The Unexamined Gauntlet: Swami Rama and the Contemporary World

 

Just before America entered the Third Millennium, Psychology Today released its final issue in which the cover title announced in blue and black lettering: Best of the Century, BREAKTHROUGHS that changed our lives. Twenty remarkable men and women, from Jean Piaget, Ellen Langer and Matina Horner to B. F. Skinner, Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers and Hans Selye, were cited for contributing to the advancement of our understanding of mental health and psychology.

            

Without taking away any of the due credit from this roster of excellent contributors, there seems to be a notable omission: Swami Rama of the Himalayas. To ignore this gentleman would be to cite the advances of computers and discount Alan Turner; better still, to celebrate the historical field of astronomy and omit Nicolaus Copernicus, or to wax ecstatic over the potentials of electricity and ignore Nicola Tesla.

            

Clearly, the Swami demonstrated tangible feats of self-consciousness that stand as a perplexing revolution to contemporary physicists, biologists, psychologists and physicians. He opened a brief window to an ancient, unknown vista on the universe, showing accomplishments that would make even Harry Potter envious. More than a breakthrough, he turned inside out our contemporary scientific, technological and mechanistic worldview. Just as astronaut Armstrong by landing on the moon in July, l969 conquered outer space, so, Swami Rama, some months later, by visiting those far galaxies of the mind unknown but yet suspected by a few scientists, conquered inner space. 

            

The concrete implications of his experiments beckon for revisions to our understanding regarding conceptions of human nature and thus society, our sense of ultimacy, and especially, the scope of manageable self-knowledge. For the demonstrator, these three major conceptions do not stand in utter separation from each other, as they do in the cataloging of western sciences. On the contrary, in his multi-leveled grasp of life they share a reciprocal enrichment; the more one understands about the field of the mind the more the others are mutually advanced.

            

To appreciate how these notions are related, may I suggest that after perusing any three or four of the forthcoming descriptions of his experiments a reflective pause be first in order. May I invite the reader to consider how startlingly these reports must have been among the scientific community that witnessed them. Normal expectations of the human potential could hardly have anticipated these recorded feats. Nor could the scientists have anticipated that one individual could demonstrate such a range of competent control with his own body and matter, for that matter. May I ask the reader further to imagine the impact the accumulation of Swami’s experiments may have on our contemporary, vested worldview. 

            

The Swami visited the world-renowned Menninger Foundation at two periods in l970, during March and later for an extended period throughout the autumn. The following are some of the experiments that were released for publication.

 

The leads of two thermistors (a sensitive detecting device that registers temperature changes at the surface of the skin), were connected to the subject’s right palm. He predicted beforehand that he would alter the temperature between each side of his palm. Within a period of fifteen minutes, there was a simultaneous warming and cooling of the right hand, causing the “left side to become pink and the right-side gray.” The temperature between the sides was eventually 11 degrees Fahrenheit, an increase of 9 degrees over the original temperature. As the director of the experiment pointed out, “without moving or using muscle tension he ‘turned on’ one of them [parts of the hand] and ‘turned off’ the other.”

            

While remaining calmly motionless, and upon a given signal, the subject’s heartbeat slowed in less than 60 seconds from a pumping rate of 74 beats per minute to 52 beats. At another time, the heart rate increased voluntarily from 60 beats to 82 beats per minute in less than 8 seconds.

            

In an experiment to stop the heart and yet remain alive, the steady heartbeat of 70 suddenly produced an atrial flutter wherein the heart rate average became 306 beats per minute for a 16.2 second interval. Actually the length was closer to 30 seconds, for the technicians were surprised by the event of the dramatic heart alteration and conversed for some moments before fully recording the procedure. No blood can be pumped through the heart chambers when they open and close with such rapidity. The subject mentioned that this performance could be sustained for 30 minutes. This type of heart stoppage is often associated in cardiac arrest, often producing unconsciousness, where “a section of the heart ‘flutters’ in oscillatory mode at its maximum rate, the chambers not filling properly, the valves not working properly and the blood pressure dropping.”

