body desperately grabbing some
relief in the form of sleep. Yet, her mind interpreted these
attempts at healing as either irrelevant or troublesome. She insisted on leading a “normal life” of high stress that
her system wasn’t equipped to cope with. “This is not the kind of disease you can ﬁght,” I said,
“because there’s no one on the other side but you. ” I
explained that the same neuropeptides that registered
stress in her brain were produced in her intestines. When
she felt fear, frustration, and worry, the identical emotions
were being experienced in her abdomen. I told her that in my opinion she didn’t need any new
mental techn ique—she needed to let her body do what it
wanted to do, which was to get well. The best way to
cooperate with that was to give her body the rest it was
demanding, continue to meditate, change her diet, and
realize that no rewards from her job could possibly
outweigh the danger she had put herself in. Nature was
trying to tell her something very important, and once she
paid attention, her problems would correct themselves. “In a case like yours,” I said, “you already have the best
medicine you could possibly hope for—it’s your own
attention. Right now, the quality of that attention is fearful
and tense, which is why you aren’t getting better. But as
soon as your awareness becomes settled and loses its fear,
your body will recover—it’s up to you. ”
She listened to me with interest, but I sensed that she
resented hearing these things. The mistake of the intellect
is insidious. The intellect refuses to believe that everything
is happening inside one mind-body reality; it creates the
ﬁction that the sick body is somewhere else, anyw here else
but in the same situation as itself. Illness is obviously a sign that there is a war going on. According to Ayurveda, the conﬂict is being waged “in
here,” contra ry to the germ theory of disease, which tries
to tell us that the war was started “out there” by invaders
of every kind—bacteria, viruses, carcinogens, et cetera—
which are lying in wait to attack us. Yet, healthy people live
amid these dangers quite safely. Only when the immune
system collapses, as in the case of AIDS, do we realize thatour skin, lungs, mucous linings, intestines, and many other
organs have learned to coexist with outside organ isms in a
delicate balance. The pneumo nia that an AIDS patient
typically catches is caused by a variety of Pneumocystis
that is prese nt in everybody’s lungs all the time. The AIDS
virus activates such diseases from the inside by
demolishing one part of the immune system (the helper T-
cells), thus breaking apart the network of information that
holds us together. In fact, we are this network, which projects itself into the
world as our bodies, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Nor
does the network stop with us. The simplistic idea that
germs are our deadly enemy is a half-truth, because germs
are part of the network, too. The whole living world is
bound up in DNA, which has evolved along one channel as
bacteria, along another as plants and animals, and along
still another as man. The environment “out there”
cooperates with the one “in here” like two polarities, in one
sense totally opposed but in another totally comple mentary. If you look at reality from the viewpoint of all DNA, not just
ours, then there is an entire global information network
that has to be kept alive and healthy. Viruses, for example, are capable of mutating very
quickly—that is why a shot that immunizes you from this
year’s ﬂu will usually not be eﬀective next year. The ﬂu
virus will have mutated somewhere around the world into a
completely diﬀerent strain. (One of the AIDS virus’s many
unprecedented talents is its ability to mutate a hundred
times faster than a typical ﬂu virus. ) Researchers have
recently speculated that the reason why viruses mutate so
rapidly is to keep pace with new variants of bacteria, thus
carrying to all parts of the globe the news that life is
changing. Getting the ﬂu, therefore, is like getting a news update. Your own DNA learns about alterations in the world’s DNAthat are challenging it, and your DNA then meets the
challenge, not passively but actively. It must prove its
viability by surviving the virus. The immune system rushes
to meet the invader, and they engage in battle, molecule
against molecule. The whole operation is timed to the split
second and leaves no room for error. The macrophages
rush to discover the identity of this new life form, probe it
for vital weaknesses, and then mobilize the genetic
material in their own DNA that will collapse the molecules
of the virus, rendering them harmless. At the same time, the immune cells also destroy  any of
