by Deepak Chopra
ISBN: 0-553-34869-9
From rear Cover -
"Dr. Chopra is a fine, evocative writer who maneuvers his way suavely through medicine, physics and metaphysics. For anyone who has awaited a Tao of Medicine, this book is a most welcome arrival."
"Deepak Chopra's book Quantum Healing is must reading for every advanced - or should I say evolved - health-care giver. It will widen our horizons, enlarge our comprehension, and help us grasp the path we are on into the new century. Exciting, stimulating and highly recommended."
Here is an extraordinary approach to healing by an extraordinary physician-writer - a book filled with mystery, wonder, and hope of people who have experienced seemingly miraculous recoveries from cancer and other serious illnesses.
Dr. Deepak Chopra, a respected New England endocrinologist, began his search for answers when he saw patients who completely recovered after being given only a few months to live. In the mid-1980's he returned to his native India to explore Ayurveda, humanity's most ancient healing tradition. Now he has brought together the current research of Western medicine, neuroscience, and physics with the insights of Ayurvedic theory to show that the human body is controlled by a "network of intelligence" grounded in quantum reality. Not a superficial psychological state, this intelligence lies deep enough to change the basic patterns that design our physiology - with the potential to defeat cancer, heart disease, and even aging itself. In this inspiring and pioneering work, Dr Chopra offers us both a fascinating intellectual journey and a deeply moving chronicle of hope and healing.
Dr Chopra writes with almost magical simplicity ... this is an important book for anyone interested in maintaining or restoring health"
In a highly readable manner, Dr Chopra shows the relevance and wisdom of a number of the concepts of Ayurveda to a modern systems/informaton theory of health and illness as exemplified by the rapidly developing field of psychoneuroimmunology."
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Since the 1960's, the proliferation of casual knowledge about the East has been a blessing and a curse, for although many people have picked up a few catch phrases like nirvana, atman, and dharma, and almost everyone can let the word karma pass by in a conversation without blinking an eye, the actual sense of these words has been garbled. I have tried to show that Vedic knowledge is systematic and sound; that it is as far-reaching as our most advanced science; and that many of the things we most desire for ourselves, such as freedom from disease and an unimpaired old age, can be approached through this great body of understanding about human existence.
But I would betray the rishis' knowledge if I did not present its final expansion which has no clearly defined precedent in the West - or at best is confined to religious doctrine. The rishis were after a state of total awareness. For them, this was not philosophy or religion but a natural form of human awareness. The fourth state, it turns out, is not an end point but a doorway. And what is on the other side? The only complete answer would have to come from the thousands and thousands of pages of Vedic texts which function as the encyclopedia of experiences the rishis recorded. The simplest answer is to say that what each rishi encountered was the Self. An extremely accurate depiction of meeting the Self was given by a meditator from Connecticut:
It is a feeling of great freedom, but also one of naturalness, far more real and natural than being confined to such a small space. Sometimes the sense of infinity is so strong that I lose the sensation of body or matter - just infinite, unbounded awareness, an eternal, never-changing continuum of consciousness.
Everyone will have to respond to this in his own terms. I hope that we have laid enough solid groundwork so that the account can appear in its true light, not as a self-delusion but as an actual encounter with the silent field of intelligence. Earlier, we noted that the body in its real nature is non-change mixed with change. The reason why that is so is that all of nature exhibits these two paradoxical yet complimentary states. As awareness expands, the huge scope of change and the equally huge scope of non-change dawn on the mind. An ancient Chinese poem by Hsu Hsu says:
Can we grant this beautiful openness of percetion, at once serene and all-encompassing, to an ordinary person from Connecticut? I think we have to, for the same biochemistry that sustains such an experience is available to anyone, regardless of time. Our DNA has remebered all the things that have ever happened to human beings. It would be ridiculous to suppose that only Chinese or Indian DNA can trigger higher states of consciousness; it would be impoverished to claim that they are not real. The meditator's statement ends with this wonderfully exact appreciation of quantum reality: "Sometimes there is an interesting paradox of activity and rest all in one, and I feel within my awareness that I am moving infinitely fast and remaining perfectly still at the same time. This is the experience of the ever-changing along with the never-changing."
