That is the limit where the Newtonian notion of
cause and eﬀect, the basis of standard scientiﬁc medicine,
breaks down. You cannot possibly ask enough questions to ﬁnd out
what really makes a patient sick. In Aaron’s case, I would
want to know how he felt about his sister’s death, what he
eats for breakfast, who his friends are, how he feels when
he loses at tennis—in eﬀect, I want to know every relevant
experience. This is virtually impossible. So many inﬂuences
press in on us every day that the idea of causation
disappears. I would think it absurd to dissect a poet’s brain
to ﬁnd the cause of his sonnets; his cortex undeniably had
to exhibit speciﬁc brain-wave patterns to produce a sonnet,
but they have evaporated and been carried to a realm
hidden by time. It begins to seem just as absurd to claim
that an isolated physical cause lies behind Aaron’s bone
marrow dysfunction. His life is swept along by time, too,
and what I want to ﬁnd has evaporated. I know this sounds shocking, because without a cause,
how can we ﬁnd a cure? But all physical causes are partial
at best. If you try to give someone a cold, for example, it
takes more than a virus. Experimenters have incubated
cold viruses, placed them  directly on the mucous lining of
the nose, and found that their subjects came down with
colds only 12 percent of the time. These odds could not be
increased by exposing the subjects to cold drafts, putting
their feet in ice water to give them chills, or anything else
that was purely physical. Ordinary experience, a complex
play of inner and outer forces, deﬁes the rules of causation
that work for billiard balls. —Conventional medicine already recognizes that ordinary
experience can play a complex role in disease. For example,
statistics show that single people and widows living alone
are more likely to get cancer than people who are married. Their lonelin ess is called a risk factor—one could just as
truly call it a carcinogen. Then why isn’t curing loneliness a
cure for cancer? It may well be, but in a diﬀerent kind of
medicine than we now practice. An Ayurvedic physician is
more interes ted in the patient he sees before him than in
his disease. He recognizes that what makes up the person
is experience—sorrows, joys, ﬂeeting seconds of trauma,
long hours of nothing special at all. The minutes  of life
silently accumulate, and like grains of sand deposited by a
river, the minutes can eventually pile up into a hidden
formation that crops above the surface as a disease. The process of accumula tion is impossible to see or to
stop. I may sit in a traﬀic jam and think, “Well, nothing is
happening to me now,” but in fact I am taking in, or
ingesting, the world around me. My body is metabolizing
everything I see, hear, smell, and touch and turning it into
me, just as surely as it ingests my orange juice. The input that is turning  into me is constant, and by my
participation I shape it into ﬁnal form. Science will not be
able to measure this process, because it canno t put my
senses or my emotions on a scale. How much loneliness
does it take to turn into cancer? This is a meaningless
question. The carcinogen is invisible. I remember one night
when I stood in the emerg ency room of a suburban hospital
after attending to an overﬂow of patients. A late commuter
train had crashed, and with one other doctor I had to work
in a near frenzy seeing dozens of passengers who might be
in shock, bandaging their wounds, calming their nerves,
setting bones, and performing minor surgeries. Our job
seemed endless, but after ﬁve hours it was done, and we
felt like heroes.Then the ambulance radio came on again, and the driver
said, “We’re coming in with a two-month-old infant, female,
who is uncon scious. No signs of respiration or pulse, and
she’s turning blue.” All at once I went cold, and I saw a
look of despair on the other doctor’s face. We knew what
was ahead of us. The ambulance unloaded its stretcher ,
bearing a tiny infant who looked lost on the big, white
sheet. To put an endotracheal tube down her throat and
begin cardiac  massage was a horrible travesty , but we went
through with it. From the ﬁrst moment, we knew this must
be a “crib death,” which medicine calls sudden infant death
syndrome. It aﬀects seemingly norm al babies, there is no
known cause, and even the fastest emergency treatment is
usually of no avail. As soon as we decently could, we took away our
apparatus and closed the baby’s eyes. I went out to talk to
the parents, young and well-to-do, who were devastated. All
I could do was tell them about a support group of other
parents whos e children had died this way. They left, still in
shock, and I never saw them again. Who can measure what
happened to me? I don’t recall the face of a single victim
from the train wreck, people whose bodies I worked on for
hours. But the blond hair and blue eyes of the baby are as
vivid in my mind as the ﬁrst second I saw her. She has
entered into me. I do not know where she lives inside me—
is it really some bit of gray matter in my cortex? It would
seem ridiculous to look for the location. What is important
is that my whole being is made up of such expe riences. I
have metabo lized a hundred thousand such things every
day, and if you want to see them in detail, just look at me. As long as you are surrounded by the input of life, there
is no stopping the rush of events that makes me what I am. On the other hand, my nature may go deeper than the
things I see and hear. There may be a zero point in me, likethe point of zero vibration which gives rise to the entire
spectrum of light. If you stepped outsid e my thoughts, sense s, and
emotions, you would be left with the equivalent of empty
space. But like the empty space of quantum physics, my
“inner space” may not be empty at all. I woul d argue that
our inner space is a rich ﬁeld of silent intelligence, and that
it exerts a powerful inﬂuence on us. —
Intelligence is easily located and yet impossible to ﬁnd. The
body’s know-how seems to be the result of a complexity of
parts, broken down according to functions—digestion,
respiration, metabolism, and so on. Although this division
of labor is real enough, intelligence remains everywhere
the same despite it, just as a drop of sea water shares the
saltiness of the whole ocean. Sea water gives us a perfect
example, in fact. The ﬂuid in the body tastes as salty as the
ocean and is equally rich in magnesium, gold, and other
trace elements. Life began in the sea, and we are alive
outside it only because we carry an internal ocean around
with us. When you are thirsty and take a drink of water , you
are actually rebalancing the ﬂuid chemistry everywhere in
your inner ocean. The feeling of being thirsty is stimulated by the
hypothalamus, a piece of the brain about the size of a
ﬁnger joint, which in turn is connected by both nerves and
chemical messengers to the kidneys. The kidneys
constantly monitor the body’s need for water by “listening
in” to signals  from the blood. The signals are chemical, as
with the neuro-peptides, but in this case the molecules
involved are salts, prote ins, and blood sugar , as well as
speciﬁc messengers. The blood in turn is picking up these
signals from every cell in the body, each of which is
constantly monitoring its own need for water . In otherwords, when you want a drink of water , you are not just
obeying an impulse from your brain—you are listening to a
request from every cell in your body . If you drink one small glass of water , you will replace only
1⁄400 of your total bodily ﬂuid, yet that will satisfy the
precise needs of 50 trillion diﬀerent cells. Such exact
monitoring is often attrib uted to the kidneys alone, but as
we have just seen, the kidneys never make decisions alone;
they work in constant consultation with the quantum
mechanical body—the whole ﬁeld of intelligence. The
evenness of intelligence is not apparent from the physical
makeup of the cells; it coexists with the body’s extreme
specialization. The neuron, which is outﬁtted on its cell wall
with a million sodium-potassium pumps, is not at all like a
heart cell or stomach cell. Yet, the integrity of the message
“time for some water” is constant everywhere. In physics, a ﬁeld is what  propagates an inﬂuence over a
large, or even inﬁnite, expanse of space. A magnet creates
a magnetic ﬁeld around itself; small magnets have a weak
ﬁeld that extends a few inches, while the Earth’s magnetic
poles are powerful enough to cover the entire globe. Anything that falls within a ﬁeld feels its eﬀect; that is why
the magneti c needle of a compass automatical ly aligns
itself with the Earth’s magnetic polarity . Sitting in the
body’s ﬁeld of intelligence, each cell is aligned with the
brain, which stands as the north magnetic pole. A cell is a small outcropping in the ﬁeld, while the brain
is a huge one. But the cell, when it “talk s” to the rest of the
body, is not inferior to the brain in the quality of what it
says. Like the brain, it must correlate its message with
trillions of others; it must participate in thousands of
chemical exchanges every second; and most important of
all, its DNA is the equa l of any neuron’s. Therefore, the
smallest impulse of intelligence is as intelligent as the
largest. In fact, it is meaningless to speak of importantpieces of intelligence or insigniﬁcant ones. We need only to
remember the chain that builds dopamine; the inability to
turn the humble protein serine into the equally humble
metabolite called glycine leads to a minutely highe r level of
dopamine, with the catastrophic outcome of schiz ophrenia,
overwhelming the entire mind. Every cell is a little senti ent being. Sitting in the liver or
heart or kidney , it “knows” everything you know , but in its
own fashion. We are of course used to the idea that we are
smarter than our kidneys. The very concept of a “building
block” implies that the brick is simpler than the building. That is true of a nonliving structure, but not of us. The
nerve impulse for worry , for example, may show up in the
stomach as an ulcer , in the colon as a spasm, or in the mind
as an obsession, but they are various manifestations of the
same impulse. Worry transf orms itself from organ to organ,
yet each point in the body knows that there is worrying
going on, and every cell remembers. You may consciously
forget that you are worrying, but then all at once the
feeling is there to remind you, and it seems to be
everywhere. Earlier , we noted that if you could see the body as it
really is, you would see it as constant change mixed with
complete non-change. It is like a house whose  bricks are
constantly being replaced , or a sculpture that at the same
time is a river. The obstacle confronting medicine so far is
that one side of our nature—the ﬂowing and changing—has
been sacriﬁc ed for the sake of the other—the stable and
ﬁxed. Now, having looked at the quantum level, perhaps we
can package both into one unit that captures our real
double essence—the impulse of intelligence. An impulse of
intelligence is the smallest unit that preserves itself intact
(non-change) while undergoing transformation (change). If
impulses of intelligence did not have this one general
property , then they could not be the basic building block ofthe body; either some purely mental impulse or some
purely physical particle would have that distinction. But neither of these can survive change. The molecules
forming your brain on the day that you ﬁrst thought the
word rose are not there anymore, and yet the concept is. At
the same time, you do not have to think the word  rose all
the time to retain it; you can think literally millions of other
thoughts without ever referring to this word. The next time
you want it back, there  it is, without confusion. It has
retained its integrity through thick and thin because the
impulse of intelligence contains mind, matter , and the
silence that glues them together . The physical structure of the body mirrors intelligence
and gives it a projected form, but intelligenc e is not
trapped inside this framework of ﬂesh and bones. A
startling conﬁrmation of this fact appears in the brain. Karl
Lashley , a pioneer in neurophysiology , tried to discover
where memo ry was located in the brain by performing a
simple experiment with lab rats. He taught them to run a
maze, a skill that is reme mbered and stored in their brains,
just as we acquire skills. Then he systematically removed a
small amoun t of cerebral tissue. Lashley supposed that if
the rats still remembered how to run the maze (as
measured by their speed and accuracy), then the brain’s
memory center must still be intact. Little by little, he took out more brain matter , but the
rats, curiously enough, still remembered how to run the
maze. Finally , more than 90 percent of the entire cortex
was gone, leaving only a speck of brain tissue, and still the
rats rememb ered the maze, with a slight fall-oﬀ in accuracy
and speed. This experiment, among others, suggested a
revolutionary idea, that every cell of the brain must store
the whole brain while at the same time storing its own
speciﬁc task. This is exactly what we have found: everyimpulse of intelligence is equally intelligent, opening up
endless possible projections of mind into body . John Lorbe r, a British neurologist, specialized in
examining patients who were hydrocephalic—in place of
cerebral tissue, their brain cavities were ﬁlled with ﬂuid. Generally , this condition, popularly called “water on the
brain,” can be quite dangerous and lead to serious mental
impairment. However , one of Lorber’s patients was a gifted college
student, majo ring in mathematics, whose IQ was measured
near 130. Referred to Lorber by his family doctor , who
thought his patient had an enlarged head, the student was
given a brain scan, which  revealed that his cortex was only
1 millimeter thick, compared to the usual 4.5 centimeters. In other words, ﬂuid had replaced about 98 percent of the
neurons needed for thinking, remembering, and all the
other higher functions centered in the cerebral cortex. With
2 percent of a normal cortex, this man was in the same
position as Lashley’s rats, physiologically , and yet inﬁnitely
more capable—he was in fact normal or above average in
all respects. —
We are being driven closer and closer to the silent ﬁeld of
intelligence as our fundamental reality . But once again,
there is the problem that a silent mind seems to contain
nothing at all. If we go back nearly a hundred years, a
similar dilemma was very much in the air. A new science
called psychology was trying to be born, but it was having a
hard time because to qualify as a science, psychology
needed an object to study . It was obviou s that every person
had a psych e, but no one had ever seen or touched one. The most basic questions about the psyche had remained
unsettled for centuries. Was it the soul, the mind, the
personality , or all three? No one was going to be able to setup the ﬁrst experiment in psychology until these matters
were settled. The turning point came when William James, a brilliant
philosopher at Harvard who also held a medical degree,
asserted that psychology did indeed have a proper  object to
study . Or rather , thousands of objects—all the though ts,
emotions, desires, and impressions that swirled through
the mind. James called these the “stream of
