Mista'peo

via Carl Jung Depth Psychology

Marie-Louise Von Franz: Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life

This inner center is realized in exceptionally pure, unspoiled form by the Naskapi Indians, who still exist in the forests of the Labrador peninsula.

These simple people are hunters who live in isolated family groups, so far from one another that they have not been able to evolve tribal customs or collective religious beliefs and ceremonies.

In his lifelong solitude the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers who tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals, or customs to help him along.

In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an "Inner Companion, " whom he calls "my friend" or Mista'peo, meaning "Great Man."

Mista'peo dwells in the heart and is immortal; in the moment of death, or shortly before, he leaves the individual, and later reincarnates himself in another being.

Those Naskapi who pay attention to their dreams and who try to find their meaning and test their truth can enter into a deeper connection with the Great Man.

He favors such people and sends them more and better dreams.

Thus the major obligation of an individual Naskapi is to follow the instructions given by his dreams, and then to give permanent form to their contents in art.

Lies and dishonesty drive the Great Man away from one's inner realm whereas generosity and love of ones neighbors and animals attracts and give him life.

Dreams give the Naskapi complete ability to find his way in life, not only in the inner world but also in the outer world of nature.

Thel help him to foretell the weather and give him invaluable guidance in his hunting, upon which his life depends.

I mention these very primitive people because they are uncontaminated by our civilized ideas and still have natural insight into the essence of what Jung calls the Self.

~Marie-Louise von Franz, Man and His Symbols, Pages 161-162

Transrealism: the first major literary movement of the 21st century?

via The Guardian

It’s not science fiction, it’s not realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between. From Philip K Dick to Stephen King, Damien Walter takes a tour through transrealism, the emerging genre aiming to kill off ‘consensus reality’

A Scanner Darkly is one of Philip K Dick’s most famous but also most divisive novels. Written in 1973 but not published until 1977, it marks the boundary between PKD’s mid-career novels that were clearly works of science fiction, including The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and his late-career work that had arguably left that genre behind. Like VALIS and The Divine Invasion that followed it, A Scanner Darkly was two stories collided into one – a roughly science-fictional premise built around a mind-destroying drug, and a grittily realistic autobiographical depiction of PKD’s time living among drug addicts.

It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name “transrealism” in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker’s essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.

Transrealism argues for an approach to writing novels routed first and foremost in reality. It rejects artificial constructs like plot and archetypal characters, in favour of real events and people, drawn directly from the author’s experience. But through this realist tapestry, the author threads a singular, impossibly fantastic idea, often one drawn from the playbook of science fiction, fantasy and horror. So the transrealist author who creates a detailed and realistic depiction of American high-school life will then shatter it open with the discovery of an alien flying saucer that confers super-powers on an otherwise ordinary young man.

It’s informative to list a few works that do not qualify as transrealism to understand Rucker’s intent more fully. Popular fantasy or science fiction stories like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games lack a strong enough reality to be discussed as transrealism. Apparently realistic narratives that sometimes contain fantastic elements, like the high-tech gizmos of spy thrillers, also fail as transrealism because their plots and archetypal characters are very far from real. Transrealism aims for a very specific combination of the real and the fantastic, for a very specific purpose, that seems to have become tremendously relevant for contemporary readers.

The potential list of transrealist authors is both contentious and fascinating. Margaret Atwood for The Handmaid’s Tale and her novels from Oryx and Crake onwards. Stephen King, when at his best describing the lives of blue-collar America shattered by supernatural horrors. Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, among other big names of American letters. Iain Banks in novels like Whit and The Bridge. JG Ballard, as one of many writers originating from the science-fiction genre to pioneer transrealist techniques. Martin Amis in Time’s Arrow, among others.

This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the “mainstreaming of science fiction”. But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there’s no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere. Both sci-fi and realism provide a measure of comfort – one by showing us the escape hatch from mundane reality, the other by reassuring us the reality we really upon is fixed, stable and unchanging. Transrealism is meant to be uncomfortable, by telling us that our reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent, and allowing us no escape from that realisation.

“Transrealism is a revolutionary art form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a ‘normal person’.” Rucker’s formulation of transrealism as revolutionary becomes especially meaningful when compared to the uses transrealism is put to by the best of its practitioners. Atwood, Pynchon and Foster-Wallace all employed transrealist techniques to challenge the ways that “consensus reality” defined who was normal and who was not, from the political oppression of women to the spiritual death inflicted on us all by modern consumerism.

Today transrealism underpins much of the most radical and challenging work in contemporary literature. Colson Whitehead’s intelligent dissection of the underpinnings of racism in The Intuitionist and his New York Times transrealist twist on the zombie-apocalypse novel, Zone One. Monica Byrne’s hallucinatory road-trip across the future of the developing world and the lives of women caught between poverty and high-speed technological change in The Girl in the Road. Matt Haig’s compulsive young adult novel The Humans, which invites the reader to see human life through alien eyes. Transrealism has 30 years of history behind it, but it’s in the next 30 years that it may well define literature as we come to know it.

The Cultural Sickness Needs to be Named

by Joe Brewer

All over the world there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong. It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience. Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth at all costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis, and other planetary-scale crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.

Those with a spiritual bend might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream. They are like Mr. Anderson and his peers in The Matrix movies, plugged into a cultural system that feeds on their bodies and souls while keeping them unaware that they are living in a dream world.

What if the pain so many of us feel is caused by the same cultural sickness? How might we diagnose it? What are its root causes? And most importantly — how do we heal ourselves and the world around us?

These are deep questions. Spiritual questions. They are questions asked by seekers of truth in a time when discernment is desperately needed. And now is such a time. Our dominant consumer culture is built on the dark side of human nature — the propensity for greed that employs tactics of division to stoke fear as a system of control.

This culture tells us that humans are selfish and greedy. It says that we are nothing more than individual islands of ego floating in a sea of chaos. It is the Great Myth of Separation that takes many forms. We’ve seen it as humans apart from nature, reason divided against emotion, body separate from mind, one tribe distinct from another. This mental tendency to categorize the world according to its separations is the root cause of illness in the world today.

And it has a name. It’s name is Wetiko.

My partners at TheRules.org have created a special campaign that invites people to practice Seeing Wetiko — in the world around us and also within ourselves.

“Wetiko” is the name given to this cultural sickness in the Algonquin language. It is described by Paul Levy in his book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, in this manner:

    Native American mythologies portray the mythical figure of wetiko as a cannibalistic spirit who embodies greed and excess and can possess human beings. The wetiko that was once a human being, but because of its gluttony and selfishness it was transformed into a predatory monster.

This mythic figure can be thought of as a state of mind, a psychosis or collective delusion that confuses the menu for the meal (for example, by confusing money for real wealth or treating nature as worthless while numbers in an accounting spreadsheet are considered to have value). A person inflicted by Wetiko is thought to have a heart of ice making it impossible for them to feel compassion or love for others.

It can be seen in the blind pursuit of money by those whose actions destroy the life-giving capacities of the Earth. It is whispered in the deep recesses of minds told there is something fundamentally wrong with them — an insecurity hole in their soul that can only be filled through mindless consumption of trendy products. It is the numbness of pornography replacing the erotic depths of emotional connection between human beings as one uses the other for carnal pleasure while giving nothing in return. And it is the psychopathic behavior of corporations that put profit above all else as the sacred purpose guiding CEO’s and investors.

Every time someone is seen justifying the destruction of life for profit — it is Wetiko.

Every time compassion is vitally missing during a time of suffering — it is Wetiko.

Every time a privileged person uses a “throw away” toy — it is Wetiko.

