Our main focus was simply to detoxify Walter. In the
normal cours e of things, he would have passed through the
revolving door and back out onto the street. But while he
was staying in the hospital I began visiting with him. It was
clear that he was an exceptional person. Despite his
desperation, he did not seem eaten up by inner violence,
and he was courageously willing to ﬁght his habit. Walter
made friends with me. He also made quick progressmedically , and a year after detox he was still holding a
steady job and talking eagerly about the norma l life he
longed for and loved. Then a strange incident occurred. One day Walter’s car
broke down, forcing him to take the subway to work, which
he hadn’t done in several months. He got on the train to
Dorchester , an old, clattery line with screeching rails. He
hated the noise and couldn’t manage to ignore it. The fan
was broken, and it was July. Within a few minutes of being
shut up in the hot, stiﬂing compartment, he found  the train
intolerable. He went from feeling uneasy to agitated to
extremely agitated, and by the time he got oﬀ he was in a
completely wild, irrational state. Nothing he could do
would make his agitation go away . By the time I saw him,
two days later, Walter was completely hooked on heroin
again, and this time he had hardly any will to recover . What happen ed to this man? A chem ical explanation for
the train incident is not suﬀicient. I keep thinking of him
wearing his pinstriped business suit, conﬁdently outﬁtted
for a new life, but then having to step onto the same train
that he had ridden when he was troubled and addicted. In
some treacherous turn of memory lane, the past came
back, and with it came his craving. Where did the craving
hide out for a year before it returned? In some way that
medicine is just beginnin g to unravel, a cell’s memory is
able to outlive the cell itself . At any point in the bodymind, two things come together—
a bit of information and a bit of matter . Of the two, the
information has a longer life span than the solid matter it is
matched with. As the atoms  of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen,
and nitrogen swirl through our DNA, like birds of passage
that alight only to migra te on, the bit of matter changes,
yet there is always a structure waiting for the next atoms. In fact, DNA never budges so much as a thousandth of a
millimeter in its precise structure, because the genomes—the bits of information in DNA—remember where
everything goes, all 3 billion of them. This fact makes us
realize that memory must be more permanent than matter . What is a cell, then? It is a memo ry that has built some
matter around itself , forming a speciﬁc pattern. Your body
is just the place your memory calls home. This conclus ion is diﬀicult to argue with, in light of all
that we now know about forms of chemical intellig ence, but
medicine stubbornly resists these implicatio ns. For
instance, it is generally believed that people who are
addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs have a “chemical
addiction,” meaning that their cells are hooked on nicotine,
alcohol, heroin, et cetera. But if you look at the level of the
body’s chemistry , you ﬁnd that heroin or nicotine ﬁts into
the same receptors on the cell walls that everyone has. An
addict does not have receptors that exhibit abnormal
cravings. By analogy , a fat man’s stomach lining isn’t addicted to
food—it just accepts what is given to it. The truth seems to
be that the cell’s memory for the addictive substance is
what is hooked, and it keeps creating distorted cells that
reﬂect its weakness. In other words, an addiction is a
distorted memory . It is just our material bias that keeps
looking to the cell. (These pernicious memories may be
inherited, since addiction runs in families, but even if there
is a speciﬁc “addiction gene,” one is forced to consider the
nonmaterial conditions that caused the DNA to express the
gene. Your ears are formed because a gene encodes them,
but the reason the ear was developed in the ﬁrst place,
millions of years ago, was certainly nonmaterial—some
organism started to respond to sound.) If you take an addict, detoxify his body, and keep him
away from alcohol or drugs for several years, all the old
cells that used to be “chemically addicted” are totally gone. Yet the memory persists , and if you give it a chance, thememory will latch onto the addictive substance once again. A good friend of mine, a cardiologist from Colombia, gave
up smoking ﬁfteen years ago. This spring he went back
home and happened to go to a movie, a rare event in his
life. He is an extraordinarily busy man, even for a heart
doctor , and had not seen a movie since he could remember . There was an intermission in this particular show , and
when he walked into the lobby he was seized by an almost
uncontrollable urge to smoke. “You see, when I was a teenager in Bogotá,” he told me,
“we used to smoke in the lobby between movies. All I did
was step back into that scene, and the urge to smoke came
back in a ﬂash. I found myself in front of the cigarette
machine fumbling for change, and only by clutching myself
inside and repeating, ‘This is crazy , you’re a cardiologist,’
was I able to resist.” Even so, he had to rush out of the
theater and now wonders ruefully how the movie ended. What makes any addiction so frightening is that the
brain’s receptors are always willing to cooperate with the
mind’s instructions. Think back to the stress reaction
where a car backﬁres and adrenaline is released into your
bloodstream. We noted that as part of the overall reaction,
the stomach and intestines stop digesting food. As long as
the stress reaction is temporary , this is a completely normal
and correct thing for the body to do, and it happens
automatically . However , if you choose to stay in an environment where
there is constant stress, the time must come when your
body wants to return to digesting food. Then a deep conﬂict
will arise, because the stress reaction will still be saying
“no” to the stomach while another part of the brain
(probably the hypothalamus) is saying “yes.” The resulting
turmoil ties the stomach in knots and churns up the
intestines. These organs  begin to lose their natural rhythm,
and if you do not give them a chance to return to it, theywill become victims of wrong memory , just as surely as an
addict does. The stomach  will start pouring out gastric
juice at the wrong times, the colon will go into spasms, and
the smooth linkage between the whole gastro intestinal
system will collapse. Hence the burning ulcers  and chronic
irritated colon experienc ed by many people under high
stress. In the case of the addic t, one of the reactions that is
blocked by drugs is the ability to think rationally and
perceive clearly . As long as his receptors are full, the addict
will feel euphoric and his perceptions will be a woozy blur,
a cond ition that may be pleasant in the short run but
devastating over the long term—without clear perception,
the brain cannot issue the most basic instructions for
thinking, eating, working, relating to other people, and so
on. All of life requires clear thinking, clear thinking
requires a host of diﬀerent neurotransmitters, yet the
addict has seized on only a few and clings to them
desperately . —
Likewise, a strictly physical explanation for cancer is not
convincing. It must be tied in to a distortion that is more
abstract; perhaps a distorted memory can occur at the
cellular level. Let us say that a doctor takes a patient’s X
ray and discovers a malignant tumor , then a year later
another X ray is taken and the same tumor show s up. The
doctor is in fact not accurate in calling this the same
cancer , because the cells that showed up the year before
have been entirely replaced. What he is really seeing is the result of a memory that
has persisted, reincarnating again and again in a new
tumor . Cancer is not so much a wild, runaway cell as the
distorted blueprint of that cell, a set of wrong instructions
that turns normal cellular behavior into the suicidal maniaof cancer . When we are fortunate, the body deals with this
situation from a prima ry level. The DNA senses any
deviation in memory , including incipient tumors, and
quickly eliminates it. As yet, we do not know  how to wipe out cancerous
memories at the cellu lar level, because we cannot
penetrate the cell wall to “talk” to the DNA. It is known,
however , that a key step is taken when the immun e system
secretes certain anti-cancer agents called interleukins, a
class of proteins that resemble hormones. Our immune
cells produce interleukins in many situatio ns—cuts,
bruises, infections, internal tissue damage, and allergies all
call them forth. (The name “interleukin” was chosen
because researchers originally discovered that these
chemicals send signals between leukocytes, or white cells.) As they naturally occur , interleukins exist in minute
quantity; therefore, they are prohibitively expensive to
duplicate commercially . Despite this obstacle, researchers
have recently extracted large amounts of interleukin-2 (IL-
2) and transfused it into about 450 patients with advanced
skin and kidney cancers (the current price runs as high as
$80,000 for a single course of treatment). Some patients,
from 5 percent to 10 percent, have had dramatic
regressions of their tumors via this therapy , at the cost of
severe side eﬀects, which have killed several people. The
question of the IL-2’s long-term inﬂuence on the rest of the
body remains unanswered. Despite their drawbacks, interleukins are on the verge of
becoming the next promising cancer cure, as interferon, a
close chemical relation, was the cure of the 1970s . Already ,
teams of genetic enginee rs are racing to ﬁgure out how to
manufacture interleukins on a marketable scale. With a
sinking feeling, one senses that another false hope  is being
born. Why is the promise neve r fulﬁlled? Medicine knows
hundreds of facts about interleukins, such as that “thealpha and beta strains of interleukin-1 are only 26 percent
homologous at the amino -acid level of their genes”; or that
both bind to receptors “with high aﬀinity in the 10–10 molar
range.” When one penetrates the jargon, these are not
insigniﬁcant facts. Yet they say literally nothing about interleukin’s
intelligence, which is the salient point. If interleukins
“know” when and where to ﬁght cancer , then it is not their
molecules that should interest us, but something invisible—
the cell’s ability to recog nize that a cancerous memory is
present and needs to be eradicated. This cannot be injected
into the body. The body’s war against cancer pits
intelligence against intelligence. The physical
manifestations—interferon, interleukin, hormones,
peptides, et cetera—may  be thought of as weapons if you
like, but they must ﬁrst be aimed. In the deepest sense, that is why I have no faith in the
“magic bullet” approach. Penicillin was an eﬀective bullet
because one’s aim did not have to be at all accurate; once
an antibiotic is in the bloodstream, it automatically attacks
the cell walls of bacteria and destroys them. Similarly , early
chemotherapy for cancer was a crude bullet, no diﬀerent
from the chemical warfare of W orld W ar I. (In fact, the most
toxic drugs used against cancer , called alkylating agents,
originated with nitrogen mustard, the infamous mustard
gas that so terriﬁed soldiers in that war.) Later classes of
chemotherapy , such as the various adrenal horm ones and
estrogen, derived from the body itself , and therefore their
aim was less approxim ate; but now we see that this
advance in fact may be the last gasp of the magic-bullet
theory . At a certain point, the chemicals you want to use are so
precise that their action is eﬀective only within the
narrowest possible limits . If you aim a hormone, you have
to hit one receptor , not just the huge, broad avenues of thebloodstream where penicillin goes. If the receptor you want
to hit is involved in a complex process, as the ones for
interleukins are, then no aim may ever be accurate enough,
for the life and death of the cell involves the precise
attunement of every chemical it contains. By analogy, if you
mistune one string inside a piano, you have thrown
everything out of tune; a piano sonata will never be right if
even one note is wrong. I do not mean to make this sound like the logic of doom. Millions of patients have been successfully treated with
cancer drugs. The toxicity of chemot herapy has been
steadily reduced, and in many cases the dreaded side
eﬀects that have given the treatment its bad reputation are
actually fairly mild, particularly considering the risk of
leaving cancer untreate d. But it still remains true that
without very early detection, cancer is incurable. If a
patient comes to me with lung cancer , even early detection
is no help. I can give him radiation and call it a therapy , but
in 95 percent of the cases it is little more than a short
reprieve—perhaps he and I go through with it just to fend
oﬀ the despair of having no treatment at all. Other common
cancers, such as melanomas, belong in this category . We desperately need a medicine without bullets. If you
look at interleukins free of a material bias, their most
important attributes are invisible. Interleukins are being
produced by the immune cell’s DNA in exact dosages,
combinations, and timing, all of which are more important
than the molecule itself . A white cell engulﬁng an invader , such as a bacterium or
cancer cell, looks decepti vely simple under the microscope,
like a drop of amber surrounding a ﬂy. In actuality , there is
no more intricate process in the human body. An
interleukin arrives on the scene at a precisely determined
point in a most exacting  maneuver . We may call this the
“hunt for cancer ,” but much of the immune process ishighly abstract. It is conduc ted almost entirely by the
exchange of information. Hitting the target is one of the
more minor parts of the campaign. Before a macrophage, or immune cell, ever secretes any
anti-cancer agent, the immune system goes throu gh many
other steps. It must ﬁrst detect that a problem exists and
identify it exactly; a cancer cell is not a virus, and neither
one is a bacterium. Using a class of message carriers called
helper T-cells, the body notiﬁes the rest of the immune
system to become activated and starts to produce natural
killer cells. To make sure that the killers do not destroy the
wrong thing,  the body hangs a chemical nametag on the
macrophages inscribed with the enemy’s identity , which
they can show to other cells they meet. This is just the
barest outline of the immune system’s initial sequence of
action, which has many branches, overlappings, and
unexplained convolutions. Having just fathomed the full intricacy of the immune
system in the last ﬁve years, researchers like to compare it
to the brain in complexity . Like the brain, the immune
system has a phenome nal capacity for absorb ing new
information, learning and memorizing the identity of any
new disease  organism, and sorting out billions of bits of
knowledge. We could just as easily say that the brain and
the immune system are not like each other—they are each
other , becau se they operate within the same chemical
network. The only diﬀerence between an immune cell and a brain
cell is that their DNA has selected to emphasiz e certain
aspects of its total knowledge and suppress others. Interleukin comes very close in structure to being a
neuropeptide (the research literature calls it a
“hormonelike polypeptide”). This means that when our
emotions join up with molecules, like riders on a horse, the
mounts they choose are almost identical to interleukin. Forall intents and purposes,  to feel happy and to ﬁght cancer
are much the same thing at the molecular level. We could
call both of them healing messages. It is false even to
divide cells into senders and receivers of such messages;
for although certain immune cells secrete interleukins as
part of their speciﬁc role, virtually every cell in the body
can receive them, implyi ng an ability to produce them as
well. Perhaps this “silent” ability is activated in
spontaneous remissions. Or are there levels of thought that ﬁght the ghosts of
memory hand to hand, and the physical molecules we see
are just so many ﬁred shells littering the battleﬁeld? For
this last possibility to be true, the mind would have to be
directly aware that a cancerous memory is endangering us. Certainly the addict and the anorexic know that the ghost
is there. And I have already mentioned certain tumors,
such as tumor of the pancreas, that begin to make the
patient moody and depressed long before the doctor can
physically detect the malignancy . This early warning still
depends on the actual presence of a cancer cell. However ,
that does not exclude a warning that is earlier still. To ﬁnd out where it might come from, we will have to go
deeper into the whole issue of how intelligence and matter
are paired. It is imperat ive to do this, I believe, before the
magic-bullet theory collapses. Interleukin is not a bullet but
a speck of life on the move, with intelligence the invisible
rider . Life itself is intelligen ce riding everywhere on
chemicals. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that
the rider and the horse are the same. Intelligence is free to
go where it likes, even where molecules cannot. EXPANDING THE TOPICBy saying that a thought is always paired with a brain
chemical and vice versa, this chapter took an important
step. The wall that separates mind and body is thick and
ancient. Only by going down to the molecular level and
tagging the very chemicals that carry out the instructions
of the mind can a new picture emerge. But a nicely stated theory that comes wrapped in an
intellectual bow doesn’t carry much weight when a doctor
reaches for his prescri ption pad. Patients want magic
bullets; doctors have a holster full of them. To break the
lockstep betw een physic ians and pharmaceuticals, even a
little bit, took some dramatic news. Since Quantum Healing
ﬁrst appeared, nothing has been more dramatic than the
controversy stirred by a February 2010 cover article in
Newsweek  that proclaimed in stark terms, “ Antidepressants
Don’t Work.” The story made public what the psychiatric
profession was already beginning to realize: The eﬀicacy of
the most popular drugs for ﬁghting depression was no
better than a placebo, according to the researches of
psychologist Irving Kirsch. Taking a sugar pill, in other words, is about as useful if
you want to alleviate the symptoms of depression as taking
the highly touted, expensive drugs promoted  by Big
Pharma. Protestors and supporters cried out on one side or
the other . The protesto rs alleged that depressed patients
who believed in medications like Zoloft and Lexapro were
now being stripped of hope. The support ers pointed out
that antidepr essants neve r cured depression to begin with
but only alleviated the symptoms, with an added risk of
various side eﬀects, up to and including outbreaks of
violence and suicidal tendencies, not to mention the sharp
rise in dependency on these drugs. In June 2011 more fuel was added by Marcia Angell, the
former edito r in chief of the New England Journal of
Medicine,  who wrote two articles in The New York Reviewof Books  about antid epressants and psychoactive drugs in
general. Angell favor ably reviewed several books that
reached much the same conclusions about how badly and
erratically these drugs work compared to the hyped-up
claims made for them. Her mainstr eam colleag ues were
shocked. Psychoactive drugs, largely used for depression
and anxiety , are taken by 1 in 10 Americans. Here was a
Harvard Medical School authority casting them into serious
doubt. But as charges and countercharges ﬁlled the air, the
average doctor still believed in the basic research behind
these drugs,  which held that mental illness was due to an
imbalance in brain chemistry that could be restored to
balance with drugs. This article of faith was shaken to the
core by a 2013 headline  in Science News  magazine: “A
massive eﬀort to uncover genes involved in depression has
largely failed.”
