The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  The yogis believe that life is powered by a snakelike coil of energy that travels through the body along a line marked by vital centers, or chakras. Most of these are associated with special organs, but one of the highest is connected with the mind and is said to be situated in the space between the eyebrows. This seems to be the pineal gland, and in its evolutionary origins as an eye, we have a biological basis for the emphasis on light in states of transcendence. [55] Meditation, say the yogis, is "lovely shiningness." From the new biochemical studies of the brain and its hormones we learn that this same light-sensitive pineal gland also produces a substance that profoundly alters the function of the mind. [258] It produces ecstasy. In visionary states, in the fugues of schizophrenia, at times when the mind is affected by hallucinogenic drugs, the pineal seems to be involved. Common to all these conditions is a sense of detachment in which consciousness is removed to a point outside personal experience, where the division between self and nonself ceases to exist and the world becomes seamless. The word "ecstasy" is derived from a Greek one that means literally "to stand outside," and it seems likely that if there is any biological possibility that the personality or mind or soul or second system can be separated from the body, then the pineal will be the point of detachment. In the light of evidence already available, it becomes more and more difficult to deny that such a separation could take place.

  We began this flight of fancy with a sneeze, and by adding just one more link to the chain, we end up right back where we started.

  The vital energy that co-ordinates the molecules of a living organism and hooks them together into a patterned and functional whole is identified in Hindu writings as prana. It is described as something that is neither a product of life nor anything as simple as oxygen or any inorganic element available in nature -- and yet it is somehow assimilated into the body by breathing and eating. It is said that the best way to replenish prana rapidly is by the exercise of pranayama, which is the voluntary control of the three acts of inbreathing, holding the breath, and outbreaking in a special rhythm. The "breath of life" has a rhythm of 1:4:2, while the destructive sneeze, as near as I can tell from timing those taking place around me, is much closer to 18:1:2.

  This notion of a universal life-breath substance is a nice one, providing an elegant theoretical basis for the suggestion that life is patterned by a biological organizer, but it is based on a mystical tradition that is not available for scientific analysis. There is, however, a recent development in pure technology that seems to provide hard evidence for the existence of something like prana. Dennis Milner at the University of Birmingham has produced an instrument for taking photographs without light. [185] He uses film sensitive to electrical discharge rather than light waves, and sends a single pulse of direct current through the object to be photographed in a dark space between two glass plates. While still developing his apparatus, Milner checked it out and found that he was getting pictures even when there was no object in the test chamber. With nothing under the camera but clean dry air, he was able to produce pictures of pulsating globules of energy in the midst of a delicate tracery of glowing threads that look like the patterns produced by dancing fireflies on a time exposure.

  These results have been criticized on the grounds that the effects may be due merely to what is known as "the streamer phenomena of corona discharge." [169] What this means is that patterns like these are produced when air is ionized as a current flows through it. [24] Milner felt certain that he had guarded against this possibility, and to prove that ionic processes had nothing to do with the production of his pictures, he modified his apparatus to work in a vacuum. With no air in the test chamber, the same characteristic patterns still appeared on the plates.

  At higher magnifications, Milner's pictures are even more interesting. The patterns seem to be of two basic forms. One is a radiating structure of force lines that center on little glowing cores but spider out in regular radial feelers to connect up with adjacent cores in a regular, almost mathematical pattern, like the skeletal filaments on a head of brain coral. The other form is based on spheres and agglomerations of spheres in circular patterns, like a field of round-petaled flowers almost touching one another. These simple basic shapes could be combined and elaborated into almost any form found in nature, and it may be that Milner has succeeded in registering for the first time the field force that is responsible at a basic level for all form and function.

  Mystics have always claimed that there are forces working invisibly all the time in nature to produce the variety of forms that we observe, and that these continue to flow through and maintain a body as prana. This energy is thought to be channeled in its passage through the body along lines of force that are marked by the focal points of the chakras.

  To those with special awareness the chakras are said to look like shining wheels of light that rotate rapidly in a counterclockwise direction. In a newborn baby they are half an inch in diameter, but in an enlightened adult they may grow to be disks five inches wide. In people of all ages, these glowing vortices are said to lie right on the surface of the body, and their exact locations, even when reported by naïve observers, are remarkably consistent. I have questioned a child on a remote Indonesian island, who was said to have special powers but who lived in a community where nobody knew anything of the classic theories of yoga, and she explained what people looked like to her and pointed to the precise traditional locations of the chakras, which she described as "fires." The lowest lies around the base of the spine, the others near the navel, between the spleen and the kidneys, over the heart, on the throat, and the highest one sits between the eyebrows.

