Chapter 1
A MINOR MIRACLE
As a postdoctoral fellow, I was given brief holidays, and the only practi- cal way for me to spend Christmas with my parents in Sedona, Arizona, was to travel by air. Flying had always frightened me, I suppose because I could envision a crash landing with no hope of controlling the out- come. I didn’t fly at all until I was in graduate school, and then I flew with white knuckles and only when I had to. One Christmas—operating on a strict timetable and coming from Eugene—I had to. While I was with my family, there was news that two planes had collided in the airspace over California, and everyone onboard died.
So, I was particularly nervous about my return flight. My elder sister walked me to the gate—this was before stringent airport security—and I confided my fears to her.
Cathie said, “I have something that will help you.” I expected her to hand me a pill, but instead she gave me a mantra, so-ham. She in- structed me to think so as I breathed in and ham as I breathed out. She said she’d received this mantra from her meditation teacher. It worked for her, so she felt it would work for me. “Try it,” she said.
My sister and I had never moved through life on parallel tracks. She now lived in a communal house in Hawaii, explored alternative lifestyles with other free spirits, and met whatever spiritual master arrived on the prevailing trade winds. Over the holiday she had been talking about one of these teachers in particular, a swami from India. While I loved my sister, I didn’t have a lot of respect for this latest turn in her life. My boyfriend always referred to her as Bubblehead, and I felt he might be right about that.
Walking down the ramp to the plane, however, I was terrified, and desperate. I started repeating Cathie’s teacher’s mantra—so on the in- breath, ham on the out-breath. What happened then was a minor mira- cle: with no faith whatsoever in the process I was engaging, I found that it worked. The physical tension I’d been experiencing all the way to the airport—a contraction in my chest and abdomen, almost as if my body were caught in a vise—relaxed, diminished, and, as I buckled my seat belt, disappeared altogether.
Throughout the entire trip I continued to repeat this mantra, feeling as light as if I myself were the one in flight. I watched the cloud forms out the window and wondered at their beauty. It occurred to me that, whatever else it is, flying is also magical.
But where had my anxiety gone? And why had it been replaced by delight—delight in the very activity that had always terrified me before? Could two syllables with no meaning for me do all of this?
When a mystery presents itself, I invariably investigate further. The next day, safe in my own cottage in the woods back in Eugene, I sat on my bed to repeat this mantra—so . . . ham . . . so . . . ham . . . so . . . ham—and I found myself, once again, deeply relaxed. This time I felt as if my body were sinking down, and coming to rest on a foundation that held it securely. It occurred to me that I had been holding myself in an adrenalized state of attention for quite some time. I poured effort into my life. I saw that I could allow myself to relax. I could be in my life. I could just be.
For about five minutes, that’s what I did. When I came out of this inner space, I knew that I had been meditating. I understood that mantra repetition is a technique of meditation, that sitting and silently thinking a mantra is itself a form of meditation.
Even though I liked the feeling of my short meditation, the demands and commitments of academia superseded any interest I might have had in relaxing. I didn’t think about meditation again for almost a year, when Cathie called to invite me to a weekend meditation workshop with her teacher. She and I were both on the East Coast, me teaching for a year at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and she on the staff of this meditation teacher. “Your birthday’s coming up,” she said. “Let me treat you.”
I accepted, but when I spoke with my boyfriend about her invitation, he didn’t want me to go. The whole Indian-guru thing sounded weird and cultish to him, and in the face of his opposition, I waffled. I called Cathie and told her it wasn’t convenient. Afterward, though, I remem- bered the deep sweetness I had experienced with that mantra—with meditation! I realized I wanted to try meditation again, so I called Cathie back, and she got me one of the last seats for the workshop.
The swami and his entourage of about five hundred were staying in a rural hotel his organization had rented for the summer. The workshop, two days, was held in the ballroom. I remember the room as darkened, fragrant with incense, and quiet.
The first morning, it was announced that during the meditation ses- sion the swami would walk around the room and initiate every individu- al there. The initiation was described as a spiritual awakening, and it was to happen through the swami’s touch. Obviously, the scientist in me was skeptical. Since I was there, however, I decided to put my skepti- cism aside for the weekend. Besides, I was curious to see what would happen.
For some time we chanted Sanskrit syllables repetitively, back and forth with a lead group of singers. This was another mantra, om namah shivaya. When the music stopped, I could hear the swami working his way down the aisles. I could hear a swish-swish-swish . . . the swish of what I didn’t know, but I could tell the sound was coming closer. When he reached me, I felt the brush of feathers—peacock feathers I later learned—across the top of my head with a gentle whoosh. I was enveloped in the sweet scent of hina. Then, firmly, I felt the swami’s thumb and fingers right between my eyes and on the bridge of my nose.
