To a research er in the eld, this is a stran ge stance,
for the overwhelming trend in recent years has been to “explain”
perception in terms of the senses, to make it much less psychological
and much more mechanical. Thus, for the sense of sight we learn
that a human eye has about 125 million rods and 7 million cones
implanted on the surface of the retina. Rods are responsible for
night vision, cones for day vision. No one knows why we have
nearly twenty times more receptors for moonlight than for sunlight,
but that is the case. These specializ ed receptors are direct extensions of the brain, and
each reacts to only a narrow wavelength of light. When a photon
strikes a retinal cell, it creates a chemical change that in turn sparks
an electrical spike that is sent to the visual cortex in the back of the
head via the optic nerve, a bundle of 800,000 neural bers wrapped
into a single cable. During the early stages of visual processing, the
brain keeps the images from each eye separate; only at the very end
are they merged to create a three-dimensional object. Even then,
there is no picture of the world in your brain. The image of a tree,
for example, is decoded purely into electrical data. However, the
visual cortex is denitely a map that marks certain aspects of the
tree. The parts of the visual image that run from top to bottom and
left to right are registered by brain cells that also are arranged top
to bottom and left to right. The mechanics of eyesight are so well understood by now that
they can be imitated articially: robot eyes have been developed
that can detect light and send it to be stored and decoded by a
computer. In some cases, robot vision is sophisticated enough to
interpret color, texture, and shape, follow moving objects, anddistinguish near-far perspective much as our own eyes do. The only
problem with this impressive cracking of the visual code is that the
experience  of seeing has been entirely missed. Robot eyes are never
bored by what  they look at, or enthralled by beauty. They do not
prefer crimson  to scarlet, or vice versa. They do not relish the
softness of the shadows in Titian’s paintings or the stark melodrama
in Caravaggio’s . None of the qualities of light that really matter, in a
human, personal sense, can be translated into mechanical terms. The mother of a friend of mine has grown old, and as sometimes
happens, she is becoming bald. The wispy blue hair on top of her
head distresses  this once-beautiful woman, and when she was nearly
eighty, she nally resigned herself to wearing a wig. My friend
wanted to cheer his mother up, so he invited her to a party where
many distinguished guests would be present. The company was
sparkling, and his mother seemed greatly impressed. “Weren’t those people fascinating?” he asked afterward. “Remarkable,” she murmured, “and did you see how much hair
they had?”
All of us see the world just this subjectively. When we walk into a
room, we see what is important to us, screening out what is
indierent. We also see much that is invisible—that person over
there is an old lover, another  a renowned bore; that vase is worth a
fortune (where did they get the money? ), that painting looks like a
fake. A map of the brain’s visual cortex can never tell you the rst
thing about the subtle connot ations that light reveals to the eye, just
as the diagram  of a piano can tell you nothing about how music
enchants the ear. The only reason a robot eye can even pretend to “see” is that it
was built by humans. Every part was designed to approximate what
a person knows to look for. If we could not see backg rounds as
dierent from foregrounds, for example, no robot eye would be built
to sense such a distinction, and no software would take it into
account. Even if a robot eye could perfectly duplicate a human eye,
including the visual cortex, it would still be blind. The light lling
the world is my light.This truth struck home while I was reading The Magic Lantern , the
autobiography of the great Swedish lm director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman gave up lmmaking before he was seventy years old, a
situation he has made peace with, despite many moments  of intense
regret. “Most of all,” he says, “I miss working with Sven Nyquist [his
longtime cameraman], perhaps because we are both utterly
captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous,
dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden,
dark, springlike, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited,
poisonous, calming, pale light. Light.”
Following the curve of this singing, elegiac sentence, I can see all
those qualities in light as well. All of us can, because without us,
light would not have them. It would have no brightness, no color,
no tone whatsoever. Without my eye (or yours), there is nothing to
see, not even blackness. Photons would bounce randomly,
unintelligibly through the void, never dening anyth ing, never
becoming light. In interstellar space, light is invisible; when it
strikes an object, it bounces back on a new track, but it does not
become any more visible. The sun is not radiant, nor the stars. At
best, they would be “hot spots” of energy emission, but even that
term depends on our sense of temperature. By itself, nothing “out there” has any denition without a
perceiver. When scientists claim to have deciphered the mechanics
of vision, all they have done is found a map, which must not be
mistaken for reality. A map of Tahiti is meaningless until you realize
that it is supposed to match a certain island whose mountains,
coasts, and rivers have been experienced by humans. We do not put
on the map the air currents or prime nesting sites that would be
noticed by birds, even though these belong to the real Tahiti as
much as the features we look for. The map is not the territory. Everyone has seen photographs of
what the world  looks like through the multiple eye of a bee, spider,
or y. Each of these insects sees through more than one lens, and
the photographs therefore present a cluster of eight or ten or twenty
images, generally of a ower, and we are to suppose that the insect
brain sees the ower that way.These composites, however, do not really capture the actual
experience of insect eyesight—they only indicate what a human
being might see if he looked through several camera lenses at the
same time. In reality, the eye of a horsey is divided into 20,000
separate eye-cell clusters. Each one responds either to a very specic
wavelength of light or to certain chemicals oating in the air. As a
result, the picture of the world processed by a horsey’s nervous
system is inconceivable to us (what does it mean to “see” a chemical
in the air, anyway?). A porpoise’s brain is almost as large as a human one, but 80
percent of it is devoted to processing sounds. Porpoises, whales, and
dolphins have remarkable hearing; some species are able to detect
one another’s “songs” through miles of water. The map of a
porpoise’s ear will tell me what kind of eardrum it has, and if I look
at the minute hair cells inside  the ear, I will see relatives of the cells
in my inner ear. All this similarity of structure is misleading,
however, because the porpoise’s experience is not understandable
by the human mind, no matter how good the map. Even to use the word “hearing” is suspect. Hearing to a porpoise
is a kind of sonar, like a bat’s, that brings back three-d imensional
images closer to sights than sounds. A porpoise can “hear” how
large a shark is and in what direction it is moving. Actually, I
shouldn’t even venture this crude guess; for all I know, a porpoise
can “hear” that it is summer, that the sun is low on the horizon, that
a grouper is gray, or that Mars is tilted on its axis. Looking at Sounds
If all perceptio n is personal, where do the “real” sights, sounds,
smells, tastes, and textures begin? We trust our eyes to see “real”
photons and our ears to hear “real” vibrations in the air, but it is
easy to show that this trust rests upon a very shaky foundation. In
his penetrating book on the world of the deaf, Seeing Voices ,
neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the strange tale of David Wright, an
Englishman who thought he could hear until he “saw” that he was
deaf.Wright had lost his hearing gradually in early childhood and was
not stone deaf until the age of seven. Since he had been born with
normal hearing , the young Wright had already mastered speech and
was used to hearing people talk. This made it hard for him to detect
that he was being shut out of the hearing world: “From the very rst
my eyes had unconsciously begun to translate motion into sound. My mother spent most of the day beside me and I understood
everything she said. Why not? Without knowing it I had been
reading her mouth all my life.” In other words, when his mother
spoke, Wright found himself unable to tell that her voice was not
real, since like the rest of us, he “heard” it. “It was an illusion that
persisted even after I knew it was an illusion,” he recalls. “My
father, my cousins, everyone I had known retained phantasmal
voices.”
Wright’s brain instantly and automatically turned the sight of
moving lips into sounds. These “projections of habit and memory,”
as he called them, lasted until he left the hospital where it had been
nally determined that his hearing loss was total and irreversible. Then the turning point came: “One day I was talking to my cousin
and he, in a moment of inspiration, covered his mouth with his
hands as he spoke. Silence! Once and for all I understood that what I
could not see, I could not hear.”
Why, then, don’t we all see voices, instead of restricting ourselves
to the same worn rut of hearing? Many deaf people do “hear” the
wind in the trees when they see the branches swaying. Some
junction point  in their minds converts a visual signal into an
auditory one. Many blind people can likewise “see” faces by feeling
them with their hands. A mental junction point has taken the signals
of touch and converted them to sight. Presumably our brains could
do the same thing, but we prefer to let habit and memory  take over. We see through our eyes and feel through our ngers because we
have been conditioned to do so. Is that statement so incredible? In Walden , Thore au records that sometimes he lingered after
nightfall at a friend’s house in Concord and would have to tramp
back to his hut on Walden Pond without a lantern. Even if there was
no moon and the woods looked pitch black, he would “see” his wayperfectly, without stumbling, and after several miles would arrive
unerringly at his doorstep. There is also the case of Meyer Schneider, an Israeli, born blind,
who managed to recover a remarkable degree of sight through self-
devised eye exercises. (He currently teaches these to a wide
following from his home base in San Francisco.) Although his vision
has been measured as 20/70, ophthalmologists who examine the
interior of Schneider’s eye see the same defective parts that he has
always had. The whole notion that we have exactly ve senses is completely
arbitrary to begin with. Under the sense of touch, for example, we
include our response to heat, texture, pressure, the placement of our
limbs, the weight of our bodies, and pain—all are things we “feel.”
When the nervous system is intact, we may be said to have as many
as seventeen senses, according to researchers on perception. We do
not give names to most of these, and some are still disputable. Everyone seems to be able to detect pheromones, for example, the
distinctive chemicals the body gives o when a person is afraid or
sexually aroused, and the pineal gland in everyone’s brain changes
its hormonal output by sensing the yearly cycle of the sun. But only
selected individuals count among their senses ESP or the ability to
see auras of light around other people. Perception, we must conclude, is innitely exible, serving the
mind in any way the mind chooses. We create new worlds inside our
private universe, worlds that the ve senses then conrm as real. Outer reality can even be turned o by a mere ick of the wrist. A
psychiatrist friend of mine  told me about being called on an
emergency in downtown Boston. A car had stopped at a red light
and had not moved when the light turned green. A policeman
arrived and found the driver motionless at the wheel. He was
apparently the victim of a heart attack. However, the ambulance
attendants who showed up within minutes saw that the driver was
alive but catatonic. He registered no response to light, sound, or
touch, even though his pupils continued to dilate if a ashlight was
shone at them. He sat like a statue, his hands gripped to the wheel,
and had to be pried from the car by force.When my psychiatrist friend saw the man, it was clear that he had
become totally  withdrawn. He had no history of mental disease
(although that does not rule out the possibility that he was a
“walking schiz ophrenic,” of which there are many). For reasons of
his own, he had just decided to stop, and in one instant his entire
perceptive machinery shut down. No one knows why some people
decide one day to make the world disappear. It is their prerogative,
and once they exercise it, no one outside the mental bubble holds
any importance. Perhaps the dierence between ve and seventeen sense s is not
all that signicant, since any sense is just a channel for the real
business of the mind, which is to sort out, interpret, and nally
create reality. A newborn baby feels completely fused with his
mother, and with all objects. Even though his skin contain s working
nerves and his eye a working retina, these mechanical parts are not
enough to tell a baby that he is an individual. The touch and sight of
anything “out there” feels like “me” touching and seeing myself. Getting out of this homogen eous soup of “me-ness” is the baby’s
main intellectual task during the rst months of life. All of us have
accomplished the task, except for a few. There are some people, for
example, who were autistic in childhood and still experience ashes
of feeling that they have blended back into the soup of me-ness;
they feel the touch of a wall when they look at it. The fusing
experience may be blissful for an infant, but for an adult it is
disorienting and, if it persists, terrifying. Once a sense has been chosen for a particular function, the things
it sees, touches , or hears become “real,” but billions of stimuli have
to be excluded during the selection process. When you look at
another person you do not pick up the infrared wavelengths he
emanates, the electrical eld around him, the lines of magnetism
that loop away  from him and back again, the shudder of the ground
when he walks—all are signals that do not t our conventional
senses, even though we probably do respond to them unconsciously. Snakes, bats, and insects depend on these signals and therefore
inhabit a world that overlaps ours while remaining quite dierent. I
particularly like to imagine  the world as seen by a chameleon,whose right and left eyes rotate independently in their sockets. A
beam of light hitting a table would be a double beam to a
chameleon. Two chairs could never be a foot apart, or any xed
distance, since with the swivel of an eye, the chameleon can make
them as far apart as he wants. Someone once vigorously challenged me on this point. “If I had a
chameleon’s eyes,” he said, “I might see that door as two feet to the
left, but that’s not where it is in reality. If I tried to walk through the
door I saw, I would bump into the wall.”
“But think about it,” I replied, “that just means you trust your
sense of touch  more than your sense of sight. The world  may look
very convincing, but that does not answer the deeper question: why
should you trust any of your senses at all?”
Many Realities
If each person  is constantly creating his own inner experience,
placing innumerable interpretations on the raw data that the senses
provide, that is strong grounds for not denying anyone his personal
version of reality. A generati on ago, the ruling assumption was that
one reality—hard, scientic, materialistic—would do for all. Now
we have to learn to cope with the state of many realities. The story is told of a British anthropologist who undertook a eld
trip to India. One evening he crept through the jungle and caught
sight of a strange scene. An old holy man was dancing ecstatically in
the forest. He ran up and embraced the trees; he laughed when the
leaves stirred and bathed his face in the moonlight with an
expression of delirious joy. The anthropologist watched this display
in fascination until he couldn’t contain himself. “Pardon me,” he said, stepping from the bushes, “but what makes
you dance out here, alone in the jungle?”
The holy man looked bewildered and replied, “Pardon me, but
what makes you think I’m alone?”
