Another condition that graphically illustrates the mind’s power to affect the body is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). In addition to possessing different brain-wave patterns, the sub-personalities of a multiple have strong psychological separation from one another. Each has his own name, age, memories and abilities. Often each also has his own style of handwriting, announced gender, cultural and racial background, artistic talents, foreign language fluency and IQ.
Even more noteworthy are the biological changes that take place in a multiple’s body when they switch personalities. Frequently a medical condition possessed by one personality will mysteriously vanish when another personality takes over. Dr. Bennett Braun of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality, in Chicago, has documented a case in which all of a patient’s subpersonalities were allergic to orange juice, except one. If the man drank orange juice when one of his allergic personalities was in control, he would break out in a terrible rash. But if he switched to his nonallergic personality, the rash would instantly start to fade and he could drink orange juice freely.
Dr. Francine Howland, a Yale psychiatrist who specializes in treating multiples, relates an even more striking incident concerning one multiple’s reaction to a wasp sting. On the occasion in question, the man showed up for his scheduled appointment with Howland with his eye completely swollen shut from a wasp sting. Realizing he needed medical attention, Howland called an ophthalmologist. Unfortunately, the soonest the ophthalmologist could see the man was an hour later, and because the man was in severe pain, Howland decided to try something. As it turned out, one of the man’s alternates was an “anesthetic personality” who felt absolutely no pain. Howland had the anesthetic personality take control of the body, and the pain ended. But something else also happened. By the time the man arrived at his appointment with the ophthalmologist, the swelling was gone and his eye had returned to normal. Seeing no need to treat him, the ophthalmologist sent him home.
After a while, however, the anesthetic personality relinquished control of the body, and the man’s original personality returned, along with all the pain and swelling of the wasp sting. The next day he went back to the ophthalmologist to at last be treated. Neither Howland or her patient had told the ophthalmologist that the man was a multiple, and after treating him, the ophthalmologist telephoned Howland. “He thought time was playing tricks on him,” Howland laughed. “He just wanted to make sure that I had actually called him the day before and he had not imagined it.”
Allergies are not the only thing multiples can switch on and off. If there was any doubt as to the control the unconscious mind has over drug effects, it is banished by the pharmacological wizardry of the multiple. By changing personalities, a multiple who is drunk can instantly become sober. Different personalities also respond differently to different drugs. Braun records a case in which 5 milligrams of diazepam, a tranquilizer, sedated one personality, while 100 milligrams had little or no effect on another. Often one or several of a multiple’s personalities are children, and if an adult personality is given a drug and then a child’s personality takes over, the adult dosage may be too much for the child and result in an overdose. It is also difficult to anesthetize some multiples, and there are accounts of multiples waking up on the operating table after one of their ‘unanesthetizable’ subpersonalities has taken over.
Other conditions that can vary from personality to personality include scars, burn marks, cysts, and left- and right-handedness. Visual acuity can differ, and some multiples have to carry two or three different pairs of eyeglasses to accommodate their alternating personalities. One personality can be color-blind and another not, and even eye color can change. There are cases of women who have two or three menstrual periods each month because each of their subpersonalities has its own cycle. Speech pathologist Christy Ludlow had found that the voice pattern for each of the multiple personalities is different, a feat that requires such a deep physiological change that even the most accomplished actor cannot alter his voice enough to disguise his voice pattern. One multiple, admitted to a hospital with diabetes, baffled her doctors by showing no symptoms when one of her nondiabetic personalities was in control. There are accounts of epilepsy coming and going with changes in personality, and psychologist Robert A. Philips, Jr., reports that even tumors can appear and disappear (although he does not specify what kind of tumors). [...]
The systems of control that must be in place to account for such capacities is mind-boggling and makes our ability to will away a wart look pale. Allergic reaction to a wasp sting is a complex and multi-faceted process and involves the organized activities of antibodies, the production of histamine, the dilation and rupture of blood vessels, the excessive release of immune substances, and so on. What unknown pathways of influence enable the mind of a multiple to freeze all these processes in their tracks? Or what allows them to suspend the effects of alcohol and other drugs in the blood, or turn diabetes on or off? At the moment we don’t know and must console ourselves with one simple fact. Once a multiple has undergone therapy and in some way becomes whole again, he or she can still make these switches at will. This suggests that somewhere in our psyches we all have the ability to control these things. And still this is not all we can do.
Some of Whitton's research is also relevant to this issue. Amazingly, when Whitton hypnotized patients and regressed them to the between-life state, they too reported all the classic features of the [near-death experience (NDE)], passage through a tunnel, encounters with deceased relatives and/or "guides," entrance into a splendorous light-filled realm in which time and space no longer existed, encounters with the luminious beings, and a life review. In fact, according to Whitton's subjects the main purpose of the life review was to refresh their memories so they could more mindfully plan their next life, a process in which the beings of light gently and noncoercively assisted.
