Only the Phonies

“Only the phonies don’t end up enlightened.”
Or so, Adya’s teacher told him.
Or so, I keep reminding myself.
“Otherwise, we’re chasing what someone told us.”

Gerson Therapy Rationale: Part I

In my last post I included a video which has two doctors criticizing the Gerson Therapy for both lack of evidence of efficacy and of any rationale:
If you think of what’s in Gerson Therapy, you wouldn’t really expect it to cure cancer.
Skeptical Doctor in Dying to Have Known

Well, the rest of the film clip rebutted this opinion. But, I find the arrogance and ignorance behind such a statement to be really annoying, if not destructive, because I also have these words ringing in my memory:
The biggest thing we’re up against, when you hear that you have cancer, is that you walk into… “the morphic field” of cancer. There’s a force field that’s been created around the word cancer that’s so big, it’s like a locomotive. You step into this world where all the subconscious and collective unconscious definitions of cancer come hurtling at you. Of course it is synonymous with death in a lot of people’s minds.
Leigh Fortson, cancer survivor

And then there’s Dr. Candace Pert’s catchy little phrase:
Your body is your subconscious mind.

My irritation with scientists who make uninformed statements about the Gerson Therapy is that they support and create a belief system that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to heal.
I’d like to spend some time here as a molecular geneticist to explain why I think there’s every reason to expect the Gerson Therapy to heal.
To my surprise, I haven’t found this rational explained anywhere by the Gerson camp itself. So, please consider this an update and information meant to be shared.

The National Cancer Institute posts this rationale for the Gerson Therapy straight from Gerson’s own work:
Central to the therapy is an abundance of potassium and the lack of sodium. Gerson had observed that as soon as his cancer patients started on the diet regimen, they released large amounts of sodium in their urine. He noticed that cells in the patients’ bodies that had been bloated with fluid started to shrink as the fluid was released. After studying the research in cancer cell biology available to him at the time and noting the ratio of potassium to sodium in cancer cells versus healthy cells, he deduced that the reason for this sodium excretion was that the diet regimen was correcting generalized tissue damage caused by excess sodium. Healthy cells had a high ratio of potassium to sodium; diseased cells had a low ratio of potassium to sodium or an abundance of sodium… This belief is the theoretical basis for Gerson’s choice of high-potassium, low-sodium fruits and vegetables in his prescribed diet: a high intake of potassium was needed to restore a normal ratio of potassium to sodium in the cell.

This is old biology. It feels like what I learned when I took a seminar in cancer as an undergrad in 1970. It does not explain a thing (to me) or lead to any hope.

So, I did a search of PubMed, the NIH National Library of Medicine.
My search words were “carrot juice” and “juice cancer”. I only had to look at papers from the past couple years to be blown away by the obvious: fresh juices contain small organic molecules that turn on and off hundreds of genes that regulate cellular metabolism.

Cancer is supported by several process each involving scores of gene products (enzymes, transcriptional regulators, micro RNAs). These processes include:
Oxidative damage
Chronic Inflammation
Angiogenesis (formation of new blood vessels to support tumor growth)
Cell adhesion and migration (causing metastasis)

There was so much basis for a rationale, I gave up trying to logically summarize it in a table. So, let me simply share some quotes and another video clip.
Traditional medicine and diet has served mankind through the ages for prevention and treatment of most chronic diseases. Mounting evidence suggests that chronic inflammation mediates most chronic diseases, including cancer. … nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-κB) and STAT3 have emerged as major regulators of inflammation, cellular transformation, and tumor cell survival, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis. Thus, agents that can inhibit NF-κB and STAT3 activation pathways have the potential to both prevent and treat cancer.
In this review, we examine the potential of one group of compounds called triterpenes, derived from traditional medicine and diet for their ability to suppress inflammatory pathways linked to tumorigenesis.
These triterpenes include avicins, betulinic acid, boswellic acid, celastrol, diosgenin, madecassic acid, maslinic acid, momordin, saikosaponins, platycodon, pristimerin, ursolic acid, and withanolide.
This review thus supports the famous adage of Hippocrates, "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food".
Yadav VR, Prasad S, Sung B, Kannappan R, Aggarwal BB.
Cytokine Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston.

So much for inflammation and the thoughts of a leading Cancer Center.
Discovering the link between angiogenesis and cancer won Folkman the Nobel Prize. One of his students, William Li, gave this TED Talk entitled, Can We Eat to Starve Cancer ?:



Dr Li started the Angiogenisis Foundations which has a link to Eat to Defeat Cancer Initiative. This site lists foods and rationales with delicious facts like: the plant compound phenylethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) found in watercress can block this process by interfering with and ‘turning off’ a protein called hypoxia inducible factor (HIF), a key stimulator of angiogenesis. HIF is produced in response to hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, which is usually the critical first step in tumor angiogenesis.

This is science I can believe. It’s current, it’s rational and it’s hopeful. And then it crossed my mind I ought to see if the original Gerson rationale had any modern basis. Here is one item that I found:
Voltage gated potassium channels have been extensively studied in relation to cancer. In this review, we will focus on the role of two potassium channels, Ether à-go-go (Eag), Human ether à-go-go related gene (HERG), in cancer and their potential therapeutic utility in the treatment of cancer. Eag and HERG are expressed in cancers of various organs and have been implicated in cell cycle progression and proliferation of cancer cells. Inhibition of these channels has been shown to reduce proliferation both in vitro and vivo studies identifying potassium channel modulators as putative inhibitors of tumour progression.

