Of course they did not meet in person, although they could have. They are contemporaries, both even in the US. But the question if they did or didn’t meet misses the point that they are trying to make in their writing and sharing. The point is that, as they both command a deeper understanding of mind, there can be a meeting of minds. The Tibetan sage calls this Buddha or enlightened mind, the Texas internist, to avoid religious overtones, non-local mind. And although “enlightened” and “non-local” mind may not be exactly the same, they differ not so much in essence, but rather in the slight variations or shades of meaning that the intellect can superimpose – after the fact of tasting it.
Something is in the air. The old understanding of an allegedly fixed, unchanging, and above all, singular and “objective” reality is fast losing ground, even in a stodgy science like medicine. This does not infer for us any need to deny the reality of the objective, which would be futile, because we will still hurt, if we bang our heads against a rock. We only learn to see how “relative” this reality actually is. It is malleable. And so is medicine, so is healing. It does not exclusively happen via medication through the clever manipulation of defect or missing molecules. This clever manipulation of molecules is but one aspect of healing. Healing also happens through understanding, which in essence is without substance and non-local. As the Tibetan sage, his name is Thinley Norbu, states in his book White Sail regarding physical cures:
“Through their medicine doctors strive to cure sickness, never understanding the connection between inner and outer elements, which creates disease. Fixing one part, they ignore the whole like a bad carpenter, who repairs the ceiling while the floor is caving in; or like a tree surgeon, who cuts the branches of a poisoned tree while the poison remains in the root. – Between impairing and repairing they are suffering because they forget my dream that when the sense object meets the sense, that is the echo.”
What did he say just now? What creates disease? - “Never understanding the connection between inner and out elements”. Exactly this is what creates disease.
According to him this very lack of understanding is the main disease-causing factor. And where does the healing come in? Through the understanding that “when the sense object meets the sense, that is the echo.” Or by intuiting how much so-called objective events are actually an echo of inner processes, although in this case the juxtaposition of “inner” versus “outer” ceases to apply.
We can also state what is happening here (very roughly) in terms of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the set-up for the test determines its outcome. From which it follows: the very way in which the sense object meets the sense, determines the quality of the echo. What a beautiful definition for mind/body medicine! We live in a hall of mirrors maintained by the unbroken, continually evolving feedback loop of our own and other minds’ input and outer reality’s echo…
But then, if it is merely an echo, how real can outer reality be? How spatially and temporally defined? How “nailed down”?
No matter what answer we find to these questions (provided we dare to NOT base them solely on the preconceived ideas of others but on our own exploration), healing and medicine unfold within this very feedback loop between sense object and sense. They have a “nuts-and-bolts” aspect, but likewise the aspect of the non-local ungraspable echo – and many aspects in-between.
This is why Larry Dossey, the Texas Internist speaks of three eras of medicine and healing, which he simply calls eras I, II & III. Era I is the medicine we are familiar with, the textbook medicine. It is mechanical, material and physical. In era II the focus shifts from the body to the mind/body continuum. It is mind-body medicine, as for example demonstrated by the biofeedback technique. Era III, Dossey calls “Eternity Medicine”, which for some may sound too mystical but in fact only constitutes a different view of the same reality, the same “echo”. In his book Reinventing Medicine he describes era III medicine as having “Mind as a factor of healing both within and between persons. Mind is not completely localized to points in space (brains or bodies) or time (present moment or single lifetimes). Mind is unbounded in space and time and thus is ultimately unitary or one. Healing at a distance is possible. (Era III medicine is) not describable by classical concepts of space-time or energy-matter.”
If anyone thinks that such considerations are not for “realists” but peddled by people who are weak-minded or a little soft in their heads, the answer is “no”. For example surveys by the University of Chicago’s “National Opinions Research Council” found that “People who have tasted the paranormal, whether they accept it intellectually or not, are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases. They are, for the most part, ordinary Americans, somewhat above norm in education and intelligence and somewhat less than average in religious involvement.” According to University of Chicago psychologist Norman Bradburn, “No other factor had ever been found to correlate so highly with psychological balance as did mystical experience”.
This is stimulating stuff. But, coming back to the more immediate concerns of the practicing physician, we had a reason to set up this fictional meeting between the Tibetan sage and the Texas internist for this blog (yes, Thinly Norbu is Tibetan and undoubtedly a sage, and yes, Larry Dossey is from Texas and holds an MD in internal medicine, and also has practiced internal medicine for many years of his life).
The reason is simply this: if as physicians we want to graduate from the car mechanic mentality (only that we do not repair or tune up engines, but human bodies), we have no choice but to embrace all three of Larry Dossey’s three eras of medicine in our daily routine. After all, patients are people, human beings,… echoes of their own and others mind/body continuums – not cars with broken down parts. Certainly, we need to have a grasp on the mechanics, but we cannot content ourselves with such limiting approach, because it ultimately makes us ineffective.
If you want to find out more, read Larry Dossey’s Reinventing Medicine. In its review the rather stodgy Journal of the American Medical Association conceded that, “Larry Dossey MD has done a masterful job of meticulously documenting the science at the frontiers of medicine while expanding those frontiers even further.”