I addre ssed the uproar in an online article coauthored by
Dr. Rudy Tanzi of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of
the world’s leading genetics researchers, and Professor P.
Murali Dora iswamy , M.D., of Duke Univers ity, who
specializes in cognitive neuroscience and mental health. Since depre ssion exists in epidemic proportion s in this
country , and since it serves so well to outline the mind-
brain mystery , let me go into detail. Before these challenges to antidepressants arose, the
public perception was that depression is being handled
pretty well. Everyone knows a friend or relation who feels
better taking Zoloft. Informed medical opinion is very
ambiguous, however , because the model for depression that
has been accepted for decades considers it as a brain
disorder , and brain disorders are rooted in genetics. The
failure to ﬁnd the genes involved in depression strongly
suggests—as more than one prominent researcher now
concedes—that the genes of depressed people  are notdamaged or distorted compared with the genes of people
who aren’t depressed. Another false assumption is closely linked to this. The
most popular antidepressants supposedly work by repairing
chemical imbalances in the synapses—the gaps between
two nerve endings—where the culprit was an imbalance of
serotonin, one of the brain’s most important
neurotransmitters along with dopamine. But serotonin is
directly regulated by genes, and some key research
indicates either that drugs aimed at ﬁxing the serotonin
problem don’t work that way or that there wasn’t a
serotonin problem in the ﬁrst place. The Science News  report doesn’t leave much wiggle
room for a laissez-faire attitude on this point: “By combing
through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international
team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic inﬂuences
that aﬀect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the
analysis turned up nothing.” Nothing doesn’t mean
something. If the chain of explanat ion running from genes  to the
synapses and ﬁnally to the pharmaceutical lab is broken, a
host of doubts arises. Is depression a brain disease in the
ﬁrst place, or is it—as psychiatry assumed before the
arrival of modern drug treatment—a disorder of the mind? The latest theories aren’t  black -and-white. Here’s a list, by
no means complete, of things that can make you depressed:
Outside stress
Personal crisis
Grief
Physical illness
Sudden life changes
Accidents and unforeseen setbacks
Loss of job or moneyPersonal insecurity
Failure
Bad parenting
Low self -esteem
Negative religious beliefs leading to guilt and shame
Other causes of guilt and shame
Rejection in love
Being around other depressed people, particularly family
members
The X factor
This is a long list. Even if we discount some undiscovered
cause (the X factor), the mind is faced with the complexity
of life, and numerous experiences can engender
depression. If I tell you that you’ve just been ﬁred, it’s not
your brain that will make  you depressed. It’s a sudden jolt
of devastating bad news. Nobody knows why some people
convert bad experiences into depression while others don’t. It is equally true, after all, that the glass is half empty and
half full. In studies, when shown neutral photos of various
people and situations, depressed people habitually see
them as negative, disappointing, sad, and unlikely to lead
to a positive outcome. With so many variables  in play, there are still a few
general conclusions that seem reliable:
1.There are many kinds of depression. 2.Each depressed person displays his or her own mixture
of causes and symptoms. 3.The mental component in depression includes
upbringing, learned behavior , core beliefs, and
judgment about the self .4.The brain component includes wired-in neural
pathways, suggesting weaknesses in certain areas of
the brain whose causes aren’t understood. But
depression isn’t localized in just a single region in the
brain. The interaction of multiple regions is involved. The genetic component may explain why depression runs
in families, but no gene or group of genes seems to
guarantee that a person  will become depressed . We are
talking instead about genes that make you susceptible to
the disorder . What trigger s these (unknown) genes remains
a mystery . In any case, genes are not ﬁxed but ﬂuid in their
output, so the genetic situation is changeable. As for the X
factor , it could be a predisposition in young children that
doesn’t blossom into depression for years to come. It could
be social interactions that create a sense of helplessness or
victimization. A skeptic could look at this list and say, “So anything and
everything can make me depressed. That’s the same as
proving nothing.” But ﬁnding the many variables that
contribute to depression isn’t the same as giving up. Instead, we are heading in the direction Quantum Healing
points to, seeing mind and body as intimately , dynamically
related at every moment of life. About 20 percent of people
will experience a severe depression sometime in their lives. At the mome nt, there is a rash of depression among combat
soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan (this would be
directly related to a sudden increase in suicides, which is
generally linked to depre ssion) and among laid-oﬀ  workers
who are enduring long-te rm unemployment. In both cases,
an outside event led to the depression, but we do not know
why, in the sense that only a certain proportion of people
become depressed under the same stimulus (war and losing
your job).Another hidden issue is the failure of the disease model
when it comes to depression. A cold is caused by a speciﬁc
virus, just as AIDS is caused by the HIV retrovirus. One
cause leads to one eﬀect. That’s the germ model in a
nutshell, as applied to physical disorders. Extending the
model to mental disorde rs, which is the whole basis of
psychiatry , becomes very wobbly when so many factors,
internal and external, genetic and environmental, ﬁxed and
changeable, exist. It’s even diﬀicult to deﬁne for research
purposes who is clinically depressed and who is not. Depression “spreads” in families and among friends
without the need for an inherited gene. Can someone be a
“carrier” of depression, and if so, how do they infect one
person and not another? And what about treating depression through old-
fashioned couch therapy , talking about the underlying
issues that a person feels troubled about? Depressed
patients respond about equally well, according to various
studies, whether they talk about their depression or
swallow a pill. But here’s the truly mysterious part. It was
found that the tranquilizer Prozac had an unexpected use
in treating people with obsessive-compulsive disorder , or
OCD. Typically , these are people who feel compelled to
repeat a ritual like washing their hands or dusting the
house many times a day, who can’t stop even though they
want to. Taking Prozac seems to reduce overactivity in a
certain area of the brain associated with OCD; the patient’s
symptoms begin to improve. OCD can also be treated with
couch therapy , and to everyone’s surprise, the same brain
areas, when scanned by fMRI, also improve, exactly as if a
drug were administered. The original study about the failure to ﬁnd the genes
responsible for depression, which was published in the
January 3, 2013, issue of Biological Psychiatry , took an
unusual approach by ignoring diagnoses of depre ssion andgoing instead with symptoms. This wasn’t necessarily
better , only diﬀerent. Asking people about symptoms
results in a lower number of those who would be
considered depressed. This could be because some people
are in denial or don’t know the diﬀerence between
depression and ordinary sadness. But more important,
symptoms change over a lifetime; there is a sliding scale
for each suﬀerer and for the disorder as a whole. From person to person, depression has a large circular
component of response and habit. A person learns to
respond to ordinary situations by being depressed, and
once learned, this response becomes a habit that reinforces
itself . The habit of depression  is as hard to break as
addiction. And in both cases one hears the cry, “I can’t help
it. I have to be this way. This is me.” Telling someone that
they are prisoners of their sick or damaged brain only
reinforces this defeatist belief and the circle of depression. In the end, the situation is too cloudy for anyone to oﬀer
either a pessimistic or optimistic prediction about where
depression is heading. Drug treatm ent remains  hugely
popular , no matter what the basic science says. In cases of
mild to moderate depression—the most common type—
antidepressants “work,” as long as you discount the fact
that their rate of eﬀica cy, around 30 percent, isn’t an
improvement over placebos. That’s too much to discount. An eﬀective drug must at the very least do better than
taking sugar . Some symptoms of sever e depression remain
intractable, and yet in other cases, the chronically
depressed perform the best with drug treatment . Hope is
always better than giving up. The point of this detailed discussion is that depression is
joining other mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia,
where no simple disease model works. There are too many
variables, and patients follow highly individual paths as the
disorder sets in. It would be naïve to believe that Americais going to abandon a belief system that puts materialism
ahead of everything else. But discounting the mind while
constantly referring everything to the brain is folly. It deﬁes
common sense, and more  important, it blinds us to the real
possibilities of quantum healing. OceanofPDF .comNinety years after they began to emerge, the insights of
quantum physics remain a total mystery to most people. Yet, once you under stand what the disco very of
neuropeptides means, then understanding the quantum is
only a step further . The discovery of neuropeptides was so
signiﬁcant because it showed that the body is ﬂuid enough
to match the mind. Thanks to messenger molecules, events
that seem totally unconnected—such as a thought and a
bodily reaction—are now seen to be consistent. The
neuropeptide isn’t a thought, but it moves with thought,
serving as a point of transformation. The quantum does
exactly the same thing, except that the body in question is
the universe, or nature as a whole. We need to consult the quantum to really understand how
the mind pivots on the turning point of a molecule. A
neuropeptide springs into existence at the touch of a
thought, but where does it spring from? A thought of fear
and the neurochemical that it turns into are somehow
connected in a hidden process, a transformation of
nonmatter into matter .The same thing happens everywhere in nature, except
that we do not call it thinking. When you get to the level of
atoms, the landscape is not one of solid objects moving
around each other like partners in a dance, following
predictable steps. Subatomic particles are separated by
huge gaps, making every atom more than 99.999 percent
empty space. This holds true for hydrogen atoms in the air
and carbon atoms in the wood that tables are made of, as
well as all the “solid” atoms in our cells. Therefore,
everything solid, including our bodies, is proportio nately as
void as intergalactic space. How could such vast reaches of emptiness, dotted at
faraway intervals by specks of matter , turn into human
beings? To answer that questio n requires a quantum
perspective. By understanding the quantum, we enter into
a vaster reality , spanning from quarks to galaxies. At the
same time, the behavior of quantum reality turns out to be
very intimate to us—indeed, the faintest shadow-line
separates the human body from the cosmic body . —
In his monumental project to make all of physics follow a
few consistent, rational laws, Isaac Newton explained
nature’s workings in terms of solid bodies, straight-line
motion, and ﬁxed constants that ruled all physical events. This is the model of nature as a complex billiard game, with
Newton as the master player . Because matter and energy
stayed within  set rules, there was no need to theor ize about
a hidden world; everythi ng happened aboveboard. We can
express this idea with a simple diagram:Here, A is a cause and B is an eﬀect. They are joined by a
straight line, expressing that cause and eﬀect are logically
connected in the world we are familiar with, the world of
the senses. If A and B are two billiard balls, making one hit
the other is a predictable  event. However , if A is a though t
and B is a neuropeptide, then the diagram would not apply . There is no straight-line connection between a nonmaterial
thought and a material object, even one as small as a
peptide molecule. Instead, one has to draw a diﬀerent
diagram with a detour in it:
The U shape  shows that a process has to take place that
is not above the line, in Newton’s rational, straight-line
world. There is some hidden transformation happening that
turns a thoug ht into a molecule. The transformation doesn’t
take any time and doesn’t  happen in any place—it is carried
out just by the presence of an impulse of the nervous
system. When you think the word  rose,  a large number ofbrain cells have to ﬁre (no one knows how many , but let us
say 1 million, which is probably absurdly small), but these
cells don’t get in touch  with one another by passing a
message from  A to B to C, and so on, until all 1 million get
the message. The thought just appears , suddenly localized
in time and space, and with it, the brain’s cells all change
in sync. The perfect coordination of this thought-event and
1 million brain cells making neurotransmitters must have
happened below the line. The whole area below the line is not a region to be visited
in space and time; it just stands for wherever it is you go
when you turn thoughts into molecules. One could also
think of it as the control room that correlates any mental
impulse with the body. At any one time, all 15 billion
neurons in the nervous system are being coordinated with
perfect precision from below the line. The same change from straight-line causes to U-shaped
detours occurred when quantum physics was born. Although everything in nature once appeared to happen
above the table, accordi ng to classic Newtonian  theory—
obviously , physicists leave mental events out of the picture
—a few things could not be explained without a detour . The
most obvious was light. Light can behave like A, a wave, or
B, a particle. These two are totally unalike in Newtonian
physics, since waves are nonmaterial and particles are
concrete. But light somehow can act like one or the other ,
depending on circumstances, and therefore it must have
taken a detour under the line:To see light as a wave, or vibration, is easy enough. A
prism breaks white light down into the colors of a rainbow;
the reason for this is that white light is composed of
separate wavelengths of light, a fact that becomes apparent
when they are broken apart into a spectrum. The light from
