Body Holographic, part 1, 515

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be goad health to you nevertheless.
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

A sixty-one-year-old man we'll call Frank was diagnosed as having an almost always fatal form of throat cancer and told he had less than a 5 percent chance of surviving. His weight had dropped from 180 to 98 pounds. He was extremely weak, could barely swallow his own saliva, and was having trouble breathing. Indeed, his doctors had debated whether to give him radiation therapy at all, because there was a distinct possibility the treatment would only add to his discomfort without significantly increasing his chances for survival. They decided to proceed anyway.

Then, to Frank's great good fortune, Dr. 0. Carl Simonton, a radiadon oncologist and medical director of the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Dallas, Texas, was asked to participate in his treatment. Simonton suggested that Frank himself could influence the course of his own disease. Simonton then taught Frank a number of relaxation and mental-imagery techniques he and his colleagues had developed. From that point on, three times a day, Frank pictured the radiation he received as consisting of millions of tiny bullets of energy bombarding his cells. He also visualized his cancer cells as weaker and more confused than his normal cells, and thus unable to repair the damage they suffered. Then he visualized his body's white blood cells, the soldiers of the immune system, coming in, swarming over the dead and dying cancer cells, and carrying them to his liver and kidneys to be flushed out of his body.

The results were dramatic and far exceeded what usually happened in such cases when patients were treated solely with radiation. The radiation treatments worked like magic. Frank experienced almost none of the negative side effects-damage to skin and mucous membranes-that normally accompanied such therapy. He regained his lost weight and his strength, and in a mere two months all signs of his cancer had vanished. Simonton believes Frank's remarkable recovery was due in large part to his daily regimen of visualization exercises.

In a follow-up study, Simonton and his colleagues taught their mental-imagery techniques to 159 patients with cancers considered medically incurable. The expected survival time for such a patient is twelve months. Four years later 68 of the patients were still alive. Of those, 14 showed no evidence of disease, the cancers were regressing in 12, and in 17 the disease was stable. The average survival time of the group as a whole was 24.4 months, over twice as long as the national norm.

Simonton has since conducted a number of similar studies, all with positive results. Despite such promising findings, his work is still considered controversial. For instance, critics argue that the individuals who participate in Simonton's studies are not "average patients." Many of them have sought Simonton out for the express purpose of learning his techniques, and this shows that they already have an extraordinary fighting spirit. Nonetheless, many researchers find Simonton's results compelling enough to support his work, and Simonton himself has set up the Simonton Cancer Center, a successful research and treatment facility in Pacific Palisades, California, devoted to teaching imagery techniques to patients who are fighting various illnesses. The therapeutic use of imagery has also captured the imagination of the public, and a recent survey revealed that it was the fourth most frequently used alternative treatment for cancer.

How is it that an image formed in the mind can have an effect on something as formidable as an incurable cancer? Not surprisingly the holographic theory of the brain can be used to explain this phenomenon as well. Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, director of research and rehabilitation science at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas, Texas, and one of the scientists who helped develop the imagery techniques Simonton uses, believes it is the holographic imaging capabilities of the brain that provide the key.

As has been noted, all experiences are ultimately just neurophysiological processes taking place in the brain. According to the holographic model the reason we experience some things, such as emotions, as internal realities and others, such as the songs of birds and the barking of dogs, as external realities is because that is where the brain localizes them when it creates the internal hologram that we experience as reality. However, as we have also seen, the brain cannot always distinguish between what is "out there and what it believes to be "out there, and that is why amputees sometimes have phantom limb sensations. Put another way, in a brain that operates holographically, the remembered image of a thing can have as much impact on the senses as the thing itself.

It can also have an equally powerful effect on the body's physiology, a state of affairs that has been experienced firsthand by anyone who has ever felt their heart race after imagining hugging a loved one. Or anyone who has ever felt their palms grow sweaty after conjuring up the memory of some unusually frightening experience. At first glance the fact that the body cannot always distinguish between an imagined event and a real one may seem strange, but when one takes the holographic model into account-a model that asserts that all experiences, whether real or imagined, are reduced to the same common language of holographically organized wave forms-the situation becomes much less puzzling. Or as Achterberg puts it, "When images are regarded in the holographic manner, their omnipotent influence on physical function logically follows. The image, the behavior, and the physiological concomitants are a unified aspect of the same phenomenon."

Bohm uses his idea of the implicate order, the deeper and nonlocal level of existence from which our entire universe springs, to echo the sentiment: "Every action starts from an intention in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form; it already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it out. And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place in that way from the subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until it manifests in the explicate."In other words, in the implicate order, as in the brain itself, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable, and it should therefore come as no surprise to us that images in the mind can ultimately manifest as realities in the physical body.