Seems to me Gerson was onto something all along. But then, so was Hippocrates. We just needed science to catch up. And now, we need to pay better attention to what the research literature is saying:
Small organic molecules derived from higher plants have been one of the mainstays of cancer chemotherapy for approximately the past half a century.
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, College of Pharmacy, The Ohio State University

On Healing & Beliefs

Art by Joseph Rael

Last summer a woman came to me whose mother was going to have surgery on her hip. I said I was willing to dedicate a dance that we’d be doing in Australia in October for her mother’s healing, and, since I wouldn’t be going to Australia for another three months, her healing would be retroactive. Her mother went to the doctor two days later. They didn’t have to operate because, apparently, the hip was healing… I said her healing would be retroactive because Spirit told me to say it, though it didn’t make much sense at the time.
Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light.

I have been poking around trying to better understand the role of consciousness in healing.
Consciousness includes many levels: Spirit, emotions, beliefs. So, in this regard I came across an interesting article not so long ago. It was scientifically tight enough to have been listed in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine archives (Pubmed). The article is looking at the results of a study out of Harvard on the effects of prayer. It is discussing experimental design – how we need to think differently when studying consciousness with proper scientific controls.

Here is the passage that has stuck in my head the past few weeks. Let me also point out that the healing Joseph Rael describes occurred not only retroactively in time, but also at a distance, i.e. “non-locally.” The article describes an experiment designed to test just such a possibility:
Israeli immunologist Leonard Leibovici highly skeptical of claims of intention/prayer studies designed an experiment that only some kind of nonlocal linkage could explain… in 2000, Leibovici identified 3,393 adult patients each of whom suffered from a bloodstream infection while in the Rabin Medical Center between 1990 and 1996 – that is to say four to ten years earlier. All of these patients were long out of the hospital. These patients were randomized into two populations; 1, 691 were assigned to the intervention group and 1,702 to the control group. The treatment group was the focus of therapeutic intention in the form of prayer… the study discovered that “length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control (P=.01 and P=.04 respectively).” …For this study to have worked, it seems that therapeutic intention from the “future” must have affected the “past” when it was the present to produce a biased outcome – not to have changed the past, but to have produced the original effect in the first instance.
Nonlocality, Intention, and Observer Effects in Healing Studies: Laying a Foundation for the Future

This is all very curious to me. Time is trickier than you think. Meditators learn this, as do physicists:
People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

I think about my father. I have come to think of him as “a man ahead of his time” as it seems like every major discovery that I’ve made, Pop was already there. When I called home from college in 1969, wanting to learn TM but a bit scared to take the step, Pop knew all about it and encouraged me. When I discovered homeopathy, Pop knew about that too and shared his books with me. When I crashed badly after an awakening, Pop was the one who said “You have kundalini burnout.” I had never heard the term. And so it was with this precedence that in the early ‘80s Pop explored the Gerson Therapy. He met Charlotte Gerson. He attended seminars and talked with cancer patients who had survived the supposedly incurable. He bought all the books and tried to spread the word.

At the time, Pop’s deep interest in a cancer therapy, when no one in the family was affected, struck my sister as more than a little morbid. She fussed to me that she was afraid that this strange preoccupation would perhaps make Pop himself sick.
Now, I wonder if he was merely being true to something in his nature: he was a scientist open to the evidence. He was ahead of his time - at least in regards to his children’s interest. And he had an unwavering intention to always help and be there for us.
Thus, it was very natural this January when Evie needed to try yet another approach to cure her cancer, for us to turn to Gerson. Pop had done the due diligence research for us years ago.

My father died in 1996, but his prayer for us is clear and I am not so worried anymore about locality and time.
I am more concerned with being open to the gift. I’m discovering that with cancer being open means not only dealing with the body but dealing with our very understanding of reality. And the scientific moorings of our culture can make that very difficult. So, I’ll continue to look at beliefs both scientific and mystical as Evie walks her path of healing.

Dying to Have Known: A ten minute clip from a film about the Gerson Therapy that illustrates the solidity of the cultural beliefs that surround us as supposed truths.

Dancing Daffodils

Shadows, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Williams Wordsworth

I have one lone daffodil growing up outside my front door by the driveway.
Yesterday, morning to my surprise and joy I noticed it had begun to bloom. As I sat in my car, waiting for the motor to warm, I stared down at the little daffodil. It didn’t look so healthy. It has a washed out color, not the classic bright yellow. Looking closer, I noticed that it looked to me like some animal had chewed away the petals just a bit. That was strange and I kept looking.
That was when I noticed the little fellow was shaking and bobbing just a bit. I enjoyed that – until I noticed, there wasn’t the least bit of wind. That was simply odd.
I put the car into reverse and drove away.

That evening when I got home, I sat for a moment in the car, looking once again down at the daffodil.
Yes, it seemed a bit chewed around the edges. And yes, there it was again, bobbing and shaking its head, in the wind… except there wasn’t the slightest stir of air anywhere around.
How odd. And I got out of the car to collect my mail.