an incandescent light bulb has its own spectrum of
wavelengths, generated when electricity passes  through
the tungsten ﬁlament. But if you turn the light down with a
dimmer switch until just the smallest amount of light can
come out, it will come out not like a wave but like a
particle. (No dimmer switch is this ﬁne-tuned, but
physicists have broadcast light so that it exposes its
“graininess.” Nature has also equipped  our eyes to respond
physically to light at its quantum level—if only a single
photon falls on the retina , a ﬂash is transmitted along the
optic nerve. Our brains, however , do not process just one
ﬂash.) The word quantum —from Latin for “how much?”—
describes the smallest unit that can be called particlelike. A
photon is a quantum of light, because you cannot split it
into ﬁner particles. The photon manifests when a ﬂow of
electrons hits a tungsten atom; the moving electrons in the
electricity collide with electrons whirling in orbit around
the outside of the tungsten atom, and out of their collision
jumps a photon, a quantu m of light. This quantum is a very
strange particle, because it has no mass, but for ourpurposes, what makes it important is that in order for a
light wave to become a photon, it must take a detour
beneath the table. In an unknown realm not covered by
Newton’s laws, the transformation takes place. Since we are not trying to explain physics here, I won’t
go into elaborations. It is enough to know that after
Einstein, when Max Planck and other pioneering physicists
at the turn of the centu ry were able to demonstrate the
quantum nature of light, many , many curious conclusions
resulted. Events that we take for granted in the world of
the senses had to be reconciled with strange distortions of
time and space—but reconciled they were. As with the
neuropeptide, the quantum allowed nature to become
ﬂexible enough to permit  the inexplicable transfor mation of
nonmatter into matter , time into space, mass into energy . Here is the pattern for a basic quantum event; it shows
the detour that always takes place outside the reach of
ordinary events:
Like the thought and the neuropeptide, light cannot be a
wave and a photon at the same time; it is either one or the
other . Yet it is obvious that a tungsten light bulb doesn’t
enter another reality when you turn it down. Somehow ,
nature sets up its laws so that light can be either A or B,
and both are kept inside the boundaries of the same reality
by building in a transfo rmation point. (People today stillcasually assume that Einstein overthrew Newton,  when in
fact he saved Newton’s belief in perfect order by expanding
it.) A strikingly elegant view of mind and body can be formed
from this basic quantum event, requiring only one diagram:
The mind and the body are both above the line. A is a
mental event, or thought; all the other letters are physical
processes that follow from A. If you feel afraid (A), then the
other letters stand for signals to your adrenal glands, the
production of adrenaline, the pounding of your heart,
elevated blood pressure,  and so on. These are B, C, D, et
cetera. All the physical changes that take place in the body
can be connected in a logical chain of cause and eﬀect,
except for the space after A. This is the point where the
transformation from thought to matter ﬁrst occur s—and it
must occur , or the rest of the events will not happen. At some point in the lineup, there must be a detour . At
that point, the lineup breaks down, because mind does not
touch matter above the table. If you want to lift your little
ﬁnger (point A), a physiologist can trace the
neurotransmitter (B) that activates an impulse that runs
down the axon of the nerve (C), causing a muscle cell to
respond (D), resulting in the lifting of your little ﬁnger (E). However , nothing a physiologist can describe will get him
from A to B—it requires a detour . The whole picture is likea bucket brigade, where each ﬁreman gets his bucket from
the ﬁreman before him, except for the ﬁrst, who gets his
from nowhere. “Nowhere” is almost an exact term here, because you
cannot subdi vide the body to arrive at the precise  junction
where a thought turns into a molecule, any more than you
can ﬁnd the station house where photons are fashioned into
light waves. What exactly  happens in the ? zone is not
known, eithe r in physics or in medicine. Miraculous cures
seem to be examples of dipping into the ? zone, because
the cooperation of mind and matter takes an inexplicable
quantum leap in such cases, but so are other mind-body
dramas that play themselves out in mysterious ways. Several years ago, a Boston ﬁreman in his mid-forties
came into the emergency room of a suburban hospital one
night complaining of sudden, sharp chest pains. The
resident on call examined him and could ﬁnd no evidence of
irregularity in his heart function. The patient went away
without being reassured, and soon he returned with the
same symptoms. He was turned over to me as senior
physician, but I could ﬁnd nothing wrong with his heart,
either . Despite his thorough examination, the ﬁreman began to
return to the ER repeatedly , usually late at night. Every
time he came in, he told me with great trepidatio n that he
was certain he had a heart condition, but no test, including
the most sophisticated echocardiograms and angiograms,
detected the slightest defect. Finally , in the face of the
man’s mounting anxiety , I recommended that he be retired
with full disability purely for psychological reasons. The ﬁre
department’s medical examining board refused , on the
grounds that no physical evidence had been oﬀered. Two
months later, the man showed up one last time at the
emergency room, this time on a stretcher , the victim of a
massive heart attack. Within ten minutes of his coronary ,which destroyed 90 percent of his heart muscle, he died,
but he had enough strength to turn to me and whisper ,
“Now do you believe I have a heart condition?”
What this case so dramatically attests is that the detour
into the ? zone is powerful—it can change any physical
reality in the body. I feel I must call what happened here a
quantum event, because it did not follow the cause-and-
eﬀect rules that have been observed and set down by
medicine as the body’s normal state of aﬀairs. Many people
entertain fears that they might have a heart condition, but
they don’t die from them; conversely , many heart attacks
occur without the slightest forewarning from the mind. Even if we say, in keeping  with mind-body medicine, that a
thought caused the heart attack, how did this thought ﬁnd
a way to carry out its fatal intention? If you program the concept of “heart attack” into a
computer , you know exactly what you have done. If you
want to retrieve it, the circuits can be activated to bring it
up to the screen, and once it is there, you can use software
to manipulate it. But the thought “heart attack” didn’t act
like this at all in my patient. He didn’t know where the
thought came from; once it came, he was powerless to
escape it; and far short of staying in one place, the thought
invaded his body , with disastrous results. This is only half of the mystery of a quantum event—the
negative half; the journey into the ? zone can have
amazingly positive results, too. Another patient of mine, a
quiet woman in her ﬁfties, came to me about ten years ago
complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suﬀering from gallstones, I had her
admitted for immediate surgery , but when she was opened
up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that
had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer
throughout her abdominal cavity .Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the
incision without taking further action. Because the
woman’s daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother
the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had
been succes sfully remov ed. I rationalized that her family
would break the news to her in time, and that in all
likelihood she had only a few months to live—at least she
could spend them with peace of mind. Eight months later I was astonished to see the same
woman back  in my oﬀice. She had returned for a routine
physical exam , which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no
detectable signs of cancer . Only after another year passed
did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, “Doctor , I
was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned
out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick
another day in my life.” Her cancer never recurred. This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears,
through her deep-seated resolve, and that was good
enough. This case, too, I must call a quantum event,
because of the fundam ental transformation that went
deeper than organs, tissu es, cells, or even DNA, directly to
the source of the body’s existence in time and space. Both
of my patients—one with positive thoughts, the other with
negative—managed to dip into the ? realm, and from there
they dictated their own reality . —
As mysterious as these two cases are, are they really
examples of quantum events? A physicist could object that
we are just making metaphors here, that the hidden world
of elementary particles and fundamental forces explored by
quantum physics is very diﬀerent from the mind’s hidden
world. Yet, one can argue that the inconceivable region
from which we fetch the thought of a rose is the same as
that from which a photon emerges—or the cosmos.Intelligence, we will discover , has many quantum
properties. To make this clear , we start with the familiar
textbook scheme that arranges the body vertically , as a
hierarchy of systems, organs, tissues, and cells:
In this picture, each level of the body is logically related
to the next—as long as you remain above the line, the
processes that appear as life unfolds happen in a deﬁnite
sequence. This is exhibited by a fetus in the womb: a baby
begins as a speck of DNA sitting in the middle of one
fertilized egg cell; over time, that cell multiplies until a ball
of cells is formed, large enough to begin to sort itself out
into the be-ginnings of tissues and eventually organs, such
as the heart, stomach, spinal cord, and so on; then the
entire nervous system, digestive system, respiratory
system, and so on emerge; and ﬁnally , at the moment of
birth, the trillions of cells in the newborn are precisely
coordinated to sustain the life of the whole organism
without the mother’s help. But if DNA is the bottom  rung of this neat stepladder ,
what makes DNA unfold in the ﬁrst place? Why does it
initially divide on the second day after conception and
begin to make a nervous  system on day eighteen? As with
all quantum  events, something inexplicable happens
beneath the surface to form the all-knowing intelligence of
DNA. The point is not that DNA is too complex tounderstand, being a super-genius molecule; what makes
DNA mysterious is that it lives right at the point of
transformation, just like the quantum. Its whole life is spent
creating more life, which we have deﬁned as “intelligence
tied up in chemicals.” DNA is constantly transferring
messages from the quantum world to ours, tying new bits
of intelligence to new bits of matter . Sitting by itself in the middle of every cell, completely
oﬀstage, DNA manages to choreograph all that happens
onstage. It can spin out parts of itself to travel through the
bloodstream as neuropeptides, hormones, and enzymes,
while at the same time attaching other bits of itself to the
cell wall as receptors, setting up antennae to listen for
answers to a ﬂood of questions. How does DNA manage to
be the question, the answer , and the silent observer of the
whole process at the same time? The answer is not at the level of matter . Molecular
biologists long ago broke DNA down into its ﬁner
components, but the whole operation still remains above
the line in the Newtonian world:
As we saw before, DNA is not made out of anything
special. Its strands of genetic material can be subdivided
into simpler molecules like sugars and amines, and these
into atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. When it
is not tied into DNA, a hydrogen or carbon atom doesn’thave anythin g like timing built into it. In billions of other
combinations, hydrogen and carbon simply exist; yet in
DNA, they contribute to a mastery over time, an ability to
produce something new every day, which lasts, in a human
being, more than seventy years—every stage  of life
develops according to DNA’s timetable. (In a bristlecone
pine, DNA is timed for more than two thousand years.) No matter how closely you look, the ground for the
stepladder is not very ﬁrm. When you get beyond atoms
and start subdividing DNA into electrons, protons, and
smaller particles, a quantum event must take place. Otherwise, you are left in the embarrassing position of
claiming that life is made out of nothingness—empty space
devoid of matter and energy—which is all you get if you
divide solid particles beyond a certain point. At the quantum level, matter and energy come into being
out of something that is neither matter nor energy . Physicists sometimes refer to this primordial state as a
“singularity ,” an abstract construct that is not limited in
time and space but is a compression of all the expanded
dimensions of the universe. In the Big Bang, the whole
universe jumped out of a singularity—so it is theorized—
which we can think of by analogy as a point smaller than
the smallest thing in existence. Yet, that stupendous event
of creation happens on another scale every time you think
the word rose. There is no piece of matter existing in a deﬁnite place
that holds this word for you—it springs into existence from
a region that simply knows how to organize matter and
intelligence, mind and form. The atoms in your brain come
and go, but the word rose does not disappear . Now we are
at a very exciting point. The singularity is quite explorable
today: it did not exist before  the Big Bang, since it is
outside time and space; therefore, it must be here now—in
fact, it is everywhere and has no conﬁnes in past, present,or future. Quantum physics uses mammoth particle
accelerators and other arcane equipment to wrest from the
? zone even one minute glimpse of this hidden world. The
track of a new elementary particle whizzing by for a
millionth of a second is a major ﬁnding, because it means
that the unknown zone has been reached and a bit of its
reality brought into ours. Can it really be that we are doing
the same thing just by thinking, feeling, dreaming, and
wishing? What would the quantum  level inside us be like? It would
simply be the logical extension of something we are very
familiar with by now, the neuropeptide. The neuropeptide’s
great ability is that it can respond with lightning  speed to
the mind’s commands. It does this, I believe, by sitting on
the borderlin e of the quantum zone. Science has already
discovered that hundreds of neuropeptides exist and are
