Welcome to the mind-body revolution
Psychology Today
Vol.26 No.4
July-August 1993
pp.58-68
COPYRIGHT Sussex Publishers Inc. 1993
Anyone who didn't spend this spring in a severely media-deprived
locale--an Antarctic substation, say, or the lazily pinwheeling
Russian spacelab--has probably heard the news: Rene Descartes, the
17th-century mathematician who shaped the world as we know it, has
been officially pronounced dead.
The eulogy was delivered by Bill Moyers, public television's own
Piers Ploughman, via his phenomenally successful TV series and
book-cum-transcript, Healing and the Mind. But in truth, the old
philosophe's stiff--which had lain for three centuries in the halls
of medicine like some glass-entombed Lenin--had become a bit of an
embarrassment.
Immortalized in Bartlett's for his inscrutable, Popeye-like
declamation, "I think therefore I am," Descartes was history's most
persuasive partisan of the mind-body split, a bedrock notion of
modern science. Mental events, the savant declared, occur in a
separate domain from those of the flesh. Consciousness has no
business in the mean streets of matter. As a result, medical science
came to be dominated by a materialism so iron-clad that one
19th-century theorist felt emboldened to quip that the mind's
influence upon the mechanism of the body was like "the steam-whistle
which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine but cannot
influence its machinery."
The problem with this is obvious to anyone who ever had an unseemly
thought about their junior-high English teacher and then blushed:
"The soul's passions," said Aristotle, who had it right all along,
"seem to be linked with a body, as the body undergoes modifications
in their presence."
By 1900, medical science had at least begun to suspect as much.
Freud and Janet's investigations of hysterical paralysis provided a
benchmark of the mind's power over the body. Dr. Walter Cannon
discovered in the 1930s that the central nervous system controlled
many bodily functions and suggested that it in turn was subject to a
regulatory mechanism "which in human beings we call the
personality."
Still, if anyone could be credited with shutting off the
refrigeration on Descartes' mortal remains and letting the aroma of
a paradigm gone bad reach science's stuffed nostrils, it is Candace
Pert, Ph.D., former chief of the Brain Biochemistry Section of the
National Institute of Mental Health and codiscoverer of the brain's
opiate receptors. Subsequent revelations that similar docking sites
for "information molecules" (or neuropeptides) were myriad as stars
scattered through the bodily firmament have launched the branch of
medicine known as psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), which is busy
codifying a self-evident truth: Mind and body have their hands so
deep in each other's pockets it's hard to tell whose car keys are
whose.
So-called messenger molecules are suddenly turning up everywhere--in
the brain (particularly in the centers governing emotion),
throughout the immune system, and in organs from gut to gland. Our
thoughts and feelings are mediated by neuropeptides; diseases
secrete neuropeptides; neuropeptides may be crucial to the healing
response. What Pert proved once and for all is that brain, nervous
system, and immune system, far from being incommunicado, are at this
very second hunched elbow-to-elbow at the espresso bar of the
Chatterbox Cafe, animatedly sharing your most intimate particulars.
I met Pert four years ago when she was in town to speak at a healing
conference. I was already well apprised of the mind-body factor,
having suffered a hellacious bout with cancer that was accompanied
by altered states more colorful that any I'd encountered in a
lifetime of Buddhist meditation. Pert was just beginning to venture
forth from the autoclaved precincts of official research to more
new-age venues, trying out the PNI gospel on an audience more
receptive than most of her colleagues. In her flowing orange
floral-print dress, slinging her pointer over her shoulder with
precision rifle-drill panache, her words ricocheting in breathless
spurts, she was like some hip diva of science. The next day,
recognizing a kindred glimmer, we decided to play hooky from that
afternoon's lectures for a picnic lunch in the mountains.
