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Reality: Yours, Someone Else's, or No One's? by Richard Stammler © Rich Stammler, 2008 An Unusual Message I was struggling. Do I quit my well-paying government job to follow my dreams of having a transpersonal therapy practice or am I risking the loss of what I worked so hard to achieve? I had worked in government, first in the military for 24 years as a pilot in the Air force and then as a project scientist for an intelligence agency for 13 years. It was time for a major shift in profession. As is common in our modern society my conflict was over financial resources to continue to enjoy my 18 acre farm in Virginia with the animals, flowers, and fish and the life-style I enjoyed so much, or, possibly giving that up to, as Joseph Campbell says, “follow my bliss.” It is to work toward what I felt was my highest potential and my passion. I had weighed these decisions for several years and the inner conflict was becoming increasingly intense. It was affecting me at work and my psychological state. I was spiritually stuck. This was on my mind as I traveled down highway 28 near the Washington beltway to a government meeting. As I approached a traffic light on the busy six-lane highway, what I saw made me smile and then laugh out loud. What I saw ahead of me was a well-worn, rusty dump truck, the back irregular from its many confrontations with contents. Words on the back of the truck in large one-foot high letters in neat yellow script that spanned the back of the truck read, “What do you want?” That was it. This was my guidance. The solution to my dilemma was to decide what I really wanted and pursue it with full gusto. The rest would take care of itself. But, is this possible? Can things in my physical reality really create events that are just for me? Surely, this is just coincidence. In Newtonian physics where every material event has a direct causal connection to some other event that created it, the connection of this seemingly random event to myself personally is impossible. To think so in modern psychiatry is called a delusion of reference and can be an indicator of mental illness. Synchronicity But, transpersonal psychology presents another view. C. G. Jung called it “synchronicity.” The definition itself tells you that it is an “acausal connecting principle.” So something is connecting these two events, my conflict on the one hand with the appearance of the dump truck message on the other. It is without a Newtonian causal connection. Can this even happen? Yes. When Jung was working on the concept of synchronicity Einstein heard of it and was so energized by the idea he wrote Jung a letter encouraging him to continue his development of the concept because the new physics of quantum mechanics permitted such an idea.1 The Quantum Explanation So what is our friend Einstein thinking about when he says the new physics permits the concept of synchronicity? Fundamentally, quantum mechanics says our world is not as it seems. It is not the rock hard reality we think it is. First, if we aren’t looking, it isn’t there, it is in a condition called a “probable amplitude wave” which is a state of all possibilities. It is only when you make a measurement, loosely defined, meaning simply to “look” with one of the physical senses, that the probability wave collapses into the instance that you observe. Each of us does this for ourselves. You don’t collapse the wave for me and I don’t collapse it for you. In that sense our realities are not only different but can be very different. It is possible that I was the only one at that intersection to see the words on that truck that day (and – that wouldn’t be a hallucination). Normally, what keeps you from seeing something radically different from the person next to you is that we coordinate expectations. It is not likely that you will experience a summer day while the person next to you is experiencing a snowy winter. Lest you think I am pretty far out on a limb with this explanation, note that the much heralded theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, now holds the position that the entire universe is a quantum event and as such collapses into all possible states meaning that there is an infinity of universes.2 String theorist (and theoretical physicist) Michio Kaku summarizes Hawking, “However, Hawking’s theory . . . goes much further: It is based on an infinite number of self-contained universes (and not just particles) and postulates the possibility of tunneling (via wormholes) between them.”3 Infinity is a big number --therefore, there are plenty of “places” for us to have different realities. Furthermore, our expectations and beliefs direct the way in which that probability wave collapses, which means we get what we expect to get. This one is a bit tricky. People will tell you that it can’t be so or we would all be millionaires. This is not true because many of us think we would like to have those resources but unconsciously, normally from childhood beliefs, hold the position that it is unattainable. And – what we hold just below conscious awareness is what counts most, as transpersonal psychology repeatedly reveals. That paragraph has a lot in it and perhaps more than you can accept at this time. I hope to give you more evidence of all of this in future articles. These concepts totally reorder the world from the Newtonian view and have powerful implications for your personal life. What are the tenets that follow?