Anyone who wants to take the full benefit of the Vedic knowledge must come to grips with the fact that such normally inconceivable states as infinity, eternity and transcendence are real. These words do not belong to the vocabulary of the ordinary waking state, but they are not so distant from it, either. We all have the power to make reality. Why make it inside boundaries when the boundless is so near?
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Every doctor realises that it is nature who cures disease, a statement first written by Hippocrates two thousand years ago. What is the difference, then, between nature's ordinary form of healing and unusual or "miraculous" healing? Perhaps the difference is small and exists only in our heads. If you are peeeling potatoes and cut your finger with a slip of the knife, and obviously you are not wonder-struck, because the process of healing - the clotting of the blood to close the wound, the formation of a scab, and the regeneration of new skin and blood vessels - seeems altogether normal.
Yet, we should be aware that this feeling of normalcy is not the same as knowing what healing is or how to control it. It is sobering to consider how much of the knowledge in medical books pertains not to life bu to death. By performing autopsies on cadavers, examining tissue slides under a microscope, and analysing blood, urine and other isolated by-products of the body, the majority of medical knowledge has been obtained. True, patients are examined when they are alive, and tests can be run on many isolated functions in their bodies. But the knowledge so acquired is rudimentary compared to the volumes of super-sophisticated data devoted to death. The poet Wordsworth wrote this memorably terse line: "We murder to dissect." No truer statement has ever been made about the limitations of medical research.
The first thing that is killed in the laboratory is the delicate web of intelligence that binds the body together. When a blood cell rushes to a wound site and begins to form a clot, it has not traveled there at random. It actually knows where to go and what to do when it gest there, as surely as a paramedic - in fact, more surely, since it acts completely spontaneiously and without guesswork. Even if we break down its knowledge into finer and finer bits, looking for the secret in some minute hormone or messenger enzyme, we will not find a protein strand labeled 'intelligence', and yet there is no doubt that intelligence is at work
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Chapter 13 - Body of Bliss
There is no more beautiful experience than when the world expands beyond its accustomed limits. These are the moments when reality takes on splendor. The Veda calls such an experience Ananda, or bliss; it is said to be another quality inherent in the human mind but covered over by layers of dulled awareness. Bliss is an uncomfortable word in the West; like transcendence, it needs to be demystified. Let's start with a personal reaction to what bliss feels like. A beautiful first-person account is given by physiologist Robert Keith Wallace. The scene is Nepal, where Wallace went in 1974, taking a break from a conference being held in India:
The tinky kite floated up into the high, thin air. I stood looking up toward the great mountains around us. Though they hid their heads in the clouds, they gave off an aura of grandeur and peace. As I watched, the clouds lifted all at once. I was absolutely in awe. What I had taken for mountains were only foothills! Beyond them, like ancient gods, rose the true Himalayas, unbelievably mighty and majestic.
We could hardly speak, so much power and beauty was concentrated in that breathtaking scene.The sense of having a small, isolated self disappeared, and in its place was the delicious sensation of flowing out into everything I beheld. I felt a sense of complete fullness contained in my own silence. Fittingly, the tallest peak before us was Annapurna, whose name means "fullness of life."
Standing there on the lake, I saw directly into the reality where time really is timeless. The same power that reared these mountains was flowing through me. If I wanted to find the source of time and space, I only needed to place my fingers over my heart. The single adequate word to describe my sensations at that moment is bliss.
- The Physiology of Consciousness by Robert Keith Wallace (M.I.U. Press 1993)
What stands out unmistakably in this experience is its sense of revelation. People who have been directly touched by bliss feel that they are suddenly being exposed to life as it really is. By comparison, their ordinary view was flat and distorted; they had been accepting a dingy image for the real thing. To experience bliss every hour of the day would be a sign of complete enlightenment, but even a brief encounter is significant - it permits you to actually feel waves of consciousness as they well up from the field of silence, cross the gap, and are infused into every cell. This is the body's own awakening.