consciousness.” If there was a mental essence or soul, as
pre-psychologists back to Plato had aﬀirmed, then science
could not ﬁnd it. James did not say that such an invisible
essence did not exist, but he saw no way to experiment
upon it scientiﬁcally . James defended the stream of consciousness on purely
pragmatic grounds, reasoning that nothing in the mind
could be considered tangible except the objects (thoughts)
that passed through it. If one is always thinking or
dreaming—no one knows what he does mentally in deep,
nondream sleep—then the reality of the mind must be
simply a continuous ﬂow of thoughts and dreams. James
was a very astute observer; he had to be when you consider
that he basically founde d the ﬁeld of psychology on the
data he saw in his own head (as Freud did, exten ding the
data into the ﬁeld of dreams and unconscious motives). But
James missed a tiny aspect of the mind that might have
seemed completely trivial. The stream of consciousness is
not made up solely of objects ﬂoating downriver; in
between every thought there is a ﬂeeting gap of silence. It may be very tiny and all but unnoticeable, but the gap
is always there and absolutely necessary . Without it, we
would be thinking like this:
“IlikethislunchanddessertbutiﬂeattoomuchohthereisSid
lneedtowhereismywallet…” and so on. The silent gap
between thoughts, being intangible, still plays no part in
modern psychology , which is oriented completely to themind’s conte nts or the brain’s mechanics. The gap turns
out to be the central player , however , if you are interested
in what lies beyond thought. Every fractio n of a second we
are permitte d a glimpse into another world, one that is
inside us and yet obscurely out of reach. A verse from  an
ancient India n Upanishad  describes this beautifully: “A man
is like two doves sitting in a cherry tree. One bird is eating
of the fruit while the other silently looks on.” The bird who
is the silent witness stands for that deep silence in
everyone, which appears to be nothing at all when in
reality it is the origin of intelligence. The fascinating thing about intelligence is that it is like a
one-way arrow: you can use intelligence to shape a
molecule, but if you look at the molecule, you cannot take
the intelligence back out of it. When the poet Keats wrote
his beautiful sonnet “To Sleep,” he began with the haunting
line, “O soft embalmer of the still midnight.” If he had been
hooked up to an EEG while he was writing, the readout of
brain waves would have formed a unique pattern, yet no
amount of examination of those brain waves could ever
yield a line of poetry . In the same way, all of our molecules are hitched up with
a bit of intelligence, which inﬂuences everything they do,
but you cann ot see it by looking at them. DNA provides a
good example. Sitting in the nucleus of each cell, DNA is
constantly bathed in a swirl of free-ﬂoating  organic
molecules, the basic building blocks of the material body. Whenever it wants to be active, DNA attracts these
chemicals and uses them to form new DNA. This is an
essential part of cell division—one double strand of DNA
must divide in half, splitting right down the middle like a
zipper , and then each half turns into new, complete DNA by
attracting the appropriat e molecules to itself . The bath of
swirling, aimless source molecules surrounding DNA
provides it with “letters” to combine—there are just four ofthem, labeled A, T, C, and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine,
and guanine. DNA spins these four letters out into an
inﬁnite variety of combinations, some of which are short (it
takes three letters to code a basic amino acid), others of
which are very long, like the poly-peptide chains that can
be seen streaming away from DNA like tendrils. The DNA knows exactly what information to pick out and
how it all goes together for each thing it wants to “say”
chemically . Besides building itself , DNA knows how to build
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which is its nearly identical twin
and active counterpart. RNA’s mission is to travel away
from the DNA in order to produce the proteins, more than 2
million in number , that actually build and repair the body. RNA is like active knowledge, in comparison to DNA’s silent
intelligence. DNA does not work just from rote memory . It can invent
new chemicals at will (such as a new antibody after you
catch a strain of ﬂu you have never been exposed to
before). Exactly how this is accomplished is not known,
although molecular biologists have found the spacers that
separate diﬀerent genetic words, or genomes. It is also well
established that only 1 percent of the genetic material in
DNA is used for its complicated coding, self-repair , and
manufacture of RNA, leaving 99 percent doing nothing that
science can account for . This puzzling silence has stimulated a great deal of
curiosity , especially amon g people who believe that humans
do not use their full intelligence. William Jame s ventured to
guess that we use only 5 percent of our intellig ence—he
meant mental capacity—with an Einstein utilizing up to 15
percent or 20 percent. How this percentage translates into
usable DNA is unknown, but we can venture to say that
DNA is keeping a large vocabulary in silent storage—one
geneticist has calculated that the number of molecular
“words” produced in a single cell, if translated into English,would ﬁll a thousand-v olume library . And that is the
product of just the activ e 1 percent we have managed to
understand. Thanks to the discovery of recombinant DNA
(pieces of genetic materi al that can be shuﬄed in and out
of sequence on the DNA strands), the potential vocabulary
may be inﬁnitely larger than we suspect; already the
combinations of “letters” encoded on DNA are suﬀicient to
create every life form on Earth, from bacteria and molds to
all plants, insects, mammals, and people. One might suppose that the more complex the organism,
the greater its share of DNA, but in fact a lily contains
about a hundred times more DNA than a huma n being. Counting genes does not give very much of a meaningful
picture: the diﬀerence between man’s DNA and that of
chimpanzees or gorillas is about 1.1 percent. This seems
like a surprisingly small divergence, and a highly
suspicious one. Can all the structural diﬀerences between a
jungle prima te and Homo sapiens , as well as our vastly
superior brains, be packed into such a tiny fractional
diﬀerence? Evolutionists, having inherited Darwin’s faith in
materialism, insist that it can. The issue is somewhat
blunted when you realize , once again, that a gene count is
not very signiﬁcant—two diﬀerent kinds of fruit ﬂies
(Drosophila ) are much more closely related than man and
chimpanzees, yet their DNA diﬀers by considerably more. Another way to show that our inner silence is alive and
intelligent is to compare it to a machine’s. When a
computer approaches a problem, it uses electrical  impulses
that must be separated from one another by gaps, forming
a complex series of coded  data out of 1 and 0. This enables
the computer to handle any problem that can be broken
down into information, since all information can be coded
into 1 and 0, just as any message in English can be broken
down into the dots and dashes of Morse code. The human
brain also takes advantage of mechanically codedinformation, but the gaps in between are not just empty;
they are the pivots that allow the mind to swing any way it
wants. In other words, a comput er has ﬁnite gaps made of
emptiness; we have inﬁnite gaps full of intelligence. We can pull anything out of the gap. Mozart pulled whole
symphonies at a time, not just note by note, but—as he
recounted the experience—with every orchestral line
already composed and orchestrated. Mathematics, like
music, has many such mysteries. A woman in India named
Shakuntala Devi multipli ed two 13-digit numbers  together
in her head, arriving at the 23-digit answer in 26 seconds. (It takes more time than that to read the numbers out loud:
7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 =
18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730.) If you tell a computer to add 2 plus 2, it comes up with
either a right or a wrong answer . If you ask a 5-year-old boy
to do the same, he may come up with an arithmetical
answer , but he just as well might say, “I want some vanilla
ice cream.” We can assume that he is bored; perhaps he is
too tired for an arithmetic lesson. So it is not correct to say
that his response is a computational error; his mind is
simply not under our control—you cannot come up with a
program to include all the possible reactions a human
being can display as he interacts with the world. What this all amounts to, in my mind, is a vindication of
how complex ordinary experience really is, and how far
away from life a scientiﬁc model is when it tries to describe
it. The old view that the brain is a computer , stable in time
and space, localized into various functions, and restricted
in its ﬂexib ility, is unjustiﬁed. A Nobel Prize–winning
neuroscientist, Dr. Gerald Edelman, has pointed out that
the brain is much more like a process than a thing, and this
process is continually evolving. It is true, for example, that
memory depends on two small pieces of “hardware” on
either side of the brain called the hippocampus ; if bothsites become damaged (through loss of blood ﬂow or
disease), the ability to recollect is destroyed. Yet, within this physical limitation, each person’s brain is
unique, both in structure and content. No two peop le have
the same neuronal connections, and each person is
constantly growing new ones from the moment of birth
onward, givin g rise to all the memories that make you and
me totally diﬀerent. (A connection does not have to be
physical; the ﬂashing signals in the brain are constantly
making patterns and reforming them into new patterns.) Edelman holds that no one literally repeats a memory . When you recollect a familiar face, something will be
diﬀerent about it, if not the face itself , then the context that
caused you to remember , which may be sad now instead of
happy . Memory is a creative act, then. It creates new
images and new brain at the same time. Edelman theorizes
that every  experience one has in life changes the brain’s
anatomy . Therefore, it is not wholly true to say that the
hippocampus is the seat of memory , for any one memory—
the ﬁrst day you saw a ﬁeld of daﬀodils—sh ifts and
shimmers across your entire cortex, touching other
memories here and there , passing into new interpretations,
and having to be re-created every time you need to
recollect it. Unlike any computer , we remember , reconsider ,
and change our minds. The universe was created  once, but
we re-create ourselves with every thought. —
Everything, in short, depends upon how well you can build
in silence. Whatever can be experie nced on the surface of
life—love or hate, disease or health—wells up from a
deeper level  and ﬂoats above it as little more than a
bubble. One can try to prick the bubbles one by one, but
they ﬂoat up from below unendingly . If we want to navigate
the ﬁeld of intelligence, we must learn about it to the verydepths, where the silent witness inside us waits. That is our
next step, to map the inner silence and master its secret
places. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Only doctors are licensed to practice medicine, but
everyone practices Ayurveda, only not systematic ally. The
“science of life” pertains to everyday experiences of pain
and pleasure, likes and dislikes, comfort and discomfort. This goes back to a term  introduced at the end of the last
chapter , qualia. A qualia is any quality of experience. Consider pain, a qualia no one likes to experience. If you X-
ray the spine of any older person, there will be compression
in the resilient ﬁbrous disks that provide a cushion between
each vertebra. Yet only a certain percentage of older people
experience lower back pain. Obviously the ones who experience no pain shouldn’t be
treated medically . The patients who compla in of severe or
acute pain should be treated immediately , while most
people, who experience intermittent pain that goes away on
its own, fall somewhere in between. We should look at pain,
then, very personally . Ayurveda takes the perso nal approach to every situation. By consulting a person’s level of discomfort, the diagnosis
can be any of the following:
1.There is no imbalance. The person is healthy . 2.There are early signs of imbalance. The person needs
to make a lifestyle change to bring the system back
into balance. 3.The imbalance has reached the stage of exhibiting
physical symptoms. Medical intervention is called for .4.The symptoms are so severe that chronic illness has
set in, with the possibility in extreme cases of
imminent death. Intense medical intervention is called
for. In the mid-1980s I was struck by how sensible and
natural this way of looking at disease was. It gave me a
prime motivation for writing Quantum Healing . Asking
people to possess medical school knowledge about their
bodies is unreasonable. Asking them  to be in touch with
their experience isn’t. How else can we live? Recently I heard about  a case where a man in his
seventies had a stiﬀ shoulder that over time became quite
painful. Suspecting the onset of arthritis, his doctor took X
rays, and indeed, the rotator cuﬀ had turned dry and pitted
because the slick membrane that keeps joints  moving
smoothly had worn down. The doctor explained that this
deterioration was irreversible and would only grow worse. He recommended immediate replacement, a procedure that
has become standard for millions of older people once a
shoulder , hip, or knee gives out. What if I go to physical therapy instead? his patient
asked. The doctor , who was an experienced orthopedist,
shrugged. Physical therapy would deliver some short-term
relief , but replacement surgery was a certainty down the
road, probably sooner than later . The man went for a second opinion, which concurred
with the ﬁrst. But something inside resisted the trauma of
major surgery , and he decided to pursue physical therapy . Today, seven years later, his pain remains intermittent. It
hasn’t grown worse, and the man himself feels  that his
shoulder is ﬂexible enough for normal tasks like driving. Since he hasn’t returned  to an orthopedist for regular X
rays, no one knows if the underlying arthritic condition hasworsened. But it doesn’ t matter right now. If the patient’s
quality of life hasn’t deteriorated, that’s the main thing. The fact that Ayurveda is based on personal experience
makes it something unique: a qualia medicine. To someone
just discovering Ayurveda, its diagnostic powers can seem
mysterious. The most basic diagnosis is body type, or more
speciﬁcally a person’s prakriti,  which determines the
fundamental qualia that have been dominant since birth. One of these is Vata, associated with air. If you meet
someone with prominent Vata, one glance will allow you to
say, “I imagine you have irregular habits. You often aren’t
hungry at mealtimes. You ﬁnd it hard to get regular sleep
and often wake up at night. Under stress  you become
anxious and nervous. But your disposition is cheerful, and
even though you suﬀer from inexplicable aches and pains
that come and go, your attitude toward them isn’t gloomy .”
