I
wasn’t sure who or what was being forgiven, but at that moment I
felt free of my old anger and loneliness.”
Sheila’s tale is extraordinar y, but I think it illustrates a much
wider phenomenon. The world “in here” is meant to ow into and
merge with the one “out there,” and if we oppose this ow, we only
postpone the day when the mind reaches out to restore the natural
scheme of things. This must be happening, in both small  and large
ways, much more often than we notice or care to admit. One is led
to believe that magical thinking is an act of healing, and the most
magical minds are therefore the healthiest. OceanofPDF.com4
Bending the Arrow of Time
As ill fortune would have it, the two worst days in Malcolm’s life
came back to back. On Monday his brother was jogging in the park,
as he did every morning, when another runner saw him suddenly
collapse onto the path. The man rushed to help, but Malcolm’s
brother was already dead, the victim of a massive heart attack. He
was fty years  old, seven years younger than Malcolm, and he had
no previous history of heart disease. On Tuesday, the wife of Malcolm’s best friend, who was a local
pediatrician in his late forties, called up weeping incoherently. Her
husband was driving home from the hospital that afternoon when
he slumped over the wheel of his car. He, too, had been struck with
a fatal heart attack without anyone suspecting that he had heart
disease. These two losses aected Malcolm deeply. Numbed and shaken,
he began to dwell moodily on the uncertainty of life. By week’s end,
he decided to consult a doctor about his own heart. His cardiologist
ran an EKG, which proved normal, but since his brother’s heart
attack might point to a famil y predisposition, Malcolm was asked to
take a treadm ill test. He performed extremely well, taking his
heartbeat up to 180 without suering pain, nor were there
indications of any distortions in his heartbea t. “Stop worrying,” his
cardiologist reassured him, “you have the heart of a twenty-year-
old.”
The next day, however, Malcolm was sitting at a red light in
morning trac, continuing to obsess over the two deaths that hadleft such a gaping hole in his life. He missed the light turning green. Suddenly he found himself at the head of three lanes of angrily
honking cars trying to zoom around him. Confused and disoriented,
he took a few seconds to regain his composure, and as he shifted
into gear, he noticed a funny sensation in the middle of his chest—
he couldn’t tell whether it was pain or pressure, but it made him
feel momentarily dizzy. Malcolm decided to consult another cardiologist, who spotted
some potential irregularities in the way the rst treadmi ll test had
been conducte d. “Why don’t you have another stress test?” he
advised. “Just  to make sure.” Malcolm showed up early at the
testing laboratory and was told that he would have to wait for the
patient in front of him. He sat down and peered in through the lab
window to see a t-looking man in running shorts walking briskly
on the treadmi ll. As if in a silent movie, the man opened his mouth
without emitting a sound, clutched spasmodically at his chest, and
fell to the oor. The nurse hustled Malcolm away. In a few minutes
he learn ed that the man had died of a coronary. His own test was
postponed for another week. Malcolm feared that he was being followed by a curse. Greatly
distressed, he returned home and for the rst time began  to notice
denite twing es of pain in the area of his breas tbone. He
immediately reported this symptom to his new cardiologist. “Look,”
the doctor said, “no treadmill test is all that reliable. If you really
want to be sure about your heart, let’s do an angio gram.” An
angiogram, which allows the heart to be observed on a monitor
while the coronary arteries are illuminated with an injection of dye,
is considered the gold standard for assessing coronary heart disease. The test was run, and if Malcolm had feared the worst, it now
came true. Two of his coron ary arteries were 85 percent blocked,
causing blood ow to his heart to be dangerously restricted. His
chest pain suddenly increased in intensity and frequency. It began to
show the prole of typical angina, coming on whenever he exerted
himself physically. Alarmed, his cardiologist put him on
nitroglycerine pills to control the attacks. All next week Malcolm
stayed home from work, but to combat his dejection, he decided tonish some home repairs, which required climbing a ladder and
setting in some heavy window sashes. On his next visit to the doctor, he mentioned that he had been
doing this work without any chest discomfort. His cardiologist
looked aghast. “You can’t do that kind of thing! Don’t you realize
that with coronary arteries as blocked as yours, you could suer a
heart attack at any moment?”
Upon hearing these words, Malcolm felt squeezing chest pain that
left him breathless—it was his rst attack of unstable angina, a late
and very serious symptom of heart disease. It is called “unstable”
because the bouts of pain start coming unpredictably , with or
without physic al exertion. His cardiologist felt that they had no
choice but to operate. Malcolm underwent a double bypass graft
that Friday. It was less than a month after the two fatal heart attacks
that had sent him into a tailspin. Nor was this the end. When I saw him four months later,
Malcolm’s newly grafted coronary vessels were still open, but his
chest pain had not abated. Today he still exhibits all the classic signs
of unstable angina. He has to avoid even the least stress and
therefore has been forced into early retirement. Since a stroll to the
refrigerator is now enough to trigger a burst of chest pain, he is
almost completely housebound. Presumably his high anxiety level
triggers his attacks, either by causing spasms of the coronary
arteries or by creating psychosomatic pain. “What do you think caused all this?” I asked him. “I lie awake thinking about it,” he said mournfully. “Did I do this
to myself, or am I just incredibly unlucky? No one’s given me any
kind of acceptable explanation. Let’s call it a mystery and leave it at
that.”
Time and the Perceiver
If Malcolm’s condition had taken forty years to develop instead of
four weeks, there would be no mystery. We would just say that he
grew old. Coronary artery disease aicts so many old people that it
was long considered a norm al part of the aging process , and evennow, when heart disease is known to be preventable and therefore is
not, strictly speaking, norm al, it remains the leading cause of
mortality among the elderly. Historically, medicine has not been
able to hunt down the cause of aging or even describe it well, but by
denition getting old is something that takes a long time to happen. A heart  that ages in a month is acting in a fashion that is highly
abnormal, even bizarre. There is more than a hint that Malcolm somehow gener ated the
series of event s that victimized him, although his consciousness did
not recognize the fact. To begin with, explaining his case as the
product of random chance is not convincing. The timing and
orchestration of events following the death of his brother is just too
perfect. They unfold like a well-crafted play, with rising  dramatic
tension and a swift, gripping denouement. Malcolm has no
knowledge of how he might have done all this. To hasten the aging
process implies  the ability to control it, but that implies control over
time itself, which is clearly impossible—or so we assume. If we step outside the limited world view of science, explanations
do exist. First we can challe nge the basic assumption that time is
objective. The clocks we depend upon to tell us the time appear to
tick their hours and minutes independent of our inuence, and daily
events appear to be jumbled up with no rhyme or reason; but from
another viewp oint, all this is only the conventional treatment of
time which all of us happen  to share. We have made a collective
agreement that time has certain unalterable features: it moves
forward, it is measured by clocks, it is uniform everywhe re, it waits
for no man. Yet this agreement is not ironclad, and at certain moments time
turns inexplicably exible. Recently a Swiss friend of mine, also a
physician, read me a curious and moving newspaper story about a
coal mine disaster in Germany. A small group of miners were
trapped underg round after a massive cave-in. They realized that the
air in the mine shaft would last only a limited number of hours. As
it turned out, just one of the group was wearing a wristwatch, and
he began to announce the time while the men anxiously awaited
rescue. To sustain hope in the others, he did not announce the righttime, however ; he called out one hour whenever two hours had
passed. Six days later, a rescue team found the trapped miners;
astonishingly, they were all still alive with one exception—the man
who wore the watch. In essence, the man with the watch fooled the others into
breaking their agreement about what constitutes real time. Tragically, he could not fool himself. Can it be that time will wait
for one man and overtake another, depending on what  each one
expects? In the spring of 1990, sociologists from the University of
California at San Diego reported that Chinese mortality dropped by
35 percent the week before the Harvest Moon Festival, one of the
most auspiciou s days in the Chinese calendar, and one where special
importance is given to elder s. When the festival ended, death rates
climbed again, and by a week later they were 34 percent higher
than normal. This implies that people who are near death can
postpone their passing in order to savor a day that is special to
them. A simila r swing has been found with Jewish mortality just before
and after Passover (by contrast, non-Jewish control groups showed
no such eect, maintaining the same death rates throughout). Finally, cardiologists have pondered the fact that heart-attack rates
are higher at 9 A.M. on Monday morning than at any other time of
the week. This is not exactly a randomly chosen hour. For many
people, going back to work after the weekend is a return to harsher
realities. Have  some of them found the drastic escape route of
suering a heart attack instead of punching the time clock one time
too many? These examples are limited to biological time, the hidden clock in
our cells. To see truly comprehensive mastery of time, one must turn
to dream s. Dream time lacks any xed sequence or logic altogether. It can go backward or forward, speed up or slow down, come to a
halt or simply disappear—many dream events are frozen in a kind
of no-time without beginning or end. Flying through the clouds,
being caught in a riptide, or running down the street pursued by aphantom villain are dream events that can seem to last either an
instant or an eternity, as if time has ed the scene. When we wake  up to the world of reliable clocks, time resumes its
creeping pace,  but that proves little about its real nature. Suppose a
man is sitting in a room idly looking out the window . Morning,
noon, and evening go by; he passively stares at people as they
parade before him and watches the events taking place on the street. The same man could go to sleep at night and witness the exact same
people and events in a dream , but now morning, noon, and evening
occupy only two minutes of his sleep. Like the rest of his dream,
time was created by his brain. In what way is waking time any
dierent? The same brain cells process the passage of time in both
cases; therefore, waking time and dream time could both be self-
created. If so, then time itself is only a personal perception, liable to the
same uctuations as a mood, reverie, fantasy, or any passing
thought. Psychologists already recognize that time contains a strong
personal element. All of us exercise some ability to manipulate time
according to our whims. If I am languishing in a dentist’s waiting
room, my unha ppiness make s time drag. To speed it up, I need only
go somewhere else—to an Indian restaurant perhaps—where I can
enjoy myself again. If I turn to something I nd deeply enjoyable,
time will start to y. The dierence between slow, dragging time
and swift, eeting time resides in my perception of the situation. As
long as I am free to move from the dentist to the restaurant, I have
personal control over how time feels. But if I am forced by a sense of duty to remain at the dentist’s,
then I have no choice but to experience the creeping kind of time
that is oered there. This sort of compulsion has trapped all of us. We stay in the same time-frame day after day because we think we
have to, or ought to. But this is only an agreement we made
somewhere along the line—we have even forgotten when. Anyone
can break free and reassert his ability to control time. Time TravelersOne of the main themes of the world’s spiritual traditions is the
falseness of time, and one of the aims of enlightened teachers is to
break the spell of time that limits the minds of their followers. A
master in India once said to his disciples, “You have enclosed
yourself in the prison of time and space, squeezing your experience
into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body. It is because of
this self-imposed illusion that all your conicts arise: life and death,
pain and pleasure, hope and fear. To end these problems , you must
rst end the illusion.”
“But how is that done?” a disciple asked. The master replied, “You are caught in this world like sh in a
net. But all nets have holes. Find one, escape through it, and you
will see what reality actually is.”