Though she may tone it down at phlegmier scientific gatherings, Pert
at ease seems on the verge of autoelectrocution from a surfeit of
cranial wattage. "Emotions exist in two realms," she told me between
exclamations about the view from a dizzying curve that sent gravel
rattling into our wheel rims. "One is the mind. The other is the
realm of living matter. Of course, science expects you to dutifully
exclude the soul. But I can't. The whole thing's vibrating back and
forth. We're actually talking about music."
She hazarded that each neuropeptide--the list of which has burgeoned
from five just a few years ago to over five dozen--may "evoke a
unique 'tone' that is equivalent to a mood state." I pictured mind
and body as a thousand-octave piano, with every note--from the
highest glissando of altruism to the middle-C of fight-or-flight to
bass-heavy autonomic arpeggios--as part of a seamless,
interdigitated boogie-woogie.
Staggering stuff: What PNI has shown us is that the human being is a
walking biological Heisenberg Principle, in which the observer's
thoughts, feelings, and attitudes can have measurable effects on
physical reality. Within the margins of its homeostatic aloofness,
the "It" of our own biology is exquisitely responsive to the "I" of
subjective experience.
And these responses are no mere grace notes. Hypnosis, long
considered a negligible medical therapy, has been successfully
employed to treat children with congenital ichtyosis, so-called
fishskin disease--a genetic illness. Meditation and relaxation
techniques have been shown to affect blood platelets, norepinephrine
receptors, and cortisol levels; biofeedback to influence phagocyte
activity; mental imagery to enhance natural killer cell function in
patients with metastatic cancer. In a now-famous study, David
Spiegel, M.D., of Stanford University showed that women with
advanced breast cancer who took part in a psychological support
group lived twice as long as those who did not take part, a benefit
no known drug can claim.
Researchers are beginning to wonder if mind-body effects may even
contribute to what physician-essayist Lewis Thomas called "the rare
but spectacular phenomenon" of spontaneous remission of cancer.
Researcher Caryle Hirshberg, Ph.D., a blunt, no-nonsense biochemist,
is the coauthor of a near-legendary study that collates some 450
medically documented cases. This startling body of evidence--the One
White Crow that disproves the thesis All Crows Are Black--will be
published this fall, suggesting that such events, treated in most
oncology texts as chimerical (if not unreal as a paper moon), could
point to yet-unsuspected powers of body and mind.
When I spoke with her, Hirshberg, hammering on publication deadline,
grumped only half-jokingly about having to write her acknowledgments
page. "What am I supposed to say?" she asks, referring to her peers'
initial skepticism. "Thanks for telling me not to even bother?" I
mention a case the late Norman Cousins recounted concerning a San
Diego woman whose cancer was so far advanced the tumor was "like a
hand grenade under a thin sheathing of skin." The woman had been
sent to his office at UCLA Medical School because she was resisting
her doctors' urgent recommendations for a mastectomy.
Cousins thought there would be no harm teaching her a few
visualization techniques. He showed her a stock mental exercise that
usually succeeds in slightly raising the skin temperature of the
hand. The woman turned out to be an exceptional subject: Her hand
temperature shot up 14 degrees. When she returned to the hospital
after two weeks of practicing various meditations, the tumor, to his
amazement, had completely disappeared.
"Who knows what mind is capable of?" Hirshberg asks rhetorically.
"For that matter, who knows what mind is? Certainly, it's thinking
and feeling. But is mind only thinking, body only feeling? I mean,
mind feels. Mind is also dreams, mind is altered states, mind is
consciousness, consciousness is spirit. It's not like we scientists
know.
"Maybe the Dalai Lama knows," she adds parenthetically. "I met him
once, and I think if there's a light in the world, he's it. I
sometimes think the kind of understanding he has is where we'll have
to go to look at what we're calling PNI."
In a recent documentary, as sunlight streams in through the window
from the icy, glittering peaks of the nearby Himalayas, the Dalai
Lama can be seen bending over a desk, one hand pressing a jeweler's
loupe to his eye, the other twirling a screwdriver in the entrails
of an old-fashioned watch. "It is my nature," the exiled leader is
saying. "As soon as I got a playtoy ...few minutes later, I try to
open...see what is inside." He giggles delightedly, holding the
watch up for inspection, then turns shrewdly to the camera: "That's
the way to learn something." He laughs again.