Not many people are such pure Vata types that this entire
description will apply , but when it does, they are frequently
amazed. (It should be emphas ized immediately that
Ayurvedic diagnosis consists of several procedu res, not
simply laying eyes on the patient.) Searching for an
explanation in Western terms is often quite diﬀicult,
because the qualia that Ayurveda is based on sound totally
nonmedical. Besides Vata (air) there is Pitta (ﬁre), Kapha
(water and earth), and most mysterious of all, Akasha, or
space. The combination of these qualities leads to a highly
sophisticated system of diagnosis, because they interact
and go out of balance in hundreds of ways. A Western-trained physician is also dependent on qualia,
because treatment always begins with how a patient feels. But from there two paths diverge. Western allopathic
medicine searches for objective underlying causes with
scientiﬁc precision, essentially leaving qualia behind. Ayurveda continues on the road of qualia, seeking to bringthem back into balance. And here is where a needless
source of confusion and diﬀiculty arises. Being a “science of life,” Ayurveda prescribes a way of
life. Its advice about diet, for example, varies from person
to person, because a Vata type beneﬁts, for example, from
heavy , sweet, oily foods that are not necessarily good—and
may be bad—for other  types. Balance is dynamic. It
changes from day to day. Therefore, someone who has
grown up in an Ayurvedic lifestyle (which means growing
up in India before the modern era) will be constantly
monitoring their qualia. This is a form of self-care that
requires each person to know exactly how he or she feels
when going out of balance, long before symptoms arise. Hence the confusion, because modern people—including
modern Indians—go to the doctor when they feel bad, by
which time symptoms have already appeared. They are at
the second or third stage  of imbalance described above. At
this point, after years of ignoring the easily treatable signs
of imbalance, Ayurveda may be helpless compa red with
Western scientiﬁc medicine. It’s like bringing a car in for its
ﬁrst tune-up after 150,000 miles. When Quantum Healing  was written, I constantly
encountered skepticism from other physicians,
accompanied by hostile remarks like, “If I got into a car
accident, a bunch of herbs isn’t going to help me.” Of
course not. Nobody said it would. Today one doesn’t meet
as much skepticism, yet it’s clear that qualia medicine, the
kind based on personal quality of life, cannot simply be a
replay of Ayurveda. Knowledge evolves, and we ﬁnd
ourselves equipped with knowledge from science and
knowledge from centuries of human experience. They don’t have to oppose each other . In the expanding
ﬁeld of integrated medicine, the doctor utilizes both. For
example, the majority of patients seek a doctor’s care
because they suﬀer from a cold, headaches, insomnia, oranxiety and depression. These are endemic, usually low-
level side eﬀects of modern life itself . They also happen to
be Vata disorders. If the doctor  knows this, he has more
tools at his disposal to cure the most common ills. But that
won’t rule out the usual pills, if that’s what he and the
patient prefer . Such a preference shouldn’t come from blind allegiance
to science or a rigid belie f that one size ﬁts all. The whole
point of integrated medicine isn’t to ﬁnd alternatives to
standard medical practice just for the sake of doing so. The
point is to personalize medical care based on the patient’s
quality of life. It’s frustrating that every medical school
student isn’t taught this principle on the ﬁrst day of class. Quantum Healing  set out a workable theory of Ayurveda
for the Western mind. Realizing that readers would ask,
“But what do I do?” I wrote a practical hand book on the
Ayurvedic lifestyle called  Perfect Health . The title wasn’t
meant to be hyperbole. Every healthy cell exists in perfect
health. It’s our personal choices over a long period of time
that create the imbalances that eventually start to damage
our cells. Therefore, positing perfe ct health as a starting
point is medically sound. As things stand today , I practice integrated medicine
solidly established on Ayurveda and the Ayurvedic lifestyle. I realize, with a touch of chagrin, that my being Indian
makes the medicine go down more easily for my patients. This bias has led me to talk much less about Ayurveda and
much more about qualia. For the average person, Ayurveda
is a narrow , exotic, specialized interest. But everyone is
interested in their quality of life. Self-care based on qualia
provides the best results, because it makes the whole
project intimate and personal. The fact that thousands of
years of wisdom lies in the background is just one more
reason to pursue optimal wellbeing. OceanofPDF .comRecently I saw a patient who had been diagnosed in 1983
with a malignant tumor in her right breast. For reasons of
her own, she had refused any form of conventional
treatment, including radiation, chemotherapy , and
hormones. She told me that the tumor was quite large but
had not spread to any lymph nodes under her arm. “I think I’d better examine it,” I said, and she hesitated. “I should warn you,” she said, “that most doctors are very
frightened when they see this, because of its size. I
generally don’t even let a doctor touch me, because the
fear in their eyes makes me scared. On my own I’m not
scared. You may not believe this, but I have never felt that I
was in any danger . I can be shaken, though, when I see a
doctor’s fear. They even say things like, ‘How dare you be
so cruel to your husband by not having surgery .’
“I thought that maybe a woman doctor would be more
understanding, but when I went to one, she was more
horriﬁed than the rest. She asked me, ‘Why did you come
to see me if you aren’t going to let me remove that thing?’
And I said, ‘Because I just want you to monitor it—it hasgrown slightly in the past ﬁve years, and I want it followed. Almost shaking, she stood up and told me, ‘Don’t come
back to see me unless you want that thing removed. I can’t
stand the sight of it.’  ”
I had no idea what my reaction would be. About half of
the women diagnosed with breast cancer have localized
tumors conﬁ ned to the breast. The standard treatment has
been either to remove the breast or to remove the lump
and radiate the site to kill any remaining cancer  cells. In
both cases, when there is no further follow-up treatment,
70 percent of patients do not have a recurrence in the next
three years. With some sort of chemotherapy , ranging from
mild to quite heavy , the proportion of long-term survivors
can be raised to 90 percent. This woman had decided to
defy odds that were very much in the patient’s favor—and
yet she would not be the ﬁrst to ignore doctors and survive. When she lay on the examining table and I saw the tumor ,
I understood why her previous doctors had been shocked—
it distended a large portion of her breast. I controlled my
automatic reaction, and I hope no fear showed in my eyes. I
sat down and held her hand, thinking. “Look,” I said softly ,
“I don’t believe you are in danger here. You have said that
you don’t feel any danger , and that is good enoug h for me. But this tumor is a nuisance. You are denying yourself a
more beautiful life by having to look after this. Why not go
to a surgeon and have the nuisance removed?”
Apparently this struck her as an entirely new angle. She
readily agreed that there  was no advantage to keeping the
tumor , and I referred her to a sympathetic surgeon. One of her parting comments stays with me. “I don’t
identify myself with this tumor ,” she said serenely , “I know
I am much more than it. It will come and go like the rest of
me, but inside, I am not really touched by it.” When she left
the oﬀice, she looked extremely happy .I felt that this woman had reason on her side. The fear in
a docto r’s eyes is a terrib le stroke of condemnation, and in
her position I would not have believed much in my chances
of recovery . The impulses from my brain would not be
saying, “I’m deﬁnitely going to recover .” Instead, they
would be saying, “They tell me I’ll probably recover ,” which
is quite a diﬀerent thing. When a doctor looks at a patient and says, “You have
breast cancer , but you’r e going to get well,” what is he
really saying? The answer is by no means certain. At one
extreme, his reassuring words, if they are believable, may
be enough to make the diﬀerence in the patient’s case. At
the other extreme, if he actually thinks the patient is
doomed, something in his voice will give that message, and
from it a destructive confusion may set in. Recently the term placebo  was inverted into a new term,
nocebo,  to describe the negative eﬀects of a doctor’s
opinion. With placebo, you give a dummy drug and the
patient respo nds because  the doctor has told him that the
drug will work. With nocebo, you give a viable drug, but the
patient doesn’t respond, because the doctor has signaled
that the drug isn’t going to work. If you take a completely materialistic view, there seems
no diﬀerenc e between the surgery this woman  refused
before and the one she agreed to now. Yet, now she
identiﬁes surgery with healing, whereas before it was
violence. If a patient regards any treatment as violence,
then his body will be ﬂooded with negative emotions and
the chemicals associated with them. It is well documented
that in a climate of negativity , the ability to heal is greatly
reduced—depressed peop le not only lower their immune
response, for example, but even weaken their DNA’s ability
to repair itself . So my patient had reasonable cause, I think,
to wait until her emotions told her to go ahead.—
This case reminds me that there are always two centers of
action within people, the head and the heart. Medical
statistics appeal to the head, but the heart keeps its own
counsel. In recent years, alternative medicine has won
much of its appeal on the basis of bringing back the heart,
using love and caring to heal. Without these ingredients,
the nocebo eﬀect can run wild, for the surroundings of
modern hospitals inject a powerful dose of it. The psychotic
episodes that sometimes strike out of the blue in intensive
care units show how unhealthy it is to hold people in
sterile, conﬁ ned spaces. (As a young child, my son showed
an almost equal fascina tion with hospitals and prisons,
which I trace to a fear he could not express. If he saw
either institution from the car, he would invariably ask,
“Daddy , are people dying in there?”)
The great drawback of proclaiming that we need to bring
the heart back into medi cine is that it punishes people for
their emotional weaknesses. The heart can be very frail; it
can be hardened by suﬀering, or just by life. Books on
holistic healing like to say that sick people “need” their
sickness. Mainstream psychiatry points its own ﬁnger when
it says that chronic diseases can stand symbolically for self-
punishment, revenge, or a deep feeling of worthlessness. I
will not argue these insights, except to suggest that they
may be harmful to the healing process rather than helpful. It is hard enough for any of us to face up to our emotional
fallibility even at the best of times. Can we really be
expected to reform when we are ill? The deeper issue is that anything  can function as a
nocebo, just as anything can function as a placebo . It is not
the dummy drug, the doctor’s bedside manner , or the
antiseptic smell of a hospital that does harm or good; it is
the patient’s  interpretation of it. Therefore, the real war isnot between the head and the heart. Something deeper , in
the realm of silence, creates our view of reality . The basic understanding most of us have about ourselves
comes from thinking and feeling, which seems only natural. But we know  very little about the ﬁeld of silence and how it
exercises control over us. The head and the heart, it seems,
are not the whole perso n. The stream of consciousness,
which is constantly full of thoughts, acts as a screen to
keep silence hidden. The solid appearance of the physical
body is another kind of screen, since we cannot see the
molecules that are being constantly shuﬄed around inside
us, much less their blueprint, which is what we would like
to change. The blueprint of reality is an important concept. Every
impulse of intelligence gives rise to a thought or a
molecule, which spends a certain time in the relative world
—the world of the senses—before the next impulse follows. In that sense, every thought is like a piece of the future
when it is created, a piece of the present when it is
experienced, and a piece of the past after it has gone. As
long as each impulse is healthy , the future is not unknown—
it will ﬂow naturally from the present, moment by moment. (This accounts for why people who make the most of every
day tend to retain their mental faculties intact into old age;
the stream of intelligence is never allowed to dry up.) Above the line is a ﬂow of thoughts that never ends, at
least while we are awake. Thought is linked to thought
without end. Our normal experience keeps within this
range of ongoing events, which may be inﬁnite on the
horizontal axis yet quite shallow on the vertical. It is
possible to spend a lifetime listening to the inventory of the
mind without ever dippin g into its source. Yet, touching the
source is how the mind creates its patterns of intelligence. These patterns are at ﬁrst only blueprints, but whatever
they inscribe  will hold—they will form our ideas and beliefs
about reality . The ﬁeld of intelligence is extremely sensitive to change,
however , both for good and ill. Two years ago I saw a
woman in her thirties who came to Lancaster to be treated
for breast cancer . Her condition was extremely serious,
since the malignancy had metastasized to the bone marrow
everywhere in her body. She suﬀered from consta nt pain in
her bones as a result. After receiving the norma l, and quite
drastic, courses of radiation and chemotherapy from her
doctor at home in Denver , she came to Boston for A yurvedic
treatments. She responded very well. After spending a
week as an inpatient, her bone pain disappeared. She was
not oﬀered any promises about her cancer , but she went
home in a state of renewed hope and optimism. Unfortunately , when she reported to her doctor that she
had improve d, he told her that it was all in her head—she
had received no orthodox therapy that could have relieved
her symptoms. Within a day her bone pain returned. She
called me, feeling panick y, and I asked if she could return
to Boston immediately . She did, and fortunately after
another week her bone pain again receded. Without intending to harm his patient—I am sure he
wanted to be realistic in his appraisal—this woman’s doctor
made a cruel mistake. He assumed that what is “in your
head” is not real, or at least very inferior to the reality ofcancer . Being trained in scientiﬁc methods, he knew the
predictable outcomes of various kinds of malignancy , and
when he saw an unexpec ted result, he tried to push it back
into the range of the predictable. Doctors push patients
into predictable results all the time, because medical-
school training is focused entirely on the horizontal axis. Making the links of cause  and eﬀect tighter and tighter is
the whole motivation behind medical research. Our great-
grandfathers vaguely knew that germs existed; we can
anatomize thousands of speciﬁc viruses and bacteria, down
to the tiniest amino-acid groups and beyond. Unfortunately ,
this leaves very little opening for any journey along the
vertical axis, which might take one to a deeper reality . A recent patient listed on his medical questionnaire that
he “once had a brain tumor.” I asked him what that meant,
and he told me this story: About ﬁve years ago, while living
in Michigan, he began to have sudden dizzy spells. These
quickly grew  worse, and in a few weeks he was vomiting
and had double vision, with increasing loss of balance and
motor coordination. He went to a hospital, where a CAT
scan was taken of his brain. The doctors informed him that
the test had disclosed a shadowy mass in his forebrain
larger than a lemon; in their opinion, he had a brain tumor . A tissue sample taken from the tumor revealed that indeed
it was a deadly , rapidly growing cancer . Because the tumor was so large and delicately placed, it
was considered inoperable. The doctors recommended high
doses of radiation and chemotherapy , without which the
man would be dead in six months. The therapy would have
severe side eﬀects, nearly as bad as his present symptoms. Certain of these, such as nausea, headaches, and skin
irritation, would be uncomfortable; others, such as the
weakening of his immune system, could be deadly , since he
would become prone to contracting other types of cancer in
the future. There was also the deﬁn ite possibility that hewould be prey to anxiety  and depression, which could be
lasting. Even with maximum treatment to shrink the tumo r,
the prognosis for full recovery was not good, but it was
better than nothing. The patient could not accept this reasoning (althou gh it is
statistically quite sound). He moved to California and joined
a meditation group; he practiced a whole series  of diets,
mental techniques, exercises, and visualizati ons. He
encouraged in himself a totally positive attitude toward his
condition. Thousands of cancer patients, as a rule from the
best-educated groups, turn to such measures, which
conventional medicine looks on as trying to buy false hope. In this case, however , the man began to feel better, and
within six months his symptoms were almost completely
gone. Hopeful but also anxious , he returned to Michigan
and underwent another CAT scan. This one showed no
traces of cancer and no sign that any had ever been
present. In response to this, his doctors informed him that he had
not recovered from cancer , because they had never heard
of such a recovery . In fact, they said, the original CAT scan
was not his but another patient’s. They were sorry for the
mistake, but from that moment on, they disavowed any
involvement with his case. The patient was immen sely
relieved that his symptoms were gone, and he believes in
the original CAT scan, which has his name and Social
Security number on it. When I contacted the hospital to ask
for his records, I was informed that he had never been
treated there for cancer but had been mixed up with
another brain-tumor patient. All I can assume is that even with X rays and a biopsy ,
these doctors could not accept that a remission had
occurred, for the simple reason that their experience told
them it was impossible. One should never underestimate
the power of indoctrination. Medical training is highlytechnical, specialized, and rigorous, but it came about just
like any other human activity—by people collecting
experiences and using those experiences to form
explanations and patterns. These patterns in turn serve to
indoctrinate the pattern makers, and within a very short
period of time the indoctrination becomes law . It is fascina ting that a major study of four hundred
spontaneous remissions of cancer , later interpreted by
Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic, found that
all the patients had only one thing in common—every
person had changed his attitudes before the remission
occurred, ﬁnding some way to become hopeful,
courageous, and positive. In other words, they broke down
their indoctrination (even if the doctors did not break down
theirs). The mystery that clouds this otherwise clear ﬁndin g
has to do with causation. Did the remissions occur because
of the new attitudes or parallel to them? Perhaps causation
is too delicate to pinpoint in this case, being repla ced by a
general, holis tic process of getting well in mind and body at
the same time. The mind-body system, about to throw oﬀ
the cancer , should know that the process is under  way and
may begin to generate much more positive thoughts
simultaneously . However it works, the key seems to be spontaneity . Channeling positive attitudes into oneself as a planned
therapy has proved only haphazardly successful as a means
of ﬁghting disease. The positive input does not tend to go
very deep. Consciousness is more pervasive than medicine
gives it credit for. Even when it is ignored , however , the
silent ﬁeld of intelligence knows what is happening. It is,
after all, intelligent. Its knowledge reaches beyond buﬀers
and screens, going farther than we expect. To illustrate: for decades , surgeons safely assum ed that
an anesthetized patient was unconscious and therefore not
inﬂuenced by what happened in the operating room. Thenit was discovered (by hypnotizing postoperative patients)
that in fact the “unconscious” mind heard every word that
was uttered during the procedure. When the surgeons said
aloud that a condition was more serious than they had
thought or had little chance of cure, the patients tended to
play out those gloomy predictions by not recovering. As a
result of these ﬁndings, which validate the idea of nocebo,
it is now standard practi ce not to make negative remarks
during surgery . The more positive the surgeon’s expressed
opinions, in fact, the more positive the outcom e for the
patient. It would be even bette r to use this highly sensitive,
extremely powerful intell igence for the patient’s cure. The
point of diving into the region of the quantum body is to
change the blueprint itself , rather than to wait for
symptoms on the surfa ce, which will then have to be
manipulated using medicine. The case of the woman with
bone pain is a reminder that the buﬀer that keeps us so
securely above the line, away from our deeper selves, is
always made by us. It is therefore subject to revision at any
time. We constantly build patterns of intelligence and look
through them to tell us what is real. If we see pain, there is
pain, but if we don’t, the pain will be gone. Nature did not make us ignorant of our deeper selves. Anesthetized patients have known what was going on all
along, presum ably since the beginnings of modern  surgery
in the 1850s. The silent ﬁeld of intelligence is out of reach
by our choice, reinforced through generations of cultural
bias. Sometimes a new reality forces itself to be
recognized, and then things can shift. New patterns of
intelligence arise; a deep transformation can then take
place, but it is not essentially diﬀerent from the mind-body
transformations we have already been talking about. Normal reality is like a spell—a very necessary one, since
we must live by habits, routines, and codes that we take forgranted. The problem arises when you can make the spell
but not break it. If you could dive, this very minute, below
your everyday reality to its source, you would certainly
have a remarkable experience. The psychologist Abraham
Maslow , who was a pioneer in studying the positive aspects
of the human personality , gave a classic description of the
experience of the deep self: “These moments were of pure,
positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all
inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses, were left behind. Now self-consciousness was lost. All separateness and
distance from the world disappeared….”