your own cells that have played host to the invader. These
infected host cells have not yet died from the ﬂu. They are
engorged with living viruses that pose a threat after the
immune cells have wiped out all the ﬂu that is gushing
through the bloodstream. To kill an infected host cell,
certain immune cells (killer T-cells) latch onto it from the
outside and puncture holes in the cell wall. Like a deﬂating
tire, the host cell spills out its liquid content, collapses into
an empty bag, and dies. But the host cell is not just eliminated; its DNA is actually
dismantled by other signals from the attacking  immune
cells. This is an absolutely fascinating aspect of the whole
process. What is really happening is that one bit of your
DNA (the immune cell) is dismantling another bit of your
DNA (the host cell), which in fact is just a copy of itself. The only diﬀerence betw een the two is that the second bit
of DNA, in the host cell, has made the mistake of
cooperating with the ﬂu virus. No one knows why this
occurs. As we saw in the last chapter, our cells
mysteriously allow themselves to be killed from within
when viruses attack them. Physically, the virus is no match
for the cell, being thousands of times smaller and less
complex—as one medical writer put it, it is as if abasketball came through the window of a skyscraper and
the whole building fell down. You would think that such mistakes show the
imperfection of the body’s intelligence, but that is too
superﬁcial. What is actually happening here is an exquisite
example of quantum healing at work; in fact, the idea that a
war is going on is just another half-truth, for when one bit
of DNA dismantles another, we are witnessing a totally self-
enclosed process. Every part of a disease reaction, from the
scavenger cells that ﬁrst meet the invader, to the host cells
that take it in, to the macrophages, killer T-cells, helper T-
cells, B-cells, and so on, are all the same DNA expressing
its various abilities. In other words, the DNA has decided to
stage for its own beneﬁt a drama in which every part is
played by itself. Why should DNA put on one mask to succumb to the ﬂu
virus and another to rush in and destroy it. No one has
answered this profound question, but it must have its logic
in the whole scheme of life, the larger drama enacted by all
the DNA in the world. I can make a speculation that we are
watching DNA enrich life by adding as many variations as
can possibly exist on one planet. Nothing that happens to DNA is lost; it all stays within
the self-enclosed system. Once the ﬂu virus is defeated, the
DNA records  the encounter by producing new antibodies
and specialized “memory cells” that ﬂoat around in the
lymph system  and bloodstream for years afterward, adding
to the immense storehouse of information that DNA has
been accum ulating since life began. This is how DNA
makes you a player on the world scene. If I look out my window, I can see a multilane highway
with cars rushing by. Occasionally a jet ﬂies over, sending a
ﬂock of birds twittering into the sky. Gulls circle overhead,
thirty miles inland from  the sea, and in the air is the
distinct smell of the ocean, rich with marine life. All of thisspectacle, including me, is the play of DNA. It has been
projected from a molecule whose responsibility is to unfold
new life without ever compromising life as a whole. Someone once estimated that all the separate DNA of every
person who has ever lived would ﬁt comforta bly in a
teaspoon, and yet if the tightly wound DNA in even a single
cell nucleus of your body  were uncoiled and the pieces laid
end to end, they would stretch out to ﬁve feet. This means
that the genetic thread contained in the body’s 50 trillion
cells is 50 billion miles long—enough to reach the moon
and back 100,000 times. The Veda says that the universe’s
intelligence extends “from smaller than the smallest to
larger than the largest,” and DNA is the physical proof of it. Therefore, it must be wrong to think that conﬂict is the
norm. In general, a state of peace exists between your DNA
and the other DNA “out there. ” For every time that you
actually have to ﬁght oﬀ a disease by getting sick, there are
dozens, if not hundreds, of times when your body has
warded oﬀ sickness without any overt symptom. It is only
when there is a distortion “in here” that the immune
system loses its ability to silently defend, heal, and
remember. We tend to forget that peace is the norm. Psychiatrists
and sociolog ists take it as a given that modern man is
deeply divided in his psyche. The rise of stress-related
disorders, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and “the
disease of being in a hurry” is a sign of the times. The