Achterberg found that the physiological effects produced through the use of imagery are not only powerful, but can also be extremely specific. For example, the term white blood cell actually refers to a number of different kinds of cell. In one study, Achterberg decided to see if she could train individuals to increase the number of only one particular type of white blood cell in their body. To do this she taught one group of college students how to image a cell known as a neutrophil, the major constituent of the white blood cell population. She trained a second group to image T-cells, a more specialized kind of white blood cell. At the end of the study the group that learned the neutrophil imagery had a significant increase in the number of neutrophils in their body, but no change in the number of T-cells. The group that learned to image T-cells had a significant increase in the number of that kind of cell, but the number of neutrophils in their body remained the same.

Achterberg says that belief is also critical to a person's health. As she points out, virtually everyone who has had contact with the medical world knows at least one story of a patient who was sent home to die, but because they "believed otherwise," they astounded their doctors by completely recovering. In her fascinating book Imagery in Healing she describes several of her own encounters with such cases. In one, a woman was comatose on admission, paralyzed, and diagnosed with a massive brain tumor. She underwent surgery to "debulk" her tumor (remove as much as is safely possible), but because she was considered close to death, she was sent home without receiving either radiation or chemotherapy.

Instead of promptly dying, the woman became stronger by the day. As her biofeedback therapist, Achterberg was able to monitor the woman's progress, and by the end of sixteen months the woman showed no evidence of cancer. Why? Although the woman was intelligent in a worldly sense, she was only moderately educated and did not really know the meaning of the word tumor-or the death sentence it imparted. Hence, she did not believe she was going to die and overcame her cancer with the same confidence and determination she'd used to overcome every other illness in her life, says Achterberg. When Achterberg saw her last, the woman no longer had any traces of paralysis, had thrown away her leg braces and her cane, and had even been out dancing a couple of times.

Achterberg backs up her claim by noting that the mentally retarded and the emotionally disturbed-individuals who cannot comprehend the death sentence society attaches to cancer-also have a significantly lower cancer rate. Over a four-year period in Texas, only about 4 percent of the deaths in these two groups were from cancer, compared to the state norm which was 15 to 18 percent. Intriguingly, there was not one recorded case of leukemia between the years 1925 and 1978 in these two groups. Studies have reported similar results in the United States as a whole, as well as in various other countries including England, Greece, and Romania7

Because of these and other findings Achterberg thinks that a person with an illness, even a common cold, should recruit as many "neural holograms" of health as possible-in the form of beliefs, images of well-being and harmony, and images of specific immune functions being activated. She feels we must also exorcise any beliefs and images that have negative consequences for our health, and realize that our body holograms are more than just pictures. They contain a host of other kinds of information including intellectual understandings and interpretations, prejudices both conscious and unconscious, fears, hopes, worries, and so on.

Achterberg's recommendation that we rid ourselves of negative images is well taken, for there is evidence that imagery can cause illness as well as cure it. In Love, Medicine, and Miracles, Bernie Siegel says he often encounters instances where the mental pictures patients use to describe themselves or their lives seem to play a role in the creation of their conditions. Examples include a mastectomy patient who told him she "needed to get something off her chest"; a patient with multiple myeloma in his backbone who said he "was always considered spineless"; and a man with carcinoma of the larynx whose father punished him as a child by constantly squeezing his throat and telling him to "shut up!"

Sometimes the relationship between the image and the illness is so striking it is difficult to understand why it is not apparent to the individual involved, as in the case of a psychotherapist who had emergency surgery to remove several feet of dead intestine and then told Siegel, "I'm glad you're my surgeon. I've been undergoing teaching analysis. I couldn't handle all the shit that was coming up, or digest the crap in my life."Incidents such as these have convinced Siegel that nearly all diseases originate at least to some degree in the mind, but he does not think this makes them psychosomatic or unreal. He prefers to say they are soma-significant, a term coined by Bohm to sum up better the relationship, and derived from the Greek word soma meaning "body." That all diseases might have their origin in the mind does not disturb Siegel. He sees it rather as a sign of tremendous hope, an indicator that if one has the power to create sickness, one also has the power to create wellness.