Apparently the net of time is full of just such holes. It appears to
be objectively real but in fact may be no more than a notion
fostered in our minds. The great sage Shankara, who towers over
the whole tradition of Indian philosophy, once wrote, “People grow
old and die because they see other people grow old and die.” I
remember, on rst reading this sentence ten years ago, feeling a
mixture of disbelief and wonder. If Shankara is right, then aging is
not a xed biological proces s; it is just a bundle of perceptions we
have picked up, taken into our bodies, and given physical shape. There is a revealing, although heartless, biology experiment in
which a rat is thrown into a tank of water. Rats are not adept
swimmers, and the animal will thrash around, trying vainly to climb
out of the tank, only to slip back down from the glass walls. After a
few minutes the animal is totally exhausted, on the verge of
drowning. The experimenter then pulls it out and allows it to rest. The procedure  is repeated over the following days, and within a
short time, usually less than three weeks, the rat will have
undergone dramatic changes . The pressure of so much daily stress
will have aged its tissues enormously. If the experiment is kept up,
the rat will die of “old age” in a month; on dissection , its heart,
liver, lungs, and other organs will be as dark, tough, and brous as
those of a rat that lived a normal life span of two years or more.In essen ce, the experimenters sped up time and forced the rat to
absorb it into its body. The discolored, exhausted tissues that
resulted were like bits of frozen time given material expression by
the aging process. The same process happens in human beings,
although we absorb time more complexly, according to our own
personal value s. Unlike experimental rats, we can choose to live
with more or less stress; more importantly, we can interpret time
dierently and therefore cause it to change. Misusing this privilege
creates untold suering. I am not thinking just of people who place
themselves in desperately stressful situations, although millions do. The deeper ignorance is that we do not realize that time does not
have to be frozen inside us. Shankara’s seemingly strange idea that we grow old because we
watch others grow old may well be true. Partial validation has
already come from an ingenious study the Harvard psychology
department ran in the late Seventies. The Harvard team, headed by
Professor Ellen Langer, did not actually set out with Shankara’s
dictum in mind; they were testing whether aging is an irreversible
process, as is widely accepted. The National Institute on Aging takes
the ocial stand that there is no reliable method, through drugs,
diet, exercise, or mental techniques, to restore lost youth. Although
a large body of research backs up this position, Langer’s  team had
its doubts; they suspected that aging might be a creation of the mind
that the mind can undo. To test this possibility, they rst placed a newspaper ad in a
Boston daily asking for men seventy-ve and older who would be
willing to go on a week’s vacation, all expenses paid. A group of
suitable volunt eers was chosen, placed in a van, and whisked o to
a luxurious retreat on ten acres of secluded woodland in the New
England countryside. When they arrived at this isolated setting, the men were met with
a duplicate of daily life as it existed twenty years earlier. Instead of
magazines from 1979, the reading tables held issues of Life and the
Saturday Evening Post from 1959. The radio played music from that
year, and group discussions centered on the politics and celebrities
of the era. A taped address from President Eisen hower was played,followed by the lm Anatomy of a Murder , which won the Academy
Award in 1959. Besides these  props, every eort was made to center
each person on how he felt, looked, talked, and acted when he was
twenty years younger. The group had to speak exclusively in the present tense, as if 1959
were today (“Do you think Castro will become a puppet of
Khrushchev’s?”), and their references to family, friends, and jobs
could not go beyond that year. Their middle-aged children were still
at home or just going to college; their careers were in full swing. Each person had submitted a picture of himself taken twenty years
before; these were used to introduce each one to the group. While this week of make-beli eve went on, a control group of men
over seventy- ve also talked about the events of 1959, but using the
past tense instead of the present. Castro, Mickey Mantle,
Eisenhower, and Marilyn Monroe were allowed to have their real
futures. The radio played 1979 music, the magazines carried the
latest news, and the lms were current releases. Before, during , and after the retreat, Langer measured each man
for signs of aging. For members of the 1959 group, to a remarkable
extent these measurements actually went backward in time over the
one-week period. The men began to improve in memory and manual
dexterity. They were more active and self-sucient (instead of
waiting to be helped, they took their food and cleared their tables
by themselves). Some such changes might be expected in any older person
enjoying himself on vacation. However, traits that are denitely
considered irreversible signs of aging also started to turn around. Independent judges looked at before-and-after pictures of the men
and rated them three years younger in appearance. Hand
measurements showed that their ngers had actually lengthened
and gained back some of the exibility in their joints. The group
could sit taller  in their chair s, had a stronger hand grip, and could
even see and hear better. The control group also exhibited some of
these changes but to a smaller degree, and in some measures, such
as manual dexterity and nger length, they had even declined over
the week.In her intriguing book, Mindfulness , Langer attributes some of
these reversals  to the fact that the men were given more control
over their lives than they enjoyed at home. They were treated like
anyone in his mid-fties, who would naturally carry his own
suitcase or select his own food for dinner. Their opinions were
valued in group discussions , and it was assumed that they were
mentally vigor ous, an assumption probably not made about them in
everyday life. In this way they moved from a mindless existence to
one that is “mindful,” Langer’s term for living with alertness,
openness to new ideas, and mental vigor. But why did the group
who lived in 1959 do so much better than the 1979 group? It is
quite plausible  that they improved because of what they saw. In a
neat twist on Shankara’s dictum, not seeing other people grow old
seems to prevent us from growing old ourselves. Langer’s men were like time travelers of a special sort, who went
back to the past by going back inside themselves. We tend to think
that time is outside us, but in this instance, it was just as much
inside, packaged as memory. To remember is to take your body time
traveling, even though you do not leave your chair. For example, if I
remember being scared in a dark alley when I was six, my heart
starts to thump like a six-year-old’s again. The mind can also project
the body forward in time. I have seen twenty-year-old women, on
being told that they have cancer, age before my eyes, becoming as
worn as someone who has battled the disease for years. In each case, the mind mana ges to be in two places at once, both
traveling in time and staying  in the present. The old men who went
back to 1959 were also rmly xed in 1979—they read old
magazines, but the same rain fell on them as on the other citizens of
Boston that week. The illusion of xed time was thus partly
dissolved. One could go furth er. If I lost all my prior conditioning of
seeing others age, perhaps I could remain a twenty-year-old
permanently, although I would still walk around experiencing the
ordinary passage of time as other people do. I would then have
taken “my time” under control. Why not speak of “my time” and “your time”? A clock  on the
shelf mindlessly taps out its seconds and minutes, but our innerclock possesses as much intelligence as the brain that houses it. After years of searching, physiologists in the last decade have
pinpointed the biological clock that governs all the rhythmical
functions of the body, such as waking, sleeping, eating, thirst, body
temperature, blood pressure, growth, and the ebb and ow of
numerous hormones. A tiny core of cells in the hypothalamus, called the
suprachiasmatic nucleus, regulates all these wheels within wheels,
orchestrating rhythms as long as the twenty-eight-day menstrual
cycle and as short as the three-hour burst of growth hormone. Even
the chemical reactions inside individual cells, which take place
thousands of times per second, must obey the body’s master clock. To use the word “clock” here is deceptive, because we can dictate
the ow of time within ourselves, breaking free of any mechanical
ticktock. We wake, sleep, eat, and breathe at will, overriding the
preset cycles for these funct ions. Some women seem to be able to
reset their ovulation cycle, delaying their periods under times of
stress (they may not realize that they have made this choice, but
their bodies apparently are responding to a specic brain signal
triggered by the woman’s emotions). In more extreme cases, women
suering from multiple personalities—the syndrome made famous
by Eve and Sybil—can have a period for each personality, separated
by several days or weeks each month. A woman with three
personalities and three menstrual cycles does not have three
separate clocks  inside; instead, she has better control over time than
we generally acknowledge. To have so much freedom of choice can play havoc with rhythms
that should not be thrown o—jet lag temporarily disrupts our
major sleep-wa ke cycle, pulling dozens of smaller cycles along with
it. Yet the very fact that time and mind can blend into one another
points to the possibility of total freedom, an escape from mindless
clocks into a reality where every second is alive. The Arrow of TimeThe concept of personal time would strike a physicist as a fantasy. To him, space-time is fundamental to existence, and time is
governed by laws that do not bend because the mind wants them to. Physicists use the phrase “the arrow of time” to indicate that events
move forward in the ordained manner and cannot be reversed. Stephen Hawk ing among others has used the example of knocking a
glass o the table. When the glass strikes the oor, it shatters into a
hundred pieces, and once shattered, it will never regroup itself into
a whole glass. By the same law, ice cubes melt in a glass of tea and
do not reform ; junkyard wrecks rust into chaotic heaps, with no
chance that they will suddenly turn back into new cars. On paper you can put a broken glass back together again by
carefully computing the energy exchanges that sent each shattered
fragment o into space. A whole glass could then be conjured up by
reversing each tangent. As pure mathematics, a whole glass is just a
smashed glass with the equations turned around, and you can
alternate one version with the other endlessly. But the arrow of time forbids such easy shuing in the real
world. The instant the smash occurs, time carries the glass away,
never to return it whole again. If this is indeed the law, it would
only be wise to resign yourself to it, to bow to time as heat, light, all
moving bodies, and all forms of energy in the univer se do. But
personal time, “my time,” is not at all like that. Instead of shooting
o in one direction, it moves forward when I worry about the future
and backward when I remember the past. “Time is not just a road,”
the novelist John Fowles has written. “It is also a room.” We call the
room memory , a space where one can sit and be surrounded by
heaps of things past. Personal time can also be dead or alive. Several decades ago a
team of archaeologists unearthed a clay vessel of wheat grains
buried in an Egyptian pyramid. The grains were planted and
watered, and within a few days they sprouted, amazingly, after two
thousand years of dormancy. If you can imagine seeing this event
from the wheat grain’s viewp oint, it must have been very much like
waking up. Time was dead while the seeds were dormant, causing
no change or decay. That twenty centuries had passed was nodierent from one season, since the intervening time had no life in
it. It was dead time, or sleeping time, wrapped up inside the seed,
waiting for the touch of life. The location of this wrapped -up time is the wheat’s DNA, which
has also stored  time for us, in the form of our own genetic memory. You could not survive a cold or any other disease if your thymus
gland did not store up the memory of antibodies that learned to
combat viruse s and bacteria millions of years ago. Your immune
system is an encyclopedia of every disease ancestral man caught;
thousands of generations died from fevers and plagues so that you
may live. Science has yet to recognize  that DNA has a magical side, yet
imagine that you are standing in an empty room with a spiral
staircase direc tly in front of you. It is a wooden staircase, the kind
once standard  in old colonial houses and churches. As you are
admiring its perfect carpentry, a strange thing happens. The
staircase slowly rotates and splits in two, right up the middle, as if a
zipper had opened it up from bottom to top. The two halves stand
apart, facing each other. Now you notice something that had escaped your eye before. The
staircases are surrounded by a swirling cloud of sawdust. The
sawdust cloud appears to be formless, but currents and eddies begin
to form in it, and then, inexplicably, the cloud gradual ly rebuilds