manufactured all over the body. It is just another step to
ﬁnd that every one of our cells can make every one of these
substances. If that turns out to be true, then the whole
body is a “thinking body,” the creation and expression of
intelligence. Here is another diagram that sketches the
situation:
We already know that intelligence can take the form of a
thought or a molecule; this is represented in the diagram
by having “mind” and “body” as the two choices thatintelligence can make. The two are always matched to each
other , even when they appear to be separate. To coordinate
them, I have inserted a quantum level, called the “quantum
mechanical body.” This is not a physical artifact but a layer
of intelligence, the layer where the body as a whole is
organized and correlated. This is where the know-how
comes from that makes molecules “smart” instead of inert. We should not assume that thoughts turn into messenger
chemicals one at a time. It is well known that in many ways
all the billion s of bits of DNA in our systems act like one big
DNA molec ule, as when the incredibly complex
development of a fetus is coordinated in the mother’s
womb—from the ﬁrst day to the ninth month, all the DNA in
an unborn child acts as one. The same holds true for us
today . Perhaps quantum events are not exclusively “out there”
in space, but “in here” as well. Do we have “black holes”
into which matter and energy disappear forever? Yes—we
call it forgett ing. Do we speed  up time and slow it down, as
a space traveler does in the event that his rocket can
accelerate to near the speed of light? Yes again, for a writer
can think up in an instan t a story that may take hours of
normal time to set down on paper; conversely , you can
spend half an hour trying  to retrieve someone’s ﬁrst name,
which comes instantly once you ﬁnd the timeless zone,
called memory , from which it must be retrieved. —
Whenever any mental event needs to ﬁnd a physical
counterpart, it works through the quantum mechanical
human body. That is the secret of how the two universes of
mind and matter associate with each other without
mistakes. No matter how diﬀerent  they appear , mind and
body are both soaked through with intelligence. Science
tends to be skeptical in the face of any claim thatintelligence is at work in nature (this is a strange historical
anomaly , since every generation before us has accepted
without ques tion some kind of universal order). However , if
there is nothing outside ordinary reality to hold things and
events together , then one is led to a set of impossibilities. We can see this in the law of gravity . Common sense says
that two objects separate d by empty space should have no
connection with each other; in the jargon of physics, they
occupy their own “local  reality .” But the Earth revolves
around the sun, held in its orbit by gravity , even though the
two bodies are separate d by a void of 93 million miles. When he discovered this violation of local reality , Newton
was shocked and refused to speculate on how it happens. Since then, local reality has taken one beating after
another . Light, radio waves, lasers, and all other
electromagnetic forces travel through empty space; matter
and antimatter seem to exist in coordinated universes that
have no physical contact; subatomic particles have spins
that are matched to one another , and it doesn’t matter how
far apart in time and space the particles are—their spins
can be matched at opposite ends of the universe. What this implies is that the commonsense idea of local
reality is true only at a certain level. The whole of reality , as
explained by quantum physics, lies deeper . A famous
mathematical formula, known as Bell’s theorem (after its
author , the Irish physicist John Bell), holds that the reality
of the universe must be nonlocal; in other words, all objects
and events in the cosmos are inter-connected with one
another and respond to one another’s changes of state. Bell’s theorem was formulated in 1964, but decades earlier ,
the great English astron omer Sir Arthur Eddin gton had
anticipated inter-connec tedness by saying, “When the
electron vibrates, the universe shakes.” Physicists now
accept inter- connectedness as a ruling principle, along with
many forms of symmetry that extend across the universe—for example, it is theorized that every black hole may be
matched up somewhere with a corresponding “white hole,”
though none has actually been observed. What kind of explanation would satisfy Bell’s requi rement
for a totally inter-connected, nonlocal reality? It would have
to be a quantum explana tion, because if gravity is present
everywhere at the same  time, if black holes know what
white holes are doing, and if a change of spin in one
particle causes an equal but opposite change instantly in its
partner somewhere in outer space, it is obvious that the
information going from one place to the other is traveling
faster than the speed of light. This is not permitted in
ordinary reality , either by Newton or Einstein. Contemporary theorists such as British physicist, David
Bohm, who has worked extensively with the implications of
Bell’s theorem, have had to suppose that there is an
“invisible ﬁeld” that holds all of reality together , a ﬁeld that
possesses the property of knowing what is happening
everywhere at once. (The word invisible  here means not
just invisible to the eye but undetectable by any measuring
instrument.) Without going deeper into these speculations,
you can see that the invisible ﬁeld sounds very much like
the underlying intelligence in DNA, and both behave very
much like the mind. The mind has the property of holding
all our ideas in place, in a silent reservoir so to speak,
where they are precisely organized into concepts and
categories. Without calling it “thinking,” we may be watching nature
think through many diﬀerent channels, of which our minds
are one of the most privileged, because the mind can create
its quantum reality and experience it at the same time. Witnessing a quantum event in the ﬁeld of light waves may
seem completely objective, but what if quantum reality was
just as present in our own thoughts, emotions, and desires? Eddington once ﬂatly stated his belief as a physicist that“the stuﬀ of the world is mind-stuﬀ .” So the quantum
mechanical body, as a formation of intelligence, has a
plausible place in nonlocal reality . The beauty of such a simple picture is that intelligence is
simple; the complications arise when one tries to track
down the incredibly complex machinery of the mind-body
system. The brain-wave patterns of a psychotic and a poet
look the same on a roll of EEG paper as it come s oﬀ the
electroencephalograph, no matter how sophisticated the
analysis. Thinking about the thousands of hours it would
take to scientiﬁcally describe the chemical conseq uences of
one cell’s daily life, a neuroscientist friend of mine
remarked, “You have to conclude that nature is intelligent
because it’s too complicated to be called anything else.”
He could just as easily have said “too simple.” A human
brain that changes its thoughts into thousands of chemicals
every second  is, after all, not so much complicated as
inconceivable. In ancient India, it was supposed that
intelligence existed everywhere; it was called Brahman,
from the Sanskrit word  for “big,” and was just like an
invisible ﬁeld. A saying from thousands of years ago holds
that a man who has not found Brahman is like a thirsty ﬁsh
who has not found water . Our whole physiology can be transformed as quick ly as a
neuropeptide, which is an integral part of the quantum
mechanical body. Because we can change like quicksilver ,
the ﬂowing quality of life is natural to us. The material body
is a river of atoms, the mind is a river of thought, and what
holds them together is a river of intelligence. —
It may seem that the quantum mechanical body is involved
only in life-or-death situations, but that isn’t so. We live in
it, casually and without thinking, just as we live in the bodyas a whole. I have a patient who glimpsed this fact while
sitting on the grass eating French bread and listening to
Mozart. She had been a frustrating case for more than two
years. She suﬀered from a combination of nagging
symptoms, including irritable bowel, headaches , fatigue,
insomnia, and depression, that humbled every attempt to
cure her. None of these conditions was fatal, but they made
her life miserable nonetheless. Conventional treatment
with anti-depressants and tranquilizers had done her little
good; neither had anything I did using A yurveda. Then one day she went to Tanglewood, the summer home
of the Boston Symphony  and an idyllic place to have a
picnic. She spread out a check ered cloth, lay in the sun
listening to music, and peacefully ate her lunch. These
things made  her very happy, and that night she slept
soundly for the ﬁrst time in years. However , she was so
used to being sick that this new event did not register on
her. Another year of misery passed, until it was time for her
to go to Tanglewood again, and the same thing happened—
all her symptoms disapp eared for the day, and she slept
beautifully that night. This time it registered. She came to see me jubilantly
waving a sheaf of reprints from medical journa ls on the
SAD syndrome. The initials stand for “seasonal aﬀective
disorder ,” referring to a condition in which patients become
seriously depressed every winter without appare nt cause. Now we know that the cause has to do with the pineal
organ, deep inside the skull; this small, ﬂat, oval endocrine
gland, although surrounded by brain matter , responds to
changes in sunlight, being the source of the “third eye”
that everyon e wants to look through in the New Age (some
lower animal s such as the lamprey do possess a literal third
eye). In certain people, insuﬀicient exposure to sunlight in
the winter throws oﬀ their pineal secretions; the glandstarts to produce too much of a hormone called melatonin,
giving rise to depression. “See,” she said, “I’ve had SAD all along, and by sitting in
the sun, I’ve got a normal pineal gland again.”
“I’m sorry ,” I said, “but that disorder occurs in winter .”
Her face started to fall, and I quickly added, “You’ve put
your ﬁnger on something  important, though. Now we have
a deﬁciency we can treat.”
“What’s that?” she asked. “Picnic deﬁciency ,” I said. For the ﬁrst time since  I’d
known her , she ﬂashed me a genuine smile. Her self-trea tment continues to work. She regularly
escapes the gray conﬁnes of her oﬀice building to sit in the
sun at lunch, talk to friends, and listen to lots of Mozart. This may not sound like advanced medicine, and in a sense
it isn’t, but the reason it works is that we need Nature to
free up our nature. We are surrounded by the best of all
healing inﬂue nces—fresh air, sunlight, and beauty . In India,
the Hippocrates of Ayurveda, a great physician and sage
named Charaka, prescribed some sunlight for all diseases,
along with a walk in the early morning, and his advice will
never grow stale. If I ﬁnd a green meadow  splashed with daisies and sit
down beside a clear-running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when I sat in my mother’s lap
in infancy , because the Earth really is my mother , and the
green meadow is her lap. You and I are strangers, but the
internal rhythm of our bodies listens to the same ocean
tides that cradled us in a time beyond memory . Nature is man’s healer , because Nature is man. When
Ayurveda says that the sun is our right eye and the moon
our left eye, we mustn’t sneer . By bathing us in the moon,
the sun, and the sea, Nature fashioned the bodies we
inhabit. These were the ingredients that provided us eachwith our piece of Natur e—a shelter , life-support system,
intimate companion, and home for seven decades or more. The discovery of the quantum realm opened a way to
follow the inﬂuence of the sun, moon, and sea down deeper
into ourselves. I am taking you there only in the hope that
there is even more healing to be found there. We already
know that a human fetus develops by remembering and
imitating the shapes of ﬁsh, amphibians, and early
mammals. Quantum discoveries enable us to go into our
very atoms and remember the early universe itself . Aeons
ago, light and heat came into being in the univers e, to last
for 20 billion years; yet, every human being strikes the
spark again, lighting the ﬁre that kindles life. In Vedic
India, the same sacred ﬁre that was in the hearth shared
the name Agni with the digestive ﬁre in the belly and the
solar ﬁre in the sky . Sir Arthur Eddington once aﬀirmed that there were two
realities that had to be known on their own term s, one of
which was trivial, the other all-important. The trivial one
was the mechanistic reality investigated by science; the all-
important one was the human reality of ordinary
experience. In the scienti ﬁc reality , Eddington said, Earth is
a speck of matter whirling around a mediocre star, both of
them cast adrift among billions of more important stellar
objects. But in the human reality , Earth remains the center
of the universe, because  the life it harbors is the only
important thing that exists, at least for us. The most poignant expression of this idea came to me
from a patient who had many health problems, including
cancer . To regain her perspective , she wrote down certain
important experiences from her past. One of these
occurred when she was a girl of 16; she entitled it, “But
How Can I Be the Moon?—Age 16:”Lying alone in the pasture, dark except for the
magnetic full moon. There is an overwhelming
sense of quietness. My being is part of the earth
and part of the pure white light of the moon at the
same time. Nothing else is signiﬁcant. For a
second I wonder , “Am I dead?” It isn’t important—
I am spendin g an hour in God’s hands, and it will
become part of me. A surprising number of people have had such
experiences, which Eddington called “the mystic contact
with the earth.” My patient later slipped away from her
experience, gradually becoming used to the grind of work
and family worries that disconnects all of us from Nature;
in her case, the accumulated stress led to frequent
sickness. (She wryly titled her later life, “Going Against
Nature—This Is Adulthood?”)
What is so unusual is that when she stopped going
against Nature, the old feeling of contact came back with
undiminished freshness. In her late twenties she visited the
Paciﬁc shore and wrote this:
For about two hours on the beach alone, I was
with God again. I was the surf, its sound and
strength. I was the sand, warm, vibrating, alive. I
was the breeze, soft and free. I was the sky,
endless and pure…I felt only great love. I was
more than my body and knew it. This moment was
absolutely cleansing and beautiful. What she expresses I also believe as a doctor . The healing
mechanism inside us perfectly matches the one outside. The human body does not look like the green meadow , but
its breezes, its laughing water , sunlight, and earth were
merely transformed into us, not forgotten.