Although such experiences are rare—Maslow termed
them “peak experiences ” for that reason—they have a
curative power that goes far beyond their brief duration,
which may be a few days or just a few hours . Maslow
records that two of his patients, one a long-term depressive
who had often considere d suicide, the other a person who
suﬀered from severe anxiety attacks, were both
immediately and permanently cured after spontaneously
falling into such experiences (for each it happened only
once). Maslow also talks about the reconciliation with life that
people have realized through these moments: “They felt
one with the world, fused with it, really belonging to it
instead of being outside looking in. (One subject said, for
instance, ‘I felt like a member of a family , not like an
orphan.’)”
Any sudden  revelation of a deeper reality carries
enormous power with it—one taste alone can make life
undeniably worthwhile. Maslow’s patients recognized this
inner power as something quite outside the ordinary . It is
not energy or strength, genius or insight, but it underlies
all of these. It is life power in its purest form. Maslow’s
understanding stopped short at the critical moment—he
was never able actually to give anyone a peak experience—yet he was fascinated by these events that transcend
normal life. In 1961, after several decades of writing and
thinking about the subject, he concluded that it was indeed
normal life and not the mystical that he had been
observing:
“The little that I had ever read about mystic experiences
tied them in with religion, with visions of the supe rnatural. And, like most scientists,  I had sniﬀed at them in disbelief
and considered it all nonsense, maybe hallucinations,
maybe hysteria—almost surely pathological. But the people
telling me about these experiences were not such people—
they were the healthiest people!”
Because he detected these experiences in fewer than 1
percent of the population, Maslow viewed them as
accidents or as moments of grace. I believe that they were
glimpses into a ﬁeld that underlies everyone’s life, but
which has remained elusive. The implication is that we
should dive very deep if we want to transcend normal
reality . We are in search of an experience that will reshap e
the world. —
Finding the silent gap that ﬂashes in between our thoughts
seems relatively easy, but because it ﬂashes by, a tiny gap
is not a doorway . The quantum  body is not separate from us
—it is us—ye t we are not experiencing it right now. Sitting
here, we are thinking, reading, talking, breathing,
digesting, and so on, all of which happens above the line. Here is an analogy that brings the quantum mechanical
body into focus: Take a bar magnet and place a piece of
paper over it. Next, sprinkle iron ﬁlings on the paper and
jostle it slightly . What will emerge is a pattern of curving
lines, one inside the other , that arch from the magnet’s
north to south pole and back again. The overall design youhave made represents a map of the magnetic lines of force
that otherwise would be invisible, except that the iron
particles automatically align themselves to bring  out the
image. In this analo gy, we see all mind-body activity above the
paper and the hidden ﬁeld of intelligence below . The iron
ﬁlings movin g around are mind-body activity , automatically
aligning with the magnetic ﬁeld, which is intelligence. The
ﬁeld is completely invisible and unknowable until it shows
its hand by moving some bits of matter around. And the
piece of paper? It is the quantum mecha nical body, a thin
screen that shows exactly what patterns of intelligence are
being manifested at the moment. There is more to this simple comparison than you might
at ﬁrst suppose. Without the paper to separate the two, the
magnet and the iron could not interact in any orderly way. Try bringing a magnet close to some iron ﬁlings. Instead of
forming regularly spaced lines, the ﬁlings simp ly clump
shapelessly onto the magnet’s surface. With the paper in
place, not only do you have an image of the magnetic ﬁeld,
but if you rotate the magnet you can watch the iron ﬁlings
move to mirror the new ﬁeld that has been created. If you
didn’t know that there was a magnet, you would swear that
the iron was alive, becaus e it seems to move by itself . But it
is really the hidden ﬁeld that is generating these lifelike
appearances. There you have a true picture of how the bodymind
actually relates to the ﬁeld of intelligence. The two remain
separated, but the division is invisible and has no thickness
whatever . It is just a gap. The only way one knows that the
quantum level even exists is that images and patterns keep
cropping up everywhere  in the body. Mysterious furrows
run across the surface of the brain; beautiful swirls, exactly
like the center of a sunﬂower , show up in molecules of
DNA; the inside of the femur contains marvelous  webs ofbone tissue, like the intricate supports of a cantilever
bridge. Wherever you look, there is no chaos, and that is the
strongest proof of all that there really is a hidden
physiology . Intelligence turns chaos into patterns. There is
incredible chaos implied in the idea of having to process
billions of chemical messages every minute, yet in reality ,
the complexity of the mind-body system is misleading: what
emerges from our brains are coherent images, just as a
coherent newspaper photograph emerges from thousands
of scattered dots. The matter in our bodies never
disintegrates into a shapeless, mindless pile—until the
moment of death. In answer to the obvio us question,
“Where is this quantum mechanical body, anyway?” one
can now conﬁdently answer that it lies in a gap that
unfortunately is rather diﬀicult to picture, since it is silent,
has no thickness, and exists everywhere. To dive into the ﬁeld of intelligence appears easy now: it
requires only a trip across a gap. But even though the gap
has no thickness, it forms a barrier no steel door could
possibly match. We can simplify our diagram to show what
has happened to make the journey so diﬀicult:
—The whole story is contained in the diﬀerence between
active and silent intelligence. We have conﬁrmed that this
diﬀerence is very real. DNA can be active or silent; our
thoughts can be express ed or stored away in drawers of
silence; we can be awake or asleep. All these changes
require a journey acros s the gap, but not a conscious
journey . To see what sleep is like, you would have to stay
awake, which is impossible. If you want to see the
diﬀerence between activ e and dormant DNA, you cannot
ﬁnd it in any chemical bond, since the two DNAs are
physically identical. And so on and on for all the
transformations of mind and body . The same diﬀiculty holds  true in physics—a photon is a
form of light, as is a light wave, but both arise from a
hidden ﬁeld. On the surface of reality we see either photons
or light waves, but the reason why both can exist in one
reality is that they preexist as mere possibilitie s in the
quantum ﬁeld. Who has ever photograp hed a possibility? Yet, that is all the quantum world is made of. If you say a
word or make a molecule, you have chosen to act. A little
wave laps up from the ocean’s surface, becoming an
incident in the space-time  world. The whole ocean remains
behind, a vast, silent reservoir of possibilities, of waves that
have yet to be born. As they dance around on the paper , the iron ﬁlings might
look at one another and say, “Well, this is life, let’s look into
its mysteries.” Deciding to do that, they can begin a
thought-adventure of the kind we call science. No matter
how adventurous their thoughts become, they will never
cross the gap. The gap is a one-way door, as far as thinking
goes, and that is its true mystery . From a certain perspecti ve, the whole idea that we are
outcroppings from an invisible, inﬁnite ﬁeld seems
ridiculous. A man’s body is a pack et of ﬂesh and bones
occupying a few cubic feet of space; his mind is anamazingly intricate but ﬁnite mechanism ﬁlled with a set
number of conceptions; his society is a grossly imperfect
organization bound to a history of ignorance and conﬂict. These obvious facts have never settled the issue,
strangely enough. We trust our ﬁnite everyd ay experiences,
which are good enough for driving a car, earning a living,
and going to the beach, but they are not quite convincing
enough compared to the overwhelming experien ce of the
inﬁnite. That experience, repeated throughout the
centuries, causes some people to suspect that reality is
very diﬀeren t, and far vaster , than what the mind, the body,
and society generally accept. Einstein himself experienced this reality . He has testiﬁed
to moments when “one feels free from one’s own
identiﬁcation with human limitation”:
“At such moments one imagines that one stands on some
spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and
yet profoun dly moving  beauty of the eternal, the
unfathomable. Life and death ﬂow into one, and there is
neither evolution nor destiny , only Being.”
Although this sounds like a spiritual insight (and Einstein
considered himself deeply spiritual), it is really a glimpse
into a level of our own consciousness that can be mapped
and explored. Without having any control over their
awareness or any cogent explanation for what is
happening, people sense that the state of rapt silen ce is not
simply emptiness. The great traditions of wisdom have
largely been founded by one or a few individuals who
realized the universe through themselves. To solve the
mystery of the gap, we need to consult the ones who have
been there; if they have found a real world, then there will
be new Einsteins to follow, and they will be Einsteins of
consciousness.EXPANDING THE TOPIC
The wisdom of the body comes from two places—active
intelligence and silent intelligence. Self-care is an example
of active intelligence. You listen to your body. You heed its
signals of pain and discom fort. You take steps to maintai n a
state of wellbeing. Active intelligence stretches no one’s
imagination. Silent intelligence is diﬀerent, because being
invisible, it can only be located in the gap. Yet of the two
kinds of intelligence, the kind that works in silence is
inﬁnitely wiser . When Quantum Healing  ﬁrst appea red, it was almost
impossible to get mainstream doctors even to entertain
such a notion as “the wisdom of the body.” I found refuge in
the mystica l poets, who became almost constant
companions. They knew about the hidden dimensions of
existence. Here is a verse from Rumi, the illuminated
Persian poet:
What do I long for? Something that is felt in the night
But not seen in the day . In a rational age, poetic intimations aren’t enough. Yet
poets can think, too, as when Rabindranath Tagore, the
great Bengali poet, contemplates how a full-blown rose
opens from a bud. He sees at work the same silent
intelligence I was describing in the human body . He who can open a bud does it simply
One glance, and the sap must stir ,
One breath, and a ﬂower ﬂutters in the wind,
Colors ﬂash out like longings of the heart,And perfume betrays sweet secrets. He who can open a bud does it simply . Who could put it more beautifully? Instead of saying “He
who can open a bud,” why not “She who can bring a child
into the world”? Silent intelligence is simple, spontaneous,
and a part of us. As it turned out, I was lucky to be writing when I was.
