Maintaining the contradiction: on being both the skeptic and the true believer, and neither

For a long time I’ve considered myself an outsider in my own field of Acupuncture and Chinese medicine. When I entered my professional graduate program, I was unimpressed with acupuncture; I was interested in herbal medicine primarily, because I had had good results overcoming chronic sinus infections that had plagued me since the end of childhood and for which the only cure had been multiple yearly rounds of antibiotics. With acupuncture, though I had found it relaxing, I had never achieved anything more than merely equivocal results for pain or anything else.  

I had entered acupuncture school after two years of intensive Zen meditation training, including two silent retreats lasting 3 months, and in between living at a few residential Zen centers. I had experience with what could be called “flow”: a lowering of resistance to the present moment, a suspension of fear and doubt in which pain can entirely disappear and everything feels effortless. Insights can arrive out of thin air without any sense of working to create them. Life itself can feel both saturated with meaning and also blissfully devoid of weight or expectation. But I hadn’t had any experiences one could call mystical per se, and I hadn’t been looking for any. I had been attracted to Zen precisely because of its groundedness. At a fundamental level, Zen is sitting on the floor and breathing with one’s eyes open and experiencing that unremarkable experience to a remarkable degree, to the point where the sitter and the breath and the floor lose their boundaries and become part of a whole unit, where the awareness that experiences the mind and the body and the room and the sounds emanating from outside the room as not located in any particular orientation within that system. Rather than being a small Ben within a larger Ben looking out through Ben’s eyes, I was the floor and the wall and truck outside and Ben’s body and the awareness of being aware of all that and all the space in between simultaneously. Though this is, as I described, a remarkable experience, it’s not a mystical one per se; nothing seemed to defy causality or the laws of physics. It was merely an expanded and more interesting reorganization of my own subjective sense of self, though one with liberating effects.  

In acupuncture school was when something happened that would tip me towards actual mysticism.

*** 

Dr. John Myerson had come to the New England School of Acupuncture to give a lecture on the shamanic origins of Chinese medicine. I sat in the back of the classroom, annoyed that three hours of a Saturday morning were being taken up by class time when I could have simply read about it at my own leisure and slept in. At some point during the lecture, however, I looked up and was startled to find his blue eyes radiating towards me like quasars -- simultaneously reaching across the cosmos from some distant spacetime while also disturbingly proximal as if he were sitting inches from my face. The other students, the entire rest of the room, seemed to filter out and telescope away, leaving only John’s spooky blue beacons. At that point, there was no way for me to stop paying attention. I couldn’t look away. At the break or maybe after the lecture, I walked up to him and asked him point-blank, “So what was it you were doing just now? What was that? And how do I learn about it?” 

“Oh, so you liked that, did you?” he asked, smiling, a giant Cheshire Cat. “Here’s my card.” 

My apprenticeship was not some set program, no wash-on, wash-off, no stages or gates to mark my graduation to Master Shaman. In our meetings, every few weeks to few months in a suburb of Boston, I simply sat on a couch in a residential office suite and John sat in a plush recliner opposite me in his carpeted room with plants hanging in front of the windows, and we would talk about the weather. Or maybe something more, but often not; this preliminary palaver would last about ten minutes. And then the air in the room would begin to coruscate, became visible with ghostly corpuscles or merely the floaters on my own retinas, and his face would change into other faces -- my brain’s reserve of DMT had reached some sort of critical mass by induction. Then John would then say, “Good. Now we begin” or something else benignly insane. And at that point in our sessions my memories cease until I’m on my way out the door again, writing him a check and scheduling our next appointment.  

He gave me some homework at the start of our training, something I would say on my meditation cushion, a mantra or prayer of some sort but I really don’t remember it and its function was merely contingent and arbitrary, useful only to me specifically in that phase, perhaps something merely to hang onto to structure my time and to feel that I was accomplishing something. But what I was accomplishing was unclear. The power of John Myerson’s psychedelic presence was singular and undeniable, though whether it was rubbing off on me I had no clear idea.  

In school, I was simultaneously learning to “feel the qi” in my acupuncture training, learning quite subtle palpatory skills such as meridian and pulse diagnosis, Japanese abdominal palpation, and detecting bony and ligamentous landmarks for locating points, so my acquisition of sensory precision and intuitive sensitivity was probably increasing to a certain extent simply through the usual pedagogic approaches central to these. I also took classes in craniosacral therapy from Pat Cunningham, LAc, a polymath instructor of functional anatomy, and that was quite obviously a gate into a realm of sensation seemingly more “energetic” than physical; the craniosacral rhythm (CSR), the basic palpatory target of craniosacral therapy, is unmistakable once you’ve been primed to sense it, detectable not only any spot on the body but also, for some, at a distance – which seems ludicrous to the uninitiated (though apparently it can be explained as “Traube-Hering oscillation of efferent sympathetic nervous activity” and detectable by laser-Doppler flowmetry, according to research).  

Still, I was always wary of whether I was staying within the bounds of the real or whether I had begun to convince myself of things that weren’t there. I didn’t want to get high on my own supply. But it was all so maddeningly equivocal, what was happening and what may have been imagined. It wasn’t until I finished school and had to earn my living by making people feel like they were getting something worthwhile out of my skills that I began to believe in acupuncture and, eventually, “energy” – but it took serious doubt and crisis to get there. 

I had been doing acupuncture for 4 or 5 years and had a growing if still small practice, but I was dissatisfied with my results for pain, the complaint for which most people sought treatment. So I had begun experimenting with treatments from the Master Tung tradition out of Miriam Lee’s text.  I got good results for lumbar pain, but her slim volume is short on theory, so I was at a loss as to why it was working. In acupuncture school I had had additional coursework in Korean Kyo Jung physical manipulation, which taught palpation of spinal misalignments, so I began palpating the spines of my patients before and after to see what may have changed.  