Every time fear or disgust is used to manipulate for personal gain — it is Wetiko.

Our purpose in telling stories about Wetiko is to cultivate healing experiences for people everywhere who are suffering through the unprecedented scales and pace of change unfolding around us. Without a clear concept for the feeling that the world has gone crazy, it remains vague and muddled. The antidote is to provide a name for this feeling — and imbue it with the power of good storytelling.

At TheRules.org we strive to reveal the hidden conceptual patterns that give rise to poverty, inequality, and ecological destruction. Using a combination of linguistic analysis and economic policy studies, we are beginning to see Wetiko all around us in the mechanisms that create these conditions in the social rules that guide the formation of trade agreements, financial policies, employment contracts, and other concrete applications.

For example, if we connect the dots well enough it becomes possible to see that:

•     Resource extraction is only possible when nature is treated as dead and worthless on its own. Thus it is possible to mindlessly consume forests and soils, deplete fish stocks, pour pollution into the oceans, and burn fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
•     Human labor is consumed as a “resource” that cannibalizes time, effort and enthusiasm. This is why so many of us are stuck in bullshit jobs while the Earth (and our local communities) are begging for meaningful service and a purposeful well-lived life.
•     The global network of tax havens is a vampire-like web that syphons the life-flow of human labor into the coffers of the super rich. As a result, the money supply becomes like blood that has been withdrawn from a living body.
•     Debt-repayment programs extract wealth from “developing” societies, disingenuously exploiting the morality of social responsibility to hoard massive wealth. Poverty is created and environments destroyed — at an accelerating pace — to keep this financial cannibal alive.
•     This debt-poverty disease inflicts “developed” nations as well. It can be seen in the exploding credit card and student loan debts, whereby people feel forced to serve money instead of pursuing their real passions.

We invite you to help us tell stories like these and reveal the ways that Wetiko functions through each of us as we remain plugged into the Matrix.

Only by awakening to our true power — that it is us who individually and collectively dream this nightmare creature into being in each and every moment — will we begin the process of letting it go and “dispelling” the myth we currently speak, think, and feel into being through unconscious actions.

By seeing Wetiko, we glimpse ourselves as powerful agents of culture creation. We become that we are capable of producing something so destructive and horrible without even realizing it. This becomes deeply inspiring when we imagine what becomes possible if we harness this creative power to embrace life and instead feed our innate sense of connection, wonder, and awe for all living things.

The human impulse to create dream worlds has been co-opted by the Wetiko mindset for far too long. It is the great threat to Wetiko and therefore must be deadened for it to work its dark magic upon us. Let’s wield this creative energy together and bring light into the dark places!

Onward, fellow humans.

What You Need to Know About the World's Water Wars

via National Geographic

Beijing is sinking.

In some neighborhoods, the ground is giving way at a rate of four inches a year as water in the giant aquifer below it is pumped.

The groundwater has been so depleted that China’s capital city, home to more than 20 million people, could face serious disruptions in its rail system, roadways, and building foundations, an international team of scientists concluded earlier this year. Beijing, despite tapping into the gigantic North China Plain aquifer, is the world’s fifth most water-stressed city and its water problems are likely to get even worse.

Beijing isn’t the only place experiencing subsidence, or sinking, as soil collapses into space created as groundwater is depleted. Parts of Shanghai, Mexico City, and other cities are sinking, too. Sections of California’s Central Valley have dropped by a foot, and in some localized areas, by as much as 28 feet.

Around the world, alarms are being sounded about the depletion of underground water supplies. The United Nations predicts a global shortfall in water by 2030. About 30 percent of the planet’s available freshwater is in the aquifers that underlie every continent.

More than two-thirds of the groundwater consumed around the world irrigates agriculture, while the rest supplies drinking water to cities. These aquifers long have served as a backup to carry regions and countries through droughts and warm winters lacking enough snowmelt to replenish rivers and streams. Now, the world’s largest underground water reserves in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas are under stress. Many of them are being drawn down at unsustainable rates. Nearly two billion people rely on groundwater that is considered under threat.

Richard Damania, a lead economist at the World Bank, predicts that without adequate water supplies, economic growth in the most stressed parts of the world could decline by six percent of GDP. His findings conclude that the most severe impacts of climate change will deplete water supplies.

“If you are in a dry area, you are going to get a lot less rainfall. Run-off is declining,” he says. “People are turning to groundwater in a very, very big way.”

But few things are more difficult to control than groundwater pumping, Damania says. In the United States, farmers are withdrawing water at unsustainable rates from the High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, even though they have been aware of the threat for six decades.

“What you have in developing countries is a large number of small farmers pumping. Given that these guys are earning so little, there is very little you can do to control it,” Damania says. “And you are, literally, in a race to the bottom.”

As regions and nations run short of water, Damania says, economic growth will decline and food prices will spike, raising the risk of violent conflict and waves of large migrations. Unrest in Yemen, which heavily taps into groundwater and which experienced water riots in 2009, is rooted in a water crisis. Experts say water scarcity also helped destabilize Syria and launch its civil war. Jordan, which relies on aquifers as its only source of water, is even more water-stressed now that more than a half-million Syrian refugees arrived.

Jay Famiglietti, lead scientist on a 2015 study using NASA satellites to record changes in the world’s 37 largest aquifers, says that the ones under the greatest threat are in the most heavily populated areas.

"Without sustainable groundwater reserves, global security is at far greater risk,” he says. “As the dry parts are getting drier, we will rely on groundwater even more heavily. The implications are just staggering and really need to be discussed at the international level.”

Below are answers to your key questions.

Where is groundwater the most threatened?

The most over-stressed is the Arabian Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Indus Basin aquifer in northwest India and Pakistan is the second-most threatened, and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa the third.

How did these giant basins become so depleted?

Drought, bad management of pumping, leaky pipes in big-city municipal water systems, aging infrastructure, inadequate technology, population growth, and the demand for more food production all put increasing demand on pumping more groundwater. Flood irrigation, which is inefficient, remains the dominant irrigation method worldwide. In India, the world’s largest consumer of groundwater, the government subsidizes electricity – an incentive to farmers to keep pumping.

How has irrigation changed farming?

Irrigation has enabled water-intensive crops to be grown in dry places, which in turn created local economies that are now difficult to undo. These include sugar cane and rice in India, winter wheat in China, and corn in the southern High Plains of North America. Aquaculture has boomed in the land-locked Ararat Basin, which lies along the border between Armenia and Turkey. Groundwater is cold enough to raise cold-water fish, such as trout and sturgeon. In less than two decades, the aquifer there has been drawn down so severely for fish ponds that municipal water supplies in more than two dozen communities are now threatened.

How much water remains?

More is known about oil reserves than water. Calculating what remains in aquifers is extraordinarily difficult. In 2015, scientists at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada concluded that less than six percent of groundwater above one-and-a-half miles (two kilometers) in the Earth’s landmass is renewable within a human lifetime. But other hydrologists caution that measurements of stores can mislead. More important is how the water is distributed throughout the aquifer. When water levels drop below to 50 feet or less, it is often not economically practical to pump water to the surface, and much of that water is brackish or contains so many minerals that it is unusable.

Is there any good news?

Depleted groundwater is a slow-speed crisis, scientists say, so there's time to develop new technologies and water efficiencies. In Western Australia, desalinated water has been injected to recharge the large aquifer that Perth, Australia's driest city, taps for drinking water. China is working to regulate pumping. In west Texas, the city of Abernathy is drilling into a deeper aquifer that lies beneath the High Plains aquifer and mixing the two to supplement the municipal water supply.