Try to open. See what is inside. Now imagine a whole society turning
its mental jeweler's tools in the innards of the mind, investing
1,200 years in a top-priority, national Inner Space Program. For
eras, while the world blustered through the age of steam, spit
electricity's cold fire in the face of the night, and unleashed the
railing demons of the atom, Tibetan followers of the Lord Buddha sat
calmly by the flickering light of millions of yak-butter lamps,
calipering the depth and breath of the soul, doing essential R&D on
consciousness itself, souping up the spiritual software.
Westerners have viewed Tibetans as Mind-Body Masters on the World's
Rooftop ever since French pilgrim Alexandra David-Neel secretly
entered Lhasa and returned bearing stories of monks sitting in the
snow, drying water-soaked sheets on their naked bodies (a feat she
puckishly filed under "psychic sports"). More than a decade ago,
Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, M.D., best known for his
best-seller, The Relaxation Response, on the medical effects of
meditation, decided to investigate.
With the Dalai Lama's blessing, he wired up monks in India's
northern foothills with electronic measuring devices while they
performed their sheet-drying stunt. To his amazement, their skin
temperature rose as much as 17 degrees above normal, even though in
such near-freezing weather the body invariably routes blood from the
periphery to keep core organs warm. "If an ordinary person were to
try this," Benson says, "they would shiver uncontrollably and
perhaps even die. But here, within three to five minutes, the sheets
started to steam and within 45 minutes were completely dry."
How is such a feat possible? Benson offers that the yogis may have
somehow learned to induce "nonshivering thermogenesis," a metabolic
state in which the body burns so-called brown fat--a substance
thought to be metabolized only in hibernating animals. But he adds,
"It's difficult to understand from what source such energy is
emanating. By our calculations of the amount of heat generated,
there must be an energy source in the body other than the ones we're
currently aware of."
Similarly, Candace Pert asked Moyers, "Can we account for all human
phenomena in terms of chemicals? I personally think we're going to
have to bring in that extra-energy realm, the realm of spirit and
soul that Descartes kicked out of Western scientific thought."
And therein lies the rub. Today's mind-body theorists seem peering
over the precipice of the worldview espoused in the droll
cat-and-cockroach classic, the lives and times of archie and
mehitabel:
"i can show you love and hate and the future dreaming side by side
in a cell in the little cells where matter is so fine it merges into
spirit."
The love-and-hate-and-cells stuff, which would have been difficult
to swallow even a few years ago, is now fair game for any PNI
investigator clever enough to design a credible experiment. It's the
matter-merging-into-spirit part that's become an Olympic triple-axel
skating routine on very thin ice.
"There's a great mystery of how thought is translated into material
response, and PNI, even though it's the darling of the emerging
sciences, hasn't shed any light on it whatsoever," remarks Larry
Dossey, M.D., co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dossey's panel falls under the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, a
new government entity that has appeared as suddenly as an April
crocus in the courtyard of the nation's firmest bastion of
biomedical research. The office's allotment of $2 million of the $10
billion NIH behemoth -- "the flea on the elephant, pen-and-pencil
money," says director Joseph Jacobs, M.D., the superbly trained
half-Mohawk Indian health-care expert tapped to helm what he calls
"the Starship Enterprise"--could be used to study anything from
acupuncture to herbal medicine to the antitumoral properties of
shark cartilage.
But it is Dossey's panel that promises to become the Enterprise's
glowing, dilithium-crystal core, for its mandate is to zero in on
therapies--from hypnosis and biofeedback to exotica like therapeutic
touch and prayer--where the driving force of healing is Western
philosophy's most debated (and science's most derided) factor x: the
human spirit.