The connection between image and illness is so potent, imagery can even be used to predict a patient's prospects for survival. In another landmark experiment, Simonton, his wife, psychologist Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, Achterberg, and psychologist G. Frank Lawlis performed a battery of blood tests on 126 patients with advanced cancer. Then they subjected the patients to an equally extensive array of psychological tests, including exercises in which the patients were asked to draw images of themselves, their cancers, their treatment, and their immune systems. The blood tests offered some information about the patients' condition, but provided no major revelations. However, the results of the psychological tests, particularly the drawings, were encyclopedias of information about the status of the patients' health. Indeed, simply by analyzing patients' drawings, Achterberg later achieved a 95 percent rate of accuracy in predicting who would die within a few months and who would beat their illness and go into remission.

As incredible as the evidence culled by the above-mentioned researchers is, it is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the control the holographic mind has over the physical body. And the practical applications of such control are not limited strictly to matters of health. Numerous studies conducted around the world have shown that imagery also has an enormous effect on physical and athletic performance.

In a recent experiment, psychologist Shlomo Breznitz at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, had several groups of Israeli soldiers march forty kilometers (about twenty-five miles), but gave each group different information. He had some groups march thirty kilometers, and then told them they had another ten to go. He told others they were going to march sixty kilometers, but in reality only marched them forty. He allowed some to see distance markers, and provided no clues to others as to how far they had walked. At the end of the study Breznitz found that the stress hormone levels in the soldiers' blood always reflected their estimates and not the actual distance they had marched.In other words, their bodies responded not to reality, but to what they were imaging as reality.

According to Dr. Charles A. Garfield, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researcher and current president of the Performance Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, the Soviets have extensively researched the relationship between imagery and physical performance. In one study a phalanx of world-class Soviet athletes was divided into four groups. The first group spent 100 percent of their training time in training. The second spent 75 percent of their time training and 25 percent of their time visualizing the exact movements and accomplishments they wanted to achieve in their sport. The third spent 50 percent of their time training and 50 percent visualizing, and the fourth spent 25 percent training and 75 percent visualizing. Unbelievably, at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, the fourth group showed the greatest improvement in performance, followed by groups three, two, and one, in that order.

Garfield, who has spent hundreds of hours interviewing athletes and sports researchers around the world, says that the Soviets have incorporated sophisticated imagery techniques into many of their athletic programs and that they believe mental images act as precursors in the process of generating neuromuscular impulses. Garfield believes imagery works because movement is recorded holographically in the brain. In his book Peak Performance: Mental Training Techniques of the World's Greatest Athletes, he states, "These images are holographic and function primarily at the subliminal level. The holographic imaging mechanism enables you to quickly solve spatial problems such as assembling a complex machine, choreographing a dance routine, or running visual images of plays through your mind."

Australian psychologist Alan Richardson has obtained similar results with basketball players. He took three groups of basketball players and tested their ability to make free throws. Then he instructed the first group to spend twenty minutes a day practicing free throws. He told the second group not to practice, and had the third group spend twenty minutes a day visualizing that they were shooting perfect baskets. As might be expected, the group that did nothing showed no improvement. The first group improved 24 percent, but through the power of imagery alone, the third group improved an astonishing 23 percent, almost as much as the group that practiced.

Physician Larry Dossey believes that imagery is not the only tool the holographic mind can use to effect changes in the body. Another is simply the recognition of the unbroken wholeness of all things. As Dossey observes, we have a tendency to view illness as external to us. Disease comes from without and besieges us, upsetting our wellbeing. But if space and time, and all other things in the universe, are truly inseparable, then we cannot make a distinction between health and disease.

How can we put this knowledge to practical use in our lives? When we stop seeing illness as something separate and instead view it as part of a larger whole, as a milieu of behavior, diet, sleep, exercise patterns, and various other relationships with the world at large, we often get better, says Dossey. As evidence he calls attention to a study in which chronic headache sufferers were asked to keep a diary of the frequency and severity of their headaches. Although the record was intended to be a first step in preparing the headache sufferers for further treatment, most of the subjects found that when they began to keep a diary, their headaches disappeared!

In another experiment cited by Dossey, a group of epileptic children and their families were videotaped as they interacted with one another. Occasionally, there were emotional outbursts during the sessions, which were often followed by actual seizures. When the children were shown the tapes and saw the relationship between these emotional events and their seizures, they became almost seizure-free.Why? By keeping a diary or watching a videotape, the subjects were able to see their condition in relationship to the larger pattern of their lives. When this happens, illness can no longer be viewed "as an intruding disease originating elsewhere, but as part of a process of living which can accurately be described as an unbroken whole," says Dossey. "When our focus is toward a principle of relatedness and oneness, and away from fragmentation and isolation, health ensues."

