A
stopped heart can survive without oxygen for up to ftee n minutes;
brain cells are irreversibly damaged without oxygen after only four
minutes. This sets the critical  time limit that cardiac units are racing
against in their frantic emerg ency eorts. Some yogic subjects have
virtually halted blood ow for hours, however, and spent days with
their hearts barely utterin g. If medicine is pledged to be an
objective science, such demonstrations should topple our whole
conception of what the body actually is. Unfortunately, metaphors
die hard. Phantoms
Nothing forces you to try and break through Maya’s mask . As long
as you accept the physical world at face value, your compliance
keeps the machinery running. Rocks remain hard and solid, the
wind blows, water makes things wet, and re burns. Maya is very
obliging. At a certain point, however, the mirage of molecules is not
real enough to be satisfying. The illusion starts to dissolve—we have
seen many instances of that by now—and then the search begins for
the true reality hidden under the trick eects. I do not have to recover “miraculously” from a brain tumor to
begin this search. Just to observe that I am not a handful of empty
space is a good enough beginning. Something must hold me
together, a kind of glue or magnetic pole that keeps my molecules
from ying apart. What is this glue? How do I manage to organize
myself around a stable, meaningful core? One clue, strangely enough, lies in the experience of amputees
who continue to feel that their lost ngers, toes, arms, and legs are
still present. Oliver Sacks has written evocatively of these
“phantom” limbs, as neurology calls them. Phantoms are observed
frequently in the aftermath of amputation and can persist for days,weeks, or years. Their appearance can be disquieting, to say the
least. Dr. Sacks describes one patie nt, a sailor, who lost an index nger
in an accident at sea. At the time of injury, the nger was rigidly
extended, and the phantom that appeared in its place retained the
same position. The man had the distinct sensation that he was
forever pointin g his nger in the air. This feeling was so lifelike that
he could hardly touch his hand to his face to shave without fearing
that he would poke an eye out. Other patients have phantoms that
bring pain, itching, and various other uncomfortable sensations,
bordering on the bizarre—one man reported that his phantom leg
regularly suered severe cramps at night, complete with curled toes
and knotted calf muscles. Phantoms often possess the uncanny ability to change size. Thus a
leg may seem eight feet long at one minute and only two inches
long the next. Phantoms are not simply deceptive, though. Anyone
who has worked with disabled patients soon discovers that without
a phantom, learning to use an articial limb is made much more
dicult. Walking steadily on a prosthetic leg is a matter of
integrating it into your existing body image. As long as the
prosthesis is dead weight, this integration will never be completely
natural. But the phantom leg can mold itself to the false leg, giving
the feeling that it is alive. Even when it proves useful, a phantom is not always cooperative. Sacks mention s one patient who would wake up some mornings to
nd that his lower leg, a phantom, was not there. In its place would
be a vacuum, nothingness devoid of any sense of existence. (Of
course there was only air below his knee to begin with, but on these
mornings it was “dead” air.) To bring his phantom back to life, the
patient would vigorously slap his thigh ve or six times like a baby’s
bottom until the phantom woke up and extended itself. Then he
could t on his prosthesis and walk. What so intrigu es me about phantoms is that all of us have one—
we just happen to call it our body. Being basically an inert lump, the
body is as dead as a false limb. Its sugars have no more feeling than
a gum drop; its proteins are no more sensitive than a pinto bean.Through the nervous system, which inltrates every ber of the
body, we have learned to project ourselves into this inert lump,
tting it on the way an amputee ts on his prosthesis. When a foot
or hand  goes to sleep, we can feel what a dead weight it really is. “Going to sleep” is a temporary paralysis that results when the
nerves have been crushed, usually under the weight of our torsos
when we inadvertently roll over in bed or sit with one leg curled up
under us too long. Many other people besides amputees rely on misguided phantoms. A young woman aicted with anorexia looks in the mirror and is
confronted with a thin, almost skeletal image. The body she has
starved throug h her eating disorder is there before her eyes. But
inside she has a contrary image of herself as too fat (or rather, not
thin enough), and this visual phantom rules her mind. She “sees” a
fat person in the mirror, just as an amputee “feels” that he has a
two-inch or eight-foot leg. Whatever the phantom tells you is real becomes real. I “know”
that my leg is three feet long, that my body weighs 150 pounds, that
I am sitting upright and am awake, but to believe these things is to
take them on trust, for my phantom could be tricking me. The
nature of the mind is to crave continuity, to bridge one thought with
another, to give our actions consistent motives and look for
consistency in others. To get some idea of how much it takes to organize a continuous
reality, we can consider the plight of schizophrenics, whose brains
process the world so poorly that what emerges as speech is a
chaotic, jumbled outpouring called “word salad.” In David Noonan’s
penetrating book, Neuro- , there is a vivid account of the kind of
“loose association” that cannot hold logic togeth er when
schizophrenia strikes. One patient says, “My last teach er in that
subject was Professor A. He was a man with black eyes. There are
also blue and gray eyes and other sorts too. I have heard it said that
snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes.”
Seemingly overwhelmed by thoughts and sensations, the mind of
a schizophrenic can no longer form any ordered or logical
statements from the swirl of impressions generated inside and out.Another patie nt was asked to comment on the energy crisis. “They’re destroying too many cattle and oil just to make soap,” he
replied. “If we need soap when you can jump into a pool of water
and then when you go to buy your gasoline, my folks always
thought they should, get pop but the best thing to get, is motor oil
and money. May as well go in there and trade in some, pop cans
and, uh, tires, and tractors to grup, car garages, so they can pull cars
away from wrecks, is what I believed in.”
It is clear that this patient understood the question he was being
asked, but he could not sort out the images, memories, and concepts
that it brought to mind. They all became mixed into a salad that is
quite crazy but hints poigna ntly at the lost days when the world
made sense. The resulting verbal garble reminds me that my own
words are glued together  in a very mysterious way by a
consciousness I take for granted. I do not have to go through any
mental struggl es to make sense when I speak—it just happens or it
doesn’t. Without this deceptively automatic continuity, life would turn
into “life salad.” Yet there is a seeming paradox here. How can one
maintain continuity and still be open to unexpected things, to the
ever-changing ow of events and the lightning ash of revelation? My choice plays the key role in whether I accept the world as it is or
alter it to suit my desires. Maya and I have been very good about
abiding by our agreement to keep the world predictable. Yet—who
knows?—I may decide to break the agreement tomor row. Or a
minute from now. Reality is always open to revision. Waking from the Spell
Milton Erickso n, a great pioneer in the therapeutic use of
hypnosis, was once giving a lecture-demonstration to an audience of
medical students. He asked for a volunteer to join him on the
platform. A young man came forward, took a seat facing the
audience, and placed his hands on his knees as Erickson requested. Then Erickson asked him, “Would you be willing to continue to see
your hands on your knees?” The student said that he would. Whilehe was talking, Erickson silently gestured to a colleague, who
walked up on the other side of the young man and raised his right
arm in the air. The arm stayed there. “How many hands do you have?” Erickson asked. “Two, of course,” the young man answered. “I’d like you to count them as I point to them,” Erickson said. “All right,” the young man replied, a patronizing note in his voice. Erickson point ed to the hand  resting on the left knee, and the young
man counted, “One.” He pointed to the right knee, where  there was
no hand, and the young man said, “Two.” He then pointed out the
hand dangling in midair. The student became hopelessly confused. “How do you explain that other hand?” asked Erickson. “I don’t know,” said the young man. “I guess I should  be in a
circus.”
You may have guessed by now that the volunteer was already
under hypnosis. The astonishing part of the story is that he was not
hypnotized beforehand. Erickson was such a master of his art that
he induced a trance merely by asking the question, “Would you be
willing to continue to see your hands on your knees?” That
suggestion is exactly what the student carried out when he “saw” a
hand on his right knee. And what about me? Everything I see around me right now is just
as precarious as that third hand. I have a “sense of reality” that I
trust, not because it is real, but because my trust makes it real. A
hypnotist can, with the slightest twist of my attention, make me
believe that there are six people in a room instead of two dozen, or
that a foul-tast ing concoction brewed up by a local pharm acist is the
most delicious  glass of dry sherry. Both of these were done to R. D.
Laing by a hypnotist friend in Glasgow. Commenting on the dry sherry episode, Laing bewails, “How
could one’s sense of taste, such an intimate sense, be so readily
deceived? I could not believe my taste! This was not merely
interesting. It was profoundly disquieting. It baed me. It scared
me.” High emotions are aroused when we feel ourselves swaying
over a bottoml ess gorge. As Laing quite logically asks, “What is the
real taste of anything? In what sense are any phenomena reallyreal?” This is the very question that teased the old men gathered on
our veranda on Babar Road. Laing is more dismayed. “How far is
the whole feeling and fabric of our ordinary, everyday world
socially programmed, an induced ction, in which we are all
enmeshed?” he asks. The only ones to escape the net are “a few
whose conditioning has not ‘taken,’ or has broken down, or who
have awakened from the spell—a motley crew of geniuses,
psychotics, and sages.”
