Document Text Content
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
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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
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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
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