The awakenings are extraordinary in two ways: first, because they occur in such unexpected circumstances, and second, because they have such an incredible effect. People feel completely reborn, as if they are completely different people. In psychology, there is a concept called ‘post-traumatic growth,’ which describes how trauma can have long term positive effects.

In the long run, it can lead to an enhanced sense of appreciation and meaning, more authentic relationships, a wider sense of perspective, and so on. TTT is an extreme and dramatic form of post-traumatic growth. It often happens instantaneously, in a single moment of transformation. People shift into a much more intense and expansive awareness. They feel a sense of wellbeing, and the world seems more real and beautiful. They feel more connected to other people, and to nature.

Essentially, people spontaneously attain the state of “enlightenment” or “wakefulness” that is spoken of in many spiritual traditions. They accidentally find what spiritual practitioners have been searching for since time immemorial. 

Extraordinary Awakenings

At the age of 42, Irene Murray was diagnosed with breast cancer and told that she might only have a few months left to live. Irene reacted to her diagnosis in an unusual way. As she described it, “It was the first time I’d seen death as a reality. I thought, ‘I’m just so lucky to be alive.’ The air was so clean and fresh and everything I looked at seemed so vibrant and vivid. The trees were so green and everything was so alive. I became aware of this energy radiating from the trees. I had a tremendous feeling of connectedness.”

Irene expected the feeling to fade but it didn’t. As she put it, “It was really intense for the first few weeks, and it’s remained ever since. It just blew me away. I used to just sit and think, “This is amazing, that things could just fall into place so quickly.’

Fortunately, Irene’s cancer went into remission, but her sense of appreciation and wellbeing remained. She felt like a different person and gave up her IT career to retrain as a counsellor and therapist. More than anything, she felt a new sense of connection to other people and to nature, and a new enjoyment of solitude and doing nothing.  

A woman called Eve had a similar experience, after reaching rock bottom as an alcoholic. After 29 years of addiction, she felt physically and emotionally broken, and attempted suicide by walking in front of a coach. At her parents’ house, her mother assumed Eve needed a drink to ease her withdrawal symptoms and gave her a glass of wine. But Eve couldn’t drink it. She was given high doses of sedatives to deal with her withdrawal symptoms, and after a few days, she felt like she had become a new person who was free of addiction. As she told me, “Mum sat me down in front of a mirror, and said, ‘Look at yourself, you’re an alcoholic.’ I looked at myself, and I had no idea who I was. I felt like a completely different person.”

Eve was slightly confused by her transformation at first, but soon it settled down, and she began to feel liberated, with a heightened awareness and an intense sense of connection to the world. She has never felt the urge to drink again and has been sober for ten years.

A New Reality

It is important to note that there is nothing religious about TTT. Although we could describe it as a spiritual awakening, it is essentially, it’s a psychological experience, related to a breakdown of identity. More specifically, I believe that TTT is related to the dissolution of psychological attachments (such as to hopes and ambitions, status, social roles, beliefs, possessions, other people) which sustain our normal sense of identity. The breakdown of attachments and identity is usually a painful experience, but in some people, it may allow a new identity to emerge.

More than anything else, transformation through turmoil reveals the massive potential and deep resilience within human beings, which we are usually unaware of until we face challenges and crises. Although we are often afraid that crises will break us down, there is a good chance that they will wake us up.

Steve Taylor, PhD, is the author of Extraordinary Awakenings and many other bestselling books. He’s senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. Steve’s articles and essays have been published in over 100 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers and he blogs for Scientific American and Psychology Today. Visit him online at www.StevenMTaylor.com.

Based on the book Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation. Copyright ©2021 by Steve Taylor. Printed with permission from New World Library — http://www.newworldlibrary.com.

When I took a close history of all these patients I found that they were what I call “physical empaths:” people whose bodies are so porous they absorb the symptoms of others. I relate because I am one. Physical empaths do not have the defenses that others have to screen things out. As a psychiatrist, knowing this significantly changed how I treated these patients. My job became teaching them to center and protect themselves, set healthy boundaries, and let go of energy they picked up from others.

To determine if you are a physical empath take the following quiz.

Quiz: Am I a Physical Empath? 

Ask yourself:

·  Have I been labeled as overly sensitive or a hypochondriac?

·  Have I ever sat next to someone who seemed nice but suddenly my eyelids got heavy and I felt like taking a nap?

·  Do I feel uneasy, tired, or sick in crowds and avoid them?

·  Do I feel someone else’s anxiety or physical pain in my body?

·  Do I feel exhausted by angry or hostile people?

·  Do I run from doctor to doctor for medical tests, but I’m told “You’re fine.”

·  Am I chronically tired or have many unexplained symptoms

·  Do I frequently feel overwhelmed by the world and want to stay home?

If you answered “yes” to 1-3 questions you are at least part empath. Responding yes to 4 to5 questions indicates you have moderate degree of physical empathy. 6 to 7 “yeses” indicate you have a high degree of empathy. Eight yeses indicate you are a full blown empath.

Discovering that you are a physical empath can be a revelation. Rest assured: You are not crazy. You are not a malingerer or hypochondriac. You are not imagining things, though your doctor might treat you like a nuisance. You are a sensitive person with a gift that you must develop and successfully manage.

Strategies to Surrender Toxic Energy

Physical empathy doesn’t have to overwhelm you. Now that I can center myself and refrain from taking on other people’s pain, empathy has made my life more compassionate, insightful, and richer. Here are some secrets to thriving as a physical empath that I’ve learned so that it doesn’t take a toll on my health.

 9 Strategies To Stop Absorbing Other People’s Illness and Pain 

·  Evaluate. First, ask yourself: Is this symptom or emotion mine or someone else’s? It could be both. If the emotion such as fear or anger is yours, gently confront what’s causing it on your own or with professional help. If it’s not yours, try to pinpoint the obvious generator.

·  Move away. When possible, distance yourself by at least twenty feet from the suspected source. See if you feel relief. Don’t err on the side of not wanting to offend strangers. In a public place, don’t hesitate to change seats if you feel a sense of “dis-ease” imposing on you.

·  Know your vulnerable points. Each of us has a body part that is more vulnerable to absorbing others’ stress. Mine is my gut. Scan your body to determine yours. Is it you neck? Do you get sore throats? Headaches? Bladder infections? At the onset of symptoms in these areas, place your palm there and keep sending loving-kindness to that area to soothe discomfort. For longstanding depression or pain, use this method daily to strengthen yourself. It’s comforting and builds a sense of safety and optimism.

·  Surrender to your breath. If you suspect you are picking up someone else’s symptoms, concentrate on your breath for a few minutes. This is centering and connects you to your power.

·  Practice Guerilla Meditation. To counter emotional or physical distress, act fast and meditate for a few minutes. Do this at home, at work, at parties, or conferences. Or, take refuge in the bathroom. If it’s public, close the stall. Meditate there. Calm yourself. Focus on positivity and love.

·  Set healthy limits and boundaries. Control how much time you spend listening to stressful people, and learn to say “no.” Remember, “no” is a complete sentence.

·  Visualize protection around you. Visualize an envelope of white light around your entire body. Or with extremely toxic people, visualize a fierce black jaguar patrolling and protecting your energy field against intruders.

·  Develop X ray vision. The spaces between the vertebrae in your lower back (lumbar spine) are conducive to eliminating pain from the body. It’s helpful to learn to mindfully direct pain out of these spaces by visualizing it leaving your body. Say goodbye to pain as it blends with the giant energy matrix of life!

·  Take a bath or shower. A quick way to dissolve stress is to immerse yourself in water. My bath is my sanctuary after a busy day. It washes away everything from bus exhaust to long hours of air travel to pesky symptoms I have taken on from others. Soaking in natural mineral springs divinely purifies all that ails.

Keep practicing these strategies. By protecting yourself and your space, you can create a magical safe bubble around you that nurtures you, while simultaneously driving negative people away. Don’t panic if you occasionally pick up pain or some other nasty symptom. It happens. With strategies I discuss in my book to surrender other people’s symptoms you can have quicker responses to stressful situations. This will make you feel safer, healthier, and your sensitivities can blossom.

Adapted from Dr. Judith Orloff’s book “The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People” (Sounds True, 2017)

Early trauma can come in many forms. Possible sources include:

• Hearing your parents or siblings frequently argue
• Being repeatedly yelled at
• Physical and/or emotional abuse
• Being shamed or blamed for being “overly sensitive.”
• Being bullied

Even experiencing intense ongoing household noise and chaos can feel traumatic. An empathic child’s highly sensitive system can absorb more stress than others would in these situations.

When empaths are exposed to early trauma or abuse their young nervous system may develop without healing making them hypervigilant. They can become exquisitely attuned to their environment to ward off threats and ensure they are safe or enter a state of hyperarousal. This hypervigilance is extremely draining for empaths.

Your past can still affect you now. When you are exposed to a similar stimulus as an adult such as a disagreement with your partner, you may have an exaggerated emotional response because you are flashing back to the original trauma. (This is similar to a veteran who misreads a car backfiring as an exploding bomb.) With post-traumatic stress, your system can’t fully return to its calmer state before the upset or even the initial incident. You are never quite at rest and remain aware of protecting yourself from further threats.

Empaths are often mistaken for being aloof or snobbish, but others don’t realize that the distance you seem to keep is because you’re focused on protecting yourself and ensuring that the ground is solid. The Buddhists say, there is always a groundless ground there to support you. Even when you are inundated with excessive stimulation, the groundless ground is always there.

To find your solid ground follow these seven strategies from “Thriving as an Empath” to help heal your past trauma.

7 Healing Strategies

1. Journal about your early traumas. Then you can be aware of them. None are “too small” to count. This is the first step to freeing yourself from the past.
2. Retrieve your inner child. In a quiet moment, think back to when the early trauma occurred. How old were you? Where did it take place? Then picture yourself returning to the house or other location where it happened and retrieving your wounded inner child who has been stuck there. Tell the child “I am sorry you were hurt and I will never allow that to happen to you again.” Then take the child home with you to care for with love.
3. Emotional Release. As you heal, many emotions will surface: anger, fear, depression, self-doubt. Let yourself feel and express these emotions—a supportive therapist can create a safe environment for you to do this.
4. Set Clear Boundaries. Learn to stick up for yourself. Don’t be a doormat. If someone isn’t treating you well, say in a firm, neutral tone, “Let’s discuss this when you’re calmer” or “It hurts my feelings when you say…I’d appreciate it if you would stop.” Also remember that “No” is a complete sentence. Sensitive people are often afraid to disappoint others but it’s essential to get in the habit of saying “no” when something doesn’t feel right.
5. Conscious Breathing. When your old traumas are being triggered take a few slow deep breaths to calm your system before your respond.
6. Meditate. Regular meditation calms the mind, body, and soul. It decreases sensory overload and keeps your system in a peaceful state.
7. Practice Self-Compassion. Shower yourself with love and kindness as you go through the healing process. You are a caring person who deserves to be loved.

It is often helpful to consult a therapist to work through the original trauma. Useful techniques for clearing trauma include EMDR, the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and somatic awareness. Since trauma often lodges in the body it’s also useful to get regular massage or energy work to clear any remnants that are hanging on.

Give yourself time to heal. Be patient and loving with yourself. Mourn the losses you experience. Allow yourself to experience your feelings and memories without any judgement. Healing is an exercise in loving yourself.

The great news is that past trauma can be healed. In that process, you will become more at ease with your empathic abilities and learn to protect your sensitivities using the strategies I suggested. As a result, you’ll be able to relax more. The world will feel like a safer place to inhabit.

Set Your Intention

I will identify my early traumas. I will notice how my reactions to them may be repeating in my relationships today. I am capable of healing from these wounds.

(Adapted from “Thriving as an Empath: 365 Days of Self-Care for Sensitive People” and “The Empath’s Empowerment Journal” by Judith Orloff, MD)

Judith Orloff, MD is the New York Times best-selling author of The Empath’s Survival Guide. Her new book Thriving as an Empath offers daily self-care tools for sensitive people along with its companion The Empath’s Empowerment Journal. Dr. Orloff is a psychiatrist, an empath, and is on the UCLA Psychiatric Clinical Faculty. She synthesizes the pearls of traditional medicine with cutting edge knowledge of intuition, energy, and spirituality. Dr. Orloff also specializes in treating highly sensitive, empathic people in her private practice. Dr. Orloff’s work has been featured on The Today Show, CNN, Oprah Magazine, the New York Times. Dr. Orloff has spoken at Google-LA and has a popular TEDX talk. Her other books are Emotional Freedom and Guide to Intuitive Healing. Explore more information about her Empath Support Online course and speaking schedule on www.drjudithorloff.com.

After working in the Intensive Journal on my own for several months, I decided to attend a Progoff workshop at a Catholic retreat house in Menlo Park.

The most striking thing about an Intensive Journal workshop is that so many people come together to work alone. Each of the hundred participants sat, focused quietly inward, notebooks in laps, working with the materials of his or her own life; while Progoff, a kindly, soft-spoken man, short and rather shy, sat in a swivel chair on a raised platform and, sometimes, talked. His talking, he explained, was to be regarded as background music to the primary focus of the workshop, each-person’s self-directed writing.

He led first-time journal users through some introductory exercises, while those more experienced with the journal (many brought in binders bulging with pages, clearly the accumulation of years) worked away on their own, stopping to listen at times, going on when the spirit moved them.

The atmosphere was quiet, focused but relaxed. Participants were invited to make their own breaks, and from time to time someone would move silently in or out of the auditorium. Cocoa, tea, coffee, and several boxes of fresh apricots were available in a room next door. It all felt a little like being in church.

A number of the participants were, in fact, from religious vocations, but while the journal is open to religious use, participants must supply their own religion. After an exercise in which we were asked to have a dialogue with our own interior wisdom figure—a conversation with a person, real or imaginary, living or dead, whom we most admired and respected—there was mention made, in the coffee room, of Jesus, Moses, God, Picasso, Martin Luther King, St. Theresa, Lao-Tze, Malcolm X, Saul Minsky, William Blake, and Margaret Sanger.

The workshop ended on noon of the third day. Progoff had promised to meet me for an interview afterward, but first wanted to make himself available to participants who wanted to see him privately. He ended up meeting at some length with more than a dozen, exhibiting a remarkable patience considering that he had been working sixteen hours a day for nearly a week. It was late afternoon by the time we settled onto wooden deck chairs on the front porch of the retreat house and taped the following interview.

TF: One thing we’ve been trying to do in the magazine is to point out ways to move the focus of health responsibility from some kind of expert back to the individual himself. It seems as if you’re trying to do something very similar with the Intensive Journal

IP: Yes, I would certainly hope so. Emerson’s essay on self-reliance has always been one of my favorites. I see psychological self-reliance, or psychological selfcare, a way of being able to tap into resources and knowledge within oneself that can enable us to deal with our problems, our experiences, in new ways. That’s the principle I’ve tried to build into the Journa!.

You studied with Carl Jung for several years. Didn’t he have his patients keep a journal?

Jungians always keep a dream log and a kind of general inner diary. The problem with an unstructured journal, including many of the Jungian ones, is that they tend to go around in circles, and they only work in very limited ways. The Intensive Journal is set up to help you break out of that circular movement.

We were talking earlier about E.F. Schumacher and the appropriate technology movement. Do you think of the Journal as appropriate psychological technology?

It really sounds very similar, doesn’t it? I know I’ve felt for a long time that many psychologists and psychiatrists are trained to rely too much on what you might call inappropriate psychological technologies— ways of taking over diagnosing and controlling psychological problems with drugs or electroshock or whatever. I think good therapy is very often more a matter of helping someone who’s stuck get unstuck. I think people are much more capable of guiding their own efforts to get unstuck than we’ve given them credit for.

Has the Journal been used with people in mental hospitals?

I had never thought the Journal could be used by very disturbed people, but we’ve had a most interesting experience using it in this way at St. Luke’s Hospital in Phoenix. They had about thirty or thirty-five psychiatric patients on their acute crisis ward, and they invited me in to do three short workshops. The were open to everyone on the ward, no matter how disturbed. It was very interesting.

There were people there who hadn’t spoken in as long as they’d been there, they were diagnosed as catatonic. I gave them the stepping-stones to do and they did them and read them out loud. Two young guys were there as depressives. After the workshops I was walking through the ward with the head nurse. She said to them, “Hello, how are you?” And they said, “Fine,” and gave us a big smile. She turned to me and said, “Those two fellows haven’t smiled or done more than grunt in the two days they’ve been here.”

Word came back to me later that the senior psychiatrist, who specializes in electroshock, said he would not have believed it possible for so many seriously disturbed people, with no restrictions, to experience nothing negative and so much that was positive and integrating.

So we’ve been following that up by starting a program to train some of their people to teach the Journal on the ward, and then to have programs available in the community so people can continue after they’re re-leased.

What could you say about the Journal as a possible tool for our readers to use in their own lives? Who might find it useful? What would it be useful for? How could they go about giving it a try?

You can learn to use the Journal either from a workshop or from my book, At a Journal Workshop. The first exercise, the Period Log, is designed to give you a kind of overview of your life, with particular attention to the most recent period of your life. It might be a good introduction to do that exercise and see if it feels like a way of working that is right for you.

As to what the Journal is useful for, I like to describe it as an instrument—in two senses. First, it’s an instrument like a hammer or a scalpel—a tool to help you deal with difficult times in your life, times of change or decision or loss, or great success for that matter.

But it’s also an instrument in the way that a piano or violin is an instrument. Working in the Journal can be a fulfilling experience in its own right, an art form if you like. It’s something you can do just for the pure pleasure of it. You can play with it. Improvise.

Do you recommend that people write in their Journal every day?

It’s entirely up to the individual. A few people keep it every day. It’s not like keeping a diary. It’s something that’s there for you when you want it, when you need it. It’s more like “Gee I’ll think I’ll get my guitar out and play a little.” It’s definitely not supposed to be another responsibility to feel guilty about.

How would you compare learning the Journal from the book to learning it from a workshop?

It’s probably easier in a workshop, though of course coming to a workshop is not always convenient. If you can do it, though, a whole weekend away from home can be a real help in getting deeply into it in a short time. It gives you a chance to block off all outside pressures and just focus on the movement of your life.

Learning from the book is certainly more convenient. It probably works best if you can give yourself some big blocks of time, at least in the beginning.

You were saying you’re now working to make the Journal workshops more widely available.

Yes. We’re now working with a number of local groups across the country—churches, community mental health centers, adult schools, universities—to help them set up and run a program of local Journal workshops.

How might that work?

Well, suppose a minister or a therapist has someone in a crisis situation and both counselor and client have been trained in the Journal method. Perhaps the client has tried to work it out for himself in the Journal but hasn’t been able to.

The client could bring in his or her Journal, maybe read some of it if he chose, and the counselor, in addition to doing some individual therapy, could suggest some specific work in the Journal that might help. We’ve developed some specific exercises, a kind of crisis module, to be used at such times.

If some of our readers belong to organizations that might be interested in sponsoring a workshop, would you encourage them to contact you?

Oh, yes. Definitely.

How have other mental health professionals responded to the Journal method? I would think that some might find it a little threatening.