  We have already suggested a connection between the highest chakra and the pineal gland, so it is worth noting that the reported positions of other centers also correspond with the locations of important hormone-producers. The ovary and the testes lie near the end of the spine and the navel, the adrenals above the kidneys and the thyroid on the throat. All these glands control and regulate bodily processes, but there is no circulatory system, nerve net, or pattern of lymph vessels that connects these points directly together. For this reason, Western medicine has tended to dismiss the possibility of the chakras having any physical reality; but there is a system of healing in Oriental medicine that correlates perfectly with the prana pattern.

  Acupuncture presupposes the existence of twelve main channels or meridians in the body through which energy flows. In five thousand years of practice, acupuncturists have painstakingly plotted the positions of these lines of force, and literally pinpointed more than seven hundred spots on the surface of the body where these channels come close enough to the skin to be manipulated. The meridians follow no known physiological pattern, but they seem to be nonetheless very real. Yoshio Nagahama, of Chiba University in Japan, found a patient who had been struck by lightning and left with an unusual sensitivity. He was a peasant farmer, a man from the mountains with no formal education and absolutely no knowledge of acupuncture. Yet, when pricked with a needle in one of the fundamental points of a meridian, he was able to trace with his finger a line over his body along which he felt an "echo" of the sensation. [202] In every case, these lines followed the traditional meridians precisely.

  In the nineteenth century a German doctor, who knew nothing of acupuncture, discovered a system of skin points which he thought were associated with homeopathic remedies. [128] When his points were later compared with those on an acupuncture chart, most of them coincided. In Korea earlier this century, Kim Bong Han developed a machine capable of measuring small differences in the resistance on the skin. [231] Places where sharp gradients occurred once again proved to be the acupuncture points. At an electronic institute in Leningrad, a device called a tobiscope has been perfected which monitors plasma-like flares on the skin and is capable of locating acupuncture points with an accuracy of less than one tenth of a millimeter. [210] These developments attest to the reality of the classic meridians and make it possible for almost anyon
e to find the elusive spots without having to go through the long and exhaustive training of the traditional acupuncturist.

  Hiroshi Motoyama at the Institute of Religious Psychology in Tokyo has just completed a project in which he worked with one hundred practicing members of a yoga group. [192] He found that they could all produce unusual fluctuating rhythms on a blood pressure sensor which had nothing to do with the normal rhythm of the pulse. Mapping the paths of the new rhythms with the sensors, while his yoga adepts were deliberately stimulating the various traditional chakras, Motoyama has discovered that these centers all lie in acupuncture meridians. Some cut through as many as four chakras, and all the lines connecting the yogic focal points are precisely those laid down, both by students of acupuncture and by the new machines that support them.

  It seems that the life force described as prana in yoga and ki in acupuncture is exactly the same thing. There are fringe fields of medicine in the West, such as homeopathy, naturopathy, and osteopathy, that have long held a similar view -- that health depends on the maintenance of a balance in the body which allows the life force to do its own healing. Only the most dedicated allopaths, those mainstream medical practitioners who believe that disease can only be treated by combative drugs, still deny that the body can do a great deal to treat itself if given the right assistance. By concerning themselves only with the working parts, they begin to look like radio repairmen who have never heard the receiver in action. Music and life need two further stimulants: power provided by food and air, and information provided by the appropriate radio waves. Prana is our equivalent of the airborne patterns that allow disembodied music from a distant source to be re-created in a million other places. The life force suggested by this theory is as insubstantial as either and yet essential to the ordered patterning of matter that produces a functional living organism. It is not something to be sneezed at or out.

  It is now very difficult to deny that we could each of us be carrying a hidden second system, a doppelgänger that complements our more familiar somatic systems. Evidence in favor of its existence accumulates all the time, but we have yet to prove that this etheric double, this electrical wraith, could survive the disorganization of body matter and continue to exist after clinical death.

  People who have had a limb amputated sometimes have the feeling not only that the missing piece is still present but that it is also painful. The ache in a lost arm can be very real and is known as referred pain. This is something familiar to all of us -- a bump on the inner elbow often causes pain in the little finger, which has not been touched. This happens because the pain is neither in the elbow nor in the finger. Pain is an awareness in the brain, in this case of a signal that has reached it by a particular nervous pathway. The route from the elbow is via the ulnar nerve which runs from the little finger up the inner side of the arm and via the spinal cord to the brain. All the brain knows about it is that the impulse originated somewhere on this pathway, and from force of habit it always interprets this signal as an insult to the little finger. It would continue to do so even if the finger had been amputated.

  Not all phantom limbs are this easily explained away. The pain in some, however, can be banished by direct suggestion under hypnosis. If someone with an intact arm is told by the hypnotist that the hand has been anesthetized, tests with a pin will always show that the upper limits of the dead area have an artificially sharp edge, like the top of a glove. [20] If anesthesia followed the anatomical distribution of cutaneous nerves in the skin, the edge of the area would be very uneven, but it never is. So the lack of sensation takes place not in any natural area defined by the nerve ends in the brain, but in a totally artificial area designated by the mind as "the hand." If the pain in a missing hand were due only to being referred, then hypnosis should have no effect at all, because, according to the theory, the brain does not know that the pain comes from someplace other than the missing hand. But it does work, and measurements show that the anesthetic glove is there, sometimes extending up onto the forearm, just as though the limb were still intact. Perhaps in a sense it is.