I was alert. My eyes were closed, but my senses were otherwise fully engaged, so that when in this moment I experienced a current of what felt like electricity enter from the swami’s fingers into my body, I had a sense of utter certainty about the event. It isn’t that I knew precisely what had happened. To this day, I can’t explain it. But it seemed as if a tiny lightning bolt leapt from his fingers to a point between my eyes and down to the center of my chest. I could feel the exact point where the energy stopped. I knew it was my heart, not the physical heart but parallel to the physical heart and more like a heart than my physical heart had ever been. I say that because for the first time I could feel energy pulsating from my “new” heart, which seemed to be at my very core. The energy that came from my heart radiated outward, filling my whole being and beyond. This energy was like honey—it was sweet, and it moved in a leisurely and steady flow. If it had a color, it must have been golden. It felt like nectar; it felt like pure love pouring through me.
Words went through my mind, and they had nothing to do with scientific analysis: I’m home, I’m home! My heart is my home!
As I flew back to Virginia from that meditation workshop, I was looking in wonder at the photograph of my sister’s teacher on the cover of his autobiography. I kept asking: Who are you? What have you given me? At some deep level inside of me I wanted more, and that part of me was determined to find a way for that to happen.
This was forty years ago.
A MATTER OF INTEGRITY
For me, what was most astonishing about that weekend workshop is what happened afterward. Without my effort or will or my even think- ing about it, I made a 180-degree shift in my habits, beginning the morning after I returned. I woke up at 5:00 am, spontaneously, and I got up to meditate. This happened day after day after day and, in fact, has never ceased.
The most significant change was the direction of my attention. The nature of neuroscience research is to enter the world of your subjects, to explore their nervous systems in order to plumb mysteries hidden within them. Now, through meditation, I attempted to do the very same thing in my own field of consciousness. I did this knowing that just beneath the surface simmered a quiet ecstasy. I had tapped it once; I felt it was there, waiting for me.
Chapter 11
THE HEALING INTENTION
I could simply say the term “energy healing” to a group of UO science majors and watch their faces freeze. In the Complementary and Alter- native Medicine class I’ve offered for the past several years, students always have had the greatest difficulty with energy-based healing. These same students have no trouble accepting that various forms of exer- cise—tai chi, hatha yoga, even just walking—can accelerate healing and ward off disease. But the idea of one person transmitting energy that heals another? Initially, most of these scientists-in-training are not sim- ply reluctant to learn about such modalities; they’re opposed to learning about them.
As a trained neuroscientist, I can understand this response. A neuro- scientist might say, “Of course, encountering someone’s anger can cause measurable stress for another person.” But the scientist thinks this anger—this emotional energy—will have an effect on the other person only if it’s physically apparent to him. It is quite a leap for a scientist to consider that the unperceived energy of one person might have an effect on the physiology of another. And this is, in fact, the claim of energy healing: that subtle energy transmitted from the one person has actually improved the physiological function of the other.
From the scientist’s perspective, it is virtually impossible to verify such a premise. A human being is a highly complex system. When our bodies change, there are infinite numbers of factors involved. Each of us has countless components to our physiology as well as our mindset, our emotions, our lifestyle, our environment—all of which influence our health. How could we possibly extract the effect of one factor—say, the intention of a spiritual healer—from the others? We have to take into account a subject’s stress levels, mood, diet, belief system, inten- tions, environment, and so on. This is why such a study is extremely difficult to carry out with what is considered to be scientific validity.
To be absolutely certain of the effects a spiritual healer has on a person’s health, a researcher would have to keep all the other factors that might influence that person’s life absolutely static. How could you possibly do that? You couldn’t. And even if you could isolate persons so that most of these factors are stable—where subjects, for instance, would receive no touch from another human being, where they would not be affected by changes in the weather, where they would receive no news from the world around them—such an antiseptic and isolated environment would not provide an ideal setting for energy healing.
So, the researchers interested in studying such subjects began by turning their attention to a simpler question: if human intention is di- rected toward a system that is simpler than another human being, will the intention itself affect a change in that system? In other words, can a person have an effect on a system, whether animate or inanimate, sim- ply by thinking about it? This sort of mind-to-body—or mind-to-ob- ject—influence, it turns out, can be verified. It has been verified. This phenomenon, called distant intentionality, has been explored extensive- ly in scientific literature, yet the research is still at the margins of West- ern neuroscience.