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This Changes Everything: When Mystery Pivots Our Life
Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.
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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into the mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.
Today we go into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to consider the work of Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. We reflected on some of her work in our very first episode this year, the one on Apocalyptic LoveWisdom. Her experiences and ideas came up again in a recent dialogue with the composer and jazz musician Carole Nelson. That dialogue is already available, and I promised to make this one available here as well, on the Dangerous Wisdom platform.
It begins with a strange but true story . . .
It all started back in 1991 in the San Francisco Bay area. At that time Dr. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was a successful psychologist. She was a clinician and also a scientist doing research in her field. She was well-regarded. She had been trained in the Western Scientific tradition. She got her PhD at Stanford University and she was on staff at Berkeley in addition to having a private practice.
In 1991, Dr. Mayer’s daughter was 11 years old, and she had just started public performance with her harp. The little girl had fallen in love with the harp when she was 6, and Dr. Mayer managed to get her a beautiful, handcrafted harp. It was made by a master harp maker, who had created a unique instrument with a wonderful sound. It was obviously quite valuable.
Her daughter was playing in a holiday concert. There was a performance Saturday night and when she went back Sunday for the matinee performance the harp was gone. The auditorium had been locked, but the harp was missing.
Dr. Mayer did all the normal things that you would do. She of course called the police and started asking around, and there was even a local t.v. news story about the case because the police had gotten nowhere.
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Sadly, the local media coverage didn’t help. And then a friend of Dr. Mayer’s said to her, “If you really want to find that harp, you should be willing to do anything, and I think you should contact a dowser.”
The first time I remember hearing about dowsing was when I was a little kid. My grandfather explained to me that he had used a dowser to find the water on his property in order to drill a well. This was a common thing. It was rural Pennsylvania, an area with a lot of small mining towns, and this is how people found their water source. Good dowsers were well respected in the community and it was the standard practice for a lot of people when drilling a well.
Dr. Mayer’s friend was suggesting that dowsers might be able to find more than just water. Maybe we can use dowsing to find lost objects. Maybe we can use dowsing to find lost Insights. Maybe we become Dowsers of the Soul when we are seeking the Wellspring of Inspiration and Realization.
Anyway it all sounds kind of weird if you’re scientifically trained, and Dr. Mayer thought it was a little strange, but she also had a broken hearted daughter. Two months of police work and all the other normal methods, including the local news story, had turned up no leads. She had nothing to lose, so she said her friend, “If you can find me a good dowser, I’m willing to give it a try.”
Her friend contacted the American Society of Dowsers. At that time the president was a man named Harold McCoy. The friend put Dr. Mayer in touch with Harold McCoy, and when she called him, the first thing he said was, “Let me see if it’s still in Oakland.”
The performance had been in Oakland, so that’s where the harp was stolen. Within a few moments Harold McCoy determined that the harp was still there.
It’s important to note that this directly contradicted the view of the Oakland police. They were ready to close the case because they concluded that the harp would have left Oakland within a matter of days or perhaps weeks. It was a slightly smaller harp, so it was easily transported in a station wagon, van, or small truck. And it was quite valuable. So, the thief would likely have found a way to get rid of it as quickly as possible. Why keep a harp lying around?
But the dowser said it was in Oakland, and he asked Dr. Mayer for a map of the city in order to pinpoint its location. Can you imagine that? The dowser claims he can pinpoint the location of a lost harp, from over 2000 miles away, by dowsing over a map.
Remember this is 1991, and Harold McCoy didn’t have Google Maps. So Dr. Mayer FedExed him a map of Oakland, and within a couple days he got back to her and told her exactly which house the harp was in.
Oakland is a pretty large city, and, according to McCoy, the harp was in a part of town Dr. Mayer had never been to. But she wanted to go and just look at the house where the harp was supposedly being held. She satisfied her curiosity, but she was stuck. What could she do? She couldn’t very well barge into the house. She couldn’t even knock and politely ask.
She decided to call the police and say she had received an anonymous tip that the harp was in that house. But, they told her they couldn’t get a search warrant on that basis.
She then decided to put up flyers in a two block area around that house. We might call it an act of desperation. However, not long after putting up those flyers, someone called. It was a man who claimed that his next-door neighbor had the very harp she was looking for in his garage.
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He said he could arrange to get it back for her.
After a few more phone calls the man told her to go to a particular 24-hour Safeway grocery store at 10 at night and to meet someone there who would have her harp.
She pulls into the Safeway grocery store she sees a young man loafing around. He looks at her and asks her if she was there for a harp. She says yes, and he pulls the harp out of his car and puts it into hers.
Imagine that drive home. Again, Oakland’s kind of big, and she lived in Berkeley. It’s maybe a half hour drive.
Two months of looking in ordinary ways, police working on the case, a local news story, but no harp. She phones up a dowser, and now she’s got the harp.
