Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, The Mystery of Mental Healing

Dr. Indranill Basu Ray is a consultant in Cardiology at the Vijay Heart Foundation, Chennai. He has been a regular contributor to many national dailies. Translated versions of his articles in multiple languages have appeared in vernacular papers.

All things by immortal power
Near or far
To each other so linked are
That thou can't stir a flower
Without troubling a star

Amebiscus was an old citizen of Abaccas, a small seaside village in Greece. He lived in 800 BC. He was a sad man. After the death of his wife, all his sons and daughters forsook him because of his miserly habits. Morose with the happenings around him, he grew sadder day by day till he fell seriously ill, and finally passed away. This story, told and retold many times over the ages, is significant because it illustrates the fact that it was the sad mental state of Amebiscus, which caused his illness, and finally led to his death.

Such concepts of intimate mind-body relationship where the state of the mind influences factors that control physical well-being are nothing new. Starting from the Vedas, through the Upanishads and up to the physicians and surgeons like Charaka and Sushruta, many have emphasized the importance of the right mental state, because the entire existence of the human being and certainly one's physical health depend essentially on the state of the mind. All ancient philosophies agreed about the concept of mind-body unity. This idea, however, did not find favour with western medical biologists. Despite the fact that medical science did trace the existence of certain diseases to mental anxiety, naming them psychosomatic illnesses, deeper mind-body links, where variance of mental state directly affected body functioning, was certainly not what most human biologists even thought of, let alone believed. Western medicine was obsessed with the conventional idea that links between the brain and the body remained restricted to those biological functions of the body that had their highest centre of control in the brain. The idea of mind, an abstract entity, had remained uptil now, vague and ill-defined.

Man has always been in search of the ultimate truth--the truth regarding creation, the nature of the universe around him and the physical and biological phenomena that occur around him. This relentless search has taken man from the discovery of law of Gravitation by Newton to the theory of superstrings in modern physics. Another field that has registered an equally phenomenal explosion of knowledge relates to the secrets of life. However, of all such advances, the discoveries about the brain that occurred in the last two decades are indeed revolutionary.

One of the greatest triumphs of this fast evolving new biology of the brain has been the discovery of the hidden links that intricately connect the mind and the body. Today if a person develops a serious viral infection within weeks of a personal tragedy, his doctor might not just push it off as coincidental. The fact that the two could be related was first accepted when researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health at Bethesda, USA, were able to prove convincingly that mental states could indeed affect body immunity.

The human body is regularly bombarded by a wide variety of bacteria and viruses. To fight this ever present menace of both infection and certain non-infective diseases like cancer, there exists a highly specialized immune system in the body. This consists of an army of blood cells called lymphocytes, monocytes, neutrophils, eosinophils etc., that have varying capacities of killing invading microorganisms either by devouring them or by releasing chemicals that inactivate them.

The connection between the mind and the body got more and more clear as scientists got to understand the so-called mind and its different aspects like mood, for example. It is now known that a particular chemical that causes one to have depressive mood when released inside the brain also depresses the immune system, leaving the flood gates open for infection and disease. Not only that, hundreds of different biomolecules were discovered that work as chemical messengers running from the brain to the immune system-cells and vice versa, informing each other of the respective state and maintaining a well-organised and elaborate but highly efficient, communication system.

Till the early eighties, it was believed that this independent system had little or no connection with the brain and acted independently to keep the body disease-free. However, in the late eighties and early nineties it was known that certain chemicals released by the brain activated or inactivated these cells of the immune system. Thus melatonin, a chemical released by the pineal gland, located deep inside the brain, was shown to directly activate certain lymphocytes--natural killer cells. Thus activated, these lymphocytes were far more active in devouring virus-infected tissues and tumours. While Melatonin was credited with functions as diverse as producing skin pigmentation to regulating sexual activities in animals, particularly reptiles, its function in humans had remained largely obscure. This severe deficit in knowledge had probably resulted in melatonin not getting the importance it deserved. However, the advent of more sophisticated gadgetry together with the frantic search by biologists for substances that mediate light-and-darkness-related changes in humans, resulted in attention falling on the hitherto little known hormone, Melatonin. The fact that Melatonin could directly stimulate the body defence mechanism to ward-off intruding invaders was discovered far later. A large number of endogenous chemicals found in the body do have the capacity to stimulate certain immunological functions, though not directly associated with the system per se. But most of these chemicals are either present in too low a concentration to bring about substantial changes in our defence mechanism or their duration of action is too short to be of any worth-while consequence. The case with Melatonin, however, is indeed different. Whilst its blood concentration is quite low compared to most hormones, its capacity to amplify the function of natural killer cells, is considerable and sustained.

