When such new disorders appear, the first reaction is always that the victims created a sickness that is essentially imaginary or psychotic. Yet when the disorder spreads, and doctors find that patients cannot turn off the switch that turned the illness on, there can be only one conclusion. Self-created symptoms are real.
Machines can’t create new disorders. But then the whole machine model was imperfect from the start. If you drive a car long enough, its moving parts are ground down by friction. But if you use a muscle, it gets stronger. Non-use, which helps keeps a machine in pristine condition, leads to atrophy with our bodies. Creaky, arthritic joints seem like a perfect example of moving parts that have worn out, but arthritis is actually caused by a host of complex disorders, not just simple friction.
During your lifetime this outworn model of the body hasn’t changed but has only been tinkered with. So what is your body, then, if it’s not a machine? Your whole body is a holistic, dynamic process in support of being alive. You are in charge of that process, and yet no one has given you the knowledge of how you should approach your job. Perhaps that is because the enterprise is immense: it covers everything, and it never stops.
The process of life
At this moment your body is a river that never stays the same, a continuous stream merging hundreds of thousands of chemical changes at the cellular level. Those changes aren’t random; they constantly serve the purpose of moving life forward and preserving what’s best from the past. Your DNA is like an encyclopedia that stores the entire history of evolution. Before you were born, your DNA thumbed through the pages to make sure every piece of knowledge was in place. In the womb, an embryo starts out as a single cell, the simplest form of life. It progresses to a loosely assembled blob of cells. Then, step by step, the embryo goes through the evolutionary stages of fish, amphibian, and lower mammal. Primitive gills appear and then disappear to make way for lungs.
By the time a baby emerges into the world, evolution has overshot the mark. Your brain was too complex as a newborn, with millions of unnecessary neuronal connections built into it, like a telephone system with too many wires. You spent your first few years paring down those millions of surplus connections, discarding the ones you didn’t need, keeping those that functioned to make you exactly who you were. But at that point physical evolution reached unknown territory. Choices had to be made that were not automatically built into your genes.
A baby stands at the frontier of the unknown, and its genes have no more old pages left in the encyclopedia. You had to write the next page yourself. As you did so, starting the process of forming a totally unique life, your body kept pace: your genes adapted to how you think, feel, and act. You probably don’t know that identical twins, born with exactly the same DNA, look very different genetically when they grow up: certain genes have been switched on, others switched off. By age seventy, images taken of the chromosomes of two twins don’t look remotely the same. As life diverges, genes adapt.
Take a simple skill like walking. With each clumsy step, a toddler begins to change its brain. The nerve centers responsible for balance, known as the vestibular system, start to wake up and show activity; this is one area of the brain that can’t develop in the uterus. Once a toddler has mastered walking, the vestibular system has completed this phase of its function.
But later, after you grow up, you might want to learn to drive a car, ride a motorcycle, or walk a balance beam. The brain, even though it may be mature, doesn’t stop there. Quite the opposite: when you want to learn a new skill, your brain adapts according to your desire. A basic function like balance can be fine-tuned and trained far beyond the base level. This is the miracle of the mind-body connection. You are not hard-wired. Your brain is fluid and flexible, able to create new connections up into very old age. Far from decaying, the brain is an engine of evolution. Where physical evolution appeared to stop, it actually left an open door.
I want to take you through that door, because much more lies beyond it than you ever imagined. You were designed to unlock hidden possibilities that will remain hidden without you. An image comes to mind of probably the greatest feat of balance ever exhibited by a human being. You may have seen photos of it. On August 7, 1974, a French acrobat named Philippe Petit breached security at the World Trade Center. He climbed onto the roof and, with the help of confederates, strung a 450-pound cable between the two towers. Petit balanced himself with a twenty-six-foot pole as he walked out onto the cable, which stretched 140 feet. Both towers were swaying; the wind was high, the drop below his feet was 104 stories, or a quarter of a mile. Petit was a professional high-wire artist (as he called himself), and he had taken a basic ability of the body, balance, to a new stage.
What would terrify a normal person became normal for one person. In essence, Petit was at the cutting edge of evolution. He made eight crossings on the wire, which was only three-quarters of an inch in diameter. At one point Petit sat on the wire and even lay down on it. He realized that this was more than a physical feat. Because of the unwavering concentration that was required, Petit developed a mystical regard for what he was doing. His attention had to focus without allowing fear or distraction to enter for even a second. Normally the brain is totally incapable of such unwavering focus; distractions roam the mind at will; fear automatically responds at the first hint of danger. But one man’s clear intention was enough: the brain and body adapted; evolution moved ahead into the unknown.