            

Sitting motionless, the subject “caused a 14-inch aluminum knitting needle mounted horizontally on a vertical shaft 5 feet away from him to rotate toward him through 10 degrees of arc.” The exact direction and angle degree were requested by a member of the professional audience just as the experiment began. 

            

Announcing that he would sleep for exactly 25 minutes, brainwave detecting equipment, EEG, was connected to the subject’s head, and thus monitored to verify the sleep state. Upon awakening at the precise minute, he repeated the various words and sentences of everyone in the room which were articulated between them during his sound sleep, also mentioning the various activities the people performed while he was asleep. 

In addition to these laboratory scheduled experiments, the same individual, in less formal settings, performed the following:

            

Demonstrating before physicians that he could irradiate light from the center of his chest. Polarized pictures were taken “in which most of his chest was obscured by a disc of pale pink light.” He mentioned that this is the natural energy of light that resides in the central region of the human chest, normally too subtle for eye detection. The Polaroid emulsion captured it because he intensified the energy.

            

In a casual conversation with the Director of Research at Menninger about tumors, he asked the director to note his exposed, unblemished forearm. In the next moment, the director saw and felt a lump upon the skin resembling a moveable cyst. Then, on call, it simply vanished. He repeated the same congestion of cells at another part of his body which the director ascertained by touch and it disappeared upon call. Similar cyst-like protrusions were also produced that projected slightly upward. These were produced on call within a fraction of a second and disappeared or receded into the body immediately at will. Actually, at the very first instance a biopsy was obtained of two cyst-like formations, one on each forearm. The report of their analysis was as the subject predicted: on one forearm the cyst was benign; on the other, cancerous. Upon requests he produced and vanished numerous cancerous “cysts” at any part of his body. He mentioned as an aside that the research money for cancer research was going in the wrong direction; the funding left out the primary study of the mind where cancer starts. 

            

By the softest touch, he caused the middle portion of a solid piece of wood, a 12-inch ruler, held by two men at its ends, to fracture into pieces. Similarly, using a metal edged ruler, held by someone at both ends, he merely pointed his index finger at the center part in a quick downward motion of his hand, causing the wood to split apart and the metal edge to twist.

            

A clinical psychologist parked her car at the clinic. When she walked by his open office door, he called and urged her to ask him several questions about any topic of her choice. After getting over the initial surprise of this request, she asked him distinct and unrelated questions. Upon the completion of the wording of the questions, he handed her a folded piece of paper upon which were written in order the five questions and his answers. He had written the note shortly before she arrived.

            

In an experiment in concentration, he sat in a darkened room, wired to biofeedback equipment to detect the slightest twitch anywhere in his body. He remained absolutely motionless for one hour. 

 

During his stay with the Menninger Foundation, he would indicate repeatedly beforehand to his associates when the phone was about to ring with a call for him.

            

Once a woman was waiting for him after his lecture in Kansas and told him about her child with chronic asthma, severe wheezing and gasping for breath at night. He mentioned that the problem is connected with the boy’s heart and suggested an EEG heart examination. The test confirmed a malfunction. When asked how he knew, Swami said he called to the boy in his mind and the lad made contact and said that in this birth, he had a defective heart. Nevertheless, the boy’s health improved since that meeting. Her physician was quite upset by her soliciting the Swami.

            

The Swami’s secretary spent some minutes squeezing the handle of a device that punched out plastic labels that he wanted to stick on the travel bags. Raw blisters painfully emerged on three fingers. Later, while departing, Swami expressed his thanks for the man’s service these past months and lengthily shook his bandaged hand. A few minutes thereafter, the man noticed he could use his wounded hand painlessly. Inspection revealed that the three blisters vanished without a trace of injury.

            

While walking down a corridor one of the staff asked Swami if plants are sensitive to humans. Swami continued walking as he raised his hand in the air as though waving to someone and assured the man that plants were highly sensitive. They were walking past a laboratory window and the man glanced through the glass and surprisingly noticed that all the plants were swaying back and forth seemingly in response to Swami’s greeting.

 

Upon request, Swami could produce and sustain unusual amounts of theta brain waves that are normally associated with entering and leaving sleep. 

