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By Root 469 0

for an hour or more. On only three occasions have I ever again achieved the sensation of satori, but it is always a pleasant, comforting experience. During the past few years, meditation has helped me enormously in dealing with a number of problems in my life. Through repetition, old emotional habits are replaced, and instead of getting excited, angry or anxious, I become calm. Repetition is as important to meditation as it is to many religious rituals. Catholic priests may order their parishioners to say ten Hail Mary’s after confession; in Africa, Haiti and other places, religious masters put their followers into trances by exposing them to the repeated rhythms of drums so intense that the sounds go right through their bodies to become a part of them, and people surrender to the rhythm as they do during meditation. The mental processes are too subtle for me to understand or even to identify, and scientists haven’t been very successful at deciphering them either. But in the theater I’ve seen how susceptible the human mind is to suggestion, and have wondered if there are related forces at play. As already observed, one of the strongest features of the human personality is how easily given it is to suggestion. If he’s in a well-written play that is performed skillfully, a good actor can affect the body chemistry of an audience. He can increase the flow of adrenaline, make people feel sad, make them cry, make them angry or apprehensive. As an actor, you try to use the power of suggestion to manipulate people’s moods, and that’s not a lot different from what happens during a religious ritual.

It took the Vatican more than three hundred years to admit that Galileo was right, and some things about the world haven’t changed. I am constantly amazed at the depth of intellectual prejudice in Western culture. Nothing is a fact unless it comes out of a petri dish. A certain type of political correctness discourages inquiry beyond certain limits; prejudice against responsible scientific research in certain fields—parapsychology, for example—is appalling. But nothing beats the apathy and skepticism regarding the mental disciplines of the Eastern religions. For at least two thousand years, yogis and swamis have been certain of the power of the mind over the body, as demonstrated by their ability to put their bodies in a kind of suspended animation that enables them to survive being buried underground for hours or even days. Their accomplishments cry out for more research, but to many Western scientists these powers and the insight that the swamis, yogis and other students of the mind have attained are merely tricks or scientific oddities.

This hasn’t changed since the first British colonials landed in India and observed the extraordinary yogic disciplines; they all but ignored them because they considered Western culture the font of all wisdom and knowledge. Even now, if a scientist such as Linus Pauling acknowledges that Eastern religions have developed extraordinary mind-body relationships in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, he is considered a flake. This isn’t surprising because that’s what usually happens when bright people with achievements in one field challenge the status quo accepted by specialists in others. Even Einstein, when he expressed opinions in fields other than his own, was thought of as an eccentric; Arnold Toynbee was told to stick to history and not venture into areas of science he knew nothing about because his ideas didn’t conform to concepts that were in vogue at the time. Still, during the next century, as science shifts from its twentieth-century preoccupation with exploring the physical world to the far more interesting world of the mind and neurogenetics, this attitude will change. As Francis Crick has pointed out, brain chemistry is responsible for human thought, behavior and character—everything about us. I believe that we can control the mind, and that man will demonstrate a capacity to do things beyond his wildest imagination. I don’t know yet what the limitations of my own mind are. I haven’t reached