  At Kirov State University in Kazakhstan, photographs are being taken with a machine that generates high-frequency fields between two electrodes. [210] If a leaf is placed in the test chamber, the picture shows the entire leaf in outline filled with pinpoints of radiance like a close-up of the Milky Way. These patterns change the whole time in a living leaf and as it dies, gradually fade away until they disappear altogether. Victor Adamenko has found that if a piece is cut from a fresh leaf immediately before its electrical photograph is taken, the picture still shows the entire leaf, with the ribs and veins and margin of the missing part faintly outlined in a lesser radiance like a botanical ghost. The Russian workers believe that this phantom limb of the leaf remains visible because of a persistent energy field that they call bioplasma which sounds like a very suitable scientific pseudonym for prana.

  Adamenko has been exposed to a great deal of doubt and ridicule over this experiment and is inclined now to pass it off under pressure as an aberration of some kind -- perhaps a double exposure -- but I get the impression that he does not really believe this. H. D. Andrade in S˜o Paulo, Brazil, has succeeded in replicating the phantom leaf effect several times, and it begins to look as though Adamenko may soon be completely vindicated. [153] I have the feeling that apparatus will be perfected in the next few years that will make it possibLe to demonstrate the phenomenon regularly and with many other forms of life. It fits so well with so many other isolated findings that I do not think we can afford just to dismiss it out of hand.

  Psychic and sensitive people often claim that they can still see the outline of an amputated limb, sometimes clearly enough to describe its peculiarities in detai1. [131] If they can, and if the Russians are right, then it seems that the life force that is so intimately connected wth a living organism can survive in its original form, at least temporarily, despite the loss of some of its parts.

  Our ultimate aim in this portion of the argument is to investigate the biological possibility of the total separation in time of the somatic and the second systems, but it could help us to look at this realistically if we first examine the possibility of their separation in space. If the two systems can exist independently at the same time, the chances of their being able to do so at different times are greatly increased.

  The Institute of Psychophysical Research in Oxford has for some time now been collecting reports on what they call lucid and prelucid dreams. A lucid dream is one in which the subject is aware of dreaming. In a prelucid dream the subject wonders whether a dream is taking place and may or may not come to the correct conclusion. This is one from the Institute's files: "I now found myself with X (a minister friend) in a room at the other end of the corridor. I was telling him about the lucid dreams I had just had, and said suddenly as it occurred to me, 'And of course this is a dream now.' X said with an unhelpful smile, 'Well, it might be. How do you know?' 'Of course it is,' I said and crossed to the window. 'I am going to fly,' I said. 'Be awkward if it is not a dream, won't it?' said X, who continued to stand by passively, looking humorous." [198]

  It is logically possible to dream about anything at all, including the experience of waking from a dream. Many people do this, seeming to wake, finding themselves in bed, getting up and starting to dress, then suddenly realizing that it is all a dream and that they are still asleep. Even recognizing that this awakening has been false does not make the next one real. Bertrand Russell said that he once had "about a hundred" false awakenings as he recovered from an anesthetic. [232] The problem of distinguishing waking from dreaming, at least while still in the dream, seems to be considerable. Prelucid dreamers cannot rely on the quality of their sensations as a guide, because the experiences of touch, taste, and smell in a dream can be convincingly real. Any sensation that one can have in waking life one can have in a dream. Experiences can be linked in a coherent and meaningful way and related to past experience. A dreamer can dream of wa
king, of getting up, of going out and doing a whole succession of everyday things, all perfectly ordinary until the point is reached where the reality of the experience is questioned. At this moment, the dreamer can even remember the problems that other people have had in similar dilemmas and compare their experience with his own -- and still not be certain of his state.

  You can even read a book in a dream and think it real. Are you awake now? Or is everything that has happened to you today all part of a complex dream? For a moment, questions of this kind can produce a twinge of doubt, but soon you discard the fantasy because you know that you are awake. This certainty is something that we feel at a biological level so basic that it has nothing to do with reason. One of the subjects of the Oxford institute expresses this feeling very well: "I Wondered how shall I know when I am really awake? It has often puzzled me; but somehow I feel certain that there is a different feeling when one is really awake. I have not been able to definitely pinpoint the difference. Somehow there seems to be one of the senses missing when one is dreaming -- possibly a sense of 'responsibility.' " [198] So if you find yourself in any doubt about being truly awake, you can be certain that you are asleep.