THE NEARNESS OF GRACE
A PERSONAL SCIENCE OF SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION
Arnold J. Mandell
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………… 3
Chapter 1: In Search of the Miraculous .…………………………………. 4
Chapter 2: Doesn’t Everybody ……………………………………………. 22
Chapter 3: Transmogrifications Of Energies ……………………………. 42
Chapter 4: Sensual In-Between Entropies ………………………………. 64
Chapter 5: Some Entheogenic Entropies …………..……………………. 87
Chapter 6: Pentecostal Phase Transitions ………………………………. 122
Chapter 7: Amphetamine Roll-Up And Splitting .………….……………. 144
Chapter 8: Faith And Rationality …………………………………………. 168
Appendix: An Intuitive Guide to the Ideas and
Methods of Dynamical Systems for the Life Sciences …………… 186
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Appreciation is expressed to the Fetzer Institute for their support of this work.
Particular thanks are due their imaginative Vice President, Dr. Paul Gailey, who shared my
vision and hope that these somewhat disparate themes could be blended into a meaningful
whole. Time and the reading by others will tell whether this idea was realized. The Fetzer
Foundation and Dr. Gailey have facilitated exploration into blends of science and
spirituality, particularly in the context of personal meaning. They also have a history of
supporting serious work in this era’s most powerful and rigorous exercise in holism as
represented by the mathematical and applied mathematical fields of modern dynamical
systems theory. Fetzer’s very special environment and years of dedication have
encouraged the variety of personal meanings within science to emerge and be recognized
as legitimate and important parts of the research enterprise. It would be difficult to imagine
a more propitious context for this effort.
The book is dedicated to my daughter Buna, and to my intellectual and creative
companion, Dr. Karen Selz, whose deep and lovely mind wrote much more of this book
than is formally acknowledged.
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CHAPTER 1:
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
More than a half-century of naïve persistence and driven search for unity in
the biophysics of mind and personal spirituality as the basis for healing
transformation has led me into many laboratories. The motivation may have been
genetic. My father said that we were descended from several generations of Jewish
mystics, none of them able to attain the salaried status of rabbi or cantor. These
ecstatic men lived lives of peripatetic eccentricity, stirring congregations with
provocative insights and uncomfortably personal inquiry. But only for a little while.
Soon they were asked to leave the synagogue and often their Eastern European
Jewish townships called shtetels as well.
My father, in the first generation of our family without rabbis in over a
Century, was a businessman-musician, who in the early mornings studied Talmudic
commentaries. He taught me about why it was that most interpretations of the book
by the rational, physician, lawyer, philosopher, Moses Maimonides, called Guide for
the Perplexed, were in error in their assumption that man cannot understand God’s
nature with his mind. He took issue with the opinion that the union of a person’s
intellect and Spirit with Him was not possible as long as a person was living. Ibn
Tibbon, Maimonides’ best-known early translator and interpreter, relegated the
cognitive, analytical, physical and alchemical transformational sciences to the
earthly, not spiritual realm. My father disagreed. He espoused the work of the 13 th
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Century proponent of a school of Jewish ecstatic mysticism, Abraham Abulafia,
whose interpretation of the Guide and his own Commentary on the Secrets taught
that the human mind, if transformed into a “state of active intellect,” could become
one with Spirit, realizing the Kingdom of God in rational mystical experience in a
state of excitement with new ideas. The new consciousness achieves deep
knowledge of both the “upper” and “lower” realms of what he called “reality” both
spontaneously and directly. He said that without personal transformation, this
knowing is not possible.
Abulafia’s lesson was that the mundane intellect of man has the potential for
transformation into another kind of mind in a spiritualization of thought. This occurs
via developmental stages that begin with intellect and imagination and culminate in
what he called prophetic emanations. The exercises leading to this transformation
are to be strongly willed and practiced with regularity. This work results in ascension
to an ecstatic state accompanied by great intuitive powers, which Abulafia called
“prophesy.” Ibn Adret, the Chief Rabbi of Spain at the end of the Thirteenth Century,
banished Abulafia from the Country, a Century before the Spanish Inquisition
ousted all the Jews.
Following what my father said was required in the practice of Kabbalah, a
13 th Century tradition of esoteric and mystical interpretations of the Scriptures, I
learned the secret meanings of each of the twenty-two letter Hebrew alphabet.
Much like the Platonic view of mathematics, that it existed before the physical
universe, these symbolic equivalences were believed to be eternal in the
transcendental realm. One of the rare written accounts of this oral tradition is in the
thirteenth-century Hebrew Book of Splendor called the Zohar which describes the
Hebrew alphabet as the heavenly code of the cosmos.
I learned that the Tegragrammaton’s repeated letter Hei, being fifth in the
Hebrew alphabet, represents the number five. In the Kabbalistic tradition, Hei
implicates the functional five-partition of the human inner self or soul. The five parts
are: nefesh, instinctual drives; ruach, mood, affect and emotions; neshamah,
cognitive activities of the mind; chayah, efforts to understand and attain
transcendence; yechidah, experiencing the world as a cosmic unity. Later in life as
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a psychoanalytical neuroscientist with a computational bent, the partitions divided
thoughtful, forewarning forebrain from automatic and stereotyped hind brain, the
signal analyzing thalamocortical system from the emotional and impulsive brain
stem-limbic, the symbolically logical left from intuitively geometric right
hemispheres. We divide the neurotransmitter moods of dopamine aggression from
the transcendentally erotic serotonin and the organized dynamical states of
periodicity and quasi(multi)periodicity from the real world complexity of chaos. I
learned that it is comforting to divide an unknown whole into two or more
unknowable parts.
The Jewish guru and Hebraic tutor of my childhood, Rabbi Isadore Kliegfeld,
smiled when I told him about my sudden loss of panic during nighttime Hebrew
letter meditations. He said that I had had received personal evidence that these
powerful symbols could call forth the transformational powers of God. He said that I
had been given a blessing, in Yiddish, a nachas. Maybe panic is not that far from
the transcendence of an activated mind.
In my tenth summer, behind closed door in a hot back bedroom, first by
accidental touch and then by more systematic chaffing, I evoked a pleasurably
urgent and yawning feeling that began in the lower part of my abdomen and back. It
filled me with thought emptying fullness that a sudden involuntary burst of pelvic
contractions found resolution in an hour or two of an unexplainable sadness. I had
been struggling to understand my father’s well warn copy of William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience and I wondered if I had been visited by one of the
altered states he described. Was this what he meant by a transformative
experience? A few months later, a late night meditation produced physical
evidence, a thick, sticky, salty sweet stuff that by morning stuck my sheets together.
Later that year, in my father’s library, I found a translation of the 1500 BCE Egyptian
Book of the Dead. It contained a creation myth of two Gods in which “rubbing with
my fist, my heart came into my mouth and I spat forth Shu and Tefnut.” Psalm 23,
read rather regularly in Sunday school, began to make me wonder about the
meanings of“…rod and staff that comforts…” and what was meant by “…my cup
runneth over.” Among the ten regions of the Zohar, connecting the inner world of
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man to the upper world, is the tree of ten sefirot in which Yesod , the phallus,
occupies a central place. Now we’re allowed to know that G-spot stimulation of the
para-urethral glands in the female can result in spurt as well as a cup that runneth
over.
Other occasions of the temporal disappearance of the self-conscious I
occurred while doing the theorem and proof work of high school geometry. Axioms
and the rule bound processes of deduction created difficult journeys from that which
was given to what should be found. Rocking back and forth in a desk chair for
hours, chewing on fingernails, cuticles and pencil ends, time disappeared in a none
self aware state of work-a-day well-being. Sri Aurobindo’s Bhagadvad Gita
described this state as one of the rewards of karma yoga. Abulafia’s Kabalistic
School emphasized the importance of hitbodedut, detachment and seclusion in
concentrated thought, as a technique for the attainment of spiritual “intensification.”
Stacks of lined yellow paper piled up full of blind alleys as I lived in humbling
dumbness. One of my teachers of mathematics described it as the working
mathematician’s dark night of the soul. A breakthrough to a route from premises to
proof brought an expansive rush.
Engagement in a struggle to fuse two differing contextual worlds may be
transporting. Geometric visions can be used to do imageless algebra in a brain
state that feels like intuition. The brain does something like this: Let the number of a
sequence of unit squares, each side of measuring 0 to 1, be the denominator of a
series of fractions, say fifths. Now put five of these boxes in a row. Then the
sequence of all possible fifths, 0/5,1/5, 2/5,..5/5, is inscribed by cutting the vertical
sides of the five sequential squares with a diagonal from the lower left of the first
one to the upper right corner of the last. This line cuts each sequential square’s
front boundary with vertical lengths, 0.0, 0.2, 0.4…1.0 in a series of decimal
fractions equivalent to the sequence of all possible fifths, the proper fractions 1/5,
2/5…5/5. It was Abulafia’s kabalistic belief that symbolic, (algebraic), operations in
(geometric) spaces can unify the “upper” and “lower” worlds in the eternal tensions
between the body and soul, the inner world and the cosmos, the conflict making the
global system both sensitive and stable. The geometric-topological approach to
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modern dynamical system’s theory describes a convolution of the expansive
motions (as in the upper world) and contractive motions (as in the lower world)
embedded naturally in the curved time and space geometries of what are called
hyperbolic spaces. Each point in this space can be visualized as a little saddle in
which orbital flows from pommel and back flow down to the seat, bringing points
together in contracting motion, and flows away from seat down along the sides are
expanding the distance between nearby points.. In the middle of the saddle,
simultaneously expansive and contracting orbits demonstrate hyperbolic stability
composed of intersecting destabilizing and stabilizing influences. Loss of this
countervailing hyperbolic dynamical stability results in global system
transformations called bifurcations and/or phase transitions.
Transformation as a loss of stability is a theme of a recent poetic translation
of portions of the Zohar called Dreams of Being Eaten Alive by David Rosenberg.
He writes that at some time in the difficult journey through the oftenincomprehensible
Zohar, in order to gain entrance to the kabalistic cosmos, there
arose what he called “heartbreak.” “No matter how much intellectual study is
involved, the reader cannot understand the text unless he or she has offered his
heart to be broken on the altar of poetry…and prayer.” Surrender may be the source
of the strange, uplifting feeling of worked through dumbness.