Both questions are mutually  unanswerable, because they depend
on unique world views. The holy man sees himself surrounded in
the forest by nature spirits, while the anthropologist sees wood andchlorophyll. The two realities overlap and yet do not come alive for
each other. I am especially drawn to such stories because my own life has
been dominated by con icting and sometimes contradictory
realities. In my Indian childhood, which was spent in the family of a
military doctor, I saw a regimental band of Punjabis marching on
the parade ground in turbans while playing Highland ings on their
bagpipes. At my birthday parties the children sat wide-eyed, hands
on their mouths, while a snake charmer performed for us, yet my
favorite present was a model train from England complete with tiny
station houses marked “Wembley” and “Paddington.”
My school was St. Columba’s in New Delhi, which was run along
strict English lines by Catholic brothers. During games period,
Brother McNamara would drag me o, pull down my pants, and
wallop me every time I bowled outside the left wicket—cricket was
a matter of life and death at St. Columba’s. On graduation day he
took me into his oce and said, “Christ died to redeem you from
eternal damna tion. That is the point of your education here. What
are you going to do about it?”
Could I tell him that a swami lived next door to our house who
subsisted on the fty rupees  a month my mother, a devout Hindu,
gave him? (Not that he needed much, since he sat in deep samadhi ,
hardly breathing or moving, for seven days at a time.) Or should I
have told him how thrilled my mother was when she came back
from a pilgrimage to a holy cave in north India? As she was
kneeling at the mouth of the cave, she opened her eyes and found
that Lord Shiva was giving her his blessing in the form of a rearing
cobra two feet away. My sense of reality continued to veer unsteadily from one world
to the next. When I ew to Sri Lanka to take the exam that would
entitle me to practice medici ne in America, I spent the morning at a
temple built around Buddha’s tooth and listened to ethereal wind
chimes tuned thousands of years ago to be pleasing to the devas , or
angels. That afternoon I sat through an exam crammed with
metabolic pathways and basic biochemistry. The American
consulate was anxious to import only those foreign doctors whoknew English well, so I also had to pass a language test that
contained the memorable question, “A heavyweight boxer is A) A
man who lifts heavy boxes, B) A kind of sportsman, C) A large man
shaped like a box.”
If you ask who is the “real” me, I would have to answer , “All of
them.” The triumph of the self is that it can create something
entirely new and individual on the face of the earth. My inner self
contains Brother McNamara, my mother, the swami next door,
Shiva in the form of a cobra, my cricket team, and a toy station
marked “Wembley.” These images have been digested and turned
into me; newe r images, including everything I saw, heard, touched,
tasted, and smelled today, are turning into me at this moment. Every time I bring one of these aspects of myself into view, I am
also launching a display of unique physical reactions. Each new
thought may cause only a slight shift inside my physiology, but
“slight” still amounts to millions of neuronal signals in the brain,
giving rise to billions of other cellular events that occur in the blink
of an eye. In a very real sense, a new thought turns me into a new
person. The same holds true for everyone. An old man reliving a
cherished boyhood memory can suddenly glow with youth. The
eect, although temporary, can often be strikingly convi ncing—his
wrinkles soften , his skin looks fresh, his eyes sparkle with life. The
boy is still inside him, yearning to cross the threshold of time. You
can see the powerful regret when the child has to turn back and the
mask of old age wearily returns. The depth and intensity of such changes is hard to fathom at
times. I was fascinated by a rst-person account given by a woman
parishioner concerning the French priest Père Jean Lamy , who died
in 1931 at the age of seventy-eight. An extremely devout and saintly
man, Père Lamy was giving a rapturous sermon when this woman
saw, uncannily, the complete emergence of a young man from inside
the old:
He stopped and looked upward. His face became translucent,
like a block of alabaster lit from within. Old as he was, I sawhim go young and handsome, like a man of thirty. I saw his
wrinkles disappear. There was no sparkling light about his
head but an inward light which made his face transpar ent,
without dimness, without shadows about either the nose or
the eyes. That lasted ve or six seconds, perhaps more—I
don’t know. He was looking lightly into the air in front of
him. Imperceptibly all became normal again, and he went on
talking as before. This magical moment, which was seconded by another
eyewitness, falls into a pattern of inner illuminations exhibited by
saints and holy men in all times and traditions. Avoidi ng for the
present the spiritual content of the event, I am struck by how
eortlessly the body’s hard mask can melt with a shift of awareness. To fully come to terms with the power of awareness, we have to
surrender the idea that its activity is conned to our mental bubble. Almost every primitive society believes that looking at an object
requires the mind to shoot forth through the eyes. Instead of
explaining vision by saying that light comes in, they say that sight is
going out. Thus a skilled hunter can mesmerize game by stalking it
with his eyes, and a shaman can heal or harm people by the power
of his gaze. In both cases, the glance is behaving as a carrier wave,
transmitting mental intention out into the world and placing it upon
whatever is being observed. Instead of understand ing visual
perception as a taking in  of reality, this viewpoint, which was shared
by Aristotle and the entire  ancient world, says that perception
confers  reality. The same holds true for the other senses. Sound goes
out with a power that is more than its physical vibrations, which is
why New Guinea tribesmen can shout down a tree or the trumpet
blasts of the Israelites topple city walls. Modern people sco at such things, reducing them to the level of
superstitions like the “evil eye.” We feel condent in our knowledge
that light waves enter the eye and sound waves the ear. Surprisingly, this does not nally settle the question, because it isthe ow of attention, not photons or air molecules, that transmits
the powers we are talking about. We have seen how the body can live or die on the basis of mental
interpretations. The age-old idea that our minds can interact with
the world needs to be more  closely examined. Otherwis e, we will
not be able to tell if we have turned our backs on superstition or
overlooked a dormant power  that might be awakened from its long
sleep. OceanofPDF.com3
Magical Thinking
There was a time when I lived outside the reach of magic. I was a
new resident in Boston, working sixteen-hour shifts at the veteran’s
hospital. I barely had a free hour to be with my wife and was lucky
when I got home to spend three sweet minutes with our baby
daughter, who went to bed almost the instant I walked in the door. My salary was meager, ve hundred dollars a month, and when our
tiny apartment began to close in on us, I decided that I had better
work harder. I began to moonlight. Instead of pointing the battered
VW toward Jamaica Plain at night, I drove the long road to an
emergency room in the suburbs, where I stayed on duty until dawn. Another doctor worked with me, a seasoned trauma surgeon
named Karl. We were comrades in exhaustion, and to avoid
complete collapse we took turns catnapping. One of us curled up on
a gurney in the back corridor while the other propped his eyes open
at the nurses’ station. No one could call such a life magical; the word would have had
no meaning for me. Life was dicult, and at times—as when I had
to perform a cesarean upon a woman who had just been murdered
—life was crushing. I worked without Karl that night, with a young
Irish nurse beside me. We didn’t have time to take the stretcher
upstairs to an operating room but had to stand there in the door of
the ER. The eeriness of the situation made both our hands shake. The baby came out within two minutes after the mother died. We
waited tensely. It was breathing, then it wriggled.“The pretty thing’s all right,” the nurse whispered. She gently
cradled the infant to take it away to an incubator. I saw her smiling,
but at the same time she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down
her cheeks. Joy was coming in on the heels of sorrow. When were
things ever dierent? I thought. The world is a mill wheel, impartially
grinding out birth and death . A doctor dances on the edge of the
wheel, trying to keep one jig-step ahead of death so that birth might
have a better chance. My assumption that things happen randomly in nature, without
any regard for human feeling s or hopes, was buttressed by a lifetime
of experience, not just one disturbing incident. However , a strange
coincidence started to unfurl that challenged my beliefs, making me
wonder if the mind is not in some way helping to fashio n events—
this is the beginning of what I mean by magic. The coincidence started with something quite mund ane and
seemingly innocuous: Karl developed a cough. You couldn’t be
surprised, because he was a heavy smoker, even on the job. He had
the wracking, rasping cough that needs two packs a day to really
ripen. One night I confronted him and asked why in the world he
didn’t go and have a chest X ray, just in case. “Because if I see
cancer on it,” he said seriously, “it will scare me to death. ” The look
on his face told me to leave it alone. Karl’s cough eventually got so bad, however, that it was clearly
interfering with his work. He bowed to my pleading and went for
the X ray. When we held the lm up in front of the viewing screen,
a gray shadow  as round as a penny could be seen in the lower lobe
of his left lung. “My God,” Karl blurted out, “I do have cancer.” I told him we had
no conclusive proof, but within a few days he turned out to be right. A week went by and he coughed up blood for the rst time. After
three weeks he was panting and short of breath. They gave him
heavy radiatio n, but he responded poorly, and within two months
my friend Karl died. He was gone with shocking swiftness, and in the aftermat h I tried
to be fatalistic. Karl had succumbed to epidermoidal lung cancer, a
disease whose mortality rate approaches 100 percent. It wasreasonable to tell oneself that his chances had been statist ically very
slim, but then I happened to run across one of Karl’s old X rays,
taken ve years before. Curious, I held it up next to the new one
and shivered. You could hardly tell them apart—the same lesion, a
gray shadow as round as a penny, was visible in the earlier picture. It looked a bit smaller and more vaguely dened, which was why it
had avoided rm diagnosis. Karl’s body had lived with this little round shadow for ve years. How could he suddenly die of it in a matter of two mont hs? Did he
actually scare himself to death, as he had predicted? Conventional
medicine would answer with a thundering “No!”—the mechanics of
malignant tumors are just that, mechanical. They work according to
the set laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, not accor ding to the
whim of a patient’s mind. You don’t die of a disease just because
you are afraid of it. And yet one had to wonder. Puzzled by Magic
A fear is just a negative kind of wish. If fears can come true, so
can wishes in general. But neither one is supposed to. In fact, when
a psych iatrist sits down to interview a patient who migh t be going
insane, one of the chief symptoms he looks for is called “magical
thinking.” The hallmark of magical thinking is the person’s rm
belief that he can control reality with his mind. Stoplights do not
turn from red to green automatically—he wills them to. His
thoughts make people move toward him or away from him. If he
shuts his eyes and wishes hard enough, he can even make a
psychiatrist disappear. The fact that a thought comes true does not necessarily make it
magical. People have sudden premonitions not to take a certain
ight and later read in the newspaper that the ight crashed. These
things happen, and once the moment of wonder passes, they are
usually dismis sed from our minds. However, what if a causal
connection is at work? Perhaps unseen powers warned those
travelers in order to save their lives. Now we are irting with magic.The next step could lead to mental disturbance. There are
paranoid schiz ophrenics who can no longer draw the line between
their mind and God’s. Such a person will begin to hold himself
responsible for world events—without his personal intervention,
earthquakes might topple the Empire State Building or nuclear
missiles come ying across the Arctic Circle. Some paranoiacs drive
themselves to stay awake around the clock, keeping watch like
fretful mothers  beside the cradle, so strong is their belief that reality
will disappear, vaporizing like a dream, unless they x their minds
on it. However, that is only one aspect of a mystery that has puzzled
humankind for thousands of years. Can we in fact inue nce reality
with our thoughts? A pure mystic immediately says yes to this
question; a pure rationalist just as quickly says no. Most people,
however, nd themselves intrigued and confused. No one has ever
proved that thinking magically has to be wrong, and in some cases
there is no other way to explain why things happen the way they
do. There is, for example, the rare phenomenon in which terminally
aicted patien ts suddenly intuit that, despite all the odds, they are
going to recover. This sudden  shift in awareness cannot be predicted
by either the patient or his doctor—it seems to strike with the
ckleness of lightning. A striking example (which came  to me via
Dr. Yujiro Ikemi, Japan’s leading researcher on spontaneous
remissions) is the terminal cancer patient whose tumor, often
massive in size, suddenly disappears, and as it does, or just before,
the patient knows it. At one moment he is subject to uncontrollable
mood swings, like any other  patient confronting death. All at once
despair gives way, not to hope, but to a calm, almost  unearthly
knowingness. “This tumor is going away” becomes as natural a
belief as “This cold is going away.” The shift in awareness has made
something happen in the body, or has given a signal that it has
already happened. Nobody really knows which. Let us accept  that this may be magical thinking, not in the
disturbed sense, but as a potentially valid power of the mind. Clearly nature  has gone to great pains to keep this power hidden.One could spend a lifetime not knowing that it exists, were it not for
those people who are too innocent or too mad to keep their inner
world a secret. One way to approach magic al thinking may be to set aside the
mind-body connection, at least for the moment, and concentrate on
the magical thinker’s own idea of what he is doing. I would propose
that he operates dierently  from most people, according to a
principle called “self-referral.” Self-referral means that I gauge
reality not by externals but by internals, by my own feelings and
intuitions. If I am living according to this principle, there is no
mystery when  a shift in awareness causes a change in my body,
because all reality begins with such a shift and keeps on changing as
I do. Things appear to be happening to me, but in fact I am
participating in each and every event. If I were alert enough, I
would see my thoughts radiating like light from a candle or a star. Thoughts surge up from their invisible source and lap against the
world like waves against the shore. They strike everything in my
vicinity—oak trees, clouds, skyscrapers, other people, even the most
random atoms and bits of atoms. These things are basically
reections seen in the mirror of my awareness. And the mirror is
vast—my thoughts roll on as far as the edge of the universe,
beginning at a nite source but spreading out to innity. The opposite of self-referral is object-referral, which means giving
primary importance to externals instead of to myself. A person
whose thinkin g is based on object-referral automatically assumes
that his mind has no inuence over things in the outside world. A
thought is a subjective event that ricochets around inside a mental
bubble, never able to break out. For all practical purposes, this
means that object-referral awareness is mercilessly dominated by
things. Compared to the ghost of a thought, the hard, solid objects
of this world seem much more real and therefore much more
powerful. This is the position almost all of us nd ourselves in. Even if you cannot imagine a reality centered entirely on yourself,
however, another person could be living that way very successfully.A friend of mine was traveling in Kashmir and brough t back the
following tale:
“Holy men are a common sight in Srinagar, the capital of
Kashmir, becau se of its proxi mity to the Himalayas. One day I saw a
holy man making his way down the street. He was an old ascetic
with a long beard, but very tall and vigorous lookin g. He was
dressed in a saron robe, and by his side he carried a three-pronged
sta called a trishul , or Shiva’s trident. The god Shiva is looked upon
by many ascetics in India as their patron. “As this imposing gure neared me, he was suddenly accosted by
a gang of jeering boys. They were rough, and in a minute their
taunts turned to shoves. They pulled the old ascetic around, while
he showed not the slightest  irritation. One of the boys stole his
trident and ran away with it. Still the old man walked on, smiling as
if nothing had happened. That stick was all he had. No doubt it had
been ceremonially presented to him by his guru decades ago, and all
his possessions were in the cotton bag that was tied around its neck. “All at once another boy dashed up and grabbed the trident back. He ran up behind the ascetic, and just as he was holding out the
stick, the old man, who couldn’t see the boy behind him, gracefully
reached backw ard to receive it. He was still walking straight ahead
at the time and didn’t even turn his head. It was as if hand and stick
were fated to meet again, or had never been separated. Then he
disappeared. “I walked on, absorbed in my thoughts. How could the old man
have remained so unperturb ed? Did he know that the stick would
come back to him? At the next block, I looked up, and there he was,
crossing my path again. He gravely turned his eyes in my direction
and gave me a slow, conspiratorial wink. I didn’t even realize that
he knew I had been watching. Then in English he said, ‘May I buy
you a cup of tea?’ The words sounded faintly ludicrous, but
immediately I felt drawn into his seamless, unshakable reality, and I
marveled at its security.”
