Spirituality and Medicine – An Integrated Approach

Lecture Ppt

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna. Welcome to this talk on spirituality and medicine.
So here is the overview. We will discuss this in three broad sections. What, why and how? So what is the correlation between spirituality and medicine? That will be the first part of the seminar.
Second will be, why is there such a correlation? And in that we will look at some scientific understandings, which have more or less become mainstream and some scientific understandings just on the cutting edge of science and some scientific and some logical, rational understandings, which are not yet within the purview of science. And then after we discussed what and why, then we will discuss how. How does this knowledge of the correlation between spirituality and medicine have a practical application on our lives? So within the what, the first thing we’ll discuss is how at the turn of the previous century, means at the start of the 20th century, there was a overall negative attitude towards religion and anything spiritual.
And how consistent research for over a century has changed that perspective. And especially we’ll focus on the Handbook on Health and Religion and what it says about this particular subject. Then why there is such a correlation? We will discuss about how emotions have been found to affect our enzymes, our hormones, and through that effect on the physiology, how they are affecting our health.
How this has been a more or less well documented fact. And then after that, some surprising finding from the start of the century, or late of the 20th century is that the emotions can affect not just our physiology, but also our anatomy. The structure of organs and structure of an organ like the brain can change because of one’s thoughts, one’s thoughts and one’s beliefs.
And then why does this change happen? For that, we will look at a Vedantic model of mind-body interaction. And therein we’ll see how the explanatory value of this model, based on looking at near-death experiences in which the blind were able to see, and also in which a person who was on the verge of death, this person is one among many, who was on the verge of death because of incurable cancer was miraculously cured. And then we will discuss how does this knowledge of the correlation between spirituality and medicine affect us.
By us, there can be two categories. There are the caregivers and the care receivers. The caregivers can refer not only the doctors, the nurses, but also the relatives of the patients, and how they can be sensitive to and supportive of the beliefs of their objects of care.
And then we’ll look at the patients and how they can get a sense of purpose, purpose to living and passion to healing by spirituality. So let’s begin. Now, at the start of the 20th century, this is slide two, 20th century, the idea was that science and religion were at war.
And science was winning and religion was losing. Now, the words religion and spirituality have some relationship and some difference between them. I will focus on one particular model here, wherein spirituality has two limbs.
There is science, there is philosophy and there is religion. Just as science has two limbs, science has theory and science has experiment. So philosophy, the wisdom within spirituality refers to the theory of science and religion is the practical what-to-dos that correlates with the application, the experiment, the field studies, the lived aspects of science.
So in that sense, religion and spirituality are not entirely separate items. They are integrated items. They are connected items.
So here in the seminar, we will use them interchangeably. Although the word religion has a negative connotation, but religion cannot be entirely divorced from spirituality. So here we’ll focus on the general attitudes towards religion.
The word spiritual became mainstream, especially after the 1960s, when there was the countercultural revolution in America. And that was the time when SBNR, spiritual but not religious, that sort of ideas became very common. And thereafter, that trend has spread all over the world also.
So right now we are discussing about a time when the word spiritual was not yet cool. And the word religion did not invoke such negative connotations. But even at that time, there was a group of people who considered religion to be like a disease.
And these people thought that science is the thing that will cure humanity of the disease of religion. And even some of these researchers, who somehow using their own models came up with the idea that religion is like a psychosis. It’s a mental disorder and it needs to be cured by the rationality that is provided by science.
So this is the science and religion war thesis. And both of them are in conflict. But surprisingly, as the centuries progressed, this what was thought to be like a conflict turned out to be a companionship.
Science and spirituality can both promote the human well-being. How this can be done and how scientific history has vindicated this idea of a combination rather than a confrontation of science and spirituality, that will be the subject of the seminar from the point of view of medicine. So since that time onwards, systematic studies started in the 1920s, 1930s onwards.
Many systematic studies started to examine what was the relationship between religious belief and health. Where people who believed in God or who went to churches, mosques or temples and did some sort of religious activities, did they have a better health or a poorer health? As compared to others, who especially as compared to those who did not do such things, who were non-believers. So the most comprehensive study of the relationship between religion and health was actually a meta study.
Meta study means where many, many studies together are brought together and seen in perspective. So this was done and published in the title Handbook of Religion and Health by the Oxford University Press, UP. And now here there are many researchers, Harold Koenig, MD, Michael McClough, PhD and David Larson, MD.
They reviewed more than 2000 published experiments that tested the relationship between religion and everything from blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and stroke to depression, suicide, psychotic disorders and marital problems. That means there were two genres, physical and mental problems. So are religious people more suicidal than non-religious people or are religious people less suicidal than non-religious people? So like that, it was not just that they themselves did one study.