My mother, once a conservatory teaching assistant in piano, sat beside me
while I practiced almost daily, weekends included, from the age of two until the
midteens. Her quiet analytic counter-point sounded mathematical, “You can hear
that that this harmonic progression goes through intervals of fourths of dominant
seventh chords.” I felt the persistent lack of harmonic resolution as growing tension
in my groin. “If you transform each of the 12 notes in a chromatic scale, multiplying
it by five (in what mathematicians call) mod 12 (the numbering system goes from
one to twelve, not ten, before it repeats), one can recover the circle of fourths, the
commonest harmonic chord progression in music.” Though her computational talk
supported rational thought, in my adolescent heat, the addition of Charley Parker’s
flatted fifth and ninth to the dominant seventh chord led suddenly somewhere else
and she knew it. Hearing my arrangement of a Beethoven piano piece become a
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mix of classical and modern jazz themes that I called “How High the Moonlight
Sonata,” she laughed lasciviously as though tickled by this sensual violation of
musical canon. A boogie-woogie Bach two and three-part invention brought more
excited disapproval.
Mysterious are the conditions of attentive (preoccupied) and none attentive,
(fugued out) disappearing time. I found a musical way for it to happen when
improvising: continue to shuffle a small set of notes that stay within the melodic field
of the tonal center of an unchanging tonic chord. In contrast, most melodies and
their chords leave the tonal center to which they return in harmonic and melodic
progression. We can call these conventional tonal centers unstable fixed points.
They are attractive repellers of melodic and harmonic expectation. It has been
mathematically proven that these hyperbolic systems are globally stable. In
contrast, a melody that remains stuck in the tonic chord, a purely contracting stable
fixed point, is technically a chant. Paradoxically, it can be shown that this kind of
fixed point is globally unstable. Rigid things can more easily fracture. The rich,
altered states of consciousness that emerge while hearing the beat of Tibetan
monks meditating, the Sufi chant-dances of Rumi and the John Coltrane and
McCoy Tyner’s endless, single chord, tenor/piano dialogues exemplify the
bifurcation to hallucinatory new stuff arising spontaneously from the experience of
unchanging repetition. Constant repetition of the conditioned (expected) stimulus
drove Pavlov’s dogs, especially those with “nervous temperaments,” into frozen,
catatonic states. Abulafia’s 1280 book on ecstatic techniques, Hayyei Ha’Olam
HaBa, recommended the recitative rearranging of a finite set of Hebrew letters,
frontward and backward, many times, using prayer melodies, until “…the heart will
suddenly become aware of the intellectual, divine and prophetic…” and hitbodedut
will rest upon him. The instructions were “…combine letters (and associated musical
notes)… reversing and rolling them around rapidly until one’s heart begins to feel
warm.”
It was in my freshman year at Stanford University when I met Michael
Murphy, later to co-found Esalon, the California center for mystical pursuits and
naked mud bathing. He is the author of Golf in the Magic Kingdom and with George
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Leonard, Integral Transformative Practice. I watched him go through a dramatic
personal transformation after participating in Professor of Asian Studies, Frederick
Spiegelberg’s seminar (with meditation lab) about Sri Arubindo’s interpretation of
the Hindu Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita. Shortly after the semester, he climbed into an
abandoned tower on campus to continue his meditation. He remained there for
several months, refusing to come down even after the Stanford Student Health
Service sent a medical school psychiatrist to investigate. I was more than curious
about how it was that this hard drinking, and like his brother Dennis, all night poker
playing, Phi Gamma Delta party boy, had suddenly become a transcendent ascetic.
My girl friend Mary and I signed up for Spiegelberg’s seminar in Indian
Religions. We were made breathless by his accounts of administering a Rorschach
Test to the Indian Saint, Swami Sivananda. He recounted discussions about God
with the artists Paul Klee and Max Ernst and the philosophers Rudolph Otto, Paul
Tillich, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber. As homework, Mary and I practiced
breathing awareness mediation twice a day. During the year, Spiegelberg
sponsored a visit by the aging but still very lively Aldous Huxley to our seminar. He
also brought us Alan Watts and several lecturers from the Jung Institute of San
Francisco. Shortly after hearing Huxley talk about the spiritual power of a particular
exercise of will and loving thoughts, Mary and I began the daily practice of karessa,
some call it coitus reservatus. I was eighteen and she was nineteen. We found that
withholding an orgasm in order to achieve nirvanic extinction of all desires and
passions was difficult. We spent hours in karessa meditation, trying to experience
the detachment described in the Bhagadvad Gita. This biblical explication of karma
yoga told how it was that the warrior, Ardjuna, instructed by God Krishna in the form
of his charioteer, was able to detach sufficiently to do his assigned job of killing
without emotional involvement. Ken Wilbur, a modern, self proclaimed pandit, an
academically oriented articulator and intellectual justifier of the dharma, the spiritual
work of Hindu and Buddhist practice, contrasts the nirvana (literally “end”)
composed of emptiness in time and space, dharma Kaya in which “…no objects are
arising…” with the lesson of the Bhagavad-Gita. Its message involved realizing
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ones spiritual unfolding within the stream of real time and space, finding emptiness
in the world of form and inaction in the world of action.
We worked at karessa so ardently that there was barely enough time left to
do our assignments in biology and chemistry. In a darkened room, Mary and I lay
legs locked, lying on our sides, moving slowly and rhythmically, humming Om and
waiting for our ascension. We worked at making the journey through Sri Aurobindo’s
soul planes of higher mind, illumined mind, infinitive mind, over mind and finally, the
supermind of infinitely empty no mind. This somewhat unusual way to study for a
three credit course in Asian Studies at Stanford grew naturally out of the central
message of Spiegelberg’s seminar that whereas “…deriving a universal theology is
not possible, having the universal experience is required for an understanding of
any of the world’s theologies.” The controversial Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of
Newark who teaches that Christian forms continue to evolve, John Shelby Spong,
D.D. says, “…every biblical word represents an attempt on the part of our ancestors
in faith to make sense out of a God experience in their time and place. The
experience …is eternal and real. The explanations will never be eternal and real.
They will last only as long as the (cultural) mind-set that created them.”
Mary got an A+ grade, topping Spiegelberg’s class with a final examination
essay, which, in literary detail, described her episodes of samadhi, yoga’s state of
unity with the creator. Her 25 page blue book contained accounts of walking fugues,
spontaneously strong genital sensations, changes in tastes and smells, sudden
feelings of rising spinal-abdominal kundalini, middle of the night dreams of oceanic
orgasmic fusion with God. She failed to mention that she was describing her usual
pre-menstrual state.
During these college years, I learned about two Isaac Newtons The first I met
at elementary physics lectures; the unit was about how things worked called
mechanics. Logically and computationally consistent but taken on faith, I learned
about an invisible field force between masses called gravity that decayed in strength
like the inverse of the square of their distances apart and operated in my intuitive
world like an electromagnetic spirit. Less occult were the expressions of
gravitational fields as contact forces, computed for the tension in the string of a
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pendulum or the pressure of the floor on a weight resting upon it. Faith in this realm
came from exercises in physical object visualization followed by manipulation of
self-consistent algebraic symbols. I learned about experiments attesting to the
“reality” of these ghostly fields (that now include electric, magnetic and strong and
weak nuclear forces), and yet it was the physicists that already believed them who
designed the machines to demonstrate them. It was Gregory Bateson, Margaret
Mead’s houseboy, lover, photographer and social anthropologist who said, “Newton
didn’t discover gravity, he invented it.”
One college summer I found a second Isaac Newton, perhaps not so
estranged from the first. He appeared in the form of a marble bust in the chapel of
Trinity College at Cambridge University, holding the prism he had used to explore
the polychromatic properties of light like a talisman. In his essay called Newton, the
Man, the early 20 th Century Cambridge Don and economic theorist, John Maynard
Keynes, said that the Newton of the chapel followed “…certain mystic clues which
God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the
esoteric brotherhood.” Michael White’s biography, called Newton the Last Sorcerer,
described his work as an attempt to integrate the magic of the Old World with the
science of the New Age. Newton’s awe over what he saw as the wonders of the
universe maintained him in private theological study throughout his life. Arthur
Waite’s Alchemists Through the Ages describes how Newton’s alchemical
orientation toward the earth’s fundamental substances such as fire, air, wind and
water, their powers and potential for transformation, was joined imperceptibly with
his metaphysics and physics. In his hands, experimental observations involving
gravitation, celestial mechanics and optics, though motivated by esoteric alchemical
theories, generated experimentally accessible phenomena and testable ideas.
The French mathematician, Jacque Hadamard, in his The Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field, said that mystical preoccupations were never
far from the minds of most of the English and European mathematicians and
physicists of the 18 th and 19 th Centuries. This orientation served as an impetus for
them to pay attention to the almost imperceptible whispers of their emergent
thoughts. E.T. Bell, the historian of mathematics and mathematicians said even
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Descartes, the essential Enlightenment rationalist, was responsive to his “…call of
the Spirit…” Napier the inventor of logarithms wrote an exegetical commentary on
the Book of Revelations. The mathematician and physicist, Pascal, believing that
contact with a religious relic had cured his terminally ill sister, wrote long tracks
about whether or not the Devil could work miracles. The great mathematician,
Cauchy, was known for his persistent efforts to convert fellow mathematicians to
Roman Catholicism. Gauss, who was not particularly religious, said that a difficult to
prove theorem did not result from hard work but “…the grace of God.” In letters
between Liebniz, who along with Newton was the inventor of calculus, and a
member of the family of great mathematicians, John Bernoulli, used scriptural
quotations and biblical diagrams as part of their theoretical correspondence.
Perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 18 th Century (or ever), Euler, in his
Letters to a German Princess, discussed the functional characteristics of spirits and
the connections between body and soul. Bell said Euler “…never discarded a
particle of his Calvinist faith.”
It was to the working out of a law of mechanics called “the principle of least
action” that Ernst Mach attributed the beginning of the separation of physical
mechanics from formal theology. The flavor of this change is captured in his 1893
The Science of Mechanics that stimulated Bridgeman’s 1936 more formal
philosophical analyses of physical theory, from a position that came to be called
operationalism: the restriction of physical concepts to those definable in terms of the
experimental operations required to demonstrate or prove them. Mach said that
these events marked the move of formal metaphysical thinking about mechanics
and the physical sciences more generally into the personal and private realm of
belief and meaning.