Exactly—the only way out of Maya is to wake up from its spell, to
join the few who are not utterly enchanted. In our culture, the spell
has become respectable as “hard” science, but that does not make it
truer. The advantage of seeing through Maya is that the scientic
spell, although  it has given us this convenient modern life with its
jets and computers, CAT scans and carrot juicers, has not done away
with fear, violence, hatred, and suering. Those have been
programmed into Maya, too. They come with this dream when you
agree to be its dreamer. Every once in a while, I meet someone who already belongs to the
motley crew whose conditi oning did not “take.” They are not
necessarily psychotics, geniuses, or sages; they are just people who
cannot be convinced as easily as the rest of us. Invariably, our
encounters shake my dream a little. I walk away aching to see what
they see and to be what they are. But there is also happiness and
even hilarity when we realize what is happening. For a moment, we
have looked across the illusion to nd that we are equals. “Who
knows?” their eyes seem to say. “Maybe you will wake up next.”
I am thinking particularly of Harold, an old man who appeared,
when I rst met him, to be completely ordinary, although at
seventy-ve, his body was in evident decline. His daughter brought
him to see me because she was worried about the prospect that
Harold was rapidly going into severe kidney failure, a serious and
even life-threatening prospect that many older people face. While the three of us sat in my oce, she talked anxiously about
what steps we could take, including putting her father on dialysis. Harold, however, settled into his chair and looked unconcerned. When I looked at his blood tests, I immediately saw why hisdaughter was upset. Harold’s BUN, or blood urea nitrogen, was near
90; a normal level is around 10. Another indicator called creatinine
was also extremely elevated. Everyone collects nitrogenous wastes in his blood as the residue
of prote in breakdown in the cells. This waste is toxic in any large
amount and would quickly become lethal if the body did not have a
way of constantly disposing of it through the kidneys. When a
doctor sees a high BUN or creatinine level, it indicates  serious if
indenite kidney problems. Harold was very close to the point
where dialysis is automatical ly called for. That was what his family
doctor had insisted upon, but Harold had refused. Harold should have been in considerable discomfort, but when I
ran down the typical symptoms of kidney failure—nausea, dizziness,
weakness, and loss of appetite—he said that he felt ne, maybe a
little tired. I must have looked disbelieving, because before I could
question him again, he said, “This isn’t a new problem, you know.”
“Oh?” I said. “When did you rst nd out about it?”
“About forty-ve years ago,” he answered, giving me a
mischievous look. A man who had lived with chronic renal failure for forty-ve
years would be plagued by a host of symptoms, not to mention
permanent damage to the bones, eyes, lungs, and blood vessels,
among many other possible sites, including the kidneys themselves. But Harold insisted that he had rst heard about his problem during
World War II when an army doctor told him that his blood tests
qualied him for immediate  medical discharge. He was told point-
blank that with his elevated BUN levels, he had no more than ve
years to live. Harold exhibited no sympt oms then, and since there was no
eective treatment for chronic renal failure, he took his discharge
and went away . Five years later he returned to see his army doctor,
only to learn that the doctor had died. “It bothered me that he wasn’t around anymore, since he knew
my case,” Harold said, “so I went home without seeing anybody
else.” It was the mid-Fifties before he sought out another kidney
specialist. This doctor panicked when he saw Harold’s BUN levelsand told him that he had very little time to live—his only hope was
that a new technology then in its rst stages of development, kidney
dialysis, might  be perfected in time to save him. Harold went away
again and bided his time. “I thought the kidney machine was going to be the answer, so I
kept a lookout for it,” he said. About ten years later, he read in the
papers that dialysis had come into practical use. He returned to the
kidney specialist, only to nd that the second doctor had now died. Harold’s count s continued to get gradually worse, and ve years
ago, when he applied for health insurance, a third specialist told
him that he was so sick he should either go for regular dialysis or
consider a kidney transplant. “That really shook my daughter,” he said. “And I kept thinking
that I should do something, so last month I called the doctor back. His nurse told me he had just died of a heart attack.”
The three of us sat there for a second, but what could we say? We
all burst out laughing at the same time. “I mean, if I have outlived
three kidney specialists,” Harold said, bewildered by his good
fortune, “I think I should just stay away from doctors altogether. It
would be much safer for them.”
I had to agree. OceanofPDF.com6
Thread to Freedom
“I’m not afraid. I realize that deciding to have this surgery means
that I’m taking  a big risk. I might be fed on a tube for the rest of my
life. It doesn’t matter, just so we do something. I’ve never felt fear at
the prospect of death. I just wanted to reassure you about that.”
It was a very unconvincing speech. As Lou was delivering it, I
watched his darting eyes and the uncontrollable tremor in his
hands. He tried not to notice how much his true feelings were
coming through. Perhaps he really didn’t notice. How could we defuse some of this pent-up fear, I wondered. It
was not an easy task, considering how swiftly the catastrophe had
fallen. Two months before, there had been no signs of trouble, unless
having a life that is too perfect is a sign of trouble. Lou was an
American living in Spain on a private income and following his
passion, which  was art history. When he began to feel ill, the
symptoms were almost trivial. His Spanish-born wife always served
wine at dinner, but Lou began to notice that just one glass of the
local red wine was enough to give him a sudden attack  of nausea
and diarrhea. He complained to an internist in Madrid, who reassured Lou that
he probably had a transient intestinal virus. When the problem
persisted, however, the doctor decided to run some diagnostic tests. A CAT scan detected a suspicious mass about ve centimeters long
at the head of the pancreas. A needle biopsy was taken, and in a fewhours the hospital lab sent back grim news. The mass was
adenocarcinoma, a deadly cancer of the pancreas. Even now, when he had only a fty-fty chance of surviving for
six months, Lou was still free of pain. His body showed no sign of
cachexia, the wasting away of tissues typical of the end stage of
cancer. If he hadn’t been so conscientious about invest igating his
bouts of indigestion, Lou might still have considered himself
healthy. “It’s bizarre waking up every  morning feeling so good,” he said. “Just as I start to think about  whether to play tennis or sort through
some drawings, I remember that I am a terminal case, and then I
can’t work up the energy to do anything.” A shadow crossed his
face. “If only I could hold on to that rst moment.”
More than usual, I felt a personal need to help. Lou had own
back to America for treatment, but the standard interventions with
surgery and radiation were grim aairs. The pancreas is the body’s
chief source of digestive enzymes; once it is removed, the patient
loses almost all of his ability  to digest food. Replacement enzymes
can be provided, but as yet they are feeble substitutes for the body’s
natural processes. When I was training in endocrinology, I spent a rotation on the
oncology ward s at Boston’s Baptist Hospital, doing workups for a
famous pancreatic surgeon who was a prominent attending
physician. His patients lay in bed looking horrible— moribund,
cachectic, yellow with jaund ice. Since they would never again be
able to eat properly after their surgeries, these patients spent weeks
hooked up to IV tubes being fed entirely on drip. In the end, after
the expenditu re of enormous eort and care, the vast majority
survived barely a few months. My rst priori ty was to save Lou from that grim scenari o. I was
not his primar y-care physicia n; he had been referred to me because
his doctor had read a book of mine and felt that a mind-body
approach might help ease Lou’s massive anxiety. However, I
couldn’t help feeling that Lou was as anxious about his treatment as
about his disease. I advised  him to consider not havin g surgery. With it, his life expectancy might be prolonged slightly, at leastaccording to the statistical tables, but his own comfort needed to be
weighed in the balance. Did he want to go through so much misery
for such a small gain? Lou listened carefully but was not persuaded
by my arguments. “My instincts tell me not to have an operation,” he said, “but
what if I am dying six months from now after doing nothing? It
would be so cruel to my wife, and I would feel too guilty hurting
her that way.”
After much soul-searching, he agreed to a compromise. Instead of
having the entire pancreas removed, he would undergo  a limited
procedure that leaves most of the organ intact. He would then still
be able to eat normally in the weeks to come. As the operation
loomed nearer, however, Lou’s moods started swinging drastically. Sometimes he came into my oce acting condent, even ebullient,
about his chances; more often he was somber and depressed. His
normal self, with its normal relationship to the body, had collapsed
in confusion. Nothing was properly connected anymore. His body
was no longer his; it was a strange, fearful object. He wanted to
distance himse lf from this thing, but he was becoming more and
more mesmeri zed by it. Stare at a monster long enoug h and you
become the monster—that adage was coming true for Lou. One day I asked him to close his eyes and sit quietly. As he did, I
said, “For the moment, let’s take time o from talking or thinking
about your case. Just be yourself. Don’t identify your mind with any
particular problem; don’t do anything.” I paused, and we both sat in
silence. “Do you notice any pain?” I asked. “No,” he murmured. “Good,” I said. “Now just sit comfortably appreciating whatever
comes to mind. If you have a strong thought, even a gripping one,
just let it go by. You’ll nd that it’s not hard to do.” Another pause,
and then, “Did you feel any impulse of fear or anxiety?”