There are hundreds of studies done by different people all over the world and not just anybody can do a study, but a study that gets published in a peer-reviewed journal that has its own level of credibility and respectability. And like that, 2000 studies from all over the world, all those published studies, they did a meta study, compiled all of them and they presented their findings in this book Handbook of Religion and Health. And what was their finding? They found that people who attended a spiritual programme at least once a week lived average seven years longer than those who didn’t attend at all.
That means just attend, if one parameter or one goal of medicine are ultimately to promote longevity. One of the branches of medicine, which is today alternative medicine, Ayurveda and the knowledge that is meant to increase Ayur is lifespan, longevity. So that is one of the primary goals of medicine and gerontology focusses specifically on that.
And wherever the average lifespan has increased as compared to the past, especially in a few centuries compared with them, then that is considered one of the great medical successes. So here we see that just attendance, participation in the religious programme once a week, that led to an average seven years increase in lifespan. Imagine if there was some medicine that was known.
If you take this medicine, your lifespan will increase by seven years. How widespread, how popular, how cool that medicine would be considered to be. So this is a medicine, just religious commitment in terms of participation in a programme at a temple or a church or a mosque.
This can, once a week, this can increase one’s lifespan by seven years. Actually, the amount of time one spends and goes to a temple for two, three hours, two, three hours in one visit per year, that would work out to be just 150 hours. And if we assume three hours per week and 150 hours is actually nothing compared to 150 hours per year.
Even if one lives for 30, 40 years, still one spend that much life, that’s just 6,000 hours. And actually the amount of hours that one gets when one lives for seven years is far, far greater. 24 into 30 into 12 or 24 into 365 into seven.
It’s a far greater amount. So even in terms of the longevity of life, one gets significantly more than what is invested. So now, of course, the point is not just some mathematical precision over here.
We will be focussing on the principle. Not only was the quantity or duration, longevity of life improved, but even the quality of life was improved by the practise of religion. So the quality was improved for youth as well as for elderly people.
So religious youth showed significantly lower levels of drug and alcohol abuse, premature sexual involvement, criminal delinquency and suicidal tendencies than their non-religious counterparts. So this is a serious problem, especially in today’s scenario, where people are being wrecked by self-destructive behaviour, by bad habits. So what was found that if people were committed to religion, then the likelihood that they would succumb to drugs or alcohol or unhealthy sexual behaviour and the diseases and problems associated with that and crime and suicide, all these were much lesser among youth.
Typically the problems when comes a teen into adolescence and then youth, as the passion of youth, the hormones of youth come over, people want to go wild and explore the pleasures that are there. And it creates a lot of danger. And if one wants a protection from the danger, this can be a protection.
Dr. Patrick Green wrote a book called God, the Evidence. And there he says that there is no better quality of mental health or no greater insurance against self-defeating behaviour than a strong religious faith. So again, it is not just for young people.
There were benefits even for elderly people. So elderly people with deep personal religious faith have a stronger sense of well-being and life satisfaction than their less religious peers. So that means well-being and life satisfaction.
As people grow older, one of the biggest problems is feeling of loneliness. That is, of course, the bodily deterioration that happens. But along with that, there is the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of abandonment, the feeling of useless worthlessness of one’s life that can overwhelm a person.
But people have some religious commitment and this helps them in dealing with that. And people have a greater sense of not just freedom from negative emotions, but well-being and life satisfaction that is better among elderly people. So what is Dr. Harold Cunning’s conclusion here? A high SQ, faithfulness to God, appears to benefit people of all means, educational levels and ages.
So SQ refers to spiritual quotient. So there is an intelligence quotient IQ, there is emotional quotient EQ and spiritual quotient SQ. So a high SQ, faithfulness to God.
So that appears to benefit people of all means, educational levels and ages. Basically, he’s saying that, this is the conclusion of his studies, that this is one medicine that helps everyone. It’s not necessarily a physical medicine in terms of something that has to be ingested into the body, but it is something which has been just to be accepted in one’s worldview and one’s lifestyle.
And if one does that, it benefits everyone. It increases the longevity and improves the quality of life. So this is the correlation and this is not just one study.
This is the inference from a compilation of 2000 studies. And many other studies subsequently have indicated the findings of this particular research. Again and again, where people have religious belief, it’s found that their overall health is better physically and mentally.
They are less prone not just to self-defeating behaviour, but also to, it’s found that people recover faster from diseases. It’s found that people overall are quicker from surgery. They are less prone to fall, less vulnerable to diseases, and they are more prone to, more likely to recover faster from diseases.
Now, so Max Planck made the statement in another context, but it is relevant for us here. He said, for religion, God is at the beginning. For science, God is at the end.
Now, that means that religion begins with the understanding of the supreme and we need to harmonise with him. For science, God is at the end. That means science initially had the idea that there is no God and non-spiritual dimension to human life.