Dossey, who grew up in a hardscrabble, King Cotton Texas prairie
town where life revolved around a one-room country church, seems
undaunted. In his teens, he played gospel piano for a fiery
tent-show evangelist before leaving the farm for college and medical
school, then served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam. After
entering private practice, Dossey found himself reading works of
Eastern and Western spirituality "insatiably." He took up the
practice of meditation, eventually writing a series of well-received
books exploring the intersection of medicine and mysticism.
A report of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions, which Dossey
coauthored, loses no time assailing the trepid with the Really Big
Questions: "What are mind and consciousness? How and where do they
originate? How are they related to the physical body? Why is it
necessary to reintroduce mind and consciousness into the modern
medical agenda?"
"Let me tell you something," confides Dossey in soft,
still-detectable Texas diphthongs. "If we ignore issues of
consciousness, it'll be the ruin of alternative medicine. It could
wind up just being something used as ruthlessly as synthetic drugs
or stainless-steel scalpels. In my opinion, the most important
research activity in the entire field will be the investigation of
nonlocal manifestations of consciousness."
Nonlocal manifestations of consciousness? Have we fallen off the
edge of the map? The panel's report explains that "studies in mental
and spiritual healing show that the mind can somehow bring about
changes in far-away physical bodies, even when the distant person is
shielded from all known sensory and electromagnetic influences.
These events, replicated by careful observers under laboratory
conditions, strongly suggest that there is some aspect of the psyche
that is unconfinable to points in space, such as brain or body, or
to points in time, as in the present moment."
The eye comes to a screeching halt seeing such phrases laid out,
neat as you please, in an official document of the United States
government. These are not the florid, metaphysical ramblings of a
19th-century occultist, but the words whispered in the side
corridors of the highest citadel of American rationalism: The mind,
it is rumored, has escaped the brain.
"These ideas do have a pretty high Boggle Factor," Dossey admits,
but he claims the evidence is mounting. He points to the work of
William G. Braud, Ph.D., senior research associate at San Antonio's
Mind Science Foundation: In a typical experiment, one person--called
the "influencer"--was placed in one room, while in a different part
of the building a "subject," fingers hooked up to electrodes to
measure galvanic skin response, settled into a chair. At randomly
selected times, the influencer tried to affect the subject's
electrodermal response by, for example, visualizing the subject
while repeating, "Relax...relax...." Later analysis showed that the
subject's electrodermal responses had varied at the same time as the
influencer's thoughts, at a rate 43,000 to one against chance.
Another of Braud's recent studies posed the question of whether
people could affect the rate of decay of human blood cells in test
tubes by thought alone. Red cells drawn from volunteers were placed
in a solution with low salt content, which normally would cause them
to rupture. The volunteers were told to try to mentally "protect"
their own distant blood cells from harm. Astonishingly, measurements
made with a computer-linked spectrophotometer revealed that nearly a
third of the participants had succeeded, seemingly, in mentally
slowing their blood cells' destruction. The odds here, gleaned from
64 separate sessions, were nearly 200,000 to one.
Overall, Braud has performed more than 500 such experiments, all
aimed at detecting the nonlocal influence of consciousness -- pure
thought--on biological processes as diverse as the spatial
orientation of fish, the locomotor activity of small rodents, and
the brain rhythms of people. Consciousness, he has concluded,
produces verifiable biological effects in distant human 'targets' as
well as in bacteria, neurons, cancer cells, enzymes, fungi, mobile
algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, insects, chicks, gerbils, cats, and
dogs. In human subjects, these "telesomatic" effects occurred even
when the target was unaware of the effort. "I very much doubt that
mobile algae," Dossey deadpans, "are susceptible to suggestion or
the placebo effect."
