What Do I Believe?

The following is a excerpt from “Into the Light” by John Lerma MD (http://www.amazon.com/Into-Light-Afterlife-Pre-Death-Experiences/dp/1564149722). This is from a chapter titled “Father Mike,” who was a 78-year-old, retired, Catholic priest who was well respected and had been president of a Catholic university. He was in the hospice unit to live his last days, diagnosed with terminal cancer. At this time, Dr Lerma was working at that hospice unit, caring for the terminally ill and making their last days as comfortable as possible. This section deals with the final minutes of Father Mike’s life:

“As I arrived at the hospice unit, the lights on the hospice floor were flickering on and off. There was an incredible sense of peace in the midst of the chaos that was occurring. Several nurses and my secretary were present. They had rushed me there to experience an inconceivable event. Every time the lights turned on and off, little feathers fell from the ceiling, drifting down as if they were snowflakes. One fell in the hand of a nurse and disappeared. As soon as they fell, they disappeared. Father Mike’s call light was going off and on. His door, which had been closed when he died, was now open. The secretary and one nurse saw a bright light shining from his room. They thought the lights were coming back on, but the bright light was radiating from his body or bed., Out of that light came this bright sphere that floated out of his body and circled the bed about three times before it soared out of the closed window. Less than a minute later, the lights came back on, it stopped raining and all the feathers disappeared. We all had goose bumps.”

I’ve tried to write this piece several times now. Each time I ended up ranting about the people who refuse to accept the evidence of the paranormal, in all it’s different forms, and I didn’t like that. I kept rewriting it, but it still didn’t feel right. Then I finally got it: The real question is, do I believe it? And the answer is, <ding> I’m not 100% sure that I do. Sure I have my intensions, but can I really accept that feathers can just appear out of nowhere and then vanish?

This now brings something into focus. There is an idea in the psychological world that everyone and every thing you dislike or hate, is part of yourself that you can’t accept. You then project it out onto people or things in the world, both separating yourself from it and unconsciously hoping that destroying it will purge it from your psyche. If that is true, then my issues with hypocrisy and abuse of power stem from my own fears and tendencies in those areas. Guess what? It turns out that I don’t have to look too long to see the truth of that, which some recent incidents have made all too clear. This leads me to the next question: What do I do about it?

I’ve been watching some Abraham-Hicks videos on YouTube. These are about a woman named Esther Hicks channels an energy that calls itself Abraham. (It took me a while before I figured that out.) Usually I don’t watch, I just listen. He/She can be very entertaining, though, at points, I sometimes I wonder why everyone is laughing so hard. (Maybe being in a seminar for 8 hours makes you a little punch-drunk?) Anyway, most of her talks center about manifesting, abundance, getting what you want, the life you want, you get the idea. I listen because these talks resonate on a very different level than someone like Tony Robbins, and give me the idea that there’s something there, if I can just wrap my head around it. In pondering/meditating while listening, the question came up about knowing who you are and what you want. At that point, I realized that I don’t know who I am.

Isn’t that a strange thought? How can you not know who you are? When I looked, I mean really looked, I could see that there is a significant part of me that I don’t have access to. It’s just an indescribable something, that is just there, and it’s completely impervious to my usual techniques to getting a handle on it. I am getting that I need to meditate in a new way to deal with it and move to the next level. I need to get out of my head, with it’s logic, language and symbols, and into something more abstract. Forget what I have been taught and practice just be with certain “concepts.”

I have spent a good portion of my life stripping away layers of conditioning and expectation, a process that has steadily accelerating over the years. At first, it was no big deal. It just made me feel better about stuff and my life better as a whole. But, as I continued, my personality and outlook began to shift. The changes were subtle at first, but over time my tastes began to change, and, eventually, I became profoundly dissatisfied and my choices led to a wholesale life restructuring. That’s a fancy way of saying that I left my career and my marriage, got a new place to live, new job and new friends. Not really on purpose, but things just happened when I realized that I could do that any more.

At this point, it seems like the process has removed most of my cultural conditioning and expectations, those “shoulds” and “should nots,” along with the fears of what will happen if deviate from the norm. I have lost a lot of comforting beliefs and rituals about the world and my place in it. But, at the same time, I have become a lot more open to new ideas. Most people cloak their skepticism in science or faith, but we all know that the simple truth is that they’re mostly worried about “what will people think?” While I wish I was completely free of that, I’m not, but I am about 90% less worried about it than I used to be. I get now that I can never be who a really am, until I can stop pretending to live up to someone else expectations. Make no mistake, we are all pretending, one way or another.

Do I believe that those paranormal things actually happened, really? Yes I am, and I’m willing to take all the flack that that engenders. What about everything else in “Into the Light?” (It has a very Christian focus) I still have very negative feelings around terms like “God,” “Jesus” and “faith.” Probably because I constantly hear those words used to justify the most hateful, hurtful and destructive actions and I can’t understand how anyone would want to be associated with the awful things that are said an done in the name of “God’s Love.” That aside, I can deal with the idea that these concepts have just as much claim to legitimacy as ghosts and guides, so I shouldn’t toss them out due to personal prejudice.