In Ayurveda, bliss is the basis for three extremely powerful healing techniques. The first is meditation, which we have already discussed. Its importance is that it takes the mind out of its boundaries and exposes it to an unbounded state of consciousness. The other two techniques are more specific. The first is the Ayurvedic psycho-physiological technique - the term psycho-physiological simply means "mind-body" (we often use an informal name, the bliss technique). The second healing technique is called primordial sound.
{Should include a link to www.chopra.com where he lists teachers etc of the primnordial sound meditation ... }
To explain how such healing works, let me take an example from hypnosis. One of the most surprising findings of hypnosis research is that subjects can make their hands warm or cold, raise rashes on their skin, and even form blisters in a matter of a few minutes after the hypnotic suggestion is introduced. This is not, strictly speaking, a peculiarity of the hypnotic trance - subjects hooked up to biofeedback machines can do similar things in their normal state of awareness. What is being demonstrated here is the power of attention to alter the body. Ayurveda has made use of this principle for thousands of years. Indeed, since the basic premise of Vedic knowledge is that consciousness creates the body, it is only natural that techniques for focusing attention should have been discovered.
The bliss technique and primordial sound fall into this category. Consciousness is nothing but awareness. You can be aware that your hand is hot, which is passive awareness, but as the hypnosis research shows, you can also make your hand hot, which is active awareness, or attention. When you "pay attention" to something, you shift from passive to active awareness. Attention exerts far more control than people ordinarily realise. That is because we are victims of passive awareness. A person in pain is aware of the pain but not that he can make it increase, diminish, appear or disappear. Yet all this is true (People can walk on fire, for example, because they can control their level of pain, more remarkably, they can control whether their feet actually get burned - that too is under the control of attention.)
In Ayurveda, each and every symptom of disease, from a minor neck pain to a full-blown cancer, is under the control of attention. However, between us and the symptom lie barriers - the veils called Maya - that prevent us from exercising our attention in a therapeutic way. All mind-body medecine attempts to remove these obstacles so that healing can take place. Outside Ayurveda, the word Maya is not used, but any term that amounts to the same thing is applicable. I have used other phrases such as "barriers in silence", "the ghost of a memory", and "the mask of matter". In the currebt envoironment, where mind-body medicine is just proving itself and has to beware of stepping on the toes of science, techniques for breaking through Maya are still rather rudimentary. Fortunately, nature has set up things so that mind-body approaches of all kinds will work. Laughter can defeat a fatal disease, so can drinking a glass of grape juice every day, if you believe strongly enough in it.
It would be much better, however, to have a science of awareness. Ayurveda supplies just that. It would also be helpful to have a theory that supplies this science with a firm grounding in philosophy; the Vedic knowledge supplies that. When I teach people Ayrvedic healing techniques, I am not inducting them into a Vedic world, or into some mystery. I am trying to let them realise that their own awareness creates, controls, and turns into their bodies. This is a fact, not just a Vedic view of things.
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It may seem that the quantum mechanical body is involved only in life-or-death situations, but this is not so. We live in it, casually and without thinking, just as we live in the body as a whole. I have a patient who glimpsed this fact while sitting on the grass eating French bread and listening to Mozart. She has been a frustrating case for more than two years. She suffered from a combination of nagging symptoms, including irritable bowel, headaches, fatigue, insomnia and depression, that humbled every attempt to cure her. None of these conditions was fatal, but they made her life miserable nonetheless. Conventional treatment with anti-depressants and tranquillisers had done her little good; neither had anything I did using Ayurveda.
Then one day she went to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony and an idyllic place to have a picnic. She spread out a checkered cloth, lay in the sun listening to music, and peacefully ate her lunch. These things made her very happy, and that night she slept soundly for the first time in years. However, she was so used to being sick that this new event did not register on her. Another year of misery passed, until it was time for her to go to Tanglewood again, and the same thing happened - all her symptoms disappeared for the day, and she slept beautifully that night.