the half-staircases, adding new steps, banisters, and posts , until you
behold before you two complete staircases, identical in every
respect to the original. DNA behaves in exactly this uncanny fashion. Every time you
need to make a new cell (a need that crops up millions of times per
minute), a molecule of DNA has to split itself in half. It does this
exactly like the dream staircase: rst the original double spiral
divides down the middle, leaving the cell temporarily with no intact
DNA. Then out of a formle ss, swirling bath of biochemicals, the
DNA rebuilds each half of itself to form two replicas of the original
molecule. What is so astonishing about this process is not its complexity—
although in every cell, 3 billion genetic bits get replaced withperfect precision. The truly astonishing part is that all this
rebuilding is done by things . A DNA molecule, like a wooden
staircase, is just a thing. It is built of quite ordinary hydrogen,
carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen molecules, which themselves are just
smaller things. Similar molecules make up a lump of sugar, a drop
of oil, a clump of peat moss. None of them can perform the actions
we just witnessed. How is it, then, that stubborn, inert molecules
learned to build a staircase many million times more complicated
than any constructed by human hands? The answer is that DNA is not really a thing; it is a living memory
residing in a thing. The memory is not intrinsic to the component
carbon, hydrog en, or oxygen atoms. If it were, then a sugar cube
would be alive, too. DNA is basically a material mask behind which
one nds a rich but abstract awareness. Consider DNA’s mastery over time. To a human being, a lm
running at twenty-four frames per second is a movie, because our
brains register its ashing images as continuous motion. That is pure
illusion to a horsey, whose eye is quick enough to catch the black
spaces projected between each frame—the y’s brain sees a slide
show of still pictures going by. A snail, on the other hand, being
able to see only one new image every four seconds, misses three-
quarters of the lm; it sees only a hodgepodge of jerky pictures (if
you moved fast enough, you would have time to surreptitiously
pluck a rose from underneat h a snail’s nose and it would think the
ower had disappeared into thin air). In each creature , DNA has
adopted a dierent conguration, which brought with it a dierent
style of consciousness suited to that creature and in turn a dierent
mode of time. DNA is like a switching statio n between eternity and all the forms
of life that partake of time. DNA chops the endless continuum of
time into neat slices accordi ng to a species’ unique awareness and
the specic life span allotted to it. Human time, horsey time, snail
time—each framework is completely dierent from the rest. What is
even more impressive, DNA can exert control forward in time or
backward. The fact that we all grow third molars, for example, is a
bit of our inher itance that DNA fetches from the past. DNA has to gointo the future, however, to know that this tooth will not appear
except as the nal addition to our adult teeth after age twelve. The same speck of DNA deposited in the womb knows how to
perform millions of actions that will not be needed for years or even
decades to come. Our genes know how to fuse an infant’s loosely
joined skull bones and at the same time how to compensate for lost
calcium in a seventy-year-old  femur. The blending of time and life
goes far beyond what a human brain can imagine. It has been
estimated that 6 trillion chemical reactions take place in the body
every second. The same speck of DNA controls them all, rarely
mistiming a single one, no matter how distant in time and space. If these teeming reactions remained the same from moment to
moment, a cell biologist might one day give a complete explanation
of how DNA masterminds the ow of life. However, there  is a fourth
dimension, wherein each cell obeys its own destiny: a skin cell
survives one month while a neuron, motivated by the same genetic
strand, endure s a lifetime. It is unimaginable how our genes
coordinate lifelines so vastly dierent. Some small patch of nowhere
and no-time has been woven into the texture of our genes, a place
where we can perch, as a sherman perches on a riverbank to cast
his line into the current. From that timeless position, you are old
before you are young, bald before you sprout baby hair, expiring on
your deathbed before you draw in your rst breath. The Self Beyond Time
Since DNA has such manifest mastery over time, we must share in
it. If so, Malcolm’s mystery is pointing to its own solution. He was
unchaining himself from the arrow of time, abandoning time’s
straight line like a train jumping the tracks. He plunge d into the
unknown with all its perils. Even so, he came closer to the truth
than most of us, for time actually is much more like a vast unknown
country than a railroad track. If you look at the whole landscape of time, the straight-line
boundaries disappear, and what is left is eternity, the timeless. In
their own ways, every spiritu al tradition has tried to persuade manthat the timeless is more real than any experience to be had in time. Nevertheless, we still nd ourselves stranded in the ow of time,
both physically and mentall y. One has to look hard for escapees,
and in this century, they are not necessarily men of faith. Erwin Schrödinger, who was among the most inuential theorists
in the early decades of quantum physics, made the conceptual leap
that most of us cannot: “Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary
reason, you—a nd all other conscious beings as such—are  all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of
the entire universe, but is, in a certain sense, the whole .” To the
isolated ego, this is an unfat homable statement. How can a person
be the whole, which means everything that exists, and still remain
what he seems to be, an individual being with separate ideas and
memories? Even though our world is time bound, there are many clues to
indicate that we are tuned to the larger reality of “all in all.” A
prominent Japanese neuroscientist, Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda, has
spent fourteen years testing the functions of the left and right sides
of the brain. In all of us there is a switching mechanism, located in
the brain stem, that enables us to shift dominance to our left
cerebral hemisphere when we are engaged in speech, calculation,
and logic, and to our right hemisphere for music, recognizing
shapes, drawing analogies, or engaging in anything that stirs our
emotions. (We are speaking of a temporary shift here, not the
permanent left- or right-brain dominance that has been publicized in
recent years.) Tsunoda devised a new way of mapping this switching
mechanism, based on the delayed feedback of sounds, very much
like watching the brain of a person who is hearing the sound of his
own voice as he speaks. Many delicate aspects of the brain’s shift
from left to right were uncovered, but the most remarkabl e was this:
It was found that people’s brain dominance switched when they
were played a sound whose frequency was a multiple of their age
(e.g., a multipl e of forty vibrations per second in the case of a forty-
year-old). Even stranger is the observation, veried with thirty
subjects in Japan, that a lasting shift in dominance also occurs onone’s birthday . For a varying length of time, right-brain people
become left-brain and vice versa. The phenomenon occurred in
more than half the subjects tested, and for some it occurred three
years in a row. Confronted with these enigmas, Tsunoda speculates that our
brains must somehow be tuned in to the earth’s revolution around
the sun, to the phases of the moon, or other cosmic clocks. “The link
with cosmic activity suggests  that there is a miniature cosmos in the
human brain,” he writes. “Yet we have lost our ability to perceive
this microcosm within ourselves in the hustle and bustle of
civilization.” In the West we might consider this conclusion rather a
far leap, considering the slimness of the data, but the ancient Indian
sages declared,
As is the macrocosm, so is the microcosm ,
As is the atom, so is the universe ,
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind . In other words, you cannot stand anywhere in the universe that is
outside yourself. As Schrödinger said, “You are a part of an innite,
eternal being.… Thus you can throw yourself at on the ground,
stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that
you are one with her and she with you. You are as rmly
established, as invulnerable as she,—indeed, a thous and times
rmer and more invulnerabl e.” This armation was not made out
of mystical reverence. Schrödinger took seriously the proposition
that the feeling of self, of “I am,” must be primary in the universe. It
is more invulnerable than the earth because the earth endures only
by being a lump of matter, which time continually wears away. I, on
the other hand , wake up with a refreshed sense of life every day,
grounded in the certainty that I exist. How did this feeling of “I am” come about? Apparently it exists in
the very nature  of life. Curre ntly, most people are not able to accept
that there is actually life in everything “out there.” This blindness
sets our culture apart from the main tradition of humankind. The
same stream of life once owed through the whole world,emanating from the gods or God. That unimaginable force created
galaxies and at the same time preserved the most fragile mountain
ower. All around us life gushed forth and met itself coming back,
curving in joy onto itself and leaping in jubilation at its own innite
strength. We were part of this stream too. We issued from it, and
our destiny was riding its crest. Now all that has become very vague and quizzical. We equate life
with DNA molecules, ignoring the fact that a person’s DNA is just as
intact the second after he dies as the second before. Sometimes after
a hard November frost I walk in the tall grass near my home and
nd a grassho pper lifelessly clinging to a withered stalk. I pick up
the cold shell, examine it, and think, “Something once lived in this. Now it has gone, I don’t know where. I am holding on to a husk,
and very soon its molecules  will also disappear, returning back to
earth. What made them alive once and then took their life away?”
In my puzzlement, I cannot help but see myself as the best judge
of what life is. I have questio ns and an unlooked-for gift, a summer
in the grass, in which to ask them. So time exists, as far as I am
concerned, for me to race against time. I already forese e that my
molecules will return to the earth, too. But unlike the grasshopper, I
may be able to consciously defeat this threat, by knowi ng how to
get beyond it. In its broade st and deepest sense, that is what the
“meaning of life” is—the sum total of what each person has learned
about his own life, and the chance to keep it. Other ages may have
known the answers to this mystery, or people then may have simply
settled for a ready-made answer, dictated by faith. The nal, “hard” proof that mind exists in nature is not anything I
am waiting for. The proof may never come, since it is our mind
conducting the search, and the mind is notorious for changing the
rules. Meaning  is where you see it, and how. You can look under a
microscope at the ashing dots on a color television screen and see
them as random scintillations  in a phosphorescent chemical base, or
you can back away and see that the same scintillations form a
picture. One perspective detects orderliness and meaning, the
product of mind; the other does not. The dierence between the two
resides solely in the perspective, not the thing itself.If you glance outside your window and recognize the trees, sky,
and clouds as part of yourself, your perception is not automatically
true or false. Perhaps you are having a schizophrenic hallucination;
perhaps you are experiencing the deepest insight of the ancient
Indian sages, Aham Brahmasmi —I am Brahman, the all in all. The
gamut of meaning contained  in such an experience runs from the
absurd to the sacred. The point is that the same mind-stu contains
all meanings. When we touch a new level of consciousness, a new
world is created. To nd oneself living in an age of doubt is not such a curse. There
is a kind of reverence in undertaking the quest for truth, even before
the rst scrap has been found. “Desire for wisdom!” Albert
Schweitzer once wrote. “Explore everything around you, penetrate
to the furthes t limits of human knowledge, and always you will
come up with something inexplicable in the end. It is called life.”
The inexplicab le thing that escaped out of the grasshopper’s shell
is repea ted in my own life, and if I look at the data collected from
the edge of the universe, I still read the same mystery there. What
this means is that my search for truth is just life looking for itself. Nature is a mirror; the seer is the seen. That may be the very clue
that brings the mystery to an end. I once heard about a spiritual
exercise that an Indian master asked his disciples to perform:
“Hold up your thumb and forenger together. Do you feel that the
thumb is touching the nger,  or is the nger touching the thumb? It
can be either way, can’t it? In one case the thumb is the experiencer,
in the other it is the experienced. “Now ask yourself, ‘Who is it that switches from experiencer to
experienced?’ Being in contro l of the operation, you must be beyond
it. You are larger than the experiencer, larger than any set of
experiences. Whatever you are, you will only nd yours elf beyond
the things you now know.”