Would "true perspective" mean "the perspective that correctly and accurately describes reality as it is, beyond perspectives?"
If so, I'd say that it's an incoherent notion…
Perceptions that are usually called "physical" occur as a kind of language that has no inside or outside… But there's nothing Out There to which any of these ideas refer.
Greg Goode

This morning, as I came out to my car, I was looking up at the sky thinking about Greg Goode and his tight philosophical reasoning that there are many, many ways that we can describe reality. I was thinking, it was even something of a prayer, “Please let me be open to seeing from the different angles. Please let me be open.”
Then once more I noticed the daffodil. I sat there in my car. “Hey, are you shaking now?”
It was not. It was still as any other object in my un-kept garden area.
Then, I felt awareness drop from in my head and open softly in my chest.
“How are you doing today?” I felt the thought leave me in a gentle, caring, consciousness to consciousness manner.
I noticed that simple change within myself. And, at that moment the daffodil began to twitch and shake.
Stunned, I started crying and the daffodil stood silent.
I bowed internally to the flower, “Thank you for that teaching.” And the daffodil immediately responded with a bobbing and a shimmy.
Again, I looked around for currents and a breeze. Again, there wasn’t the slightest motion anywhere.
I looked once more at the flower. Back in my head, I wanted to try for yet a third time. Yet, I knew going in this time once more in the mode of scientist I would not get a response.
And there was none – at least not from the flower.

For me, this was a huge confirmation. It may sound silly to many others and a proof of nothing.
But, all I know was I felt myself get out of my head and into my heart.
I felt a connection with the flower. And there was communication.
There was also a deep, deep blessing.

Apparently our eyes are locked to the daily perceptual reality we live in; therefore we program our eyesight not to see too many vibrations in our lives. That is because we do not want to be distracted… Once I apply “puuh” (to-be –cast –awayness) I can then see with deer eyes, not only the image of the physical plant, but additionally the spirit that usually steps outside and stands beside its plant home and talks telepathically.

The plants taught me to eat them for their medicinal properties because they enjoyed traveling the human digestive tract, through the pleasing landscapes that could only be found in the human anatomy. I would eat the leaf of a plant, and then I would wait fifteen counts. The plant part I had eaten would send back a report to the plant that had given the leaf and translate the messages of the eaten plant leaf back to me. The transmission had to be done quickly because after fifteen to twenty seconds the eaten leaf of the plant went into a pure bliss state and connections were lost.
Joseph Rael

Cashing in the Chips

Grandma , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

After Evie got the news about her PET scan, for about the next twenty-four hours I kept envisioning a cashing in of all the chips. I kept seeing this poker table in my head and hands pushing all the chips forward. We had finally arrived at that all or nothing bet.

All the chips were in, pushed into the center of the table which seemed awfully like the edge of all creation.
That image and the ensuing free fall into nothingness kept looping through my mind until I heard a quiet voice ask in wonderment: What is it that you throw it all into?
Immediately I realized the obvious: It was the Void and it was God.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.


Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.
Adyashanti

So that is what I did and that is just what happened.

I have a friend who’s fond of saying that there are really only two prayers in the world:
Help me, help me, help me! and Thank you, thank you, thank you!
It seems to me there might also be a third and it’s called surrender:
You look into the Void of Unknowing and toss yourself into it.
It wasn’t even a “take me, take, take me!” It was just a reverential toss, like you’d drop a flower.
And there wasn’t any great swell of emotion, but rather the cradling gentleness and love inherent in deep trust.
And then… there were about three weeks that felt like wandering lost in darkness of the Void.
During this period I recalled Adya’s advice to not resist the freefall or try to orient yourself. And, for once, I found I could simply wait and trust that the way forward would eventually become clear.

I wondered if Evie understood this “cashing in” and decided that most probably she’d say that something deep inside, some tight constriction had been broken. She’d felt a jump into living in a new manner where some of the old rules no longer would apply. But, I don’t think she’d speak of Void or even God. Perhaps she’d mention sacredness and energy or maybe even archetypes.  People noticed she was strong. She mentioned she was scared. But, she did not hesitate to act.

Leigh Fortson, having traversed three rounds of going deeper and deeper into the healing of her own cancer, puts it this way:
I find it hard to call it a "will to live," because I think will is different from what I tapped into and what I think people tap into when they heal themselves. Will is the energy that you use to carry out what you learn to do, but the initial thrust was a combination of surrender to something that you don't understand, that you can't control, that you can't comprehend-which goes outside of the arena of will.
It's like, "Okay, there's a power in me, in all of us. There's something in me that I am asking to tap into, that I will surrender to, that I will give myself to in every way that I can."
…It's a combination of will and surrender and dedication and self love.

When I read stories about healing the impossible, be it via diet, or energy, or Shamanic journey I always find that the person gave themselves to the process entirely.
Entirely! Do you realize how very seldom we actually do that in life? Hardly ever. We always hedge our bets and hold something back. In fact, we call that being smart.
This plays right into the discussion I posted recently about the placebo effect – how there is now a theory that placebos work by simply giving ourselves permission to heal; that we are biologically programmed to hold back some of our healing resources for a later date and more dire straits and placebos relax that rule… well, finally- no more holding back.