This time it registered. She came to see me jubilantly waving a sheet of reprints from medical journals on the SAD syndrome. The initials stand for "seasonal affective disorder", referring to a condition in which patients become seriously depressed every winter without apparent cause. Now we know that the cause has to do with the pineal organ, deep inside the skull; his small, flat oval endocrine gland, although surrounded by brain matter, responds to changes in sunlight, being the source of the "third eye" that everyone wants to look through in the New Age (some lower animals such as the lamprey do possess a literal third eye). In certain people, insufficient exposure to sunlight in the winter throws off their pineal secretions; the gland starts to produce too much of a hormone called melatonin, giving rise to depression.
"See," she said, "I've had SAD all along; and by sitting in the sun, I've got a normal pineal gland again."
"I'm sorry," I said, "but that disorder occurs in winter." Her face started to fall, and I quickly added, "You've put your finger on something important, though. Now we have a deficiency we can treat."
"What's that?" she asked
"Picnic deficiency," I said. For the first time since I'd known her, she flashed me a genuine smile.
Her self-treatment continues to work. She regularly escpaes the gray confines of her office building to sit in the sun at lunch, talk to friends, and listen to lots of Mozart. This may not sound like advanced medicine, and in a sense it isn't, but the reason it works is we need Nature to free up our nature. We are surrounded by the best of all healing influences - fresh air, sunlight and beauty. In India, the Hippocrates of Ayurveda, a great physician and sage named Charaka, prescribed some sunlight for all diseases, along with a walk in the early morning, and his advice will never grow stale.
If I find a green meadow splashed with daisies and sit down beside a clear running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when i sat in my mother's lap in infancy, because the Earth really is my mother and the green meadow is her lap. You and I are strangers, but the internal rhythms of our bodies listens to the same ocean tides that cradled us in a time beyond memory.
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The rishis took a simple position in the mind-body debate. Everything, they said, comes from the mind. It projects the world exactly as a movie projector does. Our bodies are aprt of the movie, and so is everything that happens to the body. To a rishi, the wonder is not that we can make ourselves sick or well, but that we don't see ourselves doing it. If we could silently witness ourselves, we would see this more and more. The very sky, ocean, mountians, and stars would be pouring out of our brains - they all belong in the movie, too. If the rishis' views are right, then we have been wrong to put so much faith in objective reality. And yet, our objective frame of reference doesn't seem wrong. It serves us very well, on the whole; the sky and the stars seem to exist "out there", totally independent of us. Are we being fooled by our own movie?
To make the rishis' case, you have to adopt their perspective, which means stepping outside ordinary waking-state reality, at least slightly. If you can do that, then you begin to appreciate that the mind is indeed a powerful creator.
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The rishis said that life is uilt up by your participation in it. Nothing is good or bad, hard or soft, painful or pleasant, except as you live it. The same is true of disease. A diesease is not the molecular contact of some outside organism with the molecules of your body. (As we saw, even if you put a drop of concentrated cold virus into a person's nose, his chances of getting a cold are no more than one in eight) It is not even the flow of toxins in your blood or the action of runaway cells. In the rishis' view, a disease is a sequence of moments that you live through, during which you appraise every iota of the vast input that comes pouring in from all quarters of your world, including your body.
Your body is a world too. When I first came to Ayurveda, I was deeply impressed by the following verse in the ancient texts:
- The New England Journal of Medicine
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.
- Marily Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy
- George Freeman Solomon, M.D., professor of psychiatry and biobehavioural sciences, University of California
One of the most regular experiences in my meditation is of expanded awarenes, of no longer being confined to the inside of my head, but being as infinite or more infinite than the universe. Sometimes I feel the boundaries of the mind being pushed out, like the ever-widening circumference of a circle, until the circle disappears and only infinity remains.
The first wave is receding
The second wave promptly arrives
So many layers of time
So many lives.
Along with a physicist friend, I made my way up from Katmandu, the capital, to be nearer the Himalayas. We found a beautiful alpine lake, which Nepalese princes once favoured as a summer retreat. For less than a dollar, we rented a boat and pushed out onto the water. It was a windy day with clearing skies, a perfect day to fly kites. I had bought one at the bazaar, paited a fierce red and built for acrobatics. I stood up, and it jumped out of my hand as I let it loose on the wind.