Met Enkephalin is another chemical which when released by certain nerves deep inside the brain, at a site called amygdala, produces euphoric moods in humans. It has been subsequently discovered that this chemical, apart from being released inside the brain, is also released into the blood stream. What then baffled the investigators was the mystery about nature indulging in this seemingly wasteful process of producing excess chemicals that got washed into the blood stream, apparently serving no useful purpose. It was only in the late eighties that researchers first discovered that Met Enkephalin, the chemical that produced euphoria when released inside the brain also stimulated our immune system on entering the blood stream. The mode of stimulating the body defence system by Met Enkephalin was simple--it activated blood cells called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes once activated had the capacity to home in on and devour invading viruses and cancer cells directly. The lymphocytes with this capacity to directly decimate the invader are called `T' cells. Met Enkephalin was found to act mainly on T cells. This was the first instance where direct evidence of mind-body interaction was discovered.

Thus when one is in a happy mood, a person's capacity to ward-off disease is greater, as his/her body's defence mechanism is perceptibly stronger. A case in favour of the above finding is the study by Sandra Levy, a psychologist, at the University of Pittsburgh's Cancer Institute. She monitored thirtysix women afflicted with highly advanced breast cancer being treated at the Institute. By the seventh year twelve of the women were still alive. It may be stated here that prognosis of highly advanced breast cancer is very poor and many patients die within five years, with almost zero survivability after ten years. This study showed that two factors were mainly responsible for the survival of these women. The primary factor was how long each woman remained disease-free after treatment and the second most important factor was a high level of happiness and joy (measured by scores on a standard questionnaire) that these surviving women enjoyed.

Similar studies have been carried out with other diseases also and the results are strikingly similar. Bronchial asthma is one such disease on which extensive studies were carried out to ascertain the effect of emotions on it, if any. The studies that show a positive co-relation between the two clearly outnumber the studies that show negative correlations. In one study as many as 108 out of 268 mothers reported worsening of the child's asthma when the child was crying. In another trial 35 per cent of parents observed that some of the asthmatic attacks in their children were precipitated exclusively by adverse emotional states like fear and anxiety. Despite the fact that many trials have made it clear that certain emotions like depression can induce asthma, the exact biological changes in the body that precipitate it are not yet clear. Another interesting development in this field is the present trend to advocate yoga, particularly Pranayamaa breathing technique as a mode of treatment for Asthma. Clinical trials on Pranayama, as a technique to control Asthma have been reported in prestigious medical journals, like the British Medical Journal. Though its mode of action is yet undeciphered, there is some consensus that it might have a decisive role to play in mitigating this disease.

Studies with the disease of increased Blood Pressure, technically called Hypertension, have shown that mild cases can be exclusively treated by modification of diet (salt and fat restriction) and meditation. The mechanism hypothesized is that meditation decreases the level of certain hormones called Catecholamines in the blood which increase during stress and cause a rise in blood pressure. Scientists strongly suspected, but failed to substantiate by research, that there could be some unknown chemicals released by the brain during meditation, playing a decisive role. In 1992 there was a stunning discovery. A chemical was discovered in the brain that closely resembled Cannabis--the much abused euphoriant drug. Why did Nature stuff in Cannabis right inside our brain? The answer is yet not forthcoming, but the first of these chemicals discovered is called Anandamide--obviously derived from the Sanskrit word for ecstasy: ananda. It is not yet certain whether meditation increases the blood level of Anandamide--a distinct possibility that cannot be discounted until proved otherwise.

These findings opened an entirely new dimension of medicine. It began to be understood that effective mental training can indeed delay the progress of the disease, if not cure it. Research conducted at the same cancer institute headed by director Ronald Heberman, psychologist Sandra Levy and Judith Rodin of the Yale University, reached the same conclusion. They selected a group of cancer patients who were in remission from medical therapy. Since there remained a high risk that the disease might relapse, they were subjected to psychological training, which included meditation as a mode to increase the patient's resistance to a relapse. Eighteen patients were selected amongst the group and were given an eight week programme of meditation, mental relaxation and an attempt was made to change self-defeating beliefs in them. At the end of the study it was found that all the patients who took part in this programme developed more active natural killer cells--a type of T-lymphocyte, which destroy cancer tissue--than that developed by the rest of the patients who received only standard medical therapy!

This new science called Psycho-neuroimmunology that endeavours to study the mind, the brain and the body-interactions is still in a formative stage. But, given the fast pace of research, the day is not far off when a much clearer picture would emerge and healing by mental power would be a scientific proposition and not a metaphysical experiment as it is now. In the `mental' labs frantic pace of research is in progress to delineate the intricacies of the most mysterious object in the Universe--the human mind, The mood is akin-- to what Swami Vivekananda said almost a century ago: There is no limit to the power of the human mind.