Perhaps not everyone will nd this lesson as earth shattering as I
do. It tells me that my indivi dual mind and body, which place such
obvious limitat ions upon me today, cannot be the whole story. What
is the mind but the experiencer, the knower? What is the body but
the experienced, the known? If I can switch my attention from oneto the other, then there must be a “me” that is not trapped in the
dualism of mind or body. This “me” is not to be discovered by
simple means. I cannot look at it, because it is in my eye; I cannot
hear it, because it is in my ear; I cannot touch it, because it is in my
nger. So what is left? Only the voice inside that whispers, “Go
beyond.” By following that whisper I may lose myself in unknown
country. On the other hand, I may step outside the boundary of time
itself. Then I will discover, once and for all, whether time is my real
home, or eternity. OceanofPDF.comPart Two
Beyond Boundaries
OceanofPDF.com5
A Mirage of Molecules
As a boy growing up in New Delhi, I wondered at the wild
contrast between my two grandfathers. One was a man of action, a
soldier who was born the son of a small-scale rajah in the dry hills
of the Northwest Territory. “Rajah,” or prince, is rathe r a grand
title, too high-own to capture those ercely independent tribal
chieftains, whose people were the most warlike in India. When
British soldiers were sent to force his allegiance to the Crown, my
great-grandfather rashly decided to re on them. His tiny forces
were quickly defeated. Our family legends hold that the rebellious village had only a
single antiqua ted cannon to ght with. The old gun futilely
thundered away, and when the foreigners nally marched in, the
dead were sprawled beside it, my great-grandfather among them. The sins of the father were not visited upon the son. The British
graciously presented my grandfather with the pension that would
have been oered to the rajah, along with a life commission as a
sergeant in the British army. This was a signal honor at the time. Grandfather relished
regimental life, and it molded every detail of his character. He
greeted my birth by climbin g onto the roof of his villa in Lahore,
ring a smart volley of rie shots into the air, and blowing a
triumphant blast on his bugle. Having satisfactorily alerted (and
terried) the neighbors, he descended to calmly resume his
breakfast.My other grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a man of peace. His life had been molded by foreign inuence, too, but in an
entirely dierent way. When the Singer sewing machine was
introduced to India at the turn of the century, he became the
company’s sales representative, traveling throughout the country to
tout this miraculous machi ne that could do the work of three
women. He quickly amassed  a sizable sum of money and retired
before he was fty, spending  the rest of his life in medi tation and
spiritual inquiry. At the announcement of my birth, he
unobtrusively took his way from his house on Babar Road in New
Delhi to a back street in the old city, where he distributed alms to
the poor. This grandfather passed hours in the company of yogis, swamis,
and other holy men, or simply with his old cronies, who constantly
talked of “the Mysterious One.” If a friend found a Queen Victoria
gold rupee in the street, they would smilingly shake their heads and
murmur, as if sharing a private joke, “Oh, it’s the Mysterious One
again.” If a young mother lost her rst child, that, too, was a whim
of the Mysterious One, and in fact no unusual incident, large or
small, went by without invoking this unseen and unseeable person. I
had no idea whom they were referring to, although there was a
mixture of the inscrutable, the unpredictable, and the divinely
playful in his character. Few ten-year-o ld boys, even in India, can be said to have a
contemplative bent, and I was no exception. It did not occur to me
that these old men in their white jackets and peaked caps, sitting on
our veranda half the day without exchanging six words, could be
investigating anything very worthwhile. This grandfather died
without letting me into his world. Instead, most of my life has been
dominated by my army grandfather. Medicine is suited to action
and is almost military in its disciplined training, its attention to
defense, its rallies and last-ditch stands against the enemy, and not
least of all, in the violence often done to the human body in the
name of doing it good. To most physicians, the most fearful prospect is not a case that
cannot be cured but one where the doctor is helpless to act. Even anincurable disea se has treatments, working toward the day when one
of them  will prove eective. Without this “anything is better than
nothing” attitude, we would  not have most of the cures that do
exist. But what about the times when doing nothing is the cure? In
those moments the Mysterious One begins to make his presence felt. In his brilliant book of essays on surgery, Mortal Lessons , Richard
Selzer recalls one patient of his, a short-order cook named Joe
Riker, who always showed up for his weekly appointments wearing
a fedora. Beneath the hat was hidden a terrible secret: In the middle
of his head a tumor had progressively worked its way through the
skin, the skull bones, and the three tough outer layers of the brain,
leaving a gaping hole. Through it, the actual moist tissue of the
brain could now be seen. Selzer’s reaction to this disturbing sight
was not horror but urgent compassion:
I would gaze then upon Joe Riker and marvel. How digni ed
he was, as though the tumor  … had given him a grace that a
lifetime of good health had not bestowed. “Joe,” I say, “let’s get rid of it. Cut out the bad part, put in
a metal plate, and you’re cured.” And I wait. “No operation,” says Joe. I try again. “What do you mean, ‘no operation’? You’re going to get
meningitis. Any day now. And die. That thing is going to get
to your brain.”
I think of it devouring the man’s dreams and memories. I
wonder where they are. The surgeon knows all the parts of
the brain, but he does not know his patient’s dreams and
memories.…
“No operation,” says Joe. “You give me a headache,” I say. And we smile, not
because the joke is funny anymore, but because we have got
something between us, like a secret. Week after week, for six months, Selzer had no choice but to apply
fresh dressings and set the next weekly appointment, always for
Thursday at four o’clock. Then one day Joe missed his appointmentand did not return. After a month, Selzer drove to the diner in New
Haven where Joe worked and found him behind the counter, still
wearing his fedora. When he demanded to examine him, Joe
nervously refused, but he agreed to meet Selzer at his oce that
Thursday. He showed up late for his appointment. “Take o your hat,” I say, and he knows by my voice that I
am not happy. He does, though, raise it straight up with both
hands the way he always does, and I see … that the wound
has healed. Where once there had been a bitten-out
excavation … there is now a fragile bridge of shiny new skin. “What happened?” I manage. “You mean that?” He points to the top of his head. “Oh
well,” he says, “the wife’s sister, she went to France, and
brought me a bottle of water from Lourdes. I’ve been wash ing
it out with that for a month.”
“Holy water?” I say. “Yeah,” says Joe. “Holy water.”
O and on after that, Selzer would see Joe at the diner, looking
completely ordinary, not at all like “a eshy garden of miracles,” as
Selzer dubbed him. There seemed to be no change at all in Joe’s
shuing walk or his matter-of-fact manner. “Perhaps the only
change is just the sly wink with which he greets me, as though to
signal that we have shared something furtive. Could such a man, I
think as I sip my coee, could such a man have felt the brush of
wings?”
The Mask of Maya
In his own very dierent words, Selzer is posing the same
question as my spiritual grandfather: Is there a mysterious force that
brushes us at times, lifting ordinary life above the laws that seem to
bind it? “What is to one man a coincidence is to another a miracle,”
Selzer writes. “It was one or the other of those I saw last spring.”
But isn’t there  a third altern ative? The body might be a mask, anappearance of reality suited to the ve senses, which usually  follows
the well-known set of physical laws, but is also free to change. If
this is so, then the strange events that occasionally crop up would
not really be miracles but glimpses behind the mask, or small
windows into a corridor of reality that is usually sealed o. If I use the phrase “the body is an illusion,” I am demoting this
structure of skin and bones from the xed, predictable, solid status
it seems to have in time and space, but I am not implying that we
should give up on it, treating it as indierently as the illusory
patterns that a swirl of cigare tte smoke makes in the air. The body is
precious to us, all the more so because  it is not xed and predictable. We have a wide choice about how to react to the illusion. It can
be made into something deceptive, unreal, and unrelia ble. But I
could also regard it as something marvelous, enchanting, and
surprising, like the illusions  of Houdini. Certainly I am free to
choose this second interpretation. That is what my spiritual
grandfather did when he approached the even greater illusion of life
as a whole: for him, the Mysterious One was not a deceiv er. He was
the all-powerful animating force that makes things happen,
sometimes according to the rules but not always. After all, they are
His rules. In the Indian tradition, the formal term for this omnipotent force
is Maya . Maya is a Sanskrit word that means “illusion” or
“delusion,” but much more besides. The eminent mythologist Joseph
Campbell has traced the shades of meaning contained in this word. Maya comes from the root verb ma, “to measure out, to form, to
build,” denoting the ability of the gods to change form, to make
worlds, to assume masks and disguises. Maya also means “magic,” a show of illusions. In warfa re it can
mean camouage or deceptive tactics. Finally, when used by
philosophers, Maya denotes the delusion of thinking that you are
seeing reality when in fact you are only seeing a layer of trick
eects superimposed upon the real reality. True to its deceptive nature, Maya is full of paradoxes. First of all,
it is everywhere, even though it doesn’t exist. It is often compared to
a deser t mirage, yet unlike a mirage, Maya does not merely oat“out there.” The Mysterious One is nowhere if not in each person. Finally, Maya is not so omnipotent that we cannot control it—and
that is the key point. Maya is fearful or diverting, all-powerful or
completely impotent, depending on your perspective. If cancer is
just Maya, then its frighten ing appearance is a bogeyman, to be
dispelled by anyone who sees through it. The fearful illusion
becomes a wonderful show if only you can manipulate it. Maya would be a worthless or degrading trick if we could not
pierce its mask . Who wants to be told that he is too ignorant to see
the real reality? In the case of a doctor, one is almost forced to
pierce the mask of Maya, because so many patients, like Joe Riker,
keep throwing our ignorance  back into our faces. My own patient,
Mr. Elliott, at least had a slim objective reason—the bad news about
his heart—that he could blow up out of all proportion. But I cannot
really convince myself that this reason is good enough. Somewhere
deep inside, each of us know s that the rules that hold life together
are provisional, and we can decide, with barely a wisp of a reason,
to stop abiding by them. A secret decision maker can awake in panic
and anger, roaring, “I made this body, I control it, and I will do with
it what I will!”
Maya does not generally shift this violently. The body has been
set up to operate like a well-behaved machine. Yet to claim that the
body is literall y a machine is to express a subjective decis ion, not an
objective fact. One time I was asked to speak in front of a small
audience of Boston doctors, and the physician who introduced me, a
pathologist, began genially, “I’m sure we will all nd the views of
mind-body medicine intriguing, but I must declare that I am a
scientist, and until I can see it under my microscope, I cannot
believe that a thing is real.”
“I’m embarrassed to begin,” I responded, “because I was going to
try to prove that what you can see under your microscope has no
reality at all. I don’t want to put you out of a job.”
“Go ahead,” he said amiably, “I don’t think you can prove that,
and besides, I secretly want to be a psychiatrist anyway.”