But now, after decades and decades of painstaking research, it’s found that living harmoniously with God is actually beneficial for human beings. It’s beneficial for their health and beneficial for their all-around well-being. So for science, God is at the end.
This is what Max Planck is saying. Now, he was talking more in terms of physics. He’s a Nobel Laureate physicist, pioneer in especially quantum physics and many other branches in physics.
But what he has said there applies to the findings with respect to religion’s effect on human health also. Now, we come to the next point is, why does this happen? If the whole idea of religion and God and something beyond this life, if it were just some belief which people have, then why should it, it’s just imaginary belief like a psychosis that people have, then why would it have a beneficial effect on people? Why would it improve one’s health? So this is why we will discuss at various levels. So now, firstly, there are more specified and planned studies done also.
Then there are retrospective studies in medicine, there are prospective studies. Retrospective studies means that there are people who have already experienced certain things and then they are invited to participate in a study. They are interviewed and their reports are combined together.
So prospective studies means that a set of people are shortlisted and they are observed and then they are studied. Generally, prospective studies are more reliable than retrospective in medical setting. They are considered more reliable because the retrospective studies, things have already happened and we mostly have to rely on memory and the documentation may not be accurate.
But in prospective studies, because this particular group of people is being shortlisted in advance, then all the documents can be kept, relevant documents can be kept more carefully, the interviews can be done more carefully and any critical or dubious memories or conflicting versions of events can be more thoroughly investigated and more authoritative resolved. So therefore, there have been prospective studies done also on the correlation between religious practise and health. So among the pioneers of body mind medicine is Dr. Herbert Benson.
Now he developed something called the relaxation response, which in one sense is nothing but a scientific term for meditation. So relaxation response means that do a particular set of actions and contemplations that brings about the response of relaxation within the body. Now, for example, there can be something like say focus on some very soothing scene from nature, think of the sky or think of some mountain with very beautiful looking greenery or contemplate on some sacred sound, whatever the sound that is sacred according to your religious belief.
So this was non-denominational study, non-sectarian study which he had done and he encouraged people according to their beliefs to take up some sound for repetition and for some site for contemplation. So people, some Christians took up Jesus, Muslims took up Allah, Hindus took up Ram or Krishna or some other names, Buddhists took up Buddha, whatever names. And he found that during the process of recovery, if people were encouraged to do this, then their health improved.
If they were sick, they would become healthier faster. Now, why was this? So in one sense, this study correlates or confirms what was found by Handbook of Religion and Health. But this takes things a bit deeper.
Why is it that people are getting cured? So now because it is a prospective study, so not only because the health recovery observed carefully, but also what was happening inside the body was observed, not just over periods of time, but also more scrutinizingly, more continuously in fact. So it was found that when people meditated on something which they considered spiritual, that activated parts of the brain, I’m not going to technicalities over here, but that activated parts of the brain which released hormones that were conducive to well-being and health. So overall, the conclusion of researchers like Dr. Herbert Wenzel was that by cultivating positive, affirmative spiritual thoughts, one literally bathes one’s body in healing fluids.
Just as if we bathe our body with water, it is a cleansing fluid. So now there are some fluids which promote growth, some fluids which promote cleaning. So if there are healing fluid, some fluids that promote healing, then actually something is wounded, we expose it to that.
So literally our positive thoughts, positive emotions, especially positive not just in terms of I’ll be healthy, I’ll improve, not just in those terms, but more in terms of focussing on a higher reality. And that they found had a positive effect on the health. So basically the power and biology of belief was also one of his books, the power and biology of belief.
So biology of belief means here he is not yet going into the spiritual dimension specifically. What he focusses on is that there is something that happens in the brain. So whatever we think about, whatever we contemplate on, that affects our thoughts naturally.
And that leads to certain kinds of chemicals being induced in the body, which promote health. So here there is one level of explanation of why we improve, why does our health improve? Why do religious people have better health than non-religious people? How does religion contribute positively to medicine? That explanation is that because we secrete enzymes and hormones which promote health. So now beyond this, so this is with respect to physiology.
But then something more was found, more dramatic. So Norman Doidge was a neuroscientist specialising in neuromedicine, that means treating people with brain disorders. And he, after many decades of study, research and experimentation, wrote a book called The Brain That Changes Itself.
And in that he says, the idea that the brain can change its own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe, the most important alteration in our view of the brain, since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the working of its basic component, the neurone. So the idea that the brain can change its own structure and function. So earlier, what was thought was, this is actually, there was a famous pioneer of psychology, William Jeads.
And it was towards the start of the 20th century, the late part of the 19th century. So he was one of the first among the medical field who emphasised the power of the mind and power of thoughts. And what he had thought of, what he had laid the foundation for was subsequently confirmed that, you know, by changing our thoughts, we change our life, not just in terms of what we achieve externally, but also in terms of the kind of health that we have.