In reality, (funny to say that in connection with the paranormal, but, oh well) all “supernatural” forces are conceptually the same, whether you’re talking about God on high or the things that go bump in the night, and all evidence needs to be evaluated and considered. The waters around these phenomena are muddy enough already, there’s no point in making it worse by buying into artificial distinctions. It’s a good idea to keep my mind open all aspects of the paranormal, for that is the only way to ever begin to draw any kind of comprehensive understand of what’s going on, and what are the implications for everyday life. Then, perhaps, I can stop being upset by the compulsive skeptics.

“Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?” —Groucho Marx

Antidepressants, Hoax or Opportunity?

It’s been Fifteen years after Dr Irving Kirsch published his landmark study that showed that, in cases of mild to moderate depression, antidepressants are no more effective that a sugar pills. Yet, as of 2013, these drugs are still prescribed at a rate of 270 million prescriptions per year, costing $9.4 billion. Over the years Dr Kirsch has had to fend off numerous challenges to his results, but he has continued his research, and continues to publish with his book “The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth,” reviewed here. Other studies have supported his results. In this article, Antidepressants a Complicated Picture, published on the National Institute of Mental Health web site, Dr Thomas Insel says “Mild depression tends to improve on placebo so that the difference between antidepressant use and placebo effect is very small, or at times, absent.” The entire controversy is summarized in this 60 Minutes segment: Treating Depression is There a Placebo Effect?  (These finding relate to people with mild to moderate depression, antidepressants are shown to have greater efficacy in cases of severe depression)

The main resistance to these results seems to come from the medical community (Once you get away from the drug companies with their vested interests), and it is two fold: On one hand, the doctors see their patients get better on the drug, and on the other, doctors worry that “If that doesn’t work, what do we give them?” The answers to both concerns is actually the same, and revolve around the placebo effect, what it is and how it works.

It is a common misconception that placebos do nothing, and that is simply not true. While it is true that placebo drugs have no active ingredients, and placebo operations are only pretend, the effects they have are very real. The 60 Minutes segment above described an study where patients were given real and placebo knee operations, and the results, two years down the road, were exactly the same for real and placebo treatments. This is not say there was no significant improvements, but that the improvement were same whether the patient had the operation, or only believed they had the operation. The point is that most people given antidepressants get better, but people given placebos also improve, at exactly the same rate. But since antidepressants cost many times more than the sugar pills and can have serious side effects, are we really doing no harm by pretending they work?

Now we come to the other objection, that we have to give them something to make them feel better. Therein lies the conundrum. You see, giving a patient a placebo and calling it a drug, is unethical, by today’s standards, because you a lying to the patent. But it is apparently perfectly ethical to prescribe a placebo, if the doctor doesn’t know it’s a placebo. Which is, in effect, the situation we have now, where we spend billions of dollars a year on drugs with no more potency than sugar, and nasty side effects, but that's ok because we believe they work.

What, exactly, is the placebo effect and how does it work, and why aren't we throwing the full power of our medical system behind using it to improve patient health? You can find lots of definitions of placebo on the web, but the fact is that nobody knows how it works. But the stone cold fact is, it does, being demonstrated by the examples above.

So, why isn’t the medical establishment standing up and taking notice? I think there are a couple of reasons, the first one is that we still hang onto ideas of the nineteenth century that say that mental problems are a moral failing, that things like depression are symptoms of a “weak mind.” While we say we are more enlightened today, the perception persists is that a disease isn’t “real” unless there is a measurable, objective, biochemical basis for it. There is still a real stigma attached to mental health issues and treatment.

The other reason that we don’t exploit the placebo effect is the materialist mindset of our scientific community. Our Western mindset insists that all phenomena relating to consciousness arise from the physical brain, and, therefor, all emotional and mental issues must be curable by manipulation of that physical brain. In this model, the mind is completely separate from the body, and, despite the huge body of evidence, we still find the idea of involving the mind in treating mental and physical problems distasteful. We are so much more comfortable taking a pill, or having an operation, because that is a “real” treatment.

I really hope to see this change in my lifetime. I expect spiraling health care costs will force a shift in attitudes, if only to save money. Think about it: We are spending over $9 billion a year on the myth that depression can be treated chemically. And that is just one treatment. How many other pills, treatments, operations out there are equally expensive and also no better than a placebo. Can we really afford to keep going down this path? The biggest obstacle here, is that all the large players in the medical system have strong interests in keeping things just as they are, since introducing any new alternative treatment methods will, inevitably, take money and business from the current players.

I am seeing these attitudes shifting, slowly, and I hope we see some significant progress on this before the our health system implodes.