The Placebo Effect So, very simply, what this explains and is supported by, are a number of phenomena. The first is the placebo effect. One of the requirements of good experimental design when testing a hypothesis such as a new drug or a new treatment procedure is to have a control group, which is as identical as possible to the actual treatment group but does not get the new treatment. Therefore, so it is not immediately obvious that one group is getting something new, the experimental strategy is to give the control group a placebo. In essence, it is a fake drug or treatment process with the key ingredient missing. The hoped for result is that those getting the drug or experimental protocol show markedly greater improvement than the control group. But, what is found consistently is the group not getting the experimental therapy also shows significant improvement. This can be as high as 35 percent of the controls.4 It is called the “placebo effect” because some of the control “think/believe” they are getting the new drug/procedure, and they get better! Wait a minute. Are we saying the belief in the outcome creates the outcome? Yes! I remember during my graduate school days (very long ago at the Master’s level) my psychology professor brought this up, stating that, “some just get better from the placebo – we don’t know why.” Don’t you think we ought to figure out why, with just the belief in the outcome, they improve? During the era of behaviorist psychology even the hint that this was of interest was anathema. A parallel effect is that called the experimenter effect. It is possible that when two experimenters run the same identical experiment, one gets a positive result and the other does not. The difference, one believes in the hypothesis and will get positive results and the other doesn’t. Scientist who (still) subscribe to the Newtonian paradigm, and there are many, will be convinced that one or the other experimenter had some confounding element in their procedure that could explain the difference. They just haven’t found it. Some of you may have trouble with the idea that thoughts can create reality for you. Certainly, you can accept that thoughts can produce certain emotional states in your body. Thoughts of love and compassion will elicit certain physical reactions in the body, which have been shown to strengthen the immune system. Negative, depressive, or angry thoughts will create the familiar flight or fright response in the body and actually over time be detrimental to the immune system. But, beyond that, there are more startling examples of the mind affecting the body. The Amazing Krebiozen There is a famous case often cited in popular literature5 and originally reported in the medical literature by psychologist Bruno Klopfer. The man he was treating was named Wright, a very logical left brain individual6, who had by any definition, terminal cancer of the lymph nodes with large tumors throughout his body. Hospitalized, he needed supplemental oxygen to continue to survive and his prognosis was very poor. Wright had heard of an experimental drug called Krebiozen and begged his physician to let him try it. His physician gave in to his pleas and gave him an intravenous injection of the drug fully expecting him to perish over the coming weekend. On Monday he was surprised to find Wright excited and energized, his tumors had apparently shrunk to half their size and by the end of the ten-day treatment period they were completely gone from his body. He left the hospital. After some months, Wright started to see articles appear that stated the Krebiozen had no effect on cancer of the lymph nodes. As a result, he soon suffered a relapse with full-blown manifestation of lymph system cancer and was readmitted to the hospital. His physician at this time tried something radical. He told Wright that the results in the media were due to a bad batch of the drug and it actually was effective. He further told him that he had a newer, more potent version of the drug but injected him with a placebo (not with Kebiozen). The results were the same as with the actual Krebiozen. All signs of Wright’s cancer disappeared and he once again left the hospital with no hint of cancer in his body. Weeks later the American Medical Association issued an official finding of the Krebiozen trials reporting that the treatment had absolutely no value in combating cancer. Virtually overnight, Wright’s cancer reappeared and he died a few days later. Other Examples of Mind over Matter It is well known that chemotherapy treatment for cancer will produce severe hair loss in many patients. In a study to assess the effectiveness of a chemotherapy protocol, which included a control group, 30 percent of the controls also lost their hair7. This group got no chemo at all; they just thought they did. There is also the fascinating work of a brave surgeon, Bruce Moseley, who cited a revealing study in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Moseley believed in his surgical intervention and the solid results it achieved with his patients. But he wasn’t sure exactly what part of the surgical procedure made the difference. So Moseley went to great lengths to determine what part of his knee surgery for severe arthritis really did the healing. He divided his experiment into three groups, one got the full surgical procedure, which included removal of damaged cartilage, and the second group did not include any excision of cartilage but did involve irrigation of the inflammatory material in the knee. To make this a complete experiment he included the obligatory control group. What was unusual about Moseley’s study was the lengths he went to make his experimental procedure as identical as possible for all groups. That is, he also did surgery on the control group, including cutting open the skin of the knee and performing a salt-water wash of the tissue but did not touch any part of the knee joint. Post-operative care was the same for all groups. The results were startling. Those receiving surgery did improve as he expected; however, so did the control group and, to the same degree! Moseley stated, “my skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee was the placebo effect.” Said another way, the entire benefit to all three groups is that they believed they should get better. The further interesting thing is that the three groups did not know to which experimental group they belonged until two years later. In the two years after the procedure some in the placebo group had dramatic results. One member of the control group was only able to walk with the use of a cane prior to the mock surgery. After the mock surgery he was soon able to again play basketball. After it was revealed to him that he was part of the placebo group, during a television interview, he