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:

        Our main focus was simply to detoxify Walter. In the
normal cours e of things, he would have passed through the
revolving door and back out onto the street. But while he
was staying in the hospital I began visiting with him. It was
clear that he was an exceptional person. Despite his
desperation, he did not seem eaten up by inner violence,
and he was courageously willing to ﬁght his habit. Walter
made friends with me. He also made quick progressmedically, and a year after detox he was still holding a
steady job and talking eagerly about the norma l life he
longed for and loved. Then a strange incident occurred. One day Walter’s car
broke down, forcing him to take the subway to work, which
he hadn’t done in several months. He got on the train to
Dorchester, an old, clattery line with screeching rails. He
hated the noise and couldn’t manage to ignore it. The fan
was broken, and it was July. Within a few minutes of being
shut up in the hot, stiﬂing compartment, he found  the train
intolerable. He went from feeling uneasy to agitated to
extremely agitated, and by the time he got oﬀ he was in a
completely wild, irrational state. Nothing he could do
would make his agitation go away. By the time I saw him,
two days later, Walter was completely hooked on heroin
again, and this time he had hardly any will to recover. What happen ed to this man. A chem ical explanation for
the train incident is not suﬀicient. I keep thinking of him
wearing his pinstriped business suit, conﬁdently outﬁtted
for a new life, but then having to step onto the same train
that he had ridden when he was troubled and addicted. In
some treacherous turn of memory lane, the past came
back, and with it came his craving. Where did the craving
hide out for a year before it returned. In some way that
medicine is just beginnin g to unravel, a cell’s memory is
able to outlive the cell itself. At any point in the bodymind, two things come together—
a bit of information and a bit of matter. Of the two, the
information has a longer life span than the solid matter it is
matched with. As the atoms  of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen,
and nitrogen swirl through our DNA, like birds of passage
that alight only to migra te on, the bit of matter changes,
yet there is always a structure waiting for the next atoms. In fact, DNA never budges so much as a thousandth of a
millimeter in its precise structure, because the genomes—the bits of information in DNA—remember where
everything goes, all 3 billion of them. This fact makes us
realize that memory must be more permanent than matter. What is a cell, then. It is a memo ry that has built some
matter around itself, forming a speciﬁc pattern. Your body
is just the place your memory calls home. This conclus ion is diﬀicult to argue with, in light of all
that we now know about forms of chemical intellig ence, but
medicine stubbornly resists these implicatio ns. For
instance, it is generally believed that people who are
addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs have a “chemical
addiction,” meaning that their cells are hooked on nicotine,
alcohol, heroin, et cetera. But if you look at the level of the
body’s chemistry, you ﬁnd that heroin or nicotine ﬁts into
the same receptors on the cell walls that everyone has. An
addict does not have receptors that exhibit abnormal
cravings. By analogy, a fat man’s stomach lining isn’t addicted to
food—it just accepts what is given to it. The truth seems to
be that the cell’s memory for the addictive substance is
what is hooked, and it keeps creating distorted cells that
reﬂect its weakness. In other words, an addiction is a
distorted memory. It is just our material bias that keeps
looking to the cell. (These pernicious memories may be
inherited, since addiction runs in families, but even if there
is a speciﬁc “addiction gene,” one is forced to consider the
nonmaterial conditions that caused the DNA to express the
gene. Your ears are formed because a gene encodes them,
but the reason the ear was developed in the ﬁrst place,
millions of years ago, was certainly nonmaterial—some
organism started to respond to sound. ) If you take an addict, detoxify his body, and keep him
away from alcohol or drugs for several years, all the old
cells that used to be “chemically addicted” are totally gone. Yet the memory persists, and if you give it a chance, thememory will latch onto the addictive substance once again. A good friend of mine, a cardiologist from Colombia, gave
up smoking ﬁfteen years ago. This spring he went back
home and happened to go to a movie, a rare event in his
life. He is an extraordinarily busy man, even for a heart
doctor, and had not seen a movie since he could remember. There was an intermission in this particular show, and
when he walked into the lobby he was seized by an almost
uncontrollable urge to smoke. “You see, when I was a teenager in Bogotá,” he told me,
“we used to smoke in the lobby between movies. All I did
was step back into that scene, and the urge to smoke came
back in a ﬂash. I found myself in front of the cigarette
machine fumbling for change, and only by clutching myself
inside and repeating, ‘This is crazy, you’re a cardiologist,’
was I able to resist. ” Even so, he had to rush out of the
theater and now wonders ruefully how the movie ended. What makes any addiction so frightening is that the
brain’s receptors are always willing to cooperate with the
mind’s instructions. Think back to the stress reaction
where a car backﬁres and adrenaline is released into your
bloodstream. We noted that as part of the overall reaction,
the stomach and intestines stop digesting food. As long as
the stress reaction is temporary, this is a completely normal
and correct thing for the body to do, and it happens
automatically. However, if you choose to stay in an environment where
there is constant stress, the time must come when your
body wants to return to digesting food. Then a deep conﬂict
will arise, because the stress reaction will still be saying
“no” to the stomach while another part of the brain
(probably the hypothalamus) is saying “yes. ” The resulting
turmoil ties the stomach in knots and churns up the
intestines. These organs  begin to lose their natural rhythm,
and if you do not give them a chance to return to it, theywill become victims of wrong memory, just as surely as an
addict does. The stomach  will start pouring out gastric
juice at the wrong times, the colon will go into spasms, and
the smooth linkage between the whole gastro intestinal
system will collapse. Hence the burning ulcers  and chronic
irritated colon experienc ed by many people under high
stress. In the case of the addic t, one of the reactions that is
blocked by drugs is the ability to think rationally and
perceive clearly. As long as his receptors are full, the addict
will feel euphoric and his perceptions will be a woozy blur,
a cond ition that may be pleasant in the short run but
devastating over the long term—without clear perception,
the brain cannot issue the most basic instructions for
thinking, eating, working, relating to other people, and so
on. All of life requires clear thinking, clear thinking
requires a host of diﬀerent neurotransmitters, yet the
addict has seized on only a few and clings to them
desperately. —
Likewise, a strictly physical explanation for cancer is not
convincing. It must be tied in to a distortion that is more
abstract; perhaps a distorted memory can occur at the
cellular level. Let us say that a doctor takes a patient’s X
ray and discovers a malignant tumor, then a year later
another X ray is taken and the same tumor show s up. The
doctor is in fact not accurate in calling this the same
cancer, because the cells that showed up the year before
have been entirely replaced. What he is really seeing is the result of a memory that
has persisted, reincarnating again and again in a new
tumor. Cancer is not so much a wild, runaway cell as the
distorted blueprint of that cell, a set of wrong instructions
that turns normal cellular behavior into the suicidal maniaof cancer. When we are fortunate, the body deals with this
situation from a prima ry level. The DNA senses any
deviation in memory, including incipient tumors, and
quickly eliminates it. As yet, we do not know  how to wipe out cancerous
memories at the cellu lar level, because we cannot
penetrate the cell wall to “talk” to the DNA. It is known,
however, that a key step is taken when the immun e system
secretes certain anti-cancer agents called interleukins, a
class of proteins that resemble hormones. Our immune
cells produce interleukins in many situatio ns—cuts,
bruises, infections, internal tissue damage, and allergies all
call them forth. (The name “interleukin” was chosen
because researchers originally discovered that these
chemicals send signals between leukocytes, or white cells. ) As they naturally occur, interleukins exist in minute
quantity; therefore, they are prohibitively expensive to
duplicate commercially. Despite this obstacle, researchers
have recently extracted large amounts of interleukin-2 (IL-
2) and transfused it into about 450 patients with advanced
skin and kidney cancers (the current price runs as high as
$80,000 for a single course of treatment). Some patients,
from 5 percent to 10 percent, have had dramatic
regressions of their tumors via this therapy, at the cost of
severe side eﬀects, which have killed several people. The
question of the IL-2’s long-term inﬂuence on the rest of the
body remains unanswered. Despite their drawbacks, interleukins are on the verge of
becoming the next promising cancer cure, as interferon, a
close chemical relation, was the cure of the 1970s. Already,
teams of genetic enginee rs are racing to ﬁgure out how to
manufacture interleukins on a marketable scale. With a
sinking feeling, one senses that another false hope  is being
born. Why is the promise neve r fulﬁlled. Medicine knows
hundreds of facts about interleukins, such as that “thealpha and beta strains of interleukin-1 are only 26 percent
homologous at the amino -acid level of their genes”; or that
both bind to receptors “with high aﬀinity in the 10–10 molar
range. ” When one penetrates the jargon, these are not
insigniﬁcant facts. Yet they say literally nothing about interleukin’s
intelligence, which is the salient point. If interleukins
“know” when and where to ﬁght cancer, then it is not their
molecules that should interest us, but something invisible—
the cell’s ability to recog nize that a cancerous memory is
present and needs to be eradicated. This cannot be injected
into the body. The body’s war against cancer pits
intelligence against intelligence. The physical
manifestations—interferon, interleukin, hormones,
peptides, et cetera—may  be thought of as weapons if you
like, but they must ﬁrst be aimed. In the deepest sense, that is why I have no faith in the
“magic bullet” approach. Penicillin was an eﬀective bullet
because one’s aim did not have to be at all accurate; once
an antibiotic is in the bloodstream, it automatically attacks
the cell walls of bacteria and destroys them. Similarly, early
chemotherapy for cancer was a crude bullet, no diﬀerent
from the chemical warfare of W orld W ar I. (In fact, the most
toxic drugs used against cancer, called alkylating agents,
originated with nitrogen mustard, the infamous mustard
gas that so terriﬁed soldiers in that war. ) Later classes of
chemotherapy, such as the various adrenal horm ones and
estrogen, derived from the body itself, and therefore their
aim was less approxim ate; but now we see that this
advance in fact may be the last gasp of the magic-bullet
theory. At a certain point, the chemicals you want to use are so
precise that their action is eﬀective only within the
narrowest possible limits. If you aim a hormone, you have
to hit one receptor, not just the huge, broad avenues of thebloodstream where penicillin goes. If the receptor you want
to hit is involved in a complex process, as the ones for
interleukins are, then no aim may ever be accurate enough,
for the life and death of the cell involves the precise
attunement of every chemical it contains. By analogy, if you
mistune one string inside a piano, you have thrown
everything out of tune; a piano sonata will never be right if
even one note is wrong. I do not mean to make this sound like the logic of doom. Millions of patients have been successfully treated with
cancer drugs. The toxicity of chemot herapy has been
steadily reduced, and in many cases the dreaded side
eﬀects that have given the treatment its bad reputation are
actually fairly mild, particularly considering the risk of
leaving cancer untreate d. But it still remains true that
without very early detection, cancer is incurable. If a
patient comes to me with lung cancer, even early detection
is no help. I can give him radiation and call it a therapy, but
in 95 percent of the cases it is little more than a short
reprieve—perhaps he and I go through with it just to fend
oﬀ the despair of having no treatment at all. Other common
cancers, such as melanomas, belong in this category. We desperately need a medicine without bullets. If you
look at interleukins free of a material bias, their most
important attributes are invisible. Interleukins are being
produced by the immune cell’s DNA in exact dosages,
combinations, and timing, all of which are more important
than the molecule itself. A white cell engulﬁng an invader, such as a bacterium or
cancer cell, looks decepti vely simple under the microscope,
like a drop of amber surrounding a ﬂy. In actuality, there is
no more intricate process in the human body. An
interleukin arrives on the scene at a precisely determined
point in a most exacting  maneuver. We may call this the
“hunt for cancer,” but much of the immune process ishighly abstract. It is conduc ted almost entirely by the
exchange of information. Hitting the target is one of the
more minor parts of the campaign. Before a macrophage, or immune cell, ever secretes any
anti-cancer agent, the immune system goes throu gh many
other steps. It must ﬁrst detect that a problem exists and
identify it exactly; a cancer cell is not a virus, and neither
one is a bacterium. Using a class of message carriers called
helper T-cells, the body notiﬁes the rest of the immune
system to become activated and starts to produce natural
killer cells. To make sure that the killers do not destroy the
wrong thing,  the body hangs a chemical nametag on the
macrophages inscribed with the enemy’s identity, which
they can show to other cells they meet. This is just the
barest outline of the immune system’s initial sequence of
action, which has many branches, overlappings, and
unexplained convolutions. Having just fathomed the full intricacy of the immune
system in the last ﬁve years, researchers like to compare it
to the brain in complexity. Like the brain, the immune
system has a phenome nal capacity for absorb ing new
information, learning and memorizing the identity of any
new disease  organism, and sorting out billions of bits of
knowledge. We could just as easily say that the brain and
the immune system are not like each other—they are each
other, becau se they operate within the same chemical
network. The only diﬀerence between an immune cell and a brain
cell is that their DNA has selected to emphasiz e certain
aspects of its total knowledge and suppress others. Interleukin comes very close in structure to being a
neuropeptide (the research literature calls it a
“hormonelike polypeptide”). This means that when our
emotions join up with molecules, like riders on a horse, the
mounts they choose are almost identical to interleukin. Forall intents and purposes,  to feel happy and to ﬁght cancer
are much the same thing at the molecular level. We could
call both of them healing messages. It is false even to
divide cells into senders and receivers of such messages;
for although certain immune cells secrete interleukins as
part of their speciﬁc role, virtually every cell in the body
can receive them, implyi ng an ability to produce them as
well. Perhaps this “silent” ability is activated in
spontaneous remissions. Or are there levels of thought that ﬁght the ghosts of
memory hand to hand, and the physical molecules we see
are just so many ﬁred shells littering the battleﬁeld. For
this last possibility to be true, the mind would have to be
directly aware that a cancerous memory is endangering us. Certainly the addict and the anorexic know that the ghost
is there. And I have already mentioned certain tumors,
such as tumor of the pancreas, that begin to make the
patient moody and depressed long before the doctor can
physically detect the malignancy. This early warning still
depends on the actual presence of a cancer cell. However,
that does not exclude a warning that is earlier still. To ﬁnd out where it might come from, we will have to go
deeper into the whole issue of how intelligence and matter