hectic pace of work, and life in general, has accustomed us
to turmoil. By now, peop le are thoroughly indoctrinated by
the idea that a certain degree of internal conﬂict is normal. The war, it seems, was started by us, and it is taking its toll
in a frighteningly ordinary way. —All of this is what I wish I could have expressed to Chitra,
the young woman with breast cancer whose story opened
this book. She was fortunate enough to receive a cure that
seemed miraculous, but as I was writing these chapters,
her case became very diﬀerent. The cancer cells had been
defeated but not their memory. Because Chitra remained
extremely anxious about having her cancer recur, she and I
agreed that conventiona l therapy should continu e. At the
same time, she promised to keep up her meditatio n and the
bliss techniq ue I had taught her. I heard nothing for a
month, then she called with bad news: her doctors had
detected a dozen small shadows in her CAT scan that they
interpreted as brain cancer. In a state of extreme fear, she
began an intensive course of radiation, this time
accompanied by experimental chemotherapy. Weakened by the earlier bout with breast cancer, Chitra
endured severe side eﬀects, including depression. She
stopped meditating and no longer returned for Ayurvedic
treatment. Her platelet count dropped severely—platelets
are blood cells critical in the clotting process—which meant
that it was too dangerous to continue the chemotherapy. Chitra’s doctors determined that her bone marrow was
producing antibodies that attacked her own platelets
(probably in reaction to the many transfusions she had
received). They considered a bone marrow transplant, but
tried ﬁrst to exchange the blood plasma. During the
procedure, she had a seizure and soon developed severe
anemia and various infections. At this point Chitra’s case was turning into a mounting
disaster. She refused a blood trans fusion, being horriﬁed at
the thought of getting AIDS. Because of her agitation, she
had to be placed on an intravenous drip of morp hine and
Valium. Her awareness became duller and duller, and she
slipped into a coma, probably induced by shock, followed
by the onset of pneum onia. The doctors informed herhusband that she would probably not recover, and a day
later, without regaining consciousness, Chitra died. She
was the victim not of her cancer but of her treatm ent, and I
cannot help but think death from cancer would perhaps
have been more humane. The passing of this beautifully innocent and devoted
young woman came as a great blow. Although I had no
consolation to oﬀer, I immediately called Raman, her
husband, who was completely shattered. For months we
had both watched Chitra pass into the light of life and back
into the shadow of death, sharing extremes of joy and
despair. Sincere eﬀorts had been made to save her, yet I
cannot expel the bitter taste that comes from knowing, as
all doctors know, the barbarity of our current approach to
cancer. Every day, a physician in practice sees patients who have
undergone some devast ating cancer treatment that has
been declare d a success because the cancer cells are now
gone, disregarding the weakening of the entire body, the
looming danger of recurrent cancer caused  by the
treatment itself, and the state of lasting fear and
depression that so often comes with the cure. To live in
constant fear, even without cancer in your body, is not a
good state of health. The war is not over; it has merely
moved from open skirmishes to underground terrorism. The underlying philosophy in cancer treatment is that the
mind will just have to stand by while the body endures
devastation. In other words, an open clash is actually
encouraged in the mind-body system. How can this be
called healing. In a clash between mind and body, the
patient is ﬁghting on both sides—there is only his body and
his mind. Isn’t it obvio us that when a loser emerges, it will
be he. The vital issue is not how to win the war but how to keep
peace in the ﬁrst place. The West has not arrived at thisinsight, or comprehended  that the physical manifestation of
a disease is a phantom. The cancer cells that patients dread
and physicians battle against are just such phantoms—they
will come and go, raising hopes and despair, while the real
culprit, the persistent memory that creates the cancer cell,
goes undetected. Ayurveda gives us the means to go
directly to the level of consciousness that exorcises this
memory. Thinking of Chitra, I wonder how long it will be
before we broaden our outlook. We ask for heroism from
patients at a time when they have little of it to give, or else
we treat them as statistics, turning survival into a game of