Quantum_Healing_by_Deppak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        That is the limit where the Newtonian notion of
cause and eﬀect, the basis of standard scientiﬁc medicine,
breaks down. You cannot possibly ask enough questions to ﬁnd out
what really makes a patient sick. In Aaron’s case, I would
want to know how he felt about his sister’s death, what he
eats for breakfast, who his friends are, how he feels when
he loses at tennis—in eﬀect, I want to know every relevant
experience. This is virtually impossible. So many inﬂuences
press in on us every day that the idea of causation
disappears. I would think it absurd to dissect a poet’s brain
to ﬁnd the cause of his sonnets; his cortex undeniably had
to exhibit speciﬁc brain-wave patterns to produce a sonnet,
but they have evaporated and been carried to a realm
hidden by time. It begins to seem just as absurd to claim
that an isolated physical cause lies behind Aaron’s bone
marrow dysfunction. His life is swept along by time, too,
and what I want to ﬁnd has evaporated. I know this sounds shocking, because without a cause,
how can we ﬁnd a cure. But all physical causes are partial
at best. If you try to give someone a cold, for example, it
takes more than a virus. Experimenters have incubated
cold viruses, placed them  directly on the mucous lining of
the nose, and found that their subjects came down with
colds only 12 percent of the time. These odds could not be
increased by exposing the subjects to cold drafts, putting
their feet in ice water to give them chills, or anything else
that was purely physical. Ordinary experience, a complex
play of inner and outer forces, deﬁes the rules of causation
that work for billiard balls. —Conventional medicine already recognizes that ordinary
experience can play a complex role in disease. For example,
statistics show that single people and widows living alone
are more likely to get cancer than people who are married. Their lonelin ess is called a risk factor—one could just as
truly call it a carcinogen. Then why isn’t curing loneliness a
cure for cancer. It may well be, but in a diﬀerent kind of
medicine than we now practice. An Ayurvedic physician is
more interes ted in the patient he sees before him than in
his disease. He recognizes that what makes up the person
is experience—sorrows, joys, ﬂeeting seconds of trauma,
long hours of nothing special at all. The minutes  of life
silently accumulate, and like grains of sand deposited by a
river, the minutes can eventually pile up into a hidden
formation that crops above the surface as a disease. The process of accumula tion is impossible to see or to
stop. I may sit in a traﬀic jam and think, “Well, nothing is
happening to me now,” but in fact I am taking in, or
ingesting, the world around me. My body is metabolizing
everything I see, hear, smell, and touch and turning it into
me, just as surely as it ingests my orange juice. The input that is turning  into me is constant, and by my
participation I shape it into ﬁnal form. Science will not be
able to measure this process, because it canno t put my
senses or my emotions on a scale. How much loneliness
does it take to turn into cancer. This is a meaningless
question. The carcinogen is invisible. I remember one night
when I stood in the emerg ency room of a suburban hospital
after attending to an overﬂow of patients. A late commuter
train had crashed, and with one other doctor I had to work
in a near frenzy seeing dozens of passengers who might be
in shock, bandaging their wounds, calming their nerves,
setting bones, and performing minor surgeries. Our job
seemed endless, but after ﬁve hours it was done, and we
felt like heroes. Then the ambulance radio came on again, and the driver
said, “We’re coming in with a two-month-old infant, female,
who is uncon scious. No signs of respiration or pulse, and
she’s turning blue. ” All at once I went cold, and I saw a
look of despair on the other doctor’s face. We knew what
was ahead of us. The ambulance unloaded its stretcher,
bearing a tiny infant who looked lost on the big, white
sheet. To put an endotracheal tube down her throat and
begin cardiac  massage was a horrible travesty, but we went
through with it. From the ﬁrst moment, we knew this must
be a “crib death,” which medicine calls sudden infant death
syndrome. It aﬀects seemingly norm al babies, there is no
known cause, and even the fastest emergency treatment is
usually of no avail. As soon as we decently could, we took away our
apparatus and closed the baby’s eyes. I went out to talk to
the parents, young and well-to-do, who were devastated. All
I could do was tell them about a support group of other
parents whos e children had died this way. They left, still in
shock, and I never saw them again. Who can measure what
happened to me. I don’t recall the face of a single victim
from the train wreck, people whose bodies I worked on for
hours. But the blond hair and blue eyes of the baby are as
vivid in my mind as the ﬁrst second I saw her. She has
entered into me. I do not know where she lives inside me—
is it really some bit of gray matter in my cortex. It would
seem ridiculous to look for the location. What is important
is that my whole being is made up of such expe riences. I
have metabo lized a hundred thousand such things every
day, and if you want to see them in detail, just look at me. As long as you are surrounded by the input of life, there
is no stopping the rush of events that makes me what I am. On the other hand, my nature may go deeper than the
things I see and hear. There may be a zero point in me, likethe point of zero vibration which gives rise to the entire
spectrum of light. If you stepped outsid e my thoughts, sense s, and
emotions, you would be left with the equivalent of empty
space. But like the empty space of quantum physics, my
“inner space” may not be empty at all. I woul d argue that
our inner space is a rich ﬁeld of silent intelligence, and that
it exerts a powerful inﬂuence on us. —
Intelligence is easily located and yet impossible to ﬁnd. The
body’s know-how seems to be the result of a complexity of
parts, broken down according to functions—digestion,
respiration, metabolism, and so on. Although this division
of labor is real enough, intelligence remains everywhere
the same despite it, just as a drop of sea water shares the
saltiness of the whole ocean. Sea water gives us a perfect
example, in fact. The ﬂuid in the body tastes as salty as the
ocean and is equally rich in magnesium, gold, and other
trace elements. Life began in the sea, and we are alive
outside it only because we carry an internal ocean around
with us. When you are thirsty and take a drink of water, you
are actually rebalancing the ﬂuid chemistry everywhere in
your inner ocean. The feeling of being thirsty is stimulated by the
hypothalamus, a piece of the brain about the size of a
ﬁnger joint, which in turn is connected by both nerves and
chemical messengers to the kidneys. The kidneys
constantly monitor the body’s need for water by “listening
in” to signals  from the blood. The signals are chemical, as
with the neuro-peptides, but in this case the molecules
involved are salts, prote ins, and blood sugar, as well as
speciﬁc messengers. The blood in turn is picking up these
signals from every cell in the body, each of which is
constantly monitoring its own need for water. In otherwords, when you want a drink of water, you are not just
obeying an impulse from your brain—you are listening to a
request from every cell in your body. If you drink one small glass of water, you will replace only
1⁄400 of your total bodily ﬂuid, yet that will satisfy the
precise needs of 50 trillion diﬀerent cells. Such exact
monitoring is often attrib uted to the kidneys alone, but as
we have just seen, the kidneys never make decisions alone;
they work in constant consultation with the quantum
mechanical body—the whole ﬁeld of intelligence. The
evenness of intelligence is not apparent from the physical
makeup of the cells; it coexists with the body’s extreme
specialization. The neuron, which is outﬁtted on its cell wall
with a million sodium-potassium pumps, is not at all like a
heart cell or stomach cell. Yet, the integrity of the message
“time for some water” is constant everywhere. In physics, a ﬁeld is what  propagates an inﬂuence over a
large, or even inﬁnite, expanse of space. A magnet creates
a magnetic ﬁeld around itself; small magnets have a weak
ﬁeld that extends a few inches, while the Earth’s magnetic
poles are powerful enough to cover the entire globe. Anything that falls within a ﬁeld feels its eﬀect; that is why
the magneti c needle of a compass automatical ly aligns
itself with the Earth’s magnetic polarity. Sitting in the
body’s ﬁeld of intelligence, each cell is aligned with the
brain, which stands as the north magnetic pole. A cell is a small outcropping in the ﬁeld, while the brain
is a huge one. But the cell, when it “talk s” to the rest of the
body, is not inferior to the brain in the quality of what it
says. Like the brain, it must correlate its message with
trillions of others; it must participate in thousands of
chemical exchanges every second; and most important of
all, its DNA is the equa l of any neuron’s. Therefore, the
smallest impulse of intelligence is as intelligent as the
largest. In fact, it is meaningless to speak of importantpieces of intelligence or insigniﬁcant ones. We need only to
remember the chain that builds dopamine; the inability to
turn the humble protein serine into the equally humble
metabolite called glycine leads to a minutely highe r level of
dopamine, with the catastrophic outcome of schiz ophrenia,
overwhelming the entire mind. Every cell is a little senti ent being. Sitting in the liver or
heart or kidney, it “knows” everything you know, but in its
own fashion. We are of course used to the idea that we are
smarter than our kidneys. The very concept of a “building
block” implies that the brick is simpler than the building. That is true of a nonliving structure, but not of us. The
nerve impulse for worry, for example, may show up in the
stomach as an ulcer, in the colon as a spasm, or in the mind
as an obsession, but they are various manifestations of the
same impulse. Worry transf orms itself from organ to organ,
yet each point in the body knows that there is worrying
going on, and every cell remembers. You may consciously
forget that you are worrying, but then all at once the
feeling is there to remind you, and it seems to be
everywhere. Earlier, we noted that if you could see the body as it
really is, you would see it as constant change mixed with
complete non-change. It is like a house whose  bricks are
constantly being replaced, or a sculpture that at the same
time is a river. The obstacle confronting medicine so far is
that one side of our nature—the ﬂowing and changing—has
been sacriﬁc ed for the sake of the other—the stable and
ﬁxed. Now, having looked at the quantum level, perhaps we
can package both into one unit that captures our real
double essence—the impulse of intelligence. An impulse of
intelligence is the smallest unit that preserves itself intact
(non-change) while undergoing transformation (change). If
impulses of intelligence did not have this one general
property, then they could not be the basic building block ofthe body; either some purely mental impulse or some
purely physical particle would have that distinction. But neither of these can survive change. The molecules
forming your brain on the day that you ﬁrst thought the
word rose are not there anymore, and yet the concept is. At
the same time, you do not have to think the word  rose all
the time to retain it; you can think literally millions of other
thoughts without ever referring to this word. The next time
you want it back, there  it is, without confusion. It has
retained its integrity through thick and thin because the
impulse of intelligence contains mind, matter, and the
silence that glues them together. The physical structure of the body mirrors intelligence
and gives it a projected form, but intelligenc e is not
trapped inside this framework of ﬂesh and bones. A
startling conﬁrmation of this fact appears in the brain. Karl
Lashley, a pioneer in neurophysiology, tried to discover
where memo ry was located in the brain by performing a
simple experiment with lab rats. He taught them to run a
maze, a skill that is reme mbered and stored in their brains,
just as we acquire skills. Then he systematically removed a
small amoun t of cerebral tissue. Lashley supposed that if
the rats still remembered how to run the maze (as
measured by their speed and accuracy), then the brain’s
memory center must still be intact. Little by little, he took out more brain matter, but the
rats, curiously enough, still remembered how to run the
maze. Finally, more than 90 percent of the entire cortex
was gone, leaving only a speck of brain tissue, and still the
rats rememb ered the maze, with a slight fall-oﬀ in accuracy
and speed. This experiment, among others, suggested a
revolutionary idea, that every cell of the brain must store
the whole brain while at the same time storing its own
speciﬁc task. This is exactly what we have found: everyimpulse of intelligence is equally intelligent, opening up
endless possible projections of mind into body. John Lorbe r, a British neurologist, specialized in
examining patients who were hydrocephalic—in place of
cerebral tissue, their brain cavities were ﬁlled with ﬂuid. Generally, this condition, popularly called “water on the
brain,” can be quite dangerous and lead to serious mental
impairment. However, one of Lorber’s patients was a gifted college
student, majo ring in mathematics, whose IQ was measured
near 130. Referred to Lorber by his family doctor, who
thought his patient had an enlarged head, the student was
given a brain scan, which  revealed that his cortex was only
1 millimeter thick, compared to the usual 4. 5 centimeters. In other words, ﬂuid had replaced about 98 percent of the
neurons needed for thinking, remembering, and all the
other higher functions centered in the cerebral cortex. With
2 percent of a normal cortex, this man was in the same
position as Lashley’s rats, physiologically, and yet inﬁnitely
more capable—he was in fact normal or above average in
all respects. —
We are being driven closer and closer to the silent ﬁeld of
intelligence as our fundamental reality. But once again,
there is the problem that a silent mind seems to contain
nothing at all. If we go back nearly a hundred years, a
similar dilemma was very much in the air. A new science
called psychology was trying to be born, but it was having a
hard time because to qualify as a science, psychology
needed an object to study. It was obviou s that every person
had a psych e, but no one had ever seen or touched one. The most basic questions about the psyche had remained
unsettled for centuries. Was it the soul, the mind, the
personality, or all three. No one was going to be able to setup the ﬁrst experiment in psychology until these matters
were settled. The turning point came when William James, a brilliant
philosopher at Harvard who also held a medical degree,
asserted that psychology did indeed have a proper  object to
study. Or rather, thousands of objects—all the though ts,
emotions, desires, and impressions that swirled through
the mind. James called these the “stream of
consciousness. ” If there was a mental essence or soul, as
pre-psychologists back to Plato had aﬀirmed, then science
could not ﬁnd it. James did not say that such an invisible
essence did not exist, but he saw no way to experiment
upon it scientiﬁcally. James defended the stream of consciousness on purely
pragmatic grounds, reasoning that nothing in the mind
could be considered tangible except the objects (thoughts)
that passed through it. If one is always thinking or
dreaming—no one knows what he does mentally in deep,
nondream sleep—then the reality of the mind must be
simply a continuous ﬂow of thoughts and dreams. James
was a very astute observer; he had to be when you consider
that he basically founde d the ﬁeld of psychology on the
data he saw in his own head (as Freud did, exten ding the
data into the ﬁeld of dreams and unconscious motives). But
James missed a tiny aspect of the mind that might have
seemed completely trivial. The stream of consciousness is
not made up solely of objects ﬂoating downriver; in
between every thought there is a ﬂeeting gap of silence. It may be very tiny and all but unnoticeable, but the gap
is always there and absolutely necessary. Without it, we
would be thinking like this:
“IlikethislunchanddessertbutiﬂeattoomuchohthereisSid
lneedtowhereismywallet…” and so on. The silent gap
between thoughts, being intangible, still plays no part in