What this story tells me is that the self and the world do not have
to be separate entities. The whole incident was not necessarily a
contest betwee n an old man and a gang of boys; it was a divertingplay within the old man’s awareness that took on outward shape. He
stood at the center of the event, certain of its outcome, and his hand
found the stick again because it was meant to. Some people see
more of this magic than the rest of us. As Robert Frost wrote in one
of his shortest poems: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But
the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” My friend went and had
tea with the holy man, but he found it hard to get any more words
out of him. The ascetic had exhibited enough of the Secret for one
day. People who learn to live on the basis of self-referral need not lose
sight of the objective world; even the most austere ascetics require
food, water, and shelter. Also, we should not hastily assume that
worldly pleasures are the enemy of the self. It is just a matter of
reorienting one’s perspective, seeing the self as primary and
outward things as seconda ry. Unfortunately, to someone who
denes himself through outside objects, the prospect of trusting in
himself as the linchpin of reality can be quite disturbing. For every
desirable word in our vocabulary like self-reliant, self-motivated,
and self-sucient, our object-referral culture has found an
undesirable one: self-centered, introverted, withdrawn, narcissistic,
solipsistic, egocentric. Although subjectivity is supposed to be changeable and
untrustworthy, it seems no less treacherous to rely psychologically
upon exterior objects. I remember a fable I used to hear in India:
Once there was a poor villager who possessed only two things of
any value—his  son, who was sixteen, and a handsome gray pony. The villager loved these two above all else in creation. One day the
pony vanished and could not be found. The villager was plunged
into deep dejection. No one could lift his spirits until three days
later, when the pony returned, followed by a handsome black
Arabian stallion. Overjoyed, the man embraced the pony and
quickly bridled the stallion. His son eagerly asked if he could ride the wild horse, and since he
could deny him nothing, the father consented. An hour later, news
came that the boy had been badly thrown while riding on the beach. He was carried  home in a litter, bruised and battered, his right legshattered in two places. At the sight of his injured son, the father’s
happiness again turned to utter sorrow. He sat in front of his hut wailing, when a contingent of the king’s
soldiers swept by. War was imminent, and their duty was to drag o
conscripts from the village. They ruthlessly seized every eligible son,
but when they came to this man’s house, the soldiers saw that his
son was maimed, and they left him behind. The father’s tears again
turned to joy, and he gave fervent thanks to heaven for the tragedy
he had bewailed the moment before. What’s peculia r about this fable is that it has no ending, and that
is its moral. The rise and fall of the villager’s spirits goes on and on,
bound to the fate of a boy and a pony. In real life, people have more
than two things they cherish, but the result is the same. So long as
our happiness depends upon objects “out there,” we are their
prisoner. We have given our freedom away to things. Sad Love Stories
Although medicine is not yet prepared to admit that self-referral
plays the major part in either the onset or the cure of disease, a
large number of patients are very open to the possib ility. They
instinctively refer to the feelings that surround their illness. If there
is a great deal of denial or self-blame present, their feelings will
usually be turbulent and therefore misleading. But they can also be
startlingly clear, giving the patient a truer understanding of his
situation than anyone could objectively supply from the outside. In this regard, there is a fascinating account from the popular
writer Michael Crichton, who was trained as a doctor at Harvard
Medical School twenty-ve years ago. In his book of
autobiographical sketches, Travels , Crichton remembers the months
he spent on the cardiac ward of a Boston teaching hospital. It is
routine for third- and fourth-year students to rotate briey through
all the major medical specializations. Crichton had no intention of
pursuing cardi ology, but he had a simple, quite novel insight during
this particular rotation: what if heart disease was not the same for
every patient but had some kind of personal meaning for each one?What prompted Crichton to speculate along these lines were some
famous pathol ogy ndings made in the early fties. During the
Korean War autopsies were routinely performed on young soldiers
who had been killed in battle, and doctors were surpris ed to nd
that the arteries of more than 70 percent showed advance d stages of
atherosclerosis; these young arteries were already building up fatty
plaques, cuttin g oxygen o from the heart, and moving inexorably
in the direction of a heart attack. Yet if men as young as seventeen already had this disease,
Crichton wondered, why did a typical coronary occur much later,
typically in a man’s forties or fties? “You had to assume that all
these patients had been walking around with clogged arteries since
they were teenagers,” Crichto n writes. “A heart attack could happen
anytime. Why had they waited twenty or thirty years to develop a
heart attack? Why had the heart attack happened this year and not
next, this week and not last week?”
To answer his questions, he decided to learn something about the
feelings the cardiac patient s had about their disease. The direct
approach seem ed to be the best, so Crichton went on the ward and
asked his patients point-blan k, “Why did you have a heart attack?”
He realized that his inquiries might set o unforeseeable reactions. “My question also implied that the patients had some choice in
the matter, and therefore some control over their disease. I feared
they might respond with anger. So I started with the most easygoing
patient on the ward, a man in his forties who had had a mild attack. “Why did you have a heart attack?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I got a promo tion. The company wants me to move to Cincinnati. But my wife doesn’t want to go. She has all her family here in
Boston, and she doesn’t want to go with me. That’s why.”
The man said this completel y calmly, without any sign of anger. When Crichton went on to question the rest of the ward, every other
patient had a similar answer:
“My wife is talking about leaving me.”
“My son won’t go to law school.”“I didn’t get the raise.”
“My wife wants another baby and I don’t think we can aord it.”
Not one person lacked an answer, yet not one mentioned
arteriosclerosis as the cause of his heart attack, nor the standard risk
factors, such as a high-fat diet, hypertension, lack of exercise, and
smoking. In the late 1960s, the mind-body connection was
considered not quite legitimate, and Crichton was perplexed by his
patients’ perspective. Looking back, he writes, “What I was seeing
was that their explanations made sense from the standpoint of the
whole organis m, as a kind of physical acting-out. These patients
were telling me stories of events that had aected their hearts in a
metaphysical sense. They were telling me love stories. Sad love
stories, which had pained their hearts. Their wives and families and
bosses didn’t care for them. Their hearts were attacked. And pretty
soon, their hearts were literally  attacked.”
This insightful account does not “prove” anything new about
heart disease. Yet Crichton can be credited with anticipating a key
mind-body concept, now widely accepted, that our feelings do not
live in a separate world from our cells. It is the precise timing of
these heart attacks, howeve r, which was controlled by the victim
but also comp letely unforese en by him, that gives Crich ton’s story
its unique fascination. His patients knew what they had done only
after they did it. This blind  spot opens up a new aspect of the
mystery. We see the body acting out the mind’s dramas, yet we have
not yet spied the director who decides which scene comes next. That
is because the mind has decided to deny a part of itself. A Space Beyond Reason
Because magic seems so foreign to it, the rational part of our
minds is generally quite fearful of the nonrational part. The very
word “magic” has a sinister overtone to most of us, equat ed with all
that is dark, dangerous, uncanny, and wild. But the threa t has been
greatly exaggerated. We spend much of our lives in the space
beyond reason. If I say “I love you,” the sound waves from my voice
bounce against  your eardrum, setting up a vibration that the innerear turns into an electric signal. This impulse is passed along the
neurons to the brain’s speech center, and you look pleased. Reason knows  all about this journey, except for the last step,
which is the most important. Why are you pleased that I love you? Why do those electrical impu lses in the brain have a meaning? If I
say a dieren t sentence, “You have terminal cancer,”  the same
physical impulses carry my voice to your brain’s speech center, but
now you are devastated. Scientically, the signals are all but
identical, yet the results they produce could hardly be more
dierent. An EEG cannot decipher the meaningfulness of brain
activity; the squiggles on the readout have nothing to say about
what distinguishes love from hate, joy from sorrow, inspiration from
tedium. The output generate d by swamis deeply immersed in bliss
creates patterns that closely resemble epileptic attacks; the voltage
generated by the nervous system of a poet is not necessarily less
than that from a psychopath. Meaning slips through the ngers of science, which provides any
person who is interested in meaning with a good reason to take
magic seriously. The materi alistic bias of science leads it to shun
things that cannot be directly contacted by the senses. Yet nature
has reserved a huge region set apart for things that cannot be seen,
touched, or weighed. If you have ever observed a ock of swallows
ying at dusk, you have seen them wheel and turn together, veering
o at impossib le tangents in the blink of an eye. How does each bird
know to turn at the precise instant the others do? Scien tists have
established that there is no bird acting as leader—the impulse is
somehow shared by every bird at once. The magic lies in each one
but also in between, over, and around them. It is uid and invisible,
like the air, but more so. A similar mystery exists if I happen to think a word at random
—“archipelago.” In order for me to think this word, millions of
brain cells have to re in a precise pattern at the exact same instant. One isolated cell doesn’t dream up the word and then pass it along. It appears everywhere at once. For that matter, where was
“archipelago” hiding when I wasn’t thinking it? The location of
mental space is as elusive as the space outside the universe.Mental space is so inconceivable that one could easily claim that
it is entirely magical. Computers can be programmed to play chess
at the grandmaster level, but unlike real grandmasters, they do not
grow tired, have brilliant inspirations, throw tantrums, exult in
victory, or sulk in defeat. One grandmaster went mad and refused to
play in tournaments unless a pineapple sundae was placed next to
the board. Such a thing is inconceivable to a computer’s mimicked
intelligence, but it is all too human. This is what it means to have a
mind. If a computer became the greatest chess player in history,
humans would still have all the fun. Magical thinking, then, presents itself not as a deviation from
reason but as a way of probing past it into a space that is more alive
and meaningful. It is just as natural to us as rationality, and perhaps
more so. At birth a baby is totally self-centered; therefor e it comes
as no surprise that we started out in life thinking magically all the
time. On the day you were born, you began to look around the
world that was born with you. Soon a peculiar ying object
appeared in your eld of vision. Soft and rather doughy in
appearance, it oated randomly before your eyes, sometimes visible,
sometimes darting out of sight. You did not relate to this object until the day came when you
made a momentous discover y. Spurred by an intense desire for the
breast or the bottle, you had an impulse to reach out. When you
acted on this untested impulse, the apparatus that fastened onto the
breast was this same object—and now you understood. The entity
dangling in front of your eyes was yours to command; you acquired
a hand. The most complex motor skills, such as playing the violin or
performing gymnastics, develop from the same basis. A desire
reaches out into some unknown region and comes back with a
report: it nds out what is possible and what is not. Using this
information, the mind slightly changes its attitude, and when the
next report comes back, the news has changed. Now more is possible, or less—the new nger position  on the
bridge of the violin allows better exibility or it doesn’t. In either
case, the mind has become renewed.The ability of the mind to extend its inuence seems limitless,
even when impossible obstacles confront it. In his last book,
Wisdom, Madne ss, and Folly, the renowned Scottish psych iatrist R. D.