These words are subject to many interpretations. What they signify to me is that when i go about my everyday existence, I am in charge of two worlds, the little one in me and the big one around me. My appraisal of every minute detail "out there" - the sun, the sky, the chances of rain, the words other people say, the shadows cast by office buildings - is matched by an event "in here". Infinite choice is open at every second for me to alter the shape of the world, for it has no shape other than what I give it. The eminent neurologist, Sir John Eccles stated this quite clearly when he wrote, "I want you to realise that there is no colour in the natural world and no sounds - nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent ... " In short, nothing is so important about the universe as your participation in it.
The rishis' subjective approach found an enormously useful outlet in Ayurveda. Ayurveda is commonly classified as a system of medicine, but with equal justice you could call it a system for curing delusions, for stripping away the convincing quality of disease and letting a healthier reality take its place. (The name itself suggests that Ayurveda is meant to be medicine in the broadest sense. It comes from two Sanskrit roots, Ayus, or "life", and Veda, which means either "knowledge" or "science". The literal meaning, then, is "science of life".)
Patients are curious to know what kinds of treatments are specifically Ayurvedic - are there new pills to try, exercises, diets, or more arcane Eastern therapies? I say yes to each of these, but then with some embarrassment I have to add that I spend much of my time just talking, trying to get people not to be so convinced by their disease. In Ayurveda, this is the first and most important step in healing. As long as the patient is convinced by his symptoms, he is caught up in a reality where "being sick" is the dominant input. The reason why meditation is so important in Ayurveda is that it leads the mind to a "free zone" that is not touched by disease. Until you know that such a place exists, your disease will seem to be taking over completely. This is the principal delusion that needs to be shattered.
It is undeniable that we all create scenarios and then become convinced by them, down to our very cells.
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Page 127 - Silent Witness
The pressing need for a quantum medicine is well illustrated, I think, by the following case study.
A young Israeli named Aaron, 24 years old, called me at my office and said, "I feel perfectly healthy, but my doctor has given me ninety days to live. He took some tests which showed that I have an incurable blood disorder - that was exactly twenty-three days ago."
Barely managing to suppress his emotions, he told me a story that had taken several strange turns. His diagnosis had come about entirely by accident. Because of an old soccer injury, he has a deviated septum, which made it difficult for him to breathe. He visited a surgeon in Chicago who could repair his nose - Aarin had moved to the United States several years earlier to attend business school - and the surgeon asked him to have a routine blood test.
When the results came back from the lab, the doctor was very disturbed. They showed that Aaron was severely anemic: his hemoglobin count had fallen from a normal of 14 to 6 (a count of 12 would be considered borderline anemic); hemoglobin is the chemical component of the blood that carries oxygen throughout the body. His hermatocrit had plummeted to 16; this means that when his blood was spun in a centrifuge to separate the red blood cells from the plasma, the red cells occupied only 16 percent of the total volume. In normal blood, this should be closer to 40 percent.
Aaron was immediately referred to a blood specialist, a hematologist, who asked him a standard series of question.
"Have you been feeling short of breath lately?"
The hematologist looked at him very hard. "Look," he said, "you're pretty tired all the time, aren't you?" Aaron shook his head. "That's amazing!" the doctor exclaimed. "With your hemoglobin counts, you should be in congestive heart failure by now."
Aaron was shocked. Looking at the blood tests, his doctor had a right to be amazed. In severe anemia, the heart has to work much harder than normal to supply enough oxygen to the rest of the body. This, combined with its own oxygen deprivation, causes the heart muscle to swell, leading to congestive heart failure. The patient begins to wake up at night feeling that he is suffocating to death, and eventually that is what happens.
Mystified, the hematologist took a sample of Aaron's blood marrow. The body typically contains only 9 ounces of bone marrow, but that is enough to manufacture our entire supply of red blood corpuscles, at a rate of 200 billion new cells per day. Under examination, Aaron's marrow shoed no signs of red-cell precursors that should have been present. The hematologist now knew that at the root of Aaron's condition was a shutdown of the bone marrow (called aplasitc anemia), but he could not determine any cause for it. Even without symptoms, Aaron was very sick.