modern psychology, which is oriented completely to themind’s conte nts or the brain’s mechanics. The gap turns
out to be the central player, however, if you are interested
in what lies beyond thought. Every fractio n of a second we
are permitte d a glimpse into another world, one that is
inside us and yet obscurely out of reach. A verse from  an
ancient India n Upanishad  describes this beautifully: “A man
is like two doves sitting in a cherry tree. One bird is eating
of the fruit while the other silently looks on. ” The bird who
is the silent witness stands for that deep silence in
everyone, which appears to be nothing at all when in
reality it is the origin of intelligence. The fascinating thing about intelligence is that it is like a
one-way arrow: you can use intelligence to shape a
molecule, but if you look at the molecule, you cannot take
the intelligence back out of it. When the poet Keats wrote
his beautiful sonnet “To Sleep,” he began with the haunting
line, “O soft embalmer of the still midnight. ” If he had been
hooked up to an EEG while he was writing, the readout of
brain waves would have formed a unique pattern, yet no
amount of examination of those brain waves could ever
yield a line of poetry. In the same way, all of our molecules are hitched up with
a bit of intelligence, which inﬂuences everything they do,
but you cann ot see it by looking at them. DNA provides a
good example. Sitting in the nucleus of each cell, DNA is
constantly bathed in a swirl of free-ﬂoating  organic
molecules, the basic building blocks of the material body. Whenever it wants to be active, DNA attracts these
chemicals and uses them to form new DNA. This is an
essential part of cell division—one double strand of DNA
must divide in half, splitting right down the middle like a
zipper, and then each half turns into new, complete DNA by
attracting the appropriat e molecules to itself. The bath of
swirling, aimless source molecules surrounding DNA
provides it with “letters” to combine—there are just four ofthem, labeled A, T, C, and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine,
and guanine. DNA spins these four letters out into an
inﬁnite variety of combinations, some of which are short (it
takes three letters to code a basic amino acid), others of
which are very long, like the poly-peptide chains that can
be seen streaming away from DNA like tendrils. The DNA knows exactly what information to pick out and
how it all goes together for each thing it wants to “say”
chemically. Besides building itself, DNA knows how to build
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, which is its nearly identical twin
and active counterpart. RNA’s mission is to travel away
from the DNA in order to produce the proteins, more than 2
million in number, that actually build and repair the body. RNA is like active knowledge, in comparison to DNA’s silent
intelligence. DNA does not work just from rote memory. It can invent
new chemicals at will (such as a new antibody after you
catch a strain of ﬂu you have never been exposed to
before). Exactly how this is accomplished is not known,
although molecular biologists have found the spacers that
separate diﬀerent genetic words, or genomes. It is also well
established that only 1 percent of the genetic material in
DNA is used for its complicated coding, self-repair, and
manufacture of RNA, leaving 99 percent doing nothing that
science can account for. This puzzling silence has stimulated a great deal of
curiosity, especially amon g people who believe that humans
do not use their full intelligence. William Jame s ventured to
guess that we use only 5 percent of our intellig ence—he
meant mental capacity—with an Einstein utilizing up to 15
percent or 20 percent. How this percentage translates into
usable DNA is unknown, but we can venture to say that
DNA is keeping a large vocabulary in silent storage—one
geneticist has calculated that the number of molecular
“words” produced in a single cell, if translated into English,would ﬁll a thousand-v olume library. And that is the
product of just the activ e 1 percent we have managed to
understand. Thanks to the discovery of recombinant DNA
(pieces of genetic materi al that can be shuﬄed in and out
of sequence on the DNA strands), the potential vocabulary
may be inﬁnitely larger than we suspect; already the
combinations of “letters” encoded on DNA are suﬀicient to
create every life form on Earth, from bacteria and molds to
all plants, insects, mammals, and people. One might suppose that the more complex the organism,
the greater its share of DNA, but in fact a lily contains
about a hundred times more DNA than a huma n being. Counting genes does not give very much of a meaningful
picture: the diﬀerence between man’s DNA and that of
chimpanzees or gorillas is about 1. 1 percent. This seems
like a surprisingly small divergence, and a highly
suspicious one. Can all the structural diﬀerences between a
jungle prima te and Homo sapiens, as well as our vastly
superior brains, be packed into such a tiny fractional
diﬀerence. Evolutionists, having inherited Darwin’s faith in
materialism, insist that it can. The issue is somewhat
blunted when you realize, once again, that a gene count is
not very signiﬁcant—two diﬀerent kinds of fruit ﬂies
(Drosophila ) are much more closely related than man and
chimpanzees, yet their DNA diﬀers by considerably more. Another way to show that our inner silence is alive and
intelligent is to compare it to a machine’s. When a
computer approaches a problem, it uses electrical  impulses
that must be separated from one another by gaps, forming
a complex series of coded  data out of 1 and 0. This enables
the computer to handle any problem that can be broken
down into information, since all information can be coded
into 1 and 0, just as any message in English can be broken
down into the dots and dashes of Morse code. The human
brain also takes advantage of mechanically codedinformation, but the gaps in between are not just empty;
they are the pivots that allow the mind to swing any way it
wants. In other words, a comput er has ﬁnite gaps made of
emptiness; we have inﬁnite gaps full of intelligence. We can pull anything out of the gap. Mozart pulled whole
symphonies at a time, not just note by note, but—as he
recounted the experience—with every orchestral line
already composed and orchestrated. Mathematics, like
music, has many such mysteries. A woman in India named
Shakuntala Devi multipli ed two 13-digit numbers  together
in her head, arriving at the 23-digit answer in 26 seconds. (It takes more time than that to read the numbers out loud:
7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 =
18,947,668,177,995,426,773,730. ) If you tell a computer to add 2 plus 2, it comes up with
either a right or a wrong answer. If you ask a 5-year-old boy
to do the same, he may come up with an arithmetical
answer, but he just as well might say, “I want some vanilla
ice cream. ” We can assume that he is bored; perhaps he is
too tired for an arithmetic lesson. So it is not correct to say
that his response is a computational error; his mind is
simply not under our control—you cannot come up with a
program to include all the possible reactions a human
being can display as he interacts with the world. What this all amounts to, in my mind, is a vindication of
how complex ordinary experience really is, and how far
away from life a scientiﬁc model is when it tries to describe
it. The old view that the brain is a computer, stable in time
and space, localized into various functions, and restricted
in its ﬂexib ility, is unjustiﬁed. A Nobel Prize–winning
neuroscientist, Dr. Gerald Edelman, has pointed out that
the brain is much more like a process than a thing, and this
process is continually evolving. It is true, for example, that
memory depends on two small pieces of “hardware” on
either side of the brain called the hippocampus ; if bothsites become damaged (through loss of blood ﬂow or
disease), the ability to recollect is destroyed. Yet, within this physical limitation, each person’s brain is
unique, both in structure and content. No two peop le have
the same neuronal connections, and each person is
constantly growing new ones from the moment of birth
onward, givin g rise to all the memories that make you and
me totally diﬀerent. (A connection does not have to be
physical; the ﬂashing signals in the brain are constantly
making patterns and reforming them into new patterns. ) Edelman holds that no one literally repeats a memory. When you recollect a familiar face, something will be
diﬀerent about it, if not the face itself, then the context that
caused you to remember, which may be sad now instead of
happy. Memory is a creative act, then. It creates new
images and new brain at the same time. Edelman theorizes
that every  experience one has in life changes the brain’s
anatomy. Therefore, it is not wholly true to say that the
hippocampus is the seat of memory, for any one memory—
the ﬁrst day you saw a ﬁeld of daﬀodils—sh ifts and
shimmers across your entire cortex, touching other
memories here and there, passing into new interpretations,
and having to be re-created every time you need to
recollect it. Unlike any computer, we remember, reconsider,
and change our minds. The universe was created  once, but
we re-create ourselves with every thought. —
Everything, in short, depends upon how well you can build
in silence. Whatever can be experie nced on the surface of
life—love or hate, disease or health—wells up from a
deeper level  and ﬂoats above it as little more than a
bubble. One can try to prick the bubbles one by one, but
they ﬂoat up from below unendingly. If we want to navigate
the ﬁeld of intelligence, we must learn about it to the verydepths, where the silent witness inside us waits. That is our
next step, to map the inner silence and master its secret
places. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
Only doctors are licensed to practice medicine, but
everyone practices Ayurveda, only not systematic ally. The
“science of life” pertains to everyday experiences of pain
and pleasure, likes and dislikes, comfort and discomfort. This goes back to a term  introduced at the end of the last
chapter, qualia. A qualia is any quality of experience. Consider pain, a qualia no one likes to experience. If you X-
ray the spine of any older person, there will be compression
in the resilient ﬁbrous disks that provide a cushion between
each vertebra. Yet only a certain percentage of older people
experience lower back pain. Obviously the ones who experience no pain shouldn’t be
treated medically. The patients who compla in of severe or
acute pain should be treated immediately, while most
people, who experience intermittent pain that goes away on
its own, fall somewhere in between. We should look at pain,
then, very personally. Ayurveda takes the perso nal approach to every situation. By consulting a person’s level of discomfort, the diagnosis
can be any of the following:
1. There is no imbalance. The person is healthy. 2. There are early signs of imbalance. The person needs
to make a lifestyle change to bring the system back
into balance. 3. The imbalance has reached the stage of exhibiting
physical symptoms. Medical intervention is called for. 4. The symptoms are so severe that chronic illness has
set in, with the possibility in extreme cases of
imminent death. Intense medical intervention is called
for. In the mid-1980s I was struck by how sensible and
natural this way of looking at disease was. It gave me a
prime motivation for writing Quantum Healing. Asking
people to possess medical school knowledge about their
bodies is unreasonable. Asking them  to be in touch with
their experience isn’t. How else can we live. Recently I heard about  a case where a man in his
seventies had a stiﬀ shoulder that over time became quite
painful. Suspecting the onset of arthritis, his doctor took X
rays, and indeed, the rotator cuﬀ had turned dry and pitted
because the slick membrane that keeps joints  moving
smoothly had worn down. The doctor explained that this
deterioration was irreversible and would only grow worse. He recommended immediate replacement, a procedure that
has become standard for millions of older people once a
shoulder, hip, or knee gives out. What if I go to physical therapy instead. his patient
asked. The doctor, who was an experienced orthopedist,
shrugged. Physical therapy would deliver some short-term
relief, but replacement surgery was a certainty down the
road, probably sooner than later. The man went for a second opinion, which concurred
with the ﬁrst. But something inside resisted the trauma of
major surgery, and he decided to pursue physical therapy. Today, seven years later, his pain remains intermittent. It
hasn’t grown worse, and the man himself feels  that his
shoulder is ﬂexible enough for normal tasks like driving. Since he hasn’t returned  to an orthopedist for regular X
rays, no one knows if the underlying arthritic condition hasworsened. But it doesn’ t matter right now. If the patient’s
quality of life hasn’t deteriorated, that’s the main thing. The fact that Ayurveda is based on personal experience
makes it something unique: a qualia medicine. To someone
just discovering Ayurveda, its diagnostic powers can seem
mysterious. The most basic diagnosis is body type, or more
speciﬁcally a person’s prakriti,  which determines the
fundamental qualia that have been dominant since birth. One of these is Vata, associated with air. If you meet
someone with prominent Vata, one glance will allow you to
say, “I imagine you have irregular habits. You often aren’t
hungry at mealtimes. You ﬁnd it hard to get regular sleep
and often wake up at night. Under stress  you become
anxious and nervous. But your disposition is cheerful, and
even though you suﬀer from inexplicable aches and pains
that come and go, your attitude toward them isn’t gloomy. ”
Not many people are such pure Vata types that this entire
description will apply, but when it does, they are frequently
amazed. (It should be emphas ized immediately that
Ayurvedic diagnosis consists of several procedu res, not
simply laying eyes on the patient. ) Searching for an
explanation in Western terms is often quite diﬀicult,
because the qualia that Ayurveda is based on sound totally
nonmedical. Besides Vata (air) there is Pitta (ﬁre), Kapha
(water and earth), and most mysterious of all, Akasha, or
space. The combination of these qualities leads to a highly
sophisticated system of diagnosis, because they interact
and go out of balance in hundreds of ways. A Western-trained physician is also dependent on qualia,
because treatment always begins with how a patient feels. But from there two paths diverge. Western allopathic
medicine searches for objective underlying causes with
scientiﬁc precision, essentially leaving qualia behind. Ayurveda continues on the road of qualia, seeking to bringthem back into balance. And here is where a needless
source of confusion and diﬀiculty arises. Being a “science of life,” Ayurveda prescribes a way of
life. Its advice about diet, for example, varies from person
to person, because a Vata type beneﬁts, for example, from
heavy, sweet, oily foods that are not necessarily good—and
may be bad—for other  types. Balance is dynamic. It
changes from day to day. Therefore, someone who has
grown up in an Ayurvedic lifestyle (which means growing
up in India before the modern era) will be constantly
monitoring their qualia. This is a form of self-care that
requires each person to know exactly how he or she feels
when going out of balance, long before symptoms arise. Hence the confusion, because modern people—including
modern Indians—go to the doctor when they feel bad, by
which time symptoms have already appeared. They are at
the second or third stage  of imbalance described above. At
this point, after years of ignoring the easily treatable signs
of imbalance, Ayurveda may be helpless compa red with
Western scientiﬁc medicine. It’s like bringing a car in for its
ﬁrst tune-up after 150,000 miles. When Quantum Healing  was written, I constantly
encountered skepticism from other physicians,
accompanied by hostile remarks like, “If I got into a car
accident, a bunch of herbs isn’t going to help me. ” Of
course not. Nobody said it would. Today one doesn’t meet
as much skepticism, yet it’s clear that qualia medicine, the
kind based on personal quality of life, cannot simply be a
replay of Ayurveda. Knowledge evolves, and we ﬁnd
ourselves equipped with knowledge from science and
knowledge from centuries of human experience. They don’t have to oppose each other. In the expanding
ﬁeld of integrated medicine, the doctor utilizes both. For
example, the majority of patients seek a doctor’s care