As Doctor Mayer describes it, when she pulled into her driveway she had the following thought: This changes everything.
There’s something beautiful about that thought, about the Moment that is that thought. Take a Moment now and let it soak in.
It’s nighttime. Maybe 10:30 or close to 11. You’re sitting in the dark. It’s quiet. A sense of Wonder comes over you.
Plato and Aristotle disagreed on a lot of things but one thing they agreed on is that a philosophical or spiritual life begins in Wonder—a life of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty begins in Wonder, which we could also refer to as an intimate experience of sacredness.
We can in fact say they didn’t make the situation clear enough, because Wonder is the beginning the middle and the end. Wonder is the very path of a spiritual life, and it’s the fruit of a spiritual life, a life of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty.
The expression “this changes everything” captures Dr. Mayer’s feeling that maybe her ideas about reality weren’t really matching up with reality itself.
A lot of philosophical traditions say that no ideas about reality capture reality. But more importantly, what philosophy and spirituality often indicate to us is that our ideas, our knowledge, what we think we know, is often the barrier between ourselves and a deeper understanding of what we actually are and what reality actually is.
After all, what is the human mind that a dowser was apparently able to locate this harp? What is the nature of reality that this phenomenon happened?
These are important questions and this is just one story. I’m going to tell you a few more, and I want you to know there are many, many such stories. You might have experienced something like this yourself.
The Wisdom, Love, and Beauty contemplations are not about whether telepathy and dowsing are real, and we don’t exclusively focus on these sorts of phenomena. But they will definitely come up in future episodes, for a variety of reasons,
because, among other things, we want to look at how we know. If we want to know—really know—what the meaning of life is, what the meaning of our own life is, if we want to know the nature of our own mind, if we want to know the nature of the Divine or, if we are nontheistic, and we want to know the nature of
reality, all of that is influenced by the way we go about knowing things. In other words, we think we just find out facts, and then we know them. But what we know depends on the way we come to know it. This is one of the most profound realizations in both the spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world AND in cutting edge science.
And Dr. Mayer’s book is called Extraordinary Knowing. It’s a lovely title—a little bit provocative. And one question we might have is whether the kind of knowing she inquires into is actually so extraordinary. Maybe it’s a part of all of us and we need to get in touch with it.
And one of the things we want to do over time, in other contemplations, is to look at how—concretely speaking—how we could get in touch with a fuller way of knowing and being, living and loving, how could we think, live, and love in the fullness of our being.
It’s something we could call Soul thinking or original thinking.
But for now, let’s just appreciate the beauty of this moment Dr. Mayer experienced, because you might be very skeptical about dowsing, and I myself am scientifically trained. My original focus in philosophy was philosophy of science, and so I studied science with great interest and excitement, took a lot of science courses, spent time in the lab, and so on. I always thought science was an important source of knowledge, and I still spend a lot of time reading scientific articles and books.
And in our culture, for many people both inside the university and outside the university, science does represent knowledge. It’s something like the gold standard of knowledge for many people. If you want to know something, you look at the available science about it.
The question is whether or not the ways we go about knowing things in science are really the best ways for us and the world. Are they perhaps incomplete in some way we don’t fully comprehend? Are they partial, fragmented, or even fragmenting?
Stick with me. All of this might sound technical. So, let’s just go back to that uncanny experience of “This Changes Everything”. A lot of things can happen in our life to trigger that feeling of, This changes everything,
and sometimes they’re strange phenomena, various things we can refer to as “anomalous data”. That’s a fancy term for stuff that happens that doesn’t fit with our expectations or our understanding of reality. Anomalous data are vital for the development of science.
Dr. Mayer’s first inclination as this sense of wonder took over her was to try to resolve this in some way that fit her scientific training.
Now, the sense of wonder does a few things. It can wake us up in the middle of the night with a kind of excitement, but sometimes there’s something else there, something in the sense of wonder that agitates us or even frightens us a little. A moment of This changes everything can bring a significant level of discomfort as we experience the threat that our view of reality might not be right. We find it very unsettling as human beings when something that we’re sure we know might not be the case. As Emerson wrote, “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
Dr. Mayer found herself waking up at 3 in the morning trying to think this through:
There’s the Harp, back in her home, and yet it was dowsing it supposedly got it there. It’s kind of freaky.
One of her colleagues at Berkeley, a statistician, told her, “Stop losing sleep! I’m telling you the odds that this is an actual case of dowsing are way greater than the odds that this is a coincidence. That’s all it is: a coincidence!”
Now this is a very common way for scientists to respond to anomalous data: To treat it as noise. Noise in the data means something essentially meaningless is going on. In everyday life, we denigrate these experiences by calling them anecdotal or mere coincidence.
If something anomalous is just noise, we don’t have to face the possibility that a new kind of music is coming through, music we don’t feel ready to hear. So we dismiss that possibility and call it noise.