Awakening Non-Symbolic Consciousness with Jeffery Martin

Jeffery Martin, PhD, is a Harvard trained social scientist who researches personal transformation. He specializes in bringing rigorous empirical research and testing to transformational techniques and theories that have previously been supported anecdotally. Jeffery is a leading expert on intentionality and non-symbolic consciousness. He holds graduate degrees in information technology, management, and transformative studies and has co-edited, authored, or co-authored over 20 books and numerous other publications; appeared in a wide variety of electronic media; and lectured widely in both academic and public forums. Jeffery is currently the director of the Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, and the Center for the Study of Intent. Portions of his research on power of thought and non-symbolic consciousness are also available in the popular fiction book, The Fourth Awakening.

Here he describes his research, beginning with neurophysiological measurements of individuals reputed to have attained a measure of spiritual enlightenment. He encountered over 200 related terms such as transcendental consciousness, god consciousness, and unity consciousness. His primary finding concerned changes that took place deep within the brain. Much was also learned by querying participants as to how they achieved their state of well-being. This led to a specific protocol for enabling people to shift into a state of persistent well-being. He concludes by defining, in everyday language, what the experience of non-symbolic consciousness is like.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). His master's degree is in criminology. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

via Wired

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."

His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869. Still in clinical trials, it looked like every pharma executive's dream: a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.

Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck's foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.

Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body's innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.

The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier's agony and prevented the onset of shock.

Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation's leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse's healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective. At the time, the process for vetting drugs was sloppy at best: Pharmaceutical companies would simply dose volunteers with an experimental agent until the side effects swamped the presumed benefits. Beecher proposed that if test subjects could be compared to a group that received a placebo, health officials would finally have an impartial way to determine whether a medicine was actually responsible for making a patient better.

In a 1955 paper titled "The Powerful Placebo," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.

The article caused a sensation. By 1962, reeling from news of birth defects caused by a drug called thalidomide, Congress amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring trials to include enhanced safety testing and placebo control groups. Volunteers would be assigned randomly to receive either medicine or a sugar pill, and neither doctor nor patient would know the difference until the trial was over. Beecher's double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial—or RCT—was enshrined as the gold standard of the emerging pharmaceutical industry. Today, to win FDA approval, a new medication must beat placebo in at least two authenticated trials.

Beecher's prescription helped cure the medical establishment of outright quackery, but it had an insidious side effect. By casting placebo as the villain in RCTs, he ended up stigmatizing one of his most important discoveries. The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively.

In his eagerness to promote his template for clinical trials, Beecher also overreached by seeing the placebo effect at work in curing ailments like the common cold, which wane with no intervention at all. But the triumph of Beecher's gold standard was a generation of safer medications that worked for nearly everyone. Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors.

What Beecher didn't foresee, however, was the explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry. The blockbuster success of mood drugs in the '80s and '90s emboldened Big Pharma to promote remedies for a growing panoply of disorders that are intimately related to higher brain function. By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect.

The tall, rusty-haired son of a country doctor, William Potter, 64, has spent most of his life treating mental illness—first as a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and then as a drug developer. A decade ago, he took a job at Lilly's neuroscience labs. There, working on new antidepressants and antianxiety meds, he became one of the first researchers to glimpse the approaching storm.

To test products internally, pharmaceutical companies routinely run trials in which a long-established medication and an experimental one compete against each other as well as against a placebo. As head of Lilly's early-stage psychiatric drug development in the late '90s, Potter saw that even durable warhorses like Prozac, which had been on the market for years, were being overtaken by dummy pills in more recent tests. The company's next-generation antidepressants were faring badly, too, doing no better than placebo in seven out of 10 trials.

As a psychiatrist, Potter knew that some patients really do seem to get healthier for reasons that have more to do with a doctor's empathy than with the contents of a pill. But it baffled him that drugs he'd been prescribing for years seemed to be struggling to prove their effectiveness. Thinking that something crucial may have been overlooked, Potter tapped an IT geek named David DeBrota to help him comb through the Lilly database of published and unpublished trials—including those that the company had kept secret because of high placebo response. They aggregated the findings from decades of antidepressant trials, looking for patterns and trying to see what was changing over time. What they found challenged some of the industry's basic assumptions about its drug-vetting process.

Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late '90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial.

Mistaken assumption number two was that the standard tests used to gauge volunteers' improvement in trials yielded consistent results. Potter and his colleagues discovered that ratings by trial observers varied significantly from one testing site to another. It was like finding out that the judges in a tight race each had a different idea about the placement of the finish line.

Potter and DeBrota's data-mining also revealed that even superbly managed trials were subject to runaway placebo effects. But exactly why any of this was happening remained elusive. "We were able to identify many of the core issues in play," Potter says. "But there was no clear answer to the problem." Convinced that what Lilly was facing was too complex for any one pharmaceutical house to unravel on its own, he came up with a plan to break down the firewalls between researchers across the industry, enabling them to share data in "pre-competitive space."

After prodding by Potter and others, the NIH focused on the issue in 2000, hosting a three-day conference in Washington. For the first time in medical history, more than 500 drug developers, doctors, academics, and trial designers put their heads together to examine the role of the placebo effect in clinical trials and healing in general.

Potter's ambitious plan for a collaborative approach to the problem eventually ran into its own futility boundary: No one would pay for it. And drug companies don't share data, they hoard it. But the NIH conference launched a new wave of placebo research in academic labs in the US and Italy that would make significant progress toward solving the mystery of what was happening in clinical trials.

Visitors to Fabrizio Benedetti's clinic at the University of Turin are asked never to say the P-word around the med students who sign up for his experiments. For all the volunteers know, the trim, soft-spoken neuroscientist is hard at work concocting analgesic skin creams and methods for enhancing athletic performance.

One recent afternoon in his lab, a young soccer player grimaced with exertion while doing leg curls on a weight machine. Benedetti and his colleagues were exploring the potential of using Pavlovian conditioning to give athletes a competitive edge undetectable by anti-doping authorities. A player would receive doses of a performance-enhancing drug for weeks and then a jolt of placebo just before competition.

Benedetti, 53, first became interested in placebos in the mid-'90s, while researching pain. He was surprised that some of the test subjects in his placebo groups seemed to suffer less than those on active drugs. But scientific interest in this phenomenon, and the money to research it, were hard to come by. "The placebo effect was considered little more than a nuisance," he recalls. "Drug companies, physicians, and clinicians were not interested in understanding its mechanisms. They were concerned only with figuring out whether their drugs worked better."

Part of the problem was that response to placebo was considered a psychological trait related to neurosis and gullibility rather than a physiological phenomenon that could be scrutinized in the lab and manipulated for therapeutic benefit. But then Benedetti came across a study, done years earlier, that suggested the placebo effect had a neurological foundation. US scientists had found that a drug called naloxone blocks the pain-relieving power of placebo treatments. The brain produces its own analgesic compounds called opioids, released under conditions of stress, and naloxone blocks the action of these natural painkillers and their synthetic analogs. The study gave Benedetti the lead he needed to pursue his own research while running small clinical trials for drug companies.

Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.

In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer's patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients' prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer's patients don't get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

Benedetti often uses the phrase "placebo response" instead of placebo effect. By definition, inert pills have no effect, but under the right conditions they can act as a catalyst for what he calls the body's "endogenous health care system." Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won't stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo's evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.

Further research by Benedetti and others showed that the promise of treatment activates areas of the brain involved in weighing the significance of events and the seriousness of threats. "If a fire alarm goes off and you see smoke, you know something bad is going to happen and you get ready to escape," explains Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. "Expectations about pain and pain relief work in a similar way. Placebo treatments tap into this system and orchestrate the responses in your brain and body accordingly."