"No one knows for sure how long a red blood cell lives," the doctor said. "The accepted figure is one hundred twenty days, but it could be as short as a month. Since you're not replacing your current red blood cells, I'm afraid you cannot live much longer than ninety days."
As Aaron listened numbly, the doctor told him that medicine could do very little for him - the suggested treatment was a bone marrow transplant, a major operation tht he might not survive and that probably would not save him. He could be given a blood transfusion to raise his red-cell count, but the sudden incursion f another person's blood would further dampen his bone marrow function; moreover, when the marrow detected that the blood count was up again, it might interpret that as a sign to roll back even further.
Because he felt no symptoms, Aaaron hesitated to undergo the transplant. The hematologist gave him two weeks to decide. He also said that it was his legal duty to advise the young man to settle his affairs as quickly as possible. (Aaron was not exactly treated with compassion at any step of the way. At one point, he divulged to his doctor that his older sister had died suddenly and tragically in law school. The cause of death, though vague, was thought to be a rare blood disorder, perhaps inherited. On hearing this, the hematologist enthusiastically asked Aaron to try to find out precisely what his sister had died of, since together he and she would make an excellent article for the journals. When aaron later recounted this incident, I found myself growing extremely angry.)
Within a day of his dignosis, Aaron began to feel short of breath and found himself unable to sleep. He sought in desperation for a way to cure himself. Almost by chance, he took up meditation and heard about our Ayurvedic clinic. Within a month, he became my patient in Lancaster.
"The most hopeful thing," I said, "is that you felt healthy before you found out what was wrong with you. Let's go on the assumption that you are controlling this disorder and do eveything we can to allow your body to heal itself."
Without knowing what cause his disease, I found as I was interviewing Aaron that there were many points of concern. The first was the frightening diagnosis itself, which had thown him into a panic. In such a condition, it is difficult to see how the bodymind could begin to find a route toward healing. In addition, aaron seemed a tense and driven person. He had worked four jobs at a time while he was in school, pushing himself to the limit in order to buy a car and keep ahead of school debts. The pressure of school itself was enormous. He routinely took huge doses of vitamins, plus an anti-ulcer medication to soothe his chronic stomach pain. A few months earlier, he'd had tendonitis from playing tennis too hard and had taken an anti-inflammatory agent to bring down the swelling - such drugs are known to suppress bone marrow function. I asked him to discontinue all medication.
He stayed two weeks at the clininc and for the first time lived in an environment free of "normal" stress. He continued to meditate, ate a simple vegetarian diet suited to his particular body type, and received a course of massage treatments that Ayurveda prescribes to purify the physiology. I also instructed him in the primordial sound technique suitable for his condition. One night a nurse caught him walking down the hall with wet hair, and he sheepishly confessed that he had sneaked out of the property to go swimming. When I heard this, I was very happy - another patient with Aaron's blood count could easily have been on oxygen and blood transfusions. The signs were more than encouraging.
On the day he left, I asked aaron not to have any more blood tests for at least two weeks. A blood sample drawn at Lancaster had disclosed that his supply of immature red blood cells called reticulocytes, was four times higher than when he entered. Since these are the cells that later mature into red corpuscles, I felt that his condition had turned around. As I write, aaron has just outlived his original prognosis. he is still severely anemic; but on the other hand he has not gone into the serious decline expected of someone whose blood count is heading toward zero. In fact, his anemia has slightly improved.
In my mind, Aaron stands on the dividing line between two kinds of medicine. The first is standard scientific medicine, whose methods have been ingrained in me, but which I can no longer trsut absolutely. It is not that standard medicine has failed. Aaron's doctors expertly tracked down his disease at every level of the body, from tissues to cells to molecules - in Aaron's case, the tissue was bone marrow, the cells were red blood corpuscles, and the molecule was hemoglobin. To a doctor trained in conventional medicine, this is the end of the route, a route that has taken two centuries of painstakingly rational investigation to find. Once you know what is wrong with a person's very molecules, what else can be known?
This logic is impeccable science, but it is dangerously divorced from the ordinary input of life. By "ordinary input" I mean what a person eats and how he sleeps, the thoughts that go through his head, and all the sights, smells, sounds and textures that enter through his senses. You can say that the body is made out of molecules, but with equal justice you could say that it is made out of experiences. That definition matches our own self-image, which is not scientific but fluid, changeable, and alive. Out of ordinary experiences, the second medicine, which is quantum, takes its origin.