Whether or not we are scientists in a formal sense, there is a kind of arrogance in asserting that we know already how all the music of the cosmos should sound.
Many philosophical and spiritual traditions overtly call us out on our arrogance about what we know, trying to get us to sense how our supposed knowledge functions as a barrier to coming to wonderstand ourselves more fully more intimately, and coming to know each other, and coming to know the nature of reality.
The statistician who told Dr. Mayer to stop losing sleep was essentially telling her to close off to any possible music that might be coming through. But Dr. Mayer decided to remain open. She kept an open mind and began to explore.
One of the things she did was start a study group on these phenomena in the American Psychoanalytic Association. She knew that Freud had himself been interested in some of these phenomena, as had other famous and well-regarded psychologists, because they thought some of these phenomena were very important to the therapeutic process.—Isn’t that an interesting notion? That, healing ourselves might sometimes require the entrance of something anomalous—healing might require us to arrive at a moment of wonder, a moment of This changes everything.
Dr. Mayer teamed up with another highly-regarded American psychologist named Carol Gilligan (you might have heard of her), and they formed a study group called Intuition, Unconscious Communication, and Thought Transference.
Freud had specifically talked about thought transference, which he felt was something vital in the psychoanalytic interaction.
Gilligan and Mayer did not want to have, as Dr. Mayer puts it in her book, voyeurs coming to the study group. So, when they sent out the announcement for the study group, they insisted that people, in their application, include a
story that involved some sort of anomalous data. Something, for instance, that their patient knew or something that they knew which they should not have been able to know, based on our ordinary scientific way of looking at the world.
Mayer and Gilligan wanted to make sure they were getting people who were genuinely wrestling with these issues, and were not wanting to merely come and kibitz or observe. What happened was, they were flooded with applications. The group filled up rapidly, and they had to send out letters to many, many therapists letting them know the group had maxed out and they had to be put on a wait list.
Within a few days of having sent out those letters, the science director of the APA called Dr. Mayer and begged her to do something about the situation because there were so many people who were bugging him about getting into the group. There was that much interest. Keep in mind that we are talking about people with conventional western scientific education in psychology and medicine.
It was quite remarkable. This was not the kind of subject matter professional programs in psychology or medicine deal with, and yet the response indicated that this was somehow important to a significant number of people. Dr. Mayer realized she had not just experienced a strange phenomenon, but she had stumbled into a pervasive set of phenomena that people were simply not talking about.
But why not?
In part because they were nervous. The dominant Paradigm wants to insist that these anomalous experiences are mere anecdote and coincidence, just noise in a mechanistic universe.
But, our experience from the inside of these phenomena reveals them as more than mere coincidences or noise in the data.
If we have an experience that makes us say, This Changes Everything, but the world view that we and our colleagues share seems to say, This changes nothing, well, we might just keep it quiet. After all, if we don’t keep it quiet, it could have a negative impact on our career and our reputation.
Let’s consider an example of one of the stories Mayer and Gilligan received.
One therapist was working with a little girl. This particular session with the little girl was on the anniversary of the death of the therapist’s brother. Many years before starting therapy with this little girl, the therapist’s brother had drowned while trying to save someone else’s life. This was not something the therapist had ever shared with the little girl, and, again, this was before big data. The little girl didn’t google her therapist.
The anniversary of her brother’s death was kind of a heavy day in a certain way, but the therapist was trying to be present, and according to her own account she wasn’t thinking about her brother during the session with the little girl.
The session started out with the little girl playing. In the middle of playing, She suddenly stopped, turn to the therapist, looked her in the eye, and said, your brother is drowning, you have to save him. The therapist was pretty shocked, but she assured the little girl that no one was drowning and everything was alright. However, the episode stayed with her.
Imagine something like that happening to you. What would you think? It might prompt you to say, This changes everything. What is the human mind that this could happen? And maybe I only got a glimpse of what we are—maybe there’s a lot more there than I ever imagined.
Dr. Myers book, Extraordinary Knowing, is a wonderful compilation of a lot of anomalous data. I’m sharing it with you in part because it’s such an enjoyable summary of some of the data I’ve encountered in my own research.
As a philosopher I’m very interested in things that challenge our paradigms. Many philosophical traditions insist that, if we want to be truly happy and realize our fullest potential, we have to get past our limited and limiting ideas about what reality is and what we ourselves are. We can see our current ecological catastrophe and our political, social, and economic tragedies as a matter of profound confusion about what reality is and what we ourselves are.
A lot of the research Dr. Mayer presents in this book helps us to at least begin to question some of the views we have that might be holding us back. Again, it’s not about believing in telepathy, but facing the deeper problem about how we know and what it is we think we know.