There was nothing I could do. So I cashed in all my chips.
Only to discover, there was nothing I need do because deepest desires are not personal.
By that I mean that when you really feel the gut wrench of true desire -that desire transcends the personal.
I want to live is built into our cells. It arises from the species. It arises from Creation itself.
Once you know that, then you simply play your part (or work your butt off) as an agent of Let Thy will be done.

This is the first thing I have learned about true healing: Give yourself entirely.
Give yourself so fully that you see firsthand just how the personal becomes impersonal and infinite. And then, you work from there.
Or, as the Bhagavad Gita says:
Established in being, perform action.

Travels in a Stone Canoe

This new journey, if it was to be anything beyond mere spiritual windmill tilting, was to be a journey of respect, a journey honoring sacred metaphors, of others and ourselves…Steve and I had invested meaning in the feather and the claw, and they returned that meaning to us a thousand fold.  We chose to see them as sacred, and they became sacred… by accepting them as metaphors of our own we found ourselves infused with their metaphorical power.  They gave us a kind of directional fix in that seemingly directionless world we were entering.
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

Metaphors and the Seemingly Directionless – in other words, how do we understand the spiritual and physical?  How to we even speak of it, let alone understand and act? 
What Really exists and how do we change?

On January 4^th, 2012 we expected that the oncologist wouldn’t call for at least a few days.  Instead, he phoned Evie within hours.  Her PET scan was lighting up.  All the ominous nodes that were seen three months ago were still there, plus a new one:  10/10 as a hot spot, 3 cm in diameter.

First, there had been the diagnosis over 2 years ago: Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “the good cancer that is easy to cure.”
Then, there was the early relapse after the chemo. … not so easy after all, they called it “aggressive.”
Now, there is the apparent relapse after high dose chemo and a stem cell transplant.  The doctors want to do a biopsy, re-state the diagnosis, and prepare for a second transplant.
In essence, they suggest we confirm that cancer has returned and they offer the very slim chance that a second transplant, more dangerous than the first, and reducing an asymptomatic Eve into a someone resembling a concentration camp survivor, will actually provide a cure.

Eve has politely declined the offer.
Within a day she had quit her job, she and Michael had decided to sell their house and move up to the mountains where they can build a healing center.
She told me, “Something physical inside broke,” and I knew exactly what she meant.
These turning points feel physical.  It can be a breaking, a letting go, a wrenching loose, or simply a dissolving – but you feel it. 
It’s the end of clutching onto beliefs that simply do not serve – not if you want to live.  And mostly, it occurs so deeply that just exactly what is going can be hard to say.
None the less, something physical inside brakes as you finally throw yourself into the unknown, out beyond the rules you knew.

To the nonbeliever, which we all are when it comes to systems we don’t “believe” in, the belief systems of others tend to be quaint, bizarre, even silly.  The more we’re stuck on the truth of our own metaphors, the more the metaphors of others seem false… and yet…If this was quackery, it was apparently successful quackery.  Does it matter how we’re healed as long as we are healed?
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

At each critical junction of Eve’s journey with cancer, we have tried to read all the science.  Curiously, we are suited to this task.  Eve, her dad (my brother), and I all have PHDs in biology.  We have followed the traditional Hodgkin’s treatments, and we have supplemented with the best complementary therapies we could find including nutrition, qigong, and meditation. And again, curiously, we are well suited to this as her dad is founder of a lab to do this.
At each turn we’ve felt we’ve taken the best path and followed that.
And still – there is that PET scan lighting up.

So, we’ve had to fashion yet another best plan. And it now looks like this:

1)       Therapeutic Nutrition:  The Gerson Diet – with modifications Evie feels make sense to her.  My dad became fixated with this during the 1970s – not that he had cancer or even knew anyone.  He just got interested and really studied it, eventually meeting Charlotte Gerson herself.  Jaquie Davison’s book Cancer Winner describing the power of the diet to heal and has stayed in with me for over thirty years.  I tried the diet myself back then and became convinced that while it supplies nutrition and physical substance, its actual power lay in the prana or Qi that it supplies.

2)      Medical Qigong: Early on we found the story of a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor relapsing three times and finally curing himself with Qigong. We also found the work of Guo Lin, a Chinese woman who used her family's Qigong to cure herself and many others.  So, what the diet stirs in Qi – here we add trained professional support.  Our practice of Taoist guided movements also works upon this level.

3)      Archetypal or Shamanic healing:  I made up this term.  It stems from what’s growing within my own practice of Taoist meditation.  Working with Eve the past 18 months, spontaneously I started channeling .  I’m sorry now I never wrote up our experience with a rather Samurai-like character who helped release the stems cells Evie need for her transplant.  I’m not sure whether one would categorize this energy as subtler than the level of Qi – it is certainly more personified and thus seems to suggest a different yet complementary approach.

4)      Meditation:  We have been practicing a Taoist breath meditation for some time.  Eve also learned TM over Christmas.  We also decided to try the Holosyn binaural beat assuming that a physical way of entraining coherence into the brain may help at times when too many others things in mind and body seem to swamp the system. 

So, there’s the plan.  It still feels like we’ve assembled a lot of band instruments and they are strewn around the floor, yet to be picked up and played in anything resembling a concert or even a simple tune.

But, I feel compelled to understand healing – physical, practical, healing of the tissues.
Curiously, this seems to require understanding metaphysical: the nature of reality and what is true.