It is doubtful that the majority of Dossey's colleagues will be
susceptible to his suggestion: that the mind-body revolution is
leading inexorably toward a consciousness revolution--one so
profound that some long-cherished scientific truisms may have to be
subsumed within a much larger, much stranger framework. The
heretical theses being nailed to the church door are unsettling:
that mental forces can violate the laws of physical causality; that
the mind's influence on the body goes beyond the biochemical links
between brain and immune system posited by PNI; that there are
things that mind can do that a physical brain could not. What Dossey
is talking about in a fairly unvarnished way is the science--or as
some would have it, the nonscience or nonsense--of parapsychology, a
bastard-turned-prodigal child that may be on the verge of claiming
its share of the patrimony.
It's not as if it was ever entirely scratched out of the family
portrait. William James, the father of American psychology, spent 25
years examining psychic phenomena, spritism, and religious
experiences, producing a radical empiricism that respectfully made
room for altered states. Freud admitted that when it came to such
oddities as visions of the future, "attempts at giving a
psychological explanation have been inadequate to cover the material
collected, however decidely the sympathies of those of a scientific
cast of mind may incline against accepting such beliefs."
Jung, whose early work was influenced by E.W.H. Meyers, founder of
the Society for Psychical Research, conceived of the brain as simply
a "transformer station": "In the deeper layers of the psyche which
we call the unconscious, there are things that cast doubt on the
indispensable categories of our conscious world, namely, time and
space. The existence of telepathy is still denied only by positive
ignoramuses."
But, we might ask...so what? Say the human mind can work some
inexplicable mojo on algae: It doesn't mean you can sit in a chaise
longue and mentally skim the pool clear of pond scum. But proponents
say the implications are sweeping: They pertain to no less than the
mind-brain connection, the mysteries of healing, and the
underpinnings of Western science itself.
In a single stroke, Dossey's panel has resurrected a bete noir, a
bugaboo, a haint that experimental reductionism has kept from
haunting the premises for centuries: "the ghost in the machine" (as
Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle derisively called the notion of
nonphysical selfhood)--a spook that, instead of vaporously passing
through walls, could eventually bash in the front door of The House
That Science Built.
The question devolves on this: How does attitude influence the
brain, and thence the body, in the first place? In which vestibule
of our gray matter, on what wetware coat hook, does the mind hang
its hat? If, as Braud's experiments suggest, the mind isn't quite
"inside" the brain, can it take jaunts around the perimeter? And
what is that perimeter? What are the limits--and prerogatives--of
consciousness?
This is far from the first time the question has come up. Every
major religion claims to own and operate the sole franchise. Every
world-class philosophy has mud-wrestled with it. Any surgeon who
ever unscrewed the lid of the skull, peeled back the dura mater, and
stared into the container of vanilla pudding said to include all the
ingredients of a human being has had at least one preposterous
moment of awe--and utter doubt.
Pioneering neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, who won the 1963 Nobel
Prize for his work on the synapse once commented that the
hair-trigger sensitivity of the brain's intercellular connections
suggests "a machine designed to be operated by a ghost." Eccles
proposed that the way that consciousness affected the brain might be
via psychokinesis (literally "soul-motion"), or the direct influence
of thought upon matter. The mind might be like a concert virtuoso
tickling the ivories of the brain, performing "cognitive caresses"
of the cortical neurons. Fellow brain-mapper Wilder Penfield called
it "the ultimate of ultimate problems." He came to believe that "the
dualist hypothesis (the mind is separate from the brain) seems the
more reasonable of explanations."
I recently attended a Harvard Medical School seminar on the
frontiers of mind-body medicine. During the question period, a
doctor from Cambridge rose from the audience and described her
cardiac arrest during her own Cesarian section. She had had no
heartbeat. Her eyes had been taped shut. Still, the obstetrician
told her rapt colleagues, "I could see everybody in the room, hear
the swearing as they tried to revive me, just as if I were standing
at the head of the operating table.
"But I could see nothing was working. My brachial artery had
narrowed too much to get a line through my neck. Suddenly I saw the
chairman of the department, whom I had never met, reach in and
through my abdomen and put his ungloved hand around my aorta. I felt
a powerful surge of energy. He held my aorta in this very firm and
loving way until it started to beat again." Later, she said, every
detail of this account was confirmed by those who were present at
her operation.