Dr. Mayer did a wonderful job writing this book. While she draws on a lot of scholarly and scientific material, there is nothing technical in the writing itself. Rather, her book is very reader friendly, and it’s a lot of fun. Maybe this contemplation will get you excited enough to read it for yourself.
And that would be great, because more people should know about some of these paradigm-challenging phenomena. A lot of the data Dr. Mayer presents comes from peer-reviewed journals. It meets, and often exceeds the standards of science that we expect to see in peer-reviewed academic journals.
But for the most part people are not aware of these studies. And people who have never read these studies are immediately dismissive, because they just know, already, they know how reality works. The metaphysical police are very vocal, and in some cases they have impressive credentials. Even though the reality sheriffs may
To give you an idea of how guarded and resistant some people, especially highly educated people, can be to the sorts of things we are discussing today, let’s close with the case of Robert J. Stoller. Stoller was a pretty insightful psychiatrist. He got his MD from the UC San Francisco medical school in 1948, and he joined the department of psychiatry at UCLA in 1954. During his career, he became rather influential, publishing at least 9 books and 115 articles.
Early in his career, Stoller was supervised by Dr. Ralph Greenson, a psychiatrist with a significant reputation. Something happened between Stoller and Greenson
that shocked both of them. Stoller wrote up an article about it, but Greenson advised him not to publish it, even though Greenson himself, according to his wife, had been, “flabbergasted” by the experience. Still, Greenson thought that publishing the material would jeopardize Stoller’s career. So, Stoller kept the article buried. But, years later, he couldn’t shake it. He became increasingly convinced that a new frontier of psychiatry would be found in the sorts of phenomena he wrote about in this article.
Keep in mind that Stoller was reluctant to publish the article, and it only appeared after his death. He asks his readers to keep an open mind, because the material is so strange to our current worldview.
What was all the hullabaloo about, you ask? Let me see if I can tell you the story:
As a young psychiatrist, Stoller had both a supervisor as well as another psychiatrist he went to for his own psychological growth. His own psychoanalytic sessions were on Mondays. His meetings with his supervisor were on Thursdays.
One Monday, he goes into his analysis session and reports a dream he had on Saturday night, a dream that he says was unlike any he had before or since. In the dream, he is very clearly working in the same ER he worked at in a San Francisco hospital while he was a medical student and intern. In the dream, a medical student is brought in for emergency treatment. He has just undergone a compound, comminuted fracture in his left leg. A comminuted fracture is a fracture in which the bone splinters into more than 2 pieces. It’s the kind of thing that happens in high impact events, such as a motorcycle accident.
Stoller is clear that he had seen the results of motorcycle accidents in his ER work, but none involving medical students. So, when he spoke with his analyst, he was unclear about any associations. He had no idea why the dream happened, because he never had dreams about the ER, and had never seen a patient like the one in the dream. He couldn’t understand what it might mean.
On the Thursday after reprting all of this to his analyst, who documented it all, Stoller had his meeting with Greenson.
Stoller was deeply impressed by Greenson, and although their relationship was, as Stoller puts it, “intense,” he did keep a professional distance. So much so that he never greeted Dr. Greenson with anything more than “Hello.”
Until that Thursday after his dream, when he said, “How are you?”
Now, these are two psychiatrists, used to keeping professional distance. But, oddly enough, Dr. Greenson did not give a perfunctory response. Instead, he said, “I am all right now, but we had a terrible experience over the weekend.” What was the terrible experience?
On Saturday night, his son Danny had a motorcycle accident near San Francisco. Keep in mind that Greenson and Stoller lived in Los Angeles at this time. Greenson’s son Danny had never been on a motorcycle before, and he lost control. He ended up in the ER with
a compound comminuted fracture in his left leg—the same injury Stoller had dreamt about on the very same night this actual event unfolded.
Recall that Stoller’s dream had been about a medical student. Dr. Greenson specifically said that he hoped his son would be able to start medical school on time, given the timing of the accident. His son Danny did in fact go on to get a medical degree.
Stoller eventually wrote all of this up, and he included in the article several more instances in which his own patients dreamed about things that were happening in his own life which they could not possibly have known about, unless we assume they were spying on him, and then telling him about what they saw under the guise of having dreamt it. That doesn’t seem very plausible. Even so, Stoller followed Greenson’s advice and did not publish the article in his lifetime.
You can find Stoller’s article online. It’s called “Telepathic Dreams”. To give you a sense of its content, here’s an event that happened a few months after the incident with Greenson’s son Danny. Stoller gives us a report of a dream one of his patients had. The patient said they went to a party at someone else’s home. A crowd of people were hanging out in a large room. This room had one wall made totally of glass. The patient said he saw an older man there, who he described as kind. The man walked by him carrying a large object, and he suddenly smashed through the glass. The patient said he felt frightened the man had gotten hurt, and there was glass all around. But the patient said that, “in some strange manner,” the man was fine.