I noticed right away that the point ling gu, which I had been using from the book to treat lumbar pain, had a particular effect on pain and misalignment of the 5th lumbar vertebra. When needled opposite a rotational misalignment of L5 (ie when the spinous process of L5 pointed more one way or the other relative to the midline of the spine), the misalignment was corrected, instantaneously. It wasn’t until I took a class with Richard Tan that I was able to generalize this effect to other vertebrae by mapping other acupuncture meridians onto the affected areas of the spine, a use of the technique I had not seen taught or discussed elsewhere. Already I was shocked that I had apparently discovered something that was right there for anyone to notice, using a bunch of off-the-shelf techniques; generally, anything anatomical that is obvious has been extensively discussed. But no one was discussing this. 

Then, as I began to use this spinal palpation and mapped distal point technique, I noticed one day that I knew what I would feel in the spine before my fingers touched skin. I experimented with how distant I could be from the patient to still accurately diagnose the misalignments. One inch? Six inches? Three feet? Not in the room? Over the phone? Eventually I realized, for my mind to feel that I could perceive the state of someone’s spine, I didn’t have to see or even know the person I was diagnosing so long as they were being directed to my attention. And I noticed that I was picking up other things my patients would confirm, issues in organs or their mental or emotional state. I could feel if points were indicated and thereby discover issues my patients hadn’t told me about, whether insomnia or sinus irritation or urgent bladders, and use the points to both diagnose and treat Chinese medicine patterns using acupuncture. 

One night, as my wife and I were walking outside, she mentioned her neck pain was acting up. I had treated her many times, and was able to see the state of her spine whenever I tuned in. On friends and family I was in the habit of asking for their forearms or scalps so I could do a 10 second acupressure treatment to fix their misalignments and tension. This time, however, I instead “pressed” those points with my mind as we were walking. I recalled the muscle memory in my fingers and hands, the sensations of pressing into the soft acupoints with the appropriate pressure, and went from one point to another as I checked in with her spine, until it seemed to me it had straightened out as well as it could in that moment. I asked her to move her head and tell me where her pain was now, and she told me that, actually, it wasn’t really hurting anymore. This was the moment I realized I was probably incurably woo-woo and everything in existence felt simultaneously unreal and more real. I began to take seriously the proposition that we are living in a simulation. Why else would something impossible like this, with implications from my occultist mother’s predictions, be possible, and somehow also not a big deal? Why didn’t everyone in the world already know that such a thing was possible? I had heard of faith healing, of Jesus making the lame walk, of energy healing over the phone, but hadn’t heard of specific vertebrae being moved in such a manner to relieve mundane musculoskeletal pain. I felt like I had used Superman laser-vision to cook a hotdog. It was depressingly and exhilaratingly mundane and impossible.  

But had I? 

We know that confirmation bias is a real thing. In complementary medicine, where research is hard to design, even harder to fund, and debated endlessly regardless of what it shows, anecdote is king, and our own apparent successes drive our optimism and confidence and our recommendations for our patients, and our students. Our textbooks are compendiums of best practices based on the clinical histories of our medical ancestors, both distant and recent, but also their ideologies and conjectures and cultural assumptions. This is what “evidence-based practices” are meant to correct. And yet there is seemingly never enough evidence to convince either Chinese medicine practitioners that their particular treatments may not be as efficacious as thought for certain conditions, nor the skeptics that the hard data shows acupuncture and herbs can work and change the bodies of clinical subjects for the better to ameliorate disease even when controlled for placebo. The amount and scope of research is limited by the money to pay for it, even more so when the research is used to test a hypothesis outside of a field’s paradigm. To make our treatments based on the best evidence, we also have to acknowledge that evidence is produced through industrial and political means. “Evidence” only exists insofar as it has the imprimatur of peer-reviewed science, and peers will only review science if it is put in front of them. The hardest numbers to date on the effects of verum vs sham acupuncture, for instance, have only been published in non-clinical journals, mostly imaging journals, though you can find many equivocal studies on acupuncture in the clinical journals. It certainly seems that clinical medical practice does not wish to incorporate all available evidence. This is reality as we have constructed it; human nature can never have a science devoid of the material and psychological needs of scientists and their funders. 

But I don’t want to give myself an out here. I cannot position myself outside this discourse. I am a body in the world that also needs shelter and food and love and a certain degree of autonomy and control; I also construct my own reality based on these (usually unacknowledged) needs. We know that the placebo effect is real, moreover, and can have replicable (albeit limited) efficacy; wanting something to happen can definitely influence our ability to perceive that it has happened, even when instruments and other people would disagree. We even know that if we tell someone they are taking a placebo it can still make them feel better!  

So perhaps instead of inexplicably altering someone’s body at a distance, I merely and much more explicably have inherited a disposition for fantasy and wishful thinking, further encouraged by pseudoscience and manipulative charlatans. Maybe all that I have discovered is that I am weak of mind.  

On the other hand (and with much biased emphasis on this other hand!): 

We also know that the real-world, macroscale implications of quantum physics are wide-ranging and impossible to settle with current theory or technology. We don’t really know what, say, particle entanglement implies in the “real world.” Or what it means for the waveform collapse to be observer-dependent. Or what consciousness is, in relation to physics, especially given that we don’t really know if time’s direction and the causality at the root of the laws of thermodynamics is intrinsic to spacetime or are actually a byproduct of our consciousness. What is the relationship between quantum superposition and the fact that, Schrödinger notwithstanding, cats can’t seem to be both alive and dead when we own them as pets? Maybe when we find out I’ll know if I’m on to something!