Well, of course, the ones we’ve been in touch with are the ones who like it and use it. A number of psychologists and psychiatrists are incorporating the Journal into their therapeutic work.

It turns out to be quite adaptable. One of the appealing things about this method is that it isn’t instead of anything else. It doesn’t promote or contradict any psychological or religious explanation of the nature of man. Freudians can use it. Gestaltists can use it. Behavior therapists can use it. Fundamentalist Baptists can use it. Suns can use it. We’ve had people from just about every possible religious or philosophical orientation use the Journal successfully. We have Catholic monks and Zen Buddhists sitting side by side in our workshops.

It sounds like you’re working toward a vision of a whole new way of approaching the area of mental health care.

Yes, and I’m very encouraged by what you’ve told me of the self-care movement in the area of physical health. I would hope that the Journal could be an important tool for a similar emphasis on psychological self-care.

The basic concept behind the Journal method is that when you’re having a hard time, when you’re troubled, it doesn’t mean you’re sick. It doesn’t mean you should immediately go out and put yourself under an expert’s care. It may mean that you’re in transition, that things are pretty confused for you right now, but that’s all right. That’s natural. It’s a part of the unfolding process of life, as it moves from cycle to cycle.

When you’re in a great darkness or feeling very depressed or a lot of anxiety, there are methods of working that will allow our life to tell us what it’s seeking to achieve beyond that blockage, beyond that stuck point.

When you use the Journal, you’re not saying, “I’m sick,” you’re saying, “I need a time of reflection, of quieting. I need a sabbath.”

I think the principle of the sabbath—the need for rest after activity—is still psychologically sound. It may be that the rhythm of six and one is not the only rhythm. The Journal is a way to follow one’s own rhythm, to create one’s own personal sabbath, whether you come to a workshop or just do it privately in your own life.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Tom Ferguson, M.D. (1943-2006), was a pioneering physician, author, and researcher and one of the earliest proponents of self-care. Dr. Ferguson studied and wrote about the empowered medical consumer since 1975 and about online health resources for consumers since 1987. After attending Reed College, earning a Master’s Degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and a medical degree from Yale University School of Medicine, he launched a prolific career in consumer focused medical writing as founder of Medical Self Care magazine. Tom was in charge of “Self-Care Central” one of the 10 “buildings in Healthy’s original Health Village design on our original website launched in 1996. This interview was drawn from the archives of Tom’s Medical Self-Care magazine. It is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. Tom passed away in 2006. He has so much more to offer the world.

I always find myself explaining Keith Sehnert as the George Washington of self-care. Keith graduated from Western Reserve School of Medicine in 1953. After working as a General Practitioner and later as Medical Director of Dorsey Laboratories in Lincoln, Nebraska, he joined the Reston-Herndon Medical Center in Herndon, Virginia. There, in 1970, he taught—and largely invented—the first of the modern breed of self-care classes, classes in which laypeople learned basic medical skills formerly reserved for doctors only.

The class drew wide media attention. In 1972, Keith became a visiting professor at Georgetown University and in 1974 founded the Center for Continuing Health Education at Georgetown.

The Center for Continuing Health Education did self-care research, taught health professionals from all parts of the country to conduct self-care classes, and prepared course materials for these classes. In 1977, Keith became Vice President and Director of the Health Promotion Group at InterStudy, a health-policy and health-futures think tank in the Minneapolis area, and joined the University of Minnesota School of Public Health as clinical professor.

It is in large part because of Keith’s efforts that there are now self-care classes in forty states. He is the author of How to Be Your Own Doctor (Sometimes).

TF: You were saying that you were a student of Ben Spock’s at Western Reserve.

KS: Yes, back in the early fifties. Spock was just starting out as a teacher there, and his book, Baby and Child Care (reviewed on page 207) was just out. Of course, no one had any idea then it was going to become so popular.

Did he have a big influence on you?

He did. He was very concerned that most patients were getting a great deal of treatment but very little teaching. He felt that was a mistake.

I don’t think there’s any doubt but that his book planted a seed for me. I’ve always thought of my book as a kind of Dr. Spock for adults.

Were there any other experiences at Reserve that nudged you in the direction” of self-care?

Yes, the influence of another very important teacher, T. Hale Ham. In those days the whole business of a doctor’s empathy for the patient and communication skills were spoken of as one’s bedside manner. We were all very concerned about our bedside manner. Dr. Ham used to say, “Keith, you just talk to your patients in whatever way is most comfortable to you—but keep in mind that if you’re a good teacher, your patients will think you’re a good doctor.”

How did you happen to end up teaching that first self-care class?

Well, you know, serendipity plays such a big part in these things. I’d just joined a family practice group in the Reston area of Virginia. The guy who’d actually planned the class was leaving to join the Family Practice Department at the University of Wisconsin. One day he just casually asked me, ” Look, as long as you’re going to be here, would you mind picking this thing up for me?” And of course I said yes.

How many students were there?

I think there were forty, maybe forty-two. About 80 percent women. Almost all of them were patients at the Medical Center.

What was the first class meeting like?

It was an interesting experience. Many of the people in the first class were women whose husbands had been recently laid off by a reduction in the Johnson administration space program. Some of them were living on unemployment insurance for the first time in their lives.

As we got to know each other better, a lot of anger toward the health-care system started to come up. Frustrating experiences. Times when they’d been treated insensitively.

The old authoritarian doctor image was hanging over our heads, even though I wasn’t the typical authoritarian doctor. There was a lot of asking, is this something that’s okay to talk about? Is it all right for me to ask this question? And when I made it very clear that it was, they really began to share their experiences and concerns. They began to express feelings they may never have expressed to anyone before—certainly never to a physician.

It soon became clear that they had a lot of health needs that weren’t being met by the health-care system. They’d been put down and ripped off. The women’s movement was beginning to be active around that time, and the women especially were beginning to look at their lives in some new ways.

Pretty soon people started saying, “Why can’t I take my father’s blood pressure?” “Why can’t I give my kids allergy shots?” “Why can’t I use an otoscope to look in my little boy’s ear when he has an earache?”

And I found myself saying, “I don’t know why not. Let’s do it.” So the whole course evolved out of the things people were asking.

Had there been any other similar classes up to that time?

No, to my knowledge, it was the first class of its kind. There had been orientation tours for new patients in certain clinics and patient education for some specific diseases like diabetes, but nobody had ever really gotten into this area before.

How would you define this new area?

1 think of it as directed toward a new kind of medical consumer, what I call the activated patient. In my Herndon class, their questions went well beyond the boundaries of what had been thought of as patient education at that time. They wanted to know why they couldn’t have their own black bags of medical tools at home. No one had ever thought of teaching laypeople to use such tools before. There weren’t any models for that. So we just had to go along and figure out how to do it as best we could.

What motivates a person to take a self-care class?

We’ve looked at that, and there seem to be seven basic reasons people give, over and over, for their interest in self-care:

1. wanting to save money on health expenses;


2. wanting to be able to take better care of their family’s health, to be able to make effective family-health decisions;


3. wanting to take more responsibility for their own illness care—like hypertensives who want to be able to keep track of their own blood pressure;


4. wanting to learn how to hook into the medical system like a number of older people who outlived their doctors and weren’t able to find a new one they were satisfied with;


5. wanting to learn more about their bodies and how they work;


6. people with illness in the family, wanting to feel more confident in dealing with it;


7. people who’ve gotten turned on to healthier life styles, wanting to hear more about jogging, nutrition, yoga, meditation, and whatever else there might be to this whole healthy lifestyle business.

So you include more than just traditional Western medicine in your classes?

Oh, yes. Of the really alternative approaches to health, yoga is the main one we’ve used—mainly because a neighbor of mine happened to be a fine yoga teacher. If I’d lived next door to a Thai chi teacher, we might have included that. The introduction to yoga has certainly been well-accepted by our students.

I think giving these kinds of alternatives is awfully important, particularly because through them people can learn to get the same kinds of things they might now be getting from alcohol and various other chemicals. And those are not ways I like to see people relieve their stress.

How long did the Course for Activated Patients go on?

We ran two classes a year for almost three years. Then, in February of 1973, Howard Eisenberg did a story on the class for Parade magazine, and I got over two thousand letters as a result. That made me realize that what we were up to might be something with a much wider appeal than I’d thought.

About that time I began getting inquiries from the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare, from a number of foundations, and from several of the faculty and deans who were interested in doing something more in the way of self-care at Georgetown University.

Several publishers started wining and dining me and convinced me that there was a need for a book on what we were doing. So I took a six-month sabbatical and collaborated with Howard Eisenberg on How to Be Your Own Doctor (Sometimes). Shortly after that, the Center for Continuing Health Education was formed at Georgetown, and I became its director.

So you were there until 1977?

Yes. Then our grant ran out, and the functions of the Center were divided between the Health Activated Person Program at the Georgetown School of Nursing, where they’re continuing to give an ongoing self-care course for the Washington community, and the Health Activation Network (see page 268), who put out a newsletter, “The Health Activation News,” to train self-care teachers and help people establish new courses.

You know, Keith, I have a feeling that if it had been some other doctor teaching that class, it might have ended up as just a lot of boring lectures. Have you had special training in communication, or are you just good at it?

Well, as you know, one of my daughters, Cindy, is deaf, and that’s made me very aware of the importance of getting and giving feedback. It got me very interested in good communications, and when I was talking to a patient I would always give and ask for feedback to be sure we were understanding each other.

And then the other thing was how much I loved doing it. I discovered that I liked being a facilitator better than being an authority. There was a feeling of real partnership. It was wonderful to relax out of my professional role and, if somebody asked me a question, to say, “1 don’t know. How do you suppose we’d go about finding out?”

It was a very rare thing in my medical education to hear a doctor say, “I don’t know.”

Incredibly rare. We were taught we were supposed to know all the answers.

How have health professionals reacted to self-care classes?

I like to say, scratch a doctor and you’ll find a teacher underneath. Most doctors have been too busy with day-to-day practice to develop as teachers, but once they do it, they find that it’s fun.

I’ve brought a lot of health professionals into selfcare classes, and while at times I’ve had to more or less drag them kicking and screaming into the pit, once they take off the white coat, loosen the tie, and get their shoes off, they find they’re having a fine time. It’s a real relief to be able to show your human side, and the people in the classes are always so appreciative.

There’s a real sense of working together for a common goal. Most of us went into medicine for pretty altruistic reasons. We’re not all dollar-sign guys. And when you start relating to people as active partners instead of passive pawns, they really appreciate it, and they let the doctor know.

In my medical school training, except for a little bit in psychiatry, I didn’t receive any formal training in communicating with patients. Many people would say that medical education makes doctors less capable of communicating on a meaningful level. Are there any signs that this is changing?

Well, coincidentally, I just finished reading a report on self-care from the Association of American Medical Colleges. They’re getting together a major project in which they will begin teaching self-care communication skills in a number of medical schools. Dr. James Hudson is going to be the Project director.

The American Medical Students Association also has modest self-care programs going at a number of medical schools. And of course there are all kinds of new and fairly informal projects at individual schools—there’s something here at the University of Minnesota Medical School, the University of Arizona has one, as does Georgetown University. There’s a big interest at UC Berkeley, and you were just telling me about the self-care class you visited at Wright State School of Medicine in Dayton. There’s actually quite a lot going on in the medical schools already.

Any signs of health insurance companies being willing to reimburse policy holders for self-care education expenses?

Blue Cross of Montana has started doing this on a very small scale, and some of the other Blue Cross plans have been saying they’re going to get into this area— they’re putting on some prevention education programs now. Several other insurance companies are looking into self-care education. International Group Health in Washington has started several projects. IGP’s head guy, Jim Gibbons, is a real self-care advocate.

Could you comment on the kinds of people who are—and should be—teaching self-care classes?

I’ve always felt that the ideal teacher was the nurse. Certainly the greatest enthusiasm for self-care has come from nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants. Many of these allied health professionals feel much more strongly about prevention and self-care than about diagnosis and treatment—which continues to be the main concern of most physicians.

Do you think it’s important for the people teaching these classes to have clinical experience?

It certainly helps. One of the real dilemmas these days is that people hear this from Reader’s Digest, that from the National Inquirer, and something else from Prevention. They need to be able to ask someone who has done more than just read the books.

How about in the schools? Do you think it would be an advantage to include people with clinical experience as a part of health-education classes?

Yes. Not only are clinical workers more likely to have experience with these matters, but it’d be very valuable for kids to be able to talk to a health worker at some time other than when they’re sick or need shots.

Do you see a connection between the widespread popularity of running and the developing self-care movement?

Absolutely. Because as people start feeling better from jogging, and begin to sleep better and eat better, they’re going to discover they have more energy than they ever did before. Then they begin to realize that health is a resource to be conserved, not something you can waste and then discard like a cigarette butt or a wrecked car.

Yes. Your body is a temple. Why treat it like a motel?

Yes, that’s a good one. So when people increase their nutritional awareness, or start jogging, or get into stress reduction, they feel better. And taken they say, “Well, gee, maybe I can kick smoking and kick alcohol and practice a healthier lifestyle. And it’ll pay off.” And it does!

What other cultural changes are we likely to see?

One we’re already seeing is a change in men’s thinking and behavior. For so long we’ve had this macho male image about everything that’s harmful or illegal.

If I smoke and it’s bad for me, I must really enjoy it. It’s a sort of bad-boy mentality. To have fun, you’ve got to be destructive—driving too fast, abusing your body or those of people around you.

That tough-guy mentality is softening. As I go into groups of my peers—men in their late forties or early fifties—I find I seldom hear the sort of thing which was the rule not very many years ago. You know, ” Boy, did we have a good time last night. I bet old Fred and I drank a fifth of booze . . .” and so on. That kind of bragging.

Now I’ll more likely hear a guy say, “You know, I’m so proud of myself. I finally quit smoking after twenty-two years.” And everyone is very interested in how he did it. They’re talking about jogging and cutting down on their drinking.

I had some unpleasant experiences—before going to medical school—when I tried to find certain health information in a medical library. It would have been much easier to look for comparable information in just about any other field—engineering, physics, biology. But technical medical information—for someone who is not a medical professional—is almost impossible to come by.

I recently called the National Arthritis Foundation to ask how our readers could order copies of a book they put out. It covers arthritic diseases in depth, it’s comprehensive, and it’s cheap—one of the best available sources of information on arthritis. I was told that it wasn’t available to laypeople, ”because they might misunderstand it. ” A medical librarian at Yale told me that she had been taught to discourage laypeople who came into the medical library in search of information, “because it was probably somebody looking for evidence for a malpractice suit. ” Why is medical information kept so secret?

Until recently, the medical mystique was much like the religious mystique in the days of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation—the language of the laity was one world and the language of the clergy was another. They didn’t even say their prayers in the same language. It was a priesthood. There were things that the layperson wasn’t supposed to know about.

I think that what we’re seeing now, with the demystification of medical language, is comparable to the change Luther made in bringing Christianity into the language of the people.

That’s the most important thing that happens in these self-care classes. First, you let people know that it’s okay for them to step into this formerly forbidden area, and second, you guide them in their first steps. So the main thing is not the class itself, but the fact that it can get people started. It’s a perceptual door opener.

It should be the goal of every health professional to transfer useful and accurate tools, skills, and knowledge to his or her clients. To hide these “professional secrets” and keep them for one’s own aggrandizement is a malfunction of one’s professional role.

One last question, Keith. Would you look into your crystal ball and share your thoughts about the kinds of changes we’re going to see in the next ten years as a result of the growing enthusiasm for self-care?

When I first moved to Minnesota last year, I picked up a paper and saw that a man was considering running for governor on a health-promotion platform. I think we’re going to see mayors and governors and other political leaders picking this up—and probably in your state of California, too. I think self-care will be one of the big political issues of the next decade—in the way that education and agricultural reform and honesty in government have been hot political issues.

A second thing is that the business community is going to get increasingly involved in health promotion, self-care, and helping their employees become wiser buyers and wiser users of health-care services. The big corporations especially are feeling the pain of rising health-benefits costs. In fact, the guys bathe executive suites are hitting the ceiling. These decision-makers are suddenly realizing that health insurance premiums, disability insurance, early retirement, days lost from work due to illness, are all things they can do something about. Several companies last year paid more for health benefits than they did for any other product or service. So I think we’re going to see a lot of self-care promotion on the part of industry.

Third, I think a lot of leadership in this area is going to come from senior citizens. I think that women will continue to be especially active in self-care, and I think we’ll begin to see unions taking a major role.

Fourth, we’re going to see school systems putting in really high-quality self-care programs running all the way from kindergarten to high school. There are some exciting things happening along such lines in Maine, Montana, and Minnesota schools already.

And finally, I think we’re going to see a growing number of fitness/self-care/health-promotion groups, health-information centers, health clubs, self-care classes and study groups, alternative health centers, stop-smoking clinics, and exercise facilities, more widely available black-bag tools, and so on.

TF: How did you happen to leave college to study at the Esalen Institute?

KD: By the end of my junior year, that was 1970, I’d read every book on awareness, growth, and body work I could find. The authors of many of the best books turned out to be at Esalen. It was clear to me that something new was going on out there that wasn’t happening on my campus. I decided to go right to the source. It was probably the smartest thing I ever did. I spent six months at Esalen, taking dozens of workshops—yoga workshops, encounter workshops, massage workshops, sensitivity workshops, t’ai chi workshops.

You were also saying that Maslow’s book, Toward a Psychology of Being, was a very, important one for you around that time.

Yes. It’s a great book. It provided the whole context within which I was starting to think. It talks about life as being a continuum, with sickness and problems on one end and creativity and vitality, aliveness and brilliance on the other. Maslow suggests that we should experience ourselves as including that whole continuum. We are both the problems and the brilliance. He talks about a kind of growth in which we come to accept both. He calls this kind of acceptance “actualization.” I would recommend that book to anyone interested in body work or personal growth.

Another important book was Will Schutz’s Joy. It spoke of honesty and sensitivity and authenticity. It was a very revolutionary book when it came out in 1967. Since then these ideas have been widely accepted in education and religion and psychology.

Fritz Perls’ books, too Gestalt Therapy Verbatim and In and Out of the Garbage Pail. I really liked his notion of seeing yourself as a whole variety of sometimes disharmonious parts in relation to each other. And working with the separate parts to achieve a more integrated state.

What were the main ideas that the work at Esalen was based on?

I thought of them as realizations. One of the main ones was self-responsibility. I realized that I was responsible for myself to a much, much larger extent than I’d ever imagined. It soon became very clear that I was making choices in the way I breathed and the way I got sick and the way I perceived other people. I learned that I had many more alternatives than I had realized. I began to discover a much greater degree of freedom in my life than anyone had ever led me to believe.

Somehow, up to then, I’d picked up the belief that I wasn’t really empowered in my own right. That I needed to depend on my parents and my teachers and other kinds of “experts.” It was an amazing realization to discover that I was really at the root of my own life. It was pretty shattering, too, because I had to assume responsibility for a lot of situations I’d been blaming on other people and on institutions. On the other hand, I suddenly felt immensely powerful, almost godlike. I realized that if I chose to work on it, I could run a marathon, raise my IQ, learn to control my heartbeat—to do all kinds of things I’d never let myself believe I might be able to do.

What were some other realizations?