remarked, “In this world anything is possible when you put your mind to it. I know that your mind can work miracles.”8 Amen, that’s my point. The Crazy (but revealing) Reality of MPD Multiple personality disorder (MPD) provides an interesting view of the workings of the mind. MPD individuals, typically, experienced trauma early in life, that for the personality was so severe and intolerable that the memory of the experience was walled off in the mind to the extent that a new personality was created. Once this process starts, it often leads to many personalities in the same individual. There are some famous cases made popular in a book (such as Sybil) and in documentaries. MPD is an extreme coping mechanism for the psyche that often continues though the life of that person. What is fascinating about these somewhat independent personalities is that they obviously inhabit the same body but apparently can have remarkable biological dissimilarities. For example, as reported in the literature, by changing personalities a multiple that is drunk can instantly be sober. One multiple will show the clinical symptoms (in blood tests) of diabetes where the others do not. One multiple can be near-sighted and another far-sighted. There are even reports of tumors manifesting on one personality just to disappear when another takes control.9 What I am getting at is that your thoughts in a very real sense create your reality; synchronicities are only one reflection of that principle. Chopra clearly sums it up when he says, “...those same impulses of energy and information we experience as thought—those same impulses—are the raw material of the universe.” So, the bottom line — synchronicities — you create them mostly from the unconscious to provide yourself with information that the conscious mind is wrestling with or – should be. This concept of your unconscious mind producing the events in your life can be expanded further to view your waking reality as you would a dream. As such, you interpret your daily events like you would a dream. In certain wisdom traditions, like the Australian aborigines and some Eastern systems of thought, the creation of our individual reality is viewed as dreaming it into being. So, if you have something unusual happen, which makes you take notice and remark — I wonder why that happened? Analyze it as you would a dream. This can be very insightful. Here is an example from my experience. An Existential Crisis Things at work had been good. I got approval and considerable amount of money to begin my new technology program. I was approved to research military and intelligence uses of an established commercial technology. I moved to a new work location and it was all going my way. Then things started to turn sour. A young bright mid-level supervisor who I enjoyed working with suddenly left to pursue a PhD program. My young immediate supervisor was never around for me to establish a connection. He had past experience in my field but seemed to have a poor grasp of the application of the technology and worse, did not appear to want me to share my knowledge of it. So management up the chain was suddenly distant and non-supportive, even negative, toward me. What had happened? Everything looked so good. All of this came together to make me feel extremely uncomfortable and unsupported, criticized even. I did not take this well at all. In stressful periods like this I always obsess on the issue, playing the conditions over and over in my mind (taking into consideration what I am saying in this article, that, of course is the wrong approach to solve the problem). As is normally the case, the weakest somatic system then reflects the conflict. So my stomach generated the gastritis that invariably surfaced during these periods; I have had two upper GI x-ray procedures. My blood pressure rose. My dreams turned negative. I was an unhappy camper. In addition, I was wrestling with the strong inner pressures for a radical career transition that had me concerned. Intuitive healer and noted lecturer, Caroline Myss, calls it the dark night of the soul. In some of the mystical religious traditions including the Christian monastic period, it was well known that before moving on to a higher level of spiritual functioning the level you are at fails you utterly. Was that what I was going through? This was the situation when I returned to San Diego for the sixth time for my continuing in-residence training in clinical hypnotherapy at the Institute of Thought with Joe Costa. San Diego and Clues I settled into my trip out to San Diego, happy to be away from the stress of my job. I was escaping for a little while and quite happy to do it. I got into San Diego around noon local time and decided to hire a cab to get to my hotel. Joe Costa has a technique of interpreting the daily events that happen in the course of living life. Particularly when events are unusual for us, they lend themselves to dream interpretation exactly as if it were a dream. Joe Costa calls it a “day dream” and has evolved the interpretive process into an art form. Stepping into the cab my young Ethiopian driver asked me in a strong foreign accent where I wanted to go. I replied the Comfort Inn and he asked me if I had the address. I had inadvertently left my folder of addresses and itineraries at home (this is also interpretable) and all I could tell him was the Comfort Inn in La Mesa. He indicated that he would get the address from the dispatcher with whom he was in near constant communication over his cell phone. He spoke in a melodious Ethiopian dialect. The meter clicked away rapidly to $30 when we turned off the highway in La Mesa. Another 20 minutes and we were no closer to finding the motel. After traversing the same terrain three times I finally told him, “look I can’t afford this, the meter is $42 and that is nearly all the cash I have.” In frustration I told him to just take me back to the airport. “You have to go back to pick up your next passenger anyway.” He assured me that he would charge me no more than the meter reflected at that moment. More instructions over the cell, backtracking and, suddenly, he crossed