because they suﬀer from a cold, headaches, insomnia, oranxiety and depression. These are endemic, usually low-
level side eﬀects of modern life itself. They also happen to
be Vata disorders. If the doctor  knows this, he has more
tools at his disposal to cure the most common ills. But that
won’t rule out the usual pills, if that’s what he and the
patient prefer. Such a preference shouldn’t come from blind allegiance
to science or a rigid belie f that one size ﬁts all. The whole
point of integrated medicine isn’t to ﬁnd alternatives to
standard medical practice just for the sake of doing so. The
point is to personalize medical care based on the patient’s
quality of life. It’s frustrating that every medical school
student isn’t taught this principle on the ﬁrst day of class. Quantum Healing  set out a workable theory of Ayurveda
for the Western mind. Realizing that readers would ask,
“But what do I do. ” I wrote a practical hand book on the
Ayurvedic lifestyle called  Perfect Health. The title wasn’t
meant to be hyperbole. Every healthy cell exists in perfect
health. It’s our personal choices over a long period of time
that create the imbalances that eventually start to damage
our cells. Therefore, positing perfe ct health as a starting
point is medically sound. As things stand today, I practice integrated medicine
solidly established on Ayurveda and the Ayurvedic lifestyle. I realize, with a touch of chagrin, that my being Indian
makes the medicine go down more easily for my patients. This bias has led me to talk much less about Ayurveda and
much more about qualia. For the average person, Ayurveda
is a narrow, exotic, specialized interest. But everyone is
interested in their quality of life. Self-care based on qualia
provides the best results, because it makes the whole
project intimate and personal. The fact that thousands of
years of wisdom lies in the background is just one more
reason to pursue optimal wellbeing. OceanofPDF. comRecently I saw a patient who had been diagnosed in 1983
with a malignant tumor in her right breast. For reasons of
her own, she had refused any form of conventional
treatment, including radiation, chemotherapy, and
hormones. She told me that the tumor was quite large but
had not spread to any lymph nodes under her arm. “I think I’d better examine it,” I said, and she hesitated. “I should warn you,” she said, “that most doctors are very
frightened when they see this, because of its size. I
generally don’t even let a doctor touch me, because the
fear in their eyes makes me scared. On my own I’m not
scared. You may not believe this, but I have never felt that I
was in any danger. I can be shaken, though, when I see a
doctor’s fear. They even say things like, ‘How dare you be
so cruel to your husband by not having surgery. ’
“I thought that maybe a woman doctor would be more
understanding, but when I went to one, she was more
horriﬁed than the rest. She asked me, ‘Why did you come
to see me if you aren’t going to let me remove that thing. ’
And I said, ‘Because I just want you to monitor it—it hasgrown slightly in the past ﬁve years, and I want it followed. Almost shaking, she stood up and told me, ‘Don’t come
back to see me unless you want that thing removed. I can’t
stand the sight of it. ’  ”
I had no idea what my reaction would be. About half of
the women diagnosed with breast cancer have localized
tumors conﬁ ned to the breast. The standard treatment has
been either to remove the breast or to remove the lump
and radiate the site to kill any remaining cancer  cells. In
both cases, when there is no further follow-up treatment,
70 percent of patients do not have a recurrence in the next
three years. With some sort of chemotherapy, ranging from
mild to quite heavy, the proportion of long-term survivors
can be raised to 90 percent. This woman had decided to
defy odds that were very much in the patient’s favor—and
yet she would not be the ﬁrst to ignore doctors and survive. When she lay on the examining table and I saw the tumor,
I understood why her previous doctors had been shocked—
it distended a large portion of her breast. I controlled my
automatic reaction, and I hope no fear showed in my eyes. I
sat down and held her hand, thinking. “Look,” I said softly,
“I don’t believe you are in danger here. You have said that
you don’t feel any danger, and that is good enoug h for me. But this tumor is a nuisance. You are denying yourself a
more beautiful life by having to look after this. Why not go
to a surgeon and have the nuisance removed. ”
Apparently this struck her as an entirely new angle. She
readily agreed that there  was no advantage to keeping the
tumor, and I referred her to a sympathetic surgeon. One of her parting comments stays with me. “I don’t
identify myself with this tumor,” she said serenely, “I know
I am much more than it. It will come and go like the rest of
me, but inside, I am not really touched by it. ” When she left
the oﬀice, she looked extremely happy. I felt that this woman had reason on her side. The fear in
a docto r’s eyes is a terrib le stroke of condemnation, and in
her position I would not have believed much in my chances
of recovery. The impulses from my brain would not be
saying, “I’m deﬁnitely going to recover. ” Instead, they
would be saying, “They tell me I’ll probably recover,” which
is quite a diﬀerent thing. When a doctor looks at a patient and says, “You have
breast cancer, but you’r e going to get well,” what is he
really saying. The answer is by no means certain. At one
extreme, his reassuring words, if they are believable, may
be enough to make the diﬀerence in the patient’s case. At
the other extreme, if he actually thinks the patient is
doomed, something in his voice will give that message, and
from it a destructive confusion may set in. Recently the term placebo  was inverted into a new term,
nocebo,  to describe the negative eﬀects of a doctor’s
opinion. With placebo, you give a dummy drug and the
patient respo nds because  the doctor has told him that the
drug will work. With nocebo, you give a viable drug, but the
patient doesn’t respond, because the doctor has signaled
that the drug isn’t going to work. If you take a completely materialistic view, there seems
no diﬀerenc e between the surgery this woman  refused
before and the one she agreed to now. Yet, now she
identiﬁes surgery with healing, whereas before it was
violence. If a patient regards any treatment as violence,
then his body will be ﬂooded with negative emotions and
the chemicals associated with them. It is well documented
that in a climate of negativity, the ability to heal is greatly
reduced—depressed peop le not only lower their immune
response, for example, but even weaken their DNA’s ability
to repair itself. So my patient had reasonable cause, I think,
to wait until her emotions told her to go ahead. —
This case reminds me that there are always two centers of
action within people, the head and the heart. Medical
statistics appeal to the head, but the heart keeps its own
counsel. In recent years, alternative medicine has won
much of its appeal on the basis of bringing back the heart,
using love and caring to heal. Without these ingredients,
the nocebo eﬀect can run wild, for the surroundings of
modern hospitals inject a powerful dose of it. The psychotic
episodes that sometimes strike out of the blue in intensive
care units show how unhealthy it is to hold people in
sterile, conﬁ ned spaces. (As a young child, my son showed
an almost equal fascina tion with hospitals and prisons,
which I trace to a fear he could not express. If he saw
either institution from the car, he would invariably ask,
“Daddy, are people dying in there. ”)
The great drawback of proclaiming that we need to bring
the heart back into medi cine is that it punishes people for
their emotional weaknesses. The heart can be very frail; it
can be hardened by suﬀering, or just by life. Books on
holistic healing like to say that sick people “need” their
sickness. Mainstream psychiatry points its own ﬁnger when
it says that chronic diseases can stand symbolically for self-
punishment, revenge, or a deep feeling of worthlessness. I
will not argue these insights, except to suggest that they
may be harmful to the healing process rather than helpful. It is hard enough for any of us to face up to our emotional
fallibility even at the best of times. Can we really be
expected to reform when we are ill. The deeper issue is that anything  can function as a
nocebo, just as anything can function as a placebo. It is not
the dummy drug, the doctor’s bedside manner, or the
antiseptic smell of a hospital that does harm or good; it is
the patient’s  interpretation of it. Therefore, the real war isnot between the head and the heart. Something deeper, in
the realm of silence, creates our view of reality. The basic understanding most of us have about ourselves
comes from thinking and feeling, which seems only natural. But we know  very little about the ﬁeld of silence and how it
exercises control over us. The head and the heart, it seems,
are not the whole perso n. The stream of consciousness,
which is constantly full of thoughts, acts as a screen to
keep silence hidden. The solid appearance of the physical
body is another kind of screen, since we cannot see the
molecules that are being constantly shuﬄed around inside
us, much less their blueprint, which is what we would like
to change. The blueprint of reality is an important concept. Every
impulse of intelligence gives rise to a thought or a
molecule, which spends a certain time in the relative world
—the world of the senses—before the next impulse follows. In that sense, every thought is like a piece of the future
when it is created, a piece of the present when it is
experienced, and a piece of the past after it has gone. As
long as each impulse is healthy, the future is not unknown—
it will ﬂow naturally from the present, moment by moment. (This accounts for why people who make the most of every
day tend to retain their mental faculties intact into old age;
the stream of intelligence is never allowed to dry up. ) Above the line is a ﬂow of thoughts that never ends, at
least while we are awake. Thought is linked to thought
without end. Our normal experience keeps within this
range of ongoing events, which may be inﬁnite on the
horizontal axis yet quite shallow on the vertical. It is
possible to spend a lifetime listening to the inventory of the
mind without ever dippin g into its source. Yet, touching the
source is how the mind creates its patterns of intelligence. These patterns are at ﬁrst only blueprints, but whatever
they inscribe  will hold—they will form our ideas and beliefs
about reality. The ﬁeld of intelligence is extremely sensitive to change,
however, both for good and ill. Two years ago I saw a
woman in her thirties who came to Lancaster to be treated
for breast cancer. Her condition was extremely serious,
since the malignancy had metastasized to the bone marrow
everywhere in her body. She suﬀered from consta nt pain in
her bones as a result. After receiving the norma l, and quite
drastic, courses of radiation and chemotherapy from her
doctor at home in Denver, she came to Boston for A yurvedic
treatments. She responded very well. After spending a
week as an inpatient, her bone pain disappeared. She was
not oﬀered any promises about her cancer, but she went
home in a state of renewed hope and optimism. Unfortunately, when she reported to her doctor that she
had improve d, he told her that it was all in her head—she
had received no orthodox therapy that could have relieved
her symptoms. Within a day her bone pain returned. She
called me, feeling panick y, and I asked if she could return
to Boston immediately. She did, and fortunately after
another week her bone pain again receded. Without intending to harm his patient—I am sure he
wanted to be realistic in his appraisal—this woman’s doctor
made a cruel mistake. He assumed that what is “in your
head” is not real, or at least very inferior to the reality ofcancer. Being trained in scientiﬁc methods, he knew the
predictable outcomes of various kinds of malignancy, and
when he saw an unexpec ted result, he tried to push it back
into the range of the predictable. Doctors push patients
into predictable results all the time, because medical-
school training is focused entirely on the horizontal axis. Making the links of cause  and eﬀect tighter and tighter is
the whole motivation behind medical research. Our great-
grandfathers vaguely knew that germs existed; we can
anatomize thousands of speciﬁc viruses and bacteria, down
to the tiniest amino-acid groups and beyond. Unfortunately,
this leaves very little opening for any journey along the
vertical axis, which might take one to a deeper reality. A recent patient listed on his medical questionnaire that
he “once had a brain tumor. ” I asked him what that meant,
and he told me this story: About ﬁve years ago, while living
in Michigan, he began to have sudden dizzy spells. These
quickly grew  worse, and in a few weeks he was vomiting
and had double vision, with increasing loss of balance and
motor coordination. He went to a hospital, where a CAT
scan was taken of his brain. The doctors informed him that
the test had disclosed a shadowy mass in his forebrain
larger than a lemon; in their opinion, he had a brain tumor. A tissue sample taken from the tumor revealed that indeed
it was a deadly, rapidly growing cancer. Because the tumor was so large and delicately placed, it
was considered inoperable. The doctors recommended high
doses of radiation and chemotherapy, without which the
man would be dead in six months. The therapy would have
severe side eﬀects, nearly as bad as his present symptoms. Certain of these, such as nausea, headaches, and skin
irritation, would be uncomfortable; others, such as the
weakening of his immune system, could be deadly, since he
would become prone to contracting other types of cancer in
the future. There was also the deﬁn ite possibility that hewould be prey to anxiety  and depression, which could be
lasting. Even with maximum treatment to shrink the tumo r,
the prognosis for full recovery was not good, but it was
better than nothing. The patient could not accept this reasoning (althou gh it is
statistically quite sound). He moved to California and joined
a meditation group; he practiced a whole series  of diets,
mental techniques, exercises, and visualizati ons. He
encouraged in himself a totally positive attitude toward his
condition. Thousands of cancer patients, as a rule from the
best-educated groups, turn to such measures, which
conventional medicine looks on as trying to buy false hope. In this case, however, the man began to feel better, and
within six months his symptoms were almost completely
gone. Hopeful but also anxious, he returned to Michigan
and underwent another CAT scan. This one showed no
traces of cancer and no sign that any had ever been
present. In response to this, his doctors informed him that he had
not recovered from cancer, because they had never heard
of such a recovery. In fact, they said, the original CAT scan
was not his but another patient’s. They were sorry for the
mistake, but from that moment on, they disavowed any
involvement with his case. The patient was immen sely
relieved that his symptoms were gone, and he believes in
the original CAT scan, which has his name and Social
Security number on it. When I contacted the hospital to ask
for his records, I was informed that he had never been
treated there for cancer but had been mixed up with
another brain-tumor patient. All I can assume is that even with X rays and a biopsy,
these doctors could not accept that a remission had
occurred, for the simple reason that their experience told
them it was impossible. One should never underestimate
the power of indoctrination. Medical training is highlytechnical, specialized, and rigorous, but it came about just
like any other human activity—by people collecting
experiences and using those experiences to form
explanations and patterns. These patterns in turn serve to
indoctrinate the pattern makers, and within a very short
period of time the indoctrination becomes law. It is fascina ting that a major study of four hundred
spontaneous remissions of cancer, later interpreted by
Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic, found that
all the patients had only one thing in common—every
person had changed his attitudes before the remission
occurred, ﬁnding some way to become hopeful,
courageous, and positive. In other words, they broke down
their indoctrination (even if the doctors did not break down
theirs). The mystery that clouds this otherwise clear ﬁndin g
has to do with causation. Did the remissions occur because
of the new attitudes or parallel to them. Perhaps causation