Interesting dream. But here’s the thing:
Stoller tells us that the dream was reported to him on a Monday, and it was dreamed on Saturday night. That very night, Stoller himself had been at a party. A crowd of people were hanging out in the living room. One entire wall of that room was glass, and there was a sliding glass door. A bunch of chairs had been brought into the living room, and Stoller was helping carry them out. He made several trips through the open glass door, but on one of his trips back in, someone had closed it. Because of the lighting in the room, the glass was basically invisible, and when Stoller headed back out with another chair, he plowed right into it. The glass shattered everywhere, but Stoller was basically unharmed.
Back to Dr. Mayer’s book, another story she relates comes from a therapist who had a practice of taking some quiet time between sessions—just to rest the Mind. This doesn’t quite count as meditation, but it does at least relax our habitual reactivity, and when we let go sufficiently, we can liberate ourselves into larger ecologies of mind.
During one such moment, the therapist said they experienced a vision of a little boy, a toddler, running around with a plastic bag on his head. There was a lot of fear and distress around it.
2 hours later a patient comes in, and he relates to the therapist how, over the weekend, his toddler son had come into the kitchen with a plastic bag over his head. The man immediately wanted to get the plastic bag off of his son’s head, but when he approached his son, the little boy ran away. This provoked a lot of fear in distress, and the patient called out to his wife for help. Thankfully, they managed to get the bag off of their son’s head.
We can sense the powerful resonance of that moment of visionary experience and the real life event—picture it, having this vision in your mind, and then, unexpectedly hearing a story that sounds just like that vision . . .
It could give you pause.
That pause is essential to a spiritual and Philosophical life. It’s the thing Socrates kept driving people toward: To pause what they thought they knew, to arrive at a place of not knowing, not knowing how to move forward.
We hear about Socratic irony. Socrates would go around saying he didn’t know anything. And yet, sometimes, it seemed as if he did know something.
That’s one aspect of Socratic irony, but we might sense an even more important aspect of Socratic irony, and that is the way Socrates, in his exchanges with people, demonstrated the irony that we ourselves live and presence, every time we claim to know something.
We all use certain ways of knowing to try to make ourselves happy, to establish stability in our lives, to get ground under our feet, to try to keep our society well organized, to try to cultivate our culture, to try to educate our youth. We use what we think we know to do all of that. And—quite ironically—it leads to more suffering, broken relationships, corruption in politics, more wars, the collapse of cultures, the collapse of ecologies. All sorts of negative side effects and anomalous data come out of our attempts To know ourselves, to know the world, and to make ourselves and those we love happy.
The essence of Socratic irony is thus that we ourselves are the ironic ones. By doing what we think we know is the right thing to do, we end up with precisely what we don’t want.
We know what will make us happy, what will make the world better, what is the right thing for our children,
We know what’s going to make us happy and healthy, and yet we end up unsatisfied and unwell.
We know what’s good for our children, and yet something is going wrong in our system of Education.
We know how to run the culture, how to run the economy, and yet something is going wrong there too.
We are in the same situation Socrates was in. The same problems he saw in his culture we see today. Education is a mess. We have increasing inequality. The vast majority of people feel disconnected from the work they do. We have an epidemic of loneliness. The list goes on and on.
We have had so much material growth since the time of Socrates, and yet people aren’t any happier. We Know by our own scientific measures that people aren’t any happier today than they were, say, 50 years ago. And we can imagine
that people aren’t genuinely happier today than they were at the time Socrates live.
In a certain way there has been some kind of growth and development. A certain level of material well-being has increased. We shouldn’t pretend that nothing good has come from 2500 years of development in the dominant culture. Nor should we pretend nothing quite seriously bad, even tragic has come from this development.
And, crucially, we seem to be stuck in this old problem of spiritual irony, and we seem to maybe need the same solution Socrates suggested: That pause, that spaciousness in the soul that allows us to say, This changes everything. And maybe a genuinely new way of knowing and being could emerge.
Let’s consider another story that indicates the beautiful possibilities for healing and transformation that could arise if we were to enter that space in the soul, the space of wonder, the space of better ways of knowing.
One therapist, instead of writing about an interaction with one of his patients, wrote about something that happened to him. He was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, which is a runaway growth of a particular kind of inflammatory cell. It can be dangerous, and in his case the doctor said it was terminal.
In order to deal with the weight of this situation, he took up meditation, and then he took up running. In part this was just stress relief. It’s the kind of thing we do to deal with a situation like this.
As he was running, I would suggest that somehow the running and a kind of meditation began to blend. His account in Dr. Mayer’s book doesn’t tell the story that way, but it’s a pretty short account.
Let’s preface the short account by recognizing something the man in this story may not have consciously known, namely that various philosophical and spiritual traditions teach of a wide variety of meditation techniques, including healing meditations of many kinds. Among those meditation techniques we find meditations based on visualization. Even in a given set of traditions, say the Buddhist or Daoist traditions, we can find many kinds of visual meditations, some of which are used not only for Spiritual Development but also for healing. It’s very common in a wide variety of traditions to use visual meditations for healing.