Maupertuis, an eccentric friend of Frederick the Great and president of the
Berlin Academy, proposed the principle of least action as evidence of the infinite
wisdom of the Creator. As an early psychopharmacologist, Maupertuis
recommended the use of opium to facilitate creative thought and was famously
parodied for doing so by Voltaire in his 1752 story in which he is portrayed as the
naïvely foolish Dr. Akakia. The physical law of least action belongs to a set of ideas
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that are called variational analysis. They involve the natural (or miraculous)
selection of maxima or minima in quantifiable physical processes. Of all possible
two-dimensional shapes with the same perimeter, the circle contains the greatest
area; in three dimensions, it’s the sphere. In his Principia, Newton reports his work
determining the optimal shape of round solids, with circles of revolution having the
same effective cross section, in order to minimize frictional resistance to gravity in a
medium.
The principle of least action says that imparting energy; say by a kick, to a
physical body on a rigid two-dimensional surface like the earth, results in it taking
the shortest route possible from its initial to final position. The related 1650 Fermat’s
“principle of least time” is about light. As Feynman explains in his Lectures in
Physics, “…out of all possible paths that light might take from one point another,
light takes the path that requires the shortest time.” Feynman, using elementary
relations from high school geometry, proved that the least time principle could lead
directly to Snell’s law of the refraction of light at the interface of two different
conducting media such as air and water. His analogy was the optimal choice of the
path to take in order to rescue a pretty girl drowning in the ocean. Whereas the
shortest distance to the girl leads directly into the water, faster running along the
beach to the point that minimizes the distance required for the intrinsically slower
rate of swimming increases the distance traveled but reduces the time required to
reach her.
Euler attributed the optimization principle to an expression of the meaning
and purpose of a loving God. Infused with this spirit, he developed mathematical
methods describing smooth variations in position of an object in motion, the Euler
differential equation, in which differential coefficients are varied to prove the
principle of least action for mechanical motion. He gave the law Maupertuis’s name.
Mach quoted Euler’s conclusion, “As the construction of the universe is the most
perfect possible, being the handiwork of an all-wise Maker, nothing can be met with
in the world in which some maximal or minimal property is not displayed.” Such faith
based mathematical formalisms were rejected by Joseph Lagrange, an early 19 th
Century mathematician, who, among many other things, proved that every natural
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number could be expressed as the sum of at most four squared numbers. It was his
strongly held opinion that metaphysical speculation was both foreign and inimical to
the conduct of mathematics and science. His work in the calculus of variations led
to the development of a system of algebraic manipulations seeking the value of
constants, Lagrange multipliers, in place of solving Euler’s differential equations. It
makes it possible to immediately write down a computable expression for the
maximum of a mathematical equation. The technique is now routinely taught to high
school students and with no mention of the role of belief in the perfection of God in
its discovery.
* * *
I was a fortunate freshman medical student. After a visit to his office and a
stimulating discussion about some of the correspondences between the ideas of
psychoanalysis and neurobiology, Robert Heath, Tulane Medical School’s Gary
Cooper-like charismatic chairman of the psychiatry department, offered me a place
in his animal and human neurophysiological laboratory. Between classes, evenings
and weekends, I used a Horsely-Clarke apparatus, one of the world’s first
stereotaxic devices. It allowed the precise placement of electrodes into functionally
specific regions of a cat’s brain. The electrodes were cemented to the skull in place
and their wires connected to a device by which the frequency, amplitude and wave
shape of the electrical stimulation could be oscilloscopically monitored and
electronically controlled as the conscious cat walked around the room. I spent hours
observing and recording changes in spontaneous behavior that followed activation
of various nuclei in the cat’s brain with small electrical currents.
Deep in the part of brain that resides in the upper neck, called the lower brain
stem, the region thought to regulate functions such as breathing, heart rate, blood
pressure, gastrointestinal motility and global states of consciousness such as
wakefulness and sleep, I found stimulus sites that, after 15 seconds of electrical
activation, led to several minutes of hissing and objectless rage. One cat attacked
an empty chair. These regions when activated also inhibited spinal reflexes such as
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the knee jerk of the standard neurological examination. Such phenomena were
already well known in the late 1930’s in what W.R. Hess and later John Flynn,
following electrical stimulation of cats in the lateral hypothalamus, called
“hypothalamic rage.” In the late 1940’s and 1950’s, work by National Institutes of
Mental Health’s Paul MacLean attributed it to the actions of parts of the emotional
“limbic” brain, particularly the fear-rage-attack coloring of experience by the
temporal lobe’s amygdaloid nucleus. Modern imaging studies in man have shown
that this source of emotional coloring is activated by new information, even before
the more rational parts of the neocortical brain processes it. How we feel about
something new arises before what we think about it. These survival-oriented states
of fight or flight are known to be biologically universal and demonstrable in even
single cell organisms.
A greater contribution to my brain metaphysics followed observations that
after several seconds of stimulation of other brain stem sites, the cats became alert
but quiet, staring into space for several minutes. Then, they circled slowly and
curled up on the ground. This was followed by several minutes of grooming and
loud purring. Difficult to handle cats became transiently tame, some coming close
for petting. I found that these same sites also increased the amplitude and reduced
the threshold for the cat’s knee jerk reflex. Responsiveness increased with
calmness. Particularly interesting was the finding that electrical induction of this
purring state could immediately stop on-going stimulation-induced episodes of
hissing rage. I referred to these experiments with my friends as my
neurophysiological studies of Old Testament vengeance and New Testament
forgiveness. It seemed that the hissing rage would produce eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth hypertension, the talon principle of the Old Testament and Koran.
New Testament forgiveness would yield low blood pressure health and Jesus was a
healer. It was about this time in the early 1950’s that Northwestern University social
psychologist, Jim Olds, found that rats could be trained to push levers to obtain
current delivery via electrodes in various parts of their brains. Shortly after, Joseph
Brady, then of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, showed that squirrel
monkeys would do the same. With depth electrodes attached to wires running to a
16
miniaturized electronics box strapped to their belts, some of Robert Heath’s
schizophrenic patients spent hours pressing their switches with beatifically
expectant smiles.
It was after several months of cat experiments that Professor Heath
suggested that we spend some time interviewing a hospitalized, chronically ill
female patient, Donna, before and during the time she was being studied with
recording and stimulating depth electrodes in the human neurophysiology
laboratory. Donna, bony thin in a lose fitting green hospital gown and sandals, had
dark red toenails, blonde hair and eyes shadowed darkly. In her mid-thirties, she
had never married and, when she could, worked as a beautician. She told us that
since her menarche at 13, she increasingly often had episodes of spontaneous
ecstatic rushes along with sudden visions of strong white light. She attributed these
experiences to visitations of “…an unseen Christ.” She showed me a stack of
notebooks filled with hand written accounts of her religious experiences
interspersed with biblical quotations and difficult to follow discussions of what she
called the Christian ideals underlying the Civil War. She read parts of it to us. One
of her memorable stories was about being invited to a Children’s Crusade that had
begun in Georgia, led by a great grandson of Stonewall Jackson. “We were trying to
find the Lord to see if He would part the waters and open up an escape route from
General Sherman’s march to the sea.”
From a relatively poor family of Southern Baptists in rural Louisiana, she had
lived in a state psychiatric hospital for almost three years. Her diagnoses ranged
from borderline schizophrenia to temporal lobe epilepsy. The collateral interviews
with her mother from several years before had been placed in the hospital chart.
They recounted that in the patient’s middle to late teens she had become suddenly
promiscuous, frequently approaching strange men in city parks. Obsessed with
fellatio and swallowing sperm, she told her mother that she was receiving a holy
sacrament. More recently, the increasing incidence of ecstatic episodes and
compulsive note taking coincided with the complete loss of interest in sexuality in
any form. Her talk was now full of moralizing detail about the shoulds and should
nots of daily living. She referred to herself as a non-Catholic nun who was married
17
to Christ. The brain waves recorded from electrodes deep in her brain demonstrated
transient episodes of spiking in a midline limbic structure called the septum and in
the right hippocampus, deep in the temporal lobe. Paul MacLean and others since
have shown that electrical stimulation of these and related brain regions could
produce pleasure and grooming reactions in cats and prolonged penile erections in
squirrel monkeys.
Many years later, I spoke about Donna with the Harvard professor of
neurology, Norman Geschwind. He took me to his twice a week epilepsy clinic. In
an effort to demonstrate what is now known as the Geschwind Syndromes of
between seizure, inter-ictal personality changes in patients with temporal lobe
epilepsy, he stood in front of the patients’ waiting room. In a loud voice, he asked
that all people keeping diaries and personal notebooks please stand up. Several did
so, some displaying their notebooks in outstretched hands. The pages that I saw
were filled mostly with religious writing, biblical quotations and exclamation points.
Gathering the positive responders together, he asked them in turn what religion they
were. Several answered the question with the question, “When?” It turned out that
many reported having several experiences of religious conversion. Geschwind
called them “Jamesian Episodes” after William James’ Varieties of Religious
Experience. He then asked when was the last time they engaged in sexual activity.
For most of them, including those that were married, it had been years. Thought the
men said they were not impotent, experiencing early morning spontaneous
erections, they claimed a complete loss of interest in sex though feeling warmly
affectionate toward people generally. As he anticipated, the patients were
emotionally intense and unstoppably loquacious, needing to speak at length about
their moral philosophies. They persisted in following us around the clinic waiting
room, several speaking at once. In his lectures and papers, Geschwind called this
last feature, difficulty in separation, interpersonal “stickiness.” First reported by the
French electroencephalographer, Henri Gastaut, a history of multiple ecstatic
religious experiences, increasing emotional intensity and lability, hyposexualilty (not
impotence), moralizing religiosity, compulsive and frequently poetic writing and
tendency to cling to people is now called the Geschwind Syndrome of temporal lobe
18
epilepsy. Some say it is relevant to the likes of Apostle Paul, Sister Teresa and
Joan of Arc.
One evening in the human neurophysiology laboratory, I was invited by Dr.