Another significant one was seeing the ways in which the mind and body were so intimately involved—like dancing partners. The mind really wasn’t separate from the body. Thinking and feeling and perceiving didn’t take place in some little box behind the eyes, as I’d always believed. My mind was present in every cell in my body. That was why the group leader in that early body work group had been able to read out my whole character. It was all there! I got so I could tell a great deal about a person by seeing them stand or sit or walk.

I learned that stress and emotional tension can become focused in a specific part of the body, and that if this happens over a long period of time it will permanently shape the person’s posture so that every movement will express that pattern. And the parts of the body in which emotions are trapped will be the parts most likely to develop malfunctions. For example, if a person needs to cry, but won’t let himself, he may stop the crying by clinching his jaw. If the jaw is held tightly, over a long period, chronic tension is likely to develop in the tempero-mandibular joint or grinding of the teeth or headaches. Or unexpressed anger, trapped in the abdomen, can lead to a wide variety of disorders.

So illness can come from unexpressed emotions.

Yes, and the opposite is also true. If a person in creative or unusually vital or energetic, it’s not just a matter of genetics or blind luck, it’s a result of choices—conscious or unconscious—that he or she is making every day.

So, the body isn’t just a static object, but a constantly-changing, pliable organism.

Yes. We are constantly in process. Our bodies are constantly being shaped by the choices we do—or don’t—make. We can passively let things go on as they are, or we can choose to make changes. I can notice that certain joints are tight and do yoga to loosen them up. If I’m feeling tense and scattered, I can meditate and actually change the kinds of brain waves I’m generating. If I’m having difficulty in personal relationships, I can get feedback from friends on my personal style of relating to people and try some new alternatives. I create myself with the choices I make every day.

So that’s what you started doing at Esalen.

Yes. I started noticing what kinds of choices made me feel good and what choices made me feel unwell. Later, when I started working as a therapist, I tried to help other people learn how to make similar kinds of choices, to design their own lives healthfully. I found that there was a real hunger for tools and skills of physical and psychological self-care.

Why do you think we are seeing this sudden interest in self-responsibility?

I think that a lot of us, whether we’re psychologists or housewives or shoe salesmen, are discovering that we’re not as healthy and fulfilled as we had dreams of being. A lot of people are discovering that giving all your faith and power to your doctor isn’t going to make you any healthier. The feeling that “I don’t know anything about my health and I don’t want to know,” which has been the predominant attitude in this culture, is really changing. People are realizing that an authoritarian medical system in which patients give over all their power to the doctors and function as though they’re deaf, dumb, and blind just isn’t meeting their needs. People are ready to take back a good deal of that power. People want to take care of themselves. And I think that the various kinds of body work are a big part of that.

What are the main approaches to body work?

One useful way of getting your bearings in the field of body work is to group kinds of body work by the general approach. Let me outline ten general kinds of self-care skills in the field of body work:

1. developing muscular strength and tone;

2. developing aerobic fitness;

3. developing flexibility:

4. developing relaxation skills;

5. developing breathing skills;

6. developing neuromuscular coordination;

7. using massage to develop sensory awareness and to fulfill our need to be touched;

8. working on emotions through the body;

9. using the mind to influence the body;

10. using the body to center the mind.
Of course, there’s a great deal of overlap among these ten general approaches.

Developing muscular strength—would that be something like weight lifting?

Yes. That’s one specific way. Pushups, swimming, tennis, basketball, housework, walking, running—any activity that uses the muscles. Anything that makes us really exert ourselves. Muscles that aren’t used get flabby and lose their tone. In addition, it’s important to remember that all the muscles in the body need to be developed in a balanced way. So activities that use a broad range of muscles are the best.

I’d like to ask you, as you go along, to suggest some of the best books for each of the ten approaches.

Sure. For developing muscular strength, the best overall- book is The East-West Exercise Book, by David Smith. General approach number two is developing aerobic fitness, building up the heart as a muscle. It’s a very valuable addition to an exercise program to get a stethoscope and just spend some time listening to your heart. And, of course, monitoring your pulse is an important part of such a program.

In developing an aerobics program, it’s important to remember that you need to perform a vigorous activity such as running, swimming, rowing, or rope jumping—wherein your body is exerting itself to 75 percent of its maximum pulse rate for at least fifteen minutes at least three times a week.

Two other excellent books on improving the health of your heart are Type A Behavior and Your Heart and The American Way of Life Need Not Be Dangerous to Your Health. The best book on aerobics exercise programs is The Aerobics Way, by Kenneth Cooper.

The third category on your list was developing flexibility.

This is where activities like yoga come in. Hatha yoga is a system of postures and exercises designed to gently stretch and tone all the muscles of the body. Yoga works to systematically lengthen, vitalize, and integrate the muscles of the body and to improve circulation and glandular nervous system function. It not only makes you more flexible, but it serves as a means of centering meditation as well.

Four beginning yoga books that many people have found helpful are Richard Hittelman’s Guide to Yoga, The Light of Yoga Society’s Beginner’s Manual, Jess Steam’s Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation, and Swami Vishnu Devananda’s The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. A good introduction for older people is provided in Easy Does It Yoga for People Over 60. My favorite introduction to the philosophies behind doing yoga is Joel Kramer’s The Passionate Mind. And the very best advanced book on yoga is the classic by B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga (revised edition).

You also list relaxation skills as an approach to body work.

Few people are really good at voluntarily relaxing their bodies. As the stress of modern life increases, it becomes essential that we learn relaxation skills and take the time to practice them regularly. One of the pioneers in relaxation training was Edmund Jacobson. His system is called progressive relaxation. It’s described in his book You Must Relax!—I’ve always thought that was a pretty funny title. Another system of relaxation training is autogenics. It’s well described in Norman Shealy’s book 90 Days to Self-Health. There’s also a good cassette tape, Autogenic Training, by Vera Fryling, and a good anthology of approaches to relaxation is John White and James Fadiman’s Relax. My favorite book on preventing stress is Ken Pelletier’s Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer.

Another approach you cite is developing breathing skills.

Paying attention to breathing is one of the most underrated approaches to body work. The air we breathe gives us life, yet most of us use only 20 to 30 percent of our lung capacity. We’ve used deep breathing exercises with older people at SAGE, and we’ve found that when people begin to breathe more deeply, their bodies and minds become revitalized. They become more alert and alive. Depression and anxiety often fall away.

Breathing exercises can also help you relax. Working on breathing can be a way to get more deeply in touch with feelings, too. People who are tense and depressed tend to breathe shallowly. A person in a relaxed, joyful state will automatically breathe more deeply.

The best practical book on breathing skills I know of is Breathe Away Your Tension, by Bruno Geba.

Describe what you mean by neuromuscular coordination as an approach to body work.

As we grow up, we learn to walk and to move in certain ways, and then, in early adulthood, our neuromuscular development diminishes and, unless we become dancers or acrobats, we fall into a few familiar patterns of moving our bodies. Many kinds of exercises, like running, involve the repetition of a limited range of movements and therefore leave much to be desired in the way of developing our full neuromuscular capacities. These approaches either encourage us to perform common, everyday movements in new ways or to move in some totally new ways. Improvisational dance and Feldenkrais exercises are two good examples of such approaches.

You can make up your own ways of doing new things with your body, too, like cleaning the house or washing the dishes with your other hand. Or learning to write with your nondominant hand. Or your toes. Or blindfolding yourself and exploring the world using only your other senses. Anything that takes you out of your normal patterns of muscular or sensory activity can be considered valid body work.

These approaches try to get your mind out of a rut. For examples, runners can experiment with adding play, movement, and dance to their regular run. Try running at varying speeds or sideways. Or backward. Of course, there are other sports, like basketball, that require constant improvisation. Aikido, a noncombat form of the martial arts, requires constant improvisation. It’s a good example of high-level training in neuromuscular sophistication. So is playing a musical instrument.

What are some good books in this area?

Two books by Moishe Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement and The Case of Norah, and Mabel Ellsworth Todd’s The Thinking Body. A good book on dance is Sweigard’s Human Movement Potential.

Approach number seven is massage.

In massage, one person uses his or her hands to touch and manipulate the body of another. There are many types of massage. Ideally, massage will accomplish several major goals.

Receiving a massage is an excellent way to become comfortable being touched by another person. This sounds pretty elementary, but for many of us, being touched in a nonsexual, caring fashion is not a usual part of our daily lives.

Light massage can facilitate relaxation and stimulate the sensory nervous system. Deeper massage can actually release the tension in our muscles. All kinds of massage can increase circulation and glandular functioning and promote a greater sense of well-being and aliveness.

The best overall how-to-get started book on massage is George Downing’s The Massage Book. Another book that does a nice job of summarizing the importance of being touched for our development and well-being is Ashley Montagu’s Touching.

The eighth approach is working on emotions through the body.

Emotions live in the body, and if they’re not allowed to express themselves, they may become lodged in the body as tension. Many of these approaches make uses of expressive activities in order to relieve the body of stress, frustration, and unresolved feelings. For example, instead of just stretching, you might stretch and scream or yell or make faces. Or you might hit a pillow or kick the floor to release tension. Or you might have a pretend fight with someone using Doffers kind of big, well-padded bat.

In some approaches, like bioenergetics, a therapist manipulates different areas while you focus on the memories and feelings that come up as the tension in the various parts of the body is released.

Nearly all the emotion-focused kinds of body work have grown out of the work of Wilhelm Reich. Rolling, Reichian energetics, Postural Integration, Radix, neoReichian therapies, bioenergetics, gestalt therapy, sensory awareness—these are some examples of body work methods that deal with feelings. Reich’s big contribution was the idea that when emotions lodge in the body, they can distort the body’s structure and impair its function. He then found that it was possible for these emotions to be released, leaving the individual not only feeling better but less susceptible to illness.

Would you recommend any books by Reich himself?

Probably not to start with. Reading Reich is like reading the Torah. There are some good books about Reich, though. Boadella’s book, Wilhelm Reich, The Evolution of His Work, is the best biography. Man in the Trap, by Elsworth Baker, is the best book on his clinical practice, and Bioenergetics, by Alexander Lowen, is a good introduction to Reichian thought. Then, and only then, for a general introduction to Reich’s own writings, I’d suggest The Selected Writings of Wilhelm Reich.

How about number nine, using the mind to influence the body?

In recent years there’s been a growing appreciation for the ways in which the mind can influence the functioning of the body. While most mind-body relationships take place outside of our conscious awareness, we can learn to train our minds to influence our bodies in positive, healing ways.

If you close your eyes and imagine that you’re getting beaten up, your mind will generate one kind of body state. If you imagine that you’re making love, it’ll generate another.

If I asked you to imagine that you’re lying on a warm, sunny beach on a quiet tropical island, your body would probably become more relaxed. Obviously, by choosing certain kinds of visualizations and following certain kinds of suggestions, you can put your body into various states. Some of these states can be useful for relaxing or for healing. Some techniques that make use of this approach are biofeedback, autogenics, selfhypnosis, and visualization.

A good book on visualization is Samuels and Samuels’ Seeing With the Mind’s Eye. Some others on influencing the body through the mind are Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, by Ken Pelletier, and The Mind /Body Effect, by Herbert Benson.

That brings us to the last category using the body to center the mind.

In these approaches, the idea is to focus the body in such a way so that the mind becomes quiet and clear. Just as stress and unwellness in the body can generate confusion in the mind, stillness in the body can help to produce a deep state of peace of mind.

Probably the most well-known of these approaches is meditation in its various forms. These approaches involve sitting in an alert stillness in order to develop a very centered, transpersonal aspect of the mind. Some of the approaches to mental centering are phrased in religious language. Others are strictly secular. Yogis and meditators have been practicing these kinds of disciplines for years, but contemporary science has only become aware of them recently.

Herbert Benson’s The Relaxation Response is a good overview of meditative approaches. Probably the best how-to-do-it books are Lawrence LeShan’s How to Meditate and Ken Pelletier’s Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer (again). A favorite is Chogyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action.

Body work covers a big area!

It certainly does. For some people, body work means yoga. For others, dance. For others, sports or massage. The best thing for you may be to sit quietly in a peaceful place for a long time. For me it may be yelling and laughing and hitting pillows.

The fact that there’s no “right way” has made my work in this field very exciting. Instead of some set of rules to follow, there’s a real freedom to explore. There are many, many ways for us to develop our bodies and our minds. All the books I’ve mentioned are ultimately talking about the same thing—each of us has our own unique path to happiness and fulfillment.

Dr. Joan Borysenko is one of the leading ambassadors of psychoneuoimmunology, or PNI. Along with Dr. Herbert Benson, she co-founded the Mind-Body clinic of Harvard University and is the author of several books, including “Guilt is the Teacher, Love Is The Lesson and “The New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism.”

DiCarlo: Larry Dossey has come up with a model to help explain the evolution of medicine which he terms era 1, era 2, and era 3 medicine. Could you briefly trace the evolution of psychology, where we’ve been, where we are now and where we are going?

Borysenko: Sure. The evolution of psychology began with Freud, who was a neurologist. He certainly began to look into what can be regarded as an era one and era two psychology. Era one psychology would be an understanding of things like neurotransmitters and areas of the brain that have been associated with certain emotions. It’s very, very important. I spent a long time in my own life exploring psychopharmacology, looking at the different structures of the brain and what kind of structures were localized there. We need that knowledge.

The second era of psychology, to borrow from Dossey’s Era two medicine, recognizes the connection between the mind and the body. Oftentimes, psychologists think of the mind as divorced from the body, and what we have begun to realize in psychology is that if you give someone a massage, as a massage therapist will tell you, and touch certain parts of the body, specific memories will suddenly be triggered. We understand now that memories are stored in certain parts of the body and that the emotions are the bridge between the body and the mind.

Era 3 psychology is truly a transpersonal psychology, where we recognize that in addition to one’s own thoughts and one’s own personal history effecting one’s mind and body, that in a certain sense we all effect each other through our thoughts. This has been substantiated in prayer studies. Most of us have no trouble recognizing that our own thoughts effect our body. That’s common knowledge now. What we don’t know, or tend to forget, is that our mind can effect someone else’s body and that their thoughts can effect our body. I think that when a psychologist has the capability of being what we call “naturally therapeutic”, it’s partly because they look at their client, whoever they may be, with a mindset of great respect and love. Through that sense of respect, they bring forth healing. Eric Fromme said that a parent ideally looks at their child with an attitude of hopefulness. He defined hopefulness as a passion for the possible. When a therapist looks at a client with a passion for the possible and knows that there is indeed a Godseed within them that is going to grow, and knows that no person is flawed beyond their capacity to heal, and understands that every wound is a sacred wound in terms of being able to lead the person to a state of greater compassion and wisdom– that attitude alone crosses space and time and leads to healing.

DiCarlo: What have been the triumphs and shortcomings of Western psychology?

Borysenko: I think there have been a lot of triumphs in behavior therapy. I spent years of my life as a behaviorist, looking at operant conditioning ala Skinner. I think that’s very important to understand how people learn, and how that effects people. For example, it’s a very simple concept, like continuous reinforcement. You give a child a reward every time something happens and they always expect that reward. If you do it only once in a while, then they will always expect it. You will never easily extinguish the behavior of looking or waiting for whatever it is they want. So operant conditioning is useful in understanding the reasons why you have to be consistent with a child if you are a parent. If you are not consistent, if every once in a while you give them something that is forbidden, they simply will not learn that they cannot have that thing and it will bug you forever. These are useful concepts and methods which have been the gifts of behavior therapy.

I also think our knowledge of brain structure and behavior is very important. It’s very important to understand where the reward centers of the brain are located, and what neuropeptides are produced in response to emotion. Psychopharmocology is also very important. Prescribed drugs can oftentimes help people to regularize their brain function and emotional response. Many of the psychoactive drugs have been extremely helpful. The whole aspect of psychology that deals with self-awareness has been enormously important. Without self-awareness, how can we ever make a choice? How can we ever have free will? We could go into much more detail, but globally, there is much to be said for psychology as we know it.

On the downside, I think the limitations of psychology has been its reductionist theory. That is, just because we can find brain areas that have to do with emotions, or just because a certain drug can alleviate a certain affliction, to reduce the human being to a stimulus-response system or to certain chemicals in the brain that produce certain responses is inadequate. We are clearly more than that. Some people try to reduce and explain away near death experiences as the trick of dying brain cells starving for oxygen. There is some truth here since research shows that if the right temporal lobe is stimulated, it will give rise to religious thinking. It will also give rise to light experiences–as of course it should. We live in a physical body. Why shouldn’t there be circuitry? But to say that just because there is circuitry there is nothing beyond that–that there is no soul or spirit–is extraordinarily limiting.

The other limiting tendency of psychology is to look at people more in terms of what’s wrong with them–their pathology–rather than in terms of their potential. Psychologists seem quick to categorize and say, “what is wrong with a person’s character?” or “what is wrong with this person’s behavior?”, rather than saying, “Oh, is there a difficulty or a wound here, that for this person, has particular relevance to the way that they become whole, and the way that they become creative, and the way the way that they awaken their inner intuition and capacity to love.”

DiCarlo: The transpersonal movement, the so called 4th force in psychology, proposes that in addition to physical body, mind and emotions, there is a aspect of being some would refer to as the soul or spirit, which plays a vital role in human existence. How would you define the term “transpersonal”?

Borysenko: I would define the term transpersonal as actually what is most deeply personal on one aspect, and also what binds us together with everybody else. It goes beyond the limit of the individual. In one sense, I would say that what is beyond the person or “transpersonal,” is that one mind that all people are part of. When the great quantum physicist Erwin Shroedinger was asked how many minds he thought existed in the universe, he laughed and said, “if the sum total of the number of minds could be counted, there would be just one.” If you look into the esoteric core– the spiritual core of all religious traditions– then you also find there is the discussion of one divine mind, of which we are all a part. Part of that divine mind dwells within each human being as some sort of essence or core.

If for example, you were a mystical Jew, you might call that core the “shekhinah” the indwelling feminine presence of God. If you were a Buddhist, you would call it the Rigpa, or your own true nature. If you were a mystical Christian, like Mster Eckhart, you would call it the Godseed that dwells within. There has been a name for it in any tradition. In the Hindu tradition it might be called the Atman, which becomes one with the Brahman or the larger mind. It’s certainly been talked about in psychological circles as well. Jung had a concept of the Self with the big “S” and that’s the same thing. So did Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis who was a contemporary of Freud and Jung. We find in modern-day psychopathology, that in the most abused members of our society, this creative, immortal aspect of self, the part of the one mind that dwells within you has also been described by people with Multiple Personality Disorder when they are hypnotically regressed to see when each of their alter personalities was formed in response to trauma. Regardless of their religious orientation or their lack thereof, a certain personality can be found within each multiple which says, “I have been with this person from before the time when they were in the body and I will remain with them when their body dies.” It makes statements that sound like lines from the Upanishads, the hindu holy scriptures. It frequently describes itself as a conduit for a greater wisdom or divine love. That part was originally described by a psychiatrist Ralph Allison, who called it the inner self helper, because when he could connect with that part of a person, it would tell him exactly what was needed for the therapy to proceed and for healing to occur. It’s like an inner physician, or inner wisdom that many people I think, simply think of as their intuition or their creativity.