Like Ring, after studying the testimony of his subjects Whitton concluded that the shapes and structures one perceives in the afterlife dimension are thought-forms created by the mind. "René Descartes' famous dictum, 'I think, therefore I am,' is never more pertinent than in the between-life state," says Whitton. "There is no experience in existence without thought."
This was especially true when it came to the form Whitton's patients assumed in the between-life state. Several said they didn't even have a body unless they were thinking. "One man described it by saying that if he stopped thinking he was merely a cloud in an endless cloud, undifferentiated," he observes. "But as soon as he started to think, he became himself" (a state of affairs that is oddly reminiscent of the subjects in Tart's mutual hypnosis experiment who discovered they didn't have hands unless they thought them into existence).
In describing the hereafter one child said that food appeared whenever she wished for it, but there was no need to eat, an observation that underscores once again the illusory and hologramlike nature of the afterlife reality.
This isn’t enough for Friston, who uses the term “active inference” to describe the way organisms minimize surprise while moving about the world. When the brain makes a prediction that isn’t immediately borne out by what the senses relay back, Friston believes, it can minimize free energy in one of two ways: It can revise its prediction—absorb the surprise, concede the error, update its model of the world—or it can act to make the prediction true. If I infer that I am touching my nose with my left index finger, but my proprioceptors tell me my arm is hanging at my side, I can minimize my brain’s raging prediction-error signals by raising that arm up and pressing a digit to the middle of my face.
And in fact, this is how the free energy principle accounts for everything we do: perception, action, planning, problem solving. When I get into the car to run an errand, I am minimizing free energy by confirming my hypothesis—my fantasy—through action.
Again, it appears that in a reality created solely out of interacting thought structures, even the landscape itself is sculpted by the ideas and expectations of the experiencer.
At this juncture an important point needs to be made. As startling and foreign as the near-death realm seems, the evidence presented in this book reveals that our own level of existence may not be all that different. As we have seen, we too can access all information, it is just a little more difficult for us. We too can occasionally have personal flashforwards and come face-to-face with the phantasmal nature of time and space. And we too can sculpt and reshape our bodies, and sometimes even our reality, according to our beliefs. [...]
In fact, it appears that this reality and the next are different in degree, but not in kind. Both are hologramlike constructs, realities that are established, as Jahn and Dunne put it, only by the interaction of consciousness with its environment. Put another way, our reality appears to be a more frozen version of the afterlife dimension. It takes a little more time for our beliefs to resculpt our bodies into things like nail-like stigmata and for the symbolic language of our psyches to manifest externally as synchronicities. But manifest they do, in a slow and inexorable river, a river whose persistent presence teaches us that we live in a universe we are only just beginning to understand.
To recap then: Souls released from the body quickly remember to monitor and control their thoughts very carefully, for whatever they think of, that is what they create and experience.
I say again, it is the same for souls still residing in a body, except the results are usually not as immediate. And it is the "time" lapse between thought and creation — which can be days, weeks, months, or even years — which creates the illusion that things are happening to you, not because of you. This is an illusion, causing you to forget that you are at cause in the matter.
As I have described now several times, this forgetting is "built into the system". It is part of the process. For you cannot create Who You Are until you forget Who You Are. So the illusion causing forgetfulness is an effect created on purpose.
When you leave the body, it will therefore be a big surprise to see the instant and obvious connection between your thoughts and your creations. It will be a shocking surprise at first, and then a very pleasant one, as you begin to remember that you are at cause in the creation of your experience, not at the effect of it.
Why is there such a delay between thought and creation before we die, and no delay at all after we die?
Because you are working within the illusion of time. There is no delay between thought and creation away from the body, because you are also away from the parameters of time.
In other words, as You have said so often, time does not exist.
Not as you understand it. The phenomenon of "time" is really a function of perspective.
Why does it exist while we are in the body?
You have caused it to by moving into, by assuming, your present perspective. You use this perspective as a tool with which you can explore and examine your experiences much more fully, by separating them into individual pieces, rather than a single occurrence.
Life is a single occurrence, an event in the cosmos that is happening right now. All of it is happening. Everywhere.
There is no "time" but now. There is no "place" but here.
Here and now is All There Is.
Yet you chose to experience the magnificience of here and now in its every detail, and to experience your Divine Self as the here and now creator of your reality. There were only two ways — two fields of experience — in which you could do that. Time and space.
So magnificent was this thought that you literally exploded with delight!
In that explosion of delight was created space between the parts of you, and the time it took to move from one part of yourself to another.
In this way you literally tore your Self apart to look at the pieces of you. You might say that you were so happy, you "fell to pieces."
You've been picking up the pieces ever since.
Even the symbolic language of the psyche is given "objective" form. For example, one of Whitton's subjects said that when he was introduced to a woman who was going to figure prominently in his next life, instead of appearing as a human she appeared as a shape that was half-rose, half-cobra.