Heath to join him and several other brain scientists behind a two-way mirror to
watch an interview with Donna while electrical current was being put through her
recording electrodes. We watched and listened as a psychiatrist interviewed her
about her past. The patient was speaking about her childhood. Unseen by the
patient, the neurophysiologist, with us behind the mirror, was intermittently pushing
the button evoking brain stimulation with very low current applied to the septum. Dr.
Heath told me to listen for subtle changes or discontinuities in the flow of the ongoing
conversation that he said might reflect alterations in her thoughts and
feelings. .
“The first time we were allowed to take a break from Sunday school for the
church service and I got to hear the choir and the pipe organ, I suddenly got a
feeling of happiness that I hoped would last forever. My Sunday school teacher told
us how much Jesus loved us and that’s what the music made me feel like. For the
first time in my life I felt completely safe.” Though the two way mirror I saw the
psychiatrist nod silently. “When I learned about the real meaning of Christmas and
Easter, it was frightening and beautiful.”
Within a few seconds after the neurophysiologist, behind the mirror and
unseen by the patient or her interviewing physician, pushed the switch on the
stimulus generator, the patient stopped talking. After a little more silence, her
interviewer encouraged her to continue,
“You were talking about how beautiful the holidays were. Tell me in what
ways?”
“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” She blushed and looked very
uncomfortable. The neurophysiologist’s hand remained on the switch. She
continued to speak with her psychiatrist.
“I have to ask you a favor and I don’t know why. I hope you don’t get upset.
The thought won’t leave me alone.” She seemed embarrassed even as her body
relaxed against the back of the chair languorously.
19
“Of course not, Donna. You know that with me you can say anything.”
Her face reddening further, she stuttered something unintelligibly and then
was silent.
“Pardon me, Donna, I didn’t hear what you said.”
“Would you mind if I rested my legs on your shoulders?”
Further Readings for In Search Of The Miraculous
The Hebrew Alphabet, A Mystical Journey, Edward Hoffman, Chronical Books, San
Francisco, 1998
The Book of Letters, A Mystical Alef-bait, Lawrence Kushner, Jewish Lights
Publishing. Woodstock, Vt., 1990
Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, Moishe Idel, State University of New York Press,
Albany, N.Y. 1988
Beyond the Human Species, The Life and Work of Sri Arubindo and The Mother,
Georges van Vrekhem, Paragon House, St. Paul, MN, 1997
Bhagadvad Gita, Sri Aurobindo, Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, WI, 1995
Play of Consciousness, Swami Muktananda, Syda Foundation, South Fallsburg,
NY, 1978
Alchemical Psychology, Old Recipes for Living in a New World, Thom F. Cavalli,
J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, NY 2002
Studies in Schizophrenia, A Multidisciplinary Application to Mind Brain
Relationships, Robert G. Heath, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1954
20
Role of Pleasure in the Brain, Robert G. Heath, Harper-Row, N.Y. 1964
Psychiatric Aspects of Neurological Disease, D. Frank Benson and Dietrich Blumer,
Grune and Straton, N.Y. 1975.
Mathematics –The Music of Reason, Jean Dieudonne, Springer-Verlag, N.Y. 1991
Mathematics for the Liberal Arts, F. Richman, C.L. Walker, R.J. Wisner and J.W
Brewer, Simon and Schuster, N.Y. 1998
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, R.P. Feynman, R.B. Leighton and M. Sands,
Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1963
21
CHAPTER 2:
DOESN’T EVERYBODY
Varieties of religious experience and the potential they bring for personal
change are embedded in and perturbative of our unique and common personalities.
The obsessive compulsive may have an easier time with the rigid restrictions of
Fundamentalism or be more resistant to the flagrancy of none rational mystical
experience. The hysteric may find subjective evidence for the Holy Ghost more
accessible and rules of behavior beside the point. The potential for double-jointed
multiplicity in personal styles and quick transitions between them characterize what
is called the borderline personality. It is in these ways that temporary and
permanent brain styles in us and important others supply much of the ground for the
possibility of spiritual transformation and the often attendant alterations in
personality. How can we think about this facilitator and source of resistance to new
spiritual practice?
A skinny, knobby kneed, small breasted, mousy haired, bright-eyed
psychotherapy patient of mine at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute Outpatient
Clinic was among the highest priced Santa Monica call girls serving Beverly Hills.
Answering my unaskable question about her thousand-dollar fee, she explained that
she was living proof that, in her profession, what was more important than physical
beauty was “griv sense.” She explained that by her middle twenties, she had
22
developed the ability to anticipate the most highly prized but often embarrassing-tosay
longing for a particular sexual act without being asked. She told me that she
had to “empty out my personal sex manual” to feel the cravings of her clients. What
the john most wanted appeared suddenly in her mind in the form of a cartoon. A
university criminologist later explained that the word “griv” was probably derived
from what pick pockets call grift sense, the ability to intuit who was likely to have
enough money in their billfold to justify the risk, even if they appeared in the worn
clothes and dated cars of old money.
In his 1913 Dernieres Penses, Henri Poincare′, France’s seminal theorist in
nonlinear dynamical systems theory, described intuition as a mental faculty which
allows us to “…immediately see the end from afar…” In the context of mathematical
epistemology, the instantaneous images of a geometer contrast with the labored
sequential logic of the mathematical analyst. Poincare′ claimed that inclinations
toward one or the other of these two cognitive styles and their associated
mathematical tools arise from different kinds of minds. He contrasted the 19 th
Century German mathematicians, Weierstrass, who he said reduced his general
theory of functions to “…a prolongation of arithmetic…without a single (pictorial)
figure in any of his books…” with Riemann who called geometry to his aid in
describing functions. He created “…an image that no one can forget… once he
understood it.”
Experiencing the behavior of others, we create a set of anticipations about
whom and how they are that align with parts of ourselves. Aware of one aspect of a
person, we imagine the others. With a small amount of initial information, we
connect the dots, fitting features we have seen and heard to personality
configurations stored by informal category in our brain files. Our conclusions about
them “being one of those” can both facilitate and impair our perceptions. Eastern
metaphysicians, Western mystical religionists, socially liberal secular humanists,
Shannon information theorists and today’s students of dynamical systems in brain
and behavior can, in different ways, make the case that the content of these
stereotypes reflect a pattern of constraints, our personal limitations resulting from
the rutted roads of worldly experiences. Baba Muktananda, the Hindi Saint from the
23
Indian village of Ganeshpuri, called them our samsara. These limit the formlessness
of anticipation that underlies sensibility. Our samsara reduces the uncertainty that
could serve as grounds for new perceptions and understanding of others. Preemptive
distortions reduce the bandwidth available for new information. They impair
the range of empathic relations with others as well as ourselves. These restrictions
in possibilities and choices are expressed in enduring patterns of behavior, thinking
and feeling that mental health practitioners call personality and character. When
confronted with these constrictions, the self justifying and diagnostically revealing
thought about a feature of one’s personality is, “…doesn’t everybody? “ This pride in
our shape contrasts with the teachings about emptiness of one of Baba’s favorite
Indian holy men, Zipruanna, who sat all day, loin clothed naked in a garbage dump,
instructing his students and followers about knowing and being nothing.
We quantitate deficiencies in formlessness using statistical measures of
entropy. They characterize the system’s behavior as a distance from the state of
highest entropy also known as maximal randomness. Professor Karen Selz of
Emory University did a study in which her human subjects, after taking a battery of
personality inventories, were asked to remove as many dots as possible from a
computer screen full of them in three minutes. They were to do so by left clicking on
each of them with the mouse key. Two seconds after a dot was removed, it
reappeared and became subject to removal again. As they went about the dot
removal task and unbeknown to the subjects, the orbit inscribed by their dot
removing mouse travels was recorded for later graphic representation and
quantification. Most subjects with the usual broad mixture of personality traits
inscribed a wide variety of orbital line styles: little wiggles, big wiggles, large and
small loops, little smooth slides and big and little jumps. The counter-intuitive
coupling of stylistic rigidity and whole system instability (as in non-hyperbolic fixed
points described in the previous essay and below) is in evidence at the personality
and graphical extremes of her subject group.
A fastidious, rigidly organized, severely obsessive-compulsive subject
repeatedly removes the same dot, only occasionally moving to a neighboring one to
do more repetitious left key mouse clicking. Very little of the large computer screen
24
of possible mouse travels is occupied. All the action is centered on a small set of
points. When such a minimal entropy person is injured and feeling helpless, their
stuckness can grow bizarre. Ruminative fixation in self-critical and persecutory
ideas extend into poisoned food anorexia, circular pacing, weight loss and middleof-the-night,
worried insomnia. Suffused with sin, they ask forgiveness for soiling the
chair by their sitting in it or smelling up the room with their body odor.
At the high entropic extreme, the mouse orbits of the seductively dramatic,
new reality-creating hysteric includes big jumps, disorganized whorls and large and
small restless and short attention span scribbles that tend to fill up the entire screen.
The fragility of fixation at this end manifests itself in breakdown into impulsively outof-control
and floridly dramatic displays. Their decrease in contact with reality
precipitates social chaos around them. The Montreal behavioral neurologist, Pierre
Flor-Henry, using electroencephalographic and psychological test data, described
the difference between these two extreme forms of personality expressions as the
overly dominant expressions of one or another of the left obsessional or right
hysteric hemispheric emotional styles. As examples, Flor-Henry said that a left half
brain depression feels like hopeless and agitated indecision and the depression of
the right brain is an experience of emptiness like homesickness. Left-brain
happiness is being exactly correct and right brain joy rushes like being especially
chosen.
The church going obsessional resonates with the sermon of the punitive
priest who invokes the tension and relief of sin and salvation. The practice can
result in a life long addiction to the transient high of this temporary forgiveness. In
other churches, the hysterical character gets spiritual respite in disassociative
visitations of the Holy Ghost and attendant signs and wonders. At Wednesday night
healing services, new hope arises from personal surrender in a floor hitting,
backward collapse called dying in the Lord. Both of these antipodal personalities
contrast with the more receptive state of in-between entropy (with enough entropy
available to form messages) which predicts more flexibility and higher potential for
undistorted information processing. Relatively style-less and ego-less people are
more open to hearing a variety of Gods in themselves and others. High alertness
25
without presupposition, ecstatically aware and selfless, it is God’s gift realized, a
joyfully awake and nonjudgmental empty state of transcendence. As we sit, we work
at feeling this in the brain of the enigmatically smiling stone Buddha.