He nodded. “Don’t mind that,” I said. “It’s just a passing cloud. What I want
you to notice is that there are spaces between your thoughts, like
patches of blue between the clouds. When you notice such a space,just give a nod.” He closed his eyes again, and after a moment, he
slowly nodded. We continued the exercise for a few more minutes. “Do you feel anxious now?” I asked. Lou shook his head, and I
asked him to open his eyes. He had a rather surprised look on his
face. “You see, it’s not so hard to stop being a cancer patient,” I said. “I
wanted you to sit quietly for a moment in order to experience, if
only vaguely, the state of inner silence. Thoughts come and go in
this silence. But when a thought isn’t present and there is also no
impulse of fear, no strong memory or temptation to act, the mind is
just by itself, being itself. At that exact second, there is a choice to
have the next thought or emotion. Now ask yourself, who faces that
choice?”
“I don’t know,” Lou said, somewhat baed. “No one has ever put
it to me in quite those terms.”
“To project a movie requires  a screen,” I said. “The images move
and play on the screen; vivid emotions and high drama are enacted. Despite all that, the screen itself isn’t engaged. It’s not part of the
movie, is it?”
“No,” he said doubtfully. “The dierenc e between the mind and a movie screen is that we
do become engaged in the movie, because it’s our life. The screen
inside us becomes so soaked in compelling personal images that the
sense of there being a screen— an unchanging, unaected part of the
mind—is lost.”
We both realized how new this all sounded. One’s inner sense of
“me” is built up of images from the past, all the fears, hopes, wishes,
dreams, loves, and disappointments one calls “mine.” However, if
you strip all of these images away, something of “me” is still left:
the decision maker, the screen, the silent witness. “I can’t nd that untouched core for you,” I said earnestly. “It has
to be encounte red directly. One clue I have given you, though. The
thoughts and feelings that ow by, like clouds against the sky, are
distractions. The real you is the sky beyond. Every time you manage
to witness that clear, open space, you will nd a place that is safe,
because it never had cancer to begin with. Here you come face toface with yourself—the witnessed is also the one who is doing the
witnessing.”
The Thread of Yoga
The belief that the self has an untouchable core plays a crucial
part in modern psychology, particularly in the setting of
psychotherapy. In therapy, a patient will at best undergo supercial
change as long as he confron ts only the supercial layers of himself. To break through and accomplish major change, he has to unveil
the “central nucleus—that whorl of the self which possesses absolute
wisdom and self-knowledge.” These words are from Irvin Yalom, a
senior psychiatrist and professor at the Stanford University medical
school. At rst, only the therapist realizes that a core of wisdom and
self-knowledge exists. The patient himself, under the inuence of his
mental distress , is alienated from this part of his psyche. Therefore
the therapist’s role (I am speaking here of classic “couch therapy”) is
to give the patient the courage and freedom to bring his deepest self
to light. In almost every case, the rst step is to convince him that the
deeper self is real. The patient must be shown and then made to
experience that part of his mind which transcends crises, which
registers life with crystal clarity even when the conscious mind is
reeling in bewilderment and panic. It is not an easy exploration. Ever since Freud, depth psychology has proceeded on the notion
that the knower is buried  under layer upon layer of painful
experiences. It cannot be confronted directly; therefore it must be
tricked out. The patient is thus presented with dreams, slips of the
tongue, and free associations that betray what is actually happening
under all the layers of disguise. Once I was discussing the current high divorce rate with another
internist and happened to ask if his parents were divorced. “No,” he
said. “Believe it or not, they are still married after forty-ve years. They’re almost museum pieces in this day and age. I should have
them put under grass.” Before I could react, he caught himself. “My
God, I meant ‘under glass,’ of course.” Eighty years ago, he couldhave dismissed  his Freudian slip lightly; now he has to wonder at
the disguised wish that popped out between the cracks of his
psyche. One of the great cultural dierences between East and West is
that the quest  for the know er, which we undertake as a cure for
disorders like neurosis or depression, is a normal goal of life in the
East. In India, nding the knower is considered life’s great
adventure. Although a highly personal adventure, the way is marked
by a tradition of knowledge—amounting to a science, really—called
Yoga, from the Sanskrit word for “union.”
The union a yogi seeks is not with anything outside himself; nor is
it a union with God, ecstasy, or the supernatural, althou gh each of
these may be manifested at one time or another. The yogi’s union is
more ultimate, rooted in his craving to nd the speck of himself that
experiences reality directly, without lters or masks. The legacy of yogic knowled ge in India is ancient and extensive,
and very bewildering to outsiders. If they bother to dene it, most
Westerners assume that Yoga means practicing variou s physical
exercises that, if taken to extremes, twist the body into grotesque
postures. This discipline is properly called Hatha Yoga and is just
one of Yoga’s eight “limbs,” or divisions (and by no means the most
important). Since the search for the knower is not an exclusively Indian
project, neither is Yoga. Its aim is to systematically uncover the
silent witness inside us, a possibility open to anyone at any time. Here it appears in thirteenth-century China, distilled into four lines
by the poet Wu-Men:
One instant is eternity ,
eternity is the now . When you see through this one instant ,
you see through the one who sees . The great Su poet Rumi beckons us to freedom with just two
tantalizing lines:Out beyond ideas of right-d oing and wrong-
doing,
there is a eld . I’ll meet you there . If we want a more literal idea of what Yoga amounts to, we must
turn to the whole problem called identication, for this is what will
be solved when union has been achieved. All of us move through
life by identifying with one thing after another. My house, my
career, my wife are all forms of identication that give us comfort
and security— but not permanently. The mind has to keep shifting
its focus of identication because conditions change: my house gets
too small to live in, my caree r slumps, my wife grows bored. If I can
shift smoothly with these changes, it is possible to remain relatively
secure, but there is always the risk that the bottom will drop out
because I have attached myself to something totally insecure. In
Lou’s case, he identied with his disease, not because he consciously
chose to, but because identifying with one’s body comes  naturally. When the body falls sick, its pain might not have to be a problem,
but it turns into one automat ically if the idea of “my” body is strong
enough. Because identication is built into the mind, one cannot abolish
it. Rather, the yogi solves the problem of identication by turning it
on its head. Instead of identifying with things, a person who
practices Yoga—primarily through meditation—begins to identify
more and more with the silent witness inside. The process is like
following a gossamer thread until you reach the spider that spun it. My thread may be very dierent from yours, because I have spun
the web of inner reality according to my unique experien ces. I may
believe in a certain master, school, method, or book. Or I may not
even have heard of Yoga as such. But the central issues remain
much the same . Do I have a thread to follow? Will it lead back to its
source before it breaks? Once the goal is reached, Yoga is said to liberate the seeker from
the limitations of ordinary life. The separation between body and
mind is healed , allowing the person to enter into a higher state offunctioning, both physically and mentally. I have already mentioned
the ability of some swamis to stop their respiration and heartbeat at
will. True yogis, however, would not stoop to consider any such
feats as a primary part of their development. They are too intent on
establishing, once and for all, the truth about mind, matter, and
spirit. In that sense, they are scientists in their own realm, keenly
observant and completely grounded in their inner experience. My spiritual grandfather could not get enough of yogis, whom he
revered in the traditional manner as living saints. I vividly
remember his account of one. He came back from a pilgrimage to
the Himalayas  breathless with excitement. “I have seen the most
amazing sight!” he exclaimed to my mother. Then he noticed me
perking up my ears in the corner—I must have been about eight—
and his face clouded. “It might frighten him,” he said anxiously. “No, it won’t,” I protested, not quite sure. “No, no,” he demurred, shaking his head. It was a long time
before I found out the story . My grandfather had visited a distant
cave on the Ganges where a yogi lived, passing most of his day in
meditation. The yogi greeted my grandfather and his companions
cheerfully. As they talked, my grandfather could not help but notice
numerous double scars covering the yogi’s exposed arms and legs. “What are those?” he asked one of his companions in a low voice. The other man shrugged his shoulders, then all at once both of them
realized that these were the results of snake bites. That area in the
lower parts of the mountain s was infested with cobras. The two
visitors looked around nervo usly, and in a moment they spotted a
large cobra lazily moving in the grass. “Baba,” my grandfather exclaimed to the saint, “you are living
with snakes all around you.”
“Snakes?” the yogi said. “I’ve never seen one here.”
“But you are covered with bites,” my grandfather protested. The yogi gazed at him with penetrating sweetness. “Perhaps you
see snakes here, but I see only God, and believe me, sir, He does not
bite.”