            

In a closed gathering of physicians, a large vial of strychnine poison was handed to him for consumption. Upon swallowing the poison, he mentioned that it tasted bitter. One of the physicians in the audience fainted.

 

On call, he could step on a conventional scale and have his weight recorded. Then step off and again step back on, only to weight pounds lighter. He explained that since weight and mass are not the same and he could control them. 

            

Asked to sit in a diagnosis of a woman whose periods were copiously irregular, each of the three physicians suggested that their specialty was the best remedy, including one who won out with brain surgery. Swami politely intervened and asked if he could instruct the woman for a few days in some breathing measures. Following his recommendations, her disorder immediately cleared. The physicians accused him of a set-up. 

 

In welcoming a physician to his Holiday Inn room for an appointment to teach the man some yoga techniques in mind-body communication, the visitor realized as he was taking off his coat that he left the speaker for his tape recorder back in his bedroom at home, some miles away. He was about to return when Swami asked him where in the house was his bedroom. Upon being told, Swami motioned his arm behind his back and brought forth the speaker in his hand. The physician was so startled that he politely excused himself. 

 

In the scientific culture still today, many neurologists in medicine and behaviorists in psychology would deny to human consciousness the voluntary power to manipulate the autonomic nervous system, and thus slate consciousness, perforce, as only a function of the brain. Likewise, there are ample physicists and biologists who insist that nature is a random conglomeration where chance rules. In medical schools where the teaching focus centers on bodily pathology, conscious humans are considered, for all practical purposes, chemical machines. 

In response to these assumptions Swami threw down a gauntlet of self-consciousness. What took place was an extraordinary anomaly of delicate self-control, planned and executed voluntarily, in direct opposition to haphazard behavior. The subject knew what he was doing and predicted the outcome. The sheer magnitude of these mind-body demonstrations reduces chance to a joke and belies any assumption that conventional rationality, scientific or otherwise, suffices as an adequate explanation.

 

Nature

            

We enter the third millennium with inherited strands of scientific misconceptions from the seventeenth century onwards that twist themselves into a strange purposeless world of mindless evolution. I find it highly curious that there are highly educated people who would proclaim that the seasons of nature, the organismic relations among our bodily organs, the inventions of machines, the course of human life itself, all amounts to inexplicable chance. The Nobel committee once awarded its prize to Jacques Monod who delighted in telling us that “man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe whence he has emerged by chance.” For him as with so many of his continuing associates, we live in an adventitious universe. Life on these cheerful terms is meaningless. If we live in their exclusive mechanical world of chance collisions of molecules, an accidental universe, then Swami Rama would not in his wildest dreams have been able to perform his experiments. For his body-mind endeavors, like the rocket science that puts astronauts on the moon and returns them to planet earth, are exceeding purposeful, full of intentional and tangible connections of means and ends.

            

His demonstrations, however, go vastly beyond the amazing and intricate accomplishments of NASA. In fact, getting to the moon involves months of intricate preparation and hosts of connected decisions orchestrated with such deliberation that change happenings are banished on principle. Even more so, what kind of decision making goes into the formation of one’s will to generate virulent cancer cells at various areas of a human body and then, without hardly breaking stride, dissipate the pathological tumors in nanoseconds? What kind of mind puts its own brain asleep, thereby muting its reception of sense impressions, and upon waking reports in sensual detail the events transpiring during his sleep interlude? What is the constitution of a human body that can stay poised as more than 600 volts of electricity are conducted into it without harmful effects, let alone death? We can praise researchers for informing us of their careful studies of earthworms, monkeys, and rats and their analogous applications to humans, but can a Skinner or an Erikson, a Rogers, or an Ellis for all their marvelous information tell us the nature of consciousness and how to access and utilize the realms of awareness that were so seemingly commonplace for Swami Rama? For scientists to uphold a one-dimensional perspective, that nature is just gamboling aggregates of molecules bunched diversely together occasionally, is radically unsupportable by the abundant facts of what he demonstrated. Yet the chance assumption persists. 