No more breakdowns, only breakthroughs
You, right this minute, stand at the growing tip of evolution. The next thing you think, the next action you take, will either create a new possibility for you, or it will repeat the past. The areas of possible growth are enormous and yet mostly overlooked. It’s worth making a list to see what the territory ahead looks like. I took a piece of paper and wrote down as quickly as possible all the aspects of my life that need growth. I didn’t limit myself. Anything I wanted to experience, any obstacle that has been holding me back, any ideal I wanted to live up to went on the list. Here’s what I came up with:
Love Guilt Eternity
Death Hope Timelessness
Transformation Lack Action
Afterlife Faith Desire
Innocence Intention Motivation
Grace Vision Karma
Renewal Selfishness Choice
Loss Inspiration Vulnerability
Insecurity Power Illusion
Fear Control Freedom
Intuition Surrender Presence
Crisis Forgiveness Non-attachment
Energy Rejection Attention
Trust Playfulness Silence
Resistance Appreciation Being
If you want to know where the universe wants you to go next, this list offers a lot to choose from. Your soul is funneling energy and intelligence that can be applied in any of these areas. Take love, for example. Today you are either in love, out of love, wondering about love, trying to get more love, spreading your love around, or mourning the loss of love. All of these mental activities, both conscious and unconscious, have consequences for the body. The physiology of a widow grieving for her husband who died of a heart attack is very different from the physiology of a young girl who has just fallen in love. We can measure the differences crudely by drawing a vial of blood and examining hormone levels, immune response, and levels of various messenger molecules that the brain uses to send information to the body. We can get subtler and take an MRI, looking at which areas of the brain light up when a particular emotion is felt. But it’s obvious that grief and love are worlds apart, and every cell in your body knows it.
Once you realize how many breakthroughs you’d like to make, the hard part is choosing where to start. Which is why humankind has relied so heavily on great spiritual guides to give us a sense of direction. Imagine that you went to see a new doctor and he turned out to be Jesus or Buddha. If you came in with stomach cramps, Jesus might say, “It’s just the flu. The real problem is that you haven’t found the Kingdom of God within
.” After running tests for heart function, Buddha might say, “You have some minor blockage in your coronary artery, but what I really want you to do is get over the illusion of the separate self.” In real life nothing close to that happens. Doctors are trained to be technicians. They don’t think about your soul, much less work to heal it. A doctor visit is a ritual that’s not much different from bringing a car to a mechanic’s garage and asking why it doesn’t run properly.
Jesus and Buddha didn’t leave out any aspect of life. They diagnosed the whole self—physical, mental, emotional, social—with uncanny accuracy. Your soul can take over the function of an ideal physician, because it stands at the junction point between you and the universe. Maybe wherever Jesus and Buddha came from, you can go. The secret is to open yourself up. You never know where the next breakthrough will come. The door opens, and from that moment on, your life is transformed.
Quiz: Are You Ready for Change?
Although we have all lived with outmoded ideas about the body, the momentum of change has been gathering. The old model shows many signs of breaking down. Have you been part of this change? The following quiz examines how receptive you are to personal change. We can all become more open, but it’s good to have a starting point before the journey begins.
Answer the following questions:
Yes___No__I believe that the mind influences the body.
Yes___No__I believe that some people have had amazing recoveries from illness their doctors can’t explain.
Yes___No__When physical symptoms appear, I seek alternative treatment.
Yes___No__Hands-on healing is a real phenomenon.
Yes___No__People can make themselves sick without a physical cause.
Yes___No__I don’t have to see healing to believe it exists.
Yes___No__Traditional medicine knows things that scientific medicine hasn’t discovered yet.
Yes___No__I can alter my genes by how I think.
Yes___No__Human lifespan isn’t determined by genes.
Yes___No__Scientists will not discover a single gene for aging—the process is far too complex.
Yes___No__Using my brain will keep it from aging.
Yes___No__I have the ability to influence whether I get cancer.
Yes___No__My body responds to my emotions: when they change, so does my body.
Yes___No__Aging contains a major mental component. Your mind can determine whether you age quicker or slower.
Yes___No__I am generally happy with my body.
Yes___No__I don’t feel my body is going to betray me.
Yes___No__I pay attention to hygiene, but germs aren’t a major issue with me.
Yes___No__I have healed myself at least once.
Yes___No__I’ve had at least one experience with Eastern medicine (acupuncture, qigong, Ayureveda, Reiki, etc.)
Yes___No__I’ve used herbal remedies that were effective.
Yes___No__I’ve used meditation or other stress-reduction techniques.
Yes___No__Prayer has the power to heal.
Yes___No__Miraculous cures are possible and legitimate.
Yes___No__My body has as good a chance of being as healthy ten years from now as it does today.
Yes___No__Even though the average elderly person takes seven prescription drugs, I foresee turning seventy on no drugs at all.
Total Yes______
Evaluating your score:
0–10 Yes answers. You accept the conventional notion that the body is basically fixed, either by genes or mechanical processes of decay and aging. You expect to wear out over time as you age. Your optimism about alternative medicine is distinctly limited and may be totally overshadowed by skepticism. You would never rely on healers, and look upon so-called miraculous cures as either fraud or self-deception. On the one hand, you trust medical science and expect doctors to take care of you, but on the other, you don’t pay much attention to your body and feel fatalistic about things that can go wrong with it.
Given the possibility of a major breakthrough, you feel cautious about making any major changes in your life.