are paired. It is imperat ive to do this, I believe, before the
magic-bullet theory collapses. Interleukin is not a bullet but
a speck of life on the move, with intelligence the invisible
rider. Life itself is intelligen ce riding everywhere on
chemicals. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that
the rider and the horse are the same. Intelligence is free to
go where it likes, even where molecules cannot. EXPANDING THE TOPICBy saying that a thought is always paired with a brain
chemical and vice versa, this chapter took an important
step. The wall that separates mind and body is thick and
ancient. Only by going down to the molecular level and
tagging the very chemicals that carry out the instructions
of the mind can a new picture emerge. But a nicely stated theory that comes wrapped in an
intellectual bow doesn’t carry much weight when a doctor
reaches for his prescri ption pad. Patients want magic
bullets; doctors have a holster full of them. To break the
lockstep betw een physic ians and pharmaceuticals, even a
little bit, took some dramatic news. Since Quantum Healing
ﬁrst appeared, nothing has been more dramatic than the
controversy stirred by a February 2010 cover article in
Newsweek  that proclaimed in stark terms, “ Antidepressants
Don’t Work. ” The story made public what the psychiatric
profession was already beginning to realize: The eﬀicacy of
the most popular drugs for ﬁghting depression was no
better than a placebo, according to the researches of
psychologist Irving Kirsch. Taking a sugar pill, in other words, is about as useful if
you want to alleviate the symptoms of depression as taking
the highly touted, expensive drugs promoted  by Big
Pharma. Protestors and supporters cried out on one side or
the other. The protesto rs alleged that depressed patients
who believed in medications like Zoloft and Lexapro were
now being stripped of hope. The support ers pointed out
that antidepr essants neve r cured depression to begin with
but only alleviated the symptoms, with an added risk of
various side eﬀects, up to and including outbreaks of
violence and suicidal tendencies, not to mention the sharp
rise in dependency on these drugs. In June 2011 more fuel was added by Marcia Angell, the
former edito r in chief of the New England Journal of
Medicine,  who wrote two articles in The New York Reviewof Books  about antid epressants and psychoactive drugs in
general. Angell favor ably reviewed several books that
reached much the same conclusions about how badly and
erratically these drugs work compared to the hyped-up
claims made for them. Her mainstr eam colleag ues were
shocked. Psychoactive drugs, largely used for depression
and anxiety, are taken by 1 in 10 Americans. Here was a
Harvard Medical School authority casting them into serious
doubt. But as charges and countercharges ﬁlled the air, the
average doctor still believed in the basic research behind
these drugs,  which held that mental illness was due to an
imbalance in brain chemistry that could be restored to
balance with drugs. This article of faith was shaken to the
core by a 2013 headline  in Science News  magazine: “A
massive eﬀort to uncover genes involved in depression has
largely failed. ”
I addre ssed the uproar in an online article coauthored by
Dr. Rudy Tanzi of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of
the world’s leading genetics researchers, and Professor P. Murali Dora iswamy, M. D. , of Duke Univers ity, who
specializes in cognitive neuroscience and mental health. Since depre ssion exists in epidemic proportion s in this
country, and since it serves so well to outline the mind-
brain mystery, let me go into detail. Before these challenges to antidepressants arose, the
public perception was that depression is being handled
pretty well. Everyone knows a friend or relation who feels
better taking Zoloft. Informed medical opinion is very
ambiguous, however, because the model for depression that
has been accepted for decades considers it as a brain
disorder, and brain disorders are rooted in genetics. The
failure to ﬁnd the genes involved in depression strongly
suggests—as more than one prominent researcher now
concedes—that the genes of depressed people  are notdamaged or distorted compared with the genes of people
who aren’t depressed. Another false assumption is closely linked to this. The
most popular antidepressants supposedly work by repairing
chemical imbalances in the synapses—the gaps between
two nerve endings—where the culprit was an imbalance of
serotonin, one of the brain’s most important
neurotransmitters along with dopamine. But serotonin is
directly regulated by genes, and some key research
indicates either that drugs aimed at ﬁxing the serotonin
problem don’t work that way or that there wasn’t a
serotonin problem in the ﬁrst place. The Science News  report doesn’t leave much wiggle
room for a laissez-faire attitude on this point: “By combing
through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international
team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic inﬂuences
that aﬀect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the
analysis turned up nothing. ” Nothing doesn’t mean
something. If the chain of explanat ion running from genes  to the
synapses and ﬁnally to the pharmaceutical lab is broken, a
host of doubts arises. Is depression a brain disease in the
ﬁrst place, or is it—as psychiatry assumed before the
arrival of modern drug treatment—a disorder of the mind. The latest theories aren’t  black -and-white. Here’s a list, by
no means complete, of things that can make you depressed:
Outside stress
Personal crisis
Grief
Physical illness
Sudden life changes
Accidents and unforeseen setbacks
Loss of job or moneyPersonal insecurity
Failure
Bad parenting
Low self -esteem
Negative religious beliefs leading to guilt and shame
Other causes of guilt and shame
Rejection in love
Being around other depressed people, particularly family
members
The X factor
This is a long list. Even if we discount some undiscovered
cause (the X factor), the mind is faced with the complexity
of life, and numerous experiences can engender
depression. If I tell you that you’ve just been ﬁred, it’s not
your brain that will make  you depressed. It’s a sudden jolt
of devastating bad news. Nobody knows why some people
convert bad experiences into depression while others don’t. It is equally true, after all, that the glass is half empty and
half full. In studies, when shown neutral photos of various
people and situations, depressed people habitually see
them as negative, disappointing, sad, and unlikely to lead
to a positive outcome. With so many variables  in play, there are still a few
general conclusions that seem reliable:
1. There are many kinds of depression. 2. Each depressed person displays his or her own mixture
of causes and symptoms. 3. The mental component in depression includes
upbringing, learned behavior, core beliefs, and
judgment about the self. 4. The brain component includes wired-in neural
pathways, suggesting weaknesses in certain areas of
the brain whose causes aren’t understood. But
depression isn’t localized in just a single region in the
brain. The interaction of multiple regions is involved. The genetic component may explain why depression runs
in families, but no gene or group of genes seems to
guarantee that a person  will become depressed. We are
talking instead about genes that make you susceptible to
the disorder. What trigger s these (unknown) genes remains
a mystery. In any case, genes are not ﬁxed but ﬂuid in their
output, so the genetic situation is changeable. As for the X
factor, it could be a predisposition in young children that
doesn’t blossom into depression for years to come. It could
be social interactions that create a sense of helplessness or
victimization. A skeptic could look at this list and say, “So anything and
everything can make me depressed. That’s the same as
proving nothing. ” But ﬁnding the many variables that
contribute to depression isn’t the same as giving up. Instead, we are heading in the direction Quantum Healing
points to, seeing mind and body as intimately, dynamically
related at every moment of life. About 20 percent of people
will experience a severe depression sometime in their lives. At the mome nt, there is a rash of depression among combat
soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan (this would be
directly related to a sudden increase in suicides, which is
generally linked to depre ssion) and among laid-oﬀ  workers
who are enduring long-te rm unemployment. In both cases,
an outside event led to the depression, but we do not know
why, in the sense that only a certain proportion of people
become depressed under the same stimulus (war and losing
your job). Another hidden issue is the failure of the disease model
when it comes to depression. A cold is caused by a speciﬁc
virus, just as AIDS is caused by the HIV retrovirus. One
cause leads to one eﬀect. That’s the germ model in a
nutshell, as applied to physical disorders. Extending the
model to mental disorde rs, which is the whole basis of
psychiatry, becomes very wobbly when so many factors,
internal and external, genetic and environmental, ﬁxed and
changeable, exist. It’s even diﬀicult to deﬁne for research
purposes who is clinically depressed and who is not. Depression “spreads” in families and among friends
without the need for an inherited gene. Can someone be a
“carrier” of depression, and if so, how do they infect one
person and not another. And what about treating depression through old-
fashioned couch therapy, talking about the underlying
issues that a person feels troubled about. Depressed
patients respond about equally well, according to various
studies, whether they talk about their depression or
swallow a pill. But here’s the truly mysterious part. It was
found that the tranquilizer Prozac had an unexpected use
in treating people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or
OCD. Typically, these are people who feel compelled to
repeat a ritual like washing their hands or dusting the
house many times a day, who can’t stop even though they
want to. Taking Prozac seems to reduce overactivity in a
certain area of the brain associated with OCD; the patient’s
symptoms begin to improve. OCD can also be treated with
couch therapy, and to everyone’s surprise, the same brain
areas, when scanned by fMRI, also improve, exactly as if a
drug were administered. The original study about the failure to ﬁnd the genes
responsible for depression, which was published in the
January 3, 2013, issue of Biological Psychiatry, took an
unusual approach by ignoring diagnoses of depre ssion andgoing instead with symptoms. This wasn’t necessarily
better, only diﬀerent. Asking people about symptoms
results in a lower number of those who would be
considered depressed. This could be because some people
are in denial or don’t know the diﬀerence between
depression and ordinary sadness. But more important,
symptoms change over a lifetime; there is a sliding scale
for each suﬀerer and for the disorder as a whole. From person to person, depression has a large circular
component of response and habit. A person learns to
respond to ordinary situations by being depressed, and
once learned, this response becomes a habit that reinforces
itself. The habit of depression  is as hard to break as
addiction. And in both cases one hears the cry, “I can’t help
it. I have to be this way. This is me. ” Telling someone that
they are prisoners of their sick or damaged brain only
reinforces this defeatist belief and the circle of depression. In the end, the situation is too cloudy for anyone to oﬀer
either a pessimistic or optimistic prediction about where
depression is heading. Drug treatm ent remains  hugely
popular, no matter what the basic science says. In cases of
mild to moderate depression—the most common type—
antidepressants “work,” as long as you discount the fact
that their rate of eﬀica cy, around 30 percent, isn’t an
improvement over placebos. That’s too much to discount. An eﬀective drug must at the very least do better than
taking sugar. Some symptoms of sever e depression remain
intractable, and yet in other cases, the chronically
depressed perform the best with drug treatment. Hope is
always better than giving up. The point of this detailed discussion is that depression is
joining other mental disorders, particularly schizophrenia,
where no simple disease model works. There are too many
variables, and patients follow highly individual paths as the
disorder sets in. It would be naïve to believe that Americais going to abandon a belief system that puts materialism
ahead of everything else. But discounting the mind while
constantly referring everything to the brain is folly. It deﬁes
common sense, and more  important, it blinds us to the real
possibilities of quantum healing. OceanofPDF. comNinety years after they began to emerge, the insights of
quantum physics remain a total mystery to most people. Yet, once you under stand what the disco very of
neuropeptides means, then understanding the quantum is
only a step further. The discovery of neuropeptides was so
signiﬁcant because it showed that the body is ﬂuid enough
to match the mind. Thanks to messenger molecules, events
that seem totally unconnected—such as a thought and a
bodily reaction—are now seen to be consistent. The
neuropeptide isn’t a thought, but it moves with thought,
serving as a point of transformation. The quantum does
exactly the same thing, except that the body in question is
the universe, or nature as a whole. We need to consult the quantum to really understand how
the mind pivots on the turning point of a molecule. A
neuropeptide springs into existence at the touch of a
thought, but where does it spring from. A thought of fear
and the neurochemical that it turns into are somehow
connected in a hidden process, a transformation of
nonmatter into matter. The same thing happens everywhere in nature, except
that we do not call it thinking. When you get to the level of
atoms, the landscape is not one of solid objects moving
around each other like partners in a dance, following
predictable steps. Subatomic particles are separated by
huge gaps, making every atom more than 99. 999 percent
empty space. This holds true for hydrogen atoms in the air
and carbon atoms in the wood that tables are made of, as
well as all the “solid” atoms in our cells. Therefore,
everything solid, including our bodies, is proportio nately as
void as intergalactic space. How could such vast reaches of emptiness, dotted at
faraway intervals by specks of matter, turn into human
beings. To answer that questio n requires a quantum
perspective. By understanding the quantum, we enter into
a vaster reality, spanning from quarks to galaxies. At the
same time, the behavior of quantum reality turns out to be
very intimate to us—indeed, the faintest shadow-line
separates the human body from the cosmic body. —
In his monumental project to make all of physics follow a
few consistent, rational laws, Isaac Newton explained
nature’s workings in terms of solid bodies, straight-line
motion, and ﬁxed constants that ruled all physical events. This is the model of nature as a complex billiard game, with
Newton as the master player. Because matter and energy
stayed within  set rules, there was no need to theor ize about
a hidden world; everythi ng happened aboveboard. We can
express this idea with a simple diagram:Here, A is a cause and B is an eﬀect. They are joined by a
straight line, expressing that cause and eﬀect are logically
connected in the world we are familiar with, the world of
the senses. If A and B are two billiard balls, making one hit
the other is a predictable  event. However, if A is a though t
and B is a neuropeptide, then the diagram would not apply. There is no straight-line connection between a nonmaterial
thought and a material object, even one as small as a
peptide molecule. Instead, one has to draw a diﬀerent
diagram with a detour in it:
The U shape  shows that a process has to take place that
is not above the line, in Newton’s rational, straight-line
world. There is some hidden transformation happening that
turns a thoug ht into a molecule. The transformation doesn’t
take any time and doesn’t  happen in any place—it is carried
out just by the presence of an impulse of the nervous
system. When you think the word  rose,  a large number ofbrain cells have to ﬁre (no one knows how many, but let us
say 1 million, which is probably absurdly small), but these
cells don’t get in touch  with one another by passing a
message from  A to B to C, and so on, until all 1 million get
the message. The thought just appears, suddenly localized
in time and space, and with it, the brain’s cells all change
in sync. The perfect coordination of this thought-event and
1 million brain cells making neurotransmitters must have
happened below the line. The whole area below the line is not a region to be visited
in space and time; it just stands for wherever it is you go
when you turn thoughts into molecules. One could also
think of it as the control room that correlates any mental
impulse with the body. At any one time, all 15 billion
neurons in the nervous system are being coordinated with
perfect precision from below the line. The same change from straight-line causes to U-shaped
detours occurred when quantum physics was born. Although everything in nature once appeared to happen
above the table, accordi ng to classic Newtonian  theory—
obviously, physicists leave mental events out of the picture
—a few things could not be explained without a detour. The
most obvious was light. Light can behave like A, a wave, or
B, a particle. These two are totally unalike in Newtonian
physics, since waves are nonmaterial and particles are
concrete. But light somehow can act like one or the other,
depending on circumstances, and therefore it must have
taken a detour under the line:To see light as a wave, or vibration, is easy enough. A
prism breaks white light down into the colors of a rainbow;
the reason for this is that white light is composed of
separate wavelengths of light, a fact that becomes apparent
when they are broken apart into a spectrum. The light from
an incandescent light bulb has its own spectrum of
wavelengths, generated when electricity passes  through
the tungsten ﬁlament. But if you turn the light down with a
dimmer switch until just the smallest amount of light can
come out, it will come out not like a wave but like a
particle. (No dimmer switch is this ﬁne-tuned, but
physicists have broadcast light so that it exposes its
“graininess. ” Nature has also equipped  our eyes to respond
physically to light at its quantum level—if only a single
photon falls on the retina, a ﬂash is transmitted along the
optic nerve. Our brains, however, do not process just one
ﬂash. ) The word quantum —from Latin for “how much. ”—
describes the smallest unit that can be called particlelike. A
photon is a quantum of light, because you cannot split it
into ﬁner particles. The photon manifests when a ﬂow of
electrons hits a tungsten atom; the moving electrons in the
electricity collide with electrons whirling in orbit around
the outside of the tungsten atom, and out of their collision
jumps a photon, a quantu m of light. This quantum is a very
strange particle, because it has no mass, but for ourpurposes, what makes it important is that in order for a
light wave to become a photon, it must take a detour
beneath the table. In an unknown realm not covered by
Newton’s laws, the transformation takes place. Since we are not trying to explain physics here, I won’t
go into elaborations. It is enough to know that after
Einstein, when Max Planck and other pioneering physicists
at the turn of the centu ry were able to demonstrate the
quantum nature of light, many, many curious conclusions
resulted. Events that we take for granted in the world of
the senses had to be reconciled with strange distortions of
time and space—but reconciled they were. As with the
neuropeptide, the quantum allowed nature to become
ﬂexible enough to permit  the inexplicable transfor mation of
nonmatter into matter, time into space, mass into energy. Here is the pattern for a basic quantum event; it shows
the detour that always takes place outside the reach of
ordinary events:
Like the thought and the neuropeptide, light cannot be a
wave and a photon at the same time; it is either one or the
other. Yet it is obvious that a tungsten light bulb doesn’t
enter another reality when you turn it down. Somehow,
nature sets up its laws so that light can be either A or B,
and both are kept inside the boundaries of the same reality
by building in a transfo rmation point. (People today stillcasually assume that Einstein overthrew Newton,  when in
fact he saved Newton’s belief in perfect order by expanding
it. ) A strikingly elegant view of mind and body can be formed
from this basic quantum event, requiring only one diagram:
The mind and the body are both above the line. A is a
mental event, or thought; all the other letters are physical
processes that follow from A. If you feel afraid (A), then the
other letters stand for signals to your adrenal glands, the
production of adrenaline, the pounding of your heart,
elevated blood pressure,  and so on. These are B, C, D, et
cetera. All the physical changes that take place in the body
can be connected in a logical chain of cause and eﬀect,
except for the space after A. This is the point where the
transformation from thought to matter ﬁrst occur s—and it
must occur, or the rest of the events will not happen. At some point in the lineup, there must be a detour. At
that point, the lineup breaks down, because mind does not
touch matter above the table. If you want to lift your little
ﬁnger (point A), a physiologist can trace the
neurotransmitter (B) that activates an impulse that runs
down the axon of the nerve (C), causing a muscle cell to
respond (D), resulting in the lifting of your little ﬁnger (E). However, nothing a physiologist can describe will get him
from A to B—it requires a detour. The whole picture is likea bucket brigade, where each ﬁreman gets his bucket from
the ﬁreman before him, except for the ﬁrst, who gets his
from nowhere. “Nowhere” is almost an exact term here, because you
cannot subdi vide the body to arrive at the precise  junction
where a thought turns into a molecule, any more than you
can ﬁnd the station house where photons are fashioned into
light waves. What exactly  happens in the. zone is not
known, eithe r in physics or in medicine. Miraculous cures
seem to be examples of dipping into the. zone, because
the cooperation of mind and matter takes an inexplicable
quantum leap in such cases, but so are other mind-body
dramas that play themselves out in mysterious ways. Several years ago, a Boston ﬁreman in his mid-forties
came into the emergency room of a suburban hospital one
night complaining of sudden, sharp chest pains. The
resident on call examined him and could ﬁnd no evidence of
irregularity in his heart function. The patient went away
without being reassured, and soon he returned with the
same symptoms. He was turned over to me as senior
physician, but I could ﬁnd nothing wrong with his heart,
either. Despite his thorough examination, the ﬁreman began to
return to the ER repeatedly, usually late at night. Every
time he came in, he told me with great trepidatio n that he
was certain he had a heart condition, but no test, including
the most sophisticated echocardiograms and angiograms,
detected the slightest defect. Finally, in the face of the
man’s mounting anxiety, I recommended that he be retired
with full disability purely for psychological reasons. The ﬁre
department’s medical examining board refused, on the
grounds that no physical evidence had been oﬀered. Two
months later, the man showed up one last time at the
emergency room, this time on a stretcher, the victim of a
massive heart attack. Within ten minutes of his coronary,which destroyed 90 percent of his heart muscle, he died,
but he had enough strength to turn to me and whisper,
“Now do you believe I have a heart condition. ”
What this case so dramatically attests is that the detour
into the. zone is powerful—it can change any physical
reality in the body. I feel I must call what happened here a
quantum event, because it did not follow the cause-and-
eﬀect rules that have been observed and set down by
medicine as the body’s normal state of aﬀairs. Many people
entertain fears that they might have a heart condition, but
they don’t die from them; conversely, many heart attacks
occur without the slightest forewarning from the mind. Even if we say, in keeping  with mind-body medicine, that a
thought caused the heart attack, how did this thought ﬁnd
a way to carry out its fatal intention. If you program the concept of “heart attack” into a
computer, you know exactly what you have done. If you
want to retrieve it, the circuits can be activated to bring it
up to the screen, and once it is there, you can use software
to manipulate it. But the thought “heart attack” didn’t act
like this at all in my patient. He didn’t know where the
thought came from; once it came, he was powerless to
escape it; and far short of staying in one place, the thought
invaded his body, with disastrous results. This is only half of the mystery of a quantum event—the
negative half; the journey into the. zone can have
amazingly positive results, too. Another patient of mine, a
quiet woman in her ﬁfties, came to me about ten years ago
complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suﬀering from gallstones, I had her
admitted for immediate surgery, but when she was opened
up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that
had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer
throughout her abdominal cavity. Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the
incision without taking further action. Because the
woman’s daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother
the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had
been succes sfully remov ed. I rationalized that her family
would break the news to her in time, and that in all
likelihood she had only a few months to live—at least she
could spend them with peace of mind. Eight months later I was astonished to see the same
woman back  in my oﬀice. She had returned for a routine
physical exam, which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no
detectable signs of cancer. Only after another year passed
did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, “Doctor, I
was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned
out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick
another day in my life. ” Her cancer never recurred. This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears,
through her deep-seated resolve, and that was good
enough. This case, too, I must call a quantum event,
because of the fundam ental transformation that went
deeper than organs, tissu es, cells, or even DNA, directly to
the source of the body’s existence in time and space. Both
of my patients—one with positive thoughts, the other with
negative—managed to dip into the. realm, and from there
they dictated their own reality. —
As mysterious as these two cases are, are they really
examples of quantum events. A physicist could object that
we are just making metaphors here, that the hidden world
of elementary particles and fundamental forces explored by
quantum physics is very diﬀerent from the mind’s hidden
world. Yet, one can argue that the inconceivable region
from which we fetch the thought of a rose is the same as
that from which a photon emerges—or the cosmos. Intelligence, we will discover, has many quantum
properties. To make this clear, we start with the familiar
textbook scheme that arranges the body vertically, as a
hierarchy of systems, organs, tissues, and cells:
In this picture, each level of the body is logically related
to the next—as long as you remain above the line, the
processes that appear as life unfolds happen in a deﬁnite
sequence. This is exhibited by a fetus in the womb: a baby
begins as a speck of DNA sitting in the middle of one
fertilized egg cell; over time, that cell multiplies until a ball
of cells is formed, large enough to begin to sort itself out
into the be-ginnings of tissues and eventually organs, such
as the heart, stomach, spinal cord, and so on; then the
entire nervous system, digestive system, respiratory
system, and so on emerge; and ﬁnally, at the moment of
birth, the trillions of cells in the newborn are precisely
coordinated to sustain the life of the whole organism
without the mother’s help. But if DNA is the bottom  rung of this neat stepladder,
what makes DNA unfold in the ﬁrst place. Why does it
initially divide on the second day after conception and
begin to make a nervous  system on day eighteen. As with
all quantum  events, something inexplicable happens
beneath the surface to form the all-knowing intelligence of
DNA. The point is not that DNA is too complex tounderstand, being a super-genius molecule; what makes
DNA mysterious is that it lives right at the point of
transformation, just like the quantum. Its whole life is spent
creating more life, which we have deﬁned as “intelligence
tied up in chemicals. ” DNA is constantly transferring
messages from the quantum world to ours, tying new bits
of intelligence to new bits of matter. Sitting by itself in the middle of every cell, completely
oﬀstage, DNA manages to choreograph all that happens
onstage. It can spin out parts of itself to travel through the
bloodstream as neuropeptides, hormones, and enzymes,
while at the same time attaching other bits of itself to the
cell wall as receptors, setting up antennae to listen for
answers to a ﬂood of questions. How does DNA manage to
be the question, the answer, and the silent observer of the
whole process at the same time. The answer is not at the level of matter. Molecular
biologists long ago broke DNA down into its ﬁner
components, but the whole operation still remains above
the line in the Newtonian world:
As we saw before, DNA is not made out of anything
special. Its strands of genetic material can be subdivided
into simpler molecules like sugars and amines, and these
into atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. When it
is not tied into DNA, a hydrogen or carbon atom doesn’thave anythin g like timing built into it. In billions of other
combinations, hydrogen and carbon simply exist; yet in
DNA, they contribute to a mastery over time, an ability to
produce something new every day, which lasts, in a human
being, more than seventy years—every stage  of life
develops according to DNA’s timetable. (In a bristlecone
pine, DNA is timed for more than two thousand years. ) No matter how closely you look, the ground for the
stepladder is not very ﬁrm. When you get beyond atoms
and start subdividing DNA into electrons, protons, and
smaller particles, a quantum event must take place. Otherwise, you are left in the embarrassing position of
claiming that life is made out of nothingness—empty space
devoid of matter and energy—which is all you get if you
divide solid particles beyond a certain point. At the quantum level, matter and energy come into being
out of something that is neither matter nor energy. Physicists sometimes refer to this primordial state as a
“singularity,” an abstract construct that is not limited in
time and space but is a compression of all the expanded
dimensions of the universe. In the Big Bang, the whole
universe jumped out of a singularity—so it is theorized—
which we can think of by analogy as a point smaller than
the smallest thing in existence. Yet, that stupendous event
of creation happens on another scale every time you think
the word rose. There is no piece of matter existing in a deﬁnite place
that holds this word for you—it springs into existence from
a region that simply knows how to organize matter and
intelligence, mind and form. The atoms in your brain come
and go, but the word rose does not disappear. Now we are
at a very exciting point. The singularity is quite explorable
today: it did not exist before  the Big Bang, since it is
outside time and space; therefore, it must be here now—in
fact, it is everywhere and has no conﬁnes in past, present,or future. Quantum physics uses mammoth particle
accelerators and other arcane equipment to wrest from the. zone even one minute glimpse of this hidden world. The
track of a new elementary particle whizzing by for a
millionth of a second is a major ﬁnding, because it means
that the unknown zone has been reached and a bit of its
reality brought into ours. Can it really be that we are doing
the same thing just by thinking, feeling, dreaming, and
wishing. What would the quantum  level inside us be like. It would
simply be the logical extension of something we are very
familiar with by now, the neuropeptide. The neuropeptide’s
great ability is that it can respond with lightning  speed to
the mind’s commands. It does this, I believe, by sitting on
the borderlin e of the quantum zone. Science has already
discovered that hundreds of neuropeptides exist and are
manufactured all over the body. It is just another step to
ﬁnd that every one of our cells can make every one of these
substances. If that turns out to be true, then the whole
body is a “thinking body,” the creation and expression of
intelligence. Here is another diagram that sketches the
situation:
We already know that intelligence can take the form of a
thought or a molecule; this is represented in the diagram
by having “mind” and “body” as the two choices thatintelligence can make. The two are always matched to each
other, even when they appear to be separate. To coordinate
them, I have inserted a quantum level, called the “quantum
mechanical body. ” This is not a physical artifact but a layer
of intelligence, the layer where the body as a whole is
organized and correlated. This is where the know-how