DiCarlo: Could you contrast your own experience of the lower self with the core self. What do each feel like?

Borysenko: Well, for me, when I am in that core or essential self, I feel spacious. I am not prone at that point to judge anybody or anything. My heart and mind are both open, which makes me a lot more perceptive as a scientist and psychologist. It makes me happy. My whole body feels relaxed, at ease, at peace. I feel a sense of unity with something greater than myself. A feeling of connectedness. For me, that experience always brings forth a tremendous sense of gratitude. The recognition that life is a tremendous mystery and a tremendous gift and that we are most fortunate to be living it.

I think everybody probably has that experience several times a day, but it might pass by very, very quickly and we just don’t notice it. It happens every time you become present in the moment. Maybe it happens when you are looking out your window at the rising sun and for a moment you forget your fears and concerns and obligations, and are fully present to the rising sun. Perhaps it happens when you are around small children. There are so many moments when a child will just erupt with such laughter or such joy that you will just find yourself pulled into the moment. That’s when you are in touch with that essential core.

The rest of the time it’s easy to tell when we are in touch with the persona or the ego. That’s when we feel closed down in some way. That’s when we are judging. That’s when we don’t feel spacious. That’s when we feel worried by something or are fearful.

DiCarlo: Do you feel that at this time in our collective history, it’s important that we come into a recognition of this aspect of ourselves?

Borysenko: Not only is it important, it is inevitable. This part of ourselves is being spoken of in so many different ways. Take for example, the people who have near death experiences and who talk about experiencing some purity within themselves, some wisdom within themselves. They come back and interest other people. What is this all about? What is this light experience within us?

Also, if people are connected to that part of themselves, then that is one way that healing will occur within our community and within our world. Our individual communities are going to have violence to the extent that we fear one another, to the extent that we judge one another and to the extent that we are unforgiving. There are going to be difficulties of every sort, from schools that are not nurturing our children, to corporations which take advantage of the public, to the war machine which is ever active. I think the hope of the world is truly in recognizing this oldest, oldest spiritual principle that exists within each of us. Then, you end up with a whole different paradigm and way of viewing the world. This world view is exemplified by the Dali Lama and how he felt about the holocaust in Tibet. He wasn’t in the old paradigm of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”. Instead, he practiced a form of loving kindness and compassion towards the Chinese. Every time he thinks of them, he tries to think of their pain and what he returns to them is his peace and blessing. We could stop war instantly–instantly–if people could do that.

DiCarlo: In your work you talk about the three stages of courage: willful, psychological, and spiritual. Could you explain their significance?

Borysenko: Sure. First of all, it’s very important to have some sense of courage if we are to effectively deal with life. Without courage, when faced with difficulty we would just fold. But there are three stages, three types of courage. In “Fire in The Soul” I talked about my mom who had quite a bit of willful courage. That is, she could rise to any occasion, and do whatever needed to be done next. She could just “keep on truck’n” and go through it without looking forward, and without looking back, and without necessarily enquiring into the meaning of anything. She just said, “this is where I am right now, this is what I am supposed to do, and I’ll do it no matter what.” That will take you pretty far in life, but you can get a little bit further if you enlarge the idea of courage beyond the plain old will to keep on going.

Psychological courage, the second type of courage, comes from self-awareness. For example, there is a book out there that essentially says, feel the fear but do it anyway. Oftentimes, that’s what we have to do in this life. You can do that through either through willful courage–“feel the fear and do it anyway”–or through psychological courage, where you enquire into the origins of that fear. You look and see what the fear has to teach you. Through that, you become a lot wiser and your heart tends to open. You develop compassion. And so that’s a broader form of courage.

The third type of courage, spiritual courage, comes from having a higher perspective on the whole situation. From a psychological point of view, we can look at who copes well when under duress and we say they are stress hardy. They are optimistic. They look at change as a challenge. But when we look at it from an even a broader view of spirituality, that’s when we reach a whole new level of transformation. I want to borrow a line from Ram Dass, who once said, “we have a choice in either viewing ourselves as human beings who might have an occasional spiritual experience or viewing ourselves as spiritual beings who happen to be having a human experience.” That is the viewpoint of spiritual courage. It reveals itself when you have contemplated the meaning of life, and have come to the point where you recognize that no matter how difficult, no matter how painful, no matter how non-sensical something may seem to be, that there is a higher form of meaning involved. It is the faith that though our perceptions may be clouded, on another level of experience, things make sense and that the universe is a friendly place.

DiCarlo: The pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow was noted for his emphasis upon our higher possibilities and potential as opposed to the prevailing fixation within the psychological profession on emotional and mental illness that you mentioned earlier. The people whom he studied were able to bring out and express their latent potential and wholeness and he referred to as being “self-actualizing.” Many understand a self-actualizer as being a better performing human being, displaying a multitude of talents and abilities. Is there more to the story?

Borysenko: It’s interesting…I think we have to be very, very careful when we talk about self-actualization because everybody has a slightly different idea about what a truly creative human being is. For me, a truly creative human being is one who has gotten some sense of what their unique gift is and is using that gift. The gifts vary. The gift of one self-actualizing person may be that they are extremely nurturing and their gift is to mother. Sometimes in this particular society we look at someone who has made the choice to mother and we say, “Oh my, poor thing. She hasn’t actualized her potential–shes just being a mother.” So I think one of the first things we have to do is take the blinders off our eyes and let people be who they are and to recognize that self-actualization has to do with being who you are. It’s not about being a perfect person in some way. One self-actualized person may in fact be highly creative in one area, and yet still have blindspots in another. They are not “perfect”. What they are able to do is say, “I see I have this blindspot or that blindspot. I’ll try to deal with it as well as I can, but it is part of who I am at this time.” So I would say that a self-actualized person has a degree of self-awareness and has become spacious enough that they can accept the pairs of opposites that they are. They can accept that they are great in some areas, but maybe not so great in others, and that’s OK.

DiCarlo: So they would to some degree be in touch with their inner core?

Borysenko: Oh, yes. Without being in touch with your inner core at some level, you don’t have enough of a feeling of spaciousness to become who you are.

DiCarlo: I suppose that the opposite of being whole and self-actualizing is to be fragmented…When we say someone is fragmented, what do we mean?

Borysenko: When somebody is fragmented it means that they have become identified with one aspect of themselves and have closed off other aspects. Much like an individual with multiple personality disorder has different alters or personalities, we all have different subpersonalities. This is the theory called Psychosynthesis, created by the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli. For example, many people have the subpersonality called the victim. They grew up in an abusive home or an alcoholic home and they might have a variety of subpersonalities. There might be the hero, or the mother or the teacher. All are different aspects of themselves, and they go from subpersonality to subpersonality rather unthinkingly. Somebody who is used to being in a victim subpersonality most of the time and doesn’t have much conscious awareness of it, will tend to associate–because it is behaviorally familiar–with other victims who then support one another in their sorrows. Or a person might associate with the subpersonality of being an aggressor, because they are used to that. Or if they are used to being victimized, they may associate or marry people whom they can rescue because that is their best way to get out of that victim sense of self.

When this happens, other aspects of a person are blocked from awareness because the person has become so identified with one aspect, one fragment of themselves. So this is what we would call being fragmented. A person who is aware of their different subpersonalities, aware that “yes, I have all of this within me” is more spacious. So when this comes up, instead of necessarily feeling like a victim, they can see the old feelings and that part of themselves might rise to the occasion but they can also make the choice to respond from a larger aspect of self and not fall back into the same holes. So a person who is integrated has far more choice. They are more flexible and they are more creative. To the extent that they have become more whole, they will tend to respond to people and situations with more kindness and love.

DiCarlo: Would this integrated person, this whole person, be balanced in mind, body and spirit?

Borysenko: Well, in balance generally, but I think we can also go overboard with this because there’s a sense that once you are “on the road to self-actualizing” you are going to be an idealized human being who is not going to fall into periods of depression, jealousy, anger or anything else. I think people need to give up these limiting ideas up and realize that these so-called negative states are all part and parcel of being human. But as you begin to recognize these negative emotional states sooner, you begin to realize that you have some choice. All emotions that come up in someway serve the realization of our wholeness. But you must be willing to pay attention, accept the message and not get stuck there. So wholeness, once again, is not about perfection. Its about awareness and choice.

DiCarlo: You state in your book that the number one affliction of those of us in American Society is a sense of unworthiness, which perhaps causes us to disconnect with this inner core that you speak of. Why is low self-esteem so prevailent on our society?

Borysenko: To discover the reason for this prevailing sense of unworthiness, you need look no further than the media. From the time we are children, we are sold a bill of goods about what it is to be a worthy person in our society and it has everything to do with money and looks. Most people don’t have that much money and they don’t look like models. You can see this preoccupation begin to take root as little children, when little girls five and six years old begin to look in the mirror and say, “I’m too fat” or “my nose is too big”. What a sad thing to measure our value and worth as human beings by. We have a very injurious society that sets people up for a good deal of self-judgement. We have a very injurious society in terms of defining the value of a life well lived. If we could define the value of a life well lived in terms of a person who develops some compassion, caring and a strong community–a community of people who help one another–and if we determined that a truly fine human being is one who has let go of judgements, and helps others, self-esteem would be a lot higher because these are qualities that a person can choose to cultivate.

Our sense of low self-esteem and unworthiness can also be traced to some old, European ideas about how children were supposed to be raised. Most of us in this country are still heir to the old type of child-rearing that says, “a child should be seen and not heard” or “adults know best.” Every time a parent, with an authoritarian point of view, raises a child, self-esteem will be low because the child never quite measures up. In some way you are being told what’s wrong instead of what’s right. There has been a great deal written about changing modes of child-rearing. That has everything to do with self-esteem. The more authoritarian the parent, the lower the self-esteem of the child.

DiCarlo: Do the roots of our unworthiness also trace back to traumas that may have been suffered during this lifetime or others?

Borysenko: Sure, it has to do with lots of different things. In “Guilt is The Teacher, Love is the Lesson” which was my second book, I discussed child development, self-esteem and experiences of shame–whether we were shamed by a parent or shamed by a teacher or shamed by peers–at length. It turns out that shame is the master emotion, and that as soon as you feel shame, which is the feeling that you are so unworthy that you wish a hole would open up in the ground and swallow you, it brings with it other negative emotions. Shame is the master emotion.

Kids who have had very shameful experiences carry the wounds of those throughout their whole lifetime. Oftentimes they are associated with school experiences, where an unthinking teacher shamed a kid in front of their peers. Some people who have had parochial school education may have had many positive experiences, but many people are beginning to step forward and say, “Gee, I was beaten by the nuns.” One little girl I know peed on the floor in front of the other students when she was shamed by a nun. She never got over the experience.

Throughout our lives have these kind of experiences and we have got to know how to integrate them. And I don’t think the wholeness of who we are is limited to just this lifetime. Who knows? Every parent will tell you that their child has a personality that they noticed from the time their child was just a few months old. Beyond the nature-nurture controversy–“is it in our genetics or is it in the way we were brought up?”–there are personal differences that go beyond that explanation and which are most likely soul experiences, soul residue. Old patterns that we bring in, whether from past lifetimes, or parallel realities, who knows? That’s all within what I would call the purview of the sacred mystery.

DiCarlo: In a recent conversation with noted Biofeedback researcher, Dr. Elmer Green, he stated that he accepts the yogic description of the real constitution of the human being( ie. etheric, emotional, mental energy fields? In your view, are these energy fields metaphorical or are they real?

Borysenko: I think they are real. They clearly correspond to levels that people, such as the eastern yogis, have noticed in meditation. They have noticed that when they learn to control their energies fields to certain degrees, they develop different abilities, such as the yogic ability to leave the body, or to bi-locate and be present at two different places at once. Elmer Green has studied yogis who can stop their heart, or control blood flow to certain aspects of the body. These yogis are true mind-body researchers in terms of understanding those different aspects of their subtle energy field.

Modern medicine cannot begin to explore that yet because there are no widely accepted measuring instruments that measure subtle energy fields. There have been many attempts to do that, but as of yet the technology simply doesn’t exist. From the point of view of medical science, all we can say is, “there is something to acupuncture which has to do with a system of subtle energy which runs through some tributary-like system that those in the east call meridians. When this energy is effected by acupuncture needles, then certain things happen that we can measure. But we can only say that something is going without saying what. Perhaps in the next decade or two we’ll be able to find out more than that, but right now we simply don’t have the ability.

DiCarlo: I am very struck by your boldness in articulating a world-view that conflicts with that of many people in our society. You touch upon seemingly taboo subjects–the soul, reincarnation, the human energy system, spirit guides and angels. What has been the reaction from those in the mainstream?

Borysenko: It’s a fascinating thing for me to think about. On the one hand, perhaps I don’t meet the mainstream that much. I have the sense that the physicians and psychologists who come to my workshops and speaking engagements are the ones who are more curious. So I don’t know if I can truthfully answer that question other than to say that what we think of as the mainstream is certainly interested in much of these same topics these days. If you look at the best-seller list, you see books which delve into these subjects at the top of the list for a long time. There is certainly a tremendous interest in angels. What a resurgence. There was a cover story on angels in both Time and Newsweek recently. Even though what I am talking about may not be “mainstream” in terms of traditional psychology or traditional medicine, I think that it strikes a chord that most human beings wish to become more aware of.

DiCarlo: How would you react to those skeptical about the multi-dimensional aspects of reality that you describe?

Borysenko: I have very little response to the skeptics. Someone once told me this story that stuck in my mind when I was a medical scientist, and that was, that a battery of scientists can get together and tell you about all the scientific proof for the fact that bananas are bitter. But all you have to do is taste one once to realize that there is this whole other aspect to bananas. I think it’s the same with skeptics. They are not reached by intellectual arguments, but by being touched in some way by the sacred.

That can happen to people in a number of ways. The way that it often happens to people is when their usual, “the way that things are” reality is cracked by coming across a period of crisis or suffering and then having to delve very deeply into the questions, “why me?” “who am I?” and “what’s a life well lived?” That is the time when people often re-think these things. To put it in simple terms, “there aren’t any atheists in foxholes.”

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

DiCarlo: Please describe the origins of the human potential movement… What was your involvement and what sparked your interest in the exploration of human potential?

Leonard: In the mid-60s, I was a senior editor at Look Magazine, one of the most prestigious and award-winning magazines of its day. I was also west coast editorial manager and I had done lots of award-winning feature articles on education, starting in 1956 with “What is A Teacher?” I did a piece in 1964 called “Revolution in Education”. In the last paragraph I said something about “human potential”. As a result, we must have received at least one hundred letters from readers, which essentially said, “That’s what we really need to do, focus upon the human potential.” It occurred to me put in a request to do an article on the human potential and my request was granted.

Those were the golden days of journalism. Look writers had total authority to do anything they wanted to do. So I began criss-crossing the country. When I was finished I had interviewed 37 experts on the subject of the human potential. Psychiatrists, psychologists, brain researchers-even theologians and philosophers. Not one of them said we were using more than 10% of our capacity. In later years, I came to realize that was a very conservative estimate-we’re using about 1% I would guess. Maybe less.

During the 7 months in which I was criss-crossing the country, I had heard something about Michael Murphy and this little institute called Esalen in Big Sur, California, the programs of which ran under the banner, “Human Potentialities.” When I finally had the opportunity to meet Michael, we hit it off immediately. We went to the house of a woman we both knew to have dinner. After we had left, we kept on talking, till three in the morning. We’ve been talking ever since. I met Mike February 2, 1965 and it changed my life.

He was really into the subject of human potential and we had what you might call a dovetailing of interests. I knew quite a bit about various social movements, such as the civil rights movement, I covered that story from Little Rock, right on through Selma and Ole Mist-the whole thing. I also knew a lot about brain research and behavioral psychology from the work I had been doing on this human potential article. Mike was very well versed on Eastern philosophy and religion, humanistic psychology and some of the more frontier developments of the day, such as biofeedback. So when we started exchanging stories, everything seemed to go together. It made a complete picture. So we just immediately started brainstorming, saying what could we both do and what should be done. A number of the events of that time indicated to us that some sort of transformation really wanted to happen. Of course these were the 60s when such things seemed imminent. So we would just toss out ideas, which I would scrawl down on a piece of paper and throw onto the floor. The accumulated paper looked like a snowstorm, we were throwing so many things. At one point I said, “How about this….we’ve got a civil rights movement and we’ve got a free speech movement…how about a human potential movement?” So I just wrote it down and threw it on the floor. I guess that was the beginning of it.

We started talking about the human potential movement almost jokingly. And that was about the same time the national media discovered Esalen. I never did a story in Look specifically on Esalen, because I thought, “Maybe I’m too close to this and maybe I shouldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else should do it.” Sure enough, by 1967 and 68, the media was in full force, and they picked up the term “human potential movement.” About four years later, Mike and I looked around and said, “My God, this is not what we had in mind at all.” In the beginning, like a child who is attracted to the brightest toy on the floor, the media was fixated upon the mixed baths, hot tubs and encounter groups. So they assumed that the human potential movement must have a lot to do with people getting into hot tubs and crying or yelling things at each other. So we said, “Let’s un-name this movement.” We told others there was no such thing as the human potential movement. But we found that it’s much harder to un-name a movement than it is to name it.

Over the years we have come to accept it, and actually it’s a wonderful term. What we had in mind was not just the emotional side of human experience. We had the idea of integral transformation-of mind, body, soul and heart- from the very beginning. So that’s how the human potential movement started.

DiCarlo: In light of the many years you have been at the leading edge of the human potential movement, I’m wondering if you can help put things into their proper persepctive. More specifically, how have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s set the stage for the new paradigm which is now emerging?

Leonard: First of all, I must say that a lot of people don’t want to take a look back at the 60s. All the big 60s books really haven’t sold well. We still haven’t come to terms with that decade. I think that many people are still afraid of the 60s and the ideas that were presented. Some people think the 60s were a period in parenthesis-a decade that really didn’t count-when our whole culture suddenly got out of step. But I don’t think that’s true. I think the activity of the 60s was a very much needed and long overdue reaction and at certain times over-reaction, to years, decades, and centuries of repressiveness and injustice. In think what the 60s basically did was set the agenda for necessary change that we still haven’t gotten around to. And I’m hoping the 90s can be a time when we get to work on that agenda.

Look at all the things that came up in the 60s-the whole idea of ethnicity, race, of gender. The women’s movement. The gay movement. The environmental movement. All of those things began in the 1960s. There was a sudden sunburst before the powers-that-be reacted by clamping down on much of it. There was a counter-60s movement. To use a body metaphor, it is true that many of us during those years were kind of short sighted, but we were literally ahead of ourselves. And a lot of things were done without too much wisdom. But it was a very euphoric and crazy time that clearly and powerfully set the agenda for change.

The 1970s, on the other hand, was a period of what I would call “cultural diffusion.” The ideas that had been circulating around college campuses-mostly in certain enclaves on both coasts but also scattered throughout various pockets in the country-began to diffuse throughout the whole culture. Some of the ideas were better absorbed than others. The sexual revolution, according to Yankalovich surveys in the late 70s, was the most pervasive. Certain sexual practices that were only being promulgated by hippies and the like on the West Coast began to show up wildly throughout the culture- in Des Moines and in Texarcana-wherever you wanted to look. Many have said, “Well, these ideas were co-opted. They have lost some of their fine purity.” Well, that’s OK. Compromise is part of change. But there was a tremendous cultural diffusion.