is too delicate to pinpoint in this case, being repla ced by a
general, holis tic process of getting well in mind and body at
the same time. The mind-body system, about to throw oﬀ
the cancer, should know that the process is under  way and
may begin to generate much more positive thoughts
simultaneously. However it works, the key seems to be spontaneity. Channeling positive attitudes into oneself as a planned
therapy has proved only haphazardly successful as a means
of ﬁghting disease. The positive input does not tend to go
very deep. Consciousness is more pervasive than medicine
gives it credit for. Even when it is ignored, however, the
silent ﬁeld of intelligence knows what is happening. It is,
after all, intelligent. Its knowledge reaches beyond buﬀers
and screens, going farther than we expect. To illustrate: for decades, surgeons safely assum ed that
an anesthetized patient was unconscious and therefore not
inﬂuenced by what happened in the operating room. Thenit was discovered (by hypnotizing postoperative patients)
that in fact the “unconscious” mind heard every word that
was uttered during the procedure. When the surgeons said
aloud that a condition was more serious than they had
thought or had little chance of cure, the patients tended to
play out those gloomy predictions by not recovering. As a
result of these ﬁndings, which validate the idea of nocebo,
it is now standard practi ce not to make negative remarks
during surgery. The more positive the surgeon’s expressed
opinions, in fact, the more positive the outcom e for the
patient. It would be even bette r to use this highly sensitive,
extremely powerful intell igence for the patient’s cure. The
point of diving into the region of the quantum body is to
change the blueprint itself, rather than to wait for
symptoms on the surfa ce, which will then have to be
manipulated using medicine. The case of the woman with
bone pain is a reminder that the buﬀer that keeps us so
securely above the line, away from our deeper selves, is
always made by us. It is therefore subject to revision at any
time. We constantly build patterns of intelligence and look
through them to tell us what is real. If we see pain, there is
pain, but if we don’t, the pain will be gone. Nature did not make us ignorant of our deeper selves. Anesthetized patients have known what was going on all
along, presum ably since the beginnings of modern  surgery
in the 1850s. The silent ﬁeld of intelligence is out of reach
by our choice, reinforced through generations of cultural
bias. Sometimes a new reality forces itself to be
recognized, and then things can shift. New patterns of
intelligence arise; a deep transformation can then take
place, but it is not essentially diﬀerent from the mind-body
transformations we have already been talking about. Normal reality is like a spell—a very necessary one, since
we must live by habits, routines, and codes that we take forgranted. The problem arises when you can make the spell
but not break it. If you could dive, this very minute, below
your everyday reality to its source, you would certainly
have a remarkable experience. The psychologist Abraham
Maslow, who was a pioneer in studying the positive aspects
of the human personality, gave a classic description of the
experience of the deep self: “These moments were of pure,
positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all
inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses, were left behind. Now self-consciousness was lost. All separateness and
distance from the world disappeared…. ”
Although such experiences are rare—Maslow termed
them “peak experiences ” for that reason—they have a
curative power that goes far beyond their brief duration,
which may be a few days or just a few hours. Maslow
records that two of his patients, one a long-term depressive
who had often considere d suicide, the other a person who
suﬀered from severe anxiety attacks, were both
immediately and permanently cured after spontaneously
falling into such experiences (for each it happened only
once). Maslow also talks about the reconciliation with life that
people have realized through these moments: “They felt
one with the world, fused with it, really belonging to it
instead of being outside looking in. (One subject said, for
instance, ‘I felt like a member of a family, not like an
orphan. ’)”
Any sudden  revelation of a deeper reality carries
enormous power with it—one taste alone can make life
undeniably worthwhile. Maslow’s patients recognized this
inner power as something quite outside the ordinary. It is
not energy or strength, genius or insight, but it underlies
all of these. It is life power in its purest form. Maslow’s
understanding stopped short at the critical moment—he
was never able actually to give anyone a peak experience—yet he was fascinated by these events that transcend
normal life. In 1961, after several decades of writing and
thinking about the subject, he concluded that it was indeed
normal life and not the mystical that he had been
observing:
“The little that I had ever read about mystic experiences
tied them in with religion, with visions of the supe rnatural. And, like most scientists,  I had sniﬀed at them in disbelief
and considered it all nonsense, maybe hallucinations,
maybe hysteria—almost surely pathological. But the people
telling me about these experiences were not such people—
they were the healthiest people. ”
Because he detected these experiences in fewer than 1
percent of the population, Maslow viewed them as
accidents or as moments of grace. I believe that they were
glimpses into a ﬁeld that underlies everyone’s life, but
which has remained elusive. The implication is that we
should dive very deep if we want to transcend normal
reality. We are in search of an experience that will reshap e
the world. —
Finding the silent gap that ﬂashes in between our thoughts
seems relatively easy, but because it ﬂashes by, a tiny gap
is not a doorway. The quantum  body is not separate from us
—it is us—ye t we are not experiencing it right now. Sitting
here, we are thinking, reading, talking, breathing,
digesting, and so on, all of which happens above the line. Here is an analogy that brings the quantum mechanical
body into focus: Take a bar magnet and place a piece of
paper over it. Next, sprinkle iron ﬁlings on the paper and
jostle it slightly. What will emerge is a pattern of curving
lines, one inside the other, that arch from the magnet’s
north to south pole and back again. The overall design youhave made represents a map of the magnetic lines of force
that otherwise would be invisible, except that the iron
particles automatically align themselves to bring  out the
image. In this analo gy, we see all mind-body activity above the
paper and the hidden ﬁeld of intelligence below. The iron
ﬁlings movin g around are mind-body activity, automatically
aligning with the magnetic ﬁeld, which is intelligence. The
ﬁeld is completely invisible and unknowable until it shows
its hand by moving some bits of matter around. And the
piece of paper. It is the quantum mecha nical body, a thin
screen that shows exactly what patterns of intelligence are
being manifested at the moment. There is more to this simple comparison than you might
at ﬁrst suppose. Without the paper to separate the two, the
magnet and the iron could not interact in any orderly way. Try bringing a magnet close to some iron ﬁlings. Instead of
forming regularly spaced lines, the ﬁlings simp ly clump
shapelessly onto the magnet’s surface. With the paper in
place, not only do you have an image of the magnetic ﬁeld,
but if you rotate the magnet you can watch the iron ﬁlings
move to mirror the new ﬁeld that has been created. If you
didn’t know that there was a magnet, you would swear that
the iron was alive, becaus e it seems to move by itself. But it
is really the hidden ﬁeld that is generating these lifelike
appearances. There you have a true picture of how the bodymind
actually relates to the ﬁeld of intelligence. The two remain
separated, but the division is invisible and has no thickness
whatever. It is just a gap. The only way one knows that the
quantum level even exists is that images and patterns keep
cropping up everywhere  in the body. Mysterious furrows
run across the surface of the brain; beautiful swirls, exactly
like the center of a sunﬂower, show up in molecules of
DNA; the inside of the femur contains marvelous  webs ofbone tissue, like the intricate supports of a cantilever
bridge. Wherever you look, there is no chaos, and that is the
strongest proof of all that there really is a hidden
physiology. Intelligence turns chaos into patterns. There is
incredible chaos implied in the idea of having to process
billions of chemical messages every minute, yet in reality,
the complexity of the mind-body system is misleading: what
emerges from our brains are coherent images, just as a
coherent newspaper photograph emerges from thousands
of scattered dots. The matter in our bodies never
disintegrates into a shapeless, mindless pile—until the
moment of death. In answer to the obvio us question,
“Where is this quantum mechanical body, anyway. ” one
can now conﬁdently answer that it lies in a gap that
unfortunately is rather diﬀicult to picture, since it is silent,
has no thickness, and exists everywhere. To dive into the ﬁeld of intelligence appears easy now: it
requires only a trip across a gap. But even though the gap
has no thickness, it forms a barrier no steel door could
possibly match. We can simplify our diagram to show what
has happened to make the journey so diﬀicult:
—The whole story is contained in the diﬀerence between
active and silent intelligence. We have conﬁrmed that this
diﬀerence is very real. DNA can be active or silent; our
thoughts can be express ed or stored away in drawers of
silence; we can be awake or asleep. All these changes
require a journey acros s the gap, but not a conscious
journey. To see what sleep is like, you would have to stay
awake, which is impossible. If you want to see the
diﬀerence between activ e and dormant DNA, you cannot
ﬁnd it in any chemical bond, since the two DNAs are
physically identical. And so on and on for all the
transformations of mind and body. The same diﬀiculty holds  true in physics—a photon is a
form of light, as is a light wave, but both arise from a
hidden ﬁeld. On the surface of reality we see either photons
or light waves, but the reason why both can exist in one
reality is that they preexist as mere possibilitie s in the
quantum ﬁeld. Who has ever photograp hed a possibility. Yet, that is all the quantum world is made of. If you say a
word or make a molecule, you have chosen to act. A little
wave laps up from the ocean’s surface, becoming an
incident in the space-time  world. The whole ocean remains
behind, a vast, silent reservoir of possibilities, of waves that
have yet to be born. As they dance around on the paper, the iron ﬁlings might
look at one another and say, “Well, this is life, let’s look into
its mysteries. ” Deciding to do that, they can begin a
thought-adventure of the kind we call science. No matter
how adventurous their thoughts become, they will never
cross the gap. The gap is a one-way door, as far as thinking
goes, and that is its true mystery. From a certain perspecti ve, the whole idea that we are
outcroppings from an invisible, inﬁnite ﬁeld seems
ridiculous. A man’s body is a pack et of ﬂesh and bones
occupying a few cubic feet of space; his mind is anamazingly intricate but ﬁnite mechanism ﬁlled with a set
number of conceptions; his society is a grossly imperfect
organization bound to a history of ignorance and conﬂict. These obvious facts have never settled the issue,
strangely enough. We trust our ﬁnite everyd ay experiences,
which are good enough for driving a car, earning a living,
and going to the beach, but they are not quite convincing
enough compared to the overwhelming experien ce of the
inﬁnite. That experience, repeated throughout the
centuries, causes some people to suspect that reality is
very diﬀeren t, and far vaster, than what the mind, the body,
and society generally accept. Einstein himself experienced this reality. He has testiﬁed
to moments when “one feels free from one’s own
identiﬁcation with human limitation”:
“At such moments one imagines that one stands on some
spot of a small planet gazing in amazement at the cold and
yet profoun dly moving  beauty of the eternal, the
unfathomable. Life and death ﬂow into one, and there is
neither evolution nor destiny, only Being. ”
Although this sounds like a spiritual insight (and Einstein
considered himself deeply spiritual), it is really a glimpse
into a level of our own consciousness that can be mapped
and explored. Without having any control over their
awareness or any cogent explanation for what is
happening, people sense that the state of rapt silen ce is not
simply emptiness. The great traditions of wisdom have
largely been founded by one or a few individuals who
realized the universe through themselves. To solve the
mystery of the gap, we need to consult the ones who have
been there; if they have found a real world, then there will
be new Einsteins to follow, and they will be Einsteins of
consciousness. EXPANDING THE TOPIC
The wisdom of the body comes from two places—active
intelligence and silent intelligence. Self-care is an example
of active intelligence. You listen to your body. You heed its
signals of pain and discom fort. You take steps to maintai n a
state of wellbeing. Active intelligence stretches no one’s
imagination. Silent intelligence is diﬀerent, because being
invisible, it can only be located in the gap. Yet of the two
kinds of intelligence, the kind that works in silence is
inﬁnitely wiser. When Quantum Healing  ﬁrst appea red, it was almost
impossible to get mainstream doctors even to entertain
such a notion as “the wisdom of the body. ” I found refuge in
the mystica l poets, who became almost constant
companions. They knew about the hidden dimensions of
existence. Here is a verse from Rumi, the illuminated
Persian poet:
What do I long for. Something that is felt in the night
But not seen in the day. In a rational age, poetic intimations aren’t enough. Yet
poets can think, too, as when Rabindranath Tagore, the
great Bengali poet, contemplates how a full-blown rose
opens from a bud. He sees at work the same silent
intelligence I was describing in the human body. He who can open a bud does it simply
One glance, and the sap must stir,
One breath, and a ﬂower ﬂutters in the wind,
Colors ﬂash out like longings of the heart,And perfume betrays sweet secrets. He who can open a bud does it simply. Who could put it more beautifully. Instead of saying “He
who can open a bud,” why not “She who can bring a child
into the world”. Silent intelligence is simple, spontaneous,
and a part of us. As it turned out, I was lucky to be writing when I was. Section summary: 

(Note: Please summarize the passage focusing specifically on highlighting essential concepts, omitting repetitive language)

**Section Summary**

In contrast to traditional scientific views, the author argues against identifying singular "causes" responsible for illnesses due to numerous influences affecting daily life's accumulation impact. Medicine seeks answers via laboratory tests/measurements/scaling, failing to capture subjective phenomena. Modern neuroscience reveals flaws inherent in separating'stable' vs. 'dynamic'. Cells & neurons communicate simultaneously; thus, individual differences persist (". if I walk barefoot"). Complex interactions require holistic comprehension

There is **NO WAY TO MEASURE OR EXPLAIN**, emphasizing intuition/intuition-based solutions versus empiricism-driven conclusions. (For clarity purposes):

* Unravel contradictions regarding quantifiable relationships amongst organs/cellular responses - understand fluid communication amidst cellular networks. • Analyzing solitary factors contributes minimal progress towards solving problems. Moreover, acknowledging existence/silience beneath external stimuli resonates harmonously


Key Points summarized:


    * Emphasises importance exploring complexities involving interconnected actions/influencers impacting behavior/human physiology  
     Exemplifies contrasting perspectives  



Please ensure accurate summarizations maintaining concise specificity. Additionally incorporate repetition reduction strategies. Final output:



References. Source: [https://www. oceanspdf. com](http://oceans. pdf)


P. S. , please adjust formatting accordingly.
The author believes that the traditional notion of cause and effect breaks down at a certain point, and that it is impossible to find a single cause for a patient's illness.
What is the author's perspective on the concept of cause and effect in medicine?