So that was, as I said, one level of, it’s easier to accept that physiologically, yes, the health-inducing symptoms, enzymes and chemicals are induced in the body by positive thoughts. But here, what he found was something even more substantial, dramatic even. So he studied for decades and his book contains many extraordinary stories of personal triumph based on changing of one’s thoughts.
So, for example, people have some problems in their brain. Certain parts of the brain are not developed, certain parts of the brain are not functional. And the brain is such a complex organ that curing it is itself a very complex process.
And surgery is not always advisable because the brain itself is so complex that one can’t say what will go right, what will go wrong. So often surgery is quite hazardous. And in some cases, some problems in the brain are so great that there is no hope for treating or healing them.
But he found that by encouraging people to live purposefully, to change the way they think, to focus on cultivating a positive attitude, it not only changed their hormones or enzymes, it also changed literally the neural connections and the brain itself redesigned itself. This is called neuroplasticity. So plasticity means changeability, malleability.
So when the neural connections are not very well developed, then the brain does not function so well. And the neural connections are more well developed, the brain functions even more effectively. Of course, the brain is very complex.
And what I’m explaining is a very, very reduced and simplified understanding of the whole situation. But the simple point is that the whole idea is that the structure and function can be changed. It is a dramatic idea.
And that was what was found here by these scientists. So it was remarkable. And now his findings have been confirmed by many other scientists also.
And this indicates something deeper. Now, how does this happen? We know that if I am living in a house, now just by desiring, Oh, this house has got say green colour paint. I don’t really like green colour paint.
I would like a yellow colour paint. Just by my desiring, the green paint is not going to change to yellow paint. Oh, otherwise, if I say that this wall is connected at the right angles, I would like to have this wall connected to the ceiling in a more smoothly curving way.
That sort of changes are going to happen just by my wish. But that’s the kind of changes that are happening in the brain just by the power of focused intention. So how does this happen? That is something which is one of the biggest unanswered questions with current conceptions of what the body is and what consciousness is.
So now to further understand this why, now let’s look at the Vedantic model of body-mind interaction based on an independent locus of consciousness. So here we will see in the Vedantic model, our being has three levels. There is the body, there is the mind and there is the soul.
So the body is like the hardware. If we compare it with a computer system, so the computer system has a hardware, a software and a user. So the body is like the hardware.
The mind is like the software. And the soul, the soul word often has a religious connotation and religious implication. But soul here simply means consciousness or source of consciousness.
That is the user. So now what does this mean the user, the person? So here the point is to understand that there is a matter-spirit duality. The consciousness is different from matter, from the physical body.
And a consciousness is the source, the consciousness is the energy that comes from the soul. The soul is the source of consciousness and that consciousness radiates into the body. So to understand this, let’s look at the model now.
So here this is, first we will talk about how this can explain some of the mysterious things that are there, that have been found in medicine and in biomedical science. And then we’ll see how it applies to the broad field of medicine. So from the Vedantic model, let’s see how we function.
So by considering our normal vision. So when we see, how do we see? That is what is illustrated in this diagram. So before we look at this diagram, when Science Magazine published one of its 120th anniversary issue, so it raised a set of questions, for which science doesn’t have any answer till now.
So one of the questions was, what is the biological basis of consciousness? You know, how are we conscious? So in the magazine, the example of vision itself was given. So now, when we say, if I see a rose, then the rose is in front of me, and the rays from the rose enter into the eyes, and they go through the retina to the optic nerve, and they go to the visual area of the brain. And once they go to the visual area of the brain, what after that? Is it that somehow, what is externally a rose, that is replicated through the connections in the various neurones in the brain? No, how do the electrochemical rays, wave patterns, how do the electrochemical wave patterns entering the eyes, how do the electromagnetic waves entering the eyes, subsequently, the electrochemical signals going through the optic nerve, and firing of the neuronal cells, how does that lead to something like sight? This itself is a great mystery, and one of the unsolved questions in science.
So the two problems are there over here, and this, first is, when we see, we know that there is, there are multiple kinds of input that come in. So, that means, that say, instead of, if I see a parrot flying by, and the parrot is chirping also. Now, at that time, I see the shape, then I see the colour, then I see the motion, and then I hear the sound.
Now, all these are coming in. So the shape, the colour, and the motion, they are coming in through the eyes. And the sound is coming in through the ears.
But all these go through different parts of the brain. In the visual area of the brain, the shape, the colour, and the motion are perceived in different places. And similarly, the sound is perceived in another different place.
Yet, when we perceive it, we get an integrated perception. So how is that, how does this integrated perception take place? That integrated, that’s a big question. This is called the integration problem or the binding problem in consciousness.
And there are no satisfactory explanations for how the integration takes place. And even if the integration takes place, now to understand what is integration means is, suppose in a movie is going on, and if that in the movie, the audio and the video are not synced together, say the video is moving faster than the audio, then the one person, say two people are fighting, and one person punches the other person. And now the sound of the punch comes, say the punch hits and the person falls.
But if the audio and video are not synced together, then the punch comes much later after the person has fallen down. And the person falls and then one hears the punch. This is stupid.
So if the audio video are not synced together, then we cannot release the experience. So similarly, the syncing has to be done inside also, in our brain. So who does the syncing? And where is the syncing done? So one thing is that the syncing has to be done, the integration on the various inputs has to be done.
And secondly, there has to be someone who perceives it. Even if all the inputs are put together on the screen, on our TV screen, still who sees this? Who sees this? That is not known. So that is itself also a big question.
So the Vedantic model explains that the syncing is done in the mind. The mind is like a high-tech multimedia computer, which integrates all the sensory inputs and then presents them for display and response by the soul. So just like data, if a computer is used for monitoring a patient, then the various sensors might be there.
To look at the heart rate, to look at the various other parameters, the brain waves, to look at the blood pressure, whatever. All those inputs are coming in from different devices, and they are put together. And the computer in one screen offers all the inputs together.
So that integrated integration function, an integrated display function is done by the mind. And beyond that, who is doing the perception? That is the source. So that’s how we can understand this three level, that the body, mind and soul.
So the body is the, we have the physical senses. The body is the primary object for treatment for medicine. Beyond that is the mind.
So whatever is happening in the body, that is integrated in the mind. The mind is not the same as the brain. The mind is subtle, just like there may be in a computer, there is a CPU, but the CPU is still a physical part.
Whereas the operating system, some people may have Unix, some people may have Mac OS X, whatever operating system they use, their operating system is not something which is gross. We cannot point out, this is the operating system. We may say that in a particular part of the computer, the operating system may be stored, but even that is not so precise.
The understanding is that it’s not that that part is the OS, it’s subtle. So like that, the brain is the root, R-O-U-T of consciousness. The brain is not R-O-O-T, not the root of consciousness.
So coming back to this diagram again, now let’s try to understand this, how this happens. How do we normally perceive? That question is unanswered in today’s mainstream science, which is largely matter-based. Let’s see how a spiritually-based science can answer this question.
So when we observe the outside world, the vision comes in through the eye, and from the eye it goes to the brain, from the brain it goes to the subtle eye, and from the subtle eye it goes to the soul. That means that it is perceived at that particular point. So the subtle body includes the mind, and the mind has its own subtle senses.
That’s why there are people who in dreams, the eyes are closed and they can still see, because there’s a subtler sense of vision. So now Dr. Kenneth Ring and several other researchers, they have found that there are, they have used the term called Mindsight. Mindsight refers to the capacity to perceive among the blind.
That means people who are blind throughout their life. There are congenitally blind people, there are adventitiously blind people. Congenitally means those who are from birth blind.
Adventitiously means those who were, who had eyes but because of accident lost eyes. So now those who are congenitally blind people, they have had no experience of vision itself. And for them to perceive anything is nothing short of a miracle.
They have found that during near-death experiences, near-death experiences refers to the experiences when a person is very close to death because of some accident or some heart attack or something like that. And during that time when people are in close to that, often they have OBs, out-of-body experiences. That means they experience, they have come out of the body and they are perceiving from outside the body.
So there are several cases which Dr. Ring observed and is documented in a book called Mindsight. Therein he describes how people, Vicky Winnipeg, for example, was one case of a person who was blind and the only time that this person saw was during near-death experience. So the patient was unconscious and then at that time the patient reported observing the doctor and the medical staff trying to treat the body, the patient’s body itself.
But the patient was observing it from above and the patient could not recognise anyone but Vicky recognised people based on their voices. Could not recognise because not seeing, had never seen. But this was the time, oh and by being familiar with the voice, the patient understood that actually, oh this is my doctor, this is how the doctor looks like, this is how this nurse looks like.
And then once the near-death experience ended, person is no longer able to see. Now there have been many documented cases of near-death experiences and many researchers have done this but these are the most incomprehensible, inexplicable. How can a person see and see accurately? So phenomena which are very difficult for the materialistic model of, for scientific materialism to explain, for a science that is open to spirituality has capacity to explain that.
So how would that be explained? We can understand it here that here there is near-death vision, near-death experience. How is the vision happening at that time? When a person, normally the soul along with the subtle body, that is the mind, we will roughly equate the subtle body with the mind. The subtle body has other components also but here we will focus on the mind.
The soul along with the mind, they are present normally inside the gross body but during some bodily rupture, during some bodily trauma, the soul and the subtle body come out and they can observe from outside the body. So here we will see, the normal vision is what? We see through the eyes but here there is no activity, there is no sight, the brain itself, all the brain waves are flat, the eyes are closed, no light is going inside. So one cannot see with the gross eye but then there is, the soul and the subtle body have come out and the subtle eye sees.
Through the subtle body and then the soul perceives that way. So now this may seem a little advanced and complex but the simple point to understand it is, it’s a sophisticated model of mind-body interaction and in fact it’s not just mind-body interaction, it is soul-spirit-matter interaction that is being talked about and the mind is the medium through which this interaction happens. So, now there is also a famous case of NDE experience with miraculous healing that is the case of Anita Murjani.
So NDE with miraculous healing. So Anita Murjani was an Indian origin person living in Singapore and was an atheist and so the point of being atheist is that person had no, she had no prior religious beliefs that she wanted to confirm by this kind of experience. But then she not only had a near-death experience but during the near-death experience she had this near-death experience in which she saw that her doctor, she was on the bed about to die and she felt herself floating outside the body and when she came out and she saw the doctor telling her husband that there is no hope and she is unlikely to live till the next morning.
Her body was, she had been taking treatment for several years for acute cancer and it had been declared incurable and therefore she in her desperation was on the verge of death. So at that time she not only saw her husband shocked by the doctor’s diagnosis, prognosis but she also saw her brother who had boarded a flight for coming to be with her and she had no knowledge that her brother was coming when she had fallen unconscious and then she had several experiences after that but apart from, but the most important thing is when she came back to consciousness doctors found that her cancer had gone into regression and within just a few weeks a person who was supposed to die was discharged and returned back to almost normal healthy living. So it is a well documented case of how a person miraculously cured.
So now if we remain closed Dr. William James, he said that now this is just one case but there are many cases like this where Dr. Ian Stevenson wrote a book called a whole book or a whole chapter in one of his books called Paranormal Modification of Biological Form. So Dr. Ian Stevenson was the pioneering researcher at the University of Virginia and Department of Personality Studies he was the founding head of that department and he said Paranormal Modification of Biological Form, that means how by thoughts one’s body can change. So here what has been found is that there have been people who have been declared to be medically incurable and they have been cured.
Now does this mean that we have to just believe anything and everything and reject medicine? No, not at all. Not a question of rejection of medicine but this is simply a question of being matter of being open minded to whatever is available for helping in the healing process. So rather than letting medicine reduce the healing options, we can be open minded to other healing options also.
Now what is the Vedantic understanding of how this person was able to perceive or be cured? The understanding is that the mind has powers that the body itself does not have because the mind acts at a subtler level. So that means that just as we can see in some cases a computer which is functioning poorly we may check at one level that okay, is some hardware part wrong? Do I need to increase the RAM? Is the monitor not proper? Is the keyboard not proper? I can check for functional issues at the level of hardware but there can be problems at the level of software and if I update my OS, at a physical level nothing has changed in my laptop but I may find that oh, my laptop’s performance has improved much more. So, when I am as a user working on a machine I cannot reduce my machine to simply its physical structure.
Yes, it has a physical structure but along with that it also has a physical part. Along with that it has something which is not exactly reducible to physical, holdable, tangible components and being open to that is important for me to optimise the performance of my machine. Similarly, it’s important for me to be open to higher forms of medication or higher forms of healing in addition to physical medication.
So, now these we may say are mystical and that is true that okay this sort of miraculous healings can often happen to some people or because some people may have some near-death experiences but what we want in medication is systematic cure that is repeatable. What is the use of something which may have happened to someone and even if we are open say okay even if I admit it has happened how does it apply to everyone? Yes, that is a valid question and we are focussing not here on the specific miraculous or mystical cures and not recommending that we somehow try to make them mainstream and reject or subordinate the normal medical process to that. What we are talking about is look at the explanatory framework that this worldview offers or this conception of the self offers and see how that can benefit the healing process and how that can promote the medical of improvement.
So, for example now today when we talk about spiritual health we are talking about application of carriers in spiritual health one of the main things that is talked about the word spiritual health has become quite mainstream in medicine today and the main focus on that is that the caregiver, the doctors and others should be sensitive to the belief systems of the patients and that sort of sensitivity is welcome development given that the world is becoming multicultural increasingly so that is desirable and welcome development so certain patients may be vegetarians and then while giving medicine or while prescribing diet the caregivers can be sensitive to their dietary preferences as much as possible that’s one level of understanding but then beyond that there is something more not just be sensitive we can be sensitive to many things certain people like certain things we are sensitive to them but we don’t consider them as really rational or reasonable but not only going beyond sensitive to being supportive so Carl Jung as we know was one of the pioneer psychologists and although he was initially a protege of Sigmund Freud later on and Sigmund Freud started sexualising everything and started becoming anti-theistic campaigner then Carl Jung parted ways and he developed his own sophisticated model of the mind based on archetypes on that’s a complex subject but let’s see what he has to say on this point of healing and one’s spiritual orientation so in his book psychotherapist or the clergy chapter 11 he says among all my patients in the second half of life that is to say over 35 there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life it is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age had given their followers and none of them had been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook so very profound and direct statement so this person has been offering care and he is saying that especially in the second half now why second half generally in youth the body is healthy and unless one indulges in some self-destructive habits one does not usually get any major problems but in second half the body itself becomes weak and that time one’s vulnerability becomes much more so he is saying that time as a person becomes older during that phase for healing to happen is not easy so how can healing happen at that time he is describing that at that time the last resort we can try norms on mainstream medicine but last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook of life so one who did not have that religious outlook that’s why the book is called as psychotherapist or clergy that means turn towards God or turn towards psychotherapy so one has to yes one can go for psychotherapy one can try to psychoanalyse and try to find out what one’s problems are but beyond that one has to go deeper and understand what is the purpose for which one is living so now he is not just talking about some dogma which one has to believe but what the living religions of every age have given to their followers what are the religions, the sense of purpose and meaning for life what religion does is that it helps us to see our life not just as something which infinity of activity with infinitesimal patch of activity between two infinites of nothingness that means I was born at birth before that I did not exist and then I live for some time flap around in this bodily bag and then afterwards I die and I am destroyed so the whole idea that my existence is going to end in nothingness that is a very debilitating idea it can demoralise a person and understand getting the sense of purpose that’s what living religions do living religions are not just meant for you go and say ring a bell or do some kind of religious activity just bow in a particular direction or move the hands in a particular way no, these are meant to be expressions of something deeper of the purpose that drives one’s life and that’s what so those who have fallen sick especially in the later years of life he says that only those who got what the living religions of the world had to have were they cured and others found it very difficult to cure because they had no purpose to life now this crisis of purpose applies not just to some individual but it applies to society at large so here there is a conversation between two noble laureates so Werner Heisenberg talking with Albert Einstein he is saying this and this has been quoted also by Dr. Abdul Kalam in his book Ignited Minds he says you know in the west they built a large beautiful ship it has all the comforts in it but one thing is missing it has no compass and does not know where to go so we have a large beautiful ship with all facilities but if we don’t have a compass we don’t know where to go so what spirituality offers us is this purpose to the western westernisation of society in India and the overall materialism that has spread in society that has ripped the sense of purpose away from people’s lives and that has left people aimless you know are we just nothing once we remove diverse spirituality from life then who are we what are we are we just particles of matter are we just electrons rotating around aimlessly and endlessly for all our life is there nothing higher to our life beyond this so this can bring a profound sense of meaninglessness and purposenessness so spirituality brings purpose to life and looking further let if the purpose to living bring passion to healing purpose to living bring passion to healing that means if I have a purpose to live not just I have to do this job or I have to do that a deeper purpose which comes from the innermost core of my being and that matches with the nature of universal reality then that kind of purpose can bring passion yes I want to get cured and then once the person has an inner motivation for recovery doctors know that if a person is demoralised and doesn’t want to get cured then medicines can’t help the person much to get cured at one extreme there are people who are hypochondriacs who are healthy physically but they pretend to be sick in order to get attention for whatever purposes now nothing can cure a hypochondriac but it’s not that people who are healthy imagine to be sick because of a sick mind but a sick mind can also make the body sick and that’s what psychosomatic diseases are all about so negative effect is also there and positive effect is also there in terms of placebo effect you know people are told that you are being treated and if they are being treated they even if they are given sugar pills they get cured because they feel that they are being treated so let purpose to so here what is happening the mind is affecting the body this is something which we have discussed earlier before of course but here we are focussing on much more that if we if spirituality can bring purpose at the level of the mind which spirituality can definitely do then it can bring purpose and sense of mission to one’s healing also as German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsch he said that he who has a why in life can tolerate almost anyhow let me now when people are sick suppose somebody has got cancer and has to go through chemotherapy or radiotherapy now it can be quite agonising and mortifying people lose all their hair and they feel so humiliated sometimes by that the body may get discoloured and just the fact that one is sick and one has to depend on others for even one’s basic needs it can be very mortifying for people but how will I tolerate all this that question can cripple people but if people have purpose for their life he who has a why in life can tolerate almost anyhow so now there is a Dr. Victor Frankl who is a famous psychologist who was trapped in being a Jew was trapped in the