“Something physically broke inside” and with that thought, that metaphor, Evie jumped into a new way of being.  It feels like something breaks, but actually what breaks is merely a construct of consciousness, something that we’ve held inside and can only express in words and metaphors. 

And while such beliefs or metaphors can hurt us, they can also heal.

I was beginning to see the value of such notions... It’s a real power, a palpable power, such notions, such metaphors, aren’t soft headed mysticism.  They’re entirely practical even essential…all conceptual worlds- yes, even America… are in the final analysis metaphors.

Travels in a Stone Canoe.

Placebo

Dogs can respond to placebos when administered by their owners. Nicholas Humphrey interviewed by Richard Dawkins for “The Enemies of Reason” (part 2)

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist whom I find rather irritating, arrogant and anti-spiritual.

So, I was curious when I read:
Richard's eyes grew wider and wider as I gave a defense of alternative medicine, saying of course it works, and it works for a reason, because it gives people a safety signal.
It gives them the belief that they are in a secure environment in which they can now release their healing resources, they can afford to let down their guard.
Richard put the lengthy unedited out-takes from the interview on his Website. It's a very strange bit of film because the camera's wandering all over the place. Richard and I are throwing ideas around.
Nicholas Humphrey

So, I went to the video and I heard amazing things:

Eighty percent of the effect of Prozac has been shown to be placebo.  (part 2)

Curiously while the healing is placebo, the side effect of suicide in teenagers is actually attributed to the pharmacology.

And they introduced me to a new term, Darwinian Medicine:
until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked".

That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo …

The reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard.  It’s an evolutionary situation… how we use our immune system… we don’t want to get better before [it’s] time, if in fact it’s not safe to do so. 

Not yet safe to get better! 
Humphrey is speaking about how evolutionarily an organism never wants to spend all its energy at once.  We always need to hold a bit in reserve for the next disaster. 
But, I think of cancer patients, real survivors, not recovering until their entire life patterns have been altered.  The body didn’t heal until the psychological stress, the life rules of their environment, have been altered also.

This is a deep healing indeed.  And Humphrey has expanded his investigation into broader implications which make me wonder about our specie’s current push to awaken much quicker than in the past:
If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

And all of this speculation that resonates and excites a Yes! comes from two hardcore scientists:
How far do you think the so called alternative practitioners believe the mumbo jumbo…?
Dawkins

In many cases they are self-deceiving.  Well it’s not even self-deceiving.  They have seen in their own experiences that these treatments work… They have to invent a rationale and then all sorts of nonsense may come… some spiritual and magical explanation…

Supposing you were Jesus and that lame men got up and walked when you told them to. 
You’d be rather impressed with yourself.
But, I am sure it was placebo effect.
Humphrey  (part 3)

And I am not so sure we understand all the layers at which placebo operates.  Dawkins and Humphrey also admit that there may be new laws of physics awaiting discovery.  Dawkins says he’s even suggested to the true believers that they aim at a Nobel Prize.
I like that notion an awful lot.
In fact, it harkens back to why I learned meditation in the first place.  I wasn’t interested in ending my suffering or world peace or getting better grades. I wanted to see if the rumors were indeed true – did Jesus really walk on the water?
Because, if that were true it would change science for millenia.
It would change everything.
Or so I thought when I was nineteen.

Which puts me in mind of yet another personally irritating man, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing last October about the discovery of a faster than light particle:

It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual-motion machine into the patent office.
These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.
But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes.
We shall need a new physics.
A new cosmology.
New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect.
Then shortly and surely, new theologies.

A Reason?

Whatever you say, you see.  So when you say nothing, you see everything.
Matt Kahn

Come January 1^st Emory University becomes a smoke free environment.  Smokers won’t even be allowed to stand outside of buildings to have a cigarette.  Last fall when employees were renewing benefits selections, we had to sign a certificate that we didn’t smoke.  Next year smokers will have to pay an extra $50 per month in insurance premium.
Why all the changes?
Because everybody knows that smoking causes cancer!
Or to be more precise, smoking greatly increases the risk of cancer-
everyone also knows a smoker than seems to escape Scott free.
Hummm.
By profession I am a molecular geneticist.  That’s a discipline that is kind of renown for being the ultimate in reductionism, the ultimate advocate for biological cause and effect.
At least that was the stance as recently as 10 years ago.
But, all that reductionism, in a perfect yin-yang flip, led right into the arms of systems theory, an appreciation of the web of life wherein everything affects everything else.

At work I study a protein, encoded by a gene that when knocked out (mutated) causes the bacteria to stop synthesizing four different antibiotics.
However, we still don’t know how this disruption of antibiotic production actually occurs.
That’s because we’ve learned that when that one gene is knockout, several hundred genes change their behavior dramatically.
There is this whole web of interactions, actions and reactions.
I think of this as biology coming finally to the Buddhist emptiness teachings which speak of Creation as only dependencies arising.

Today, I got an email from a friend who commented, re a Woody Woodpecker cartoon I had sent her (go figure):
In compassionate friends [a group for parents who have lost a child] there are two camps – one believes, as I do, that there is some rhyme and reason to events – a plan in which Charlie’s death makes sense. Nothing is random. 
And another group believes the Divine sets things in motion but is not intimately involved in the day to day such that there is an element of randomness in the car accident or the cancer – God with a capital G does not have a hand in it other than that he created the initial creation….
Even though I believe there are no coincidences and things do not happen randomly – I also sometimes entertain the thought that I could be completely wrong on this and it could all be pretty random.  I don’t like that thought.

Theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, says that Einstein talked about two Gods.
There is God, the interventionist, who listens to and answers our prayers.  Einstein didn’t buy this. However, he did believe in a God of order, harmony and elegance. 
But does that mean that nothing is random?

Actually, what does it mean to say, Nothing is random? 
Does that translate into, There is a reason for everything?
And is the appeal of Reason actually the hope that, One day I can understand?
...And if that is the real belief here, does that bring true relief and freedom?

I came across this video the other day in which Matt Kahn asks you to repeat a phrase so that you can feel your response to simply saying the words.
I think that’s a very nice experiment to try.

Courage

Bravery is something you can experience on the spur of the moment, faced with danger.  To have Courage, you must think about the dangers in advance, then weight the risks, and then do what you have to do…

Young Arthur to his mentor Merlin in The Saxon Shore

At the back of my copy of Eckhart Tolle’s A new Earth there is a list that I composed shortly after my partner informed me she was leaving.

It is a list of discoveries that appalled me at the time even as they liberated:

1.        If she’s not here, I’ll have to…

2.       Hair cuts

3.       Car maintenance

4.       Telephone, the answering machine

5.       Banking, budgeting, pay the bills

6.       Cook the meals

7.       I cleaned the refrigerator once in 20 years!  My God!  It makes me cry!

8.       ** As I do the responsible duties for myself I feel more competent and alert.  I don’t feel I am aging or as old.

9.       Why do I keep thinking about a new car?

10.   **I discover she didn’t just “hold me up” – she “held me back.”

Life’s disasters invite us into the courage that is actually our birthright, and for me this was and is a spiritual adventure.  Often when life is good and comfortable we’re really not advancing all that much.

Sometimes we are cradled and held up, while simultaneously we don’t even notice that we’re holding back.

A new year is coming. What will it bring? 

On my list there is perhaps Cancer, Joblessness, Awakening… these are the unknowns.

Who knows how they will play out and what I will be asked to face and feel.

And every single person gets to have this new year – if they are lucky enough to be alive.

Merlin and Arthur were explicitly concerned with leadership and war.  That may seem something of a non-sequitur here, but then, the entire story of Bhagavad Gita occurs on a battlefield.  So it isn’t too surprising that the principles of war have a bearing upon what Maharishi called “the battlefield of life.”

Men must want to fight, they must be inspired, willing to follow their leader to the death.  That willingness to die… for another man’s purposes only results from great and inspiring leadership…

The Saxon Shore

And what is the essence of great leadership?  … funnily enough it’s love.

 

His men would follow him anywhere, and they don’t care that he has a wooden leg.

No they don’t, because it’s not important.  They follow what they love in him.

 

And that’s about all any of us can do – follow the love we find inside.

For myself, trying to find my way forward from that stark list of inadequacies in the back of A New Earth, I found courage and a willingness to die in my great desire to awaken.

Now, desire may not sound so much like love. 

But my deep desire was a passion and passion is just the frothy waves of the silent ocean of love.

To become that ocean is to awaken.

And to embody that ocean into life requires that “one stand in one’s own shoes.”

That’s how Adya says his teacher described it.

And that was what I told myself whenever I got scared.

And I love that it is doesn’t matter if you have a wooden leg.  (Who doesn’t?)

Merlin and Arthur are describing the leader that lies within us all, our true Self,

which is always and already there.

And if you don’t believe me, then take it from the archetype...

and have a Happy New Year:

Expectation

Asemic Shadows 3, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Yes - the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
        or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
       going and coming and often staying all night.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy


It was Sunday morning early and I was driving the familiar road to be there at the Farmer’s Market right when they unlocked the doors.
That’s how I beat the crowds.
And as usual when driving I checked out – into my head and all those thoughts and the music floating up from the CD player.
And as usual there came a moment when I came up out of my head for air and a look around at the world.


I didn’t recognize a thing!
And for just a second I panicked because I felt totally lost.

And then, I noticed something surprisingly subtle (for me).
I noticed that I had expected to see the previous intersection.
And I saw that I’d become lost because of that simple albeit unconscious expectation.


Expectation.
It will rob you blind.


How many times on BATGAP has someone telling their story of awakening simply said,
“It’s not at all what I expected.”
How many times has Adya told how he’s never met anyone who wasn’t totally surprised?
It’s never what you expected.
So why not give that up?

Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
Rilke, The First Elegy

Said a bit differently

I am really enjoying Michael Barnett’s teaching.  It’s what he calls “resonance based.”

Here he addresses the impotence of words and the importance of the meditative space.
It ties in nicely, from a different angle and different expression, with what I getting at in Dumb Saints.
Barnett’s moving meditations appear very similar to what my Taoist practice looks like.
That’s probably why I find such resonance.

I’m coming to appreciate three kinds of approaches:

awareness based teaching  (Advaita)
emptiness teachings (Buddhism)
resonance teachings  (Taoism, energy movement)

Dumb Saints

Asemic Shadows 2, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
Jack Kerouac

Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s writing, “That’s not poetry, it’s typing.”
I came across it recently as I sought to flesh out a comment Adyashanti once made:
Saint Teresa called that a dumb saint.

As I recall, Adya meant dumb in the sense of stupid – not seeing deeply enough into one’s awakening.
Dumb, of course, can also mean not speaking.
I’ve a friend, most loved and respected, Harvard educated, and she has insisted for some time now that she’s become quite tired of thinking. She doesn’t want to explain what is unfolding within her consciousness.
She simply wants to live it.

I really like to understand.
Though Adya also says:
There’s nothing to understand.

But, there is! And while … wow… I was going to say “And while Awakening is not dependent upon the mind understanding – awakening is not an experience of mind – suddenly, it hit me:
Understanding can take you deeper.
A new understanding can allow the mind to let go.

These days often I am torn. I want to write down the explanation, a description of what has transpired.
But about five minutes into the effort I feel how writing contracts, solidifies individuality, and brings back separation.
I let the effort go. That’s what feels correct. That’s when I understand the wisdom in my friend’s admonishing.

Then, this morning I came across Kerouac. He reminds me of my Taoist practice where we simply follow the flow of energy.
My friend and I began that over 15 years ago and soon discovered that it led to speaking in tongues.
We laughed at this unexpected “Pentacostal Buddhism” and let the energy blow the knots out.
Perhaps that’s not all that different from what Jack' describing:

No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life

As the mind let goes of preconceptions,
it’s not at all what I had expected.
I have to risk becoming dumb.

Realizations

Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?

Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment that literally means "understanding".
In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to a flash of sudden awareness…and is considered a "first step" or embarkation toward nirvana…
The traditional way of achieving satori is through the use of koans.
Wikipedia

Koans seem a formal way to inquire into the nature of one’s experience.

I find it’s also useful to simply sit and notice.  Maybe” useful” isn’t quite the right word.   
It sounds too much like a strategy.  I have these questions my mind seems to fixate upon.

And so, I was looking at my experience the other day and suddenly was hit by what felt like a stunning realization, a totally new understanding that let some rather inchoate knot dissolve and drop away:

I cannot answer the question as to whether or not I am enlightened.

Now, I was already aware that this is a correct conclusion.

Is it not frequently said, there is no “I’ to be enlightened.
And thus, “I” can never become enlightened.
What amazed me, was that I once again I had arrived at the correct conclusion in a rather backward manner.  So, I was also chuckling at my ridiculousness as I was blown away by the impossibility of ever knowing,  or rather, the depth of Not Knowing.
What I had deeply seen was, “There is no such thing as enlightenment.”
Or perhaps the thought at the very moment of epiphany was:
“Enlightenment does not exist.”

The exact phrasing doesn’t matter.  My point is that for a moment I had had a deep realization.
And this one realization came during a week in which realizations came one after another too fast to be recorded.  I found this rather frustrating.
Wow, a beautiful insight - and it’s lost because I didn’t write it down.
But that “supposed” loss is as it should be.  Loss is actually a letting go.
What is once seen in blazing clarity becomes a dead belief a moment later.
So let it go.  Holding on kills it anyway.  So let it go.

Why try to record exactly what the steps were to the insight?
A eureka moment cannot actually be shared.  Each person must solve the koan for herself.
And the letting go allows a deeper dropping… right into the sound of one hand.

There will be many realizations.  In fact, I hope to awaken from as many different angles as possible.

This is true and so is the exact opposite.   Enjoy, and then
Let them all go…

Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind.
One said to the other, "The flag is moving."
The other replied, "The wind is moving."
Huineng overheard this. He said, "Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving."

As long as mind is moving I expect there will be realization after realization.

Let’s not mistake realization for Realization, or beyond that Liberation.

Post script

I didn’t finish this post at first sitting.  My Christmas To-Do List and Timetable called, and I was already behind the curve. So having written the above, I trotted off to grab a quick breakfast, throw on some clothes, and about 15 minutes later discovered that I was blow drying my hair and absent mindedly  singing into the bathroom mirror new words to an old holiday refrain:

Let it go,
Let it go,
Let it go.

I started laughing.  God I love the subconscious mind!  It’s both wise and filled with playfulness.
I mean, the old familiar words fit amazingly well to this whole process of awakening:

It doesn’t show signs of stopping
And I’ve got some corn for popping
And since there’s no place to go…
Let it go, let it go, let it go.

And Happy Holidays!

One Step Over the liNE

white stripe , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

My friend’s cat has been quite ill and my friend has started wondering:
Is she getting better? or
Is she dying?
Where is the line, the demarcation?

Long ago, my father taught me the phrase “asymptotically approaching.”
He was a chemist by training and shared many such wonderfully polysyllabic phrases.
I miss Pop. He crossed that Line over 15 years ago.
And yet, how is that possible?
If there is a finish line, and each step that you take gets you half way there… then even though you keep getting closer, you’re always only half way there.
In short, you can only “asymptotically approach.”

This reminds me of the biggest regret I have from my days of teaching biology.
It happened when I was in graduate school.
I taught an introductory lab course that was filled with non-biology majors, college freshman to juniors. The brightest student in there was a young kid from a local high school who was just sitting in.
One evening he hung around till everyone was gone to ask me a question:
Where was the line between inanimate and animate?