Also, the 70s was a period of rationalization and commercialization of a lot of good practices. Organizations like “est” took ideas from gestalt therapy and Zen, and so forth, and packaged it very neatly and put it out in hotel ballrooms. I think those organizations probably did more good than harm. But here again, it was a little too pro-forma, it was a little too pat. Of course some people who wouldn’t go to Esalen might go to a hotel ballroom where they could still wear their coat and tie where they could see there was another world and that other possibilities could exist. And we really are a bizarre culture in not recognizing these other spiritual possibilities that have been our birthright since the human race became human. Humankind emerged on this planet with vision, with tremendous vision of an unseen world, of a spiritual realm that held meaning and guidance for us all. The consequences of lack of vision are quite clear- “Where there is no vision the people perish” as the bible says. So all these things were part of the cultural diffusion. Some of these new, “old” learnings, which go way back yet seemed new in the 60s, spread. Ideas found in Eastern philosophies were introduced in the 1960s and spread widely in the 1970s.

Then in the 1980s, it continued spreading quietly, but at the same time, there was a tremendous backlash against it. The twelve years of Reagan and Bush presented much opposition. They were very, very opposed to many of the ideas. Of course, a lot of democrats were also opposed to the ideas of the 60s. It’s interesting, Reagan was elected to be governor of California on the basis of his promise to clobber the University of California. That was his primary platform. And he did it. He held back the free-speech movement. The Reagan administration sent helicopters to drop tear gas not only on the university but all over Berkley. I was over there during the People’s Park uprising and I was gassed-we were all gassed. All the Look people were trapped right in the middle of the campus. We were the only ones there on The Terrace who were watching this battle unfold beneath us. It was very bizarre. But there was that kind of backlash. So the movement entered into national politics in the 80s.

Now, during the 90s I think we are kind of teetering on the brink. We can go forwards or backwards, but I feel necessity will force us to realize that the old ways are simply not working. That repressiveness is not the answer. On the other hand, total license is not the answer either. Total freedom to do anything, the freedom to buy assualt weapons or do anything one wants, doesn’t work. There has to be some kind of long-term, disciplined practice. There has to be this understanding that that’s the way things work. I think there are quite a few hints that’s now happening.

DiCarlo: Do you think the 60s represented a kind of a “dress rehearsal” for the true transformation taking place in the 90s?

Leonard: The 60s certainly put the agenda for transformation up there. Now we’ve got to do it. There is so much more transformative activity going on now than in the 60s. Everybody thinks the 60s was radical. What was considered radical back then is kindergarten stuff compared to what’s going on now.

DiCarlo: What are some of the more hopeful signs that you see that we will move forward?

Leonard: A lot of things…. For example, never before in human history has so much of the great wisdom teaching of all ages and all cultures been so available throughout the world. It really is a global village. You can go to the corner drugstore and buy the Tibetan Book of The Dead. The easy availability is something new. Even a thinker as wise as Hagel did not have as much access to Oriental thought as an average college student does today. And of course a lot of information is being spread throughout the world via the satellites, through the communications network-the bad as well as the good. And that is something new. Very revolutionary. It contributed towards the downfall of communism. Havel said rock-and-roll caused the Berlin Wall to go down. That was his quote.

Another significant development is all the understanding we’re getting now on human evolution. You see new headlines constantly about the new male Lucy, the early ancestor of our species, for example, and the understanding of the power of the evolutionary process. One of the hallmarks of the project that Mike and I are working on, is the idea that evolution has not ended. The Future of The Body is about the next step. We are still evolving and I think things are really moving.

We have such a rich legacy of positive accomplishments. Just consider the Eskimo, Aruba tribesman, East Indian, Japanese Samurai, Christian Desert Fathers, the shaman, the Penitenti, Victorian Novelists, 20th century scientists…consider all the different kinds of governments, governance and philosophies that we have had. Embedded in this flamboyant richness, we’ve always had hints of further evolution. But now, all this diversity is becoming accessible everywhere on the earth. No one living before the mid-20th century-even the privileged king or monarch or greatest scientist of the time-has had as much access as we do today to the descriptions of metanormal capacities in people. Never before was there a medical science that could precisely measure the physiological changes produced by transformative practice. At no other time have so many people practiced so many different disciplines for growth and transcendence.

In public meeting places you find people practicing Sufi exercises that were once reserved for initiates. This stuff is really happening. Shamanic practices of Stone Age people are offered at workshops. It’s really spreading, more now than ever before. There’s a magazine called “Common Ground” published in the San Francisco area that has advertisements for literally hundreds of these activities. It is incredible. In the 60s this was simply not available. We have much, much more of this paradigm-busting lore now than we had back then. It’s not even close-it’s a thousand times more than what we had in the 60s.

Psychoneuroimmunology has had a powerful influence in the medical profession and is showing that emotions and feelings influence every aspect of bodily functioning. Ideas of the mind-body connection grace the covers of the news magazines now…The Bill Moyers Special, “Healing and the Mind” has had a very powerful influence on a relatively large audience. Not like Roseanne of course, but it doesn’t take all the people to make changes. It takes some of the people who are controlling the instruments of power, like those in the media.

A lot of experiments are going on, even though mainstream science is very loathe to admit it, which demonstrate that the minds of individuals can influence living tissue at a distance. They can influence bacteria, plants and other human beings. And these have been demonstrated in good, rigorous experiments, where the protocols and the procedures are much more closely monitored than they would be in a normal scientific experiment, where people are not so suspicious.

The anthropologists and sociologists have made so much progress too, in showing how our facial expressions, the way we walk, the way we move, how these things are influenced by culture. And how we can break out of these cultural traps.

Such martial arts as aikido, which I think is transformative, is now spreading throughout the world. It is a very transformative martial art that is based upon love and harmony. And that’s a very radical idea.

DiCarlo: Qi Gong also..

Leonard: Qi Gong and T’ai Chi continues to spread.

Very quietly the shift is occurring.

Also, the attitude of the media towards things such as Esalen has greatly shifted since the 1960s. In the very beginning before they knew what was happening, there were some wonderful articles about Esalen. Then by the 70s everybody who wrote about Esalen would talk about “touchy-feely” things while sticking their tongues in their cheeks. There was so much sticking of tongues in the cheeks that on Madison Avenue they had to develop a special operation to plug up the holes. But now, I have a whole press kit of articles that were written in 1987 about Esalen and every one of them is favorable. Part of the favorable response was simply a celebration of survival. Esalen endured and that’s pretty good. Nobody expected that. And when it hit its 30th birthday in 1992, there were even more favorable articles. It’s almost as if it’s now in the mainstream, an edge of the establishment. Recently Vogue and the New York Times all had very nice articles about Esalen. Today, Esalen is packed-you can’t even get in. So very, very quietly these “new/old” ideas are integrating into the very fabric of our society. It’s about something that appears to be almost essential to humanity. Without vision, without the understanding that there is the realm of the spirit that can give us guidance, that can give us meaning to life, I don’t think we can do anything. Life that is just consuming is totally an empty life. You can never get enough of what you really don’t want.

DiCarlo: Speaking of this realm of the spirit-Do you think there are beings that exist on different levels of reality that somehow guide the unfoldment of human potential?

Leonard: Well, I don’t think there is any question. What an impoverished universe it would be if what we see with our senses, and what we can pick up with our instruments of science represented all that there is in existence. Before the understanding of radio waves anybody who said you could hear a message from someone far away would have been labeled a kook. Are we arrogant enough to say that now our instruments have picked up all the emanations of life that exist? Of course there are more! Wherever you go, there is always more. And I don’t know what they are. I am not one of those who follows the idea of aliens and angels, but I would by very surprised, in fact, it’s unthinkable to me that our science and our senses have now picked up all the forms of life or energy that exist. There’s no question about it.

In my own L.E.T. work, Leonard Energy Training, we do exercises that are absolutely reliable, where average, untrained folks can wander around the room with eyes covered with cloth so they cannot see. When I clap my hands, the great majority of these people can point to the location of their partner who might be anywhere in the room or even outside the room. It takes a little induction to get people ready for this. One half hour-that’s all. But this is now routine. This is not special. This is not extraordinary. This is routine. We call this, “The Synchronization Process”.. I describe it briefly in the back of my book, The Silent Pulse.

So obviously, there is some kind of energy there that is not in the electromagnetic spectrum. We don’t want to be electro-magnetic chauvinists you know. There’s got to be more to the world than the electro-magnetic spectrum.

But there’s no question, there are other beings. There have got to be.

DiCarlo: Do you think scientists who are attempting to map and measure these other dimensions of “subtle” energies are heading in the right direction?

Leonard: Yes. Many years ago, myself and my ex-wife went to the University of California at Davis and were measured as we attempted to move our life energy from the right to the left hand. I still have the graphs. They were picking up electrical potentials off the back of each hand, and just by intention alone…we would say, “move energy right” and you would see the pulsations going up, up up, above the mid-line on the graph. Then we would say, “now bring the energy to the left” and you would see the line on the graph go down and over to the other side. Now, how is that done? I don’t know.

So I think, yes, let’s try to measure these things. You have to keep trying or else you’re not a real scientist. You’re not a scientist on the edge of discovery. I think it’s a wonderful idea.

DiCarlo: Could you elaborate on the integral practice for the development of human potential you have developed with Michael Murphy?

Leonard: Mike and I have written a book called The Life We Are Given. In a sense it is the follow upto Michael’s, The Future of The Body but it can stand totally alone. You might say that it is a book of instruction for the average person, which tells them what they can do to begin an integral transformative practice. Integral means, to integrate “mind, body, soul and heart.” Transformative mean that it’s based on positive change. Practice is a wonderful word, meaning something you do on a regular, disciplined basis. Not primarily for the goodies you get out of it, but primarily for the sake of doing it. A practice is the path you walk. You do it for its own sake. Paradoxically, the people who follow a practice for its own sake are the ones who get the most extraordinary results.

In part three of The Future of The Body Michael posits that the best way to achieve metanormal capacities, of perception, communication abilities, vitality, volition, etc. is through integral transformative practices. So for two years, throughout most of 1992 and 1993, we ran an experimental class. There were 33 people in the first group and 30 in the second group. We met for just two hours every Saturday but everybody had a number of commitments, things that they had to do every week. We kept very close statistics. We also had affirmations as to positive changes in their life and especially in their bodies. That’s something a lot of human potential workshops and experiments don’t do. They don’t keep close statistics which helps make things more understandable. We are offering a way for the average person to embark on this practice, just through reading this book and getting together with other folks.

DiCarlo: So this is a step-by-step methodology for individual transformation?

Leonard: Well, we have developed a step-by-step methodology for integral transformative practice. By doing that-and you can’t be sure-the odds are very good that you will get some positive transformation, because almost everybody, especially in the second cycle in 1993, got some very, very significant, positive changes. The amount of change is really quite spectacular. All sorts of wonderful changes in their body, some of which would have to be called metanormal and extraordinary.

DiCarlo: What would be some of the key elements of this practice?

Leonard: First of all, before we started these classes, I developed a less than 40 minute “kata”. Kata is just a convenient term in the martial arts which simply mean “form”. It’s a specific form where you go through a certain series of moves, always in the same sequence.

We asked that everyone in the course perform this kata at least 5 days a week. Some people did this seven days a week. It takes only 40 minutes because from the very beginning we wanted to make this a “householders path”. That is, a practice that can be engaged in by people who have jobs and a family. Not just people who live in a monastery or go on a retreat. So we wanted to do something that was feasible, and that was an important part of the experiment. These people all had jobs and families of sorts-they had a life other than this practice. But by doing the practice they got really remarkable results.

We asked all the participants to attend the class punctually and regularly. Also, we asked that everyone do at least three hours of aerobic exercise every week, in no increment less than 30 minutes. Everyone was also asked to be conscious of everything they ate, and a very low fat diet was recommended. We also recommended strength training but that was not absolutely required. We asked that everybody stay current in their emotional relations with all the people in the class, the teachers, and the people in their lives. We also did some emotional group work in the class, but we allowed people to do whatever they needed to do to handle that and report on it. Staying current in other words. Not letting things build up. Keeping the emotional information flowing to the appropriate people.

We also had affirmations. Everyone made four affirmations near the beginning of the class. These affirmations were written in the present tense, and went something like this, “I George Leonard, intend to see that the following circumstances have occurred by November 21, 1992.” Then, the rest is written in present tense, and for affirmation number one, we asked people to do things that are normal-not metanormal by any means. In other words, something that if you just did what you were supposed to do, you would achieve it and nobody would be surprised. It would be quite understandable through all the canons and concepts of present day science and medicine. For example, a person might affirm in writing, “My waist measures 32 inches” whereas it might measure 34 inches in the beginning.

All participants fill out a record of their affirmations, which is kept in a file. At the end, on November the 21st using this example, they would make note of their progress. If they have really watched their diet, and if they have done the aerobic exercises and perhaps the strength exercises, no one should be surprised that they have achieved this intended outcome.

The second affirmation for the first year was what we call, “exceptional”. Something that could still be explained by modern, mainstream science, but which would be an exception. Such as, “I measure 5 foot 6 inches” and your measurement right now is 5 foot 5 inches. Well, to grow an inch at age forty is kind of unusual isn’t it? I think most people can grow about a third of an inch or a half of an inch just by improving their posture. But to actually grow measurably a whole inch would be kind of exceptional.

We rated people on a scale of zero to ten to see how well they achieved their affirmations. We tried to make it as objective as possible with measurements. We didn’t restrict it to the objective because that would be too limiting, but we had people make it objective as much as possible. In other words, if a person were affirming an improvement in eyesight, we asked them to go to an eye doctor and have the eyes measured and have a record of it in the beginning and again, eleven months later. Incidentally, in that particular case we got remarkable results.

The third affirmation was the metanormal, something that could not be explained by traditional science and something that rarely happens to people. For example, a metanormal affirmation might be to grow two inches. And we got fascinating results. In fact, during the 1993 program, the success in achieving affirmation number three was 6.67 on a scale from zero to ten.

The fourth affirmation was the same for everybody, “My entire body is balanced, vital and healthy.” We wanted to cover this base because we didn’t want someone to achieve an unusual metanormal state at the expense of their health and balance. And that was one that we really excelled at with an 8.2 overall improvement in health on a zero to 10 scale.

Taking a look at all this gave us some ideas for some very practical applications. We cannot solve our health care crisis in a financially viable way. It is impossible to do it no matter what method we use, as long as we continue to use our present method of medical technology, which is sickness based and relies upon expensive drugs and expensive technology. The only way we can make it work is through a radical change in lifestyle. And if we can change the lifestyle of a group of ordinary Americans, improving their health by 8.2 on a scale of 0 to 10, we can save hundreds of billions of dollars in this country. So it’s very practical.

So we asked that everyone fulfill their affirmations. In other words, they continued to speak their affirmations in various ways. In practice we used focused surrender, which was one of our best methods and inductions for achieving these meta-normalities.

DiCarlo: Focused surrender? What’s that?

Leonard: While writing The Silent Pulse , I noticed there seem to be certain magical moments in life, which I call periods of perfect rhythm, where everything seems perfect. If you go one way that’s exactly the right way and you’ll find something marvelous there; if you go the other way that’s the right way, and so forth and so on. These moments of perfect rhythm generally come in a period where you have concentrated very hard on something. You are really focused. After this period of intense concentration, you surrender. You let go of that which you were focusing upon. Focused surrender is a combination of these two actions.

There’s a big debate going on right now: Is the petitioned form of prayer, where an individual requests something specific, like a cure from an illness, more effective than accepting prayer, thanksgiving prayer, like “Thy Will Be Done”. There has been research studying the effectiveness of various kinds of prayer on various kinds of organisms. The debate is still open. Some people come down on the side, “Thy Will Be Done” as the best way to go about it. In other words, surrender.

Now what I have done-and I did this way back in the 70s-is to devise a way where you really get both. A combination of the two. And it’s really at the point where you surrender that magical things might begin to happen. Extraordinary things. What I call this is a “mental-material interface”. In Integral Transformation Practice training we have an activity where we sound a gong. As long as the participant can hear the gong, they are to focus with all their power on making whatever state they want to achieve absolutely real in their consciousness. This is real in the present moment in this universe, because your consciousness is a part of this universe. If you want to experience yourself as being an inch taller, you see yourself as an inch taller. That exists in your consciousness and it’s real. Take the example of the wiring diagram of a little radio. The radio itself is real. No one would dispute that since it is concrete and exists in three dimensions. Of course, if you drop it and step on it, it won’t work anymore. It’s broken. There’s also a wiring diagram. That’s real too, it’s just on two dimensions primarily. Now, how about the diagram as it exists in the mind of the inventor, of the person who works on that radio. Is that real or not? My argument is that these represent three different forms of reality, but they are all equally real.

So next, the person is instructed to follow the tone of the gong down into the void itself, into the nothingness. When it reaches that void and nothingness from which all things arise-the creative void-they completely let go of whatever they are envisioning. The way we do it, you are lying on your back and you hold your left hand up over your abdomen as long as you can hear the sound. If you can no longer hear the sound, drop it. Say, “I give up.” What we have found-and we can’t prove this-is that at the moment of surrender, the mental-material interface somehow clicks in. In other words, what was real in the mental realm, to some small extent becomes real in the material realm. Of all the methods we have tried, focused-surrender has turned out to be our most effective induction.

The great warrior works to achieve control, then acts with abandon. In aikido, I have worked and worked and worked on certain techniques, but when I’m being attacked, if I think about the techniques, I’ve had it. You have got to let go totally. Just let it happen. Achieve control, then act with abandon. Many great sports achievements, and many great achievements in the world, I think, result from the combination of the two.

DiCarlo: I like that because then you get a blend between personal will and perhaps Higher Will. There’s no conflict, just a creative dance between the individual and the universe.

Leonard: Boy, you’ve got it exactly. It’s not one or the other. The idea of focused surrender in which the mental and material can touch, individual will finally letting go to grace. As Mike said in his book, “The winds of grace are always blowing, you just have to raise your sails.”

DiCarlo: What sort of metanormal capabilities have manifested for some of the people?

Leonard: There’s one woman in her mid-40s whose grandfather on her mother’s side went practically blind from cataracts. This was before the condition could be treated through surgery, and this man could barely see. Her mother had the cataract operation in her 40s. This woman has three older sisters, and each of them had the cataract operation while they were in their 40s. It was an absolutely genetic condition. When this woman in the class had achieved the age of 42, she developed cataracts, which was noted in her yearly examination and she assumed she too would have the operation since one of the cataracts was near the middle of the cornea.

So she made an affirmation in the 1992 class that her eyes were free of cataracts. Unfortunately, when she went in for the first examination, she told the eye doctor. He scoffed at the idea. He said, “well, you can change some things, but cataracts you can never change.” Still, she was a good student and did that work and every time she did the kata she would take the palms of her hand and place them three or four inches from each eye, kind of stroking the eyes with the energy in the palms of each hand, saying, “My vision is clear. My eyes are free of cataracts.”