Everybody laughed, but I wonder if he grasped that I was serious. If you exclude every part of a human being that can be viewedunder a microscope, nothing remains for the scientist to hold on to. Every atom inside us is more  than 99.999 percent empty space, and
the “solid” particles whizzing around are themselves just compact
bundles of energy vibrations. As you sift through this solid-looking,
convincing body, you only have to go so far before you wind up
with a handful of nothing. Yet this nothing is not really a void but a
womb. With incredible fertili ty, our inner space gives birth to “love
and hate, joy and sorrow, misery and happiness, pleasure and pain,
right and wrong, purpose, meaning, hope, courage, despair, God,
heaven and hell, grace, sin, salvation, damnation, enlightenment,
wisdom, compassion, evil, envy, malice, generosity, camaraderie,
and everything , in fact, that makes life worth living.” That is quite
an impressive list of things for scientists to exclude from reality. (R.
D. Laing made up the list, but then he is a psychiatrist.) Scientists defend objective facts by saying, “I can see and touch
this thing; it has measurable dimensions; it follows objective laws
that mathema tics can describe to the nth power.” This sort of
reasoning does not prove much. If I go to a movie, I can walk right
up to the screen and count the stitches on the actors’ clothes. If I
take a diagnostic look, I can nd signs of disease  in their
appearance, and with the proper microscope, I could probably
examine the skin cells on the celluloid image. None of that makes
the image real. Our bodies occupy three dimensions instead of the
two occupied by a movie, which means that I can go deeper into the
image I see and touch, but that doesn’t make it any more real,
either. What makes the body more real than a movie is Maya. Above all
else, Maya is convincing. If it were not, we would all see through it,
and yet the next layer of reality would be Maya as well. The process
doesn’t ever have to end. As long as you want “proof” that the
sensory world is real, Maya is deep enough to have all the layers
you want: organs give way to tissues, tissues to cells, cells to
molecules, and on to atoms, protons, electrons, quarks, and nally—
nothing. Intellectually, we all know that empty space is all there is at the
bottom of things, but to keep everyday life going, we agree tocertain conventions. “Objective” science is the keeper of these ad
hoc rules and performs an extremely valuable task so long as it
remembers that rules are made to be broken. For example, in the
midst of this machine we call a body, nothing is more orderly and
reliable than the heart. Its complex workings have challenged
brilliant medical minds for four hundred years, ever since William
Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. But like every other
part of the body, the heart is just empty space when you get down
to it. The “real” heart is not this tough bundle of twitching muscles
that beats 3 billion times before it expires but the organizing power
that pulls it together, that creates a thing out of nothingness. Dr. Harvey’s Metaphor
Historically, the heart played a key role in turning the body into a
machine. As early as 1616 Harvey wrote a simple sente nce in his
notebook: “The movement of the blood is constantly in a circle, and
is brought about by the beat of the heart.” No one had ever
expressed such a daring thought before (at least not in the West;
ancient texts from India give credence to the claim that Ayurvedic
physicians had already discovered blood circulation centuries
earlier). Harvey’s bold assertion ew in the face of the greatest
medical authority of the ancient world, the Greek physician Galen,
whose words had remained law for fourteen centuries. In Galen’s view—and therefore the view of every educated
physician in Europe—the heart helped the lungs to bring pneuma
into the body;  this was the Greek term for the invisible vital force
that kept living creatures alive. Galen held that the blood did not
circulate. Rather, there were two kinds of blood, one in the arteries,
the other in the veins, which ebbed back and forth like the tides. Blood of either kind was produced by the liver; it then oozed out to
every other part of the body and in some unexplaine d way got
consumed, never to return to its source. Since their culture was revolted by the thought of dissecting
corpses, the fathers of Greek medicine gave scant attention to the
anatomy of the heart. Observing the living heart was out of thequestion, and in any case, its beat went by too fast to be accurately
described, taking barely a second in a human being and far less time
in smaller animals. This led medieval churchmen to state
denitively that only God could know the actual workings of the
heart. Doctors had of course seen blood spurt from cut arteries and
noted the dierence between the bright red of arterial blood and the
dark bluish red of venous blood. They had also detected  the pulse,
but it was thought to be the independent throbbing of the arteries
themselves. In one way or another all these details were tted into
Galen’s scheme. Harvey was a short, intens e, black-haired man and a fervent
experimentalist. He paid shermen to bring him live shrimp from
the estuaries of the Tham es so that he could peer into their
transparent bodies and watch their blood move. He visited butchers
and looked into the carcasses of animals as they died, because only
then did their heartbeats slow down enough to be observable. He
thrust his hand s into the steaming cavities of expiring dogs and pigs
to squeeze their arteries and veins; in this way he could personally
validate that the arterial blood owed away from the heart and the
venous blood back toward it. Yet what Harvey supplied was not just new observations but a
new metaphor for the heart. He took the ineable source of our
tender emotions, the seat of love, the mystery knowable only by the
divine mind, and reduced it to the status of a pump. This was not
the rst time that the metaphor of the machine had been applied to
the human body, but it established such a deep mind-set that
medicine still has not recovered. Very few people seem to realize that Harvey was not handing
down pure truth. A metaphor is a symbol, a verbal play that
substitutes an imaginative word for a literal one. In metaphor, the
woman you love can be a rose, the sun, the moon and the stars—all
images that express your feelings better than the naked statement
“My love is a woman.” Callin g the body a machine is a particularly
powerful metaphor because “machine” is not a poetic word—it is
hard, solid, literal. A machine is a thing of matter, not of fancy.Doctors are great believers in matter. Training to become a doctor
reinforces this bias again and again, from that moment in medical
school when you rst touch a dissecting scalpel to a cadaver’s gray
skin. As an initiation rite, the rst cut through human skin is at once
adventurous, furtive, shocking, and very convincing, much too
convincing to shake o easily in the years to come. Alone in our
society, physicians are trusted to violate the body’s sacred interior,
to reach in and roughly handle its tissues and organs. This
experience is more potent than any chart in Gray’s Anatomy  can
remotely suggest. The opening of the brain, for example, is an
awesome event even to the most practiced neurosurgeo n. In large
part, the awe comes from actually setting eyes on the moist,
vulnerable gray matter that hides under the skull’s armor, touching
it, and manipulating it with utmost care. Yet unlike the Greeks, we are no longer handicapped by feeling
too much awe in the presenc e of the body. The machine is there to
be tinkered with. Dr. Michael DeBakey, the renowned Houston
cardiologist, begins his authoritative textbook, The Living Heart , with
these words: “The organs of the body might be likened to a series of
working engin es. For example, the heart, which is linked to all of
them, is a two-stage stroke pump. The liver and intestines rene the
fuels used by the body’s engines. The kidneys, lungs, bowels, and
liver are sanitation units, disposing of potential pollutants, wastes or
the ashes left after fuel is consumed.”
Proceeding to the lungs (bellows for the furnace), the nervous
system (a network of teleph one lines), and the veins and arteries
(fuel pipelines), DeBakey elaborates his image of carefully linked up
machinery, all at the service of one great machine, the body itself. The whole scheme is eminently useful in a world that wants newer
and better articial valves, bypass grafts, and synthetic arteries. The
problem with assuming that the heart is a machine, howe ver, is that
it may predestine you to live like a machine, too. Metaphors can be
very convincing to the mind, and once the mind is convinced,
reality gets stuck, like a river frozen in winter and unable to ow. Seeing the heart as a pump, we expect it to behave like the pump
at a well or a gas station. It wears itself out; its parts becomedamaged or defective; in time its usefulness is gone. But if you are
not spellbound by the metaphor, it is self-evident that the heart is
not a pump. It grows, for one thing: your heart weighed less than
two ounces when you were born and took more than a decade to
reach its nal weight of just over a pound. The heart can alter its
rhythm and stroke volume as your activity or moods change, self-
regulate its timing, and repair damage inicted by minor heart
attacks. What pump does any of that? Then there are the feelings associated with the heart. Something
in my chest aches with pain, soars with joy, turns hard as int when
it feels distrust, and melts as softly with tenderness as a snowake in
the sun. “Granted, the heart is more than a machine,” you may reply, “but
be practical. Surely the day must come when the heart, like any
other pump, does wear out?” We cannot be so sure of that. Twenty-
ve years ago, the heart was thought to lose function steadily with
age, to grow stier and more brous, eroding its ability to pump as
much blood with each stroke. Then pictures came back from
faraway places like the Caucasus region of the Soviet Union showing
ninety-year-olds who could perform prodigious physical activity. Western doctors witnessed these people as they climbed steep
hillsides, leaped into mounta in streams for their morning bath, and
did many other things that should not be possible for old pumps. Medical examination revealed that these remarkable hearts were
often years younger biologic ally than they should have been, but
even when disease and deterioration was present, the person had
not been deter red from leading an active life. To compensate for the
impairments of old age, the heart thickened its walls, learned to
pump a dierent style of stroke, and generally operated at full
strength. To ignore all these facts would be an ironical legacy from Harvey,
given his deep-dyed respect for fact. Modern doctors consider
themselves just as dedicated to truthful investigation as their great
predecessor, and yet they have not given all the facts equal weight. Some facts have been rudely shut out simply because they do not t
the machine metaphor.Indian yogis have been observed under controlled conditions to
slow down their hearts at will, to the point that no blood ow
reaches the heart muscle. By Western standards, such a feat is not
only baing, it is inconsis tent with the maintenance of life.
