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Mindstates
We Are One
Ancient Spiritual Knowledge Is Backed by Science
by Bente Mirow
It has been known for centuries that human beings have a direct influence on their health through their thoughts and moods. However, this knowledge has either been stored with shamans and mystical healers or it has been forgotten or ignored. For many years, it has been a matter of spiritual nature—a matter of faith. Not surprisingly, science has fully rejected such nonsense.
With the study of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), science and spirituality are converging as medical researchers are proving a connection between our neurological system, our immunology system, and our thoughts and emotions.
The Greek doctors knew in 200 A.D. that melancholic women were more susceptible to breast cancer than cheerful women. Hippocrates, commonly known as the father of medicine, decried physicians who separated the soul from the body. The most renowned Chinese doctors were those who understood the mind and emotions. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs tell us that the alchemists and healers of thousands of years back believed the smells of essential oils increased a person’s frequency, leading to transformation of negative energy.
Yet in the western world, the treatment of illness and the human condition has long been founded in dualism and to a large degree, based on the philosophies of Rene´ Decartes in the 17th century. He saw matter and spirit as separate, matter behaving according to physical laws and spirit being immaterial and without dimension.
One of the world’s most esteemed theoretical physicists, David Bohm, who has done major research in the mind-body field, says it well: “The great strength of science is that it is rooted in actual experience. The great weakness of science is that it admits only certain types of experience as legitimate.”
Although the study of PNI is still a young science, it has already had an enormous impact on how we understand emotions, as well as disease. Most of the research in the field has taken place in the last 20 years and we now also know from scientific study—and not just holistic healing—that every thought, idea, belief, emotion and mood we have has a neurological consequence. Truly cross-disciplinary, yet now acknowledged as a science of its own, PNI involves the fields of psychology, physiology, molecular biology, immunology, neuroscience, psychiatry, endocrinology, behavioral medicine and more.
As an enigma to science for so long, a definition of emotions is now offered by one of the key researchers of PNI, Candice Pert, PhD, as “molecules working as messengers carrying information to link the major systems of the body into one unit that we call the body-mind. Emotions are cellular signals that are involved in the process of translating information into physical reality, literally transforming mind into matter. Emotions are at the nexus between mind and matter, going back and forth between the two and influencing both.”
Recent PNI research suggests that information goes from the immune system to the brain, and not the other way around, according to Steven Maier, PhD, director of the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In other words, “things that go on in the body can have potent effects on the brain’s activity,” he explains.
The immune system is a complex surveillance system, a “sixth sense” providing the brain with information about a person’s health. The immune system, as the messenger, releases proteins called cytokines which alert the brain of distress and then communicate that information to the central nervous system. In response, the brain releases its own chemical signals, or neuropeptides, back to the central nervous system to help the body cope by reducing energy output and creating such manifestations as fever or fatigue.
David Bohm points to the similarities between recent discoveries in physics and ancient mystical thought. He states, “all of this implies a thoroughgoing wholeness in which mental and physical sides participate very closely [with] each other. Likewise, intellect, emotion, and the whole state of the body are in a similar flux of fundamental participation. Thus, there is no real division between mind and matter.”
In his book The Unified Universe, Bohm presents a holographic model of the universe. PNI researchers have found this model to be applicable to their studies as it demonstrates that every tiny piece of the universe contains a complete picture of the whole. It implies that each person is a small piece within the space-time hologram which contains everything that exists and ever existed.
Henry Grayson, PhD, and author of Mindful Loving, concludes in his research of the new physics that “at the subatomic or quanta level, the particles are more like tendencies to exist. It’s at the level of thought or consciousness that we influence the nature of creation of all types, which is what the shamans of the world have known and practiced for centuries.”
Grayson further observes that “mounting scientific studies are propelling this revolutionary understanding of mind, finding evidence of the far-reaching effects of our thoughts on plants, our bodies, on seemingly non-conscious matter, and on other people, most notably for healing.”
As PNI is now scientifically establishing the body as a complex integrated circuit in constant biochemical communication to guard against disease of the body and mind, we know it is the disruption of this circuit that causes us to become ill.
When His Holiness, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Prize in 1989, he said, “All we have is education. It’s our only weapon, along with the example we can set. And this education, from the Buddhist viewpoint, begins with the notion of interdependence.”
Adds Bohm: “Extending this view, we see that each human being similarly participates in an inseparable way in society and the planet as a whole. What may be suggested further is that such participation goes on to a greater collective mind, and perhaps ultimately to some yet more comprehensive mind, in principle capable of going indefinitely beyond even the human species as a whole.”
Perhaps we are finally accelerating towards a greater understanding as the lost wisdom of the past is revitalized with new discoveries in science, modern medicine and healing. It is an integration of body, mind and spirit, all telling us in their different languages that we are one and that we all have the power to heal and create.
Bente Mirow is a freelance writer who writes what her heart and mind demand. She can be reached at laumedreams@gmail.com.