Michael B. Sabom, M.D., cardiologist and professor of medicine at
Emory University, staff physician at the Atlanta VA Medical Center,
was skeptical of increasingly common accounts of such out-of-body
experiences, or OBEs. He set out to compare a group of heart-attack
patients who had never had OBEs to those who claimed that they had.
He found, to his surprise, that those who had ostensibly experienced
OBEs were able to provide far more accurate descriptions of cardiac
procedures, and that some were able to give highly specific,
verifiable details of their own particular resuscitations.
At end of his 1982 book, Recollections of Death: A Medical
Investigation, he states, "If the human brain is actually composed
of two fundamental elements--the 'mind' and the 'brain'--then could
the near-death crisis even somehow trigger a transient splitting of
the mind from the brain in many individuals? My own beliefs are
leaning in this direction. The out-of-body hypothesis simply seems
to fit best with the data at hand."
The NIH's Dossey told me, "How mind might operate beyond the
physical brain is not comprehensible. But the inconceivable has
become commonplace in fields like quantum mechanics. With phenomena
like the instant, simultaneous change in the spin characteristics of
photons separated by distances of light-years, what I'm calling
'nonlocal mind' is right at home in modern physics. Physicists don't
have a clue how things in the quantum world can happen, but they
don't question that they do. They honor the data."
Indeed, many theorists are looking to the brain-teasing,
mind-twisting strange-but-true factoids of quantum physics to
provide at least provisional explanations for the mysteries of
consciousness. Brain Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for
his work on quantum tunneling and superconductivity, has said that
evidence for apparent faster-than-light signaling in quantum physics
"raises the possibility that one part of the universe may have
knowledge of another part--some kind of contact at a distance."
Josephson suggests that such interconnections could permit the
operation of 'psi functioning' between humans, currently anathema to
biomedical science.
"The fact that nonlocal events are now studied by physicists in the
microworld," the NIH report adds, "suggests a greater permissiveness
and freedom to examine phenomena in the biological and mental
domains that may possibly be analogous."
That, according to renowned neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, M.D., is
nothing but a load of Mandrake the Magician-class hooey. Edelman and
colleagues at Rockefeller University's Neurosciences Institutes are
working assiduosly on a purely biological theory of how
"higher-order consciousness" could be produced in the brain through
a reflexive "bootstrapping process" of its own neuronal circuitry.
Edelman, who once planned a career as a concert violinist, sees the
mind as an emergent property of brain tissue--"an orchestra without
a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music," in the
approving summation of fellow neurologist Oliver Sacks, M.D. "To
attempt to explain aspects of consciousness using
as-yet-undiscovered physical fields or dimensions," Edelman comments
acerbically, "is a bit like a schoolboy who, not knowing the formula
of sulfuric acid asked for on an exam, gives instead a beautiful
account of his dog Spot.
"Some very good physicists," he adds, "have reached beyond the
biological facts and have supposed that [the quantum is] the answer
to the riddle of consciousness. This is an off-putting way of
proposing physics as a surrogate spook."
Michael Scriven, Ph.D., a philosopher of science who can recall with
relish the occasion when, barely more than a graduate schoolboy
himself, he argued with Einstein over "whether time could be closed
as well as space," finds such dismissals a little glib. "I'm a
little irked," he says in his crisp Down Under accent, "about
mainstream scientists' knee-jerk reactions to strangeness, as if
kangaroos can't be real because they've never seen one themselves.
It's pathetic to hear Nobel Prize winners acting like children
seeing a ghost at night."
Scriven, who has been around the scientific block (he worked for the
NIH in the forties and in the fifties served on the board of the
Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases), is a member of a loosely
affiliated group of thinkers who are trying to come up with less
reductionist solutions to the conundrums of consciousness. He refers
to himself as the "Guardian at the Logical Gates" for the group
(dubbed the Causality Project and sponsored by the same Fetzer
Foundation that funded the Moyers series.)