In other words, one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind's ability to predict the future. We are constantly parsing the reactions of those around us—such as the tone a doctor uses to deliver a diagnosis—to generate more-accurate estimations of our fate. One of the most powerful placebogenic triggers is watching someone else experience the benefits of an alleged drug. Researchers call these social aspects of medicine the therapeutic ritual.

In a study last year, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever strategy for testing his volunteers' response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual. The study focused on irritable bowel syndrome, a painful disorder that costs more than $40 billion a year worldwide to treat. First the volunteers were placed randomly in one of three groups. One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the same sham treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined the causes of IBS, and displayed optimism about their condition.
Rx for Success

What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, or the tremors of Parkinson's disease? The brain's own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phony medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor's bedside manner, but according to research, the color of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine meds—or help convince a patient that a placebo is a potent remedy.—Steve Silberman

Yellow pills make the most effective antidepressants, like little doses of pharmaceutical sunshine.

Red pills can give you a more stimulating kick. Wake up, Neo.

The color green reduces anxiety, adding more chill to the pill.

White tablets— particularly those labeled "antacid"—are superior for soothing ulcers, even when they contain nothing but lactose.

More is better, scientists say. Placebos taken four times a day deliver greater relief than those taken twice daily.

Branding matters. Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than "generic" placebos.

Clever names can add a placebo boost to the physiological punch in real drugs. Viagra implies both vitality and an unstoppable Niagara of sexy.

Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.

Studies like this open the door to hybrid treatment strategies that exploit the placebo effect to make real drugs safer and more effective. Cancer patients undergoing rounds of chemotherapy often suffer from debilitating nocebo effects—such as anticipatory nausea—conditioned by their past experiences with the drugs. A team of German researchers has shown that these associations can be unlearned through the administration of placebo, making chemo easier to bear.

Meanwhile, the classic use of placebos in medicine—to boost the confidence of anxious patients—has been employed tacitly for ages. Nearly half of the doctors polled in a 2007 survey in Chicago admitted to prescribing medications they knew were ineffective for a patient's condition—or prescribing effective drugs in doses too low to produce actual benefit—in order to provoke a placebo response.

The main objections to more widespread placebo use in clinical practice are ethical, but the solutions to these conundrums can be surprisingly simple. Investigators told volunteers in one placebo study that the pills they were taking were "known to significantly reduce pain in some patients." The researchers weren't lying.

These new findings tell us that the body's response to certain types of medication is in constant flux, affected by expectations of treatment, conditioning, beliefs, and social cues.

For instance, the geographic variations in trial outcome that Potter uncovered begin to make sense in light of discoveries that the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill's shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team—Forza Azzurri!

But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products.

Potential trial volunteers in the US have been deluged with ads for prescription medications since 1997, when the FDA amended its policy on direct-to-consumer advertising. The secret of running an effective campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi's Jim Joseph told a trade journal last year, is associating a particular brand-name medication with other aspects of life that promote peace of mind: "Is it time with your children? Is it a good book curled up on the couch? Is it your favorite television show? Is it a little purple pill that helps you get rid of acid reflux?" By evoking such uplifting associations, researchers say, the ads set up the kind of expectations that induce a formidable placebo response.

The success of those ads in selling blockbuster drugs like antidepressants and statins also pushed trials offshore as therapeutic virgins—potential volunteers who were not already medicated with one or another drug—became harder to find. The contractors that manage trials for Big Pharma have moved aggressively into Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. In these places, however, cultural dynamics can boost the placebo response in other ways. Doctors in these countries are paid to fill up trial rosters quickly, which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of illness that yield more readily to placebo treatment. Furthermore, a patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."

Big Pharma faces additional problems in beating placebo when it comes to psychiatric drugs. One is to accurately define the nature of mental illness. The litmus test of drug efficacy in antidepressant trials is a questionnaire called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. The HAM-D was created nearly 50 years ago based on a study of major depressive disorder in patients confined to asylums. Few trial volunteers now suffer from that level of illness. In fact, many experts are starting to wonder if what drug companies now call depression is even the same disease that the HAM-D was designed to diagnose.

Existing tests also may not be appropriate for diagnosing disorders like social anxiety and premenstrual dysphoria—the very types of chronic, fuzzily defined conditions that the drug industry started targeting in the '90s, when the placebo problem began escalating. The neurological foundation of these illnesses is still being debated, making it even harder for drug companies to come up with effective treatments.

What all of these disorders have in common, however, is that they engage the higher cortical centers that generate beliefs and expectations, interpret social cues, and anticipate rewards. So do chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, Parkinson's, and many other ailments that respond robustly to placebo treatment. To avoid investing in failure, researchers say, pharmaceutical companies will need to adopt new ways of vetting drugs that route around the brain's own centralized network for healing.

Ten years and billions of R&D dollars after William Potter first sounded the alarm about the placebo effect, his message has finally gotten through. In the spring, Potter, who is now a VP at Merck, helped rev up a massive data-gathering effort called the Placebo Response Drug Trials Survey.

Under the auspices of the FNIH1, Potter and his colleagues are acquiring decades of trial data—including blood and DNA samples—to determine which variables are responsible for the apparent rise in the placebo effect. Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and other major firms are funding the study, and the process of scrubbing volunteers' names and other personal information from the database is about to begin.

In typically secretive industry fashion, the existence of the project itself is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers2 are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.

For Potter, who used to ride along with his father on house calls in Indiana, the significance of the survey goes beyond Big Pharma's finally admitting it has a placebo problem. It also marks the twilight of an era when the drug industry was confident that its products were strong enough to cure illness by themselves.

"Before I routinely prescribed antidepressants, I would do more psychotherapy for mildly depressed patients," says the veteran of hundreds of drug trials. "Today we would say I was trying to engage components of the placebo response—and those patients got better. To really do the best for your patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response."

The pharma crisis has also finally brought together the two parallel streams of placebo research—academic and industrial. Pfizer has asked Fabrizio Benedetti to help the company figure out why two of its pain drugs keep failing. Ted Kaptchuk is developing ways to distinguish drug response more clearly from placebo response for another pharma house that he declines to name. Both are exploring innovative trial models that treat the placebo effect as more than just statistical noise competing with the active drug.

Benedetti has helped design a protocol for minimizing volunteers' expectations that he calls "open/hidden." In standard trials, the act of taking a pill or receiving an injection activates the placebo response. In open/hidden trials, drugs and placebos are given to some test subjects in the usual way and to others at random intervals through an IV line controlled by a concealed computer. Drugs that work only when the patient knows they're being administered are placebos themselves.

Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.

The Neuroscience of Suffering – And Its End

via Psychology Tomorrow

It was 1972, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old materials science PhD student at Penn State University, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! – continuously, oppressively – a stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, whatever. While most human beings would consider this par for the course, par for the human condition (cogito ergo sum), Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a process guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be tweaked to work more efficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going over and over the same anxieties and cravings and storylines. “Most of these thoughts had no purpose,” he said. “They were not going to cure cancer.”

It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one of those little life coincidences that some people like to call “synchronicities,” Weber picked up a slim volume of poetry on his way out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the University admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book. He read:

    “All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.”

This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of Zazen – written in the 18th century by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew nothing of Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber, “the entire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I dropped into this magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts whatsoever.”

Weber had had what in Zen is called a “kensho” – an awakening, a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon described in different ways by countless texts and countless teachers in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many such experiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as insistent and clamorous as ever. But now Weber knew another way was possible. He was determined.