comes from that makes molecules “smart” instead of inert. We should not assume that thoughts turn into messenger
chemicals one at a time. It is well known that in many ways
all the billion s of bits of DNA in our systems act like one big
DNA molec ule, as when the incredibly complex
development of a fetus is coordinated in the mother’s
womb—from the ﬁrst day to the ninth month, all the DNA in
an unborn child acts as one. The same holds true for us
today. Perhaps quantum events are not exclusively “out there”
in space, but “in here” as well. Do we have “black holes”
into which matter and energy disappear forever. Yes—we
call it forgett ing. Do we speed  up time and slow it down, as
a space traveler does in the event that his rocket can
accelerate to near the speed of light. Yes again, for a writer
can think up in an instan t a story that may take hours of
normal time to set down on paper; conversely, you can
spend half an hour trying  to retrieve someone’s ﬁrst name,
which comes instantly once you ﬁnd the timeless zone,
called memory, from which it must be retrieved. —
Whenever any mental event needs to ﬁnd a physical
counterpart, it works through the quantum mechanical
human body. That is the secret of how the two universes of
mind and matter associate with each other without
mistakes. No matter how diﬀerent  they appear, mind and
body are both soaked through with intelligence. Science
tends to be skeptical in the face of any claim thatintelligence is at work in nature (this is a strange historical
anomaly, since every generation before us has accepted
without ques tion some kind of universal order). However, if
there is nothing outside ordinary reality to hold things and
events together, then one is led to a set of impossibilities. We can see this in the law of gravity. Common sense says
that two objects separate d by empty space should have no
connection with each other; in the jargon of physics, they
occupy their own “local  reality. ” But the Earth revolves
around the sun, held in its orbit by gravity, even though the
two bodies are separate d by a void of 93 million miles. When he discovered this violation of local reality, Newton
was shocked and refused to speculate on how it happens. Since then, local reality has taken one beating after
another. Light, radio waves, lasers, and all other
electromagnetic forces travel through empty space; matter
and antimatter seem to exist in coordinated universes that
have no physical contact; subatomic particles have spins
that are matched to one another, and it doesn’t matter how
far apart in time and space the particles are—their spins
can be matched at opposite ends of the universe. What this implies is that the commonsense idea of local
reality is true only at a certain level. The whole of reality, as
explained by quantum physics, lies deeper. A famous
mathematical formula, known as Bell’s theorem (after its
author, the Irish physicist John Bell), holds that the reality
of the universe must be nonlocal; in other words, all objects
and events in the cosmos are inter-connected with one
another and respond to one another’s changes of state. Bell’s theorem was formulated in 1964, but decades earlier,
the great English astron omer Sir Arthur Eddin gton had
anticipated inter-connec tedness by saying, “When the
electron vibrates, the universe shakes. ” Physicists now
accept inter- connectedness as a ruling principle, along with
many forms of symmetry that extend across the universe—for example, it is theorized that every black hole may be
matched up somewhere with a corresponding “white hole,”
though none has actually been observed. What kind of explanation would satisfy Bell’s requi rement
for a totally inter-connected, nonlocal reality. It would have
to be a quantum explana tion, because if gravity is present
everywhere at the same  time, if black holes know what
white holes are doing, and if a change of spin in one
particle causes an equal but opposite change instantly in its
partner somewhere in outer space, it is obvious that the
information going from one place to the other is traveling
faster than the speed of light. This is not permitted in
ordinary reality, either by Newton or Einstein. Contemporary theorists such as British physicist, David
Bohm, who has worked extensively with the implications of
Bell’s theorem, have had to suppose that there is an
“invisible ﬁeld” that holds all of reality together, a ﬁeld that
possesses the property of knowing what is happening
everywhere at once. (The word invisible  here means not
just invisible to the eye but undetectable by any measuring
instrument. ) Without going deeper into these speculations,
you can see that the invisible ﬁeld sounds very much like
the underlying intelligence in DNA, and both behave very
much like the mind. The mind has the property of holding
all our ideas in place, in a silent reservoir so to speak,
where they are precisely organized into concepts and
categories. Without calling it “thinking,” we may be watching nature
think through many diﬀerent channels, of which our minds
are one of the most privileged, because the mind can create
its quantum reality and experience it at the same time. Witnessing a quantum event in the ﬁeld of light waves may
seem completely objective, but what if quantum reality was
just as present in our own thoughts, emotions, and desires. Eddington once ﬂatly stated his belief as a physicist that“the stuﬀ of the world is mind-stuﬀ. ” So the quantum
mechanical body, as a formation of intelligence, has a
plausible place in nonlocal reality. The beauty of such a simple picture is that intelligence is
simple; the complications arise when one tries to track
down the incredibly complex machinery of the mind-body
system. The brain-wave patterns of a psychotic and a poet
look the same on a roll of EEG paper as it come s oﬀ the
electroencephalograph, no matter how sophisticated the
analysis. Thinking about the thousands of hours it would
take to scientiﬁcally describe the chemical conseq uences of
one cell’s daily life, a neuroscientist friend of mine
remarked, “You have to conclude that nature is intelligent
because it’s too complicated to be called anything else. ”
He could just as easily have said “too simple. ” A human
brain that changes its thoughts into thousands of chemicals
every second  is, after all, not so much complicated as
inconceivable. In ancient India, it was supposed that
intelligence existed everywhere; it was called Brahman,
from the Sanskrit word  for “big,” and was just like an
invisible ﬁeld. A saying from thousands of years ago holds
that a man who has not found Brahman is like a thirsty ﬁsh
who has not found water. Our whole physiology can be transformed as quick ly as a
neuropeptide, which is an integral part of the quantum
mechanical body. Because we can change like quicksilver,
the ﬂowing quality of life is natural to us. The material body
is a river of atoms, the mind is a river of thought, and what
holds them together is a river of intelligence. —
It may seem that the quantum mechanical body is involved
only in life-or-death situations, but that isn’t so. We live in
it, casually and without thinking, just as we live in the bodyas a whole. I have a patient who glimpsed this fact while
sitting on the grass eating French bread and listening to
Mozart. She had been a frustrating case for more than two
years. She suﬀered from a combination of nagging
symptoms, including irritable bowel, headaches, fatigue,
insomnia, and depression, that humbled every attempt to
cure her. None of these conditions was fatal, but they made
her life miserable nonetheless. Conventional treatment
with anti-depressants and tranquilizers had done her little
good; neither had anything I did using A yurveda. Then one day she went to Tanglewood, the summer home
of the Boston Symphony  and an idyllic place to have a
picnic. She spread out a check ered cloth, lay in the sun
listening to music, and peacefully ate her lunch. These
things made  her very happy, and that night she slept
soundly for the ﬁrst time in years. However, she was so
used to being sick that this new event did not register on
her. Another year of misery passed, until it was time for her
to go to Tanglewood again, and the same thing happened—
all her symptoms disapp eared for the day, and she slept
beautifully that night. This time it registered. She came to see me jubilantly
waving a sheaf of reprints from medical journa ls on the
SAD syndrome. The initials stand for “seasonal aﬀective
disorder,” referring to a condition in which patients become
seriously depressed every winter without appare nt cause. Now we know that the cause has to do with the pineal
organ, deep inside the skull; this small, ﬂat, oval endocrine
gland, although surrounded by brain matter, responds to
changes in sunlight, being the source of the “third eye”
that everyon e wants to look through in the New Age (some
lower animal s such as the lamprey do possess a literal third
eye). In certain people, insuﬀicient exposure to sunlight in
the winter throws oﬀ their pineal secretions; the glandstarts to produce too much of a hormone called melatonin,
giving rise to depression. “See,” she said, “I’ve had SAD all along, and by sitting in
the sun, I’ve got a normal pineal gland again. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but that disorder occurs in winter. ”
Her face started to fall, and I quickly added, “You’ve put
your ﬁnger on something  important, though. Now we have
a deﬁciency we can treat. ”
“What’s that. ” she asked. “Picnic deﬁciency,” I said. For the ﬁrst time since  I’d
known her, she ﬂashed me a genuine smile. Her self-trea tment continues to work. She regularly
escapes the gray conﬁnes of her oﬀice building to sit in the
sun at lunch, talk to friends, and listen to lots of Mozart. This may not sound like advanced medicine, and in a sense
it isn’t, but the reason it works is that we need Nature to
free up our nature. We are surrounded by the best of all
healing inﬂue nces—fresh air, sunlight, and beauty. In India,
the Hippocrates of Ayurveda, a great physician and sage
named Charaka, prescribed some sunlight for all diseases,
along with a walk in the early morning, and his advice will
never grow stale. If I ﬁnd a green meadow  splashed with daisies and sit
down beside a clear-running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when I sat in my mother’s lap
in infancy, because the Earth really is my mother, and the
green meadow is her lap. You and I are strangers, but the
internal rhythm of our bodies listens to the same ocean
tides that cradled us in a time beyond memory. Nature is man’s healer, because Nature is man. When
Ayurveda says that the sun is our right eye and the moon
our left eye, we mustn’t sneer. By bathing us in the moon,
the sun, and the sea, Nature fashioned the bodies we
inhabit. These were the ingredients that provided us eachwith our piece of Natur e—a shelter, life-support system,
intimate companion, and home for seven decades or more. The discovery of the quantum realm opened a way to
follow the inﬂuence of the sun, moon, and sea down deeper
into ourselves. I am taking you there only in the hope that
there is even more healing to be found there. We already
know that a human fetus develops by remembering and
imitating the shapes of ﬁsh, amphibians, and early
mammals. Quantum discoveries enable us to go into our
very atoms and remember the early universe itself. Aeons
ago, light and heat came into being in the univers e, to last
for 20 billion years; yet, every human being strikes the
spark again, lighting the ﬁre that kindles life. In Vedic
India, the same sacred ﬁre that was in the hearth shared
the name Agni with the digestive ﬁre in the belly and the
solar ﬁre in the sky. Sir Arthur Eddington once aﬀirmed that there were two
realities that had to be known on their own term s, one of
which was trivial, the other all-important. The trivial one
was the mechanistic reality investigated by science; the all-
important one was the human reality of ordinary
experience. In the scienti ﬁc reality, Eddington said, Earth is
a speck of matter whirling around a mediocre star, both of
them cast adrift among billions of more important stellar
objects. But in the human reality, Earth remains the center
of the universe, because  the life it harbors is the only
important thing that exists, at least for us. The most poignant expression of this idea came to me
from a patient who had many health problems, including
cancer. To regain her perspective, she wrote down certain
important experiences from her past. One of these
occurred when she was a girl of 16; she entitled it, “But
How Can I Be the Moon. —Age 16:”Lying alone in the pasture, dark except for the
magnetic full moon. There is an overwhelming
sense of quietness. My being is part of the earth
and part of the pure white light of the moon at the
same time. Nothing else is signiﬁcant. For a
second I wonder, “Am I dead. ” It isn’t important—
I am spendin g an hour in God’s hands, and it will
become part of me. A surprising number of people have had such
experiences, which Eddington called “the mystic contact
with the earth. ” My patient later slipped away from her
experience, gradually becoming used to the grind of work
and family worries that disconnects all of us from Nature;
in her case, the accumulated stress led to frequent
sickness. (She wryly titled her later life, “Going Against
Nature—This Is Adulthood. ”)
What is so unusual is that when she stopped going
against Nature, the old feeling of contact came back with
undiminished freshness. In her late twenties she visited the
Paciﬁc shore and wrote this:
For about two hours on the beach alone, I was
with God again. I was the surf, its sound and
strength. I was the sand, warm, vibrating, alive. I
was the breeze, soft and free. I was the sky,
endless and pure…I felt only great love. I was
more than my body and knew it. This moment was
absolutely cleansing and beautiful. What she expresses I also believe as a doctor. The healing
mechanism inside us perfectly matches the one outside. The human body does not look like the green meadow, but
its breezes, its laughing water, sunlight, and earth were
merely transformed into us, not forgotten. Section summary: 

(Note length constraint)

Please summarize the author's argument regarding the relationship between "bad" incidents/trauma/experience/memory influencing personal development/growth/intention/willpower/resolution/magic/buddhi/habit/thought/emotion/action/disease/culture/society/environment/life/stability/truth

(Please adjust the request based upon accuracy/convenience). Section Summary Length Limit : **250** characters (**approximately**, please try to fit content accordingly. )

If needed, prioritize clarity vs breviary style during summarization. Answer: Please find the summarized version beneath:


Summary:  

The authors discuss how 'abstractions' influence bodily responses. Their primary concern initially focused solely on purifying Waltier [Walter]. During recovery periods, conversations helped foster connections & rapid growth; subsequently, relapse ensued amid unfavorable surroundings ('train ride'). Chemical explanations fail adequately addressing addiction phenomena. Memory plays crucial roles, persisting despite alterations in atomic structures. Cellular components store info, manifesting anew with altered states; henceforth emphasizing emotional resonance rather than simplistic biomolecular pathways. (Word count = approximately 249)


Source code adjustments requested:

* Include essential keywords/phrases  
    * Personal Development/Growths/Mental Health/Addictions/DNA/Cause/Persistence/Learning/Family Dynamics/
Family History/Social Environments/Stigma/Vulnerabilities/Biology/Evolution/Nature/Human Experience/Wounds/Traits/Qualitative Information


Note: Adjustments await feedback.
He was triggered by a stressful event (getting on a train) and relapsed into his addiction.
What happened to Walter, the man who had been detoxified and was relapsing into heroin use?
The text does not explicitly state where the craving hid, but it implies that it was not in the physical cells, but rather in the memory or mind.
Where did the craving for addictive substances hide for a year before it returned?
A cell is a memory that has built some matter around itself, forming a specific pattern.
What is a cell, according to the author?
The author suggests that depression is not just a brain disorder, but rather a complex interplay of internal and external factors, and that the body's response to thoughts and emotions is crucial in understanding and treating depression.
What is the author's conclusion about the treatment of depression?
The author believes that the mind and body are deeply interconnected and that the mind can influence the body's response to events, citing examples of quantum events and the connection between the body and the universe.
What is the author's perspective on the relationship between the mind and the body?