"But it's also wrong to say," he hastens to add, "that just because
there's something parapsychological out there, everything we know
must crumble. The basis of science is so well founded, so built up
layer upon layer, that this stuff is no more than a little crack at
the edges of some very old, very solid monuments."
Others think, however, that the cracks could widen into a serious
structural flaw. Consider Spiegel's Stanford study, where women with
advanced breast disease who attended a psychological support group
lived twice as long as those who didn't attend. Suppose an
anticancer drug were undergoing trials, and the experimental group,
unbeknownst to the experiments, contained a disproportionate number
of patients who were also in group therapy. Longer survival rates
might not have to do entirely with the efficacy of the
pharmaceutical, but with the patients' state of mind. Thus, even
carefully designed experiments could be hopelessly, invisibly
skewed.
This would be what Larry Dossey calls a "local" effect of
consciousness, the stuff of PNI: a person's attitudes, emotions, and
thoughts can have effects on their bodies. But Dossey and the Panel
on Mind/Body Interventions go yet further, pointing to evidence
suggestive of "non-local" effects: that the body may be "influenced
by events occurring at a distance from the patient and outside his
or her awareness."
If this is true, it could topple the tallest spire on the cathedral
of science--the double-blind experiment. Science works by accounting
for--and controlling--every variable and influence that could
conceivably affect an experimental outcome. What if there are
factors that must be taken into account that have heretofore been
ruled out as theoretically impossible? For all we know, Dossey says,
outcomes could be influenced "by people outside the experimental
arena, like well-wishing friends or praying kinfolk. When we look
back on our present era, I think we're going to be astonished how
naive we were, that we actually believed we could isolate people in
such a way that the influence of consciousness could be annulled."
Under his prodding, the NIH's Panel on Mind/Body Interventions has
sandwiched into its report a daring call for a Task Force on the
Nature of Consciousness, to comprise representatives from every
discipline: psychologists, neurophysiologists, artificial
intelligence experts, physicists, physicians, and philosophers.
Similarly, the professionally variegated Causality Project has
already been meeting for three years, aiming for nothing less than a
new paradigm of science. Other enclaves--with exotic names like the
Bay Area Consciousness Group, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies
Research lab (PEAR), and Temple University's Center for Frontier
Sciences--are already pins in the sketchy map of a brave new world.
A project is even underway to create an internationally affiliated
group of first-class "Consciousness Research Laboratories" that
would exchange data and provide replication of each other's work.
All the baroque-sounding formulations that have sparked centuries of
philosophical wrangling--Descartes' "radical dualism," Leibniz's
"psychophysical parallelism," Spencer's "mindstuff theory"--may soon
move from the Victorian armchair to the cyclotron, the petri dish,
the electron-tunneling microscope.
But what species of researcher is going to risk grants, tenure, and
professional repute by venturing out into the night with a high-tech
jelly jar to try to capture a flitting, hypothetical psychic quark?
Typical of a new breed of what might be called experiential
experimentalists, biophysicist Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., director of
Temple University's Center for Frontier Sciences, has logged time on
a Zen meditation cushion and also taught for three years at an
institute run by Catholic mystic Father Matthew Fox. Rubik, a
well-regarded hard scientist, recently attended a White House
meeting on health care in her capacity as advisor to the NIH Office
of Alternative Medicine, where she heads a panel on "electromagnetic
interventions." The panel will examine everything from electrical
therapies used to accelerate bone healing to a "neurobiochemical
stimulator" (which, she says, "has created profound changes in
animals' brain chemistry and moods"). Her passion, she says, is "how
energy fields--maybe including a nonlocal field of consciousness
itself--interact with life."
Like a number of her Causality Project colleagues, Rubik feels her
various spiritual sojourns have given her an inside track on the
mind-brain puzzle. Her accounting makes it sound as if Descartes,
last seen at his recent, merciful public interment, may yet shake
off the clods of soil to meander among the scientific living. "I
agree Cartesianism is dreadful," she muses, "but there is something
immaterial about who we are. Maybe we'll need to go back to Eastern
mystical concepts like an 'etheric' or 'astral' energy domain."
