predictable. You could give two patients the same disease and they had completely different outcomes. So at least in human beings, we didn’t respond predictably. As does always occur, the bell-shaped curve, which there is to everything now. So, I started getting interested in mind-body medicine, and I would say I probably coined the phrase. In 1985 I wrote a book which nobody would accept, no publisher would accept, so I published it on my own,
called Creating Health: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection. The book then was picked up by Houghton Mifflin and became at national bestseller. And I wrote another book
called Quantum Healingwhich was vilified by the medical establishment because I was basically proposing, long before anybody was talking about entanglement, I was talking about the entanglement of mind, body, neuropeptides, molecules of emotion, etc., etc., from my own experience. But the books did very well with the lay public. The New England Journaldid a good review of Quantum Healing in 1988, but basically I’m still ridiculed for it by the regular medical establishment.
Matt: Were you talking about quantum entanglement—
Deepak: I wasn’t using the word quantum entanglement. I was talking about the fact that thoughts and molecules are inseparable, basically, and that between a thought and a molecule there’s a gap, and that gap is consciousness. It’s now 30 years since the book, and Rudy was my co-author. He’s a neuroscientist at Harvard and the head of neuroscience at Mass General. He wrote the foreword to the reissue of Quantum Healing, which I'll send you, but it’s almost now quaint with all that we know of now. But I used that word which annoyed a lot of people, including Richard Dawkins, who ridiculed me, and I said, "Listen, I’m using it as a metaphor."
All science, I was saying, was a metaphor anyway, but it was then that I also got very interested in meditation. And then I went to India, and I spend about 10 years in India talking to these teachers, basically, of consciousness, where consciousness is fundamental reality, it is beyond thought or experience, and the word they use is pure consciousness. So I went through an experience with a teacher of meditation who basically asked me questions like I can ask you right now. What is this? [Matt: "It’s a glass."] And what’s this? [Matt: "Flower."] And what’s this? [Matt: “A candle.”] What’s this?” [Matt: “A Sharpie.”’] “What’s this?” [Matt: “A hand. Did I get them all right?”’] So far. I said the same thing. But I was having a conversation with somebody, and he said to me, "Those are human
constructs." And I was trying to tell this person, who was a meditation teacher, I was telling him about the molecules of emotion. Serotonin. He said they’re not real.
So that got me thinking, okay, and I seriously went into wanting to experience pure consciousness, which they all talk about, as transcendence, beyond subject-object split. So, this person that I had this conversation with, he said, "If you were a baby and you had no language, not exposed to any language, this would not be a hand. This would be a shape, a form, a color, maybe a smell, a texture, a sensation, as an activity of consciousness. But then
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