_OceanofPDF.com_Unconditional_Life_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        I
wasn’t sure who or what was being forgiven, but at that moment I
felt free of my old anger and loneliness. ”
Sheila’s tale is extraordinar y, but I think it illustrates a much
wider phenomenon. The world “in here” is meant to ow into and
merge with the one “out there,” and if we oppose this ow, we only
postpone the day when the mind reaches out to restore the natural
scheme of things. This must be happening, in both small  and large
ways, much more often than we notice or care to admit. One is led
to believe that magical thinking is an act of healing, and the most
magical minds are therefore the healthiest. OceanofPDF. com4
Bending the Arrow of Time
As ill fortune would have it, the two worst days in Malcolm’s life
came back to back. On Monday his brother was jogging in the park,
as he did every morning, when another runner saw him suddenly
collapse onto the path. The man rushed to help, but Malcolm’s
brother was already dead, the victim of a massive heart attack. He
was fty years  old, seven years younger than Malcolm, and he had
no previous history of heart disease. On Tuesday, the wife of Malcolm’s best friend, who was a local
pediatrician in his late forties, called up weeping incoherently. Her
husband was driving home from the hospital that afternoon when
he slumped over the wheel of his car. He, too, had been struck with
a fatal heart attack without anyone suspecting that he had heart
disease. These two losses aected Malcolm deeply. Numbed and shaken,
he began to dwell moodily on the uncertainty of life. By week’s end,
he decided to consult a doctor about his own heart. His cardiologist
ran an EKG, which proved normal, but since his brother’s heart
attack might point to a famil y predisposition, Malcolm was asked to
take a treadm ill test. He performed extremely well, taking his
heartbeat up to 180 without suering pain, nor were there
indications of any distortions in his heartbea t. “Stop worrying,” his
cardiologist reassured him, “you have the heart of a twenty-year-
old. ”
The next day, however, Malcolm was sitting at a red light in
morning trac, continuing to obsess over the two deaths that hadleft such a gaping hole in his life. He missed the light turning green. Suddenly he found himself at the head of three lanes of angrily
honking cars trying to zoom around him. Confused and disoriented,
he took a few seconds to regain his composure, and as he shifted
into gear, he noticed a funny sensation in the middle of his chest—
he couldn’t tell whether it was pain or pressure, but it made him
feel momentarily dizzy. Malcolm decided to consult another cardiologist, who spotted
some potential irregularities in the way the rst treadmi ll test had
been conducte d. “Why don’t you have another stress test. ” he
advised. “Just  to make sure. ” Malcolm showed up early at the
testing laboratory and was told that he would have to wait for the
patient in front of him. He sat down and peered in through the lab
window to see a t-looking man in running shorts walking briskly
on the treadmi ll. As if in a silent movie, the man opened his mouth
without emitting a sound, clutched spasmodically at his chest, and
fell to the oor. The nurse hustled Malcolm away. In a few minutes
he learn ed that the man had died of a coronary. His own test was
postponed for another week. Malcolm feared that he was being followed by a curse. Greatly
distressed, he returned home and for the rst time began  to notice
denite twing es of pain in the area of his breas tbone. He
immediately reported this symptom to his new cardiologist. “Look,”
the doctor said, “no treadmill test is all that reliable. If you really
want to be sure about your heart, let’s do an angio gram. ” An
angiogram, which allows the heart to be observed on a monitor
while the coronary arteries are illuminated with an injection of dye,
is considered the gold standard for assessing coronary heart disease. The test was run, and if Malcolm had feared the worst, it now
came true. Two of his coron ary arteries were 85 percent blocked,
causing blood ow to his heart to be dangerously restricted. His
chest pain suddenly increased in intensity and frequency. It began to
show the prole of typical angina, coming on whenever he exerted
himself physically. Alarmed, his cardiologist put him on
nitroglycerine pills to control the attacks. All next week Malcolm
stayed home from work, but to combat his dejection, he decided tonish some home repairs, which required climbing a ladder and
setting in some heavy window sashes. On his next visit to the doctor, he mentioned that he had been
doing this work without any chest discomfort. His cardiologist
looked aghast. “You can’t do that kind of thing. Don’t you realize
that with coronary arteries as blocked as yours, you could suer a
heart attack at any moment. ”
Upon hearing these words, Malcolm felt squeezing chest pain that
left him breathless—it was his rst attack of unstable angina, a late
and very serious symptom of heart disease. It is called “unstable”
because the bouts of pain start coming unpredictably, with or
without physic al exertion. His cardiologist felt that they had no
choice but to operate. Malcolm underwent a double bypass graft
that Friday. It was less than a month after the two fatal heart attacks
that had sent him into a tailspin. Nor was this the end. When I saw him four months later,
Malcolm’s newly grafted coronary vessels were still open, but his
chest pain had not abated. Today he still exhibits all the classic signs
of unstable angina. He has to avoid even the least stress and
therefore has been forced into early retirement. Since a stroll to the
refrigerator is now enough to trigger a burst of chest pain, he is
almost completely housebound. Presumably his high anxiety level
triggers his attacks, either by causing spasms of the coronary
arteries or by creating psychosomatic pain. “What do you think caused all this. ” I asked him. “I lie awake thinking about it,” he said mournfully. “Did I do this
to myself, or am I just incredibly unlucky. No one’s given me any
kind of acceptable explanation. Let’s call it a mystery and leave it at
that. ”
Time and the Perceiver
If Malcolm’s condition had taken forty years to develop instead of
four weeks, there would be no mystery. We would just say that he
grew old. Coronary artery disease aicts so many old people that it
was long considered a norm al part of the aging process, and evennow, when heart disease is known to be preventable and therefore is
not, strictly speaking, norm al, it remains the leading cause of
mortality among the elderly. Historically, medicine has not been
able to hunt down the cause of aging or even describe it well, but by
denition getting old is something that takes a long time to happen. A heart  that ages in a month is acting in a fashion that is highly
abnormal, even bizarre. There is more than a hint that Malcolm somehow gener ated the
series of event s that victimized him, although his consciousness did
not recognize the fact. To begin with, explaining his case as the
product of random chance is not convincing. The timing and
orchestration of events following the death of his brother is just too
perfect. They unfold like a well-crafted play, with rising  dramatic
tension and a swift, gripping denouement. Malcolm has no
knowledge of how he might have done all this. To hasten the aging
process implies  the ability to control it, but that implies control over
time itself, which is clearly impossible—or so we assume. If we step outside the limited world view of science, explanations
do exist. First we can challe nge the basic assumption that time is
objective. The clocks we depend upon to tell us the time appear to
tick their hours and minutes independent of our inuence, and daily
events appear to be jumbled up with no rhyme or reason; but from
another viewp oint, all this is only the conventional treatment of
time which all of us happen  to share. We have made a collective
agreement that time has certain unalterable features: it moves
forward, it is measured by clocks, it is uniform everywhe re, it waits
for no man. Yet this agreement is not ironclad, and at certain moments time
turns inexplicably exible. Recently a Swiss friend of mine, also a
physician, read me a curious and moving newspaper story about a
coal mine disaster in Germany. A small group of miners were
trapped underg round after a massive cave-in. They realized that the
air in the mine shaft would last only a limited number of hours. As
it turned out, just one of the group was wearing a wristwatch, and
he began to announce the time while the men anxiously awaited
rescue. To sustain hope in the others, he did not announce the righttime, however ; he called out one hour whenever two hours had
passed. Six days later, a rescue team found the trapped miners;
astonishingly, they were all still alive with one exception—the man
who wore the watch. In essence, the man with the watch fooled the others into
breaking their agreement about what constitutes real time. Tragically, he could not fool himself. Can it be that time will wait
for one man and overtake another, depending on what  each one
expects. In the spring of 1990, sociologists from the University of
California at San Diego reported that Chinese mortality dropped by
35 percent the week before the Harvest Moon Festival, one of the
most auspiciou s days in the Chinese calendar, and one where special
importance is given to elder s. When the festival ended, death rates
climbed again, and by a week later they were 34 percent higher
than normal. This implies that people who are near death can
postpone their passing in order to savor a day that is special to
them. A simila r swing has been found with Jewish mortality just before
and after Passover (by contrast, non-Jewish control groups showed
no such eect, maintaining the same death rates throughout). Finally, cardiologists have pondered the fact that heart-attack rates
are higher at 9 A. M. on Monday morning than at any other time of
the week. This is not exactly a randomly chosen hour. For many
people, going back to work after the weekend is a return to harsher
realities. Have  some of them found the drastic escape route of
suering a heart attack instead of punching the time clock one time
too many. These examples are limited to biological time, the hidden clock in
our cells. To see truly comprehensive mastery of time, one must turn
to dream s. Dream time lacks any xed sequence or logic altogether. It can go backward or forward, speed up or slow down, come to a
halt or simply disappear—many dream events are frozen in a kind
of no-time without beginning or end. Flying through the clouds,
being caught in a riptide, or running down the street pursued by aphantom villain are dream events that can seem to last either an
instant or an eternity, as if time has ed the scene. When we wake  up to the world of reliable clocks, time resumes its
creeping pace,  but that proves little about its real nature. Suppose a
man is sitting in a room idly looking out the window. Morning,
noon, and evening go by; he passively stares at people as they
parade before him and watches the events taking place on the street. The same man could go to sleep at night and witness the exact same
people and events in a dream, but now morning, noon, and evening
occupy only two minutes of his sleep. Like the rest of his dream,
time was created by his brain. In what way is waking time any
dierent. The same brain cells process the passage of time in both
cases; therefore, waking time and dream time could both be self-
created. If so, then time itself is only a personal perception, liable to the
same uctuations as a mood, reverie, fantasy, or any passing
thought. Psychologists already recognize that time contains a strong
personal element. All of us exercise some ability to manipulate time
according to our whims. If I am languishing in a dentist’s waiting
room, my unha ppiness make s time drag. To speed it up, I need only
go somewhere else—to an Indian restaurant perhaps—where I can
enjoy myself again. If I turn to something I nd deeply enjoyable,
time will start to y. The dierence between slow, dragging time
and swift, eeting time resides in my perception of the situation. As
long as I am free to move from the dentist to the restaurant, I have
personal control over how time feels. But if I am forced by a sense of duty to remain at the dentist’s,
then I have no choice but to experience the creeping kind of time
that is oered there. This sort of compulsion has trapped all of us. We stay in the same time-frame day after day because we think we
have to, or ought to. But this is only an agreement we made
somewhere along the line—we have even forgotten when. Anyone
can break free and reassert his ability to control time. Time TravelersOne of the main themes of the world’s spiritual traditions is the
falseness of time, and one of the aims of enlightened teachers is to
break the spell of time that limits the minds of their followers. A
master in India once said to his disciples, “You have enclosed
yourself in the prison of time and space, squeezing your experience
into the span of a lifetime and the volume of a body. It is because of
this self-imposed illusion that all your conicts arise: life and death,
pain and pleasure, hope and fear. To end these problems, you must
rst end the illusion. ”
“But how is that done. ” a disciple asked. The master replied, “You are caught in this world like sh in a
net. But all nets have holes. Find one, escape through it, and you
will see what reality actually is. ”
Apparently the net of time is full of just such holes. It appears to
be objectively real but in fact may be no more than a notion
fostered in our minds. The great sage Shankara, who towers over
the whole tradition of Indian philosophy, once wrote, “People grow
old and die because they see other people grow old and die. ” I
remember, on rst reading this sentence ten years ago, feeling a
mixture of disbelief and wonder. If Shankara is right, then aging is
not a xed biological proces s; it is just a bundle of perceptions we
have picked up, taken into our bodies, and given physical shape. There is a revealing, although heartless, biology experiment in