Clearly, these ideas--particularly as they emerge from the belly of
what looks suspiciously like a new-age Trojan Horse wheeled in
sometime around the dawn of Aquarius--will irritate some
sensibilities. "Media Blitz for Mind/Body Malarkey" blared a recent
headline in a scientific-muckraking newsletter called Probe. The
article took aim at what it held to be the moonier aspects of
Moyers' TV series, which it called "seductively anti-medical,
anti-scientific, and anti-rational." Its claim that "a campaign has
been launched to radically change and spiritualize America's
science-based medicine" received wide press coverage.
"It's not as if anyone's saying science is completely wrong,"
counters Beverly Rubik. "Conventional science is appropriate within
a conventional framework. But there can be other sciences which
exist outside of that box. We need multiple ways of inquiry that
accord with--and I realize this will sound odd--our levels of being.
Our usual practice of science is based on the lowest common
denominator of human consciousness: of feeling separated from the
rest of universe.
"What's missing," she says, "is attention to the inner state of the
investigator. We've been pretending we're neutral, playing dead,
putting our feet in concrete shoes and saying we can't jump. It's
time to try on some different footwear."
One Causality Project member told me, "the study of consciousness
may require scientists who are willing to risk being transformed in
the process of observation." Fetzer Foundation president Robert
Lehman concurs: "We'll need investigators who can work more
according to an old medieval notion: that to observe nature's deeper
secrets, you must personally strive to create 'eyes to see, ears to
hear.'"
The Buddhist monks whose mediations raise their skin temperatures
are not just performing a stunning biofeedback experiment but are,
they tell us, practicing an inner science of compassion. The purpose
of their inquiries into the body's most arcane chemistries is to
transcend divisions between self and other, subject and
object--dualities that one Buddhist translation refers to as
"primitive beliefs about reality." Similarly, physicists at
Princeton's PEAR lab, whose experiments seem to indicate that mind
may affect subatomic particles, have concluded there is now "a need
on the part of science to soften the boundary between 'I' and 'not
I.'"
The Buddhist monks, and increasingly some adventurous physicists,
biologists, and doctors, represent a radical new model of science,
one that does not posit inviolable distinctions between spirit and
matter, perceiver and perceived. The new paradigm may well deem any
models of reality that deny the intersubjectivity of existence to be
fundamentally unscientific.
The glory of science has always been its commitment to "follow the
data" on a quest for the unadorned, replicable, verifiable truth.
But what if the data have begun leading us to a truth more marvelous
than we, in our scientific "reality" of isolated egos, dead physical
nature, and decoupled mind and body, have imagined?
Here at the close of the second millenium, sometime between the
world-fragmenting fall from Babel and the Last Trump, we search for
a unifying Theory of Everything, still ignorant--in some ways,
willfully--of where we ourselves fit into the astonishing world of
cells, particles, and parsecs we have discovered. Too often,
perhaps, our measure of mind, body, and nature has been a little
like pre-Columbian maps of a flat Earth: cutting off boundaries at
the visible horizon, ignoring the Mercator projections of the soul,
consigning the psyche's deeps and expanses to "Here Lie Dragons."
Medicine, once the crown jewel of reductionist scientism, has
improbably opened up an unexpected vista. Its newly discovered
mind-body pathways are leading to the largely unexplored terrain of
the human spirit. We seem to suddenly be on the cusp of a moment
foreseen by Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology: "I
have conviction," he wrote, "that when Physiology will be far enough
advanced, the poet, the philosopher, and the physiologist will all
understand each other." Surely, the late Buckminster
Fuller--syncretic thinker extraordinaire--would have understood.
Asked where a proper investigation of the human condition should
commence, he answered without hesitation: "You start with the
universe."