We might casually think that everyday life is too commonplace and simple for science to bother with. In truth, it is far too complex. Although a molecule of hemglobin is structured out of 10,000 separate atomes, it can be isolated and mapped - a feat that has led to severl Nobel prizes. However, to trace what hemogobin is doing take in a single breath would be impossible, because each red blood cell contains 280 million molecuels of hemoglobin, each of which picks up 8 atoms of oxygen. Considering that the lungs expose about one quart of blood to the air per breath, containing 5 trillion red cells, the total number of chemical exchanges is astronomical. The whole process quickly disintegrates into a swirling chaos of activity.
When you enter the human body during surgery, what confronts you is not the well-defined map of textbook anatomt, with the nerves in blue, blood vessels in red, and a green liver neatly set apart from a yellow gallbladder. Instead, an uneducated eye sees a jumble of tissue that is mostly undifferentiated - almost all of it is pink and moist; one organ slides imperceptibly into another. The great wonder is that scientific medicine has learned as much as it has about this pulsating chaos.
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What kind of messages do nerve cells exchange with one another? The answer is tantalising, for certain segments of our chemical vocabulary seem to be just as specific as ordinary speech, while others are highly ambiguous. Our tolerance for pain, like the camel's, depends on the class of biochemicals discovered in the 1970's called endorphins and enkephalins, which act as the body's natural painkillers. The word endorphin means "internal morphine", and enkephalin means "inside the brain". And that is their story: they are like a version of morphine produced by the brain itself.
This hitherto unkown ability to make internal opiates proved very exciting. It was already suspected that the body must be able to regulate the sensation of pain. Although insistent, pain does not always register on our awareness. Strong emotions, for example, can overide pain signals from the body, as when a mother rushes to save her child from a burning house or a wounded soldier fights on, ignoring the pain of his injuries. Under more ordinary circumstances, all of us to some extent can take our attention away from a minor pain - we don't notice a sore throat, for instance, if we are talking to someone with intense interest.
Despite this common experience of having the pain threshold rise and fall, no mechanism had ever accounted for it. Now medicine could explain it by using these internal painkillers, the endorphins and enkephalins, which every neuron in the body is able to produce ay will. Very quickly the general public was told that the brain produces narcotics up to two hundred times stronger than anything you can buy on the street, with the added boon that our own painkillers seemed to be nonaddictive. Perhaps in the future a physician would anaesthetise his patients by stimulating some region in their rains, giving Western medicine a scientific form of Chinese acupuncture.
Morphine and endorphins both block pain by filling a certain receptor on the neuron and preventing other chemicals that carry the message of pain from coming in. Without these chemicals, there can be no sensation of pain, no matter how much physical provocation is present. Using this model, a molecule of endorphin is like a specific word, the word pain-killer. One can imagine that whenever the word pain comes to the brain's attention, it has the option of sending painkiller back as its answer. Unfortunately, this simple picture was clouded over by later research.
It was found that levels of endorphins in the body do not correspond on a one-to-one basis with how much pain is being felt. This can be proved with placebos, or dummy drugs. Patients who are in pain can often be relieved by receiving a placebo, usually a coated sugar pill, which they are told is a powerful painkiller. Not everyone will respond to this, but generally between 30 and 60 percent will report that their pain went away. This result, called the placebo effect, has been noted for centuries, but it is highly unpredictable. The doctor cannot tell in advance which patients will benefit and to what extent.
Why should a totally inert sugar pill relieve pain in the first place, even the stabbing pain of peptic ulcers or traumatic surgery? Endorphins, it was now discovered, must hold the answer. A drug called naloxone acts as a chemical antagonist to morphine, meaning that it has the ability to knock morphine molecules out of a receptor site. When naloxone is admnistered on top of a painkiller, the sensation of pain instantly floods back. As it turns out, the same thing will happen with the placebo. The patients whose pain went away from the sugar pill reported that it returned again after they took naloxone. This implied that endorphins and morphins must basically be the same drug, the difference being that one is manufactured by the body and the other by the opium poppy.
