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Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green

The blood-cell experiment …. is worth discussing even though we did not see it demonstrated because Swami did not complete the experiments planned. In explaining it he said that just before taking a blood sample we were to say, "20 percent," "40 percent," "100 per-cent," or "zero," or any other number. Then a drop of his blood would be extricated and put on a microscope slide and the fraction of dead white blood cells could be counted. He would kill, he said, whatever fraction was commanded at the time of the sampling.

I asked how he could kill individual cells. After long discussion ("long" because the Swami told of following procedures from the Sanskrit scriptures involving processes with which he was not totally familiar), I pieced together the following picture.

The body and the mind are both energy structures. In fact, the body is a subsection of the mind. Almost all of the body is in the unconscious, however, and thereby beyond ordinary control. In order to control cells of the body it is necessary to control "cells" of the unconscious. If one can extend conscious control over all parts of the unconscious, then all parts of the body come under control. If the mind is withdrawn from a particular section of the unconscious, the corresponding area of the body dies. That is how death is defined, according to theory. Organized tissues which are bereft of organizing mind fall back into the cosmic pool of physical matter, which is in a general state of disorganization, and the pattern gradually dissolves.

This explanation from Swami Rama is, I discovered later, essentially the same as that given by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras, composed twenty-two centuries ago. Everything consists of "mind and its modifications" (Taimni, 1967). I first read that sutra in 1950, but it had no particular impact at that time.