The man Mayer tells us about in her book began to have an experience while he was running that seems very much like a visual meditation. In this meditation, he felt he was becoming the cells in his body. He wasn’t just seeing them, but he said that he was the cells. And he wasn’t just seeing the lesions from the sarcoidosis, but he was those lesions.
And as this continued, he felt he not only became those cells and lesions but he also became the healing of those cells and lesions.
Sure enough, the sarcoidosis completely reversed. He was healed, and his case was so surprising that his doctors wrote it up in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Of course, it was explained as “unexpected remission.”
Unexpected or spontaneous remission is another area of anomalous data, data that doesn’t fit our paradigm—data that could possibly incline us to pause, maybe incline us to pause and ask sincerely, Wait . . . does this change everything?
In fact, in medicine we find at least two kinds of anomalous data we should know about: negative side-effects and spontaneous remission.
Negative side-effects are the anomalous data that come about when people have developed a drug to treat a disease and something unexpected happens. Negative side-effects indicate limitations in our understanding of how the human body functions.
The drug maker would love to make a drug that they could advertise as working in 100% of cases with zero negative side effects. The reason they can’t do that is because our knowledge is incomplete and fragmented. Most of the drugs we design are incomplete, out of balance, and arise from fragmentation—often furthering fragmentation.
This could indicate a serious need for a shift in our understanding of what health and healing are, what the human body and mind are, an understanding of what reality is and what the so-called environment is, and the relationship between the human being and the environment. We might need to do a lot of rethinking, and the evidence for it is right in front of us, including these sorts of anomalous data.
Another set of anomalous data in medicine is the data involving cases of spontaneous remission. There is a significant database on spontaneous remission maintained by The Institute of noetic Sciences, which was founded by the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, ultimately as a consequence of his spiritual experience when he travelled to space. There was a graduate student at Berkeley named Kelly Turner who went through that database and ended up writing her dissertation on her findings about what unifies these cases of spontaneous remission, what these cases have in common.
The spontaneous remission database catalogues cases in which the patients were told that either Western medicine had already exhausted its options for them, or that it simply had none. These people were told their case was terminal, and that was all there was to it. You can look at Turner’s dissertation if you have access to proquest. Or you can read her book. It’s called Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds.
Spontaneous remission cases are quite interesting, because in a certain way they could make us pause. If you had a terminal illness, if doctors told you that you were going to die, and if somehow, by making the kinds of changes Turner documents in her book, you managed to survive, to either heal or somehow go into remission, it might create a shift in your being.
These cases often involve a spiritual or philosophical shift—that’s a key unifying factor. This happens in part because, when our death is imminent, it can open us up, get us to pause, and in some cases and it gives us a sense of, This changes everything. Death itself can stop us, force a pause, force us to let go of our habits of thought, speech, and action. We will discuss that in other contemplations.
For now we can highlight the fact that what we think we know is not the end of the story.
There’s always something more in reality.
We’re always being invited to see something more. And that something more can involve a different way of knowing. Certainly it can involve a different sense of ourselves and a different sense of the world.
Let’s consider another example. Imagine you need brain surgery. There are two neurosurgeons you have to choose from. One is a man who uses the best so-called evidence-based medicine to determine when to move forward with your surgery. He has data that has been published in peer-reviewed journals and this is how he determines how to handle your case. He does lose patience, but that’s just part of the game. He has the best decision procedure based on the data but it’s not 100% perfect. But we love the phrase “evidenced-based,” and everyone from the pharmaceutical industry to the self-help industrial complex trues to sell us with it. The whole self-help catastrophe loves to use what it refers to as evidence-based approaches. So that first neurosurgeon sounds great. Again, he’s not 100% perfect, but the failures are part of the evidence base, and he always follows those protocols.
The other neurosurgeon is world renowned, and what’s interesting about him is that he doesn’t seem to lose patients. He gets flown all over the planet to perform difficult surgeries. Brain surgeries in general are pretty risky. We could say there is some kind of risk in any surgery we get. Brain surgery is particularly risky for a lot of reasons. But for this surgeon, things always seem to go perfectly. He has a better track record than the evidence-based surgeon.
However, he can’t really talk about what his procedure is for determining when to move forward with a surgery.
This neurosurgeon is a real person. He met with dr. Mayer and she writes about it in her book. He came to her because he was having severe ongoing headaches that weren’t being relieved by ordinary means. They seemed to have no physical cause so he ended up seeing a therapist, with the thought that the headaches might be psychosomatic—which means they had their origin in the psyche, not in something we might call biological.