Dossey feels the word patient is as misleading as the word particle. Instead of being separate and fundamentally isolated biological units, we are essentially dynamic processes and patterns that are no more analyzable into parts than are electrons. More than this, we are connected, connected to the forces that create both sickness and health, to the beliefs of our society, to the attitudes of our friends, our family, and our doctors, and to the images, beliefs, and even the very words we use to apprehend the universe.

In a holographic universe we are also connected to our bodies, and in the preceding pages we have seen some of the ways these connections manifest themselves. But there are others, perhaps even an infinity of others. As Pribram states, "If indeed every part of our body is a reflection of the whole, then there must be all kinds of mechanisms to control what's going on. Nothing is firm at this point."Given our ignorance in the matter, instead of asking how the mind controls the body holographic, perhaps a more important question is, What is the extent of this control? Are there any limitations on it, and if so, what are they? That is the question to which we now turn our attention.

Another medical phenomenon that provides us with a tantalizing glimpse of the control the mind has over the body is the placebo effect. A placebo is any medical treatment that has no specific action on the body but is given either to humor a patient, or as a control in a double-blind experiment, that is, a study in which one group of individuals is given a real treatment and another group is given a fake treatment. In such experiments neither the researchers nor the individuals being tested know which group they are in so that the effects of the real treatment can be assessed more accurately. Sugar pills are often used as placebos in drug studies. So is saline solution (distilled water with salt in it), although placebos need not always be drugs. Many believe that any medical benefit derived from crystals, copper bracelets, and other nontraditional remedies is also due to the placebo effect.

Even surgery has been used as a placebo. In the 1950s, angina pectoris, recurrent pain in the chest and left arm due to decreased blood flow to the heart, was commonly treated with surgery. Then some resourceful doctors decided to conduct an experiment. Rather than perform the customary surgery, which involved tying off the mammary artery, they cut patients open and then simply sewed them back up again. The patients who received the sham surgery reported just as much relief as the patients who had the full surgery. The full surgery, as it turned out, was only producing a placebo effect.Nonetheless, the success of the sham surgery indicates that somewhere deep in all of us we have the ability to control angina pectoris.

And that is not all. In the last half century the placebo effect has been extensively researched in hundreds of different studies around the world. We now know that on average 35 percent of all people who receive a given placebo will experience a significant effect, although this number can vary greatly from situation to situation. In addition to angina pectoris, conditions that have proved responsive to placebo treatment include migraine headaches, allergies, fever, the common cold, acne, asthma, warts, various kinds of pain, nausea and seasickness, peptic ulcers, psychiatric syndromes such as depression and anxiety, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.

Clearly these range from the not so serious to the life threatening, but placebo effects on even the mildest conditions may involve physiological changes that are near miraculous. Take, for example, the lowly wart. Warts are a small tumorous growth on the skin caused by a virus. They are also extremely easy to cure through the use of placebos, as is evidenced by the nearly endless folk rituals-ritual itself being a kind of placebo-that are used by various cultures to get rid of them. Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tells of one physician who regularly rid his patients of warts simply by painting a harmless purple dye on them. Thomas feels that explaining this small miracle by saying it's just the unconscious mind at work doesn't begin to do the placebo effect justice. "If my unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue rejection, then all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot further along than I am," he states.

The effectiveness of a placebo in any given circumstance also varies greatly. In nine double-blind studies comparing placebos to aspirin, placebos proved to be 54 percent as effective as the actual analgesic.From this one might expect that placebos would be even less effective when compared to a much stronger painkiller such as morphine, but this is not the case. In six double-blind studies placebos were found to be 56 percent as effective as morphine in relieving pain!

Why? One factor that can affect the effectiveness of a placebo is the method in which it is given. Injections are generally perceived as more potent than pills, and hence giving a placebo in an injection can enhance its effectiveness. Similarly, capsules are often seen as more effective than tablets, and even the size, shape, and color of a pill can play a role. In a study designed to determine the suggestive value of a pill's color, researchers found that people tend to view yellow or orange pills as mood manipulators, either stimulants or depressants. Dark red pills are assumed to be sedatives; lavender pills, hallucinogens; and white pills, painkillers.