numbers. Ayurveda tells us to place the responsibility for
disease at a deeper level of consciousness, where a
potential cure could also be found. To say that a patient’s awareness is responsible for his
cancer is very troublesome to many people—and so it
should be. Ayurveda as I view it does not agree that there is
a so-called cancer personality, nor does it accept that
superﬁcial emotions, styles of behavior, and attitud es cause
cancer. Some resear chers are convinced that patients who
react with helplessness and depression to their cancer are
more likely to die from the disease than those patients who
have a strong component in their personalities called “the
will to live. ” This seems unarguable, but is it any help. A person aﬄicted with cancer naturally goes through
cycles of emotion; his will to live is susceptible to wild
swings from one extrem e to the other; and there is no
reason to expect that any “typical cancer personality”
proﬁle should emerge. (Some of the original research that
supposedly veriﬁed the “typical cancer personality” was
based on insigniﬁcantly small patient groups, as few as
twenty-ﬁve subjects, all of whom had only one type of
cancer—typically breas t cancer. ) Why should the
psychologically healthy, who already have such a great
advantage, be the only hopeful cases. This is not an empty question. Recently I was on a plane
and happened to sit beside a very lively woman in her
sixties. She struck me immediately as a Yankee of the
classic type— very vigorous, no-nonsense, and full of strong
opinions. Her family had lived in Maine for generations and
had become quite prosperous. Since my head was full of all
the issues involved in cancer treatment, we bega n to talk
about them. The old lady lifted her chin. “I don’t believe any of these
doctors know what they’re talking about,” she declared. “My mother was diagnose d with breast cancer in 1947. She
went and had the lump removed and then came  home to
look after her four children. My father begged her to return
to Boston for a mastectom y, but she said she was too busy
for it, and she was too busy to be sick, too. She went on
perfectly normally like that. After a while my father won
out, and she did go back for the mastectomy, but there
wasn’t any radiation or chemotherapy back then. ”
“What happened to her. ” I asked. “Nothing happened,” the woman answered. “She lived
twelve more years, until she was over seventy, when she
contracted pneumonia. The whole family gathered around
her bed, she told us goodbye, and three days later she
died. ”
Listening to this story, I suddenly saw, with a comb ination
of wonder and sadness, what it was about—the paradox of
being normal. It is absolutely normal to be too busy to be
sick, for that is exactly the kind of awareness that the
immune system thrives on. When you are just yourse lf and
not a “cancer patient,” then the complicated chain of the
immune response, with its hundreds of precise ly timed
operations, goes to work with a vengeance. But once you give in to helplessness and fear, this chain
breaks apart. You start sending out the neuropeptides
associated with negative emotions, these latch onto theimmune cells, and the immune response loses its eﬀiciency. (Exactly how this happens is not known, but the decreased
immune status of depressed patients is well docu mented. ) Here is where the paradox comes in: if you reacted to
cancer as no great threat, the way you react to the ﬂu, you
would have the best chance of recovering, yet a diagnosis
of cancer makes every patient feel totally abnormal. The
diagnosis itself sets up the vicious circle, like a snake biting
its tail until there is no more snake. The reason I felt sadness and wonder at the same  time is
that it sudde nly dawned on me how inﬁnitely beautiful the
immune system is and how terribly vulnerable at the same
time. It forges our link with life and yet can break it at any
moment. The immune system knows all our secrets, all our
sorrows. It know s why a mother who has lost a child can
die of grief, because the immune system has died of grief
ﬁrst. It knows every moment a cancer patient spends in the
light of life or the shadow of death, because it turns those
moments into the body’s physical reality. Cancer, or any other disease, is nothing more than the
sequence of these ﬂeeting moments, each with its own
emotions, its own mind-b ody chemistry. In other words, the
diseased cells are but one ingredient out of countless
others; the others are just more intangible. Ayurveda
maintains that many diﬀerent conditions interact to create
disease—the disease organism plays one part, aided by the
patient’s immune resistance, age, diet, habits, the time of
year, and many other factors that contribute to the eventual