Laing recounts the following remarkable story about Jacqueline du
Pré, the celebrated British cellist who died in her forties of multiple
sclerosis. Tragically, du Pré was stricken by the disease when she was
twenty-eight and her musical career ended very quickly, as she soon
lost her ability to coordinate her two arms. A year passed during
which she had no contact with the cello. One morning, however, she awoke to nd that she was
completely, inexplicably cured. Not just her muscular coordination
but her musical abilities had returned intact. She rushed to a studio
and recorded beautiful performances of music by Chopin and Franck
that, needless to say, she had not been able to practice for a year. Her remission lasted four days, at the end of which she returned to
her former helpless state. It is hard to deny that for these four days, du Pré was totally  free
of her disease, and yet that makes no sense medically. Multiple
sclerosis causes progressive organic damage to the nervous system;
the fatty sheat h covering each nerve cell, called myelin, becomes
destroyed in patches that are randomly scattered throughout the
brain and spinal cord. For some patients the degenerative process
takes up to fty years, while others are incapacitated within a few
weeks or months of onset. Du Pré was already at the point where her damaged neurons were
physically dysfunctional. How did she recover? How did a nervous
system that could not move an arm one day sudde nly regain
mastery over the incredibly precise and delicate motions involved in
playing the cello? She did not think herself better, nor did courage
and willpower  seem to play a new part. Somehow she transcended
her illness so completely that reality simply changed. As a capstone to this tale, Laing records that he helped a patient
create the same magical eect, although only for a moment. The
patient was a man in his late thirties who had been conned to a
wheelchair for some time. He “denitely presented the clinicalpicture of someone with well-established multiple sclerosis,” Laing
writes. “Just to see what would happen, I hypnotized him and told
him to get up out of his wheelchair and walk. He did—for a few
steps. He would have fallen if he had not been supported and helped
back to his chair. “He might still be walking now,” Laing believes, “if I (and he) had
not lost nerve after those rst three or four steps—he had not been
supposed to be able to walk for over a year.” This argument implies
that for a moment Laing allowed his patient to enter a space where
his MS did not exist. The ravaged neurons either acted like healthy
ones or failed to count in some wholly mysterious way. Either
notion comes down to the same thing: the paralysis depended, to
what extent we do not know, on the patient’s state of awareness. This conclusion would outra ge a hard scientist, but we would all
be paralyzed if thoughts did not have an invisible anima ting force. This is poigna ntly evident in cases of autism. Autism, which is
derived from Latin roots meaning “self-centered” or “independent,”
is a rare infant disorder that was rst diagnosed as late as 1943; it
strikes fewer than 1 baby in 10,000, aecting four times more boys
than girls. Its cause is still debated. The older, psychological theories
blamed the child’s “refrigera tor mother,” but these have given way
to biological theories that hypothesize a chemical imbalance or
perhaps a physical lesion in the child’s brain. Whatever the cause, an autistic child displays almost no response
to the outside world and other people. If he is placed in a swing and
pushed back and forth, he may appear to be slightly engaged in the
experience, but as soon as he is left to swing himself, he lapses into
apathy. If a ball is thrown at him, he will not lift up his hands either
to catch it or to fend it o. Much of his spare time may be spent in
repetitive, mechanical movem ents called “twiddling.” Somehow, the
spark of desire  has become lost in the dark, winding maze of self-
absorption. It can sometimes be tricked into returning. I once watched a
videotape of autistic children  who at three or four years of age had
not yet learned to walk. Withdrawn in their sealed-o worlds, they
could stand up only if given a prop to lean against. Otherwise, theyimmediately fell down and did not try to get up again. To help these
children, an ingenious contrivance was devised. First, two chairs were set up ten feet apart with a strong rope
connecting them. Each child was coaxed to hold on to the rope and
walk a few steps. After a while, this task was mastered, and the
child could make it from one chair to the next without falling. The
next time, a slightly thinner rope was substituted for the thick one. Again the child leaned on the rope and made it from one chair to
the other. On each success ive day a slightly thinner rope was
substituted, but the child noticed no dierence. Finally, he was
walking “supported” by only a imsy piece of string. Then came the stroke of brilliance. To release the children from
the mechanical routine of walking from one chair to the next, the
experimenters handed each of them a piece of string to carry around
in his hand. Feeling secure that he still had his support to lean on,
the child could now walk freely. That moment of letting go has
magic in it. Seeing these newly liberated children roaming their
playroom for the rst time, I wondered how many small gaps
separate me from freedom, gaps that seem like huge, impassable
gulfs because I do not have a piece of string to use as a bridge. Bridging Two Worlds
So far, my defense of magical thinking has not strayed far outside
the tightly enclosed domain of the brain and the body it controls. Yet people do at times believe that their thoughts inuence events
completely beyond the reach of nerve signals. The study of
parapsychology has staked out a shaky sort of credibility here. Most
people have had premonitio ns that come true, but as we noted
before, magical thinking goes beyond ESP and precognition by
apparently causing people or things “out there” to move according
to one’s will. Since there is such fear and prejudice surrounding it, this is the
nal kind of magic that I would like to demystify. To have another
person enact a thought you have had does not mean that he must be
an automaton or that you have encroached upon his free will. Theseare reex fears that spring to mind, reinforced by the “rational”
belief that each person occupies a completely isolated portion of
space and time. Let us suppose for just a moment that this is a prejudic e. If you
hold a small horseshoe magnet in your hand, its charge is extremely
tiny and apparently isolated. But the magnet would have no charge
without the earth’s immens e magnetic eld; there is an invisible
connection between the two, and beyond. The earth could not be
magnetized without the magnetic eld of the sun, the sun depends
for its elds of force on the galaxy, and so on, expanding to innity. The nal result is that the magnet in your hand is wove n into the
scheme of the entire universe. The evolutionary sequence leading from the Big Bang to my mind
is just as continuous as that which leads to the horsesho e magnet. Although each thought in my mind is tiny, it emerges from the
trillions of potential thoughts  a person might have, and they depend
on millions of years of human evolution leading up to the present
structure of the brain. Evolut ion in turn depends on the unfoldment
of the entire universe since the moment of the Big Bang. Therefore,
a single thought may be seen as a small outcropping in a universal
eld. The crucial dierence, of course, is that the electromagnetic eld
can be measure d for millions of light years, while no one has proven
that the cosmos has a mind. We prefer to believe that intelligence
arrived late on the scene, at the last minute of the eleventh hour in
the known life of the unive rse, and our intelligence is a special
outgrowth in that extremely isolated occurrence. Indeed, aside from
a handful of evolutionary biologists, science gets along very well
without having to confront  the thorny issue of where and how
intelligence began. We are facing the issue here because magical thinking seems to
exhibit many of the characteristics of a eld. The universe’s
electromagnetic eld is invisible, all-pervasive, and capable of
responding to the slightest change within itself. As the earth’s
magnetic pole shifts, every compass on the planet follows it; in
return, if you take a compass out of your pocket, the earth’smagnetic eld is aected by a minuscule amount. In short, no part
of the eld can move without moving the whole. If we transpose this understa nding onto the mind, it would mean
that each of our thoughts aects all other minds, not because we are
exercising psychic powers, but because every mind is a small
outcropping in the eld. This is a sweeping paradigm that I am
introducing here, and I have every intention of pursuing its many
ramications. Yet if we ignore the huge questions that loom up
before us, the idea of belonging to one interwoven intelligence is the
logical conclusion of the argument that reality “in here” is
connected to reality “out there.” For what is more likely to connect
the two than intelligence? If a person’s mind is engagin g in a creative give-and-take with the
world—as we concluded when we looked at perception—there must
be some sort of common ground. It may sound absurd to claim that
anyone’s mind can aect a boulder or a tree, but inside our brains,
mental activity is constantly altering the structure of brain
chemicals. These chemicals are made of molecules and atoms, as are
boulders and trees. Just because a carbon atom resides in the gray
matter of your brain does not bring it any closer to the mind than if
the atom  resided in a tree. There is still the impassable gulf between
mind and matter to contend with. Magical thinking provides us with evidence that we are bridging
that gulf all the time. Actually, this linear image is far too static,
since elds are continually pulsating with life. It is much closer to
the truth to say that mind and matter join in a dance, moving
instinctively together, aware without speaking of where their next
step will fall. To bring this metaphor to life, I can present  Sheila, an
Englishwoman in her mid-fties who was profoundly aected by
one magical thought. Thirty years ago, as a young girl fresh out of convent  school,
Sheila conceiv ed a child out of wedlock. Her family, who were
devout Catholics, could not accept this pregnancy. Sheila herself
realized that she was not ready to raise a child alone, and although
she was distraught about giving up her baby, she decided to carry itto term and allow the adoption agencies to nd the infant a home. As she told me in a remarkable letter:
“I watched my baby being born, in the mirror they placed at the
foot of my bed. I remember my sense of wonder, excitement, and
achievement when this beautiful tiny boy appeared. I remember as
well the sense of loss that came from having no one to share these
feelings with. “The moment my baby was born, we both started to cry. I held
him close to my heart, trying  to comfort the two of us and to feel his
heart beating in unison with mine. For six days I bottle-fed him
while the slow, relentless adoption procedures took over our lives. I
wasn’t counseled, other than to be told that I was ‘a poor dear’ who
should forget what had happened, go out, and start all over again. A
deep sense of grief settled into my soul.”
A suitable family had been found for her infant son, and Sheila
agreed not to interfere in his growing-up years or even to make her
existence known. In return, she asked that he keep the name she
had given him, which was Simon. For twenty years she kept her
promise, although the separation became harder rather than easier
for her to bear as time went on. She was never able to have another
child, fearing to repeat the intense trauma of her rst birthing
experience. Finally, when Simon turned twenty-one, Sheila decided to return
to England from her home abroad and ask for a meeting with him. Since she did not know the whereabouts of the adoptive family, she
hired a detecti ve agency to make an investigation. In the meantime
she retreated to stay with old friends in Oxford. At this point an
event took place that lifts Sheila’s story to a new sphere. “To pass the time, I took long walks among the dreaming spires of
Oxford. I found myself captivated by the medieval air of the town. One afternoon, after visiting Christ Church College, I walked
through the meadows down to the riverbank. An Oxford eight
rowing crew was practicing nearby. “All at once, an eerie feeling crept up my spine. For no reason my
adrenaline started pumping, my palms grew sweaty and my mouth
dry. My mind became very alert, and I heard the word ‘Simon’ringing in my ears. I rushed back to my friends’ house, stunned. I lay
on the sofa in front of the re, feeling very cold, shaken, and
confused. Somehow I knew that my son was a student at Oxford and
that I had seen him rowing on the river that afternoon! “A second wave of insight came over me, and I said aloud, ‘I
know somethi ng that I shouldn’t know. He is studying medicine. Simon is following in his grandmother’s footsteps.’ [Sheila’s mother
was a practicing internist.] I had no idea where this state of
heightened awareness came from.”
Her friends hastened to borrow a college roster, and as she had
intuited, it contained a listing  for her son. Sheila was troubled at her
uncanny know ledge, but since she had no idea what to do next, she
did nothing. The detective agency called with a repor t verifying
other details of her intuition; they were amazed that she knew them
already. Our conventional study of human psychology cannot explain this
occurrence, yet there is no doubt in my mind that Sheila
“magnetized” this event, drawing to herself the lost child she had
ercely longed to regain. It was as if all her pent-up frustration
could no longer be held back. It had to break free, and to do that, it
broke down the articial barrier between inner and outer reality. There is another detail of Sheila’s story that provokes in me a
sense of both awe and gratitude. As it turned out, her uncanny
insights did not lead to a happy reunion with Simon. His adoptive
family put strong pressure on him to reject the sudden appearance
of this unwanted woman in their life. It took another nine years
before mother and son found the mutual courage to meet and accept
each other. Their emotiona l reunion took place in 1989, when Simon, now a
practicing physician in Oxford, invited his mother to visit him. Despite her trepidation, Sheila’s most cherished hope was realized—
she was accept ed for who she was, on her own terms, and welcomed
as a member of Simon’s family. Soon after she arrived at his home,
her son suggested that they go for a walk through the woods near
his old college. By chance he picked the same riverbank whereSheila had seen the rowing team years before. She told him about
her intuition, and he listened mesmerized. “It’s true,” he said in a halting voice, “I was rowing that day, and I
remember looking up to see a woman standing alone on the
riverbank. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. My spine
tingled, and I became very agitated. She seemed to be watching me. Then the thought ashed into my head, ‘She is your mother.’ ”
Sheila and Simon fell silent. It was impossible for them to
comprehend how they had been brought together, but they felt that
something supernatural had occurred. “We walked to the chapel at
Merton College,” Sheila said. “Simon took o my gloves and gently
held my hands while we prayed in gratitude. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ he
whispered. ‘It’s like being on a rst date.’ I laughed, and tears
trickled down our cheeks, softly and silently. They seemed to wash
away the pain in my heart , leaving only love and forgiveness.