a ridge and I was in familiar territory because I recognized the Starbucks where I get my morning coffee. I gave him $45 and thanked him – it wasn’t his fault. Besides, I understood that this was my confusion that represented itself in my day dream. I was lost, having difficulty finding my way and using my resources ineffectively, not hard to interpret. This taxi experience reflected that in symbolic from – just like in a dream. A little later, after I settled into my room, I walked up the hill to the Starbucks for a welcome coffee and some time to reflect and read one of the books purchased at the IARRT conference. I had just eased into the big stuffed chair with my coffee and book in hand when I heard a familiar voice. It was the Ethiopian cab driver with a friend. I acknowledged him and we laughed as we greeted each other again. He sat down in the chair near me and his friend sat across the coffee table when my driver engaged in an intense conversation in their Ethiopian tongue. My driver appeared to be giving his friend counsel and guidance. Was I getting mine as well but the communication was “foreign” to my personality and I wasn’t getting it? A Very Telling Day Dream I went to sleep that night only half-heartedly requesting a dream about my question [posed in the hypnotherapy class that day]. I’m not sure I wanted that answer. The next morning I awoke, aware that I had dreamt all night but did not remember – deep inside I really didn’t want to. I got dressed and walked up the hill to my Starbucks with some anticipation for the day. I didn’t bring along any reading materials, intent instead on people watching at this interesting location. I had just begun nursing my Grande Half-caf when I heard my name, “Richard.” Two men had just entered the coffee house and one was speaking to his friend who came in ahead of him. Richard was close to my age, a little over six feet tall with short silver-gray hair. When his friend called him by name again and he sat down in the easy chair across from me, I smiled as I thought, “OK, I don’t need to be hit over the head. I can recognize a day dream in the making.” I greeted him, “Hi, my name is Richard also. How are you?” He responded in kind and noting the unusual medallion that hung prominently from his neck I inquired as to its meaning. It was about the size of a nickel, round with a raised circle on the outside edge, which circumscribed an equilateral triangle. He said, “Oh that is just a religious symbol.” Then seeming to think about his answer for a few seconds he revised his response, “It represents alcoholics anonymous. I’m an alcoholic.” He went on, “I took my last drink in September of 1989. I’m lucky because I didn’t lose my job or my family.” “What caused you to drop the habit,” I queried. “I hit bottom,” he said lowering his head just a little. “The church tried to help but it didn’t work. Alcoholics anonymous finally did the trick. It saved my life.” We chatted for a few more seconds and he got up to get the coffee his friend had ordered for him. A few moments more and he came back to share one more bit of wisdom with me. “Richard, you know I’m in the health care profession and at times customers and physicians get on me. In those instances I just go outside and look up and am grateful for what I have and just say that I choose to start over. Each day you choose. It is all perception. You can restart your day.” (I surmised that he must be a pharmacist.) With that he left. So here we are. Here was a person with my name, my age, and in the health care profession – in broad terms where I want to be. This day dream was more obvious than any nighttime dream I have ever had. In class as was the routine we either discuss a dream from the previous night, or if one was unavailable, a day dream as Joe terms it. I related the events from that morning as he listened intently making short notations on his legal pad. Joe personalized it and drove the point home. “Richard, you have gotten lost in your spirituality. You have identified with it and lost yourself. You must be at the center. Don’t throw the baby out with the wash water. You can start over. You have to start over.” The bottom line is that I need to take a fresh approach to my conflict. My existential crisis has a resolution and the multiple synchronicities helped guide me through it. Nothing in your life happens through serendipity. It is all purposeful and meaningful. We don’t always know the meaning; sometimes our conscious mind will not allow it. But, rest assured, it has meaning for you personally and, normally, uncovering that meaning yields valuable insight for your inner development. Do you have any interesting day dreams or synchronicities? What do they say about your burning issues right now? For answers see a good transpersonal therapist (I know one). _____________________________ 1 Jung, C. G. (1953). Letter to Carl Selig, in Letters: Nineteen fifty-one to nineteen sixty-one, Vol 2, Bollingen Series XCV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1973). Cited in Grof, S. (1993). Holotropic mind; the three levels of human consciousness and how they shape our lives. San Francisco, CA: Harper, San Francisco. P.179. 2 As described in Kaku, M. (1994). Hyperspace: a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10th dimension. New York: Doubleday. 3 Ibid. p. 264. 4 Talbot, M. (1991). The Holographic universe. New York: Harper Perennial, p. x91. Actually Talbot cites the 35 percent as an average number that improved with the placebo. Although many of these examples are cited elsewhere in the literature, I am citing most out of Talbot’s book. 5 Harman, W. (1988). Global mind change: the promise of the last years of the twentieth century. Indianapolis, IN: Knowledge Systems, Inc. p. 47. Also cited by Talbot (Talbot actually cites the original journal article by Klopfer) and Chopra, for example. 6 This is key because he believed what an authority told him producing the amazing and powerful consequences. 7 Talbot, p. 97. 8 Talbot, pp. 97-99. 9 This material all comes from Talbot’s book cited above. He provides full citations for these clinical observations. |