When time at the end of the 92 cycle came, this woman just couldn’t face going in for her eye exam because the doctor had been so certain the condition could not be healed without surgery. If you’ve ever wondered why people don’t achieve their potential, this is one example. The cultural pressure of the current paradigm is extremely powerful and is enunciated in so many different ways by the experts and the acknowledged authorities in each field.

Although the woman had given up on it , she continued doing the affirmation every time she did the kata, which was five times a week. Near the end of the second year of the program, she needed some prescription sunglasses and her old prescription was out of date. She went to the same hospital as before and after she had the exam she waited for the usual cataract lecture. The doctor said, “Do you have any inherited eye problems?” She responded, “Don’t you know? How about my cataracts?” “What cataracts?,” said the doctor. They were gone.

DiCarlo: That’s an incredible example of realized human potential. I’m wondering, how does this potential, which is inherently in us all, get blocked? You’ve already mentioned cultural pressures…

Leonard: Let me give you some examples…. You know how as schoolchildren, we all worried that we didn’t have enough ability. We weren’t sure that we were going to do well enough on the achievement tests. Well, I really believe that the biggest threat to the establishment is not underachieving, but rather it’s the threat of overachieving.

When I was covering education back in the 1960s, I was going around the country doing an article on programmed education. In fact, it was that same story , “Revolution in Education” that gave me the idea for the human potential story. It was in Roanoke, Virginia, where I had heard about this student at a local junior high school who had taken a simple programmed course on solid geometry home for a long weekend. He finished one semester’s worth of work over that period, Friday until Monday. Now do you think the school system would cheer about that?

DiCarlo: You would think they would marvel at the accomplishment..

Leonard: No, they thought, “what the hell do we do with this guy?” What do you do with the kids who come into first grade reading very fluently? The system is set-up to keep everybody in lock-step. Those who are not in lock-step are a threat to the system.

I think that humans natural tendency is to learn. We are learning animals. We are put here on this planet to learn. We are genetically endowed to learn a great deal over a lifetime rather than having to wait through the mechanisms of evolution, of mutation and selection and so forth. Because of this, changes can be made during one lifetime. But unfortunately, there is actually very little positive reinforcement, and much adversive conditioning which is opposed to people achieving their full potential.

DiCarlo: Would you say that it’s a control issue?

Leonard: Control?

DiCarlo: In so far as certain people in society wanting to control us in certain ways…

Leonard: I don’t think it’s any conscious control. In my book, The Transformation I offer the whole idea of the human individual as being a component of society as an example of one of the inventions of civilization. The first pyramid building gangs you might say. We specialize and standardize components so they are reliable and predictable. A true learner is none of those things. A learner is eternally surprising. Unpredictable. Not necessarily reliable to do the same job the same way every time. So the entire system works against the full development of human potential. The system works against learning. Our present school system actually set-up to stop the human organism from learning in a really radical and deep way.

To learn is to change. Education is a process which changes the learner. How much are we willing for our students to change in school? You know, they see, “Two plus two,” and before they have learned elementary addition they will just look at it with a blank expression on their face. After being taught they can say, “four.” And that is a change. So that’s definitely a learning. Our children are learning certain amounts of symbolic manipulation and the memorization of a bit of the common cultural material, but in learning to be a learner, and learning to create, in learning to love, in learning to feel deeply, there is a tremendous constraint against learning, if learning is any kind of significant change. And if learning is not any kind of significant change, then what the hell is it? In other words, if you don’t change after a learning experience, if you are not different from when the learning experience started, you have not learned much. Learning is not truly respected. Education as it is now constituted really works against learning in the deepest sense. You don’t want people to change deeply because it would be very worrisome to the system.

I have often thought about this: Let’s say that learning is done in segments. I am not sure that’s even the right way to do it, but if learning is done in segments in school, at the end of each segment, the teacher should not be necessary. In other words, the teacher should fade from prominence. Maybe one of the jobs of a teacher is to set the learners on a course of learning, and then gradually fade himself or herself, so that the last day, the students wouldn’t even notice the teacher there.

DiCarlo: That would be a switch..

We need to cultivate a real respect for learning. You know, people’s thought of the human potential movement does not normally include calculus. I think it does include calculus. Mike and I both feel that way. Another requirement we had in our Integral Transformative Practice Club (ITP), was that everybody would agree to read assignments and write essays. That doesn’t sound very New Age does it?

DiCarlo: Not at all…

Leonard: But that’s integral transformative practice-it’s across the board. We feel that to neglect any of those four aspects of being human-mind, body, heart or soul-is a big mistake. People will do things if they know why they are doing them. If they have some kind of vision as to why they are doing them. We need vision. Every viable culture and every successful individual needs at least two guardian angels-vision and practice. Both of those have been totally lost. They have become endangered species in the culture of the freeway and shopping mall.

Vision is given away to obsession with short term goals; practice is given away to the quick fix. “The One Minute Manager”, “Total Fitness in One Week”. Almost all “how-to” books; New Age books are mostly quick-fix books. And you don’t learn anything by the quick fix. It takes long-term regular practice.

There’s an old Eastern idea that “where there is no practice, nations fall into ruin.” I think we have to get the idea of long-term, regular practice for everybody, rather than “10 Easy Lessons” or “Fast, Temporary Relief”-all the slogans you hear in this culture.

Just take a look at the areas in which we have our biggest problems: the economy; health care; politics; pharmacology; crime; and environment, the most important one of all. Look at each of these. The factor that is common to each problem involves long term versus short-term. In all of those, we tend to do what seems best on the short term, but what we are really doing is losing the long term. Almost always, the short term is inimical to the long term. Sometimes you have to do both, but we’ve almost totally neglected the long term. So I think that factor, long term versus short term is something people need to take a look at.

When you adopt a practice, you’re in it for the long haul. You work, and work and work on a thing. You diligently keep practicing the same thing over and over again. You are not getting anywhere- or so you think. But you are getting somewhere. It doesn’t show itself. Then finally when it clicks in, you have this little spurt of apparent progress. But where did the learning take place? It took place on the plateau.

Just think about all those years people worked against the whole communist system. Then in a period of a few weeks, the Berlin wall goes down. Then a few months afterwards most of the eastern satellites had given up communism. Some said, “My God, change occurred very fast.” But in reality, that change was occurring over the last 20 or 30 years. The change occurred because of long time learning. And the learning occurs on the plateau. So if I have any message, I want to preach the plateau…you have to preach the plateau to young people. Just hang in there.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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DiCarlo: In your work you describe three eras of medicine: Era 1, Era 2, and Era 3. Using that as a framework, could you explain the emerging paradigm of medicine as you see it?

Dossey: I formulated this three era approach to medicine basically to make sense of all the therapies that are out there and to characterize the way that we define ourselves as human beings. If you start at the time when medicine first became scientific, which began in the decade of the 1860s and move forward from there, at least 3 different eras “shake-out” in terms of the nature of health-care and how we think about the nature of who we are.

Era 1, which began in the 1860s, is plain old mechanical medicine. It looks at the body and the mind as purely physical, as purely pursuing the blind laws of nature. The therapies that shake out of that approach are medications, surgery, radiation and so on. The body is not functioning properly, so the “doctor-mechanic” uses whatever tools of treatment are available to fix the problem.

In the 1940s, a different way of thinking about who we are emerged as people started talking about psycho-somatic diseases. This was the second era, Era-2, or what is today called “Mind-Body Medicine”. Originally, it suggested that negative thoughts can do bad things to the body, thus the term psycho-somatic disease. Now, this has been sort of turned on its head and we recognize that thoughts, emotions, attitudes and feelings can really be used to make people healthy. You can even make dreadful diseases go away by activating these positive emotions. An example of this is the scientific work of Dr. Dean Ornish in reversing coronary artery disease. So basically Era 2 is the impact of thought, feeling and belief within an individual.

DiCarlo: Would you say then, that television programs, with titles like “Healing and the Mind” and “The Heart of Healing” are basically rooted in Era 2 medicine?

Dossey: Almost totally Era 2. One of my frustrations with these types of TV programs is that they neglected a tremendous body of evidence which supports putting a third era on the table, Era 3, which I want to call “Transpersonal Medicine” or “Non-Local” medicine. This emerging era of medicine–although it has probably been around as long as human beings have been here–is contingent upon the ability of the mind to function non-locally. That is to say, the ability of the mind to function beyond the person, beyond the individual.

In Era 2, you are concerned about what your thoughts, feelings and attitudes can do to your body. Period. That’s what most of these television programs have centered upon, and that’s great. But there is compelling evidence, such as the evidence for the effectiveness of distant intercessory prayer–that the mind has some quality which allows it to reach out across space and time to affect the physical course of a distant living organism–whether that’s a human being or something else. So many people in the alternative health care movement think that Mind-Body medicine is just about as far out and exotic as the new model is going to get. But I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We need to begin to focus upon and acknowledge this emerging Era 3-type data which shows the ability of the mind to function at a distance–irrespective of the spatial separation from the object of its concern. We need to begin to ask questions about what this may mean.

Prayer is not the only body of available evidence which supports the ability of the mind to function at a distance. In the book, “Healing Words” I look at several categories, among which is transpersonal imagery. Most people think this is just the use of positive images to you do something nice for your body. That’s one definition and one use. But Dr. William Braud has shown that people who hold positive images of a distant person in a way that is caring, compassionate and prayer-like can actually bring about physical changes in that distant person.

So you see, we can differentiate three different categories or eras to define consciousness, and its relationship to the body which exists in space and time. Although my personal interest in the 1970s and 80s centered on Era 2, “Mind-Body” medicine, today, my interest has been captured by the emerging Era 3 medicine. There is a lot of neglected data that I want to make public. And secondly, I think there is more philosophical, spiritual, and practical “bang-for-your-buck” in this Era 3 medicine. Era 2 can still be explained based upon the chemistry and the anatomy of the brain and body. And you can still say, “So what? That’s great while you are alive, but take away the brain, and you’ve got nothing.” So there’s nothing more following death when the mind is confined to the brain. But in Era 3, the stakes are completely different. You can’t hold on to the idea that it’s all brain and body. If you honor this Era 3-type data, it is patently obvious that consciousness is capable of things that brains are incapable of. In other words, you cannot completely account for the workings of consciousness by studying the brain. This means there must be something about the psyche over and above the brain and the body. Working out the implications of all this has been my task.

DiCarlo: I’m wondering what might have sparked your interest in research the effects of prayer?

Dossey: As a child I was naturally curious. I grew up in a Protestant religious community in Central Texas where a lot of praying went on all the time. I was involved in that. At sometime or another I think that most people who pray wonder if their efforts are working, and ask themselves “Is it doing anything?” I was curious about that.

After I became a physician, I began to notice that some people got well even though no medical treatment had been rendered, except prayer. Sometimes these people had fairly dreadful diseases. So one wonders again, “Is the prayer operative? Did it do anything or is this one of those funny coincidences?”

I think many physicians have this sense of curiosity. I was propelled forward again when I discovered a 1988 controlled study out of San Francisco General Hospital which involved nearly 400 patients in the coronary care unit. The group that was prayed for appeared to do much, much better than the group which received no prayer. I went to the medical literature to see if there had been any previous studies involving prayer to support this. I was astonished to discover over 130 studies in this general area showing that prayer really does something remarkable–not just in human beings but in a great many other living things, from bacteria and germinating seeds, to rats and mice and so on.

So it was a curiosity which propelled me to the discovery of scientific data in the area of the prayer and its observable effects.

DiCarlo: What would you say has been the essential finding of your research?

Dossey: The essential message is that belief in prayer is no longer just a matter of faith. We’ve always said, “You can believe in this stuff if you want to, but you are on thin ice and shaky ground. It’s no longer just a matter of faith. There is overwhelming evidence that if you take prayer into the laboratory and subject it to testing, you can show that it works. So, that’s the big news. This information has been marginalized and it is practically unknown, even to physicians. It is not taught in medical schools. But it’s out there. Through my work I hope to bring this information forward, so that it can be placed out on the table for discussion and dialogue.

My primary interest is not the practical applications of prayer to make diseases go away. It’s really the larger message about who we are, and what our origins and destiny may be. How consciousness manifests in the world. Those are the real issues that go far beyond whether you can use prayer to bail yourself out of a difficult situation or illness.

DiCarlo: How do you define prayer?

Dossey: The prevailing notion that prayer is asking for something–basically talking out loud to a cosmic male parent figure who basically prefers English–either for yourself or somebody else is woefully incomplete. I want to get away from that common way of looking at prayer. Prayer for me is any psychological act which brings us closer to the transcendent. It’s not the territory of any specific religion. Belief in a personal God is not even necessary. For example, Buddhists pray all the time, but Buddhism is not a theistic religion.They don’t even believe in a personal God.

Prayer may involve words. We don’t want to disenfranchise people who like to talk when they pray. That’s fine. It’s just that it goes deeper than that. It can involve silence, non-activity. It can even be done in the subconscious or when we sleep at night. So I prefer to use the term “prayerfulness” to capture those activities we have traditionally called prayer. One of the common features of prayerfulness that really makes a difference in the world is empathy, caring, compassion, love and so on. This has been demonstrated in the laboratory. It is clear that the experiments don’t work very well if a person does not have empathy, love, compassion and caring for the object or subject they are trying to influence. The experiments work so much better if there is an empathic connection, a unity, a caring bond.

DiCarlo: So in the case of these experiments that you have uncovered, love was found to be more than a nice sentiment or feeling–a real force critical to the healing process itself?

Dossey: Let’s say this. Love is a felt quality that can change the state of the physical world. We are beyond metaphor and poetry here. We are talking about something that literally can make a difference in outcomes in the world.

DiCarlo: I have to say that I was struck by the comprehensive number of studies you have reported on.

Dossey: That’s one of the things I have taken pains to do. Every book I have ever written has at least 20 pages at the end which list references–mostly from scientific journals–to exemplify the fact that we’re not just talking anecdotes here. This stuff flows out of science. If you want ammunition, there it is.

DiCarlo: How would you respond to the materialists who explain away the concept of realms of existence that go beyond the physical? That the mind is the brain and nothing more?

Dossey: I think the best response is to play science. You see, the theories and hypotheses of the materialists work fine as long as you restrict yourself to a certain class of data and ignore other data. The materialists cannot account for non-local events. There is currently nothing within the field of biological science that can explain distant, non-local, consciousness-related events. Period. To discover an explanation, you have to revise the materialist manifesto, which states that there is nothing beyond matter, there is nothing beyond what is perceivable through the five senses.

The problem is, the skeptics and the materialists won’t look at non-local data at the level of biology and psychology. They will grant you that non-local phenomena occur at the quantum level–the level of the very small, such as atoms and subatomic particles. That has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But the notion that these things can happen at the level of the psyche and at the level of biology is just not being entertained. They have some classical ways of dismissing the kind of data that I have been focusing on. They paint it with the term, “parapsychology.” They will say, “Oh, that’s just parapsychology.” But it doesn’t matter what it’s called. The real question is, “Is the data good?” And if the data is good, then the materialists are in a world of trouble, and the materialist way of looking at things by saying that “It’s just all matter and energy” falls flat on its face.

Let me tell you why. These non-local manifestations of consciousness–among which prayer is one type–display characteristics that are not displayed by any known form of energy. For example, prayer, transpersonal imagery effects, an so on, are not a function of the amount of distance a person is from their target. These activities are just as effective when done on the other side of the earth as when they are done close up. All known forms of energy display something called “The Law of the Inverse Squared” which means that the farther away from the source of the energy you get, the weaker the energy becomes. Prayer doesn’t do that. Transpersonal imagery effects don’t demonstrate that principle of physics either. Robert Jahn’s data at Princeton doesn’t display dissipation with distance. Furthermore, you can put the object of the prayer in a shielded Faraday cage lined with lead, which for all practical purposes shields out electromagnetic energy of all types, and the prayer still gets through. The transpersonal imagery still works.

What I am saying is that the psyche has ways of manifesting far beyond anything known to materialistic science. You need to get a feel for what’s at stake here. The reason that many of the dedicated materialistic scientists are so infuriated over the mere discussion of prayer and distant healing, is that it really begins to call into question their world view. It calls into question the adequacy of materialistic science, upon which these people have staked their careers, self-identity and self-esteem. And when you begin to question somebody’s world view, that’s more inflammatory than making derogatory comments about their mother. It generates tremendous animosity and really draws a line in the sand. If the data is right, then the materialist’s model of the universe is inadequate. It’s down to that. That’s why you see people libeling and slandering other people over these issues in the scientific journals. These are really fighting words, and that’s why people get angry about them.

DiCarlo: In a lot of respects, I would guess that a lot of researchers in this area have been forced into a catch-22 situation. Prestigious scientific journals will not even publish the research, and if an individual is not able to publish, they are essentially put out of business. No money for further research will be available.

Dossey: It’s slowly changing…if it were all as intractable as it seems at times, things would never change. But historically, science and medicine have been dynamic and world views do change. Thomas Kuhn’s work at Harvard regarding paradigms demonstrates this. Up to a point, everything seems secure and people are locked-in to a particular world view, but gradually the exceptions that just don’t fit the prevailing world view tip the scale. And when the scale gets tipped, the paradigm switches rather rapidly. I personally get the feeling that the data is mounting up inexorably on the other side of the scale. The tip is visible in the not-too-distant future. I just think you can never put this genie back into the bottle. According to Kuhn’s model of scientific revolution, it’s predictable that the critics and the skeptics are never more vocal and hostile than right before the switch in world views.

Right after I began to attract the attention of cynics, materialists and skeptics in medicine, I pulled a book off my shelf called “Garrison’s History of Medicine” which was written back in 1929. It’s one of my favorite books. I went back and I looked at the way the great medical authorities of the day treated Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was among the first to suggest handwashing. He was vilified for proposing the silly idea that washing your hands could cut down on the incidence of infections and death following childbirth, in spite of the fact that there was supportive scientific data which had been collected from the hospital. It showed that the practice of physician hand-washing tremendously lowered the death rate following childbirth. The data was in, yet in spite of that, this man was unbelievably hounded by other leading orthodox obstetricians.

This kind of response never changes. It has been played out time and again in the history of medicine. You are seeing it again here, and I will tell you, it will probably make the objections to hand-washing look very tame in comparison. You have world class researchers and a great many other philosophers saying all this stuff is silly. And they will claim that they have carefully looked at the data and it’s all baloney. What we have is a basic disagreement. Although this may not be perfect science, I believe that a great many of these experiments are so clean and tight, with such great controls that you can take them to the bank. Look at it this way, if just one of these 130 experiments that I mention in the book is right, the materialists viewpoint is bankrupt.

DiCarlo: Marcel Truzzi , a self-acknowledged skeptic, suggests that the focus needs to be on the preponderance of the evidence, not simply isolated studies. Would you say that the preponderance of the evidence in the studies that you have researched indicate that prayer works and that the prevailing materialistic paradigm is inadequate?

Dossey: Yes. I would emphasize the word inadequate. I don’t want to say invalid. We haven’t thrown away Newtonian physics just because quantum physics came on to the scene, but it certainly did show Newton’s view was incomplete. I love Truzzi’s phrase, “preponderance of evidence”. There is variation in all areas of scientific work. I don’t care what area it is. All the studies in any given field never show exactly the same results and this is true in the 130 experiments I have identified. Over half of them showed statistical significance that something phenomenal was going on. But the skeptic will say, “Ok, well look. Half of them show significance, but half don’t. Trash the whole thing.” That’s not fair. That’s not the way science is played. One must look at the preponderance of evidence.