The externally inactive state of high internal activity, the Bhagavad-Gita’s
formlessness in the world of form, inaction in the world of action, has a natural
mathematical representation in the simultaneously expanding and contracting
motions of hyperbolic dynamics and its associated entropic descriptors. How can
this kind of formlessness equip us for almost instantaneous knowing? In a resting
state of uniform hyperbolicity that only looks like randomness, accurate impressions
of others can arise quickly and from only a few data points of observation. In the
late 1960’s, University of California mathematician, Rufus Bowen, proved the now
famous shadow theorem. This says that in dynamical states of hyperbolicity, directly
observable on the screen in computer simulations, the first few points of the ongoing
wild dynamical dance that appears to jump randomly from here to there on
the computer screen, counter-intuitively will quickly outline the entire skeleton of its
future global shape, its geometry, though more time of observation is required to
realize this structure in full detail. The contracting motions on the stable surface of
action, called a manifold, “iron down” all the points onto the unstable manifold that
serves to outline the shape of the attractor of all starting points. In such a system,
observation of just the first few points outline the whole. Intuition, anticipatory
knowing and that which some call prophesy, may be expressions of the hyperbolic
brain’s mind doing dynamical shadowing.
To review briefly, hyperbolic brain flow is made up of three decomposable
components: (1) The apparently predictable one along the main road of the action,
going straight ahead and round and round on a throughway called the center
manifold—analogous perhaps to what might be a sequentially logical development;
(2) Intersecting the center manifold transversally is a field of influence moving the
action away from the center manifold with out-of-the-box motion, exploring side
paths of unpredictably new, creative possibility called the unstable manifold, we
might think about inspired risk-taking, impulsive associations in thought; (3) Another
transversally intersecting field of influence, which conservatively, rationally, “irons
26
down” the expansive flow back onto the road, the entire constrictive field called the
stable manifold. This influence herds points into shadowing the main road of the
dynamics, like the hair of the dog that stay close to the real body of the animal in
motion. It is in this way that just a few often slightly off the mark points nonetheless
shadow the real (called fiduciary) orbits of the attractor, outlining its global geometry
with just a little information.
The intuitive reason shadowing works is built into these natural countervailing
tendencies of hyperbolic dynamics, which on one hand tends to spread out nearby
initial points and brings disparate others together. The latter inclination is the one
that smoothes down the escaping points onto surfaces of actions that
mathematicians call manifolds. However, the details of the orbital paths don’t look
that orderly due to the mixing of the sequence of points in hyperbolic motion. The
mixing process on manifolds has been analogized to that of the bundled pink loops
of the stretching (expanding) and folding (contracting) taffy puller at the carnival
candy stand. The process gets sequences of small particles of candy out of
sequential order while maintaining the taffy’s overall geometrically ovoid shape.
Disorder is local with the entropy being generated by the repeatedly shuffling of the
line up of the original orbital sequence. This results in the impossibility of any pointto-point
prediction for more than a few points even though the over all shape is
maintained. Exactly what minute a habitually late sleeper awakes can’t be
predicted. On the other hand, the skeletal manifold of the global structure is entirely
in evidence from almost the beginning. Late risers remain late risers even without a
precise, minute-to-minute, predictable schedule.
It is also interesting that a uniformly hyperbolic dynamical system, unlike the
fixed-point attractors of stylistic fixation, resist perturbation-induced changes in
global dynamical form. In an apparent paradox worthy of metaphysical allusion, the
dynamically hyperbolic kind of formlessness has structural stability. The global
geometric predictability of this point-to-point, completely unpredictable system can
be both the subject and object of Zen frustration and thoughtful meditation.
During weekly professorial rounds at Los Angeles’s Neuropsychiatric
Institute, I assigned a standard exercise for psychiatric residents on clinical rounds,
27
which involved limiting their contact with a patient to five minutes. This was followed
by detailed discussion of everything we’d seen and heard. I’d ask them to predict
what we’d find in the many pages of personal interviews and nurses observations in
the clinic chart. The student psychiatrists with the most street smarts, called
emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman, were particularly quick at shadowing and
thus predicting the patient’s global dynamical pattern.
Do personality patterns exist? Evidence from biometric studies of the
hereditary aspects of personality style in animals and humans suggest that
relatively few global component properties underlie a variety of complicated-looking
manifestations of behavioral style. Primary colors are the source of all hues.
Harvard psychologist, Jerome Hagen, has reviewed the history of this idea in his
book, Galen’s Prophecy. While there are differences among personality research
programs, almost all rating scale and questionnaire-based studies result in clusters
of traits that reflect statistically associated properties which when taken together are
called temperament. This idea is close to what we mean by personality. These
relatively few response clusters are given descriptive names such as introversion,
extroversion, neuroticism, impulsivity, sociability, task persistence and tolerance of
ambiguity. As defined by psychological inventories, studies of families show that
these styles are heritable in the range of 60%.
Hans Eysenck, in over four decades of work and more than 5000 published
papers from London’s Maudsley Hospital, derived common global factors of
personality using questionnaires. The best known was called the Eysenck
Personality Inventory. His studies resulted in evidence for only a few fundamental
behavioral axes, behavioral manifolds, which describe extremal properties of
personality types analogous to stable and unstable manifolds: introversionextroversion,
shyness-sociability, low and high activity level and emotional
constriction versus impulsivity.
To make the issue of personality as dynamical system more realistically
complex, we can call on some examples of the rich history of behavioral genetic
studies using animals such as the mouse. They can be selectively bred for
underlying personality factors, such as dominance, fear, aggression or exploratory
28
courage. Not surprisingly, social interactions, as configured by the mouse’s own
personality style, contributed significantly to their behavioral patterns. As an
example, the C57BL strain of laboratory mouse has strong tendencies toward
impulsively wild behavior. To be anthropocentric and using Hagen and Eysenck-like
behavioral dimensions, we could describe the C57BL mouse as exhibiting high
psychotocism, P, energetic sociability, high energy, E, and low emotionality, low
neuroticism, N. The C57BL also loves alcohol and will dominate the low E, shy, low
P, retiring, alcohol avoidant, high N, emotional, anxious, frequently defecating albino
BALB strain of mouse when they are placed together for a limited time in a novel
situation during the daylight hours. Over a more extended time, however, the BALB
mouse comes to dominate the C57BL, beginning with attacks in the dark and finally
as the persistent and patient survivor over days of aggressive fighting. BALB’s low
E, social fear eventually turns into rage and aggression. The C57BL is quick to mate
and ejaculate but very slow to recover sexually, so that the less post-orgasmically
refractory BALB also wins in long term sexual competition in a cage full of fecund
females. Modern social psychological approaches to human personality are
beginning to approach the interactions of genetic brain proclivities and collective
social dynamics in this way.
Employing Eysenck categories of personality characteristics, similar results
about style as influenced by genetic selection can be seen in humans. The
correlations between factor scores based on B. Loehlen’s studies using the
California Personality Inventory in twins demonstrated as much as threefold higher
correlations among identical twins for extroversion (E) and neuroticism (N) factors
compared with matched fraternal twins. The primacy of some of the in-born
biological roots of these personality styles is suggested by G. Methany’s finding of
higher correlations between identical as compared to fraternal twins when studied at
the age of two months. The similarities in personality and temperament measures
included activity level, regularity, approach-withdrawal, intensity, persistence,
distractibility and adaptability.
More recent familial studies of the heritability of personality characteristics
included childhood shyness, neuroticism, depressive symptoms, aggressiveness,
29
behavioral inhibition and anxiety, behavioral flexibility, narcissism, deviant motor
activity levels, novelty seeking, harm avoidance and reward dependence. These
studies were conducted by R.R. Crowe, J.F. Rosenbaum, A. Methany, and J.L
Robinson and indicated familial congruity of these characteristics among first and
second degree relatives in the range of 40-50%. This level of heritability in
genetically unrelated family members was found to be less than 20%.
Low entropy fixations of personality can also evolve developmentally.
Experiments in young animals have shown that stress-induced high levels of
adrenal hormones exaggerate the normal developmental process of trimming back
unused neural connections, called pruning, the normally complexly over-grown
sprouting pathways. The pruning actions of the pituitary-adrenal stress hormones
come to dominate sprouting actions of neural growth factors and their protection of
neuronal axonal branching and connections during development. The research
program of Bruce McEwan of Rockefeller University and others document nerve cell
loss resulting from the neurohormonal concomitants of stress. This reduction in
neuronal connectivity and neuronal cell content has been conjectured to contribute
to the pathological simplification of neuronal projections and neural network
complexity, reducing information processing capabilities. The still intact machinery
underlying the global patterns of neurological activity, such as those that underlie
personality styles, is arranged around these pruned, unoccupiable holes of lost
brain possibility. If this range of potential behavior is extremely reduced, the
behavioral syndrome is often called a personality disorder. Those that have one are
the predictable Johnny one notes of response to perturbation: thrash out, lie without
reason, get drunk, binge on promiscuity, steal unneeded things from department
stores, or withdraw into interpersonal isolation.
A more abstract and quantifiable way of representing the pathological
simplification-induced emergence of low entropy, stereotypical personality style is
inscribed on the head stone of the post-suicidal grave of Ludwig Boltzmann. This
father of modern statistical physics expressed the idea in the form of a
transformation: the (maximal) entropy, S, of a system is the logarithm of the
number,Ω, of its available ways of being, (i.e., S = log Ω). That is, one way a
30
reduction in the dynamical entropy of a system can occur is by reducing the number
of its available states. As the repertoire of ways of personal responding, log Ω, is
reduced, so is the brain system’s entropy, S.
Reality constrained patterns of behavior, as in successfully adaptive
personalities, lie in some optimal in-between place between the maximal and
minimum measures of entropy. The dynamical state that is postulated to yield inbetween-valued
entropies is called nonuniform hyperbolicity. This is best seen when
the values of the experimental observations are plotted in a two dimensional phase
space with each point represented by two values: along the x-axis is plotted the
value observed, along the y-axis is graphed the change in the value from the last
observation. The signatory motions of these observations plotted in phase space
are irregularly varying in rate of expansion (near by initial values are separating in
time) and contraction (greatly differing initial values are coming together in time).