At eight years old, I marveled at this story and believed it, but it
did not take. For me, the concept of Yoga became meaningful onlyin adulthood, when it was paired with the concept of Maya. Yoga is
the process that makes Maya less convincing, so that eventually one
is free to choose a wider reality than the one automatically
presented by the senses. The senses present a cobra, but the saint
sees only God—and reality shifts. What would have killed another
man cannot touch him because he has already died; he is dead to
the old, sense-dominated reality. A subtle  aspect of identication is being overcome here. Generally
we cannot help identifying with the world. When the image of a
rose falls on the retina, it automatically makes an impression on the
visual center in the brain. No choice is consciously made, because
the nervous system has taken  instant possession of the image. Until
the attention wanders to another object, one’s awareness is
imprinted with a rose. This is therefore a kind of union, or Yoga, but
a false one, because it is so weighted in favor of the object. Seeing
the rose, I forget myself. Most people have no idea that looking at things can be a kind of
bondage. A rose is a rose, re is re, water is water— all these
natural facts arrange themselves into a unity that seems
preordained, thanks to the automatic process of identication. But
to the yogi, the bondage of the senses is a serious handica p, because
it commits us to things “out there” and to our memories, which are
totally lled with things from the past. If I break my leg and feel
intense pain, my response seems unchallengeable when in fact it is
merely a repetition of an old way of responding that I learned years
ago. Can this old lesson be unlearned? Anyone can distract himself from a mild headache by talking to a
friend or becoming absorbed in a book. The reason these
distractions work is that we have more choice over identication
than we realize. Even though the senses  stick to the world like glue,
we are still free to pull them  away to new objects of fascination. There is no reason why this element of choice has to be foiled by
pain. The Christian martyrs whom the Romans fed to the lions in the
rst and second centuries A.D. often welcomed their fate, seeing it asan opportunity to prove their faith, In The Gnostic Gospels , Elaine
Pagels cites letters in which condemned Christians begged their
friends not to intercede and save them from death. Motivated by
their zeal to literally imitate the events of Christ’s life, the martyrs
competed in the arena to show as much patience as they could,
singing hymns  and looking upward with expressions of angelic joy
as the beasts attacked them—we have this from reliable accounts by
amazed Roman onlookers. As much as anything else, Christianity
conquered the pagan world by rst awing the pagan mind, proving
beyond dispute that human will dictates to matter and not vice
versa. Modern theories of pain concentrate on the complex neural
pathways of the pain signal and the various chemical triggers that
accompany the sensation of pain. Yet believing in Christ is not a
chemical event; it is a choice made in the mind. That is why the
yogi’s vocabulary, which deals in such abstract terms as
identication, is actually truer to life than the scientist’s concrete
terms. To get at the switch that turns pain o and on, one has to
step over the line that separates visible molecules from invisible
beliefs. In this abstract eld people decide whether or not something
will hurt them . They attach their sense of “me” to some events and
detach it from others. There is a notable medical case, described by Stephen Locke and
Douglas Collig an in The Healer Within , concerning a foundry worker
whose legs fell into a vat of molten aluminum. Taken unconscious to
the hospital, he was hypnotized the instant he woke up by a
psychiatrist attached to the burn unit. The suggestion was planted in
the burned man’s mind that he had fallen into cool water instead of
700°F. molten metal. This suggestion took root and worked so well
that it not only canceled out the pain, but the patient recovered
quickly and with minimal scarring. This is the practical result of a
purely mental detachment. A man who has solved the problem of identication may still feel
pain as a signal from his brain, but he will not convert it into my
pain, and that minuscule but all-important dierence cuts the cord
of suering. He no longer makes the mistake of thinking thatperception is ooding in to create his awareness; rather, awareness
is going out to create his perceptions. By returning our minds to the
depths of awareness where we are free to make our own experience,
Yoga opens up the possibility for uprooting all suering at its
source. Can the Mind Free Itself? Breaking down the mind’s illusion sounds desirable as an ideal,
but what does it amount to in practice? Many people try to
substitute “positive thinking” for the disturbing thoughts they want
to eliminate. On the surface this tactic may lead to some signs of
improvement. The mind can be forced into identifying only with
pleasant or uplifting things. But in time the feared thoughts will
surface again (Freud called this “the return of the repres sed”), and
until then there is the exhausting eort of trying to maintain
constant self-control. Some time ago I was consulted regularly by a woman who was
xated on positive thinking. She had been successfully treated for
breast cancer two years before but remained extremely worried
about a recurrence. Her anxiety was obvious to everyone around
her, but it was the last thing she herself wanted to confront. If I
even entertained the notion of saying, “You’re scared, aren’t you?”
her xed smile and upbeat manner made me feel gratuitously cruel. I also felt increasingly nervous just being around her. She seemed
like a taut wire on the verge of snapping. Finally, after not so subtly hinting that she might be creating a
false mood, I asked her point-blank to stop being so relentlessly
positive. “You mean it’s all right for me to have negative thoughts if
I want to?” she asked with touching incredulity. “Yes, when they are natural and unavoidable,” I said. Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Thank goodness,” she
exclaimed, “I needed permission from someone. I have read so much
about the damage you can do to your body with negative thoughts
that I spent the whole year after my operation dreadin g the leastsign of one. Then it occurred to me that dread is a negative thought. You don’t know how confused that made me feel.”
I considered this quite an impressive insight on her part. Many
people, in their well-intende d eorts to accent the positive, do not
escape their problems but only increase them. They want to put an
end to suering but mistake nly choose the tactic of denying their
true feelings, on the grounds that the feelings are “too negative ” to
express. I went deeper into this whole issue with my patient. “Paying attention to one’s fear and pain is a great source of guilt in
most people,” I pointed out, “because it seems like self-p ity, a trait
we think of as wrong. But denying pity to yourself, when you would
give it willing ly to others, is also wrong. We all have hidden pain
inside, and trying to suppress it is not a virtue. It’s only an
impossibility. “You may consider it very important to maintain a good attitude,
but in itself an attitude is not very reliable. After all, who’s keeping
whose spirits up? Everything inside you is just you, even though you
might split it up into a brave you that is trying to suppress or defeat
a fearfu l you. If one part is addressing the other, saying , ‘All right
now, don’t give in, don’t turn hopeless,’ isn’t that really just a kind
of game?”
She admitted that this was probably true, but it was not very
reassuring. “I always feared that if I didn’t keep up this game, as you
call it, my negative thoughts would swallow me up.”
“Does opposing your negative thoughts lessen their power?” I
rejoined. “Doesn’t it just delay the day when they will come out in
one way or another? Think about it. You probably put in a lot of
time not thinking negatively. It must require constant vigilance and
eort on your part. Yet as soon as the pressure is o, don’t these
denied feelings  rebound with doubled intensity? In your position, I
couldn’t lay my head on the pillow at night without armies of
negative thoughts assaulting me.”
She agreed that going to sleep had become a torture. “Negative
thoughts come  on their own, even in the face of our strongest
opposition,” I said. “It’s just something we all have to accept. If we
keep playing this game of opposing thoughts that are not acceptableto us, we will always lose. The serious question is, ‘Can I give the
whole game up?’ Very few people consider that alternative.”
After a second’s reection, the woman commented, “No matter
what you say, I don’t think the game will be so easy to quit.”
She is right, of course. Our conditioning to keep going in the same
direction is very powerful. The ancient Indian sages, or rishis,
noticed this and concluded that the mind cannot free itself through
any mental activity, whether of struggle, vigilance, or repression. Thinking your way out of thought is like trying to get out of
quicksand by pulling yours elf up by the hair. At bottom, any
thought, howe ver positive, is still in the realm of thought. Yoga
opens another way, and its secret is just this: there is more to the
mind than thinking. Indeed, thinking is another mask of Maya, less
solid than things we see and touch but just as untrustworthy. In an ancient Indian text called the Shiva Sutras , one hundred and
twelve ways are given for a person to escape Maya by the only
means possible—transcending it to experience the deeper reality of
the silent witness. Here are a few of the techniques,  delivered
directly by the god Shiva, the traditional teacher of yogis:
When vividly aware through some particular sense, keep in
the awareness . When on a bed or a seat, let yourself become weightless ,
beyond mind. See as if for the rst time a beauteous person or an ordinary
object. At the edge of a deep well, look steadily into its depth s
until— the wondrousness . Simply by looking into the blue sky beyond clouds, the
eternity . Although they stress seeing  the world in a dierent way, all of
these techniques are actually  based upon a shift in awareness, for as
we have discussed, awaren ess is the source of seeing . Seeing a
beautiful perso n “as if for the rst time” might happen by chance,
out of the corner of your eye, but never as a constant state, not ineveryday awareness. I cannot  see a certain small, shy, devout Indian
woman withou t seeing my mother, nor can she see me without
seeing her son. We are used to each other, accustomed to looking
through so many layers of ourselves. My father looks at her and sees a dierent person, in fact, several
dierent people superimposed one on another: the sheltered girl
with downcast eyes who was at rst a stranger, then an object  of
timid courtship, next the new bride and mother, and ever since the
intimate adviser and companion whose words and thoughts have
intertwined into his almost like a second self. Each layered image
contributes something of its own value when he sees her. The
shaping force that has made them almost one is no less powerful
because it has worked so slowly and invisibly. A shared reality ows
in, over, and between them both. Their intimacy gives my father and mother a privileged
relationship, but at a price. Until the masks are lowere d, he will
never see my mother except  as his wife. Her beauty will remain at a
certain distance. In a happy relationship, this price is worth paying,
many times over. In the absence of true intimacy, the price becomes
too high. A father may say to his son, “I only criticize you because I
love you,” and in his own eyes that may be true. But the son has to
untwist love from criticism as best he can. This is why so many
people, after they’ve grown up, feel a core of suspicion toward being
loved. From childhood onward, we all learned to cope with a
complicated situation where the most basic feelings and perceptions
were blended with one another much of the time. Life would be
simpler if we could see directly into the crystal-clear ideals, the
wondrousness and beauty, that the yogi declares to be at the heart
of life, meaning our own hearts. But Shiva’s teaching barely
penetrates the shell of modern skepticism. A skeptic often harbors
an idealist within who has suered the pain of disillusionment one
too many times. If idealists are born to be disillusioned, why not be
disillusioned to begin with? Again and again, Freud stressed the
importance of “the reality principle” as an index of psychological
health. The reality principle is the recognition that you are not theworld’s creator. Your ego stops at a certain boundary, beyond which
you have no inuence. A baby is thus considered primitive because he feels that he is at
the center of the world, indulging the fantasy that everything is
himself. As a child grows up, he is supposed to shed this infantile
illusion of boundlessness. “Me” and “not me” congeal into their
separate space s, and hopefully it is not long before “me” learns how
to cooperate with “not me.” Parents are generally quite anxious to
promote this cooperative attitude, even when their child is
obviously too young to adopt it. They ignore the child’s discomfort
out of fear that he is being selsh. It is hard for them to see that
their own hidden anxiety is being reected here—they are afraid
themselves to be fully self-accepting. Their own parents signaled
that being self-centered was wrong, and this value judgment is being
passed along now by seeing most forms of satisfaction as “selsh.”
The raw selsh ness of a newborn baby is not a model for future
behavior, needless to say, but it needs to be tempered naturally into
more seless behavior. If the growing-up process sacrices a child’s
very sense of being, then something has been lost that is too
precious to lose. Being carrie s with it a subtle feeling of uniqueness,
and out of that feeling come s a sense of union with the world, of
being bathed in beauty and love. This is reality, too, but of a higher
order. Many young children report experiences that t remarkably well
with the supreme goals of spirituality. One woman writes of a vivid
childhood memory: “At age four I was lying in the grass making
pictures with the clouds. At a certain point I realized that they had
stopped moving. Everything around me was very still, and I felt
merged into the sky. I was everything and everything was me. I
don’t know how long this lasted, and I’ve never felt that way since. But it’s possible.”
Her experience closely mirrors the meditation in the Shiva Sutras
that goes, “Look into the blue sky beyond clouds” in order to sense
eternity . Many children recall mome nts just before they fell asleep at
night when they had the sensation of lightness or oating—again,
this echoes the meditation whose instruction is to be weightless  whilelying in bed. A spiritual exercise that seems so dicult to an adult,
“seeing a beauteous person as if for the rst time” is completely
eortless for a four-month-old. He greets the sight of his mother, the
most beauteous person in his universe, with adoration and delight,
day after day. As long as she is in the room, his eyes remain xed on
her, unable to see anything else. To be, for a newborn, is to be in
the center of a magical world. Some children can remember the magic suusing into much later
stages of development. At ve and six, the poet William
Wordsworth saw the mountains, lakes, and meadows around him
“apparelled in celestial light,” and had to cling to a tree to remind
himself that material things were not visions. Without this eort, he
tells us, he would have been swept away into an ideal world of pure
light and divine feeling. Seeing through Maya, then, may be much
more natural than we suppose. Who knows how many of us have
played in elds of light only to lose the memory of it? What is
certain is that our current ideal of a sound psychological upbringing
is rooted in the real, not the ideal. Through many repeate d lessons a
child is taught that the rough  bark of a tree is more real than divine
feelings; as soon as he is old enough to go to the playground he
nds out that sidewalks skin knees and sts hurt when they hit your
face. In meditation, a yogi erases this rough sense of reality and points
himself back toward the light, the ideal, the divine. Yoga aims for
perfection, which means living from one’s creative core twenty-four
hours a day, without disguise or evasion, free of any form of
unreality. The successful yogi does not simply contac t the all-
knowing nucle us, he becomes  it. As beautif ul as that sounds, the
adult mind instinctively holds aloof. Our experiences of pain and
disillusion are extremely convincing, whereas the premises of Yoga
seem far removed. “Anythin g can be accepted as true today,” a
friend of mine likes to say, “as long as it isn’t the Truth.” He has
understood the reality principle all too well. The Flash of InsightFortunately, higher reality has a way of breaking out
unexpectedly. There are moments when the all-knowing nucleus of
the self defeats the mind’s narrow prejudices. We call these ashes
insight, and they give us a good sense, at least in passing, of what it
must be like to be enlightened. As the Vedas put it, the enlightened
mind is like the sun, compared to which all other minds are like
candles. But a candle has value, because once it is lit, the darkness
cannot be total. In the ash of insight, a corner of the self is
revealed for what is really there. One silently exclaims “Aha!”  and a bit of the truth is brought out
from under wraps. Insight is not always deep or lasting—psychiatrists spend huge
amounts of time shoring up new insights and making sure that the
patient does not lose hold of old ones and regress. Nor does the
body always follow the mind’s lead into a healthier state. Even so,
the moment of insight often manages to shift the entire self, and
that is the key to its power. A social worker in his early forties tells this story: “I was walking
down the hall at work, and I was casually sharing some opinions
with a friend. I told him that I felt he was taking his cases too
personally and might be applying a lot of unnecessary guilt to them. Suddenly he turned on me and snapped, ‘You’re imposing your own
emotions on me, and I resent it.’ Then his voice softened a little and
he said, more reasonably, ‘It’s just something you should work on. I’ve noticed that you have a habit of imposing your own hostile
feelings on other people.’
“I didn’t know what to say. I gured he would apologize for
attacking me. Instead, he simply walked away. When I got to my
oce, I sat down at my desk, but it was impossible to work, I was
feeling so angry. “I simmered for a few minutes like a child on the verge of
throwing a tantrum. I felt outraged and extremely sorry for myself. Why would a friend betray me like this? To discharge my anger, I
started talking  out loud to him, imagining that he was in the room. ‘You don’t seem to care how much you’re imposing your hostile
feelings on me! You have really hurt me, and I have to tell you thatyour accusation is totally and completely unfounded.’ This ploy
made me feel better for a few seconds, but some rational part of me
knew that I wasn’t merely the victim of a pointlessly cruel remark.”
At this point a surprising process of emotional release began. “All
at once, I began to split into layers. It was the most extraordinary
thing. To describe it completely would take a long time, so many
images began to ash by in my mind. I saw my self-pity as a defense
against a huge amount of anger, which was out of all proportion to
what my friend had said—I  wanted to kill him! Then I saw my
father as he looked years ago. He was asking me to do chores
around the house, something I hated as a boy. Clearly the same
overblown resentment was at work. “That stage lasted no more than a split second. Images were still
whizzing by in my mind; it was like watching myself from the
viewpoint of a pebble falling down a well.”
In rapid succession, he saw that his anger at his father was
connected to feeling that he could never win his father’s love. Then
he saw that he had never been able to take criticism from his
brothers or male friends, either. Images of them ashed by, stirring
up a whirl of emotions and memories. “By now only half a minute had passed, but the pebble was still
plummeting, faster and faster. Instead of feeling giddy and
disoriented, my mind was actually quite clear. I was appreciating
every new angle and seeing it truthfully. Strangely, whenever my
feelings started  to run away with me, a detached, calm, inquisitive
voice in my head kept repea ting, ‘Well, is it true? Do I impose my
feelings on others?’ Whereve r this voice was coming from, it wasn’t
going to be dismissed with half-truths.”
During this entire process, this man had lost consciou sness of
things around  him. He was concentrating with intense focus, as
most of us cannot, on the dynamics of moving out repressed
feelings. In a few more seconds, the sensation of being a rock
plummeting down a well ended. “The thing is, I didn’t feel myself hit bottom. I passed through all
these layers, expecting to wind up God knows where. Instead, all
that happened was that I came to again and noticed that I wassitting at my desk. I took a deep breath—apparently I had been
holding it the whole time—a nd went back to work, feeling calmer
though still wounded. It was only an hour later that the insight
came. I was sitting at lunch with a few co-workers, people whom I
know inside out and who frankly have ceased to interest me for
years. Suddenly, they seemed appealing, even fascinating. “They looked at me with aection in their eyes, they laughed
when I said something funny , and I laughed with them. It was the
most peculiar thing, until I realized, with a ash of recognition,
what had happened: I wasn’t imposing my feelings on them
anymore. It hadn’t occurred  to me that these people had nothing
new to oer because I wasn’t giving them a chance. As soon as I
backed o, they opened up, like shy owers. The change in my
awareness had released something new in them. To see them open
up like that was very intima te, and at the same time it came as a
great relief.”
Craig’s Story
At the ash of insight, psychiatry and Yoga are one—the
revelation of the knower is the goal of both disciplines. However,
psychiatry is content with a ash: insight is basically a tool, not a
permanent state. Patients come to therapy for various reasons—to
relieve unhappiness, to sort out unwarranted guilt or anxiety, to
correct self-defeating behavior, and so on—but they do not come to
wake up from the dream of Maya. If anything, that would be seen as
a confused, disabling fantasy, far removed from the sensible,
rational end product of successful therapy. Psychiatry is an imperfect healer because it is wounded itself. Its
reality does not include a core of magic; in fact, many therapists do
their utmost to stamp out any signs of magic in the patient’s mind. Only the most exceptional people manage to rise above the reality
principle; they alone can begin to appreciate how simple the state of
total insight might actually be. Here I am thinking of one patient whose experience of
transcending his physical boundaries seemed to make the dierencebetween life and death. “For the last year I have been aware of a
battle raging inside my body, but in my heart, I am like the
happiest, most carefree of children. I have found the part of me that
cannot be touched by my cancer. I am so much more than it, so far
beyond it. Sometimes I feel totally in command of my illness, at
other times I simply pay no attention to it. In either case, illness
cannot mar my sense of being alive and whole, though surrounded
by chaos and destruction.”
Craig Reed had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when he
wrote these words in a letter; he showed it to me after he had
recovered. Craig Reed is a meditation teacher in his thirties from
upstate New York. Three years ago he visited his family doctor with
a severe sore throat, only to discover that he had contracted a fast-
spreading form of lymphatic cancer called lymphoma. He had
probably had the disease for six months before noticing any
symptoms, which meant that the cancer had metastasized
throughout his body. Two days later Craig checked into a large
teaching hospi tal in Boston where he was assigned to a leading
specialist in lymphatic cancers. “Our only choice,” his oncologist told him, “is to try to kill this
thing with everything we’ve got. It will be very rough, I warn you,
but absolutely necessary.”
When Craig asked how rough it would be, the oncologist smiled
grimly and said, “First we run a truck over you, then we back it up
to make sure we didn’t miss.” In private, he wondered if Craig
would live long enough to complete the rst round of treatments. But from the very outset, Craig was a highly atypical case. His rst
treatment went unusually smoothly. The fever he entered the
hospital with resolved and the balloonlike swelling in his face
subsided. His psychological readiness to face the trials that lay
ahead began to grow. At this point Craig wrote the letter from which I quoted. It
mentions that he practiced meditation every day and had been
doing so for seventeen years. He had developed a remarkable ability
to stop identifying with his disease. Though centered in his mind,this attitude of nonattachme nt also had a profound eect on his
body. Two months into his treatment, his temperature began to rise
alarmingly; Craig was rushed to the hospital, where it was
determined his immune system was severely compromised. His
white cell count had been cut to the bone—it stood at 200, whereas
a health y person’s is between 4,000 and 11,000. Chemotherapy is
known to cause these crises, which put patients in grave jeopardy
from any passing infection, no matter how minor. Discouraged,
Craig’s oncolog ist left his bedside wondering how many weeks they
would have to wait before the white count crept back up. Three
days later, a second blood test was taken. It showed that Craig’s
count had bounced back to 4,000, from near-fatal to near-normal. The doctor associated with the case had rarely if ever observed or
read about such an occurrence. Despite the odds, Craig was rebounding rapidly, and the cancer
was in retreat. He was releas ed from the hospital after four months,
having chosen not to undergo a bone-marrow transplant, despite his
doctor’s insistence. In Craig ’s mind, there was no doubt that being able to distance
himself from his disease was crucial. “The emotional ups and downs
are endless, the ordeal has dragged me through every imaginable
emotion, but something in me is not involved. I still laugh and cry,
celebrate and grieve, but I remain apart at the same time. I have
discovered how to free my life from hysteria, and when the hysteria
went, I was healed.” It has been nearly three years since Craig left
the hospital. He leads a completely normal life and rema ins free of
disease. It is very heartening to see that patients can pick up the thread to
freedom. And what about Lou? He now stands at a halfway stage,
no longer a prisoner of his fear but not quite believing that he has
escaped. As things turned out, Lou went in for his surgery, which was
supposed to remove the tumor on his pancreas while leaving the
majority of the organ intact. But his surgeons discovered that the
tumor was much larger than they suspected. Lou was judgedinoperable for either a partial or a total removal, and the incision
was immediately closed. When he came out of the anesthesia, he shocked his oncologist by
taking the news in high spirits. “I never wanted surgery in the rst
place,” he told me in his hospital room, “and by a circuitous route I
got what I wanted.”
We both mused  on this. I didn’t realize at the time that something
critical had happened—Lou’s sense of being under a dark
enchantment was broken. He ew back to Europe and a fate I could
not predict. Six months later I was delighted to see him in my oce
again, looking well and without any discernible weight loss. He had
a normal appetite and no digestive diculties. Lou did not seem as
happy with this situation as I was, however. “Do I look all right?” he
asked nervously. “You look wonderful,” I enthused. “That’s what everyone tells me, but inside I don’t know  how I
feel.” It became apparent that Lou’s uncertainty still cast a shadow,
and yet if he only knew it, he had smashed through huge barriers. I remem ber how we parted that day. We had been talking for
quite a while. I paused and glanced outside. It was April, a rare
spring day in New England when the sky was a perfect, crystalline
blue. The crocuses were up, yellow and violet jewels splashed across
the lawn, and the trees were bursting in their rst glory of golden
green. I saw that Lou was looking outside, too, but dully. All at once, I
knew the utter loneliness his sickness had brought. “Look,” I said,
“why don’t you go outside for a little while. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t
it?” He nodded sadly, still alone inside his impenetrable gray space. I had to break through, if only for a moment. “Think of the
beautiful days you used to love,” I said, surprising myself with
emotion. “Where are they now? They must still be here, inside you. You breathed the air, and it became part of your blood. You looked
at the sky, and the sight became engraved on the neurons of your
brain. You felt the sunshine,  and its warmth was absorbed by your
skin.“It’s all there now, not just in your memory, but turned into you. So don’t long for the good old days, Lou— you are them. Outside this
window is another day that wants to turn into you. You aren’t
outside life. Like all the rest of us, you’re blended into it, creating it
as you are being created. This day cannot last without you to keep it
alive. Will you give it a chance?”
When I was through, Lou said very little, but he embraced me
warmly when we parted. We had come to an understan ding. As I
stood by the door, I caught one last glimpse of him from the back. He was just stepping outside, and from the eager way he looked
around, I sensed his happiness at being welcomed by the warm
spring light. OceanofPDF.com7
The Importance of Feeling  
Special
The instant he started to fall, Ray was probably dead. Twelve
thousand volts of electricity had violently hurled him o the roof
where he was working, helping a neighbor to install a new
television antenna. What should have been a harmless ground wire
turned out to be a live high- tension cable. When Ray picked it up,
he had no protection against the massive surge of current, which
almost certainly stopped his heart on the spot. The horried neighbor round ed the corner and found Ray’s body
in a heap on the ground. His right arm was shattered where the
current had entered; the charred right knee of his work pants
marked where  it had exited. When the neighbor gingerly touched
Ray’s chest, however, he felt a beating heart. We will never really
know why. Perhaps—given just the right angle and velocity—hitting the
ground restarted his heart. When debrillator paddles are not
available for shocking the heart back to life, thumping the chest is a
standard procedure in emergency resuscitation. Yet, even in the
hands of a doctor, it is a crude, risky method. You can just as easily
damage the heart as save it, and in the process crack a rib or
puncture a lung. Falling from a roof would increase these risks
considerably. But how else could Ray Shepard’s heart have started
again? It was an intriguing circumstance for the doctors on the
trauma team to speculate about later. When he heard about it,however, Ray began to call this moment, out of all the remarkable
ones to come, “the gift.”
Medical services are modest in the rangeland of eastern
Washington where Ray runs his horse ranch. Now barely  conscious
again, he had to endure an hour-long ambulance ride without
painkillers. A helicopter airlifted him to the nearest burn center, in
Seattle, and intensive surgery began. Over the course of sixteen
hours, the trauma surgeons removed his right arm at the elbow and
carefully preserved the tissue that could be salvaged at the other
two sites hurt worst in the accident, his right knee and left wrist. His sister picks up the story in a letter written six months later:
“Ray was remarkably clear-h eaded and calm from the moment he
entered the hospital. He did not sink into depression during his
extended perio d of treatment, and despite the intense pain of his
burns, he insisted on a minimum of medication. He underwent ve
surgeries over the next six weeks. It took that many procedures to
remove all the dead and damaged tissue and to begin the massive
work of reconstruction. A very delicate ap graft was required to
cover an exposed tendon on his left wrist. The right knee was so
devastated that it wound up being reduced to arteries, bone, and
nerves, all exposed to the air.”
Healing is a highly individual process, and in complex cases like
Ray’s, a “normal” recovery is almost a self-contradiction. Most of us
cannot imagin e what we would do if our nerves and bones were
opened naked to the air.
_OceanofPDF.com_Unconditional_Life_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        A
stopped heart can survive without oxygen for up to ftee n minutes;
brain cells are irreversibly damaged without oxygen after only four
minutes. This sets the critical  time limit that cardiac units are racing
against in their frantic emerg ency eorts. Some yogic subjects have
virtually halted blood ow for hours, however, and spent days with
their hearts barely utterin g. If medicine is pledged to be an
objective science, such demonstrations should topple our whole
conception of what the body actually is. Unfortunately, metaphors
die hard. Phantoms
Nothing forces you to try and break through Maya’s mask. As long
as you accept the physical world at face value, your compliance
keeps the machinery running. Rocks remain hard and solid, the
wind blows, water makes things wet, and re burns. Maya is very
obliging. At a certain point, however, the mirage of molecules is not
real enough to be satisfying. The illusion starts to dissolve—we have
seen many instances of that by now—and then the search begins for
the true reality hidden under the trick eects. I do not have to recover “miraculously” from a brain tumor to
begin this search. Just to observe that I am not a handful of empty
space is a good enough beginning. Something must hold me
together, a kind of glue or magnetic pole that keeps my molecules
from ying apart. What is this glue. How do I manage to organize
myself around a stable, meaningful core. One clue, strangely enough, lies in the experience of amputees
who continue to feel that their lost ngers, toes, arms, and legs are
still present. Oliver Sacks has written evocatively of these
“phantom” limbs, as neurology calls them. Phantoms are observed
frequently in the aftermath of amputation and can persist for days,weeks, or years. Their appearance can be disquieting, to say the
least. Dr. Sacks describes one patie nt, a sailor, who lost an index nger
in an accident at sea. At the time of injury, the nger was rigidly
extended, and the phantom that appeared in its place retained the
same position. The man had the distinct sensation that he was
forever pointin g his nger in the air. This feeling was so lifelike that
he could hardly touch his hand to his face to shave without fearing
that he would poke an eye out. Other patients have phantoms that
bring pain, itching, and various other uncomfortable sensations,
bordering on the bizarre—one man reported that his phantom leg
regularly suered severe cramps at night, complete with curled toes
and knotted calf muscles. Phantoms often possess the uncanny ability to change size. Thus a
leg may seem eight feet long at one minute and only two inches
long the next. Phantoms are not simply deceptive, though. Anyone
who has worked with disabled patients soon discovers that without
a phantom, learning to use an articial limb is made much more
dicult. Walking steadily on a prosthetic leg is a matter of
integrating it into your existing body image. As long as the
prosthesis is dead weight, this integration will never be completely
natural. But the phantom leg can mold itself to the false leg, giving
the feeling that it is alive. Even when it proves useful, a phantom is not always cooperative. Sacks mention s one patient who would wake up some mornings to
nd that his lower leg, a phantom, was not there. In its place would
be a vacuum, nothingness devoid of any sense of existence. (Of
course there was only air below his knee to begin with, but on these
mornings it was “dead” air. ) To bring his phantom back to life, the
patient would vigorously slap his thigh ve or six times like a baby’s
bottom until the phantom woke up and extended itself. Then he
could t on his prosthesis and walk. What so intrigu es me about phantoms is that all of us have one—
we just happen to call it our body. Being basically an inert lump, the
body is as dead as a false limb. Its sugars have no more feeling than
a gum drop; its proteins are no more sensitive than a pinto bean. Through the nervous system, which inltrates every ber of the
body, we have learned to project ourselves into this inert lump,
tting it on the way an amputee ts on his prosthesis. When a foot
or hand  goes to sleep, we can feel what a dead weight it really is. “Going to sleep” is a temporary paralysis that results when the
nerves have been crushed, usually under the weight of our torsos
when we inadvertently roll over in bed or sit with one leg curled up
under us too long. Many other people besides amputees rely on misguided phantoms. A young woman aicted with anorexia looks in the mirror and is
confronted with a thin, almost skeletal image. The body she has
starved throug h her eating disorder is there before her eyes. But
inside she has a contrary image of herself as too fat (or rather, not
thin enough), and this visual phantom rules her mind. She “sees” a
fat person in the mirror, just as an amputee “feels” that he has a
two-inch or eight-foot leg. Whatever the phantom tells you is real becomes real. I “know”
that my leg is three feet long, that my body weighs 150 pounds, that
I am sitting upright and am awake, but to believe these things is to
take them on trust, for my phantom could be tricking me. The
nature of the mind is to crave continuity, to bridge one thought with
another, to give our actions consistent motives and look for
consistency in others. To get some idea of how much it takes to organize a continuous
reality, we can consider the plight of schizophrenics, whose brains
process the world so poorly that what emerges as speech is a
chaotic, jumbled outpouring called “word salad. ” In David Noonan’s
penetrating book, Neuro-, there is a vivid account of the kind of
“loose association” that cannot hold logic togeth er when
schizophrenia strikes. One patient says, “My last teach er in that
subject was Professor A. He was a man with black eyes. There are
also blue and gray eyes and other sorts too. I have heard it said that
snakes have green eyes. All people have eyes. ”
Seemingly overwhelmed by thoughts and sensations, the mind of
a schizophrenic can no longer form any ordered or logical
statements from the swirl of impressions generated inside and out. Another patie nt was asked to comment on the energy crisis. “They’re destroying too many cattle and oil just to make soap,” he
replied. “If we need soap when you can jump into a pool of water
and then when you go to buy your gasoline, my folks always
thought they should, get pop but the best thing to get, is motor oil
and money. May as well go in there and trade in some, pop cans
and, uh, tires, and tractors to grup, car garages, so they can pull cars
away from wrecks, is what I believed in. ”
It is clear that this patient understood the question he was being
asked, but he could not sort out the images, memories, and concepts
that it brought to mind. They all became mixed into a salad that is
quite crazy but hints poigna ntly at the lost days when the world
made sense. The resulting verbal garble reminds me that my own
words are glued together  in a very mysterious way by a
consciousness I take for granted. I do not have to go through any
mental struggl es to make sense when I speak—it just happens or it
doesn’t. Without this deceptively automatic continuity, life would turn
into “life salad. ” Yet there is a seeming paradox here. How can one
maintain continuity and still be open to unexpected things, to the
ever-changing ow of events and the lightning ash of revelation. My choice plays the key role in whether I accept the world as it is or
alter it to suit my desires. Maya and I have been very good about
abiding by our agreement to keep the world predictable. Yet—who
knows. —I may decide to break the agreement tomor row. Or a
minute from now. Reality is always open to revision. Waking from the Spell
Milton Erickso n, a great pioneer in the therapeutic use of
hypnosis, was once giving a lecture-demonstration to an audience of
medical students. He asked for a volunteer to join him on the
platform. A young man came forward, took a seat facing the
audience, and placed his hands on his knees as Erickson requested. Then Erickson asked him, “Would you be willing to continue to see
your hands on your knees. ” The student said that he would. Whilehe was talking, Erickson silently gestured to a colleague, who
walked up on the other side of the young man and raised his right
arm in the air. The arm stayed there. “How many hands do you have. ” Erickson asked. “Two, of course,” the young man answered. “I’d like you to count them as I point to them,” Erickson said. “All right,” the young man replied, a patronizing note in his voice. Erickson point ed to the hand  resting on the left knee, and the young
man counted, “One. ” He pointed to the right knee, where  there was
no hand, and the young man said, “Two. ” He then pointed out the
hand dangling in midair. The student became hopelessly confused. “How do you explain that other hand. ” asked Erickson. “I don’t know,” said the young man. “I guess I should  be in a
circus. ”
You may have guessed by now that the volunteer was already
under hypnosis. The astonishing part of the story is that he was not
hypnotized beforehand. Erickson was such a master of his art that
he induced a trance merely by asking the question, “Would you be
willing to continue to see your hands on your knees. ” That
suggestion is exactly what the student carried out when he “saw” a
hand on his right knee. And what about me. Everything I see around me right now is just
as precarious as that third hand. I have a “sense of reality” that I
trust, not because it is real, but because my trust makes it real. A
hypnotist can, with the slightest twist of my attention, make me
believe that there are six people in a room instead of two dozen, or
that a foul-tast ing concoction brewed up by a local pharm acist is the
most delicious  glass of dry sherry. Both of these were done to R. D. Laing by a hypnotist friend in Glasgow. Commenting on the dry sherry episode, Laing bewails, “How
could one’s sense of taste, such an intimate sense, be so readily
deceived. I could not believe my taste. This was not merely
interesting. It was profoundly disquieting. It baed me. It scared
me. ” High emotions are aroused when we feel ourselves swaying
over a bottoml ess gorge. As Laing quite logically asks, “What is the
real taste of anything. In what sense are any phenomena reallyreal. ” This is the very question that teased the old men gathered on
our veranda on Babar Road. Laing is more dismayed. “How far is
the whole feeling and fabric of our ordinary, everyday world
socially programmed, an induced ction, in which we are all
enmeshed. ” he asks. The only ones to escape the net are “a few
whose conditioning has not ‘taken,’ or has broken down, or who
have awakened from the spell—a motley crew of geniuses,
psychotics, and sages. ”
Exactly—the only way out of Maya is to wake up from its spell, to
join the few who are not utterly enchanted. In our culture, the spell
has become respectable as “hard” science, but that does not make it
truer. The advantage of seeing through Maya is that the scientic
spell, although  it has given us this convenient modern life with its
jets and computers, CAT scans and carrot juicers, has not done away
with fear, violence, hatred, and suering. Those have been
programmed into Maya, too. They come with this dream when you
agree to be its dreamer. Every once in a while, I meet someone who already belongs to the
motley crew whose conditi oning did not “take. ” They are not
necessarily psychotics, geniuses, or sages; they are just people who
cannot be convinced as easily as the rest of us. Invariably, our
encounters shake my dream a little. I walk away aching to see what
they see and to be what they are. But there is also happiness and
even hilarity when we realize what is happening. For a moment, we
have looked across the illusion to nd that we are equals. “Who
knows. ” their eyes seem to say. “Maybe you will wake up next. ”
I am thinking particularly of Harold, an old man who appeared,
when I rst met him, to be completely ordinary, although at
seventy-ve, his body was in evident decline. His daughter brought
him to see me because she was worried about the prospect that
Harold was rapidly going into severe kidney failure, a serious and
even life-threatening prospect that many older people face. While the three of us sat in my oce, she talked anxiously about
what steps we could take, including putting her father on dialysis. Harold, however, settled into his chair and looked unconcerned. When I looked at his blood tests, I immediately saw why hisdaughter was upset. Harold’s BUN, or blood urea nitrogen, was near
90; a normal level is around 10. Another indicator called creatinine
was also extremely elevated. Everyone collects nitrogenous wastes in his blood as the residue
of prote in breakdown in the cells. This waste is toxic in any large
amount and would quickly become lethal if the body did not have a
way of constantly disposing of it through the kidneys. When a
doctor sees a high BUN or creatinine level, it indicates  serious if
indenite kidney problems. Harold was very close to the point
where dialysis is automatical ly called for. That was what his family
doctor had insisted upon, but Harold had refused. Harold should have been in considerable discomfort, but when I
ran down the typical symptoms of kidney failure—nausea, dizziness,
weakness, and loss of appetite—he said that he felt ne, maybe a
little tired. I must have looked disbelieving, because before I could
question him again, he said, “This isn’t a new problem, you know. ”
“Oh. ” I said. “When did you rst nd out about it. ”
“About forty-ve years ago,” he answered, giving me a
mischievous look. A man who had lived with chronic renal failure for forty-ve
years would be plagued by a host of symptoms, not to mention
permanent damage to the bones, eyes, lungs, and blood vessels,
among many other possible sites, including the kidneys themselves. But Harold insisted that he had rst heard about his problem during
World War II when an army doctor told him that his blood tests
qualied him for immediate  medical discharge. He was told point-
blank that with his elevated BUN levels, he had no more than ve
years to live. Harold exhibited no sympt oms then, and since there was no
eective treatment for chronic renal failure, he took his discharge
and went away. Five years later he returned to see his army doctor,
only to learn that the doctor had died. “It bothered me that he wasn’t around anymore, since he knew
my case,” Harold said, “so I went home without seeing anybody
else. ” It was the mid-Fifties before he sought out another kidney
specialist. This doctor panicked when he saw Harold’s BUN levelsand told him that he had very little time to live—his only hope was
that a new technology then in its rst stages of development, kidney
dialysis, might  be perfected in time to save him. Harold went away
again and bided his time. “I thought the kidney machine was going to be the answer, so I
kept a lookout for it,” he said. About ten years later, he read in the
papers that dialysis had come into practical use. He returned to the
kidney specialist, only to nd that the second doctor had now died. Harold’s count s continued to get gradually worse, and ve years
ago, when he applied for health insurance, a third specialist told
him that he was so sick he should either go for regular dialysis or
consider a kidney transplant. “That really shook my daughter,” he said. “And I kept thinking
that I should do something, so last month I called the doctor back. His nurse told me he had just died of a heart attack. ”
The three of us sat there for a second, but what could we say. We
all burst out laughing at the same time. “I mean, if I have outlived
three kidney specialists,” Harold said, bewildered by his good
fortune, “I think I should just stay away from doctors altogether. It
would be much safer for them. ”
I had to agree. OceanofPDF. com6
Thread to Freedom
“I’m not afraid. I realize that deciding to have this surgery means
that I’m taking  a big risk. I might be fed on a tube for the rest of my
life. It doesn’t matter, just so we do something. I’ve never felt fear at
the prospect of death. I just wanted to reassure you about that. ”
It was a very unconvincing speech. As Lou was delivering it, I
watched his darting eyes and the uncontrollable tremor in his
hands. He tried not to notice how much his true feelings were
coming through. Perhaps he really didn’t notice. How could we defuse some of this pent-up fear, I wondered. It
was not an easy task, considering how swiftly the catastrophe had
fallen. Two months before, there had been no signs of trouble, unless
having a life that is too perfect is a sign of trouble. Lou was an
American living in Spain on a private income and following his
passion, which  was art history. When he began to feel ill, the
symptoms were almost trivial. His Spanish-born wife always served
wine at dinner, but Lou began to notice that just one glass of the
local red wine was enough to give him a sudden attack  of nausea
and diarrhea. He complained to an internist in Madrid, who reassured Lou that
he probably had a transient intestinal virus. When the problem
persisted, however, the doctor decided to run some diagnostic tests. A CAT scan detected a suspicious mass about ve centimeters long
at the head of the pancreas. A needle biopsy was taken, and in a fewhours the hospital lab sent back grim news. The mass was
adenocarcinoma, a deadly cancer of the pancreas. Even now, when he had only a fty-fty chance of surviving for
six months, Lou was still free of pain. His body showed no sign of
cachexia, the wasting away of tissues typical of the end stage of
cancer. If he hadn’t been so conscientious about invest igating his
bouts of indigestion, Lou might still have considered himself
healthy. “It’s bizarre waking up every  morning feeling so good,” he said. “Just as I start to think about  whether to play tennis or sort through
some drawings, I remember that I am a terminal case, and then I
can’t work up the energy to do anything. ” A shadow crossed his
face. “If only I could hold on to that rst moment. ”
More than usual, I felt a personal need to help. Lou had own
back to America for treatment, but the standard interventions with
surgery and radiation were grim aairs. The pancreas is the body’s
chief source of digestive enzymes; once it is removed, the patient
loses almost all of his ability  to digest food. Replacement enzymes
can be provided, but as yet they are feeble substitutes for the body’s
natural processes. When I was training in endocrinology, I spent a rotation on the
oncology ward s at Boston’s Baptist Hospital, doing workups for a
famous pancreatic surgeon who was a prominent attending
physician. His patients lay in bed looking horrible— moribund,
cachectic, yellow with jaund ice. Since they would never again be
able to eat properly after their surgeries, these patients spent weeks
hooked up to IV tubes being fed entirely on drip. In the end, after
the expenditu re of enormous eort and care, the vast majority
survived barely a few months. My rst priori ty was to save Lou from that grim scenari o. I was
not his primar y-care physicia n; he had been referred to me because
his doctor had read a book of mine and felt that a mind-body
approach might help ease Lou’s massive anxiety. However, I
couldn’t help feeling that Lou was as anxious about his treatment as
about his disease. I advised  him to consider not havin g surgery. With it, his life expectancy might be prolonged slightly, at leastaccording to the statistical tables, but his own comfort needed to be
weighed in the balance. Did he want to go through so much misery
for such a small gain. Lou listened carefully but was not persuaded
by my arguments. “My instincts tell me not to have an operation,” he said, “but
what if I am dying six months from now after doing nothing. It
would be so cruel to my wife, and I would feel too guilty hurting
her that way. ”
After much soul-searching, he agreed to a compromise. Instead of
having the entire pancreas removed, he would undergo  a limited
procedure that leaves most of the organ intact. He would then still
be able to eat normally in the weeks to come. As the operation
loomed nearer, however, Lou’s moods started swinging drastically. Sometimes he came into my oce acting condent, even ebullient,
about his chances; more often he was somber and depressed. His
normal self, with its normal relationship to the body, had collapsed
in confusion. Nothing was properly connected anymore. His body
was no longer his; it was a strange, fearful object. He wanted to
distance himse lf from this thing, but he was becoming more and
more mesmeri zed by it. Stare at a monster long enoug h and you
become the monster—that adage was coming true for Lou. One day I asked him to close his eyes and sit quietly. As he did, I
said, “For the moment, let’s take time o from talking or thinking
about your case. Just be yourself. Don’t identify your mind with any
particular problem; don’t do anything. ” I paused, and we both sat in
silence. “Do you notice any pain. ” I asked. “No,” he murmured. “Good,” I said. “Now just sit comfortably appreciating whatever
comes to mind. If you have a strong thought, even a gripping one,
just let it go by. You’ll nd that it’s not hard to do. ” Another pause,
and then, “Did you feel any impulse of fear or anxiety. ”
He nodded. “Don’t mind that,” I said. “It’s just a passing cloud. What I want
you to notice is that there are spaces between your thoughts, like
patches of blue between the clouds. When you notice such a space,just give a nod. ” He closed his eyes again, and after a moment, he
slowly nodded. We continued the exercise for a few more minutes. “Do you feel anxious now.
Up to 4 minutes.
How long can a heart survive without oxygen?
To project our sense of self onto the body, allowing us to perceive the world in a consistent and meaningful way.
What is the purpose of the nervous system in the human body?
A yogi can halt their blood flow for hours and still maintain a sense of self, whereas a non-yogi would not be able to do so.
What is the main difference between a yogi and a non-yogi?
To help individuals transcend the limitations of their own minds and connect with a higher reality.
What is the goal of Yoga, according to the text?
A yogi is able to separate themselves from their physical sensations and emotions, while a non-yogi is deeply attached to their physical form and emotions.
What is the main difference between a yogi and a non-yogi in terms of their relationship with their bodies?