            

Everywhere we turn we are reminded of purpose. Society would be sheer chaos without the various plans, projects, agendas, schemes, blueprints, rules, mandates, prescriptions, ordinances, laws, and occasional common sense that make it run however inefficiently. Our whole life, from domestic desires to the marketplace, is dominated by flexible purpose. What would farmers do if they could not bank on the organic purposefulness of Mother Nature? No doubt a lot of conflict, mistakes, unpredictable and accidental occurrences erupt. Yet these interruptions only point up the presence of order in the first place. In the conduct of our professional lives, we prefer and strive for reliable consistency, rather than bank on haphazardness. 

            

What perplexed the scientific community of examiners was a threefold discovery. First, as he performed his designated task, there was maintained the calmest, unstressed demeanor in the organisms of the body resulting in its achievement. Like the Nike advertisement: he just did it. Secondly, there was causation at a distance. Here was a clear violation of the common sense and Newtonian worldview in which contiguity is paramount; events like moving items through space disconnected from the agent of motion are hardly commonplace. Swami’s mind, seemingly without the aid of extending his bodily, could nevertheless cognitively affect tangible reality. Thirdly, a summary of his experiments would portent powers of consciousness that are not only inexplicable to conventional interpretation by modern psychology but infer cognitive realms of operation beyond the rational mode. 

 

Swami Rama echoed the sentiments of William James: “Our normal consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness…No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

            

In more than one of his lectures, Swami referred to the mind as both a transmitter and receiver. Most of us would find consolation in his declaration especially when we assume he always includes the body. After all, I can think thoughts and articulate them; I can also apprehend with the aid of my senses the external world. While Swami would concur with that ordinary use of the body, he would also insist that human intelligence could put aside the organic sensing apparatus and allow for the immediate apprehension of and communication with reality. Consciousness, in other words, utilizes but is not essentially depended upon the body for its operations. With sufficient training, bodily instrumentality could be put aside without repercussions.

            

So, where does that leave, scientifically or religiously, our standard definition of human nature? 

 

Ultimacy

            

Swami Rama strove further. The cultural dependencies, the societal cartels, the institutions of solace that have become so much of our daily existence serve on one plane of reality. These enterprises remind us of our limitations and inadequacies. In the meantime what about the sovereignty of our spirit? Until you recognize and access its reality, it would seem that you are sentenced to move painfully through the commercial matter of life and define yourself as a consumer in the marketplace.

            

In one of his books, Enlightenment without God, the title alone jars our conventional thinking about human possibilities, he forsakes the usual dependence upon religious institutions for explicating human significance. His theme, however, is not original. Rather he deliberately chooses an ancient quest that echoes down through global history: what’s the ultimate meaning of human life? To awaken us to that perennial question in a fresh light, rather than preach promises or cite chapter and verse for scriptural consolation, he demonstrated in vivo. 

            

In that context, to properly grasp the implications of his experiments, one has to see beyond the Kansas laboratory. Why? For one, to appreciate the irony of their scientific impossibility, and, for two, the challenge to the emotional and intellectual resistance to them arising from societal assumptions that govern the lives of normal people everywhere. Speaking of assumptions, a too favored mechanistic elaboration of life can become the symbol of ultimacy as portrayed by a famous academician, Bertrand Russell, from Oxford University, where, by the way, Swami obtained a graduate degree: “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end…his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…blind to good and evil…omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” In Kansas, Swami detoured “omnipotent matter” for a while.

 

Self-Knowledge

            

Upon interrogation, Swami explained that these feats were guided by self-conscious volition. As a living agent, he reminded his technical audience that cognitive and biological, not mechanical and gravitational, forces were at the root of his actions. His holistic yoga training that brought him to this level of performance incorporated growth primarily in self-awareness. A superb athlete, for example, achieves with time and concerted effort greater and greater coordination between body and mind. A consciously fostered unity of mind and corporeal matter gradually shifts one from a clumsy, awkward state into increasing levels of integrated execution. We witness the manifested result: Olympian actions. 