As Dr. Mayer spoke with him, she found out that his life seemed to be going very well. He had a stellar career and a happy family life. As they were discussing his life she heard him say that he had to give up teaching. He said that he loved teaching and didn’t want to give it up.
She checked in with him, asking if he really did love it, and if so, why would he have to give it up?
He said he loved teaching as much as he’d love doing surgery but he had a major problem. He said he didn’t think he could actually teach what he thought was crucial to his process
for successful surgery. He had never spoken to anyone about it because it was a difficult thing to discuss. But he did decide to share it with dr. Mayer.
In order to determine when to move forward with a surgery, this neurosurgeon would just sit by the patient. He would sit at their bedside, maybe for minutes, maybe for hours, maybe for days, waiting for something.
He explained that what he was waiting for was the appearance of a white light around the patient’s head. When he saw this white light, and he said he would see it clearly, he knew he could proceed with the surgery.
That’s a strange way of determining how to move forward with a medical procedure. It’s not something we would find in any sort of rational decision theory. This is the term people use in evidence-based approaches in conventional scientific and analytical domains: a rational decision theory or a rational decision procedure.
Clearly this neurosurgeon was using a decision procedure, but it draws on a different way of knowing than we find in conventional science and conventional thinking.
Think about how we claim to decide when to give medicine to our child, when to pitch a project proposal, when to ask for a raise. How do we do it? If I told you that I get what I want at work because I wait to ask for it until I see a white light around the boss’s head, you might think me crazy. But what if I seem to always get what I ask for, and your approach ends up hit and miss?
And what if I could teach you how to apply a different way of knowing, and then it ended up working for you? It might be an experience that would lead you to say, This changes everything.
As I have noted, Elizabeth Mayer calls these sorts of experiences extraordinary knowing, and I want to suggest again that maybe it’s not so extraordinary. And I us to consider how the message Socrates gives us—the same message one finds in a variety of philosophical, spiritual, and religious Traditions around the world—is that what we think we know is often the main barrier between what we are now and what we might become, a barrier between what we think we are and what our true nature is.
What we know is a barrier between ourselves and what we might discover and create for ourselves and our world.
In our world today it seems very clear that what we know is a major problem. We know that it’s those darn Mexicans who are creating all our problems, along with antifa, and the liberals. And we know that if we build a wall and buy more guns, it will solve these problems. Or we know it’s the GOP and their bad policies. And we know that if we elect this particular person he or she will fix everything for us. We know that capitalism is the only way to organize an economy, and we know that the only alternative would be some terrible communistic economy.
These might not be your favorite bits and bites of knowledge, but we all have them, we all have things we know.
We know that our way of knowing the world is the right way, and we know that anyone who disagrees is wrong.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about something subtle. This is not just about having dogmatic opinions. We might be very open-minded in many ways, but we still hold unconscious beliefs about the nature of reality and the nature of ourselves too, and these function as givens, as things we take for granted because we just know them to be true. We have a style of consciousness, a general way or set of ways to know ourselves and our world that our culture gives us so completely that we cannot simply wish it away.
And yet we have all this anomalous data about our ways of knowing, all of this feedback about how we know that could make us say—that should make us, ethically speaking—should make us say, because it’s the right thing to say: Wait . . . this changes everything.
What might change everything? What does it take to get us to change? What feedback do we already have about how we know the world that might get us to pause?
Well, how about the fact that 94% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated with plastic. Or how about other pollutants in our water? We heard about the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan in 2014, and the lead contamination there, but what you might not know is that hundreds of communities across the United States have unacceptable levels of lead in their water,
other communities have supposedly acceptable levels of lead, but do we really know the acceptable level of lead?
And what about the Mercury in our water, the dioxin in our water, the rocket fuel in our water, the other petrochemicals in our water, the Pharmaceuticals in water,
Sometimes these toxins are at plainly unsafe levels, while at other times their levels are declared safe, but without any true understanding about what happens when a massive cocktail chemistry flows through your water and all through your body, day after day after day.
We all carry this toxic burden, not only from the water but also from the air and the soil.
We also have soil erosion of course, with maybe only 60 harvests left in some areas.
We have Rising inequality.
We’re almost in Perpetual War now in the United States.
We have all sorts of mental health problems, not only from the wars but in general in our society. We have an increase in loneliness.
We have an increase in feelings of disconnectedness.
We have less leisure time, and yet the vast majority of people feel disconnected from their jobs.
It’s an extraordinary situation.
That’s the extraordinary part. What we might call extraordinary knowing is not as extraordinary as the situation we’ve created by means of the ordinary, conventional knowing we all participate in.
I don’t mean that it’s just the so-called scientific and rational way of knowing that has gotten us into trouble. What I mean is that all of us live our lives by means of what we think we know.
And this whole approach of
knowing, whatever it might be, holds in common all the things that each of us claim to know as individuals. It’s as if our way of knowing is a vast pattern of insanity.