11–20 Yes answers. Your experience has caused you to shift away from conventional wisdom about the body. You are open to change and have broadened your ideas about healing. Either you or your friends have tried some form of alternative treatment with success, and you no longer believe that mainstream medicine is the only answer. Yet the claims of hands-on healing probably make you skeptical. In general, you haven’t found a way of understanding the body that’s more satisfying than the Western scientific model, yet you are aware that unconventional approaches can be valid.
You are attracted to the possibility of making a major change in your life, although you haven’t decided which path is right for you.
21–25 Yes answers. You have made a conscious effort to shift away from the old paradigm. You firmly accept alternative therapies. You seek conventional treatment only after you’ve tried holistic medicine, and even then you are wary of drugs and surgery. Your view of the body is likely to be tied to a spiritual journey that you take quite seriously. You identify with other seekers of higher consciousness. You believe firmly in hands-on healing. You question whether any form of materialism can really plumb the deeper mysteries of life.
You have embraced personal transformation as a major goal in your life and want to change as rapidly as possible.
Breakthrough #1
Your Physical Body Is a Fiction
Breakthroughs depend on daring ideas, so let’s begin with the most daring of all. Your physical body, which you have always assumed to be real, is actually a fiction. If you could see that your physical body is an idea your mind is stubbornly holding on to, an enormous breakthrough would take place. You would no longer be imprisoned in a lump of matter. Best of all, you would be free to adopt a much better idea of your body.
Certainly the five senses seem to confirm our physicality. It might be disturbing to realize that the touch of warm, soft skin is only an idea. But it is. Other cultures have offered very different ideas. To early Christians, the body was spirit made flesh, the fleshly part being an illusion. To touch warm skin was to touch temptation. To the Hopi Indians, the entire universe is a flow of energy and spirit, and therefore the body is a transient event in that flow; to touch warm skin was like touching a puff of wind. Buddhists combine the notions of transience and illusion; to them the body is like a ghostly river, and being attached to it is the source of all suffering. To touch warm skin is to sink deeper into illusion.
Those ideas are just as valid as the idea that you have a physical body—a thing, an object—and they point to a simple fact: there was always something suspicious about human beings fitting so neatly into the material world. Rocks are material, but they don’t have emotions. Trees are material, but they have no will. Every cell is composed of matter, but cells don’t write music and make art. The universe took human evolution far beyond the physical. Think how strange it would be if you treated a book as merely a physical object. You could burn it for fuel or use it as a doorstop. You could crumple up the pages and play wastepaper-can basketball with them. If the book is big enough, you could hurl it at someone like a weapon. Yet obviously the whole point of a book, its very reason for existing, would be missed. What is a book if not a source of information, inspiration, pleasure, and beauty? It’s just as mistaken to approach your body as a physical object, even though it, too, burns fuel, plays games, and turns into a weapon whenever a fistfight or a war breaks out.
Your body already knows that its purpose in life isn’t physical. If you look through a microscope and watch a germ being surrounded, engulfed, and destroyed by a white cell known as a macrophage (literally, “big eater”), nothing could seem more physical. But your eyes are deceiving you. What you are actually seeing is intelligence at work. A macrophage must first identify the intruder. It must decide if the intruder is friend or foe. Having made this decision, the macrophage must move into close position for attack and then de
ploy its toxic chemical arsenal for killing the enemy.
Purely physical entities don’t make decisions, certainly not such delicate yet potentially fatal ones. If white cells go wrong, a macrophage can start eating the body’s own cells, creating an autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, both of which are based on drastically wrong decisions. Yet a white cell’s intelligence is so profound that it orchestrates its own death when it is no longer useful. Once it consumes the invading microbe, the macrophage dies, the victim of its own chemical weapons. Its suicide is voluntary and altruistic. A single white cell knows that the good of the many overrides the good of the individual—and so it is that the cell makes the ultimate sacrifice in support of that understanding.
If being physical is an outworn model for the body, moving to a new model is urgent, because how we live is based on our underlying beliefs.
Aiden’s story
Some people have already started inventing a new body that isn’t based on the old physical model. Aiden is a man now past fifty who is educated enough to have pursued a highly successful career in any field he chose. Instead he went on a spiritual quest that began almost by chance thirty years ago.
“The whole thing started out very normally, with no signs that anything strange was about to happen,” Aiden recalls. “I was a typical middle-class kid. I went to college in the aftermath of Vietnam, although I wasn’t an idealist or a protester.
“But in my early twenties things began to happen that I had no control over. At night in my sleep I would feel that I was awake. I’d find myself in a kind of bubble that could travel anywhere; when I was in that bubble, it was like leaving my body. I had visions of places I didn’t recognize, including fantastic cities and landscapes. I saw people I knew, and felt that I had X-ray vision about their hidden characters. These experiences were incredibly vivid. I couldn’t dismiss them purely as dreams, because I sometimes had similar experiences sitting in a chair, only instead of being in a bubble, I’d feel myself rising out of my body. One time I expanded beyond the walls of the room and could see outside my house, watching people and cars go by.”