            

From the aspect of science and its parameters, it can be proffered that a new science of self-knowledge, of transcendental psychology if you will, is in the offing. Respecting the modern understanding of psychology, biology, and physics in its current formation demands a recognition that these disciplines have now assumed what Newtonian science became in the face of Relativity and Quantum theory: namely, a special case and not the whole story. Conventional science regarding human nature is not so much wrong, just severely incomplete.

            

This proposal, warranted by the indisputable facts of the experiments, will meet its hardest resistance from the scientists themselves. A certain bureaucratic outlook, obvious to anyone who has studied the intramural conflicts of science and its wavering progress, blights the acceptance of additional truths that won’t fit into the reigning paradigm. At times it can get vicious. When Nicola Tesla was proposing at the turn of the nineteenth century an alternating current system for lighting up cities, Thomas Edison, who claimed his direct current system was better and safer, brandished all sorts of maligning propaganda in the public arena to discredit his opponent. Edison was convinced that only he should illuminate American streets and homes. That Tesla’s approach was simpler, more efficient, and less expensive didn’t matter to Edison the entrepreneur who owned the manufacturing plants for making his generators. 

            

Vested interests occur not only financially but intellectually as well. In graduate schools in both Europe and America, the superstition that Sigmund Freud invented the Unconscious still prevails. In medical colleges, the notion that diet has therapeutic value is almost as suspect as to suggest that the mind influences both pathology and healing. The mechanistic endeavor means that the physician’s role is to move molecules around in one’s body through drugs, surgery, and radiation. From a scientific perspective, the practice of medicine is mostly chemistry. Hence the role of the pharmaceutical houses. The mind is marginal at best. More importantly, the cultural myth of conventional medicine is that it’s the only legitimate way to address illness and health. Lest scientists be singled out, the same egotistical resistance with vested interests colors the prominent fields of commerce, religion, and legislation. 

            

In an attempt to decipher the mental requirements for performing his experiments, Swami made a summary statement in answer to the staff’s query of how he could execute his feats: “All of the body is within the mind, but not all of the mind is within the body.”

            

This precipitant declaration flies in the face of orthodoxy. The typical operation of everyday sense apprehension and discursive reasoning is by far the familiar mode of consciousness that occupies most of our waking hours. Our rational endeavors enable us to pay the bills, raise our children, plan a vacation, and struggle with the marketplace. Yet this discursive mind-set cannot fully exert command over the mind-body relationship that allows for the experiments. Swami insisted that our innate consciousness has various levels of operation, different modalities by which it perceives and executes its actions. Broadly speaking, he divided the continuum of consciousness into the rational or discursive level and the unconscious, memory level, which were modes within the total conscious. Swami’s awareness was capable of transposing his attention to these modes at will, giving him, for example, access to non-sensory perception of reality. Simply, he could see and hear the world without using eyes and ears. He could discern the electromagnetic spectrum as though it were the daily newspaper. Faster than the WIFI, he could surf wherever he wanted. 

            

Society celebrates and heralds Olympian performances, honors bravery in battle, and commemorates the triumph of explorers, yet we admire these accomplishments at a certain distance from ourselves. When one tallies up the diverse ways Swami exercised volition over his personal biology as well as the external world, a new acknowledgement of the preeminence of the human spirit is called forth. Omnipotent matter recedes from the forefront of life. Standing in its way and speaking for humanity was this daring gentleman from the Himalayas. By his applied science called yoga, Swami Rama repositioned the ultimate sovereignty of human nature and its place in a respectful universe. He became, as novelist Henry James put it, a person upon whom nothing is lost. 

            

As of today, at the beginning of the third millennia, his gauntlet still lies on the ground unanswered. 

 

The quotations cited were taken from the pages of:

 

D. Boyd, Swami, New York: Random House, l976.

E. & A. Green, Beyond Biofeedback, California: Delacorte Press, l977. 

E. & A. Green, “The Ins and Outs of Mind-Body Energy,” Science Year: The World Book Science Annual. Chicago: Field Enterprises Education Corp., l974. 

W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experiences, New York: New American Library, 1958.

J. Monod, Le Hasard et la, Necessite, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970.