For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD, married and raised two kids and made his way through a string of industry jobs – eventually culminating in a senior management position running the R&D operations of big manufacturing business – he got spiritual. He read lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered complicated yoga postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as “self-enquiry” – a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind. To make time for all this, Weber would get up at 4am and put in two hours of spiritual practice before work.

Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber kept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something happened. He got into a yoga pose – a pose he had done thousands of times before – and when he moved out of it his thoughts stopped. Permanently.

    “That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back.”

Now of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would seem to contradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom tells us that talk is the verbal expression of thinking; separating the two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports. And at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. What he cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was supposed to run four research labs and manage a thousand employees and a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How was that going to work?

“There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he admits may say more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go into a meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d just sit there and wait to see what came up. And what came up when I opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter and more elegant than any I could have developed on my own.”

Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts had disappeared; rather a particular kind of self-referential thinking had cut out, what he calls “the blah blah network.” Scientists now refer to this as the “default mode network” (DMN), that is, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the distracted daydreamer. This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged in a specific task.

    “What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, “is I can still reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing emotionally-charged self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”

But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the “me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it all mental and emotional suffering. He has a theory about this: “If you look at the self-referential narrative it’s all ‘I, me, mine.’ When that cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s very quiet and peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than they are, and no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’” Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with research showing that more DMN activation correlates with more unhappiness – ‘A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.

Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional life:

    “I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel the energy come up, but it doesn’t go anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway. The anger dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the typical neural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire leading up to them, and, once the response passes, you don’t make up a story about what happened that you repeat again and again in your head. Those storylines are gone.”

Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar transformations – the neuroscientist James Austin, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, to name two examples – Weber got interested in what was going on his brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at Yale University named Judson Brewer who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation. He found, as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when meditating. But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the opposite pattern: Weber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind of deliberate effort – actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a kind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few times previously, and other researchers had until then only reported anecdotally.

And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion between Weber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a state of “no-thought” where the mind is permanently stilled of any kind of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue. Creative thoughts, planning thoughts – these are fine, and are, according to Weber, in fact served by completely different parts of the brain. The real suffering happens in the endless and exhausting internal monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of thoughts should be the explicit goal of practice, something he says other contemplative traditions also emphasize.

By contrast, further study has suggested to Brewer that the thoughts themselves – even a certain amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the problem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and get “caught up” in these thoughts. Some of his subjects attained dramatic reductions in DMN activity while still thinking in a self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations. One subject described watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have long argued, you don’t need to eliminate the self-thinking process, you just need to change your relationship to it.

Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity in the DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being discussed at all marks an important advance in the scientific study of meditation in particular and spiritual practice in general. The Mind and Life conferences, the big NIH grants, the explosion of studies on mindfulness – all have generated enormous insights. They’ve demonstrated how positive emotions can be trained, and reactivity softened, and concentration increased, and attentional clarity boosted. Many researchers have shown unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by meditation and by mindfulness in life. But they have not yet shown why this is so.

Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting go that parallels the experiential one? Brewer: “Even in novices we saw a relative deactivation across the brain – like the brain was saying, Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff, I don’t have to do all this high energy maintenance of myself. One interpretation of that – and there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to do. It’s a very efficient machine; we just have to stop getting in the way.”

This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what Brewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help teachers and practitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer, addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with. As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [here and here] that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t notice otherwise,” he says.

Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more efficient.”

Like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with a psychotherapeutic twist, Weber has it down to a terse progression: “I had suffering, it came from my attachments. My attachments cause me to slip over into the narrator. If I stop that, I lose my suffering. We have the tools to do this. They require no scriptural texts or philosophy. All it takes is persistence and curiosity. The old ego-motivated human existence, our 75,000 year-old operating system with its need to gratify our desires and exploit the environment and have six of this and ten of that – that can all fall away. It’s time for an upgrade.”

Man Missing Most Of His Brain Challenges Everything We Thought We Knew About Consciousness

via IFLScience

Back in 2007, scientists reported that a French man in his mid-40s had walked into a clinic complaining of a pain in his leg. As a child, he’d had this same problem as a result of the ventricles in his brain filling with cerebrospinal fluid, so the doctors decided to scan his brain to see if this was again causing his limb-related lamentations. To their astonishment, they found that his ventricles had become so swollen with fluid that they’d replaced virtually his entire brain, leaving just a thin cortical layer of neurons.

Yet miraculously, the man was not only fully conscious, but lived a rich and unhindered life, working as a civil servant and living with his wife and two kids, blissfully unaware of the gaping hole in his brain. His ability to function without so many of the key brain regions previously considered vital for consciousness raises some major questions about existing theories regarding how the brain works and the mechanisms underlying our awareness.

For example, neuroscientists have often asserted that a brain region called the thalamus, which relays sensory signals to the cerebral cortex, is indispensable for consciousness. This is because research has indicated that damage to the thalamus often causes people to fall into a coma, while one team of scientists were even able to manually “switch off” an epileptic patient’s consciousness by electrically stimulating this brain region.

Similarly, researchers have shown that it is possible to cause people to lose consciousness by using electrodes to manipulate the activity of a brain region called the claustrum, which receives input from a wide variety of brain areas and communicates extensively with the thalamus.

Leo Decaprio and the nature of reality: Crash Course Philosophy

Today Hank gains insight from that most philosophical of figures...Leonardo DiCaprio. In this episode, we’re talking about the process of philosophical discovery and questioning the relationship between appearance and reality by taking a look at Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave. All with a little help from our good pal Leo.

Alan Watts - How to melt anxiety

A short and concise statement of what's at the root of anxiety.

Philip K. Dick's Spiritual Epiphany

by Kyle Arnold

In February of 1974, Philip K. Dick’s life changed. While he was recovering from dental surgery, he claims, he had a spiritual epiphany. It started with a delivery from the local pharmacy. Three days after Dick’s surgery, an order of medications arrived in the hands of a stunning delivery woman. She wore a gold fish pendant that she said was a symbol of early Christianity. After taking the package, Dick saw a mysterious flash of pink light and collapsed onto his bed. A mystical contemplative, Dick supposed the pink light was a spiritual force activated by the fish pendant. As he lay in bed, visions of abstract paintings appeared, followed by philosophical ideas and engineering blueprints.

Over the next few months, the visions continued to develop. Dick saw streams of “shiny fire” moving through his environment and entering his body. He caught glimpses of a strange, humanoid being that appeared to blend in with his surroundings. He named it Zebra, and decided it was a benign deity that could “enter anything, animate or inanimate” and “take volitional control of causal processes- mimesis, mimicry, camouflage.” He saw a portal of pink light open, and out of it stepped a team of tiny three-eyed extraterrestrials who warned there was a cosmic conspiracy behind the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. The aliens said the ancient Roman Empire, stealthily hidden over the centuries but still active, was responsible. Rome “had come forward, by insidious and sly degrees, under new names, hidden by the flak talk and phony obscurations, at last into our world again.” Nixon was a modern Caesar. Frightening scenes of ancient Rome showed up, superimposed over Dick’s suburban California neighborhood. Dick felt guided by helpful spirits, especially one known as “Thomas,” who he believed to be an ancient Christian revolutionary.

