Today is Sunday; this must be Zurich.
by Siegfried Othmer | November 17th, 2004Today is Sunday; this must be Zurich.
Life has been just a little like that recently. A well-attended public lecture and advanced training course in Alexandria, Virginia; the NF Conference in Mexico; the BSC meeting in San Francisco, and now a public lecture, Introductory and Advanced training course in Switzerland, all in less than four weeks. Right now we are still pushing to make things happen. What happens when there is an actual demand for our appearances, when there is pull as well as push?
I still need to report on the BSC Conference, where Victoria Ibric and I conducted a panel on pain management. My talk tended toward the theoretical, where I made my usual case for the General Self-Regulation Model and for the conceptual reunification of peripheral and EEG biofeedback. Victoria summarized her extensive case histories on chronic pain and found that for those people who stayed for at least twenty sessions, there was substantial benefit found by more than 90% of patients.
There were two other presentations at the BSC Conference that prompt comment. The first was by Judith Prager, who along with her husband has undertaken the project of documenting Elmer Green’s most recent work in a film documentary. This work wraps completely around Elmer’s experience with his wife’s decline into dysfunction with Alzheimer’s. The record of that experience is to be found in the three-volume book “The Ozawkie Book of the Dead,” named humbly for the place in which they were then living.
Judith showed excerpts from their sixty hours of film, accumulated in conversations with Elmer over the past year. What comes across is Elmer’s thorough orientation to scientific discipline as he explores phenomena that scientists have not been willing to touch. For example, his experiments with the copper wall—much ridiculed by Barry Sterman and others—was intended to document electromagnetic influences that might mediate the acts of healing that are attributed to “healers.” The experiments did not even get into the more difficult question of whether healing occurred as a result of such encounters. Such questions are at best difficult to answer. The experiments were intended to answer a very simple question: Was there something unusual or even unique in the interaction of the healer and the supplicant that could be measured, and that could attract the interest of serious scientists? Elmer Green’s greatest hope lay with his fellow physicists. Hence a very simple demonstration project was needed that could be readily proofed or even replicated by a physical scientist.
The electrically isolated copper wall, protected from outside electro-magnetic influences by a Faraday cage, was instrumented to show even miniscule changes, much like the early experiments to detect gravity waves. When the experiment was first tried, the signals pegged the equipment out. They were not subtle at all! So, obviously there is some process of an electro-chemical nature that is mobilized in this encounter, and the radiated component can be detected at distance. Having satisfied himself on this score, Elmer Green moved on. He is 86 years old, after all, and entitled to consider carefully where he wants to invest the remainder of his life. The fact that the rest of the scientific community has chosen not to take up the challenge of his work is not under his control.
What has gripped his interest is the profound interaction he had with his wife as she sank into the incoherence and the silence of Alzheimer’s. Over the course of several years he remained in communication with her at another level, even though her “cortical self” could no longer put more than two words together. This communication was extensive in time duration, profound in its meaning, and independently verifiable in terms of content. In this same timeframe he was also getting reports of Alyce appearing in the vivid dreams of others where she might offer advice that was relevant to the person’s immediate situation. During this timeframe she came to adopt the practice of summoning her friends into her presence every couple of weeks, during which time she would answer their questions. Elmer would be present for these encounters, but would be able to hear only the answers, not the questions.
He contrasts this to the experience somewhat earlier in his wife’s descent into the incoherence of Alzheimer’s, in which she could still lecture on familiar material when working from notes and slides, but she would become disoriented when confronted with questions. At this much later date, she was only answering questions, and she was fluid and coherent in doing so.
What strikes me in watching Elmer even more than in reading his books is the matter-of-factness with which he reports all of this—including such details as propping his wife up in a tall-back chair for her meetings with these friends, and tying her to the chair with ropes so that she would not fall over. The novelty has clearly worn off for him, and he reports on these bizarre events with casual certitude, just as if he were giving a travelogue. Elmer has given up lecturing to groups except for those that have done their homework by actually reading his books. Skepticism can wear you down.
According to Elmer, he was watching the slow transition of Alyce to another realm, one familiar to him as the Bardo of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Hence this aspect of existence is accessible to the living, and the “afterlife” is effectively already with us.
The second lecture was by Lawrence Meredith. This was a strange counter-point to the talk by Judith Prager. Meredith is the author of the book “Life Before Death, A Spiritual Journey of Mind and Body.” He was a Christian evangelist or revivalist in his earlier life, but has come to criticize Christianity for its other-worldly orientation. Jesus has been gradually stripped of his humanity, he suggests, and as a model of behavior has led our civilization toward a kind of rejection of the body, or at least an equivocal relationship to it. As a model for a different view, Meredith refers to the art of Nikos Kazantzakis, who came within a single vote of a Nobel Prize for literature some years ago. Undoubtedly what stood in the way was his publication of the book “The Last Temptation of Christ,” in which Jesus is shown subject to normal human yearnings and temptations.
So from the former Christian evangelist we hear the recommendation of living fully in this life as opposed to orienting toward the afterlife, and from the physicist Elmer Green we hear an appeal to be open to the presence of the larger spiritual world even in our corporeal existence. All this at a meeting of the Biofeedback Society of California. There was a time when “Body, Mind, and Spirit” was the slogan of the YMCA. Now it is the theme of one of the most secular organizations on the planet.
The sub-title of Elmer Green’s book is: Alzheimer’s isn’t what you think it is. Last August the Los Angeles Times Magazine had an article by Lauren Kessler on Alzheimer’s that similarly called for a re-appraisal of the condition. Following on the publication in 1997 by Tom Kitwood of the book “Dementia Reconsidered,” Kessler encounters Alzheimers patients in a residential facility with a different eye. Even though memory may be fragmentary, the person’s existence may still have considerable integrity. Grounding oneself in the moment is, after all, an objective of the meditative disciplines. Alzheimer’s patients get to live there.
We have lots of reasons to think that cortical preoccupations get in the way of our apprehending our deeper and more essential human selves. We have seen this not only through the meditative traditions but also through alpha-theta training, and now through the lucidity that was achieved by Alyce Green in her ostensibly diminished state. Interestingly, this theme was also reflected in Patti Davis’ new book about her relationship to her father (Ronald Reagan) during his descent into dysfunction.
“His soul did not have Alzheimer’s.”
And as it happens I got to see the new movie “The Notebook” on my flight back from Zurich. Unfortunately I only got interested in the movie as it was already underway. James Garner reads the notebook, a hand-written love story, to a resident at an Alzheimer’s treatment center. She keeps inquiring about what is going to happen next, but she must await the next reading…. Episodically, we see the notebook story played out. At the end of the story, there is a flash of recognition that the story refers to herself, and that the person reading to her is her husband in the story. Aware of her flawed memory, she asks, “how much time do we have?” “Maybe five minutes.” We don’t know how many times this cycle has been repeated, but the husband resists the entreaties of his children to abandon their mother to the closeting of her Alzheimer’s experience and return to his normal routines. He is married to this person, and cherishes these moments of shared awareness.
We have under-estimated the mental capacities of a person in coma.
We have apparently under-estimated the mental life of the Alzheimer’s patient.
We have discounted the intuitive and dismissed the spiritually aware.
There has been a kind of tyranny of the intellect that discounts or discredits such non-rational parts of ourselves.
We have long realized that the more profound impacts of our work occur through alpha-theta training, through the ordering of processes involving the deeper, more intrinsic self. We can only approach this work productively if we allow for the fullest expression of our human faculties, and that includes the spiritual dimension. And as a first order of business, perhaps it is necessary to set aside the judgmental propensities that the more scientific sides of ourselves always insist upon.