Spiritual, philosophical, and religious Traditions all over the world tell us that we need to know differently. We need to know ourselves, each other, and our world differently.
These traditions tell us that there are possibilities for knowing that—from our current standpoint of knowing—seem extraordinary, but should seem quite ordinary once we begin to mature.
Opening ourselves to them is opening ourselves to an ongoing sense of sacredness and wonder, so they are wondrous. But they aren’t wondrous in the sense of being Supernatural or delusionary. They are only strange because—when we are caught in a certain paradigm—things outside that Paradigm can seem strange, nonsensical, and even irrational.
This is a well-known thing in science. It’s important to recognize that this very thing happens in science. The history of science is full of these shifts, in which the new way of looking at the world is, from the old perspective, quite nonsensical, even irrational.
The shift, for instance, from Newtonian mechanics to relativity and quantum theory is a major shift. It’s important for us to recognize that, from the standpoint of Newtonian physics, from that way of knowing the world, Quantum and relativity Theory make extraordinary claims.
We need paradigm shifts like the one from Newton to Einstein and the Quantum view—and indeed we still haven’t accomplished even that shift. And the difficulty in making that shift more fully, and maybe even opening to further transformation and maturity, is that many scientists, like the rest of us, are quite resistant to Paradigm shifts. Therefore, scientists, like the rest of us, can be very resistant to ideas that strike them as extraordinary from their current perspective. All of us can get rather defensive about these matters. And then we begin to live that Socratic irony we contemplated earlier.
It is precisely what we know that keeps us from arriving at greater Insight, greater Wisdom, greater Love, greater Happiness and well-being.
What we tried to do in this contemplation is lay out some of the basic problems that are well exemplified by these interesting stories of anomalous data. The anomalous, the strange, the uncanny, the unexplained, and the Wondrous are important in our lives philosophically and spiritually.
From a spiritual perspective, the principal set of anomalous data is suffering—our own suffering, and also the suffering of others.
When we experience suffering in our lives, the suggestion from many philosophical and spiritual Traditions is that it should give us pause.
Experiencing suffering can give us pause, especially if we start to recognize the patterns of suffering that manifest in our lives, when we start to be able to say, Wait, this is the same kind of relationship I was just in,
or this is the same uncomfortable position I’ve been in before with this friend, this is the same argument I’ve had with my boss . . .
Seeing these patterns is important because the patterns should get us to pause to slow down to say, Wait maybe this changes everything.
It would be nice if every experience of this changes everything were happy and exciting. However, they are all Mysterious and Wondrous in their own way, including the painful ones.
When we suffer we can pause and ask if we are knowing the world in a way that doesn’t work, if we are knowing something about ourselves or others that is getting in our way, interfering with intimacy, with mystery and wonder, with wildness and wellness and maybe even with magic.
We know with such certainty what kind of a bad person we are, what our weaknesses are.
We know so well the kinds of things about us that are the sources of our self-criticism and self-hatred.
We know how to give ourselves a terribly hard time.
We know how to be mean to ourselves and others. We know how to see the world, how to know the world, in ways that lead to suffering for ourselves and others.
Can we know the world and know ourselves differently?
Can we practice a way of knowing in the fullness of our being? Can we practice knowing and being, living and loving from the heart of wonder and wildness, sacredness and serenity?
Can we practice a genuinely Original Thinking—genuinely original, not original thinking as we hear it spoken about in our culture, but something more profound, a thinking that would lead to Greater peace, greater happiness, greater wisdom, Greater Love, greater Beauty in the world for ourselves and others?
As we continue our contemplation of these matters, we will look into these and other questions more fully. And we will find concrete ways to move forward, to cultivate the whole of life onward.
LoveWisdom, Philosophy, and spirituality are not about my giving you answers to your life. It’s your life. You have to figure out your own life. But the LoveWisdom, is a user’s manual for your life. Indeed, the traditions of wisdom, love, and beauty from around the world offer us a user’s manual for the Cosmos—a cosmic user’s manual for our heart, mind, body, world. The teachings and practices of these traditions can help us to cultivate the whole of life onward, moving in mutuality, living and loving on a common ground that gives space for our individuality.
The wisdom traditions from around the world offer techniques, strategies, practices, Concepts, and stories, mythopoetic stories and wisdom stories that can frame a way for each one of us to discover what’s most important in our lives, for each of us to find the meaning and the purpose of Our Lives, in relationship to all the other beings who make this world together with us. They help us to attune with wisdom, love, and beauty. They help us attune with sacredness and wonder.
Today and over the next few days, see if you can find that sense of Wonder in your life. See if you can invite those moments that open you to the possibilities of, This changes everything.
If you have reflections or questions about today’s episode, send them in, at wisdomloveandbeauty.org, and we’ll address some of them in a future episode.
Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your Soul and the Soul of the World are not two things. Take good care of them.