Eventually, the visions disappeared. But Dick’s fascination with what he called his “divine madness” remained. He was so obsessed that, over the next eight years of his life (Dick died in 1982), he produced an 8,000 page interpretation of the visions he titled his Exegesis. The bulk of it remains unpublished. Each page of the Exegesis proposes fresh ideas about the meaning of Dick’s divine madness. He suggests it may have been the work of KGB telepaths, an extraterrestrial satellite, a first century Christian named Thomas with whom he was in telepathic communication, a version of himself from an alternate dimension, or the spirit of his deceased twin sister contacting him from the spirit world. Another hypothesis Dick considered was that it was all a product of mental illness. While Dick was paranoid—likely because he used amphetamines to enhance his productivity—he knew his divine madness had a lot in common with mystical experiences that were considered bona fide, especially those of of the early Christian mystics known as Gnostics.

After 1974, most of Dick’s writing centered on these matters. While spirituality shows up in his earlier works, after 1974 his focus on it is laser-like. Dick’s 1978 novel VALIS combines science fiction with an autobiographical account of his divine madness. So does Radio Free Albemuth, an early draft of VALIS later reworked into a separate novel and published posthumously. The Divine Invasion, also written in the 1970s, is based on the notion of a God who, like Zebra, redeems the world by entering and mimicking it. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, published posthumously, explores related aspects of Dick’s spiritual views in narrative form. Every novel Dick wrote after his visions was either about them or related themes.

It’s hard to say whether the impact of Dick’s divine madness on his writing career was beneficial or stultifying. In some respects it was limiting, insofar as he lost interest in writing about much else. On the other hand, VALIS is one of his best books. Furthermore, eight thousand pages of Exegesis in eight years is an impressive amount of work, despite the fact that it consists mostly of esoteric philosophical contemplation not intended for public consumption.

One change in Dick’s writing is that his post-1974 pieces are arguably more optimistic. Prior to Dick’s religious experience, his tales usually ended on a paranoid or ambiguous note—often punctuated by what I’ve called equivocal rescue. In some stories, Dick’s protagonist is saved by a deity or other powerful figure, only to discover it was an illusion. In others, an apparent rescue turns out to be a cruel trap. The world is not only cruel and untrustworthy, these stories seem to say, but also may be essentially meaningless. After 1974, Dick’s stories suggest the possibility of finding meaning. Dick wrote that one aspect of his divine madness was “paranoia turned inside out.” Where he had formerly perceived malign conspiracies, Dick now often saw divine conspiracies. As the end of his life approached, Philip K. Dick increasingly considered that the universe might be on our side.

Philip K. Dick's Divine, Amphetamine-Fueled Madness

via Alternet

The following is an excerpt from the new book The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick by Kyle Arnold (Oxford University Press, 2016):

Just after Christmas in 1981, a scruffy science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick was excited to receive an invitation to visit the studio of the film Blade Runner, which was to be released a few months later. Blade Runner was the first of many major motion pictures based on Dick stories, and the only one filmed during his lifetime. While Dick was an industrious author and had pub­lished thirty-three novels, he was a poor man most of his life, and never had mingled with Hollywood glamour before. He’d been asked to visit the film set earlier, but it was far away and Dick, who had a history of near-fatal car accidents he attributed to his own wish to die, had largely given up on driving. An actor friend, Mary Wilson, told him to insist that the studio send a limo to fetch him, and they did so. Dick asked Wilson to accompany him, as he believed she was conversant enough with the film industry to help the anxious author navigate its unfamiliar rituals and person­ages. Dick was particularly nervous about meeting the director, Ridley Scott, whom he had scathingly criticized as unoriginal in a review of Scott’s previous film, Alien. A mystical contemplative, Dick balked when he heard from Scott that Blade Runnerwould omit the spiritual themes so central to his writing. But despite all this, the two got along unexpectedly well, and photos of the meet­ing show them goofing off with big smiles. When Scott took Dick into a screening room and showed him the first twenty minutes of the uncompleted dystopian sci-fi film, Dick was spellbound. When the lights went on, he exclaimed that watching the footage was like having a mirror held up to his mind.

What neither Scott nor most audiences of Blade Runner knew was that Dick’s mind really was every bit as far out as what was on the screen, if not more so. Dick had grappled with madness, and self-depreciatingly referred to himself as a “flipped-out freak.” When he saw the Blade Runner footage – which included a scene of a murderous android undergoing a psychological evaluation– he might have been reminded of the time he called the police during a bout of paranoid terror and warned them he was a machine who should be locked up. Dick not only wrote stories about androids, but sometimes was afraid he literally was one. There are many other instances of Dick’s life imitating sci-fi, the most notorious of which was his declaration that in early 1974 he was zapped by a bright pink light that uploaded mystical information into his brain. He believed the source of the light was a benevolent entity he nicknamed “Zebra.” Zebra, so called because it camouflaged itself by assuming the form of everyday objects, revealed Dick’s world was not what it seemed. According to Zebra, time had been frozen in the year 50 a.d. by the machinations of the Roman Empire. The rest of history was an illusion. His mind awakened by the pink light of Zebra, Dick witnessed scenes from ancient Rome superimposed over his neighborhood. He heard a voice in his head uttering cryptic messages and felt guided by an other­worldly entity. He saw streams of red and gold energy reshaping his environment. Many of his visions were chilling, but they were also exhilarating. The stories Dick spent his life conjuring were now real. His identity was transformed. In Dick’s mind, he was no longer just a sci-fi genre writer, but a mystical seer and prophet. Because Dick’s visions of 1974 were most powerful in February and March of that year, he referred to them, collectively, as 2-3-74.They have perplexed Dick fans and scholars ever since.

After 1974, the visions faded, and Dick tried to come to grips with his experience. Although wildly imaginative, Dick was also a chronic doubter. Skeptical of the revelations he received, he considered what he called the “minimum hypothesis”: that it was all nothing but delusion. Dick struggled for years with the ques­tion of his own sanity. To be sure, he had a point: 2-3-74 included striking paranoid features. As I hope to show, however, it is best to classify 2-3-74 not as a delusional episode but as a complex psycho-spiritual emergency, an intense psychological breakthrough resem­bling mental breakdown. The term emergency, here, signifies both a crisis and an emergence of a more profound level of wholeness. If handled well, these powerful events can contribute to personal growth. If miscarried, they can be traumatizing. Dick was not able to resolve his psychospiritual crisis. After Zebra left him, he lapsed into despair and made a brutal suicide attempt. But the experience was so engrossing that Dick was unable to let it go. He couldn’t stop writing about 2-3-74, producing a total of four novels about it: VALIS, The Divine Invasion, Radio Free Albemuth, and the uncompleted Transmigration of Timothy Archer. He also churned out, over the span of eight years, an eight-thousand-page piece of philosophical-religious exposition he called his Exegesis.

Of the numerous interpretations of 2-3-74 that Dick gener­ated during his frenzied exegetical activity, most are dazzling but many spurious. The Exegesis is a remarkable achievement of the imagination. Its pages are crammed with intricate philosophical reasoning, Gnostic mysticism, Jungian psychology, and occultism, all intertwined with autobiography. Each section of the Exegesis offers new theories, new explanations of 2-3-74. Dick proposes that the intelligence behind the pink light may have been God, the KGB, a satellite, aliens, a first-century Christian named Thomas with whom he was in telepathic communication, the CIA, a version of himself from a different dimension, or possibly his deceased twin sister contacting him from the spirit world. Each new theory of 2-3-74 telescopes out into further possible theories, ad infinitum. Dick never settled.