In any given field, one looks at the most precise and accurate experimental protocols. You don’t look at the experiments that are not as well designed. You look at what the best-designed studies show. And I would be willing to say that the best studies in this field offer the best evidence. They show the most powerful effects. Actually, there are about three or four areas of parapsychological research which have been subjected to “meta-analysis” a powerful form of statistical analysis by people with world-class reputations like Robert Rosenthal at Harvard. Rosenthal has made a career in figuring out how to do this kind of analysis in tough subject areas. He was invited to analyze parapsychological studies by the National Research Council (NRC), which is a materialistically-oriented organization,which was putting together a report on human performance. After looking at several areas in the parapsychological literature, Rosenthal concluded that the level of quality of the research in those areas was extraordinarily high. This so angered the NRC that they asked him to withdraw his statement in their report. He refused and they eliminated it anyway. This is an example of the ends to which people will go to keep the prevailing paradigm propped up. Physicist Max Planck, commenting about the controversy surrounding quantum physics around the turn of the century said that, science changes funeral by funeral. That’s a clever way of stating that some people are never going to change their mind.

DiCarlo: What evidence exists to support the assertion that a new paradigm is emerging within the field of medicine?

Dossey: You can get a feeling for the profound changes taking place within medicine by looking at Dr. David Eisenburg’s 1992 Harvard survey which found that over 60 million Americans went to alternative therapists that year–one-third of the adult population. That sounds like a huge shift to me.

DiCarlo: It’s interesting that a lot of the change that is taking place in medicine is occurring through forces outside of the medical profession.

Dossey: One of the great examples of that is the way the Office of Alternative Medicine became established within the NIH. It came about as a result of outside political pressure. Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa was the prime advocate. And I think it’s still true that most doctors within the National Institute of Health wish that this office didn’t exist and would go away. But it has been established by order of law. It really is a landmark development and it does illustrate your point.

DiCarlo: What is the purpose of the Office of Alternative Medicine?

Dossey: First of all, it is not an advocacy group. It’s not advocating anything. It’s purpose is to dispassionately evaluate alternative forms of medicine in this country to see if further exploration is warranted. It’s intended to apply science to areas of therapy other than drugs and surgery, which typically get evaluated within the rest of the NIH. It really is a window of opportunity to take a look at therapies that otherwise would not be evaluated.

We want to see what will shake out. There are basically three questions that we must ask of any alternative therapy:

1. Does it work?
2. What’s the downside or side-effects?
3. Is it cost-effective?

And that’s the role of this office. It’s not to advocate anything.

DiCarlo: Are there certain assumptions that we have about ourselves as human beings that your research would tend to reject?

Dossey: Yes, I think we have been laboring under some fairly dismal and erroneous assumptions about ourselves. The most erroneous assumption is that we are separate individuals. By definition, if something about minds is non-local and there aren’t any boundaries around them, at some level there cannot be some five and one-half billion individual minds walking around on the earth all safely separated from one another. At some point, they are one. This was the point that was put forth by Erwin Shroedinger back in the 30s–a Noble Prize-winning physicist.

Now, I would propose to you that if people could really “get it”–that at some point we really are not separated but instead we share identity at a certain psychological dimension– this would constitute a radically different ethical and moral imperative. It could have the effect of reducing a lot of international anger and war. Why would you want to go and make war on another individual if at some level you and they were the same? I think this raises brotherhood and sisterhood to a new level. It takes it out of the dimension of just being nice towards another person. It really does take it out of the level of metaphor to the level of fact. It makes it very, very real.

I think that this could have a transformative effect on business. For instance, as a natural urge, why wouldn’t you want to make the very best possible product for another human being, if at some level you and they were the same? You are not doing this for somebody who is totally different and isolated from you. You are doing it for yourself, to yourself. This makes literal for instance, the Golden Rule imperative, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Why? Because at some level they are you. And so I think you can see how non-local implications of mind reverberate through virtually every human activity we can think of.

DiCarlo: Are there any other limiting assumptions many of us tend to have?

Dossey: I think that a lot of people in this culture have been deeply brutalized by the false assumption that there are only two ways you can live a life and you have to choose one or the other. You can choose to be intellectual, rational and scientific on the one hand, or on the other, you can live your life intuitively, spiritually. It’s being either the scientist or the artist or mystic and there is no way to get those two abilities together in your life. This schizophrenic assumption has caused immense suffering for people in this culture and I think that’s a false divide. If you look at the implications of these prayer studies for example, where you can show under laboratory controlled conditions that things like empathy, compassion, love, and caring can make a difference, and that there is some aspect of the psyche that is eternal, non-local, immortal–spiritual if you will-the fact that we can show that scientifically suggests that this great divide between science, religion and spirituality is false.

I would hope that this dialogue over Era 3, non-local aspects of consciousness, can help heal this gap between science and spirituality. But to do this, you have to have the courage and integrity to honor this data and go through it, instead of around it as we traditionally have done.

DiCarlo: Some people make a distinction between being a healer and being a doctor. Is there a difference in your view?

Dossey: There certainly seems to be in this culture. Healing is a word that is practically forbidden in medical schools and hospitals. You don’t talk about healing. You talk about the mechanics of medicine. It’s really that simple. If you were to actually use the word healing the way you just used the word, people in these places would look at you with very strange facial expressions.

The very possibility that some doctors might have healing capacities unshared by others is a foreign idea. My wife, who is a cardiovascular nurse and an author who is widely known in her profession, got a fax today from a nursing chairman at a major US hospital. It said, “Dear Barbara Dossey, although we do not plan currently to invite you to our next annual nursing conference at our hospital, I can assure you that we will do so in the future when we get into healing.” My wife came and showed me that and said, “What do you suppose they are into now?” So, figure it out for yourself. It’s all mechanical. The idea that there are these other qualities that could be called healing potentials, healing powers, healing skills–it’s an idea that has not yet come for hospitals. It’s changing though.

DiCarlo: Weston Agor has been doing a lot of ground-breaking work in the area of intuition in business. Has intuition played a significant role in your work?

Dossey: Well, I think intuition has played a major role. One of the ways that surgeons have of describing internists, of which I am one, is to call them crystal ball gazers. This is not intended as a compliment. This is one of the labels that is always levied by surgeons to the internists because “They think too damn much.”

But I think there may be an element of truth to it. I believe that doctors frequently make intuitive diagnoses that have nothing to do with the known facts, physical examinations, and assessment of lab data. I had a long section on this subject in my previous book, “Meaning and Medicine.” There was a phenomenon called “snap diagnosis” that was the rage on this continent back in the late 1700s up to the mid-1800s. The great teachers in the medical schools would vie with each other in making accurate diagnoses with a minimal amount of information. Napoleons’ physician was one of the best at this. These individuals would have diagnostic information just come to them from within. They would walk past a room and say,”The patient in that bed has this disease.” Or they would look at a portrait and say, “This is what the diagnosis is.”

Well, few people will talk about snap diagnosis because that’s been laid to rest. You have to dig that out of history books. But here’s a connection you can consider. If there’s some aspect of consciousness that is non-local, that cannot be confined to space and to time, if the mind can reach into the future–which a non-local mind by definition can do–and if there is no separation between minds at some level, then this intuition takes on a whole new luster.

For example, if a diagnosis will one day be known, why can you not intuit it right now if there are no temporal barriers? If someone in the world knows the diagnosis, why couldn’t you know it too if consciousness is omnipresent and there aren’t any divisions at some level? So intuition takes on a whole new flavor through the lens of non-locality. Where this becomes practical is illustrated in a series of experiments by Dr. Norman Shealy with Carolyn Myss who is an intuitive. Carolyn is 93% correct at a distance in her diagnosis of 100 patients. I know of no internists, relying upon the data and physical exams, who are that accurate in the early stages of diagnosis. So if you can make intuitive diagnosis with that degree of accuracy, this is no longer a laboratory fluke. It is no longer an irrelevant plaything or a stage trick. This has stunning medical implications.

DiCarlo: “Who are we?” and “what is the nature of the Universe in which we live are questions that cut right to the heart of the shift in perspective of the emerging paradigm. In light of your research,what is your response?

Dossey: For at least the last 200 years, our culture has embraced an idea, born of science, that the universe is a pretty dismal place. When we die, that’s it. There’s nothing that survives. Life is all a matter of chemistry, anatomy, and the physiology of the brain. When the brain and body die and rot–that’s it. That’s a very dismal outlook, and that doesn’t sound like a very friendly universe to me.

On the other hand, if you take seriously the implications of these prayer studies, and other categories of experiments that have been done in addition to prayer, the research seems to suggest that consciousness can violate time and space. It seems to be non-local. It seems to be infinite in space and time in the way that it behaves. If you take those experiments and data seriously, then you can arrive at a completely different conclusion regarding the nature of the universe. You are able to say, for instance, that there is some aspect of the psyche, of consciousness, that is not confined to time and space or to brains and bodies. It is apparently infinite in space and time. And if it is, then by definition it must be omni-present, eternal, immortal. This turns the tables on the dismal, traditional view of science. It says that something about us survives. It has no beginning. It has no ending. It is eternal and immortal. Now I will grant you that we don’t have any “soul meters” to give you a direct read-out on whether or not anything like the soul exists, but we’ve got the next best thing. We have reasonable empirical evidence that is indirect, that something about us is non-local in space and time. That to me sounds like an extraordinarily friendly universe.

DiCarlo: So you are suggesting that science has provided evidence for the existence of an immortal soul? That’s astounding.

Dossey: I would add the word indirect to it–because the evidence is indirect. But I think it is absolutely sensational. I have thought about these implications for a great many years and I believe that the reasoning here is as straight as an arrow. I do not know how to take this data seriously and come to any other conclusion. This information is so positive and so potentially transformative that it should be shouted from rooftops. It is that promising. I happen to believe that the fear of death and extermination has caused more fear, pain, agony and suffering in human beings than anything else in the history of the human race. This information has a way of neutralizing that fear. It gives positive answers to those fears. I think this information is what I would call the “Big Cure” for the “Big Disease”–the fear of death. This is no exaggeration. I believe that this kind of reasoning is that potentially sensational. There’s a tremendous pay-off here, spiritually and practically for people.

DiCarlo: Do you feel that it’s important at this juncture in our collective history that we recognize this aspect of our being?

Dossey: Well, the choice is to continue muddling along with this clinical depression that seems to be affecting our society, our culture and our species. That, “we’re bogged down, the planet’s going to hell in a handbasket and we’re going right along with it.” I think that a recognition of these inherently divine qualities can have a rejuvenating effect on our definition of who we are, our collective self-esteem, our sense of empowerment, and what we might be able to do in whatever time we have left on this planet. And I choose these words carefully. I think there is some sense of urgency involved to get this information out, to re-define who we are as individuals and as a species.

DiCarlo: What are the beliefs about “the way things are” that you hold that you feel are especially empowering in the turbulent times we live in?

Dossey: The most important is a felt sense that no matter what happens, at some level it’s OK. I basically give a “yes” answer to what Einstein once said is the most important question in the world,” Is the universe friendly?” I think there is a pattern. I think there is a process and design in the universe. I think there is place in the universe for enduring human consciousness. I think that the most essential aspect of who we are is immortal. In view of that, the overarching and most important fact is, I think that what happens on this scale is relatively less important. That doesn’t mean I am not going to work my fanny off while I am in this form of existence, but I basically think that Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize winning American poet had it right when he said, “The only people who are fit to work truly for the survival of this planet, are those who have the wisdom to see it go to hell in a handbasket.” I don’t plan to do that by the way. I intend to be as active as I can before I sign-off.

The important thing is the nature of human consciousness and whether or not it has a home in the universe. I think it does. This belief has contributed immeasurably to my mental peace and my serenity. For me, the notion that whatever happens is OK, drives me to even greater activity, not less.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

DiCarlo: Could you explain to me the origins and purpose of the Center For Frontier Sciences?

Rubik: The Center was set up by the Temple University administration in 1987. The administrative team included the president of this state university, the provost and a few members of the board. Some of these individuals had prior experience with alternative medicines, and they wondered why no one in science was taking a look at these things. They wanted to explore not just alternative medicine but some other issues in science that they felt the scientific system had been closed to so they set up the Center for the Study of Frontier Issues in Science. That was the original name. The purpose of the center was simply to ask questions, not to advocate a certain position. In 1988 I was brought in to serve as Director. At the outset, I became the scapegoat for a lot of antagonism from the faculty, who were not involved with it from its inception. This created problems, but of course, all of that is behind us now.

DiCarlo: Are there any other university affiliated programs similar to yours?

Rubik: Just recently, two other centers for frontier sciences have started. At the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, they have a Center For Frontier Sciences which was inspired by our program and they have received a massive amount of funding from very conventional sources. It’s a much bigger program that what we have here. Also, there’s the new Center of Frontier Sciences at the University of Milano, Italy. They are going to follow three frontier areas -(1) alternative medicine or holistic medicine and biology , and (2) the physics and chemistry of new energy technologies, such as co-fusion, capillary fusion and energy from the vacuum, and (3) the history and philosophy of science.

DiCarlo: How many people or organizations are involved with the Center?

Rubik: It ranges above 3,000 affiliated scientists and scholars worldwide. Some of our affiliates are ordinary people who have an interest in alternative medicine, but I would say that most of them are scientists and scholars that I have met personally at meetings or that have heard me speak. So they are mainly colleagues in science, psychology and medicine that feel a kinship with these ideas and who are interested in exploring questions that go beyond the mainstream.

DiCarlo: You hold a monthly lecture series..what kinds of subjects are discussed?

Rubik: We bring in some very distinguished frontier scientists, some Nobel laureates, some lesser known but nonetheless doing interesting work. We have hosted a number of round-table international meetings on some key topics such as mind and matter; fields and living systems; homeopathy; and geobiology -the subtle interrelationship of life and the earth.

DiCarlo: In starting any kind of enterprise that challenges the status quo, you’d expect that there would resistance. The Center for Frontier Sciences is part of a major American University and I know you have had your share….Are you finding that there is more acceptance towards what you are doing than say 5 years ago?

Rubik: I would say that there is the usual benign neglect-that’s typical among academics. You know, scientists are trained specialists in some very narrow aspect of realty and they really do not know much beyond that. What’s more, they don’t care. The system doesn’t encourage them to think in broader terms. In fact, through promotions and tenure, the system rewards focussed thinking and only mainstream perspectives.

In the past I brought very distinguished scientists in to speak. To get people interested and involved, I held faculty lunches. As it turns out, we did get faculty members to attend, but it appeared that their main interest was to simply pick the brain of my visitors with questions that related to their own narrow area of research. I thought that was a reprehensible misuse of our visitors’ time, so I stopped having the luncheon meetings.

Keep in mind, this is your average state university. Faculty at other universities would have likely responded in the same way.

DiCarlo: What are the main areas of interest of the Center?

Rubik: There are three. First is the area of consciousness studies, that is, the interactions of the mind-through intention, will and beliefs-and the body and beyond to the larger sphere of the material world. That’s one area. The second area is complementary medicine or alternative medicine- particularly “energy” medicine. The third area is bioelectromagnetics, the interrelationship between living systems and electric and magnetic fields. Those three areas were selected because they are all testable. It’s not like the study of UFO’s where the evidence takes the form of people’s subjective experiences. We wanted to study areas in which we could collect hard physical evidence. There has been a certain amount of scholarly inquiry into these areas, and the anomalies, or events that cannot be explained by our conventional, scientific understanding of the world, keep piling up. Ultimately, these will lead us to a new world vision.

The mechanical vision of the universe has been useful, but I think it’s increasingly been one of the sources of our abuse of nature. We don’t really assist nature, we try to compete with nature or manipulate it and in so doing we often create imbalances. Consciousness, field interactions and energy medicine are the softer aspects or the feminine side of nature that have not really been addressed by science.

DiCarlo: Why have these areas been neglected?

Rubik: I think the system selects people who are very much like their prospective mentors-they have similar training backgrounds and look at things in much the same way. My way of looking at things was often in contrast to some of my former teachers.

DiCarlo: You are to be congratulated on all the prominent leading-edge scientists whom you have brought in to speak. Of all the people that have presented over the past few years, who most sticks out in your mind as having impressed you the most?

Rubik: That’s hard to say. There’s certainly been a number of very good talks. I think the talk by the great physicist David Bohm was very profound. He gave an overview of his idea of information as the bridge between mind and matter. Bohm’s idea of information is so very different from the materialistic view of information used in the computer sciences. In Bohm’s view, information is something that’s really not physical. That’s a view I share. Information is something which has meaning and is communicated. My voice is the carrier of the words, and the actual words contain the meaning which is intangible. To state that information is the bridge between the mind and the material realm is a very rich way of thinking because all entities in the universe have information. They have something to tell us. But in order to get that information, we have to ask new questions. When we do, the answers that follow will reveal new insights. So I really thought that Bohm’s talk about the notion of “active information”-that’s the term he uses-was quite an eye opener. It’s a very different way of thinking about information.

DiCarlo: Have there been any other visitors whose work has impressed you?

Rubik: I think the experimental work Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunn at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory is certainly important. They have shown that people can skew the numbers on a random number generator towards higher or lower values by simply wishing them to be high or low, respectively. It’s one of those exceptions to the traditional scientific world view about the way things are that we simply can’t explain using the old framework. Their data is a real challenge to the prevailing paradigm. They have shown that mental intention can interact with random physical systems whether they are mechanical, electronic, or radioactive. It’s fascinating work, and all of the data pooled together shows high statistical significance. Although their 15 years worth of work is extremely solid-it is so solid that no one can contest it anymore-it has certainly not changed the view of the mainstream. Unfortunately, it has not gained them any respect at Princeton University either.

DiCarlo: I am surprised they’ve been able to get funding for such a long time…

Rubik: I believe they have had funding from the aerospace industry. Robert Jahn is such a distinguished aerospace engineer that he’s been an on-going consultant to NASA. But for most researchers, obtaining adequate funding for frontier type research is an extraordinary problem.

DiCarlo: Why is there such resistance to accepting these kinds of studies? Aren’t they bringing us new discoveries and expanding our understanding of reality?

Rubik: Originally I thought the lack of acceptance was due to the fact that the data was scanty or people didn’t know about it . Most of these studies are not published in the mainstream journals, so it’s hardly accessible to the traditional scientific community. But I sense that something much deeper is at play here because I have been bringing this data to the attention of the mainstream in meetings at Temple and elsewhere in the world for six years now. So it’s not simply a matter of being uninformed.

I really think it’s about the scientific world view-the conventional, materialistic reductionistic world view-which is being challenged. Keep in mind it is the scientists themselves who form the world view. Any challenge to the world view is actually a direct assault on them-on who they are- so it becomes a highly emotional, irrational thing. I have seen it happen a lot. It’s not simply about some lofty ideas. This challenges the essence of who people are in this culture. So the real work involves planting a seed in their minds that there is something more to themselves and reality than they had previously thought. And that takes time.