What a wonderful question!
In fact, I had taken it as my own for several years and really studied it. The answer is incredibly illusive.
While anyone can see a rock is inanimate and a parakeet is obviously animate,
there is actually no clear line of demarcation.
Animate: inanimate. What is a virus?
Life: nonliving? Crystals grow, reducing entropy and thus do not decay.
Alive: dead. When do we pull the plug on vegetative states?
If the extremes are so clear cut, why is an actual demarcation point impossible to find?

Curiously, back into 1960’s there was a Letter to the Editor published in the flagship science journal, Nature.The writer wanted to point out that since there could be no demarcation between animate and inanimate, it followed there could also be no clear demarcation for the arising of consciousness.
For if there were, we could simply make that the criterion for life and thus solve that question recognized as unanswerable.

Alive: dead.
Getting better: dying.
Consciousness present: consciousness absent.

Make no mistake – this issue is totally about consciousness.
It’s about the inseparable, unity of Creation, dependently arising, and how It also appears dualistically.

Oh! And why do I regret the boy asking me this question?
Because when he asked I was tired. It came at the end of a long day and I didn’t have the energy and the enthusiasm that young man deserved.  I feel sorrow for that lapse.
But, I’m also betting he just looked elsewhere for his answer.
Scientist, you see, are seekers through and through.

Turkey Consciousness

This beautiful film is one of the most eloquent testimonies to the mystery of consciousness I have ever seen.
Don't know if posting a link will work here.  But, I'll give it a try.
A belated Thanskgiving Turkey:

Watch My Life as a Turkey on PBS. See more from NATURE.

A History of the Sky

Everything that happens in a person is like clouds… A thought is like a cloud, an emotion is like a cloud, a feeling is like a cloud… but what a person really is, is the sky.  They are the space which everything passes through.

But this is poetry.  No one should believe me.  This is something to discover, simply by being with yourself… everything passes through, except for you.

It’s so easy to watch. 

If you look at the sky –the sky never moves… lightening or thunder or sunshine.  But the space in which it happens doesn’t move at all.

It’s sort of a poetic way to try to talk about What’s this?  What’s that?

Benjamin Smythe

So, I invite you to watch the poetry.

With thanks to my friend at the Cassandra Pages for the head’s up.

In Passing

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.*
Lynn Margulis

Taking Vedic Studies with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1975 forever changed the way I think.
What Maharishi suggested, but somehow didn’t say flat out – or at least not in a manner that I could hear – was that since the Absolute is the Source of all relative creation, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, mathematics, astrophysics, and all the arts… they are just the mechanics of Consciousness expressed in different words.

It was maybe a year later that understanding dawned and I abbreviated the concept in my head as “patterns of consciousness.”
The laws of Nature and laws of Consciousness follow the same pattern.
I have sought and admired these patterns ever since.

Lynn Margulis was a scientist who argued similarly, not from any Vedantic rationale, but from keen observation, good science, and a brilliant and tenacious mind.
Yesterday, she died.
And I am saddened by her passing.

Among other things she helped James Lovelock articulate the Gaia Principle.
Perhaps the best tribute I can offer is to let her words about Gaia correct any misconception you may have regarding Gaia:

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems.
Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect.
To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science… And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.
If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! …
Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

And long after Lynn Margulis is gone, biology students will be learning principles she discovered.


*And again to not lose context and to demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of her mind, the larger quote:
You can reduce the study of nervous systems to physics and chemistry but you're missing the microbiological step. It's as if you documented the changing surface of the Earth at urban sites using Landsat images, without knowing anything about the people.
Think of the nerve as coming from what had formerly been a bacterium, trying but unable to rotate and swim. Thought involves motility and communication, the connection between remnant spirochetes. All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Hurts More, Bothers You Less

I came across this Ken Wilber clip that rang a bell.   He doesn’t get to the heart of the matter for over 2.5 minutes, but then he addresses how it actually feels to integrate both absolute and relative views into life experience.

It can HURT!  And while Wilber takes this to the level of bodhisattvas and Christ, the increased sensitivity begins well before that.

For the past few weeks I’ve been repeatedly doubled up with belly grief and love beyond all reasonable proportion.

And, I never see it coming. 

For example, as I clean up the breakfast dishes the radio announces: the first hard freeze arrives tonight.  Take your plants inside because those left out won’t make it.  In the morning the impatiens will be gone.

I look out my window, see my own impatiens, a bit yellowed but still in bloom, and I double over in sobs.

My god, tomorrow the flowers will be gone!

My god, Bralley get a grip!

Adyashanti told us once that there will come a point where, “What isn’t true will become so painful you have to drop it.”  That’s another way to say it.

I’ve discovered that even when all evidence supports a belief, That person lies, That person cheats… the thought becomes intolerable, too painful to maintain.  I am forced to let it go.

People are so much more than their history and behavior.

I seem to be repeatedly invited to drop beliefs and see more deeply.

And it’s not just the world around me.  The beliefs I hold about myself, the way I block love and Infinity from flowing freely through my Life when not exploding in my belly, just kind of hang there, like damp towels caught on little hooks.

Dirty laundry doesn’t seem all that dangerous, but this sudden immolation has a pain that is really quite remarkable. 

But, it seems to bother less.  Intensity does pass.  Such intensity seems only possible because of and due to Presence.  And it feels “correct” to really feel.