Values are not fixed, rhythmically varying nor in random motion. These
nonuniformly hyperbolic motions are seen in speeded up, talking head videos
showing bursts of hand gestures and in normal neuronal activity. Silences have
widely varying lengths and bursts of hand movements and neuronal discharges are
irregular in duration and character. The statistical pattern of neuronal inter-burst
intervals is not the convergent Gaussian distribution of I.Q. or heights but the
nonconvergent, long tailed, Levy distribution of flood incidences and, according to
Mandelbrot, stock market crashes.
The labored logic and inscrutably compact mathematical formalisms of the
Nobel Prize winning physicist, Ilya Prigogine, and his Belgian school, explain the
thermodynamics of these long lasting niches of restricted variation in our personal
style as energy requiring dissipative structures. Compulsive nail biting, driven
promiscuity, readiness to be suspicious are seen as a persistence of deviations
from the maximum entropy of formless, flexible, receptive end states. The system is
trapped in possibility reduced, energy requiring, samsaric niches of what Prigogine
called minimal entropy generation. We unique and oddly shaped and entropy
leaking balloons maintain our characteristic distortions through energy-requiring,
31
persistent efforts at insufflation. The maintenance of neurotic defenses and
eccentric habits can be fatiguing.
* * *
The children at Kids in Distress Residential and Day Care Center in
Southeast Florida, called KIDS, tended to be small for their ages. As a psychiatric
consultant to the Center, I often summarized an evaluation of both their physical
and intellectual development as “delayed.” Looking like almost completely formed
adult-like personalities, however, they were developmentally “advanced.” I heard in
a child analytic seminar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Southern California that
traumatized children often hurry through the dangerous developmental ambiguity of
openness and flexibility to the predictable, fixed attitudes and behavior of adults. It
was common to find prematurely wise young children serving as parents in
chaotically dysfunctional families. In residence at the Center, set free from their
pathogenic homes by social workers and family law judges, these premature
caregivers lost sleep worrying about who was taking up their obligations to the
sisters and brothers left behind.
Trauma-induced possibility pruning was often obvious in the young refugees
at Kids in Distress. Having been soaked in alcohol containing, nutritionally deficient,
crack-laced amniotic fluid, young babies were then left in dirty cribs behind locked
doors to cry themselves into exhausted despair. Their mothers were working the
streets for drugs. The children that survived often demonstrate personality styles
that are reduced in variety. They came to use a few, individualized, and stereotyped
techniques for survival. Some children’s insulated detachment was hollowly
disguised as interpersonal caring. Others used driven and rigid compulsion to
maintain the appearance of conscientious good citizenship. For some children,
paranoid thoughts were realistic expectations. .
Arriving at the Center I heard “Dr. Arnold! Dr. Arnold!” in high-pitched
screams. Several children ran up to me at once, demanding to be held. Some
leaped into my arms for a hug. Trying to get and hold their visual gaze was another
32
matter. Their eyes darted back and forth across my face, not stopping at my eyes,
as though checking for danger. It felt like a strange mix of physical clinging and
interpersonal distantiation. Many articles in the International University Press’s
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Child book series, described these prematurely
formed child personality types: the paranoid scouts, the detached as if children
pretending to feel, the desperate to please obsessionals, the charismatically
seductive hysterics and the unconscionable psychopaths.
Experiments simulating trauma and neglect in young animals also
demonstrate acceleration in biobehavioral development. Possibilities, the number of
available states, Ω, brain entropies as S = log Ω, become casualties of traumatic
and neglected early life. Like one trick ponies, these abused and abandoned
children take up singular patterns of behavior that seem to work and stick to them.
One doesn’t anticipate seeing such narrowly fixated personality patterns until late
adolescence or adulthood. They appear at ages too young to qualify for the
character pathology coding of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. Yet the
labels of adult personality disorder seem inescapable when one sees a four-yearold
child trapped in a compulsive hand washing ritual or a panty flashing five-yearold
girl with a seductive gait.
Four-year-old Alicia rubbed the lumps in my right hip pocket containing
caramel candies. Her blue eyes twinkled. Her long blonde hair was in bangs and
her lips in a pout. She kept a hand on her hip and tilted her pelvis as she spoke.
Listening to children’s stories, she straddled the reader's thigh and rocked. Alicia
had a history of sexual abuse in a home that was a hang out for drug dealers. There
were rumors that she talked to strange men late at night on the phone. On
admission to the Center, she was found to have genital herpes. Both of her parents
had been in and out of prison for drug-related crimes. The Center’s staff spoke of
Alicia’s seductive smiles, incessant demands, irritable complaints and tantrums.
With the back of her hand held against her forehead, she said that it was too hot to
pick up the toys she had scattered around the fenced yard. Ordered to comply,
Alicia took three steps into Florida’s summer heat and fainted. Each morning, she
spent the better part of an hour in front of the mirror, trying on all four of her dresses
33
and their scarf and belt accessories before choosing one for her appearance at the
breakfast table.
Five-year-old Grace was a suspicious and dictatorial presence in the
Center’s kindergarten class. Articulate and righteous, she confronted children and
staff alike with evidence for the unfairness she found everywhere. In legalistic
defense of her rights and sometimes those of her peers, she used her strong wide
face, penetrating look and quick and observant mind aggressively. Her somewhat
intimidated childcare worker maintained Grace's cornrowed hair with care. Sensitive
to criticism and quick to anger, she competed with her teacher for control of the
class. Her drug abusing young mother had escaped from her own mother’s
authoritarian house, leaving six-month-old Grace in the care of her commanding
grandmother, a matronly church elder. Recent studies by David Reiss and
associates at George Washington University assessed psychosocial dynamics in
genetically varied families. They found that genetic similarities amplified the
expression of individual characteristics of interpersonal relating through what might
be called personality resonance. Relatives often commented that Grace and her
grandmother, being alike, deserved one another. Shortly after her fourth birthday
Grace was removed from her grandmother's home while the circumstances
surrounding the accidental scalding of the bottom half of her body in an overheated
bath were being investigated. She began her first conversation with me, “Hey doctor
baldy, why are your bottom teeth so crooked?”
Damon was darkly handsome, with teasing eyes and a gleaming smile.
Talking to his legal guardian on the pay phone in the afternoon of his second day at
KIDS, he was heard to be making charges of mistreatment by the staff. He asked
his guardian, loud enough to be heard throughout the day room, “What does it take
to get someone fired around here?” Six years old and abandoned by his mother at
the age of three, Damon came to KIDS with a history of provoking administrative
conflicts at several children’s shelters. His record showed that once he successfully
used accusations of beatings to get a staff member fired employing charges that
were later shown to have been fabricated. He argued persuasively, manufacturing
events and quoting imaginary conversations with smooth confidence. He could
34
change stories midstream without apparent loss of continuity or confidence. He
learned the power of a claim of abuse, and used the threat of it to control his
environment. Damon talked other children out of their candy allotments, cheated at
games and stole clothes from other children’s lockers.
Debbie, age eight, was the eldest of four children. Her mother was a street
prostitute with an expensive drug habit. Debbie was thin, restless and worried. A
self-appointed mother from the age of four, Debbie felt responsible for the care and
feeding of her brother and two sisters. With a history of physical and sexual abuse
by a series of her mother’s boyfriend-pimps, Debbie spent most of her time cleaning
and recleaning their small apartment and worrying about obtaining enough food for
her brothers and sisters. Her mother was often gone for one or two days at a time,
and food supplies were not dependable. On several occasions, Debbie was caught
stealing food from all night grocers. The investigative social worker reported that
Debbie had learned to sell oral sex to the men who loitered behind a neighborhood
bar. She used the money to buy food. For several days after admission to the crisis
home, Debbie was anxious and sleepless. She worried endlessly about the welfare
of her sisters and brother despite reassurances that they were in caring foster
homes. She checked on them as frequently as allowed by phone. In a playroom
therapy session, wielding a rubber knife, she pointed to a scar on her left forearm
and told a story about the time that she cut herself with a kitchen knife and fed her
blood to her infant sister when there wasn’t any food in the house. Debbie kept her
room very tidy, did all her chores and sometimes those of other children. Even after
several months in residence, always-busy Debbie didn’t have even one close
relationship with any of the other children or members of the staff.
Despite the superficial differences, there are subtle and pervasive similarities
among the personality styles of Alicia, Grace, Damon and Debbie. Like overgrown
and tasteless cabbages, pale and four feet across, growing from seeds over-treated
with gibberellin or auxin plant hormones, the inner lives of these prematurely big
little people are relatively empty of stable interpersonal objects. The pantheon of
indwelling companions are either malignant, absent or both. There is a deficiency of
internalized significant others with qualities we more healthy neurotics paste onto
35
new faces which we then love and hate. Instead, every interpersonal arrangement
is new, suspect and run on a cash-and-carry basis. We are made to feel like there
are no seats for us inside of them. Even Debbie, with her history of selfless motherly
devotion to her “children,” felt like an empty husk, encased in the exoskeletal armor
of compulsive correctness. With their inner life unpeopled, the best we on the
outside can hope for is to be valuable to them as tools, like forks and chairs.
In new and potentially therapeutic settings, for example a genuinely loving
foster family, these children manipulate, testing for the feared loss and abuse that
first generated their detachment. They provoke the very mistrust they fear. The
sexually exploited child is seductive. The physically abused child provokes attack.
Personality constellations which can be adaptive, when narrowed and fixated,
become impediments to new and reparative experience. It is in this way that
personality disorders are self-maintaining.
An irony is that these interpersonally empty and rigid patterns in personality
tend to occur in the most constitutionally robust of the abused and neglected
children. They are those who have escaped early death from failure to thrive,
severe neuropsychological impairment, chronic depression, severe social
withdrawal or the pediatric psychotic disorders. The children with sufficient flexibility
to adapt quickly and survive often settle into empty-centered rigid caricatures of
adult personality styles.
Of course, well-defined and characteristic personality patterns do not require
abandonment and abuse or the pathological simplification of traumatic deforestation
of neuronal connectivities in order to emerge. Demanding social selection of
particular personality proclivities that are competitively advantageous for highly
sought positions also results in the appearance of well-defined personality styles.