_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:

        To a research er in the eld, this is a stran ge stance,
for the overwhelming trend in recent years has been to “explain”
perception in terms of the senses, to make it much less psychological
and much more mechanical. Thus, for the sense of sight we learn
that a human eye has about 125 million rods and 7 million cones
implanted on the surface of the retina. Rods are responsible for
night vision, cones for day vision. No one knows why we have
nearly twenty times more receptors for moonlight than for sunlight,
but that is the case. These specializ ed receptors are direct extensions of the brain, and
each reacts to only a narrow wavelength of light. When a photon
strikes a retinal cell, it creates a chemical change that in turn sparks
an electrical spike that is sent to the visual cortex in the back of the
head via the optic nerve, a bundle of 800,000 neural bers wrapped
into a single cable. During the early stages of visual processing, the
brain keeps the images from each eye separate; only at the very end
are they merged to create a three-dimensional object. Even then,
there is no picture of the world in your brain. The image of a tree,
for example, is decoded purely into electrical data. However, the
visual cortex is denitely a map that marks certain aspects of the
tree. The parts of the visual image that run from top to bottom and
left to right are registered by brain cells that also are arranged top
to bottom and left to right. The mechanics of eyesight are so well understood by now that
they can be imitated articially: robot eyes have been developed
that can detect light and send it to be stored and decoded by a
computer. In some cases, robot vision is sophisticated enough to
interpret color, texture, and shape, follow moving objects, anddistinguish near-far perspective much as our own eyes do. The only
problem with this impressive cracking of the visual code is that the
experience  of seeing has been entirely missed. Robot eyes are never
bored by what  they look at, or enthralled by beauty. They do not
prefer crimson  to scarlet, or vice versa. They do not relish the
softness of the shadows in Titian’s paintings or the stark melodrama
in Caravaggio’s. None of the qualities of light that really matter, in a
human, personal sense, can be translated into mechanical terms. The mother of a friend of mine has grown old, and as sometimes
happens, she is becoming bald. The wispy blue hair on top of her
head distresses  this once-beautiful woman, and when she was nearly
eighty, she nally resigned herself to wearing a wig. My friend
wanted to cheer his mother up, so he invited her to a party where
many distinguished guests would be present. The company was
sparkling, and his mother seemed greatly impressed. “Weren’t those people fascinating. ” he asked afterward. “Remarkable,” she murmured, “and did you see how much hair
they had. ”
All of us see the world just this subjectively. When we walk into a
room, we see what is important to us, screening out what is
indierent. We also see much that is invisible—that person over
there is an old lover, another  a renowned bore; that vase is worth a
fortune (where did they get the money. ), that painting looks like a
fake. A map of the brain’s visual cortex can never tell you the rst
thing about the subtle connot ations that light reveals to the eye, just
as the diagram  of a piano can tell you nothing about how music
enchants the ear. The only reason a robot eye can even pretend to “see” is that it
was built by humans. Every part was designed to approximate what
a person knows to look for. If we could not see backg rounds as
dierent from foregrounds, for example, no robot eye would be built
to sense such a distinction, and no software would take it into
account. Even if a robot eye could perfectly duplicate a human eye,
including the visual cortex, it would still be blind. The light lling
the world is my light. This truth struck home while I was reading The Magic Lantern, the
autobiography of the great Swedish lm director Ingmar Bergman. Bergman gave up lmmaking before he was seventy years old, a
situation he has made peace with, despite many moments  of intense
regret. “Most of all,” he says, “I miss working with Sven Nyquist [his
longtime cameraman], perhaps because we are both utterly
captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous,
dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden,
dark, springlike, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited,
poisonous, calming, pale light. Light. ”
Following the curve of this singing, elegiac sentence, I can see all
those qualities in light as well. All of us can, because without us,
light would not have them. It would have no brightness, no color,
no tone whatsoever. Without my eye (or yours), there is nothing to
see, not even blackness. Photons would bounce randomly,
unintelligibly through the void, never dening anyth ing, never
becoming light. In interstellar space, light is invisible; when it
strikes an object, it bounces back on a new track, but it does not
become any more visible. The sun is not radiant, nor the stars. At
best, they would be “hot spots” of energy emission, but even that
term depends on our sense of temperature. By itself, nothing “out there” has any denition without a
perceiver. When scientists claim to have deciphered the mechanics
of vision, all they have done is found a map, which must not be
mistaken for reality. A map of Tahiti is meaningless until you realize
that it is supposed to match a certain island whose mountains,
coasts, and rivers have been experienced by humans. We do not put
on the map the air currents or prime nesting sites that would be
noticed by birds, even though these belong to the real Tahiti as
much as the features we look for. The map is not the territory. Everyone has seen photographs of
what the world  looks like through the multiple eye of a bee, spider,
or y. Each of these insects sees through more than one lens, and
the photographs therefore present a cluster of eight or ten or twenty
images, generally of a ower, and we are to suppose that the insect
brain sees the ower that way. These composites, however, do not really capture the actual
experience of insect eyesight—they only indicate what a human
being might see if he looked through several camera lenses at the
same time. In reality, the eye of a horsey is divided into 20,000
separate eye-cell clusters. Each one responds either to a very specic
wavelength of light or to certain chemicals oating in the air. As a
result, the picture of the world processed by a horsey’s nervous
system is inconceivable to us (what does it mean to “see” a chemical
in the air, anyway. ). A porpoise’s brain is almost as large as a human one, but 80
percent of it is devoted to processing sounds. Porpoises, whales, and
dolphins have remarkable hearing; some species are able to detect
one another’s “songs” through miles of water. The map of a
porpoise’s ear will tell me what kind of eardrum it has, and if I look
at the minute hair cells inside  the ear, I will see relatives of the cells
in my inner ear. All this similarity of structure is misleading,
however, because the porpoise’s experience is not understandable
by the human mind, no matter how good the map. Even to use the word “hearing” is suspect. Hearing to a porpoise
is a kind of sonar, like a bat’s, that brings back three-d imensional
images closer to sights than sounds. A porpoise can “hear” how
large a shark is and in what direction it is moving. Actually, I
shouldn’t even venture this crude guess; for all I know, a porpoise
can “hear” that it is summer, that the sun is low on the horizon, that
a grouper is gray, or that Mars is tilted on its axis. Looking at Sounds
If all perceptio n is personal, where do the “real” sights, sounds,
smells, tastes, and textures begin. We trust our eyes to see “real”
photons and our ears to hear “real” vibrations in the air, but it is
easy to show that this trust rests upon a very shaky foundation. In
his penetrating book on the world of the deaf, Seeing Voices,
neurologist Oliver Sacks tells the strange tale of David Wright, an
Englishman who thought he could hear until he “saw” that he was
deaf. Wright had lost his hearing gradually in early childhood and was
not stone deaf until the age of seven. Since he had been born with
normal hearing, the young Wright had already mastered speech and
was used to hearing people talk. This made it hard for him to detect
that he was being shut out of the hearing world: “From the very rst
my eyes had unconsciously begun to translate motion into sound. My mother spent most of the day beside me and I understood
everything she said. Why not. Without knowing it I had been
reading her mouth all my life. ” In other words, when his mother
spoke, Wright found himself unable to tell that her voice was not
real, since like the rest of us, he “heard” it. “It was an illusion that
persisted even after I knew it was an illusion,” he recalls. “My
father, my cousins, everyone I had known retained phantasmal
voices. ”
Wright’s brain instantly and automatically turned the sight of
moving lips into sounds. These “projections of habit and memory,”
as he called them, lasted until he left the hospital where it had been
nally determined that his hearing loss was total and irreversible. Then the turning point came: “One day I was talking to my cousin
and he, in a moment of inspiration, covered his mouth with his
hands as he spoke. Silence. Once and for all I understood that what I
could not see, I could not hear. ”
Why, then, don’t we all see voices, instead of restricting ourselves
to the same worn rut of hearing. Many deaf people do “hear” the
wind in the trees when they see the branches swaying. Some
junction point  in their minds converts a visual signal into an
auditory one. Many blind people can likewise “see” faces by feeling
them with their hands. A mental junction point has taken the signals
of touch and converted them to sight. Presumably our brains could
do the same thing, but we prefer to let habit and memory  take over. We see through our eyes and feel through our ngers because we
have been conditioned to do so. Is that statement so incredible. In Walden, Thore au records that sometimes he lingered after
nightfall at a friend’s house in Concord and would have to tramp
back to his hut on Walden Pond without a lantern. Even if there was
no moon and the woods looked pitch black, he would “see” his wayperfectly, without stumbling, and after several miles would arrive
unerringly at his doorstep. There is also the case of Meyer Schneider, an Israeli, born blind,
who managed to recover a remarkable degree of sight through self-
devised eye exercises. (He currently teaches these to a wide
following from his home base in San Francisco. ) Although his vision
has been measured as 20/70, ophthalmologists who examine the
interior of Schneider’s eye see the same defective parts that he has
always had. The whole notion that we have exactly ve senses is completely
arbitrary to begin with. Under the sense of touch, for example, we
include our response to heat, texture, pressure, the placement of our
limbs, the weight of our bodies, and pain—all are things we “feel. ”
When the nervous system is intact, we may be said to have as many
as seventeen senses, according to researchers on perception. We do
not give names to most of these, and some are still disputable. Everyone seems to be able to detect pheromones, for example, the
distinctive chemicals the body gives o when a person is afraid or
sexually aroused, and the pineal gland in everyone’s brain changes
its hormonal output by sensing the yearly cycle of the sun. But only
selected individuals count among their senses ESP or the ability to
see auras of light around other people. Perception, we must conclude, is innitely exible, serving the
mind in any way the mind chooses. We create new worlds inside our
private universe, worlds that the ve senses then conrm as real. Outer reality can even be turned o by a mere ick of the wrist. A
psychiatrist friend of mine  told me about being called on an
emergency in downtown Boston. A car had stopped at a red light
and had not moved when the light turned green. A policeman
arrived and found the driver motionless at the wheel. He was
apparently the victim of a heart attack. However, the ambulance
attendants who showed up within minutes saw that the driver was
alive but catatonic. He registered no response to light, sound, or
touch, even though his pupils continued to dilate if a ashlight was
shone at them. He sat like a statue, his hands gripped to the wheel,
and had to be pried from the car by force. When my psychiatrist friend saw the man, it was clear that he had
become totally  withdrawn. He had no history of mental disease
(although that does not rule out the possibility that he was a
“walking schiz ophrenic,” of which there are many). For reasons of
his own, he had just decided to stop, and in one instant his entire
perceptive machinery shut down. No one knows why some people
decide one day to make the world disappear. It is their prerogative,
and once they exercise it, no one outside the mental bubble holds
any importance. Perhaps the dierence between ve and seventeen sense s is not
all that signicant, since any sense is just a channel for the real
business of the mind, which is to sort out, interpret, and nally
create reality. A newborn baby feels completely fused with his
mother, and with all objects. Even though his skin contain s working
nerves and his eye a working retina, these mechanical parts are not
enough to tell a baby that he is an individual. The touch and sight of
anything “out there” feels like “me” touching and seeing myself. Getting out of this homogen eous soup of “me-ness” is the baby’s
main intellectual task during the rst months of life. All of us have
accomplished the task, except for a few. There are some people, for
example, who were autistic in childhood and still experience ashes
of feeling that they have blended back into the soup of me-ness;
they feel the touch of a wall when they look at it. The fusing
experience may be blissful for an infant, but for an adult it is
disorienting and, if it persists, terrifying. Once a sense has been chosen for a particular function, the things
it sees, touches, or hears become “real,” but billions of stimuli have
to be excluded during the selection process. When you look at
another person you do not pick up the infrared wavelengths he
emanates, the electrical eld around him, the lines of magnetism
that loop away  from him and back again, the shudder of the ground
when he walks—all are signals that do not t our conventional
senses, even though we probably do respond to them unconsciously. Snakes, bats, and insects depend on these signals and therefore
inhabit a world that overlaps ours while remaining quite dierent. I
particularly like to imagine  the world as seen by a chameleon,whose right and left eyes rotate independently in their sockets. A
beam of light hitting a table would be a double beam to a
chameleon. Two chairs could never be a foot apart, or any xed
distance, since with the swivel of an eye, the chameleon can make
them as far apart as he wants. Someone once vigorously challenged me on this point. “If I had a
chameleon’s eyes,” he said, “I might see that door as two feet to the
left, but that’s not where it is in reality. If I tried to walk through the
door I saw, I would bump into the wall. ”
“But think about it,” I replied, “that just means you trust your
sense of touch  more than your sense of sight. The world  may look
very convincing, but that does not answer the deeper question: why
should you trust any of your senses at all. ”
Many Realities
If each person  is constantly creating his own inner experience,
placing innumerable interpretations on the raw data that the senses
provide, that is strong grounds for not denying anyone his personal
version of reality. A generati on ago, the ruling assumption was that
one reality—hard, scientic, materialistic—would do for all. Now
we have to learn to cope with the state of many realities. The story is told of a British anthropologist who undertook a eld
trip to India. One evening he crept through the jungle and caught
sight of a strange scene. An old holy man was dancing ecstatically in
the forest. He ran up and embraced the trees; he laughed when the
leaves stirred and bathed his face in the moonlight with an
expression of delirious joy. The anthropologist watched this display
in fascination until he couldn’t contain himself. “Pardon me,” he said, stepping from the bushes, “but what makes
you dance out here, alone in the jungle. ”
The holy man looked bewildered and replied, “Pardon me, but
what makes you think I’m alone. ”