I remember planting such a seed 10 or 15 years ago when I was in California . I was talking to a scientist about my interests and my work and I could see he was very uncomfortable with the topics. He dismissed what I was saying. Twelve years later I spotted him at a meeting. He came up to me and asked me whether I remembered him. “Yes, I of course I remember you,” I said. I’m surprised to see you here.” He said, “I came here because I saw your name in the program.” “Well,” I responded, “twelve years ago you weren’t interested in these things.” And he said, “I am now, thanks to you.” So, things happen. You plant a seed in people and it settles down into some deep substratum of the mind. Over time, it starts to grow and suddenly it becomes conscious and they’re interested in these things many years later as they themselves have changed in response to these new ideas.

The thing about a paradigm shift-and Thomas Kuhn talked about it at length-is that it’s not something that’s just an intellectual change of mind. It’s a deep conversion experience. It’s more like a religious shift inside a person. So this work of mediating between paradigms and bringing data to the attention of others and hoping that they will change their minds is very slow work . It doesn’t happen overnight and it’s more like being a missionary worker.

The younger generation of scientists, who are more open minded, who do not have a vested interest in the dogma, and who are able to appreciate the importance of the new world view will of course more easily embrace these ideas. Ultimately, these younger scientists will replace those who are older and that’s how world views will shift. Niels Bohr wrote, “Science advances funeral by funeral.”

DiCarlo: You’ve mentioned the difficulty a scientist on the leading-edge may have obtaining research funds. What are some of the other penalties facing scientists who choose to do paradigm busting work?

Rubik: There are quite a lot of extraordinary things. In essence, nothing is new. Scientists who do this kind of research go the route of Galileo and Copernicus- they are excommunicated from the flock. In his day, Galileo was considered a heretic by the Church. Isn’t it strange that only two years ago the Pope, sitting in Rome today proclaimed that Galileo was finally, “OK”-absolved, 300 years later. It was on the news. Galileo was regarded as a heretic and excommunicated. Copernicus was excommunicated. These people defied the Church’s view of the earth being at the center of the universe. They saw new evidence: Galileo saw moons moving around Jupiter, but his contemporaries refused to look through his telescope.

Even though we don’t have the Catholic Church over our heads anymore, we have the “Church of Science,” which is almost like the Catholic Church, you know. Those who dare to challenge the dogmas of the Church of Science find themselves essentially excommunicated. They are cut-off from their peers. Isolated. Their funding is removed. In fact, those very words “excommunication” were used to described Jacques Beuveniste, a French scientist who six years ago published a paper in the distinguished journal Nature showing that very dilute solutions-so dilute that there should be no molecules of any effective substance-could produce real biochemical effects on blood cells. Beuveniste has been subtlely silenced by the scientific community. Scientists who are treated this way find that they can no longer get grants and this means they will lose their graduate assistants, who are their arms who carry out the laboratory research They are not allowed to publish in the peer-reviewed, mainstream journals that most scientists make the time to read.

There is another example involving a very distinguished American scientist, Linus Pauling. Pauling is a double Nobel laureate -he has a Nobel prize in chemistry as well as in peace. He thinks that Vitamin C in high doses might help prevent the common cold and might also extend the lives of cancer patients, giving them quality time. Because of this, he has been unable to publish in the proceedings of the National Academy of Science, despite the fact that he is a member of the Academy. Those in power made specific rules to keep him from expressing his views, which are considered dangerous to young minds.

People with points of view that conflict with the paradigm find their research papers have been rejected based upon unreasonable logic such as, “lack of readership interest”. But, it’s really an unfair way of censoring the work without giving it peer review. There is no real peer review when you’re challenging the paradigm. There are a lot of underhanded ways of dealing with people who have threatening points of view.

DiCarlo: Well, to read Thomas Kuhn’s account of paradigm change is one thing, but to see it actually playing itself out in front of you is something altogether different.

Rubik: The sad thing is that most American scientists have not studied the history or philosophy of science. It’s not part of the curriculum. You get a Doctorate in the Philosophy of Science and you’ve never had a single philosophy of science course! That’s very peculiar, isn’t it, but that’s how most universities are. They simply produce trained technicians, able to conduct experiments that they then analyze using statistics. When I enrolled in a philosophy of science graduate course at the University of California at Berkeley over 20 years ago, I was laughed at by my superiors. They said, “Why are you wasting your time taking these classes?” I was dismissed as a kook.

DiCarlo: Given everything you said, do you think that a lot of the changes that will take place in the scientific community then will come from the outside rather than the inside?

Rubik: Well, Robert Becker is an example of change coming from the outside-in. Twenty years go Becker was doing research on electromagnetic fields and the regeneration of amputated limbs on animals. As a result of his work, which showed profound biological effects from weak electromagnetic fields, he became concerned about the possible health risks associated with people who live next to high voltage power lines. He found it very difficult to get money from the government to study this and the military had silenced a lot of his reports. So he wrote several popular books on the subject that activated and aroused the general public. People began openly expressing their concerns about the increased risk of cancer to their congressmen, and research monies became available soon thereafter. When consumer groups start clamoring and making noise, then change happens. I think that’s a good strategy for making a paradigm shift today, whether it’s in medicine or in new energy technology. The scientific community is much more conservative and hard to shake. I didn’t use to believe this, by the way, but I do now.

DiCarlo: You have acknowledged that some of the ideas of alternative medicine challenge the very foundations of science. What are some of those ideas?

Rubik: For example, issues of the spirit. A human being may or may not be a spiritual believer or have some spiritual life and that could very much play a part in his or her healing response. Even one’s belief about death is not taken into account by conventional medicine. Moreover, the realms of spirit are not addressed by science, that’s again the 300 year old debate which can be traced back to Galileo. There is still a rift between science and spirit.

Another example is consciousness. The role of the health care provider has been that of the technician administering the techniques for the patient to get well. It would be much more powerful if the consciousness of the practitioner and the patient were aligned in a kind of partnership. In alternative medicines, there is often a much closer relationship between the patient and the practitioner. This may help facilitate the healing response. Conventional science does not pay attention to issues of consciousness because it doesn’t believe consciousness can have any active consequences in physical reality, which of course would include physical health and healing.

If we are going to take issues of spirit and consciousness into account in order to study the full efficacy of alternative medicine, then how do we do it using a science in which they have no importance? Furthermore, there is no scientific foundation at all on which to study the nonmaterial realm.

Before we do all of these experiments we need to bring this up front and discuss it. Ethnomedicines that are non-Western have very different assumptions underlying them which do not fit in with Western scientific assumptions. For example, in Chinese medicine, the mind and body is one. There are serious philosophical discrepencies between Western science and these different ethnomedical systems.

Western science is not a universal system of truth testing. It really is bound by its own cultural context, its own system of values and its own hidden assumptions. We need to extend science so that we can accommodate other ethnomedicine systems in their fullness in order to study them. We need to recognize that these are really complete systems on their own, with different assumptions. If we try to test them, we need to give full respect to their depth and their differences.

DiCarlo: I see what you mean. It has always struck me that when Western science studies acupuncture, let’s say, we try to explain its effects in terms of neurotransmitters and bodily produced chemicals, which fall within the realm of traditional science-chemistry and biology. In Eastern culture there’s a whole different explanation as to why acupuncture might work.

Rubik: That’s exactly right . I was asked once to give a lecture to American Academy of Medical Acupuncture on that very topic. In the talk I stated, “Who are we to think that a 300 year old system of thinking is vastly superior to a 4,000 year old way of practicing medicine and thinking about the body? Who are we to have such arrogance?” I don’t see one-to-one correspondences between Western science and Chinese philosophy. We find, for example, that when acupuncture needles are inserted to diminish pain, natural pain-killing endorphins which have been produced by the body can be found at the site of the needles, in the spinal cord and even in the brain. But that doesn’t mean that all of the effects of acupuncture are explainable in terms of ordinary Western science concepts. Maybe in the long run they will be, but certainly not now. We have no way of explaining why stimulating the crown of the head is helpful in treating hemorrhoids. We have no way of explaining that kind of nonlocal interconnectedness of the body. Western science has no explanation at all, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that we do.

DiCarlo: These Eastern traditions oftentimes speak in terms of fields of energy. Do you think that’s a metaphor or do you think there is an element of truth to that?

Rubik: I think there’s an element of reality to that. You can experience that if you do some Qi Gong or T’ai Chi exercises. You can easily experience the sensation of energy between your hands. If you move your hands slowly together then apart for about 5 minutes, you will feel a ball of energy between them. It’s like bringing two North poles of a magnet together and feeling the resistance. Everybody experiences that, yet the Westerner will say , “Am I imagining this, or is is it really in my body?” And that’s a question only a Westerner would ask because in the East they don’t distinguish between your mind and your body. Right away, we slip into our Cartesian duality and try to explain it, “Well, it’s just a mental thing. It’s not real.”

But actually, I think there are some parallels between, let’s say, the physical fields that we know in physics and acupuncture. One of the things about acupuncture points is that they conduct electricity more than the surrounding tissues. That’s how people who are not good at acupuncture find the points. They have what is called a point finder, an electrical device that they move around until they find a place of low resistance or high electrical conductivity, and that’s where they insert the needle. There’s no way of looking at the body and knowing. Of course, the real master of acupuncture in China can feel the energy and its blocks and knows where to put the needle. They don’t have to use a point finder. So it seems that there is some relation between electromagnetic fields and acupuncture but the exact nature of that relationship is not well understood yet.

DiCarlo: Has there been any good scientific work done to demonstrate the existence of the human energy field?

Rubik: I’m intrigued by some work done in Germany. In fact I’ve gone over there to work with Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp. This involves extremely low level light that the body and all organisms emit which might be called an aura. However, I don’t know if it’s the same aura that people who are psychic claim to see, because this is a real physically measurable energy. Though it’s visible light, it’s not something that you can see easily with the naked eye. Popp uses very sensitive detectors that can count the photons, the particles of light coming out of the body. I think that this may be one of the manifestations of the energy dynamics of life. For example, in the Popp laboratory they have demonstrated that the light to a large extent is coherent like a laser. That means that the light probably has a capacity for carrying information, unlike incoherent light. If that’s the case, it’s probably not some junk radiation, which is the mainstream opinion. I think that the light, if it’s coherent, may be involved in both an internal communication system as well as an external one that conveys signals between living things.

It’s interesting that in studying the cancer tissues of patients, they have found losses of coherence in the light. Perhaps the light has lost informational value and cannot communicate with the other cells and that’s why the tissues grow abnormally.

I did some experiments to explore communication between two cultures of single-celled algae that glow. When I disturbed one of them with a chemical stressor, it emitted a burst of light. Almost simultaneously, the second culture that was in a separate container emitted light too. You could see it with your eyes. It was almost as if it was communicating with the first culture. After doing experiments like that for a month, I am intrigued that there is something here.

I think the idea of this biophoton field is just an indicator of some some deeper field in the organism. When an organism dies, it gives up a burst of light. There have also been a lot of interesting findings by German and Japanese researchers that would seem to echo some of the old Hindu ideas about the chakras. Researchers have discovered, for example, that the areas near the forehead, throat and heart have increased photon emission compared to non-chakra regions of the body.

So there’s been a number of research laboratories documenting that there are energy dynamics associated with the body which seem to support the wisdom of ancient cultures. To me, this convergence of the new information from frontier science and old perennial wisdom is fascinating.

DiCarlo: You have mentioned that there are certain scientists who are arrogant and perhaps closed minded. What do you feel are the essential qualities and characteristics that make for a good scientist?

Rubik: I think it is very important to neither be believer nor a disbeliever. It’s a very narrow line to stand on, but I think the best position to be with respect to old data and new data-the mainstream thinking and the frontier thinking-is to stand on the fine line between them. This is the position of the non-believer. But at the same time try to stay open. I want to ask as many questions as possible which challenges all sides-mainstream, frontier and even fringe ideas. Unfortunately, that’s not a popular place to be. When I put myself in that place and go the mainstream, they often accuse me of being too frontier. When I go to the frontier science meetings and challenge them with questions, they accuse me of being too mainstream. But it’s really the best place to be because you don’t stop asking questions. Science is driven by questions and we must never stop asking questions. I feel where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. We can never say, “We now we have it . This is the truth.” This is the problem even with the frontier scientists-many have become true believers in a particular system. I’ve actually encountered violence while I attended the meetings of some groups. One individual threw a journal in my face in response to my question. He got so upset because he was a true believer. I began to understand he wasn’t interested in bridging his work to the mainstream of everyday science. He, and others like him, want to be seen as mavericks bucking the system.

That’s definitely one type of frontier scientist. Others would like to see their work merged into the mainstream, but they don’t know how to do it. They often take an intense fighting posture in their writing and language and instead of building bridges they actually cut themselves off. I see various different ways in which people destroy their chances of trying to bring their work into the mainstream, but usually it’s because of an, “I’m right and you’re wrong” attitude. Anytime we have that, I think we lose the art of being a scientist, which is never to believe in what you have have found. Science is about being humble rather than being arrogant, because you know that what you have found is only part of an even bigger picture and that there are many, many more questions that will lead to an even greater unfolding of our knowledge. I believe that our science will never be complete, because I think as God’s creation, it is deep and unfathomable, like divinity.

Over a 100 years ago, one of the Deans of Harvard University said our science is nearly complete and he tried to discourage students from going into science as he felt there was nothing more to do. That was before quantum and relativity theory! This notion has come up over and over again in history and the present is no different. We think it’s almost finished now-we just need a unified field theory and that’s it folks-we have everything. I think this is nonsense. We should be encouraging all of our students not to memorize and regurgitate scientific dogma, but to ask new questions. We should ask them to go inside themselves and rely on their own intuition and come up with their own personal questions to ask of nature. I think that nature is so complex and creatively evolving that if all of us were asking questions, we would never unfold all the available knowledge. But of course, that’s more of a religious belief on my part. I see that nature is filled with divinity and being filled with divinity, it is infinitely complex. So we will never know it all, but we have to keep asking new questions.

DiCarlo: I’m wondering what role does the inner state of the scientist play in experimentation in scientific inquiry?

Rubik: I think that our inner state and our own beliefs and ideas, the things that make us unique, contribute to the specific questions we pose in science and determine the kinds of things we are going to see in the world. We are all looking for self-reflections of who we are, perhaps that is all we can really “see.” I’ll give you an example. I know an Italian physicist who is a Marxist that also believes that collective human behavior makes for good societies. When he looks at atoms and molecules he “sees” that they behave cooperatively. As a result, he asks questions relative to the cooperative behaviors of atoms and molecules.

DiCarlo: Well is it conceivable that our beliefs could actually affect the outcomes of our scientific experiments?

Rubik: Yes. There are some very famous examples of that historically. I’ll mention one for you. It’s really one of the most outrageous. One of the most famous microphysicists in the history of science was the 17th Century Dutchman named Van Leeuwenhoek. He and his contemporaries were among the first few people to look through a microscope. When they looked at human sperm, they saw, inside the heads of the sperm, little babies. Now that’s a wild idea. Today we no longer see little babies, but everybody saw little babies inside the sperm heads at this time because the world view for 2,000 years up to that time was that men planted little babies inside the bodies of women where they incubated until birth. Of course, they were going to see little babies in the sperm and everybody agreed it was so. They were even comparing the little babies, one from another under the microscope. I mean it’s amazing that they all saw this simply because everybody believed it. It just shows you the power of collective expectation and belief, of intersubjective consensus, and how it can influence what a whole society perceives.

I wonder today what collective beliefs we share that force us to see data in a certain configuration because we cannot divorce ourselves from certain beliefs. What questions do we dare not pose about nature because they would so threaten our own beliefs? We should look deeply inside ourselves regarding these things, but it’s very had to do. It’s very hard to step outside of our own culture, with all its underlying assumptions, beliefs and expectations, to do this. That’s why I think it’s important for scientists to meditate and to enter the void of their own minds to be able to transcend some of their own shortcomings as individuals within their communities.

In the deepest sense, true scientists are really mystics and I don’t mean that in the trivial sense, such as in gazing into a crystal ball to foretell the future. I mean that they are on the road to inner, self-awareness and development of their full human potential. Because of this, their questions about nature will change as they themselves change. The real act of being, let’s say, a yogi of knowledge-which the scientist is-is to know thyself. I think that’s one of the first premises. I think it’s human nature that we project what’s inside ourselves out into the cosmos. We project it externally and then we think it’s objective, but really it’s only a means of letting us see more of who we are inside, and working out our interior problems in the external world.

DiCarlo: What are the three frontier areas of science telling us?

Rubik: They tell us that there is a new paradigm emerging. It’s not yet finished, and everybody has a slightly different version of what it looks like, but the paradigm is about the new views of life in the whole universe. The whole universe itself, the whole cosmos, is a living, dynamical being. The universe is not just a clockwork mechanism. It has creativity built into it . It’s changing, it’s dynamic, it’s evolving more complexity and more richness and beauty all of the time.

We’re coming to realize that life wasn’t just something that happened once on this tiny planet. We shouldn’t think that we are that special in the universe. The universe was destined to produce conscious life from its very inception. There’s a lot of factors that entered into the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang, onwards and the factors were coordinated just precisely so that we have an interesting living universe. It could have expanded into a dust cloud, or collapsed back into a speck of dust, but the dynamics were so balanced that it initially produced heavy elements, eventually planets and then life forms. Eventually conscious life forms developed.

In my view, the universe actually had some rudimentary consciousness from its inception. This whole question of, “Is mind separate from matter”, or “when did consciousness begin?” to me is a moot question. I really think that consciousness was always there and the evolution toward greater consciousness was purposefully built into the cosmic design. Now that becomes almost a religious issue, but that’s my own position on it and in my view, the emerging paradigm is really telling us that life has a lot of subtle characteristics that involve numerous relationships. An organism is dynamic. It has energy properties that have not yet been considered very much. Life is linked in its many rhythms to the earth, biosphere,the sun, and even the cosmos at large. So the emerging paradigm considers life to be a deep principal of the universe. It’s the primary principal. We exist in a nurturing, caring universe that wanted to develop life from its inception and that can sustain us. Nature is not something we should be fighting against and feeling alienated from but it’s very much a part of who we are. If we embrace that point of view-that we exist in a very nurturing place-I think it can lead us to a new renaissance.

Excerpted from the book Towards A New World View: Conversations At The Leading Edge with Russell E. DiCarlo. The 377-page book features new and inspiring interviews with 27 paradigm pioneers in the fields of medicine, psychology, economics, business, religion, science, education and human potential. Featuring: Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, Joan Boysenko, George Leonard, Gary Zukav, Robert Monroe, Hazel Henderson, Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Senge, Jacquelyn Small, Elmer Green, Larry Dossey, Carolyn Myss, Stan Grof, Rich Tarnas, Marilyn Ferguson, Marsha Sinetar, Dr. Raymond Moody, Stephen Covey and Peter Russell.

Russell E. DiCarlo is a medical writer, author, lecturer and workshop leader who’s focus is on personal transformation, consciousness research and the fields of energy and anti-aging medicine. His forthcoming book is entitled “The Definitive Guide To Anti-Aging Medicine” (1998, Future Medicine Publishing). DiCarlo resides in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Copyright 1996. Epic Publishing. All Rights Reserved.