Holocaust in Auschwitz and other places and when he was trapped he was living on the border of birth and death and in human conditions at that time he lived by focussing, meditating on the purpose of life and when he eventually survived and came out he wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning and in that book he explained how by meditating on that purpose he was able to get strength and then he inspired people to discover the purpose of their lives and he also acknowledges that the great wisdom texts of the world can help one to find a deeper purpose to one’s life so spirituality helps us to understand that we have a purpose that is not defeated even by death you know we are indestructible beings especially the Vedantic model of spirituality what does it tell us that we are souls and just as I mentioned the soul can come out of the body to near the experiences similarly after that the soul leaves the body and the soul continues to live and the soul lives lives lives till the soul attains perfection till the soul attains eternal life with God and there there is no frustration there is no unhappiness there is everlasting joy and that is life’s supreme success so when one understands that big purpose to life suppose if I am going by car and I know that a friend whom I love very much is there at my destination waiting to meet me or if I know somebody is going to give me 25 kgs of gold over there if I know something precious is there then even if the road is very bumpy even if my car breaks down and I have to have a lot of inconvenience to get the car repaired still because there is such a shining purpose to my life I will keep persevering so I will tolerate all the obstacles that will come and move on similarly basically medicine involves what medicine involves not just treating the patient that is important but also giving the will for the patient to be treated and to be healed if the patient is demoralised the patient doesn’t have a purpose to live now often doctors strive to treat and heal the patient and sometimes the patients are so demoralised they do the opposite they take some pills which kill them, they commit suicide so now suicide is the result, is the most tragic and drastic expression of purposeless living how purposeless living can lead to the end of living can lead to destruction of life voluntarily in the form of suicide lack of purpose can harm a person so much and purpose can bring a person back from the verge of death or can bring the purpose back from within the midst of a terrible disease back to health and joy and this is the purpose that spirituality can offer us so now somebody may say all this is non-scientific mumbo-jumbo who knows about the soul and all these things why bother, we will just focus on treating patients by giving medicines treating patients by giving medicines precise medicines state of the art treatment that is all very important but here we have a quote of a Nobel laureate scientist Sir Peter Medawar advised to a young scientist his gist of his quote is basically be open to learning from all sources so what does he say, there is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and upon his profession than roundly to declare particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for that science knows or soon will know the answer to all questions worth asking and that questions which do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer that means he is saying that there are questions which science answers and there are questions for which science has no answers and one should not reject those questions which science can’t answer as useless, as unscientific as valueless no, they may be they are not against science, they may be about science, they are at a different level of understanding and spirituality can offer that to a person so how does spirituality offer that by giving a sense of purpose to living so this will be say that if now what you are talking about scientists can apply to a doctor can apply to anyone, if a doctor says the beliefs is all just trash after you die nothing happens now all that will happen if a patient has a strong belief such sort of statements will only make the patient lose respect for the doctor lose respect for the medical system so there is no quicker way for a scientist to be discreet upon himself and upon his profession so disrespecting the questions for which science does not have answers, just what is the purpose of life and disrespecting the sources that can give answers to such questions is actually a disservice to science, so by being open to knowledge from wherever one can get it, one can actually expand one’s own horizons and expand the resources available to assist in the healing process and this has been the vision of all the great scientists of the world so for example here we have Albert Einstein his famous quote science without religion is lame religion without science is blind so he is saying that both these fields can be brought together for the purpose of all round well being of people religion and science can be brought together science without religion is lame in the sense that a doctor can offer the best medicine but if the patient does not have a desire to live, does not have a purpose to live, science will not be able to do anything, doctor will give the best treatment and the first opportunity the patient may end up committing suicide so now I am not equating lack of religion with suicide but it has been well documented that irreligious people atheistic people are more prone to commit suicide and to have suicidal tendencies than religious people so science without religion is lame unless that person has a purpose to living, science will not be able to sustain the life of that person for very long as is tragically exemplified in suicide on the other hand, religion without science is blind so there is no need to reject medicine per se yes there is a higher purpose to living, so when I have the purpose to live, I also need the instrument to live and the instrument is the body so I also need to take care of the body and I need proper treatment at the level of the body and I can offer treatment to people also at the level of the body and in this way one can actually integrate both and that is the conclusion of Arjuna an integrated approach to caring is that let all human energies, scientific and spiritual physical and mental be channelised for healing and living, so scientific and spiritual means whatever understanding we get from science, rather than saying that I am a scientist and that person is not scientist, we can see we are all at our core human beings and we are all on a journey towards learning and growing, so whichever sources of knowledge help us in learning and growing, let’s be open to them so science offers us something, we accept that spirituality offers us something, we accept that also so both can help in treating patients and helping them, so spirituality can offer a why to live and medicine can offer a how to live, I want to live and then ok, I will take this treatment, get this part of the organ healed, get this system fixed up and then you will be able to live, so physical and mental, so both the aspects they can be integrated and that can bring about healing and not just a deeper long lasting healing but also a more fulfilling a more productive living for those who are healed and even for those who have not fallen sick, spirituality can offer a more fulfilling internally in terms of more satisfactory and more productive externally in terms of what one contributes the world, in this way spirituality and medicine can be integrated together for the all round well being of all human beings thank you, Hare Krishna