Both questions are mutually  unanswerable, because they depend
on unique world views. The holy man sees himself surrounded in
the forest by nature spirits, while the anthropologist sees wood andchlorophyll. The two realities overlap and yet do not come alive for
each other. I am especially drawn to such stories because my own life has
been dominated by con icting and sometimes contradictory
realities. In my Indian childhood, which was spent in the family of a
military doctor, I saw a regimental band of Punjabis marching on
the parade ground in turbans while playing Highland ings on their
bagpipes. At my birthday parties the children sat wide-eyed, hands
on their mouths, while a snake charmer performed for us, yet my
favorite present was a model train from England complete with tiny
station houses marked “Wembley” and “Paddington. ”
My school was St. Columba’s in New Delhi, which was run along
strict English lines by Catholic brothers. During games period,
Brother McNamara would drag me o, pull down my pants, and
wallop me every time I bowled outside the left wicket—cricket was
a matter of life and death at St. Columba’s. On graduation day he
took me into his oce and said, “Christ died to redeem you from
eternal damna tion. That is the point of your education here. What
are you going to do about it. ”
Could I tell him that a swami lived next door to our house who
subsisted on the fty rupees  a month my mother, a devout Hindu,
gave him. (Not that he needed much, since he sat in deep samadhi,
hardly breathing or moving, for seven days at a time. ) Or should I
have told him how thrilled my mother was when she came back
from a pilgrimage to a holy cave in north India. As she was
kneeling at the mouth of the cave, she opened her eyes and found
that Lord Shiva was giving her his blessing in the form of a rearing
cobra two feet away. My sense of reality continued to veer unsteadily from one world
to the next. When I ew to Sri Lanka to take the exam that would
entitle me to practice medici ne in America, I spent the morning at a
temple built around Buddha’s tooth and listened to ethereal wind
chimes tuned thousands of years ago to be pleasing to the devas, or
angels. That afternoon I sat through an exam crammed with
metabolic pathways and basic biochemistry. The American
consulate was anxious to import only those foreign doctors whoknew English well, so I also had to pass a language test that
contained the memorable question, “A heavyweight boxer is A) A
man who lifts heavy boxes, B) A kind of sportsman, C) A large man
shaped like a box. ”
If you ask who is the “real” me, I would have to answer, “All of
them. ” The triumph of the self is that it can create something
entirely new and individual on the face of the earth. My inner self
contains Brother McNamara, my mother, the swami next door,
Shiva in the form of a cobra, my cricket team, and a toy station
marked “Wembley. ” These images have been digested and turned
into me; newe r images, including everything I saw, heard, touched,
tasted, and smelled today, are turning into me at this moment. Every time I bring one of these aspects of myself into view, I am
also launching a display of unique physical reactions. Each new
thought may cause only a slight shift inside my physiology, but
“slight” still amounts to millions of neuronal signals in the brain,
giving rise to billions of other cellular events that occur in the blink
of an eye. In a very real sense, a new thought turns me into a new
person. The same holds true for everyone. An old man reliving a
cherished boyhood memory can suddenly glow with youth. The
eect, although temporary, can often be strikingly convi ncing—his
wrinkles soften, his skin looks fresh, his eyes sparkle with life. The
boy is still inside him, yearning to cross the threshold of time. You
can see the powerful regret when the child has to turn back and the
mask of old age wearily returns. The depth and intensity of such changes is hard to fathom at
times. I was fascinated by a rst-person account given by a woman
parishioner concerning the French priest Père Jean Lamy, who died
in 1931 at the age of seventy-eight. An extremely devout and saintly
man, Père Lamy was giving a rapturous sermon when this woman
saw, uncannily, the complete emergence of a young man from inside
the old:
He stopped and looked upward. His face became translucent,
like a block of alabaster lit from within. Old as he was, I sawhim go young and handsome, like a man of thirty. I saw his
wrinkles disappear. There was no sparkling light about his
head but an inward light which made his face transpar ent,
without dimness, without shadows about either the nose or
the eyes. That lasted ve or six seconds, perhaps more—I
don’t know. He was looking lightly into the air in front of
him. Imperceptibly all became normal again, and he went on
talking as before. This magical moment, which was seconded by another
eyewitness, falls into a pattern of inner illuminations exhibited by
saints and holy men in all times and traditions. Avoidi ng for the
present the spiritual content of the event, I am struck by how
eortlessly the body’s hard mask can melt with a shift of awareness. To fully come to terms with the power of awareness, we have to
surrender the idea that its activity is conned to our mental bubble. Almost every primitive society believes that looking at an object
requires the mind to shoot forth through the eyes. Instead of
explaining vision by saying that light comes in, they say that sight is
going out. Thus a skilled hunter can mesmerize game by stalking it
with his eyes, and a shaman can heal or harm people by the power
of his gaze. In both cases, the glance is behaving as a carrier wave,
transmitting mental intention out into the world and placing it upon
whatever is being observed. Instead of understand ing visual
perception as a taking in  of reality, this viewpoint, which was shared
by Aristotle and the entire  ancient world, says that perception
confers  reality. The same holds true for the other senses. Sound goes
out with a power that is more than its physical vibrations, which is
why New Guinea tribesmen can shout down a tree or the trumpet
blasts of the Israelites topple city walls. Modern people sco at such things, reducing them to the level of
superstitions like the “evil eye. ” We feel condent in our knowledge
that light waves enter the eye and sound waves the ear. Surprisingly, this does not nally settle the question, because it isthe ow of attention, not photons or air molecules, that transmits
the powers we are talking about. We have seen how the body can live or die on the basis of mental
interpretations. The age-old idea that our minds can interact with
the world needs to be more  closely examined. Otherwis e, we will
not be able to tell if we have turned our backs on superstition or
overlooked a dormant power  that might be awakened from its long
sleep. OceanofPDF. com3
Magical Thinking
There was a time when I lived outside the reach of magic. I was a
new resident in Boston, working sixteen-hour shifts at the veteran’s
hospital. I barely had a free hour to be with my wife and was lucky
when I got home to spend three sweet minutes with our baby
daughter, who went to bed almost the instant I walked in the door. My salary was meager, ve hundred dollars a month, and when our
tiny apartment began to close in on us, I decided that I had better
work harder. I began to moonlight. Instead of pointing the battered
VW toward Jamaica Plain at night, I drove the long road to an
emergency room in the suburbs, where I stayed on duty until dawn. Another doctor worked with me, a seasoned trauma surgeon
named Karl. We were comrades in exhaustion, and to avoid
complete collapse we took turns catnapping. One of us curled up on
a gurney in the back corridor while the other propped his eyes open
at the nurses’ station. No one could call such a life magical; the word would have had
no meaning for me. Life was dicult, and at times—as when I had
to perform a cesarean upon a woman who had just been murdered
—life was crushing. I worked without Karl that night, with a young
Irish nurse beside me. We didn’t have time to take the stretcher
upstairs to an operating room but had to stand there in the door of
the ER. The eeriness of the situation made both our hands shake. The baby came out within two minutes after the mother died. We
waited tensely. It was breathing, then it wriggled. “The pretty thing’s all right,” the nurse whispered. She gently
cradled the infant to take it away to an incubator. I saw her smiling,
but at the same time she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down
her cheeks. Joy was coming in on the heels of sorrow. When were
things ever dierent. I thought. The world is a mill wheel, impartially
grinding out birth and death. A doctor dances on the edge of the
wheel, trying to keep one jig-step ahead of death so that birth might
have a better chance. My assumption that things happen randomly in nature, without
any regard for human feeling s or hopes, was buttressed by a lifetime
of experience, not just one disturbing incident. However, a strange
coincidence started to unfurl that challenged my beliefs, making me
wonder if the mind is not in some way helping to fashio n events—
this is the beginning of what I mean by magic. The coincidence started with something quite mund ane and
seemingly innocuous: Karl developed a cough. You couldn’t be
surprised, because he was a heavy smoker, even on the job. He had
the wracking, rasping cough that needs two packs a day to really
ripen. One night I confronted him and asked why in the world he
didn’t go and have a chest X ray, just in case. “Because if I see
cancer on it,” he said seriously, “it will scare me to death. ” The look
on his face told me to leave it alone. Karl’s cough eventually got so bad, however, that it was clearly
interfering with his work. He bowed to my pleading and went for
the X ray. When we held the lm up in front of the viewing screen,
a gray shadow  as round as a penny could be seen in the lower lobe
of his left lung. “My God,” Karl blurted out, “I do have cancer. ” I told him we had
no conclusive proof, but within a few days he turned out to be right. A week went by and he coughed up blood for the rst time. After
three weeks he was panting and short of breath. They gave him
heavy radiatio n, but he responded poorly, and within two months
my friend Karl died. He was gone with shocking swiftness, and in the aftermat h I tried
to be fatalistic. Karl had succumbed to epidermoidal lung cancer, a
disease whose mortality rate approaches 100 percent. It wasreasonable to tell oneself that his chances had been statist ically very
slim, but then I happened to run across one of Karl’s old X rays,
taken ve years before. Curious, I held it up next to the new one
and shivered. You could hardly tell them apart—the same lesion, a
gray shadow as round as a penny, was visible in the earlier picture. It looked a bit smaller and more vaguely dened, which was why it
had avoided rm diagnosis. Karl’s body had lived with this little round shadow for ve years. How could he suddenly die of it in a matter of two mont hs. Did he
actually scare himself to death, as he had predicted. Conventional
medicine would answer with a thundering “No. ”—the mechanics of
malignant tumors are just that, mechanical. They work according to
the set laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, not accor ding to the
whim of a patient’s mind. You don’t die of a disease just because
you are afraid of it. And yet one had to wonder. Puzzled by Magic
A fear is just a negative kind of wish. If fears can come true, so
can wishes in general. But neither one is supposed to. In fact, when
a psych iatrist sits down to interview a patient who migh t be going
insane, one of the chief symptoms he looks for is called “magical
thinking. ” The hallmark of magical thinking is the person’s rm
belief that he can control reality with his mind. Stoplights do not
turn from red to green automatically—he wills them to. His
thoughts make people move toward him or away from him. If he
shuts his eyes and wishes hard enough, he can even make a
psychiatrist disappear. The fact that a thought comes true does not necessarily make it
magical. People have sudden premonitions not to take a certain
ight and later read in the newspaper that the ight crashed. These
things happen, and once the moment of wonder passes, they are
usually dismis sed from our minds. However, what if a causal
connection is at work. Perhaps unseen powers warned those
travelers in order to save their lives. Now we are irting with magic. The next step could lead to mental disturbance. There are
paranoid schiz ophrenics who can no longer draw the line between
their mind and God’s. Such a person will begin to hold himself
responsible for world events—without his personal intervention,
earthquakes might topple the Empire State Building or nuclear
missiles come ying across the Arctic Circle. Some paranoiacs drive
themselves to stay awake around the clock, keeping watch like
fretful mothers  beside the cradle, so strong is their belief that reality
will disappear, vaporizing like a dream, unless they x their minds
on it. However, that is only one aspect of a mystery that has puzzled
humankind for thousands of years. Can we in fact inue nce reality
with our thoughts. A pure mystic immediately says yes to this
question; a pure rationalist just as quickly says no. Most people,
however, nd themselves intrigued and confused. No one has ever
proved that thinking magically has to be wrong, and in some cases
there is no other way to explain why things happen the way they
do. There is, for example, the rare phenomenon in which terminally
aicted patien ts suddenly intuit that, despite all the odds, they are
going to recover. This sudden  shift in awareness cannot be predicted
by either the patient or his doctor—it seems to strike with the
ckleness of lightning. A striking example (which came  to me via
Dr. Yujiro Ikemi, Japan’s leading researcher on spontaneous
remissions) is the terminal cancer patient whose tumor, often
massive in size, suddenly disappears, and as it does, or just before,
the patient knows it. At one moment he is subject to uncontrollable
mood swings, like any other  patient confronting death. All at once
despair gives way, not to hope, but to a calm, almost  unearthly
knowingness. “This tumor is going away” becomes as natural a
belief as “This cold is going away. ” The shift in awareness has made
something happen in the body, or has given a signal that it has
already happened. Nobody really knows which. Let us accept  that this may be magical thinking, not in the
disturbed sense, but as a potentially valid power of the mind. Clearly nature  has gone to great pains to keep this power hidden. One could spend a lifetime not knowing that it exists, were it not for
those people who are too innocent or too mad to keep their inner
world a secret. One way to approach magic al thinking may be to set aside the
mind-body connection, at least for the moment, and concentrate on
the magical thinker’s own idea of what he is doing. I would propose
that he operates dierently  from most people, according to a
principle called “self-referral. ” Self-referral means that I gauge
reality not by externals but by internals, by my own feelings and
intuitions. If I am living according to this principle, there is no
mystery when  a shift in awareness causes a change in my body,
because all reality begins with such a shift and keeps on changing as
I do. Things appear to be happening to me, but in fact I am
participating in each and every event. If I were alert enough, I
would see my thoughts radiating like light from a candle or a star. Thoughts surge up from their invisible source and lap against the
world like waves against the shore. They strike everything in my
vicinity—oak trees, clouds, skyscrapers, other people, even the most
random atoms and bits of atoms. These things are basically
reections seen in the mirror of my awareness. And the mirror is
vast—my thoughts roll on as far as the edge of the universe,
beginning at a nite source but spreading out to innity. The opposite of self-referral is object-referral, which means giving
primary importance to externals instead of to myself. A person
whose thinkin g is based on object-referral automatically assumes
that his mind has no inuence over things in the outside world. A
thought is a subjective event that ricochets around inside a mental
bubble, never able to break out. For all practical purposes, this
means that object-referral awareness is mercilessly dominated by
things. Compared to the ghost of a thought, the hard, solid objects
of this world seem much more real and therefore much more
powerful. This is the position almost all of us nd ourselves in. Even if you cannot imagine a reality centered entirely on yourself,