But once again, it was only a certain percentage of patients who showed this result. Naloxone made the pain return in full force for certain patients; for others, the placebo effect still worked totally; and for still others, only a little of the pain came back. Researchers found themselves in a state of renewed confusion, where they remain today. {I can relate to that!} Endorphins are certainly internal painkillers, but uncovering these new molecules was not the whole answer.
Pain studies have now shown that morphine is not chemically identical to endorphins, that endorphins interct in a more complex way than narcotic drugs, and that any form of treatment for pain relief - morphine, endorphins, acupuncture or hypnosis - is highly variable in its effectiveness. It was also discovered that endorphins cannot be made into satisfactory pharmaceuticals: our internal painkillers are just as addictive as heroin if given by injection.
Soon, the frustrating complications that scientists ran up against with the endorphins and enkephalins spread to all the other neuro-transmitters. It turns out that a neuron does not simply catch a signal from a neighbouring nerve cell and pass it along to the next synapse. That is only one of its choices. Although no one can descibe exactly how neurons receive their chemical messages or how they transmit them down the axons, or trunks, it is known that the process must be very flexible. The nerve cell can change the message en route, turning the chemical it received at point A into a different one at point B. The receptor sites on the ends of nerve cells can also modify themselves to receive different types of messages; the sending station on the other side of the synapse is equally versatile.
For our purposes, this confusion is actually a highly encouraging state of affairs, because it proves that the body cannot be understood without the missing ingredient of inteeligence. The physical make-up of endorphins, or any other neurochemical, is not nearly as important as their know-how - how they choose their sites, what triggers them to act, how they 'talk' to the rest of the body in precise co-ordination, and so on. Even in the midst of a genuine chemical revolution, mind is superior to matter. In fact, it now appears that the molecular structure of any neuro-transmitter is completely secondary to the brain's ability to employ it.
It cam as a tremendour surprise to cell biologists that, as far as molecules go, neuro-transmitters are nothing special. All of the protein in our bodies is built up from chains of twenty basic amino acids, and these chains can be further arranged inot longer strands called peptides. Neuropeptides have their own signature, making them distinct from the other peptide chains in the body, but the same factory, our DNA, makes all of them. DNA is the source for all the proteins that repair cells, build new ones, replace missing or defective pieces of the genetic code, heal cuta and bruises, and so forth.
{May type more of this section later ...}
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A "cured" schizophrenic does not yet exist through chemical means. This is because there is more to being normal than not having hallucinations. Once you suppress a schizophrenic's bizarre visions or the strange voices he hears in his head, you do not find a normal person facing you, but a shell. Altering the chemical level of dopamine, even if it could be done a hundred times better than it is done today, will not lead to a cure. The reason is contained in the lesson learned from the neuro-transmitters themselves: for every chemical breakthrough, there is also a chemical barrier.
The good news about neuro-transmitters is that they are material. A thought, whether sane or mad, is hard to grasp becuase it is so intangible; it is not something you can touch or feel. The neuro-transmitters, however, are tangible, although they are exteremely tiny and often short-lived. It is the neuro-transmitter's role to match up with a thought. To do that, its molecules must be just as flexible as thoughts, just as fleeting, elusive, changeable and faint.
Such flexibilty is a kind of miracle but also a curse, in that it throws up a barrier that is almost impossible to pass. No man-made drug can duplicate this flexibility, either now or in the foreseeeable future. No drug actually pairs up with a thought. This is apparent just by looking at the structure of the receptor.
... more of this later ... it's well worth a read ... or more than a mere read if you know what I mean ...
Click here for part two of excerpts
"No," Aaron answered.
"Do you wake up in the middle of the night feeling suffocated?"
"No."
"Have your ankles been swelling up?
"No."
A few links -
Some Excerpts from Quantum Healing
Click here for some more excerpts from books by Deepak Chopra & a couple of links as well ...
Quantum Healing article at www.naturaltherapy.com
Results of a search for Quantum Healing ...
A couple from Caroline Myss -