clinical result. Western medical studies have also
abundantly proved that a person’s lifestyle and emotional
makeup are implicated in his state of health, but we lack
the omniscience to evaluate all these factors. A cancer
patient has a whole life behind him, populated by thoughts,
actions, and emotions that no other person shares exactly. The fact that emotions lie so deep does not mean that
cancer patients cannot alter them. People can be rescued
from their feelings of helplessness and despair by going to
a still deeper level. It does not matter if one is caught in the
throes of either despair or huge self-conﬁdence. Either one
could be a phantom. Ayurveda therefore pays much less
attention to surface emot ions than does current mind-body
medicine. The whole rationale for treating cancer (or AIDS)
with primordial sound and bliss techniques is that they
reach the deep levels of consciousness common to
everyone, the weak as much as the strong. The following  case study is the most complete success to
date of treating cancer with these techniques. The patient
is a woman in her late thirties named Eleanor. In 1983,
while living in Colorado and working for a computer
company there, Eleanor was diagnosed with advanced
breast cancer that had metastasized to the lymph nodes
under her arm. She underwent one radical mastectomy,
followed by a second; her reaction to chemotherapy
afterward was extremely poor. Finding the side eﬀects
intolerable, she abandoned conventional treatment
altogether, even though her doctors made her well aware
that the cancer had now spread to her bones. Patients in
this category of metastasis have about a 1 percent chance
of survival. As it happens, Eleanor was advised by her family doctor
to start meditating in 1986, in the middle of her disease. Through her meditatio n practice, she heard about
Ayurveda. She came to Lancaster for inpatient treatment,
where I met her and instructed her in the primordial sound
for treating cancer. The results were remarkable. Her
severe bone pain disappe ared (this incident was mentioned
earlier, in chapter 9), and whenever she returned home to
be X-rayed, her radiologist found fewer and fewer pockets
of bone cancer. It was far too late for these regressions to have been
caused by her earlier treatment. Generally, if a tumor is
being bombarded with radiation or chemotherapy, it
shrinks very quickly. If Eleanor survives for two more years,
she will enter the privileged ranks of patients who beat all
the odds. But what I want to portray here is the overall
change she has undergone. I asked her to write down the
history of her disease as seen from the inside. What she
sent me is a very remarkable document. It begins at the
most harrowing moment of her life, when she is about to
enter the operating room to have breast surgery:
Undrugged, I am lying in the pre-op holding area
by the doors of the O. R. at City of Hope Hospital. A nurse walks by carrying  a huge breast in a clear
plastic bag. My breasts seem so small, helpless,
and innocent. I had nursed my baby sons and felt
so good about my breas ts; they were feminine,
soft, and pretty—I truste d them. Now I am just
lying here, waiting for someone to cut away at
least one of them. I am scared  and shaking. Every nerve in my
body seems to be screaming for action, wanting
to run away before it is too late and I am pushed
through the doors to the O.
The author notes that the enlightened state is not a single, fixed state, but rather a sliding scale, and that the subjects in his research came from diverse backgrounds and were influenced by cultural factors.
According to the author, what is the fundamental difference between the enlightened state and the non-enlightened state?
The author suggests that the key to treating cancer is not just the treatment, but rather finding inner peace and acceptance, which allows the body to heal naturally.
What is the key to treating cancer, according to the author?
The author believes that enlightenment is not a fixed state, but rather a personal and evolving concept that requires a broader definition.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of enlightenment?
The author does not specify the collaborator's name in the provided text, but mentions that he co-authors papers with scientists, including Menas Kafatos.
Who is the author's collaborator for the paper "How Consc iousness Becomes the Physical Universe"?
The author suggests that quantum healing is the ability of one mode of consciousness to spontaneously correct the mistakes in another mode of consciousness, and that it is not a game of numbers or statistics.
What is the author's view on the concept of quantum healing?