Common examples are the technical types, “techies,” “nerds,” whose work require
long hours alone to master and execute, as in doing mathematical proofs, solving
problems in theoretical physics, unraveling computer programming problems or
writing highly technical tracks. These activities can be aided by the personality
inclinations of shyness and distantiation, the experience of discomfort in social
occasions along with a rich private fantasy life. Diagnostically oriented mental health
36
professionals (and lonely mates) may label these interpersonally distant,
engineering rocket science people, “high functioning” sufferers of Asperger’s autistic
spectrum disorder. Things going on inside get most of the attention, having more
impelling importance than those on the outside involving other people. A recent
study by Cambridge University’s Autism Research Center compares the
empathizing (E) versus systemizing (S) ability of normal controls and adults with
Asperger Syndrome and find the quasi-autistic adults are deficient in E and superior
in S. They call it the E-S theory of autistic spectrum diseases. Psychotherapists of
these autistic spectrum personality types, patients who characteristically do not
seek therapy but are forced into the office by marital or family conflict, speak of their
long, patient and mighty struggles to make intimate contact with these clients. A
more philosophical question involves issues of what are acceptable individual
differences and why it is that these high functioning, highly paid and successful
professionals have any diagnosis at all.
It is not surprising that the highest paid members of corporations producing
technical products and services such as IBM and Oracle are those rare individuals
in technical sales that are able to combine the skills and insights of introverted
scientists and technicians with those of the gregariously successful salespersons. In
business schools such a blend is seen in people who combine talents in both
marketing and finance. In architecture this combination might take the form of a
graphic-design artist with computational mechanical engineering skills. Recruiters
know that it is difficult to find people for what is called engineering sales.
From all over the United States, professional instrumental musicians that
began to experience severe technical difficulties that defied their teachers as well as
more extended practice time came to see Chicago’s music guru, Carl Boardstadt.
He was a nationally known consultant to classical and jazz professionals in the
1920’s and 30’s. His particular specialty involved those who had “hit the wall,” those
whose progress toward advanced musical mastery and accession into the higher
echelons of the business had been truncated. His recommendations were often
eccentric indeed. For the wind musician with breadth control problems, it might be
blowing uniform bubbles through a long tube held at increasing depths of a filled
37
bathtub or feeling the seductively diaphragmatically oscillating belly of a taxi dancer.
Pianists with speed problems worked at specially constructed up-side-down
keyboards with the rationale being that finger lifting was more rate limiting than
finger placing. He said that his most hopeless cases were those whose
personalities didn’t fit their choices of instrument, too often made by what position
remained open in the high school band rather than following a personal interview.
He claimed that trombonists should be sensually languorous; clarinetists, nervously
impatient; double reed instrument players, obsessional and withdrawn; brass
players, athletic and exhibitionistic.
* * *
As one of the team physicians of the San Diego Chargers in the years 1971-
1975, I spent several days a week in their summer training camps, on the team
plane to and from games, in the locker room and on the sidelines during games. I
was involved particularly in player drafts. Unbeknown to candidate players and
other teams, we used a system of what social scientists call unobtrusive measures
of their personalities as part of their evaluations. College football players are sent
questionnaires each year by professional teams asking about a variety of life events
and attitudes including their goals for the future. Filled out by hand, they served as
repeated measure, handwriting samples. Twenty years of them were available in
the Charger’s record room. Using 30 standard signs from the French graphology
literature and three trained raters, we evaluated the hand writing characteristics of
players, National Football League wide, who obtained and retained playing, not
reserve, positions in the League for at least three years.
After studying handwriting profiles from close to a thousand established NFL
players, and hundreds of hours of individual interviews of members of many teams,
it became clear that, athletic abilities being equal, success was more likely when the
player’s personality type fit his football position. What amounts to a series of
selective filters are operated by coaches, scouts and managers throughout the
playing careers of these players in grammar schools, high schools, universities and,
38
ultimately, the NFL draft. Choices obviously involved more than height, weight, time
in the 40-yard dash and performance in motor coordination tasks. The players
behavior, carefully studied on the field, in multiple camera angle game films, direct
and collateral interviews and observations under game conditions constituted a high
level of selective pressure that brought with it the emergence of characteristic
personality types. Tens to hundreds of thousands of candidates are winnowed down
to several hundred highly paid players in this selective process.
Distinctive personality patterns accompany success at a particular position.
Structure loving, politically more conservative, choreographed in detail and
repeatedly rehearsed, offensive players keep their lockers more organized and tidy.
More rebellious, resentful of structure, politically more libertarian, thematically
instructed but principally opportunistic, defensive players, particularly linemen and
linebacker’s lockers had messy lockers. Defensive team players were most often in
trouble with the law. Offensive lineman including centers, guards, tackles and some
tight ends tend to be patiently enduring and tenacious, their aggression taking the
form of stubbornness. This contrasts with the temperamental explosiveness of the
defensive line and linebackers. We could speak of the volubility of centers, the loyal
and caring kindness of offensive tackles, the narcissistic exhibitionism of wide
receivers, the murderous rage of the defensive end, the sullen and paranoid
depressiveness of the defensive back, the joyfully impulsive unpredictability of
broken field running backs and the good citizenship egolessness of the blocking
fullback. Some quarterbacks lead and play fearlessly in a religious state of grace,
some are members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Others lead as
fearlessly, but in the style of an unconscionably calm psychopathic bank robbing
professional.
Influenced by our findings, the San Diego Chargers drafted the Hall of Fame
quarterback and one time ABC Monday Night Football commentator, Dan Fouts.
Skinny and hurt several times during his college years as a quarterback in Oregon,
he was passed over in the NFL draft until the third round. The scouts “knock” on him
was that they thought that he lacked psychological and physical toughness; the
ability to get up after a hit and to ignore the on coming tons of defensive linemen
39
while calmly and quickly surveying the routes of several potential receivers. The
pattern found in his handwriting features, however, resembled those Johnnie
Unitas, the Hall of Fame quarterback of the Baltimore (then) Colts who, in spite of
his small size, famously played with great courage and physical toughness. In
chronic and severe back pain, he played regularly until retirement in his early 40’s.
Fouts drafted in the third round with a small five-figure bonus, proved to be a great
bargain for the Charger franchise.
Given the theoretically infinite number of ways that a personality can be, it is
remarkable that the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American
Psychiatric Association, DMS-IV, describes only eight types, which form three
subsets of exaggerated expressions of stable personality styles called personality
disorders. All eight personality disorders can be grouped into: (1) Cluster A - Odd
and eccentric types, whose anxiety is related to the felt threat of disintegration and
annihilation of the self and whose style is dominated by mistrustful paranoia, a
schizoid, detached and emotionally flat pattern or the isolated strange eccentricism
of schizotypal characters; (2) Cluster B - Unstable and impulsive types whose
anxiety is related to loss of the stable self and whose style is dominated by
irresponsible antisocial behavior, chronic instability with high amplitude fluctuations
in behavior called borderline, or patterns of excessive emotionality and dramatic
display associated with histrionic characters; and (3) Cluster C - Fearful types
whose anxiety is related to hypersensitivity to criticism, guilt and feelings of
inadequacy or loss of control, and whose style is dominated by interpersonal
avoidance, clinging dependency, or rigid lock up into obsessive-compulsive efforts
to do the right thing and avoid disapproval. This remarkably small array of
stylistically consistent global behaviors selected from a practically infinite number of
imaginable possibilities establishes a small set of invariants of some, perhaps
abstract, property. These characteristic patterns inspire our search for the implied
brain and behavioral conservation laws that may underlie them.
40
Further Readings for Doesn’t Everybody
The Evangelicals, David F. Wells and John D. Woodbridge, Abingdon Press,
Nashville, 1975.
Godtalk, Travels in Spiritual America, Brad Gooch, Knopf, N.Y. 2002
The Value of Science, Essential Writings of Henri Poincare’ Stephen Jay Gould,
Modern Library, Random House, N.Y. 2001
From Being to Becoming, Ilya Prigogine, Freeman, San Francisco, 1980
The Development of Mathematics, E.T. Bell, McGraw Hill, N.Y. 1945
Deterministic Chaos, An Introduction, Heinz, George Schuster, VCH, Weinheim,
1989
Lectures on Dynamical Systems, Structural Stability and their Applications, Kotic K.
Lee, World Scientific, Hongkong, 1992
The Psychobiology of Behavioral Development, Ronald Gandelman, Oxford, N.Y.
1992
Handbook of Character Studies, Psychoanalytic Explorations, Manfred Kets de
Vries and Sidney Perzow, International Universities Press, Madison, 1991
Cognitive Style, Five Approaches and Relevant Research, Kenneth M. Goldstein
and Sheldon Blackman, Wiley, N.Y. 1975
41
CHAPTER 3:
TRANSMOGRIFICATIONS OF ENERGIES
After several of months of running, 12 miles most days, I felt an energetically
calm, self-containment and a growing loss of interest in things sexual. My
increasingly impoverished fantasy life led my training psychoanalyst to suggest that
I was running away from the critical, females issues of my psychoanalysis. He said I
was becoming more out of reach as I became more socially pleasant. This was
decades before Prozac, Paxil and other serotonin reuptake inhibitors were inducing
similar hyposexual, withdrawn states of cordiality in millions of Americans. Recall
that Norman Geschwind, the Harvard Professor of Neurology, reported similar
conditions of high energy sexual disinterest and abstract metaphysical
preoccupation in patients with right temporal lobe epilepsy. For reasons other than
the loss of church property rights and the spread of syphilis to the clergy, it felt like I
was being readied for Pope Gregory VII’s Eleventh Century celibacy reforms for
abbots and clerics of the Catholic Church.
It was true that my feelings of dependence on my analyst for understanding
and approval were being reduced as I ran into less emotional involvement. I was
becoming a more rationally objective observer of others and myself. It wasn’t the
first time that my over-ardent practice led to this warning. Baba Muktanada, my
Hindi guru, told me to reduce my daily sitting time of meditation. He said my spacey
42
social smile belied a growing disinterest in the welfare of others. I was getting
hooked on the hard training high of not really being there for other people.