which a rat is thrown into a tank of water. Rats are not adept
swimmers, and the animal will thrash around, trying vainly to climb
out of the tank, only to slip back down from the glass walls. After a
few minutes the animal is totally exhausted, on the verge of
drowning. The experimenter then pulls it out and allows it to rest. The procedure  is repeated over the following days, and within a
short time, usually less than three weeks, the rat will have
undergone dramatic changes. The pressure of so much daily stress
will have aged its tissues enormously. If the experiment is kept up,
the rat will die of “old age” in a month; on dissection, its heart,
liver, lungs, and other organs will be as dark, tough, and brous as
those of a rat that lived a normal life span of two years or more. In essen ce, the experimenters sped up time and forced the rat to
absorb it into its body. The discolored, exhausted tissues that
resulted were like bits of frozen time given material expression by
the aging process. The same process happens in human beings,
although we absorb time more complexly, according to our own
personal value s. Unlike experimental rats, we can choose to live
with more or less stress; more importantly, we can interpret time
dierently and therefore cause it to change. Misusing this privilege
creates untold suering. I am not thinking just of people who place
themselves in desperately stressful situations, although millions do. The deeper ignorance is that we do not realize that time does not
have to be frozen inside us. Shankara’s seemingly strange idea that we grow old because we
watch others grow old may well be true. Partial validation has
already come from an ingenious study the Harvard psychology
department ran in the late Seventies. The Harvard team, headed by
Professor Ellen Langer, did not actually set out with Shankara’s
dictum in mind; they were testing whether aging is an irreversible
process, as is widely accepted. The National Institute on Aging takes
the ocial stand that there is no reliable method, through drugs,
diet, exercise, or mental techniques, to restore lost youth. Although
a large body of research backs up this position, Langer’s  team had
its doubts; they suspected that aging might be a creation of the mind
that the mind can undo. To test this possibility, they rst placed a newspaper ad in a
Boston daily asking for men seventy-ve and older who would be
willing to go on a week’s vacation, all expenses paid. A group of
suitable volunt eers was chosen, placed in a van, and whisked o to
a luxurious retreat on ten acres of secluded woodland in the New
England countryside. When they arrived at this isolated setting, the men were met with
a duplicate of daily life as it existed twenty years earlier. Instead of
magazines from 1979, the reading tables held issues of Life and the
Saturday Evening Post from 1959. The radio played music from that
year, and group discussions centered on the politics and celebrities
of the era. A taped address from President Eisen hower was played,followed by the lm Anatomy of a Murder, which won the Academy
Award in 1959. Besides these  props, every eort was made to center
each person on how he felt, looked, talked, and acted when he was
twenty years younger. The group had to speak exclusively in the present tense, as if 1959
were today (“Do you think Castro will become a puppet of
Khrushchev’s. ”), and their references to family, friends, and jobs
could not go beyond that year. Their middle-aged children were still
at home or just going to college; their careers were in full swing. Each person had submitted a picture of himself taken twenty years
before; these were used to introduce each one to the group. While this week of make-beli eve went on, a control group of men
over seventy- ve also talked about the events of 1959, but using the
past tense instead of the present. Castro, Mickey Mantle,
Eisenhower, and Marilyn Monroe were allowed to have their real
futures. The radio played 1979 music, the magazines carried the
latest news, and the lms were current releases. Before, during, and after the retreat, Langer measured each man
for signs of aging. For members of the 1959 group, to a remarkable
extent these measurements actually went backward in time over the
one-week period. The men began to improve in memory and manual
dexterity. They were more active and self-sucient (instead of
waiting to be helped, they took their food and cleared their tables
by themselves). Some such changes might be expected in any older person
enjoying himself on vacation. However, traits that are denitely
considered irreversible signs of aging also started to turn around. Independent judges looked at before-and-after pictures of the men
and rated them three years younger in appearance. Hand
measurements showed that their ngers had actually lengthened
and gained back some of the exibility in their joints. The group
could sit taller  in their chair s, had a stronger hand grip, and could
even see and hear better. The control group also exhibited some of
these changes but to a smaller degree, and in some measures, such
as manual dexterity and nger length, they had even declined over
the week. In her intriguing book, Mindfulness, Langer attributes some of
these reversals  to the fact that the men were given more control
over their lives than they enjoyed at home. They were treated like
anyone in his mid-fties, who would naturally carry his own
suitcase or select his own food for dinner. Their opinions were
valued in group discussions, and it was assumed that they were
mentally vigor ous, an assumption probably not made about them in
everyday life. In this way they moved from a mindless existence to
one that is “mindful,” Langer’s term for living with alertness,
openness to new ideas, and mental vigor. But why did the group
who lived in 1959 do so much better than the 1979 group. It is
quite plausible  that they improved because of what they saw. In a
neat twist on Shankara’s dictum, not seeing other people grow old
seems to prevent us from growing old ourselves. Langer’s men were like time travelers of a special sort, who went
back to the past by going back inside themselves. We tend to think
that time is outside us, but in this instance, it was just as much
inside, packaged as memory. To remember is to take your body time
traveling, even though you do not leave your chair. For example, if I
remember being scared in a dark alley when I was six, my heart
starts to thump like a six-year-old’s again. The mind can also project
the body forward in time. I have seen twenty-year-old women, on
being told that they have cancer, age before my eyes, becoming as
worn as someone who has battled the disease for years. In each case, the mind mana ges to be in two places at once, both
traveling in time and staying  in the present. The old men who went
back to 1959 were also rmly xed in 1979—they read old
magazines, but the same rain fell on them as on the other citizens of
Boston that week. The illusion of xed time was thus partly
dissolved. One could go furth er. If I lost all my prior conditioning of
seeing others age, perhaps I could remain a twenty-year-old
permanently, although I would still walk around experiencing the
ordinary passage of time as other people do. I would then have
taken “my time” under control. Why not speak of “my time” and “your time”. A clock  on the
shelf mindlessly taps out its seconds and minutes, but our innerclock possesses as much intelligence as the brain that houses it. After years of searching, physiologists in the last decade have
pinpointed the biological clock that governs all the rhythmical
functions of the body, such as waking, sleeping, eating, thirst, body
temperature, blood pressure, growth, and the ebb and ow of
numerous hormones. A tiny core of cells in the hypothalamus, called the
suprachiasmatic nucleus, regulates all these wheels within wheels,
orchestrating rhythms as long as the twenty-eight-day menstrual
cycle and as short as the three-hour burst of growth hormone. Even
the chemical reactions inside individual cells, which take place
thousands of times per second, must obey the body’s master clock. To use the word “clock” here is deceptive, because we can dictate
the ow of time within ourselves, breaking free of any mechanical
ticktock. We wake, sleep, eat, and breathe at will, overriding the
preset cycles for these funct ions. Some women seem to be able to
reset their ovulation cycle, delaying their periods under times of
stress (they may not realize that they have made this choice, but
their bodies apparently are responding to a specic brain signal
triggered by the woman’s emotions). In more extreme cases, women
suering from multiple personalities—the syndrome made famous
by Eve and Sybil—can have a period for each personality, separated
by several days or weeks each month. A woman with three
personalities and three menstrual cycles does not have three
separate clocks  inside; instead, she has better control over time than
we generally acknowledge. To have so much freedom of choice can play havoc with rhythms
that should not be thrown o—jet lag temporarily disrupts our
major sleep-wa ke cycle, pulling dozens of smaller cycles along with
it. Yet the very fact that time and mind can blend into one another
points to the possibility of total freedom, an escape from mindless
clocks into a reality where every second is alive. The Arrow of TimeThe concept of personal time would strike a physicist as a fantasy. To him, space-time is fundamental to existence, and time is
governed by laws that do not bend because the mind wants them to. Physicists use the phrase “the arrow of time” to indicate that events
move forward in the ordained manner and cannot be reversed. Stephen Hawk ing among others has used the example of knocking a
glass o the table. When the glass strikes the oor, it shatters into a
hundred pieces, and once shattered, it will never regroup itself into
a whole glass. By the same law, ice cubes melt in a glass of tea and
do not reform ; junkyard wrecks rust into chaotic heaps, with no
chance that they will suddenly turn back into new cars. On paper you can put a broken glass back together again by
carefully computing the energy exchanges that sent each shattered
fragment o into space. A whole glass could then be conjured up by
reversing each tangent. As pure mathematics, a whole glass is just a
smashed glass with the equations turned around, and you can
alternate one version with the other endlessly. But the arrow of time forbids such easy shuing in the real
world. The instant the smash occurs, time carries the glass away,
never to return it whole again. If this is indeed the law, it would
only be wise to resign yourself to it, to bow to time as heat, light, all
moving bodies, and all forms of energy in the univer se do. But
personal time, “my time,” is not at all like that. Instead of shooting
o in one direction, it moves forward when I worry about the future
and backward when I remember the past. “Time is not just a road,”
the novelist John Fowles has written. “It is also a room. ” We call the
room memory, a space where one can sit and be surrounded by
heaps of things past. Personal time can also be dead or alive. Several decades ago a
team of archaeologists unearthed a clay vessel of wheat grains
buried in an Egyptian pyramid. The grains were planted and
watered, and within a few days they sprouted, amazingly, after two
thousand years of dormancy. If you can imagine seeing this event
from the wheat grain’s viewp oint, it must have been very much like
waking up. Time was dead while the seeds were dormant, causing
no change or decay. That twenty centuries had passed was nodierent from one season, since the intervening time had no life in
it. It was dead time, or sleeping time, wrapped up inside the seed,
waiting for the touch of life. The location of this wrapped -up time is the wheat’s DNA, which
has also stored  time for us, in the form of our own genetic memory. You could not survive a cold or any other disease if your thymus
gland did not store up the memory of antibodies that learned to
combat viruse s and bacteria millions of years ago. Your immune
system is an encyclopedia of every disease ancestral man caught;
thousands of generations died from fevers and plagues so that you
may live. Science has yet to recognize  that DNA has a magical side, yet
imagine that you are standing in an empty room with a spiral
staircase direc tly in front of you. It is a wooden staircase, the kind
once standard  in old colonial houses and churches. As you are
admiring its perfect carpentry, a strange thing happens. The
staircase slowly rotates and splits in two, right up the middle, as if a
zipper had opened it up from bottom to top. The two halves stand
apart, facing each other. Now you notice something that had escaped your eye before. The
staircases are surrounded by a swirling cloud of sawdust. The
sawdust cloud appears to be formless, but currents and eddies begin
to form in it, and then, inexplicably, the cloud gradual ly rebuilds
the half-staircases, adding new steps, banisters, and posts, until you
behold before you two complete staircases, identical in every
respect to the original. DNA behaves in exactly this uncanny fashion. Every time you
need to make a new cell (a need that crops up millions of times per
minute), a molecule of DNA has to split itself in half. It does this
exactly like the dream staircase: rst the original double spiral
divides down the middle, leaving the cell temporarily with no intact
DNA. Then out of a formle ss, swirling bath of biochemicals, the
DNA rebuilds each half of itself to form two replicas of the original
molecule. What is so astonishing about this process is not its complexity—
although in every cell, 3 billion genetic bits get replaced withperfect precision. The truly astonishing part is that all this
rebuilding is done by things. A DNA molecule, like a wooden
staircase, is just a thing. It is built of quite ordinary hydrogen,
carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen molecules, which themselves are just
smaller things. Similar molecules make up a lump of sugar, a drop