One of the theories Dick entertained about 2-3-74 was that his visions might be symptoms of paranoid schizo­phrenia. Indeed, Dick’s imagination often drifted in a paranoid direction. He asked neighbors to conceal his identity, complain­ing that the FBI, CIA, or KGB was after him. In 1971 he was admitted to Marin State Psychiatric Hospital for claiming he was being pursued by government agents. Close examination of the context of Dick’s paranoid episodes, however, reveals they are most parsimoniously explained as byproducts of his voracious consumption of speed. Dick began taking prescription amphet­amines for asthma as a child and later ingested massive doses to fuel the frenetic pace of his writing. Because of its impact on the dopamine system of the brain, amphetamine abuse often causes paranoia. Previous commentators have conjectured that Dick’s paranoia was the result of drug use, but many have focused on the wrong drug: LSD. Although Dick took LSD occasionally, there is no evidence that he was a heavy user. Rather, it was his excessive use of amphetamines that most likely led to paranoia.

During the zenith of Dick’s amphetamine-fueled paranoia in 1971, his house was mysteriously burglarized. He came home one evening to find his windows smashed, his reinforced file cabinet broken open, and pieces of asbestos littering the floor. The burglary, made legendary by a famous Rolling Stone article, was a baffling event that sparked Dick’s passion for creative theorizing. Dick’s imagina­tion ran wild. Were the burglars CIA operatives, Black Panthers, or political thugs? To date, the burglary remains a mystery. It turns out there is only one plausible explanation for what happened: Dick did it himself.

There were traumatic events later in Dick’s life, including separations from his parents that left him with a lifelong terror of abandonment. Like many traumatized people, he was largely unable to establish secure attachments to others. Dick had stormy relationships that drove him to the brink of suicide. Yet, his history of trauma also con­tributed to his development as a spiritual contemplative. It is not unusual for traumatic experiences to awaken spiritual insights. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, cracks are how the light gets in.

The Man Who Balances Rocks

from Huffington Post

Always balance, never symmetry.

That's one way artist John Felicè Ceprano describes his most famous works.

Every spring, John heads out to Remic Rapids in the Ottawa River and balances rocks. When I say "in," I mean "in," as you can see by the pictures.

Every winter, nature dismantles them. And so he starts afresh in the spring. His fans wait in eager anticipation, as the first rocks show up early in the spring.

The 69-year old has been doing this since 1986, when he first discovered the soothing sounds of Remic Rapids along the shore of the Ottawa River, secluded by bushes. The ambient meditative sound and peaceful environment brought him back. The spring runoff receded, exposing a flat and solid limestone riverbed, a perfect platform to create his now-famous sculptures.

When I spoke with John on Father's Day, he told me that he has a natural inclination to seek balance, as he had learned to do through Tai Chi. So, to complement the sound of water and to create a more direct link between himself and nature, he began to first look, then touch, then feel the balance of rocks he found in the vicinity.

In 1989, a Canada Council grant supported the project, as locals began paying attention. Since 2000, the National Capital Commission has sponsored the project, an internationally recognized mark on the Canadian landscape.

Today, the bushes are gone, so that people can appreciate his work. without playing hide-and-seek.

Just a few minute west of downtown Ottawa, this is the coolest tourist attraction that isn't in the brochures. As a result, it's mostly Ottawa residents who appreciate the sculptures. But if you plan to visit Ottawa, take a half hour to come down to Remic Rapids and bathe yourself in both the calming sound of the water and the inspiring site of the balanced rocks.

You'll be greeted at the entrance to the parking area by the rock family. It makes its appearance before the spring run-off reveals the limestone tables by the shore. This is the perfect spot for a picnic, which is why my daughters and I were there on Father's Day in the first place.

Probably the most frequent comment I hear about the rocks goes something like this:
"Wow. How does he get them to balance?"

People are asking the wrong question.

The bigger question is how does he lift those huge rocks, which four of me together would have a hard time lifting, then place them in a gingerly precarious balance? I was explaining to my girls that he must have some kind of hoist to lift the bigger rocks, then lower them into place. Still held up by the hoist, he would be able to put the smaller rocks in place to keep the large rocks in balance, before releasing the rock from its sling.

"No, I lift them myself," he calmly told us not 15 minutes later.

John is a small man, full of muscles. He put me doubly to shame with that correction.

If I was to describe this artist in one word, after speaking with him for at least half an hour, the word would be "philosopher". He reflects on nature, on the growth of the city, on where humanity is headed, on the good in the world and the bad in the world, on the difference between balance and symmetry and on the various perspectives we can take to view everything around us.

If you take a half hour to appreciate the art and the nature of the place, be prepared to take another half hour to chat with the artist if you happen to be so lucky as to meet him.

The Taoist Way - Alan Watts

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao Tzu

F. David Peat: Synchronicity, a bridge between mind and matter

Synchronicities are those mysterious and inexplicable coincidences that occasionally erupt into a life. At times we may feel that those around us are confined to a narrow world of logic and physical law, a world that admits no hint of mystery. This can give rise to a feeling of isolation within an indifferent universe and in an increasing complex society whose members are reduced to ciphers. Synchronicities, by contrast, open a doorway into a very different world: a world that also has resonances with the deep insights that have been revealed by the new sciences.

True synchronicities are more than mere chance occurrences. They are characterized by a sense of meaning and numinousness. They provide a bridge between inner and outer worlds, between our private thoughts and external, objective realities. Within a synchronicity, patterns of external events mirror an inner experience; likewise dreams and fantasies may seem to flood over into the external world. To distinguish synchronicities from mere chance occurrences Carl Jung stressed that they must always involve "meaningful coincidence" that lie beyond any explanation involving causal links and connections. They reveal to us an underlying world of patterns, forms and connections that transcend any division between the mental and the material.

The week in Pari will explore a number of connections between our subjective, internal world and the objective, external. One route will be to reflect on the metaphor of alchemy as a pathway to inner transformation. This will include an exploration of the deep links between art and alchemy. In the field of literature we will meet James Joyce's notion of an epiphany -- that moment when meaning coalesces into the world -- and the poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins also wrote of inscape, the authentic and individual voice within the natural world that speaks to us directly.

An introduction to some key ideas from depth psychology will be given. Archetypes as the structuring principles of the psyche will be compared to notions of an underlying implicate order to reality as discussed by the physicist David Bohm. The therapeutic encounter will be viewed as an alchemical vessel in which "frozen accidents" to the psyche can be melted and transformed by generating psychic heat.

The spiritual dimensions of transformation and transcendence will be discussed with examples from a number of mystics including the Sufi, Ibn bin'Arabi. From the New Sciences we shall explore new notions of chance, connectedness, order out of chaos, the changing nature of matter and the notion that proto-mind may have existed from the beginning of the universe.

The course will also feature a day with Dr. Shantena Sabbadini, author and translator of the new Eranos I Ching. Sabbadini will explore the ancient Chinese notion of the significance of patterns of meaningful chance. He will explain how participants can frame a question to the Book of Changes and "read" the answer given by the I Ching.
See Synchronicity: The Speculum of Inscape and Landscape , Cosmos and Inscape , Divine Contenders: Wolfgang Pauli and the Symmetry of the World
and Wolfgang Pauli: Resurrection of spirit in the world

The course will explore:
Synchronicities, illuminations, epiphanies and the sense of connectedness as events that sum up a life or anticipate the future
The nature of consciousness and its connection to the body
Theories of Mind and Matter
The nature of the Archetypes and other structuring principles of the psyche
Laws of matter and mind. Are they a priori or do they evolve?
The role of the New Physics (chaos theory and quantum theory) and its connection to consciousness
Connections between minds, and between mind and matter
Metaphors of alchemy and the process of individuation
Wolfgang Pauli, his dreams and relationship with Carl Jung. Pauli's vision of the resurrection of spirit within the world of matter
The current state of our world and the need for values and ethics

Shantena Sabbadini, who has recently published a new translation and concordance of the I Ching will also give a workshop on Ancient Chinese views of synchronistic connections and on how to consult and interpret the I Ching.
Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind will proceed via lectures and group discussions. Participants will be encouraged to keep a journal. Participants are also encouraged to take advantage of the thermal hot springs below the village.