Another factor is the attitude the doctor conveys when he prescribes the placebo. Dr. David Sobel, a placebo specialist at Kaiser Hospital, California, relates the story of a doctor treating an asthma patient who was having an unusually difficult time keeping his bronchial tubes open. The doctor ordered a sample of a potent new medicine from a pharmaceutical company and gave it to the man. Within minutes the man showed spectacular improvement and breathed more easily. However, the next time he had an attack, the doctor decided to see what would happen if he gave the man a placebo. This time the man complained that there must be something wrong with the prescription because it didn't completely eliminate his breathing difficulty. This convinced the doctor that the sample drug was indeed a potent new asthma medication until he received a letter from the pharmaceutical company informing him that instead of the new drug, they had accidentally sent him a placebo! Apparently it was the doctor's unwitting enthusiasm for the first placebo, and not the second, that accounted for the discrepancy.

In terms of the holographic model, the man's remarkable response to the placebo asthma medication can again be explained by the mind/body's ultimate inability to distinguish between an imagined reality and a real one. The man believed he was being given a powerful new asthma drug, and this belief had as dramatic a physiological effect on his lungs as if he had been given a real drug. Achterberg's warning that the neural holograms that impact on our health are varied and multifaceted is also underscored by the fact that even something as subtle as the doctor's slightly different attitude (and perhaps body language) while administering the two placebos was enough to cause one to work and the other to fail. It is clear from this that even information received subliminally can contribute greatly to the beliefs and mental images that impact on our health. One wonders how many drugs have worked (or not worked) because of the attitude the doctor conveyed while administering them.

Understanding the role such factors play in a placebo's effectiveness is important, for it shows how our ability to control the body holographic is molded by our beliefs. Our minds have the power to get rid of warts, to clear our bronchial tubes, and to mimic the painkilling ability of morphine, but because we are unaware that we possess the power, we must be fooled into using it. This might almost be comic if it were not for the tragedies that often result from our ignorance of our own power.

No incident better illustrates this than a now famous case reported by psychologist Bruno Klopfer. Klopfer was treating a man named Wright who had advanced cancer of the lymph nodes. All standard treatments had been exhausted, and Wright appeared to have little time left. His neck, armpits, chest, abdomen, and groin were filled with tumors the size of oranges, and his spleen and liver were so enlarged that two quarts of milky fluid had to be drained out of his chest every day.

But Wright did not want to die. He had heard about an exciting new drug called Krebiozen, and he begged his doctor to let him try it. At first his doctor refused because the drug was only being tried on people with a life expectancy of at least three months. But Wright was so unrelenting in his entreaties, his doctor finally gave in. He gave Wright an injection of Krebiozen on Friday, but in his heart of hearts he did not expect Wright to last the weekend. Then the doctor went home.

To his surprise, on the following Monday he found Wright out of bed and walking around. Klopfer reported that his tumors had "melted like snowballs on a hot stove" and were half their original size. This was a far more rapid decrease in size than even the strongest X-ray treatments could have accomplished. Ten days after Wright's first Krebiozen treatment, he left the hospital and was, as far as his doctors could tell, cancer free. When he had entered the hospital he had needed an oxygen mask to breathe, but when he left he was well enough to fly his own plane at 12,000 feet with no discomfort.

Wright remained well for about two months, but then articles began to appear asserting that Krebiozen actually had no effect on cancer of the lymph nodes. Wright, who was rigidly logical and scientific in his thinking, became very depressed, suffered a relapse, and was readmitted to the hospital. This time his physician decided to try an experiment. He told Wright that Krebiozen was every bit as effective as it had seemed, but that some of the initial supplies of the drug had deteriorated during shipping. He explained, however, that he had a new highly concentrated version of the drug and could treat Wright with this. Of course the physician did not have a new version of the drug and intended to inject Wright with plain water. To create the proper atmosphere he even went through an elaborate procedure before injecting Wright with the placebo.

Again the results were dramatic. Tumor masses melted, chest fluid vanished, and Wright was quickly back on his feet and feeling great. He remained symptom-free for another two months, but then the American Medical Association announced that a nationwide study of Krebiozen had found the drug worthless in the treatment of cancer. This time Wright's faith was completely shattered. His cancer blossomed anew and he died two days later.

Wright's story is tragic, but it contains a powerful message: When we are fortunate enough to bypass our disbelief and tap the healing forces within us, we can cause tumors to melt away overnight.

In the case of Krebiozen only one person was involved, but there are similar cases involving many more people. Take a chemotherapeutic agent called cis-platinum. When cis-platinum first became available it, too, was touted as a wonder drug, and 75 percent of the people who received it benefited from the treatment. But after the initial wave of excitement and the use of cis-platinum became more routine, its rate of effectiveness dropped to about 25 to 30 percent. Apparently most of the benefit obtained from cis-platinum was due to the placebo effect.

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Thanks to Michael Talbert, the many sources and the teachers for this knowledge
and wisdom that is helping us on our journey.

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE