The Quest for Meaning
Yesterday I had the privilege of doing an interview with Michael Dresser on HealthRadio.Net. If you have not yet discovered them, I highly recommend the organization. I have put a link to them in the “Shared Visions” section on the left hand side of this blog. If you have any interest in health, there are a huge number of extremely interesting shows and free podcasts.
Having done radio and TV shows in around twenty countries, I can tell you that interviewers come in all shapes and sizes! Michael was very good: quick on the uptake and clearly committed to improving the welfare of his listeners. We did not agree on everything, but an interview where both people stroke each other, is not going to be much help to anyone!
Michael started by saying that the topic of Healing, Meaning and Purpose could easily have filled a three-hour show and he was right. After all, it took me 35 years to write that book. Well, getting it down on paper took eight weeks, but it had taken years of experiment and experience, and the input of thousands of people to get it right.
We decided to focus on meaning. A little tricky to do in 25 minutes, given that over a quarter of Healing, Meaning and Purpose is dedicated to the precise steps for discovering meaning in your life!
Michael expressed his concern about the large numbers of people who live without a feeling of meaning in their lives. And indeed there are huge numbers of people, particularly those who have lost their religious faith or who suffer from chronic illnesses, who find it very hard to find a sense of meaning in their lives.
Many reductionist writers and scientists don’t help when they tell us that we live in a dead, empty, meaningless Universe. They could not be more wrong!
Human beings are the consummate meaning generators in the Universe. Meaning provides context, and from context flows the real richness of life. Meaning fuels the alchemy that can transform an event into an experience. Parables and myths make deep meanings accessible.
The work of the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl has quite rightly become popular in recent years. He observed that people in concentration camps who had a reason to survive did so. He felt that it was important for people to commit to meaningful goals and values, and to be constantly aware of the meaning in all things. He also emphasized the importance of extending ourselves, to becoming more than we are now. This is one definition of the transpersonal or spiritual domain. Frankl saw mental health as deriving from ultimate meaning, or spiritual values.
The real meaning of freedom is the ability to choose how you will react in response to any situation. You choose the way to think about a problem; you establish your point of view and your way of behaving. It saddens me that so many people whom I see function “on automatic:” They live in a world of habitual responses. As long as you are concerned about what others think and say, you are responding and will never be free. You can be different. So why is it that for so many people life seems to have no meaning?
The main reasons for this sorry state of affairs are disconnection, separation and alienation on the one hand, and being reactive rather than reflective. This can be disconnection and separation from ourselves, from each other, from the world, from understanding our place in the world or from our Higher Self. If we react out of habit and assumption we can really fail to smell the roses. The problem of meaninglessness was never so serious when everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to be doing and they had a clear set of duties and responsibilities.
For many of us our life story has become garbled and inconsistent. Sometimes the simple act of re-writing our life stories can help enormously. In the CDs and the last book I talk a lot about how to do that.
In recent years many people have started talking about “Diseases of Meaning,” a term that was, I think, first introduced by my old friend Kim Jobst.
Most of us think of health and disease as a dichotomy, as two sharply different states. But in reality, health and disease are part of a duality of healthy functioning. As with the other dualities that we have looked at, each contains the other, each is necessary for the other, and each gives rise to the other. Disease is a healthy response of an organism striving to maintain its equilibrium in the face of disruptive forces, like negative thoughts, unbalanced relationships, environmental toxins, poor nutrition, and so on. Disease can initiate a process of transformation; it has meaning. And instead of being brought low by a feeling of powerlessness, this realization can help people become stronger, to live more fully and with more understanding. This way of looking at disease can be applied to any of the chronic illnesses, and even to environmental problems like community violence. Understanding a disease for what it is can be empowering, and even transformative.
Sometimes people who feel meaningless do need professional help and there are forms of therapy designed to help us find meaning. And sometimes the sense of meaninglessness is actually a symptom of an illness such as depression.
But for people who just need to clarify and feel the meaning in their lives there are sets of techniques that we have been using for over twenty years. Here are a few that are all rooted in empirical scientific studies:
- Writing and re-writing your own life story
- Questioning your assumptions about life and about relationships
- Using a brief pause before reacting to anything that happens to you
- Creating meaning through making decisions about your life
- Developing a sense of coherence
- Forming and strengthening relationships
- Techniques for giving people a glimpse of a transcendent reality
- Developing a legacy
It turns out that Michael Dresser and I had another thing in common. He also eradicated a very serious illness using an early form of Integrated Medicine. For both of us, the experience was highly meaningful and gave us a new and sharper focus: to show other people how to care for themselves and their families and how to enhance the quality of their lives.
We are both walking the talk.
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
“Deep within himself man seeks meaning for his life, and tries to fulfill himself in accordance with that meaning.”
–Viktor Frankl (Austrian Psychiatrist, 1905-1997)
“When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.”
–Ernest Becker (Canadian Cultural Anthropologist and Interdisciplinary Thinker, 1925-1974)
“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
–Morrie Schwartz (American Educator and the subject of the book Tuesdays With Morrie, 1916-1995
“Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.”
–Susan Sontag (American Essayist, 1933-2004)
“What truly gives life meaning is to work with the light and for the light, without worrying about pleasing or displeasing others.”
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
Motivation, Manipulation and Empowerment
It would be good to know how many people really change after they’ve done one of those motivational seminars. Undoubtedly some do, but most do not.
This stands in stark contrast to inspirational speakers who often change people for life.
If you try to “motivate” an adult to change their behavior, after an initial brief period during which they get excited about what they are learning, they will most likely resist what they perceive as manipulation. People who do change normally don’t maintain the new behavior because the primary motivation was external.
If we are trying to help people eat a more healthy diet, or take some exercise, research has shown that the best way to initiate and maintain a new behavior is for an individual to have an expert who can teach, guide and facilitate. That together with a peer supporter: someone who will help you along, and diet and exercise with you. You know yourself better than anyone else ever can.
The trick is to work with someone who may know a bit more about psychology, physiology and metabolism and can use that information to help you to develop a personalized program. The expert can help you move forward by asking question to identify your own motivators, locus of control (do you feel that you are the captain of your own ship, or do you believe that you are more a plaything of fate?) ego-fears, reward system and action style (do you like to break tasks down into small steps and work at one at a time in sequence, or do you like to work on one task, then pull out something else that like to do and do you have some other way of getting things done?)
There was recently a study from the UK that showed that the behavior of children with special needs was improved by a good diet and regular exercise. No surprise there. But the problem is this: how do you maintain the diet and exercise programs?
I spent many years working with young people with weight problems and/or diabetes. They usually also had some mood or behavioral problems. Issuing young people with a great long list of “Thou shalt nots” is guaranteed to backfire: youngsters are rebellious anyway. Tell them all the things that they can’t do, and force them into eating a certain way, and you will have a rebellion on your hands that will make the Storming of the Bastille look like a picnic. It is much better to come to an agreement that may include having days on which they can “cheat.”
A while ago I wrote about the way in which psychologists have moved beyond the pain/pleasure dichotomy as the major motivators of human behavior. Rewards and punishments are called extrinsic motivators, while intrinsic motivators are a composite of genes, learning, environment and temperament. I gave a few examples of motivators culled from the current literature:
- Clarity of vision
- Encouragement
- Personal engagement
- Recognition
- Pride
- Free flow of energy and information
- Appropriate reward systems (money is often not the best one!)
- Personal and group expectations
- Creating shared goals
- Transpersonal motivation: Inspiration and leaving a legacy.
I had several excellent questions: couldn’t people practice altruism because it gives them pleasure? Yes, they could, but that is not what the research data shows. Though people can derive pleasure from all kinds of things, the evidence base suggests that human motivations are far more complex.
It has also become possible to visualize regions of the brain while people are engaged in different tasks, and altruism does not seem to engage most of the circuits that we normally associate with pleasure or pain.
Yet more evidence that pleasure and pain and far from being the only – or maybe even the main – motivators of human behavior.
“No one ever does anything from a single motive”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Romantic Poet, 1772-1834)
“No one can motivate you, until you motivate yourself.”
–Jawaharlal Nehru (Indian Politician and Statesman, 1889-1964)
“Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can’t be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.”
–Lee Iacocca (American Businessman and Former CEO of Chrysler, 1924-)
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
–Jim Rohn (American Businessman, Author, Speaker and Philosopher)
“Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.”
–Sri Swami Sivananda (Indian Physician and Spiritual Teacher, 1887-1963)
“The need for devotion to something outside ourselves is even more profound than the need for companionship.”
–Ross Parmenter (American Expert on Mixtec Documents, Journalist and Music Reviewer for the New York Times, 1920-1999)
“He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.”
–Confucius (Chinese Philosopher, 551-479 B.C.E.)
Are Prayers Answered?
Most of the world’s population is in no doubt about the answer to the question, “Are prayers answered?”
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I told the following tale:
“I review articles that have been submitted for publication to quite a number of major medical journals. I am known as something of a “hawk.” If there’s a mistake, I am usually good at finding it. Several years ago I was sent a now-famous study of the influence of distant prayer on the recovery of patients in a coronary care unit. I was certain that I would find a flaw in it, but after three days of intense work, I had to conclude that the paper was sound. And it is now one of many. Prayer works, whether or not the recipient even knows that he or she is being prayed for.”
So I was intrigued to see a new study from Arizona State University that was published in the March issue of the journal Research on Social Work Practice. David R. Hodge, a recognized authority on research in prayer, conducted a comprehensive analysis of 17 major studies on the effects of intercessory prayer – or prayer that is offered for the benefit of another person – among people with psychological or medical problems, and the researchers came up with a positive result.
David had this to say,
“There have been a number of studies on intercessory prayer, or prayer offered for the benefit of another person,” said Hodge, a leading expert on spirituality and religion. “Some have found positive results for prayer. Others have found no effect. Conducting a meta-analysis takes into account the entire body of empirical research on intercessory prayer. Using this procedure, we find that prayer offered on behalf of another yields positive results… “This is the most thorough and all-inclusive study of its kind on this controversial subject that I am aware of,” said Hodge. “It suggests that more research on the topic may be warranted, and that praying for people with psychological or medical problems may help them recover.”
“Overall, the meta-analysis indicates that prayer is effective. Is it effective enough to meet the standards of the American Psychological Association’s Division 12 for empirically validated interventions? No. Thus, we should not be treating clients suffering with depression, for example, only with prayer. To treat depression, standard treatments, such as cognitive therapy, should be used as the primary method of treatment.”
This result is different from the widely publicized study by Herbert Benson’s group that was published last year. So why the difference? First, this study, like all other meta-analyses, lives or dies on its methodology. This one used a very standard technique and the data look reliable. By contrast, the Benson study was an empirical study of the effect of prayer on cardiac disease. It appeared to produce a negative result.
There are always some difficulties with any studies on prayer:
- If I am praying for one outcome and you are praying for another, who “wins?”
- Can we really apply the scientific method to faith? {The answer to that one is yes. If someone tells me that the moon is made of green cheese and held up by pieces of string, they have just presented us with a testable hypothesis!}
- Are we being too limited and too limiting if we do a study in we only consider a physical outcome? What about the impact of prayer not only on physical and psychological well being, but also on our sense of meaning and purpose?
- By praying for a particular outcome, aren’t we trying to second guess a Higher Power? Before you can pray effectively, can you listen effectively and surrender to the Will of that Higher Power?
From personal experience and a very careful review of the literature I am in no doubt that prayer is effective. But only if we first ask for guidance and listen for the answer. Telling a Higher Power what to do is unlikely to be crowned with successs.
“When we pray to God we must be seeking nothing – nothing.”
–Saint Francis of Assisi (Italian Roman Catholic Friar, and in 1209, Founder of the Franciscan Order, c. 1182-1226)
“Most people consider the course of events as natural and inevitable. They little know what radical change is possible through prayer. Every morning I offer my body, my mind and any ability that I posses, to be used by Thee, O infinite creator, in whatever way Thou dost choose to express thyself through me. I know that all work is Thy work, and that no task is too difficult or too menial when offered to Thee in loving service.”
— Paramahansa Yogananda (Indian Spiritual Teacher and, in 1920, Founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, 1893-1952)
“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
–Mahatma Gandhi (Indian Nationalist and World Teacher, 1869-1948)
“When you pray, above all ask heaven to give you light. For only light will allow you to find your direction, to avoid pitfalls and to find the strength to see your projects through to completion.”
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
“Many people think that they don’t know how to pray. Just think of God as a great river that runs through the universe. The idea of prayer is not to pull God out of the stream but to put yourself into the stream with God.”
–Joni Rodgers (American Writer, Lymphoma Survivor and United Methodist Layspeaker)
Ian Stevenson R.I.P.
I just heard that the Candian-born psychiatrist and researcher Ian Stevenson passed away last month at the age of 88.
You may not have heard of him, but he spent a lifetime on a peculiar area of academic research: he was the world’s foremost authority on the study of reincarnation. He was interested in children who claim to remember previous lives, near-death experiences,
apparitions (death-bed visions), the mind-brain problem, and survival
of the human personality after death.
Stevenson was always careful and cautious about his claims. He wrote his first paper on reincarnation in 1960 and went on to conduct additional field research about reincarnation in Africa, Alaska, British Columbia, Burma, South America, Lebanon, Turkey,
and many other places. The children studied would typically start recalling
their past life story between the ages of two and four, yet seem to
have forgotten it by seven or eight. There were frequent mentions of
having died a violent death, and apparently clear memories of the mode
of death. He gathered testimonies as well as medical records of
information on birthmarks, birth defects, and other physical evidence
for reincarnation.
Stevenson published over 200 articles and several books, but they were almost exclusively for the academic and scientific community, so they can be heavy going for a non-speciaist. His research database contains over 3,000 cases that
provide evidence suggestive of reincarnation, though he himself was
always careful to refer to them as "cases suggestive of reincarnation"
or "cases of the reincarnation type."
I first heard about his work as a young student in the early 1970s, and I subsequently read most of his books and papers. They make fascinating reading and it is difficult not to be persuaded that either these are genuine cases of reincarnation, or else there is some unknown non-physical method by which young children can pick up information about people and events about which they should know nothing.
Stevenson’s work continues with a new generation of researchers. It is is important to think about the incredible implications if even one of these cases is genuine.
And it bears repeating that there is not one case, but over 3,000, all meticulously documented.
One of his papers is available for free download, and if you are interested in the topic of survival, I also recommend the Survival Research Network and the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
Prayer and Healing
We have already talked a little about the associations between active, healthy spirituality and psychological and physical well-being.
Yet another study has highlighted the connection, showing that breast cancer patients who pray in online support groups can obtain mental health benefits.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center of Excellence in Cancer Communications Research did the study that was that was funded by the National Cancer Institute.
The research looked at message transcripts from 97 breast cancer patients participating in an online support group that was integrated with the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) “Living with Breast Cancer” program, a computer-based health education and support system. The patients were recruited from Wisconsin and Michigan.
Surveys were administered before group access and then again four months later. Text messages within the computer-mediated support groups were analyzed using a text analysis program that measured the percentage of words that were suggestive of religious belief and practice (e.g., pray, worship, faith, holy, God). Writing a higher percentage of these religious words within the online support groups was associated with lower levels of negative emotions and higher levels of self-efficacy and functional well-being, even after controlling for patients’ pre-test levels of religious beliefs.
One of the researchers had this to say:
“From a psychological standpoint, there are a variety of reasons why cancer patients may benefit from prayer – whether on the Internet or elsewhere. In reviewing the messages, some of the most common ways study participants used religion to cope with their illness included putting trust in God about the course of their illness and consequently feeling less stressed, believing in an afterlife and therefore being less afraid of death, finding blessings in their lives and appraising their cancer experience in a more constructive religious light.”
And that is, of course, one set of explanations for the findings.
Or perhaps, as we have seen before, there is a growing body of research to indicate that prayer is effective.
We just have to expect it to be effective. And isn’t that faith?
“Prayer, like radium, is a luminous and self-generating form of energy.”
–Alexis Carrel (French-born American Surgeon, Experimental Biologist and, in 1912, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, 1873-1944)
“Too often we see prayer as a last resort rather than as our first thought. People will say, “I guess all we can do now is pray!” like that’s the last thing, horrible thing to do. And your friend says, “Has it come to that?! Is it so hopeless that all we can do is pray?”
–Rick Warren (American Evangelist and Author, 1954-)
“Though God knows all our needs, prayer is necessary for the cleansing and enlightenment of the soul.”
— John Sergieff of Kronstadt (Russian Priest who, in 1882, Established the House of Industriousness, 1829-1909)
“Man often thinks that, as God is the knower of the heart, there can be no need of any recital or gesture in prayer: but that it would surely be sufficient if he were to sit in the silence and think of God. But this is not so; it is according to the extent of a man’s consciousness of prayer that his prayer reaches God.”
–Hazrat Inayat Khan (Founder of the Sufi Order of the West, 1882-1927)
“Through prayer, the love of God grows and assumes a form which is called supreme devotion. Forms vanish, rituals fly away, books are superseded, images, temples, churches, religions and sects, countries and nationalities – all these little limitations and bondages fall off by their own nature from him who knows this love of God.”
–Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic and Spiritual Teacher, 1863-1902)
“Prayer is part of man’s original nature. He can never be satisfied with merely meditative religion, and naturally and involuntarily inclines to move on to the religion of prayer.”
–Toyohiko Kagawa (Japanese Christian Anti-War Campaigner, 1888-1960)
“All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death.”
Thomas Merton (French-born American Trappist Monk and Writer, 1915-1968)
“There is a relationship between prayer and action. Receptive prayer results in an inner receiving, which motivates to right action.”
— “Peace Pilgrim” (a.k.a. Mildred Norman, American Peace Activist, 1908-1981)
The Internet Sacred Text Archive
I have been commenting about the important new initiatives in open access and I don’t want to forget to let you know about another resource that I’ve used for years.
It is the Internet Sacred Text Archive.
This is what it says:
Welcome to the largest freely available archive of full-text books
about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet.
The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship,
and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web.
They ask for support for the site by buying sacred-texts on disk.
This is a complete library of over a thousand of
the most important books ever written.
It includes the complete text of all major world scriptures,
and hundreds of books scanned specially for sacred-texts.
I have one of the earlier disks and it is superb. I am going to upgrade to the new one to support this very worthwhile venture.
These are just a few of the categories on the website:
Baha’i
Buddhism
Celtic
Christianity
Classics
Confucianism
DNA
Earth Mysteries
Egyptian
England
Esoteric/Occult
Freemasonry
Gnosticism
Hinduism
I Ching
Islam
Jainism
Shakespeare
Shamanism
Shinto
Sikhism
Swedenborg
Theosophy
Time
Utopia
Women
Zoroastrianism
And these are some recent additions:
The House of the Hidden Places (1/9/2007)
The Satapatha Brahmana, Part IV (SBE 43) (12/19/2006)
Lives of the Saints (12/14/2006)
The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (12/12/2006)
The Rosetta Stone (12/5/2006)
Devil Worship in France (12/3/2006)
Tractate Berakoth (12/2/2006)
The Satapatha Brahmana, Part III (SBE 41) (11/29/2006)
Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Through Time (11/21/2006)
Proofs of a Conspiracy (11/18/2006)
Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus (with the Alphabet of Ben Sira) (11/15/2006)
Tractate Sanhedrin (11/8/2006)
The Satapatha Brahmana, Part II (SBE 26) (11/5/2006)
Unveiled Mysteries (10/18/2006)
The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (10/16/2006)
The Satapatha Brahmana, Part I (SBE 12) (10/7/2006)
The Religions of South Vietnam in Faith and Fact (10/4/2006)
Karezza, Ethics of Marriage (10/3/2006)
The Comte de St. Germain (10/1/2006)
A Miracle in Stone: or The Great Pyramid of Egypt (9/28/2006)
The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise (9/18/2006)
The Brahan Seer (9/13/2006)
Noa Noa (9/6/2006)
The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (8/30/2006)
History of Philosophy in Islam (8/27/2006)
Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales (8/8/2006)
Folk-lore of the Holy Land; Moslem, Christian and Jewish (7/29/2006)
An excellent resource.
Charles Tart's Library
If you are at all interested in altered states of consciousness, transpersonal psychology, parapsychology or spirituality, you will find a great many useful and interesting papers written by Professor Charles Tart.
I was smitten by his work when I read his classic book Altered States of Consciousness in 1969, and he reamins one of the most respected figures in these fields
I have followed his work closely ever since, and his library of free articles is a treasure trove containing papers written between 1963 and 2006.
Charlie is currently a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California, a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito, California, as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California.
I would like to thank him and many publishers for making all this material freely available.
Separation and Integration
“The ego always seeks to divide and separate. The Holy Spirit always seeks to unify and heal.”
–A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)
Many of us feel that we have lost or forgotten something important and it nags at us. In the Matrix, Morpheus tries to capture this when he says, “There is a splinter in your mind.”
What we have forgotten is the hidden secret not only to who we are but also to what we may become.
There are hundreds of thousands of books, websites, classes, groups and, of course, religions that all say that they have an answer to those two questions. And I tend to believe that they probably all do. But each has only a part of the puzzle.
Integrated Medicine was always designed to provide answers synthesized from the very best of what is already available.
I am always being asked whether Integrated Medicine is an approach toward health and wellness, a method of achieving personal growth and development or some form of holistic treatment?
The answer is “Yes!”
The goal is not to replace other forms of self-care or treatment, but to integrate and enhance them. The reason for using the term “Integrated,” and why it is a little different from Integrative or Integral medicine, is that it aims to:
- Integrate an individual’s current health and wellness practices into a combined whole
- Integrate all the parts of a person, for the quotation is true: the role of the ego is to separate itself from the rest of the Universe, and healing come from the Source: your Informational Matrix, your Inner Light or Soul
- Integrate healing methods that will ensure that each aspect of you being is addressed and respected so that the healing can flow. Not only of your body, but of your mind, relationships, the planet, society, subtle systems and your spirituality
- Integrate your views about the nature of reality: healing is not simply a matter of fixing a physical machine. In any case, this is not always possible. The objective is not to “use” methods and insights to heal the body. It is rather to ask that your Overself or Higher Self teach you the right perception of your body and your mind. That is why I am always recommending that the first thing that you can do for yourself is to develop your intuition so that it provides a delicate counterbalance to your ability to reason. If you have ever been to a gym, you know the importance of exercising not just your bicep muscle, but your triceps muscle as well. One without the other will make you lopsided. So it is with intellect and intuition.
- Integrate the personal you with something beyond yourself. The ultimate aim of Integrated Medicine is not simply to stay well, but to return to Wholeness
And all have been done already with tens of tousands of people around the globe.
Will you be next?
“To have a curable illness and to leave it untreated except for prayer is like sticking your hand in a fire and asking God to remove the flame.”
— Unknown Author (Sometimes attributed to “Sandra L. Douglas”)
"A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
–Abraham Lincoln (American Statesman and, from 1861-1865, the 16th President of the United States, 1809-1865)
“In the integral Yoga, the integral life down to even the smallest detail has to be transformed, to become Divine.”
— The Mother of Pondicherry (a.k.a. Mirra Alfassa, French-born Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1878-1973)
The Irreducible Mind
I get a great many requests for recommendations for books and papers that either debate or provide support for the topics that I discuss on this blog and in my books and articles. That is why I’ve been constructing some reading lists at Amazon.com and linking them to this website.
A friend recently commented that she was surprised that the book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose that was created for a general audience, contains over 800 books and websites. My response to that was that I think that my readers and listeners are all grown ups who should be able to check everything that any author says!
The days of authors or speakers waving their hands about and making airy statements are finally coming to an end. If an author tells you that "science" proves what they are saying, they must show that they understand the topic themselves. I just saw yet another paper in which the writer said, "Quantum mechanics proves what I’m saying, but let’s not get into that." Well, that’s just the point: let us indeed get into that to see if what you are saying holds water!
Which brings me to a book that I’ve just read and reviewed. It is entitled Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century and it is an extraordinary achievement. For the last century, the vast majority psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have believed that thoughts, emotions and consciousness are the product of physical processes in the brain. And , of course, the brain is heavily involved in many mental phenomena. The question has always been if neurological activity is sufficient to explain the whole of human experience.
This new book presents the most comprehensive and critical analysis of phenomena normally ignored by psychology, including mystical experiences, the placebo response, stigmata and hypnotic suggestion, memories that survive physical death, near death experiences, automatic writing, out-of-body experiences, apparitions, deathbed visions and many more.
It comes to the inescapable conclusion that the mind is not generated by the brain but is instead limited and constrained by it. There is no hand waving, and no "science has shown that…" Instead everything is laid out in front of you. There are a hundred pages of citations and references. Despite that, it is an easy and enjoyable read.
I have no personal connection with the book, but the next time that someone says that there’s no proof for any of these phenomena, and that emotions, cognitions and consciousness are just byproducts of biochemical processes in the brain, refer them to this book.
And if Santa brought you any gift cards that you haven’t used yet, you might want to have a look at the book for yourself.
Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication
The idea that there can be direct communication between people at a distance sounds like the stuff of science fiction.
I will be quite honest: I was always intrigued by the idea of direct contact between brains and I’d had more than my fair share of personal experiences of them. When I was a young student, long before I had started being trained, I suddenly blurted out some very specific information about a classmate that almost lead to a fight: he was enraged, not because of what I said, but because he thought that another friend had betrayed a confidence.
I spent a lot of time poring over experiments done by J.B. Rhine and others, and it all seemed to make sense. But I always had a problem: because I could not understand the mechanism of mind-to-mind communication I remained a bit skeptical. But now the evidence is gradually building up. A few months ago I wrote about some of the intriguing evidence concerning nonlocal interactions of neurons.
If all this is correct and mind-to-mind or brain-to-brain communication is really possible, it instantly changes everything about how we see ourselves and reality. So it is utterly essential to ensure that such extraordinary claims are indeed supported by extraordinary data, and that neither is undermined by shoddy explanatory models.
That is why, as ideas and observations have come forward, I’ve always been at great pains to see whether or not they have been accurate. One of the reasons for going on about the misuse of quantum mechanics has been that the entire topic of parapsychology and of direct brain-to-brain communication is so incredibly important to our worldview.
Unless we have a clear view of who and what we are; what it means to be human; what it means to be an inhabitant of this planet and this Universe and of our place in the grand scheme of things, it is very difficult to devise sensible strategies for healing ourselves and our planet.
I think that I’ve said enough about the misuse of science, but it is just as bad when people misuse the Ageless Wisdom. I’ve just read an article in which the writer talks about the Law of Correspondences, an old Hermetic term that was adopted by the Rosicrucians and Theosophists. The writer said that this Law explains why atoms are just like little solar systems, except that they have electrons whizzing round a nucleus, rather than planets orbiting the sun. This is the kind of silly comment that could only have been made by someone who never got beyond 8th grade physics. For anyone who is interested I can give you chapter and verse as to why the Law of Correspondences does not apply in this situation.
Does this blooper matter? Well yes, because it encourages people to construct an inaccurate view of reality that is based on a very limited visual metaphor, when what is needed is the imagination to stride into a new vision of reality.
So with that, back to brain-to-brain communication. There is a nice article on the topic by Robert Charman in the month’s issue of the Paranormal Review. Sad to say the article is not available online, but the Review itself is available through the Society for Psychical Research in London.
Robert has identified eleven articles that have found evidence of direct brain-to-brain communication using functional MRI and evoked potentials: someone send a signal, there is a blip in the brain of the sender and then a corresponding blip in the brain of the receiver. (Here are some references that I’ve checked out: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.).
His conclusion is that these high-tech studies have confirmed the possibility of brain-to-brain communication at a distance. I think that he is probably correct, though I know from personal exerience just how hard it can be to analyze data from MRI and EEG measurements of the brain.
Something that I find particularly interesting is that using this technology there seems to be a slight delay in the “communication,” though one study showed that the “receiver” might have an electrical potential in his or her brain before the “sender” had sent the communication. These observations may simply reflect the equipment being used, this observations implies that the mechanism is physical.
However some experiential evidence indicates that there is another type of direct persons to person communications that is instantaneous. For this there is no good scientific evidence, just a lot of experience. The difference between the two forms of communication – delayed and instantaneous – is similar to the difference between instinct (physical, brain and body based) and intuition (nonlocal and transpersonal).
This research and these papers are doing us an enormous service. To quote Robert Charman:
“…The data demonstrating episodes of direct communication between brains exists and will not go away.”
And we know from experience that many if not most people can be trained to improve their ability to communicate at distance both in a time-limited and time-independent modes. The keys? Relaxation, meditation, practice and above all, belief in the possibility that you can do it.
You may remember when Luke Skywalker said to Yoda “I don’t believe it,” to which Yoda responded: “That, is why you fail.”