however, another person could be living that way very successfully. A friend of mine was traveling in Kashmir and brough t back the
following tale:
“Holy men are a common sight in Srinagar, the capital of
Kashmir, becau se of its proxi mity to the Himalayas. One day I saw a
holy man making his way down the street. He was an old ascetic
with a long beard, but very tall and vigorous lookin g. He was
dressed in a saron robe, and by his side he carried a three-pronged
sta called a trishul, or Shiva’s trident. The god Shiva is looked upon
by many ascetics in India as their patron. “As this imposing gure neared me, he was suddenly accosted by
a gang of jeering boys. They were rough, and in a minute their
taunts turned to shoves. They pulled the old ascetic around, while
he showed not the slightest  irritation. One of the boys stole his
trident and ran away with it. Still the old man walked on, smiling as
if nothing had happened. That stick was all he had. No doubt it had
been ceremonially presented to him by his guru decades ago, and all
his possessions were in the cotton bag that was tied around its neck. “All at once another boy dashed up and grabbed the trident back. He ran up behind the ascetic, and just as he was holding out the
stick, the old man, who couldn’t see the boy behind him, gracefully
reached backw ard to receive it. He was still walking straight ahead
at the time and didn’t even turn his head. It was as if hand and stick
were fated to meet again, or had never been separated. Then he
disappeared. “I walked on, absorbed in my thoughts. How could the old man
have remained so unperturb ed. Did he know that the stick would
come back to him. At the next block, I looked up, and there he was,
crossing my path again. He gravely turned his eyes in my direction
and gave me a slow, conspiratorial wink. I didn’t even realize that
he knew I had been watching. Then in English he said, ‘May I buy
you a cup of tea. ’ The words sounded faintly ludicrous, but
immediately I felt drawn into his seamless, unshakable reality, and I
marveled at its security. ”
What this story tells me is that the self and the world do not have
to be separate entities. The whole incident was not necessarily a
contest betwee n an old man and a gang of boys; it was a divertingplay within the old man’s awareness that took on outward shape. He
stood at the center of the event, certain of its outcome, and his hand
found the stick again because it was meant to. Some people see
more of this magic than the rest of us. As Robert Frost wrote in one
of his shortest poems: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But
the Secret sits in the middle and knows. ” My friend went and had
tea with the holy man, but he found it hard to get any more words
out of him. The ascetic had exhibited enough of the Secret for one
day. People who learn to live on the basis of self-referral need not lose
sight of the objective world; even the most austere ascetics require
food, water, and shelter. Also, we should not hastily assume that
worldly pleasures are the enemy of the self. It is just a matter of
reorienting one’s perspective, seeing the self as primary and
outward things as seconda ry. Unfortunately, to someone who
denes himself through outside objects, the prospect of trusting in
himself as the linchpin of reality can be quite disturbing. For every
desirable word in our vocabulary like self-reliant, self-motivated,
and self-sucient, our object-referral culture has found an
undesirable one: self-centered, introverted, withdrawn, narcissistic,
solipsistic, egocentric. Although subjectivity is supposed to be changeable and
untrustworthy, it seems no less treacherous to rely psychologically
upon exterior objects. I remember a fable I used to hear in India:
Once there was a poor villager who possessed only two things of
any value—his  son, who was sixteen, and a handsome gray pony. The villager loved these two above all else in creation. One day the
pony vanished and could not be found. The villager was plunged
into deep dejection. No one could lift his spirits until three days
later, when the pony returned, followed by a handsome black
Arabian stallion. Overjoyed, the man embraced the pony and
quickly bridled the stallion. His son eagerly asked if he could ride the wild horse, and since he
could deny him nothing, the father consented. An hour later, news
came that the boy had been badly thrown while riding on the beach. He was carried  home in a litter, bruised and battered, his right legshattered in two places. At the sight of his injured son, the father’s
happiness again turned to utter sorrow. He sat in front of his hut wailing, when a contingent of the king’s
soldiers swept by. War was imminent, and their duty was to drag o
conscripts from the village. They ruthlessly seized every eligible son,
but when they came to this man’s house, the soldiers saw that his
son was maimed, and they left him behind. The father’s tears again
turned to joy, and he gave fervent thanks to heaven for the tragedy
he had bewailed the moment before. What’s peculia r about this fable is that it has no ending, and that
is its moral. The rise and fall of the villager’s spirits goes on and on,
bound to the fate of a boy and a pony. In real life, people have more
than two things they cherish, but the result is the same. So long as
our happiness depends upon objects “out there,” we are their
prisoner. We have given our freedom away to things. Sad Love Stories
Although medicine is not yet prepared to admit that self-referral
plays the major part in either the onset or the cure of disease, a
large number of patients are very open to the possib ility. They
instinctively refer to the feelings that surround their illness. If there
is a great deal of denial or self-blame present, their feelings will
usually be turbulent and therefore misleading. But they can also be
startlingly clear, giving the patient a truer understanding of his
situation than anyone could objectively supply from the outside. In this regard, there is a fascinating account from the popular
writer Michael Crichton, who was trained as a doctor at Harvard
Medical School twenty-ve years ago. In his book of
autobiographical sketches, Travels, Crichton remembers the months
he spent on the cardiac ward of a Boston teaching hospital. It is
routine for third- and fourth-year students to rotate briey through
all the major medical specializations. Crichton had no intention of
pursuing cardi ology, but he had a simple, quite novel insight during
this particular rotation: what if heart disease was not the same for
every patient but had some kind of personal meaning for each one. What prompted Crichton to speculate along these lines were some
famous pathol ogy ndings made in the early fties. During the
Korean War autopsies were routinely performed on young soldiers
who had been killed in battle, and doctors were surpris ed to nd
that the arteries of more than 70 percent showed advance d stages of
atherosclerosis; these young arteries were already building up fatty
plaques, cuttin g oxygen o from the heart, and moving inexorably
in the direction of a heart attack. Yet if men as young as seventeen already had this disease,
Crichton wondered, why did a typical coronary occur much later,
typically in a man’s forties or fties. “You had to assume that all
these patients had been walking around with clogged arteries since
they were teenagers,” Crichto n writes. “A heart attack could happen
anytime. Why had they waited twenty or thirty years to develop a
heart attack. Why had the heart attack happened this year and not
next, this week and not last week. ”
To answer his questions, he decided to learn something about the
feelings the cardiac patient s had about their disease. The direct
approach seem ed to be the best, so Crichton went on the ward and
asked his patients point-blan k, “Why did you have a heart attack. ”
He realized that his inquiries might set o unforeseeable reactions. “My question also implied that the patients had some choice in
the matter, and therefore some control over their disease. I feared
they might respond with anger. So I started with the most easygoing
patient on the ward, a man in his forties who had had a mild attack. “Why did you have a heart attack. ”
“You really want to know. ”
“Yes, I do. ”
“I got a promo tion. The company wants me to move to Cincinnati. But my wife doesn’t want to go. She has all her family here in
Boston, and she doesn’t want to go with me. That’s why. ”
The man said this completel y calmly, without any sign of anger. When Crichton went on to question the rest of the ward, every other
patient had a similar answer:
“My wife is talking about leaving me. ”
“My son won’t go to law school. ”“I didn’t get the raise. ”
“My wife wants another baby and I don’t think we can aord it. ”
Not one person lacked an answer, yet not one mentioned
arteriosclerosis as the cause of his heart attack, nor the standard risk
factors, such as a high-fat diet, hypertension, lack of exercise, and
smoking. In the late 1960s, the mind-body connection was
considered not quite legitimate, and Crichton was perplexed by his
patients’ perspective. Looking back, he writes, “What I was seeing
was that their explanations made sense from the standpoint of the
whole organis m, as a kind of physical acting-out. These patients
were telling me stories of events that had aected their hearts in a
metaphysical sense. They were telling me love stories. Sad love
stories, which had pained their hearts. Their wives and families and
bosses didn’t care for them. Their hearts were attacked. And pretty
soon, their hearts were literally  attacked. ”
This insightful account does not “prove” anything new about
heart disease. Yet Crichton can be credited with anticipating a key
mind-body concept, now widely accepted, that our feelings do not
live in a separate world from our cells. It is the precise timing of
these heart attacks, howeve r, which was controlled by the victim
but also comp letely unforese en by him, that gives Crich ton’s story
its unique fascination. His patients knew what they had done only
after they did it. This blind  spot opens up a new aspect of the
mystery. We see the body acting out the mind’s dramas, yet we have
not yet spied the director who decides which scene comes next. That
is because the mind has decided to deny a part of itself. A Space Beyond Reason
Because magic seems so foreign to it, the rational part of our
minds is generally quite fearful of the nonrational part. The very
word “magic” has a sinister overtone to most of us, equat ed with all
that is dark, dangerous, uncanny, and wild. But the threa t has been
greatly exaggerated. We spend much of our lives in the space
beyond reason. If I say “I love you,” the sound waves from my voice
bounce against  your eardrum, setting up a vibration that the innerear turns into an electric signal. This impulse is passed along the
neurons to the brain’s speech center, and you look pleased. Reason knows  all about this journey, except for the last step,
which is the most important. Why are you pleased that I love you. Why do those electrical impu lses in the brain have a meaning. If I
say a dieren t sentence, “You have terminal cancer,”  the same
physical impulses carry my voice to your brain’s speech center, but
now you are devastated. Scientically, the signals are all but
identical, yet the results they produce could hardly be more
dierent. An EEG cannot decipher the meaningfulness of brain
activity; the squiggles on the readout have nothing to say about
what distinguishes love from hate, joy from sorrow, inspiration from
tedium. The output generate d by swamis deeply immersed in bliss
creates patterns that closely resemble epileptic attacks; the voltage
generated by the nervous system of a poet is not necessarily less
than that from a psychopath. Meaning slips through the ngers of science, which provides any
person who is interested in meaning with a good reason to take
magic seriously. The materi alistic bias of science leads it to shun
things that cannot be directly contacted by the senses. Yet nature
has reserved a huge region set apart for things that cannot be seen,
touched, or weighed. If you have ever observed a ock of swallows
ying at dusk, you have seen them wheel and turn together, veering
o at impossib le tangents in the blink of an eye. How does each bird
know to turn at the precise instant the others do. Scien tists have
established that there is no bird acting as leader—the impulse is
somehow shared by every bird at once. The magic lies in each one
but also in between, over, and around them. It is uid and invisible,
like the air, but more so. A similar mystery exists if I happen to think a word at random
—“archipelago. ” In order for me to think this word, millions of
brain cells have to re in a precise pattern at the exact same instant. One isolated cell doesn’t dream up the word and then pass it along. It appears everywhere at once. For that matter, where was
“archipelago” hiding when I wasn’t thinking it. The location of
mental space is as elusive as the space outside the universe. Mental space is so inconceivable that one could easily claim that
it is entirely magical. Computers can be programmed to play chess
at the grandmaster level, but unlike real grandmasters, they do not
grow tired, have brilliant inspirations, throw tantrums, exult in
victory, or sulk in defeat. One grandmaster went mad and refused to
play in tournaments unless a pineapple sundae was placed next to
the board. Such a thing is inconceivable to a computer’s mimicked
intelligence, but it is all too human. This is what it means to have a
mind. If a computer became the greatest chess player in history,
humans would still have all the fun. Magical thinking, then, presents itself not as a deviation from
reason but as a way of probing past it into a space that is more alive
and meaningful. It is just as natural to us as rationality, and perhaps
more so. At birth a baby is totally self-centered; therefor e it comes
as no surprise that we started out in life thinking magically all the
time. On the day you were born, you began to look around the
world that was born with you. Soon a peculiar ying object
appeared in your eld of vision. Soft and rather doughy in
appearance, it oated randomly before your eyes, sometimes visible,
sometimes darting out of sight. You did not relate to this object until the day came when you
made a momentous discover y. Spurred by an intense desire for the
breast or the bottle, you had an impulse to reach out. When you
acted on this untested impulse, the apparatus that fastened onto the
breast was this same object—and now you understood. The entity
dangling in front of your eyes was yours to command; you acquired
a hand. The most complex motor skills, such as playing the violin or
performing gymnastics, develop from the same basis. A desire
reaches out into some unknown region and comes back with a
report: it nds out what is possible and what is not. Using this
information, the mind slightly changes its attitude, and when the
next report comes back, the news has changed. Now more is possible, or less—the new nger position  on the
bridge of the violin allows better exibility or it doesn’t. In either
case, the mind has become renewed. The ability of the mind to extend its inuence seems limitless,
even when impossible obstacles confront it. In his last book,
Wisdom, Madne ss, and Folly, the renowned Scottish psych iatrist R. D. Laing recounts the following remarkable story about Jacqueline du
Pré, the celebrated British cellist who died in her forties of multiple
sclerosis. Tragically, du Pré was stricken by the disease when she was
twenty-eight and her musical career ended very quickly, as she soon
lost her ability to coordinate her two arms. A year passed during
which she had no contact with the cello. One morning, however, she awoke to nd that she was
completely, inexplicably cured. Not just her muscular coordination
but her musical abilities had returned intact. She rushed to a studio
and recorded beautiful performances of music by Chopin and Franck
that, needless to say, she had not been able to practice for a year. Her remission lasted four days, at the end of which she returned to
her former helpless state. It is hard to deny that for these four days, du Pré was totally  free
of her disease, and yet that makes no sense medically. Multiple
sclerosis causes progressive organic damage to the nervous system;
the fatty sheat h covering each nerve cell, called myelin, becomes
destroyed in patches that are randomly scattered throughout the
brain and spinal cord. For some patients the degenerative process
takes up to fty years, while others are incapacitated within a few
weeks or months of onset. Du Pré was already at the point where her damaged neurons were