of oil, a clump of peat moss. None of them can perform the actions
we just witnessed. How is it, then, that stubborn, inert molecules
learned to build a staircase many million times more complicated
than any constructed by human hands. The answer is that DNA is not really a thing; it is a living memory
residing in a thing. The memory is not intrinsic to the component
carbon, hydrog en, or oxygen atoms. If it were, then a sugar cube
would be alive, too. DNA is basically a material mask behind which
one nds a rich but abstract awareness. Consider DNA’s mastery over time. To a human being, a lm
running at twenty-four frames per second is a movie, because our
brains register its ashing images as continuous motion. That is pure
illusion to a horsey, whose eye is quick enough to catch the black
spaces projected between each frame—the y’s brain sees a slide
show of still pictures going by. A snail, on the other hand, being
able to see only one new image every four seconds, misses three-
quarters of the lm; it sees only a hodgepodge of jerky pictures (if
you moved fast enough, you would have time to surreptitiously
pluck a rose from underneat h a snail’s nose and it would think the
ower had disappeared into thin air). In each creature, DNA has
adopted a dierent conguration, which brought with it a dierent
style of consciousness suited to that creature and in turn a dierent
mode of time. DNA is like a switching statio n between eternity and all the forms
of life that partake of time. DNA chops the endless continuum of
time into neat slices accordi ng to a species’ unique awareness and
the specic life span allotted to it. Human time, horsey time, snail
time—each framework is completely dierent from the rest. What is
even more impressive, DNA can exert control forward in time or
backward. The fact that we all grow third molars, for example, is a
bit of our inher itance that DNA fetches from the past. DNA has to gointo the future, however, to know that this tooth will not appear
except as the nal addition to our adult teeth after age twelve. The same speck of DNA deposited in the womb knows how to
perform millions of actions that will not be needed for years or even
decades to come. Our genes know how to fuse an infant’s loosely
joined skull bones and at the same time how to compensate for lost
calcium in a seventy-year-old  femur. The blending of time and life
goes far beyond what a human brain can imagine. It has been
estimated that 6 trillion chemical reactions take place in the body
every second. The same speck of DNA controls them all, rarely
mistiming a single one, no matter how distant in time and space. If these teeming reactions remained the same from moment to
moment, a cell biologist might one day give a complete explanation
of how DNA masterminds the ow of life. However, there  is a fourth
dimension, wherein each cell obeys its own destiny: a skin cell
survives one month while a neuron, motivated by the same genetic
strand, endure s a lifetime. It is unimaginable how our genes
coordinate lifelines so vastly dierent. Some small patch of nowhere
and no-time has been woven into the texture of our genes, a place
where we can perch, as a sherman perches on a riverbank to cast
his line into the current. From that timeless position, you are old
before you are young, bald before you sprout baby hair, expiring on
your deathbed before you draw in your rst breath. The Self Beyond Time
Since DNA has such manifest mastery over time, we must share in
it. If so, Malcolm’s mystery is pointing to its own solution. He was
unchaining himself from the arrow of time, abandoning time’s
straight line like a train jumping the tracks. He plunge d into the
unknown with all its perils. Even so, he came closer to the truth
than most of us, for time actually is much more like a vast unknown
country than a railroad track. If you look at the whole landscape of time, the straight-line
boundaries disappear, and what is left is eternity, the timeless. In
their own ways, every spiritu al tradition has tried to persuade manthat the timeless is more real than any experience to be had in time. Nevertheless, we still nd ourselves stranded in the ow of time,
both physically and mentall y. One has to look hard for escapees,
and in this century, they are not necessarily men of faith. Erwin Schrödinger, who was among the most inuential theorists
in the early decades of quantum physics, made the conceptual leap
that most of us cannot: “Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary
reason, you—a nd all other conscious beings as such—are  all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of
the entire universe, but is, in a certain sense, the whole. ” To the
isolated ego, this is an unfat homable statement. How can a person
be the whole, which means everything that exists, and still remain
what he seems to be, an individual being with separate ideas and
memories. Even though our world is time bound, there are many clues to
indicate that we are tuned to the larger reality of “all in all. ” A
prominent Japanese neuroscientist, Dr. Tadanobu Tsunoda, has
spent fourteen years testing the functions of the left and right sides
of the brain. In all of us there is a switching mechanism, located in
the brain stem, that enables us to shift dominance to our left
cerebral hemisphere when we are engaged in speech, calculation,
and logic, and to our right hemisphere for music, recognizing
shapes, drawing analogies, or engaging in anything that stirs our
emotions. (We are speaking of a temporary shift here, not the
permanent left- or right-brain dominance that has been publicized in
recent years. ) Tsunoda devised a new way of mapping this switching
mechanism, based on the delayed feedback of sounds, very much
like watching the brain of a person who is hearing the sound of his
own voice as he speaks. Many delicate aspects of the brain’s shift
from left to right were uncovered, but the most remarkabl e was this:
It was found that people’s brain dominance switched when they
were played a sound whose frequency was a multiple of their age
(e. g. , a multipl e of forty vibrations per second in the case of a forty-
year-old). Even stranger is the observation, veried with thirty
subjects in Japan, that a lasting shift in dominance also occurs onone’s birthday. For a varying length of time, right-brain people
become left-brain and vice versa. The phenomenon occurred in
more than half the subjects tested, and for some it occurred three
years in a row. Confronted with these enigmas, Tsunoda speculates that our
brains must somehow be tuned in to the earth’s revolution around
the sun, to the phases of the moon, or other cosmic clocks. “The link
with cosmic activity suggests  that there is a miniature cosmos in the
human brain,” he writes. “Yet we have lost our ability to perceive
this microcosm within ourselves in the hustle and bustle of
civilization. ” In the West we might consider this conclusion rather a
far leap, considering the slimness of the data, but the ancient Indian
sages declared,
As is the macrocosm, so is the microcosm,
As is the atom, so is the universe,
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. In other words, you cannot stand anywhere in the universe that is
outside yourself. As Schrödinger said, “You are a part of an innite,
eternal being. … Thus you can throw yourself at on the ground,
stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that
you are one with her and she with you. You are as rmly
established, as invulnerable as she,—indeed, a thous and times
rmer and more invulnerabl e. ” This armation was not made out
of mystical reverence. Schrödinger took seriously the proposition
that the feeling of self, of “I am,” must be primary in the universe. It
is more invulnerable than the earth because the earth endures only
by being a lump of matter, which time continually wears away. I, on
the other hand, wake up with a refreshed sense of life every day,
grounded in the certainty that I exist. How did this feeling of “I am” come about. Apparently it exists in
the very nature  of life. Curre ntly, most people are not able to accept
that there is actually life in everything “out there. ” This blindness
sets our culture apart from the main tradition of humankind. The
same stream of life once owed through the whole world,emanating from the gods or God. That unimaginable force created
galaxies and at the same time preserved the most fragile mountain
ower. All around us life gushed forth and met itself coming back,
curving in joy onto itself and leaping in jubilation at its own innite
strength. We were part of this stream too. We issued from it, and
our destiny was riding its crest. Now all that has become very vague and quizzical. We equate life
with DNA molecules, ignoring the fact that a person’s DNA is just as
intact the second after he dies as the second before. Sometimes after
a hard November frost I walk in the tall grass near my home and
nd a grassho pper lifelessly clinging to a withered stalk. I pick up
the cold shell, examine it, and think, “Something once lived in this. Now it has gone, I don’t know where. I am holding on to a husk,
and very soon its molecules  will also disappear, returning back to
earth. What made them alive once and then took their life away. ”
In my puzzlement, I cannot help but see myself as the best judge
of what life is. I have questio ns and an unlooked-for gift, a summer
in the grass, in which to ask them. So time exists, as far as I am
concerned, for me to race against time. I already forese e that my
molecules will return to the earth, too. But unlike the grasshopper, I
may be able to consciously defeat this threat, by knowi ng how to
get beyond it. In its broade st and deepest sense, that is what the
“meaning of life” is—the sum total of what each person has learned
about his own life, and the chance to keep it. Other ages may have
known the answers to this mystery, or people then may have simply
settled for a ready-made answer, dictated by faith. The nal, “hard” proof that mind exists in nature is not anything I
am waiting for. The proof may never come, since it is our mind
conducting the search, and the mind is notorious for changing the
rules. Meaning  is where you see it, and how. You can look under a
microscope at the ashing dots on a color television screen and see
them as random scintillations  in a phosphorescent chemical base, or
you can back away and see that the same scintillations form a
picture. One perspective detects orderliness and meaning, the
product of mind; the other does not. The dierence between the two
resides solely in the perspective, not the thing itself. If you glance outside your window and recognize the trees, sky,
and clouds as part of yourself, your perception is not automatically
true or false. Perhaps you are having a schizophrenic hallucination;
perhaps you are experiencing the deepest insight of the ancient
Indian sages, Aham Brahmasmi —I am Brahman, the all in all. The
gamut of meaning contained  in such an experience runs from the
absurd to the sacred. The point is that the same mind-stu contains
all meanings. When we touch a new level of consciousness, a new
world is created. To nd oneself living in an age of doubt is not such a curse. There
is a kind of reverence in undertaking the quest for truth, even before
the rst scrap has been found. “Desire for wisdom. ” Albert
Schweitzer once wrote. “Explore everything around you, penetrate
to the furthes t limits of human knowledge, and always you will
come up with something inexplicable in the end. It is called life. ”
The inexplicab le thing that escaped out of the grasshopper’s shell
is repea ted in my own life, and if I look at the data collected from
the edge of the universe, I still read the same mystery there. What
this means is that my search for truth is just life looking for itself. Nature is a mirror; the seer is the seen. That may be the very clue
that brings the mystery to an end. I once heard about a spiritual
exercise that an Indian master asked his disciples to perform:
“Hold up your thumb and forenger together. Do you feel that the
thumb is touching the nger,  or is the nger touching the thumb. It
can be either way, can’t it. In one case the thumb is the experiencer,
in the other it is the experienced. “Now ask yourself, ‘Who is it that switches from experiencer to
experienced. ’ Being in contro l of the operation, you must be beyond
it. You are larger than the experiencer, larger than any set of
experiences. Whatever you are, you will only nd yours elf beyond
the things you now know. ”
Perhaps not everyone will nd this lesson as earth shattering as I
do. It tells me that my indivi dual mind and body, which place such
obvious limitat ions upon me today, cannot be the whole story. What
is the mind but the experiencer, the knower. What is the body but
the experienced, the known. If I can switch my attention from oneto the other, then there must be a “me” that is not trapped in the
dualism of mind or body. This “me” is not to be discovered by
simple means. I cannot look at it, because it is in my eye; I cannot
hear it, because it is in my ear; I cannot touch it, because it is in my
nger. So what is left. Only the voice inside that whispers, “Go
beyond. ” By following that whisper I may lose myself in unknown
country. On the other hand, I may step outside the boundary of time
itself. Then I will discover, once and for all, whether time is my real
home, or eternity.
A massive heart attack
What did Malcolm's brother die of?
That his coronary arteries were 85% blocked, and he should avoid any physical exertion
What did Malcolm's cardiologist tell him about his condition?
It refers to the idea that time is not fixed and can be manipulated by one's perception
What is the concept of "my time" in the context of the text?
It refers to the idea that the body is not just a physical structure, but a complex system that can be influenced by one's consciousness
What is the concept of Maya in the Indian tradition?
It presents the heart as a machine that wears out over time, but the text also highlights the limitations of this perspective, as there are cases where people's hearts remain healthy and active despite their age.
What is the main point of Dr. DeBakey's textbook, "The Living Heart"?