More info. at http://www.paricenter.com/programs/co...

Grant Morrison: Aliens, Magic, and the Mystery of Reality

"All the comics are sigils. 'Sigil' as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all." - Grant Morrison

Philip K Dick reflects on his life, literature, and ideas

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Phillip K. Dick

As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.

In the late 1980s, I was introduced to a self-styled Satanic high priestess. She called herself a witch and dressed the part, with flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow around to her temples. In our many discussions, she acknowledged worshipping Satan as his “queen.”

I’m a man of science and a lover of history; after studying the classics at Princeton, I trained in psychiatry at Yale and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. That background is why a Catholic priest had asked my professional opinion, which I offered pro bono, about whether this woman was suffering from a mental disorder. This was at the height of the national panic about Satanism. (In a case that helped induce the hysteria, Virginia McMartin and others had recently been charged with alleged Satanic ritual abuse at a Los Angeles preschool; the charges were later dropped.) So I was inclined to skepticism. But my subject’s behavior exceeded what I could explain with my training. She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside of her trances. This was not psychosis; it was what I can only describe as paranormal ability. I concluded that she was possessed. Much later, she permitted me to tell her story.



The priest who had asked for my opinion of this bizarre case was the most experienced exorcist in the country at the time, an erudite and sensible man. I had told him that, even as a practicing Catholic, I wasn’t likely to go in for a lot of hocus-pocus. “Well,” he replied, “unless we thought you were not easily fooled, we would hardly have wanted you to assist us.”

So began an unlikely partnership. For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician, but I don’t see these two aspects of my career in conflict. The same habits that shape what I do as a professor and psychiatrist — open-mindedness, respect for evidence and compassion for suffering people — led me to aid in the work of discerning attacks by what I believe are evil spirits and, just as critically, differentiating these extremely rare events from medical conditions.

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

The Vatican does not track global or countrywide exorcism, but in my experience and according to the priests I meet, demand is rising. The United States is home to about 50 “stable” exorcists — those who have been designated by bishops to combat demonic activity on a semi-regular basis — up from just 12 a decade ago, according to the Rev. Vincent Lampert, an Indianapolis-based priest-exorcist who is active in the International Association of Exorcists. (He receives about 20 inquiries per week, double the number from when his bishop appointed him in 2005.) The Catholic Church has responded by offering greater resources for clergy members who wish to address the problem. In 2010, for instance, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops organized a meeting in Baltimore for interested clergy. In 2014, Pope Francis formally recognized the IAE, 400 members of which are to convene in Rome this October. Members believe in such strange cases because they are constantly called upon to help. (I served for a time as a scientific adviser on the group’s governing board.)



Unfortunately, not all clergy involved in this complex field are as cautious as the priest who first approached me. In some circles, there is a tendency to become overly preoccupied with putative demonic explanations and to see the devil everywhere. Fundamentalist misdiagnoses and absurd or even dangerous “treatments,” such as beating victims, have sometimes occurred, especially in developing countries. This is perhaps why exorcism has a negative connotation in some quarters. People with psychological problems should receive psychological treatment.

But I believe I’ve seen the real thing. Assaults upon individuals are classified either as “demonic possessions” or as the slightly more common but less intense attacks usually called “oppressions.” A possessed individual may suddenly, in a type of trance, voice statements of astonishing venom and contempt for religion, while understanding and speaking various foreign languages previously unknown to them. The subject might also exhibit enormous strength or even the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of levitation. (I have not witnessed a levitation myself, but half a dozen people I work with vow that they’ve seen it in the course of their exorcisms.) He or she might demonstrate “hidden knowledge” of all sorts of things — like how a stranger’s loved ones died, what secret sins she has committed, even where people are at a given moment. These are skills that cannot be explained except by special psychic or preternatural ability.

I have personally encountered these rationally inexplicable features, along with other paranormal phenomena. My vantage is unusual: As a consulting doctor, I think I have seen more cases of possession than any other physician in the world.

[I’m a transgender Republican. My party has betrayed me.]

Most of the people I evaluate in this role suffer from the more prosaic problems of a medical disorder. Anyone even faintly familiar with mental illnesses knows that individuals who think they are being attacked by malign spirits are generally experiencing nothing of the sort. Practitioners see psychotic patients all the time who claim to see or hear demons; histrionic or highly suggestible individuals, such as those suffering from dissociative identity syndromes; and patients with personality disorders who are prone to misinterpret destructive feelings, in what exorcists sometimes call a “pseudo-possession,” via the defense mechanism of an externalizing projection. But what am I supposed to make of patients who unexpectedly start speaking perfect Latin?

I approach each situation with an initial skepticism. I technically do not make my own “diagnosis” of possession but inform the clergy that the symptoms in question have no conceivable medical cause.

I am aware of the way many psychiatrists view this sort of work. While the American Psychiatric Association has no official opinion on these affairs, the field (like society at large) is full of unpersuadable skeptics and occasionally doctrinaire materialists who are often oddly vitriolic in their opposition to all things spiritual. My job is to assist people seeking help, not to convince doctors who are not subject to suasion. Yet I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners nowadays who are open to entertaining such hypotheses. Many believe exactly what I do, though they may be reluctant to speak out.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

As a man of reason, I’ve had to rationalize the seemingly irrational. Questions about how a scientifically trained physician can believe “such outdated and unscientific nonsense,” as I’ve been asked, have a simple answer. I honestly weigh the evidence. I have been told simplistically that levitation defies the laws of gravity, and, well, of course it does! We are not dealing here with purely material reality, but with the spiritual realm. One cannot force these creatures to undergo lab studies or submit to scientific manipulation; they will also hardly allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment, as skeptics sometimes demand. (The official Catholic Catechism holds that demons are sentient and possess their own wills; as they are fallen angels, they are also craftier than humans. That’s how they sow confusion and seed doubt, after all.) Nor does the church wish to compromise a sufferer’s privacy, any more than doctors want to compromise a patient’s confidentiality.



Ignorance and superstition have often surrounded stories of demonic possession in various cultures, and surely many alleged episodes can be explained by fraud, chicanery or mental pathology. But anthropologists agree that nearly all cultures have believed in spirits, and the vast majority of societies (including our own) have recorded dramatic stories of spirit possession. Despite varying interpretations, multiple depictions of the same phenomena in astonishingly consistent ways offer cumulative evidence of their credibility.

As a psychoanalyst, a blanket rejection of the possibility of demonic attacks seems less logical, and often wishful in nature, than a careful appraisal of the facts. As I see it, the evidence for possession is like the evidence for George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. In both cases, written historical accounts with numerous sound witnesses testify to their accuracy.

In the end, however, it was not an academic or dogmatic view that propelled me into this line of work. I was asked to consult about people in pain. I have always thought that, if requested to help a tortured person, a physician should not arbitrarily refuse to get involved. Those who dismiss these cases unwittingly prevent patients from receiving the help they desperately require, either by failing to recommend them for psychiatric treatment (which most clearly need) or by not informing their spiritual ministers that something beyond a mental or other illness seems to be the issue. For any person of science or faith, it should be impossible to turn one’s back on a tormented soul.

Richard Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist and a professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. He is at work on a book about demonic possession in the United States.