physically dysfunctional. How did she recover. How did a nervous
system that could not move an arm one day sudde nly regain
mastery over the incredibly precise and delicate motions involved in
playing the cello. She did not think herself better, nor did courage
and willpower  seem to play a new part. Somehow she transcended
her illness so completely that reality simply changed. As a capstone to this tale, Laing records that he helped a patient
create the same magical eect, although only for a moment. The
patient was a man in his late thirties who had been conned to a
wheelchair for some time. He “denitely presented the clinicalpicture of someone with well-established multiple sclerosis,” Laing
writes. “Just to see what would happen, I hypnotized him and told
him to get up out of his wheelchair and walk. He did—for a few
steps. He would have fallen if he had not been supported and helped
back to his chair. “He might still be walking now,” Laing believes, “if I (and he) had
not lost nerve after those rst three or four steps—he had not been
supposed to be able to walk for over a year. ” This argument implies
that for a moment Laing allowed his patient to enter a space where
his MS did not exist. The ravaged neurons either acted like healthy
ones or failed to count in some wholly mysterious way. Either
notion comes down to the same thing: the paralysis depended, to
what extent we do not know, on the patient’s state of awareness. This conclusion would outra ge a hard scientist, but we would all
be paralyzed if thoughts did not have an invisible anima ting force. This is poigna ntly evident in cases of autism. Autism, which is
derived from Latin roots meaning “self-centered” or “independent,”
is a rare infant disorder that was rst diagnosed as late as 1943; it
strikes fewer than 1 baby in 10,000, aecting four times more boys
than girls. Its cause is still debated. The older, psychological theories
blamed the child’s “refrigera tor mother,” but these have given way
to biological theories that hypothesize a chemical imbalance or
perhaps a physical lesion in the child’s brain. Whatever the cause, an autistic child displays almost no response
to the outside world and other people. If he is placed in a swing and
pushed back and forth, he may appear to be slightly engaged in the
experience, but as soon as he is left to swing himself, he lapses into
apathy. If a ball is thrown at him, he will not lift up his hands either
to catch it or to fend it o. Much of his spare time may be spent in
repetitive, mechanical movem ents called “twiddling. ” Somehow, the
spark of desire  has become lost in the dark, winding maze of self-
absorption. It can sometimes be tricked into returning. I once watched a
videotape of autistic children  who at three or four years of age had
not yet learned to walk. Withdrawn in their sealed-o worlds, they
could stand up only if given a prop to lean against. Otherwise, theyimmediately fell down and did not try to get up again. To help these
children, an ingenious contrivance was devised. First, two chairs were set up ten feet apart with a strong rope
connecting them. Each child was coaxed to hold on to the rope and
walk a few steps. After a while, this task was mastered, and the
child could make it from one chair to the next without falling. The
next time, a slightly thinner rope was substituted for the thick one. Again the child leaned on the rope and made it from one chair to
the other. On each success ive day a slightly thinner rope was
substituted, but the child noticed no dierence. Finally, he was
walking “supported” by only a imsy piece of string. Then came the stroke of brilliance. To release the children from
the mechanical routine of walking from one chair to the next, the
experimenters handed each of them a piece of string to carry around
in his hand. Feeling secure that he still had his support to lean on,
the child could now walk freely. That moment of letting go has
magic in it. Seeing these newly liberated children roaming their
playroom for the rst time, I wondered how many small gaps
separate me from freedom, gaps that seem like huge, impassable
gulfs because I do not have a piece of string to use as a bridge. Bridging Two Worlds
So far, my defense of magical thinking has not strayed far outside
the tightly enclosed domain of the brain and the body it controls. Yet people do at times believe that their thoughts inuence events
completely beyond the reach of nerve signals. The study of
parapsychology has staked out a shaky sort of credibility here. Most
people have had premonitio ns that come true, but as we noted
before, magical thinking goes beyond ESP and precognition by
apparently causing people or things “out there” to move according
to one’s will. Since there is such fear and prejudice surrounding it, this is the
nal kind of magic that I would like to demystify. To have another
person enact a thought you have had does not mean that he must be
an automaton or that you have encroached upon his free will. Theseare reex fears that spring to mind, reinforced by the “rational”
belief that each person occupies a completely isolated portion of
space and time. Let us suppose for just a moment that this is a prejudic e. If you
hold a small horseshoe magnet in your hand, its charge is extremely
tiny and apparently isolated. But the magnet would have no charge
without the earth’s immens e magnetic eld; there is an invisible
connection between the two, and beyond. The earth could not be
magnetized without the magnetic eld of the sun, the sun depends
for its elds of force on the galaxy, and so on, expanding to innity. The nal result is that the magnet in your hand is wove n into the
scheme of the entire universe. The evolutionary sequence leading from the Big Bang to my mind
is just as continuous as that which leads to the horsesho e magnet. Although each thought in my mind is tiny, it emerges from the
trillions of potential thoughts  a person might have, and they depend
on millions of years of human evolution leading up to the present
structure of the brain. Evolut ion in turn depends on the unfoldment
of the entire universe since the moment of the Big Bang. Therefore,
a single thought may be seen as a small outcropping in a universal
eld. The crucial dierence, of course, is that the electromagnetic eld
can be measure d for millions of light years, while no one has proven
that the cosmos has a mind. We prefer to believe that intelligence
arrived late on the scene, at the last minute of the eleventh hour in
the known life of the unive rse, and our intelligence is a special
outgrowth in that extremely isolated occurrence. Indeed, aside from
a handful of evolutionary biologists, science gets along very well
without having to confront  the thorny issue of where and how
intelligence began. We are facing the issue here because magical thinking seems to
exhibit many of the characteristics of a eld. The universe’s
electromagnetic eld is invisible, all-pervasive, and capable of
responding to the slightest change within itself. As the earth’s
magnetic pole shifts, every compass on the planet follows it; in
return, if you take a compass out of your pocket, the earth’smagnetic eld is aected by a minuscule amount. In short, no part
of the eld can move without moving the whole. If we transpose this understa nding onto the mind, it would mean
that each of our thoughts aects all other minds, not because we are
exercising psychic powers, but because every mind is a small
outcropping in the eld. This is a sweeping paradigm that I am
introducing here, and I have every intention of pursuing its many
ramications. Yet if we ignore the huge questions that loom up
before us, the idea of belonging to one interwoven intelligence is the
logical conclusion of the argument that reality “in here” is
connected to reality “out there. ” For what is more likely to connect
the two than intelligence. If a person’s mind is engagin g in a creative give-and-take with the
world—as we concluded when we looked at perception—there must
be some sort of common ground. It may sound absurd to claim that
anyone’s mind can aect a boulder or a tree, but inside our brains,
mental activity is constantly altering the structure of brain
chemicals. These chemicals are made of molecules and atoms, as are
boulders and trees. Just because a carbon atom resides in the gray
matter of your brain does not bring it any closer to the mind than if
the atom  resided in a tree. There is still the impassable gulf between
mind and matter to contend with. Magical thinking provides us with evidence that we are bridging
that gulf all the time. Actually, this linear image is far too static,
since elds are continually pulsating with life. It is much closer to
the truth to say that mind and matter join in a dance, moving
instinctively together, aware without speaking of where their next
step will fall. To bring this metaphor to life, I can present  Sheila, an
Englishwoman in her mid-fties who was profoundly aected by
one magical thought. Thirty years ago, as a young girl fresh out of convent  school,
Sheila conceiv ed a child out of wedlock. Her family, who were
devout Catholics, could not accept this pregnancy. Sheila herself
realized that she was not ready to raise a child alone, and although
she was distraught about giving up her baby, she decided to carry itto term and allow the adoption agencies to nd the infant a home. As she told me in a remarkable letter:
“I watched my baby being born, in the mirror they placed at the
foot of my bed. I remember my sense of wonder, excitement, and
achievement when this beautiful tiny boy appeared. I remember as
well the sense of loss that came from having no one to share these
feelings with. “The moment my baby was born, we both started to cry. I held
him close to my heart, trying  to comfort the two of us and to feel his
heart beating in unison with mine. For six days I bottle-fed him
while the slow, relentless adoption procedures took over our lives. I
wasn’t counseled, other than to be told that I was ‘a poor dear’ who
should forget what had happened, go out, and start all over again. A
deep sense of grief settled into my soul. ”
A suitable family had been found for her infant son, and Sheila
agreed not to interfere in his growing-up years or even to make her
existence known. In return, she asked that he keep the name she
had given him, which was Simon. For twenty years she kept her
promise, although the separation became harder rather than easier
for her to bear as time went on. She was never able to have another
child, fearing to repeat the intense trauma of her rst birthing
experience. Finally, when Simon turned twenty-one, Sheila decided to return
to England from her home abroad and ask for a meeting with him. Since she did not know the whereabouts of the adoptive family, she
hired a detecti ve agency to make an investigation. In the meantime
she retreated to stay with old friends in Oxford. At this point an
event took place that lifts Sheila’s story to a new sphere. “To pass the time, I took long walks among the dreaming spires of
Oxford. I found myself captivated by the medieval air of the town. One afternoon, after visiting Christ Church College, I walked
through the meadows down to the riverbank. An Oxford eight
rowing crew was practicing nearby. “All at once, an eerie feeling crept up my spine. For no reason my
adrenaline started pumping, my palms grew sweaty and my mouth
dry. My mind became very alert, and I heard the word ‘Simon’ringing in my ears. I rushed back to my friends’ house, stunned. I lay
on the sofa in front of the re, feeling very cold, shaken, and
confused. Somehow I knew that my son was a student at Oxford and
that I had seen him rowing on the river that afternoon. “A second wave of insight came over me, and I said aloud, ‘I
know somethi ng that I shouldn’t know. He is studying medicine. Simon is following in his grandmother’s footsteps. ’ [Sheila’s mother
was a practicing internist. ] I had no idea where this state of
heightened awareness came from. ”
Her friends hastened to borrow a college roster, and as she had
intuited, it contained a listing  for her son. Sheila was troubled at her
uncanny know ledge, but since she had no idea what to do next, she
did nothing. The detective agency called with a repor t verifying
other details of her intuition; they were amazed that she knew them
already. Our conventional study of human psychology cannot explain this
occurrence, yet there is no doubt in my mind that Sheila
“magnetized” this event, drawing to herself the lost child she had
ercely longed to regain. It was as if all her pent-up frustration
could no longer be held back. It had to break free, and to do that, it
broke down the articial barrier between inner and outer reality. There is another detail of Sheila’s story that provokes in me a
sense of both awe and gratitude. As it turned out, her uncanny
insights did not lead to a happy reunion with Simon. His adoptive
family put strong pressure on him to reject the sudden appearance
of this unwanted woman in their life. It took another nine years
before mother and son found the mutual courage to meet and accept
each other. Their emotiona l reunion took place in 1989, when Simon, now a
practicing physician in Oxford, invited his mother to visit him. Despite her trepidation, Sheila’s most cherished hope was realized—
she was accept ed for who she was, on her own terms, and welcomed
as a member of Simon’s family. Soon after she arrived at his home,
her son suggested that they go for a walk through the woods near
his old college. By chance he picked the same riverbank whereSheila had seen the rowing team years before. She told him about
her intuition, and he listened mesmerized. “It’s true,” he said in a halting voice, “I was rowing that day, and I
remember looking up to see a woman standing alone on the
riverbank. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. My spine
tingled, and I became very agitated. She seemed to be watching me. Then the thought ashed into my head, ‘She is your mother. ’ ”
Sheila and Simon fell silent. It was impossible for them to
comprehend how they had been brought together, but they felt that
something supernatural had occurred. “We walked to the chapel at
Merton College,” Sheila said. “Simon took o my gloves and gently
held my hands while we prayed in gratitude. ‘I’m embarrassed,’ he
whispered. ‘It’s like being on a rst date. ’ I laughed, and tears
trickled down our cheeks, softly and silently. They seemed to wash
away the pain in my heart, leaving only love and forgiveness. Section summary: 

In contrast to traditional scientific explanation-based models of consciousness, author suggests alternative perspectives

* Explains sensory systems using examples like rod/cone photodetection vs artificial imitation  
   * Highlights limitations & biases inherent in reductionalist "object" worldview 
     - Critiques overly simplistic assumptions of mechanistically explaining perceptions
    
    Key points summarized:

1\. **Personalization**: Perceptions vary depending solely
2\. Note down accurate summaries of sections separately for future reference. Source: https://www. oceanpdf. co/magic. html#book_summary_5


Here's a concise summarisation incorporating main ideas:


**Section Summary**

Author challenges prevailing trends towards oversimplified'machine' explanatory frameworks,

Contrasting insights emphasize experiential complexities;

• Demonstrators illustrate distinct receptor types in sensors(e. g. , Moon/Sunset)
	+ Contrary instances expose limits/bias intrinsic in Object-centric Viewpoint

These highlights include fundamental notions:
      • Personal experiences influence percepts differently 

Please note down further references individually.
Rods are responsible for night vision, and cones are responsible for day vision.
According to the text, what is the primary function of the rods and cones in the human eye?
The limitation is that it lacks the subjective experience and emotional response that a human experiences.
What is the limitation of artificial vision, even if it perfectly replicates the human eye?
A robot perceives the world in a mechanical and objective manner, whereas a human experiences the world subjectively and with personal interpretation.
What is the key difference between the way a human and a robot perceive the world?
The author suggests that the mind can indeed have an invisible animating force that can alter the course of events, and that this is not necessarily a deviation from reason.
What is the author's stance on the idea that the mind can influence reality?
The author believes that magical thinking is not a deviation from reason, but rather a natural extension of the human mind's ability to shape reality and influence the world.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of "magical thinking"?