Several articles in Runner’s World said that many runners become addicted
after even a few months of running over six miles per day. It’s true that over fifteen
years I missed less than 10 days of running per year. I ran in driving rain, sweltering
heat and dangerous places. In New York’s Central Park after dark, I followed a
freshly strewn trail of torn woman’s garments that ended in shredded panties and a
bra on the Park’s bridle path. In Oklahoma City at 104,° I was chased and bitten by
a terrier. In Munich at 4:30 AM, before delivering a morning lecture, the black
uniformed police stopped me for a shakedown. In Ann Arbor, I shuffled along in two
feet of snow. By the Seine, at 14°, paranoid barge hounds barked in big dog
baritones. I ran on the Hebrew University track a block away from a loud Palestinian
bomb left in a refrigerator near a busy street corner. Breathless at nine thousand
feet in Aspen, gagging on the strong manure smell of Sacramento Valley farms, in
the hot wetness of Houston and dry heat of Palm Springs. I wore out three to four
pairs of Nike running shoes per year. What I did not tell my training analyst was that
this felt like a chase after God. As in most spiritual transformations, His messages
and music could emerge quite suddenly.
Even after stretching, it was painful to begin and that was my daily sacrifice. I
was readying myself to follow the God of the Hebrews and make the “three days
journey into the desert” as in Exodus and Paul’s recommended presentation of my
body “as a living sacrifice, holy and well pleasing to God.” After three miles of
running, the hip pain, back stiffness and leg heaviness lifted, difficult breathing
became easier. A burst of new energy appeared suddenly. The first pop usually
took the form of assertive feelings fueled by new personal power, an undoing of the
lethargy and depression of a helpless sinner. New and big, I felt like I could fix
almost anything. Up bubbled an aggressive speech to the Dean about his refusal of
our recent request for an increase in departmental research space. As for the
National Institute of Health’s recent return of one of our grant proposals, it was now
clear that the reviewers were wrong. I would resubmit but this time ask for twice the
amount of money. I rehearsed a new list of necessary and routine laboratory chores
43
for my most rebellious post-doctoral student. I would tell my teen-age son that he
must wait another year for his own car. I felt generally intolerant.
In an article in Runners World, I labeled my run’s first global brain state
transition, the first second wind. It energized me with the cool firmness but ready-tobe
angry righteousness of modern religious orthodoxy: Orthodox Jews gunning
down Hamas terrorists as retribution for bus bombing children which was itself a
retribution; Muslim suicide bombing as vengeance for cultural contamination;
Catholic Bishops refusing the Eucharist to pro-choice politicians; Charismatic
Christians gay bashing defense of the sanctity of marriage; Mohammed’s early Sufilike
poetry of love turning into territorial aggression and Jew killing in his later years.
Once in while, unpredictably, past the first hour of running and after the first
second wind, a fatigue easing second burst of energy followed the second stage of
exhaustion. I called this running-induced, second global brain state transition to a
softer loving energy, the second second wind. Colors became intense, clouds
breathed and my body lightened. Running once again became easy. I was flooded
with empathic and generous thoughts. I understood that the Dean was faced with
too many space demands to satisfy; the grant reviewers’ criticisms of the budget
were meant to be constructive. I recalled that strong minded, rebellious postdoctoral
students often made the most creative contributions to science. I realized
that my son’s urgent desire for his own car was a proposal in the direction of the
independence that would be required of him the following year when he was going
to be hundreds of miles away at a university. Filled with benign optimism, I felt the
compassionate perspective afforded those with energy but without envy, anger or
fear. William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, A.C. Underwood’s book,
Conversion, Christian and Non-Christian and Gobi Krishna’s The Awakening of the
Kundalini, among many others before and since, describe the sudden appearance
of long lasting states of optimistic energy and loving empathy that can emerge after
long episodes of suffering, especially following periods of privation of spiritual
meaning and the loss of a previously strong faith. These episodes are painfully
chronicled by St. John of the Cross in his Dark Night of the Soul.
44
In the long distance running model of spiritual transformation, the first energy
appears suddenly in the middle of painful fatigue and feels like a vigorous
implementation of Halachic commands or Canon Law. The second burst of energy
emerges from readiness for resignation and ends in humane comprehension and
empathy. In some Christian monastic practice, a similar transition is represented in
the ritual of Tenebrae (or Darkness). Fifteen lit, unbleached candles are
extinguished, one by one over the night, while reading the Psalms. The practice is
said to represent the desertion of Christ by his disciples, as the church grows darker
over the night. After the singing of the Benedictus, the one remaining light is
quenched, plunging the church into total darkness. In Myth and Ritual in
Christianity, Alan Watts suggests that the loss of the last light of Tenebrae induces
the realization that “I am nothing.” This reduction in egocentrism, along with a darkpiercing
alertness is said to facilitate an invasion by a loving God that precipitates
the fasting, sleep deprived and praying petitioners into long lasting ecstatic states.
These uses of energy and its attendant characteristics are not physically
specifiable but rather hermeneutic of a force. It is both a potential and a realization,
observed and inferred. It is the “energy stuff” of Freud’s libido, Wilhelm Reich’s
orgone energy, Pavlov’s drive, Rudolph Steiner’s etheric formative force, the
arousal and attention of brain wave and consciousness research, the Ch’I of
Chinese medicine, the Hindu divine energy of Shakti, the Hebraic ruach, the
Cabalist’s Yesod, the Sufi’s Baraka, the Christian Holy Spirit, the Yogic breath
energy, prana, Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Galvani’s life force, Goethe’s
Gestaltung, Madam Blavatsky’s astral light, Georg Groddeck’s it, Henri Bergson’s
elan vitale, Schroedinger’s entropy, Abraham Maslow, Ruth Benedict and
Buckminister Fuller’s synergy, Bertalanffy’s anamorphosis, Colin Wilson’s x factor
and George De la Warr’s biomagnetism. Of course, by nationality, culture and field
of study, there are many more examples, each locally defined by its particular
context and haunting with its promise of universality.
Energy in the context of mathematical physics is intuitional, abstract and
relational. It is not created or destroyed, but rather transformed. Consistent with his
deceptively simple style of physical intuition training of the young, Feynman’s
45
discussion of thermodynamic energy and its conservation in Lectures in Physics
begins with the premise that it is a numerical quantity that does not change when
one or many alterations in the system occurs. His heurism for energy and its
conservation involves the premise that Dennis the Menace has 28 indivisible blocks,
a number which his parents find constant at the end of every day of play. If one day
a count yielded 27, an investigation would reveal that a block could be found
elsewhere, say under the rug. If at the end of the day, the count was 29, the extra
one had to come from somewhere else, perhaps Dennis’s playmate Bruce. If
Dennis locked some of his blocks in the toy box and threw some into a bathtub of
dirty water and (1) A block weighed three ounces; (2) The box alone weighed 16
ounces; and (3) Each block raised the water level of 6 inches by one fourth of an
inch, then this metaphoric energy relation can be expressed:
(blocks seen) + (weight of box)-16 ounces + (height of water)-six inches = constant (28)
3 ounces 1/4 inch
Feynman notes that this representation of an energy relation, computed as a
number of blocks, will always remain the same. If there were no blocks in sight, and
one used this energy conservation relation with blocks as units of energy, we find
no blocks as such in the expression at all.
The abstract and formal idea of energy in physics first arose in
mechanics and was generalized to electrostatics and electrodynamics. If one
idealizes these systems, eliminating real world factors such as friction, temperature
gradients, temperature dependence of the properties of materials, viscosity,
hysteresis and other nonlinear behavior, then the energy conservation law says that
in an isolated and interacting set of systems, the sum of the energies of the several
systems remains constant. If, on the other hand, a system interacts with its
surroundings, not isolated and interacting, then the increase in the energy of the
index system is equal to the work done on the system by its surrounds. Like pre-
Enron bookkeeping of corporate cash flow and balancing ones personal checking
account, energy, like money, does not disappear; it is only changed in expression.
As in the context of currency equivalent value, energy can represent a very general
quantity applicable to a wide array of specific objects and activities. The results of
46
the early studies by Professor Seymore Kety of Harvard and Dr. Harold Himwich of
the Thudicum Laboratory in Galesberg, Illinois, using measures of whole brain
oxygen and glucose utilization as indices of energy generation and utilization by the
brain, surprised many of us. They indicated that energy use by the whole brain was
relatively constant when states of relaxed awakeness, mathematical cognition and
deep sleep were compared. Of course, modern studies have indicated that relative
regional brain energy utilization is state dependent and may vary quite widely.
More spiritual aspects of energies and their transformations were made
clearer during several month visits to Baba Muktananda’s, now Gurumayi
Chidvilasananda’s, Sidha Yoga Ashrams. Baba Muktananda loved and worshipped
his Hindu Guru, Bhagawan Nityananda. Baba had been a restlessly wandering,
guru-hunting, young man. Nityananda said he had “wheels for feet.” After many
years of devoted meditation, chanting and service, sadhanna, all the while being
prohibited from eating mangos, his favorite food, his passive, taciturn, ecstatic guru,
Nityananda, presented voluble, energetic, joyful Baba with the guru’s rather
aromatic and worn sandals. This symbolically acknowledged Baba’s successful
absorption of the guru’s transforming spiritual energy, shaktipat, the power of his
enlightenment.
At Nityananda death, Baba, using world tours, spiritual fellowship meetings,
satsangs (public conversations) and spiritual training sessions called “intensives”,
organized Ashrams in West Coast sites such as Oakland and Venice, and on the
East Coast, in South Fallsburg, New York, buying several old residence hotels in
the Borscht Belt. Baba was introduced to America by one of his first advance men,
Be Here Now Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary’s co-investigator in the Harvard
Student LSD project when his name was Richard Alpert. EST’s Werner Erhard was
another of Baba’s advance men.
Baba discipled and disciplined a sister and brother who, when 18 and 11
respectively, were sent to live in his Ashram in Ganeshpuri India by their parents.
The girl was known as Malti when she served as a translator for Baba and
Gurumayi Chidvilasananda after receiving the energy of her enlightenment. The
younger brother was given the name of Baba’s guru, Nityananda. When Baba took
47
a guru’s ecstatic death, Samadhi, both Gurumayi and young Nityananda became
co-gurus. Following three years of the usual covert power struggles of succession in