Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
DJB: So you see it as a natural extension of your own development?
LAURA Yes. When you feel the immensity of the possible, naturally you are interested in plunging into it. When you feel good, you plunge deeper. However, at my age--I am eighty--I often am exhausted. Then I have to stay quietly--I have no choice. And then again something new happens. It may be something distressing and I just have to deal with it however I can. Or something wonderful happens, giving me again the overwhelming apprehension of life's renaissance forever, even when death may be around the corner.
RMN: How did your interest in psychotherapy develop?
LAURA In 1949 Ginny Pfeiffer, my best friend, was diagnosed as a terminal cancer case. The Mayo Clinic declared with total certainty that there was no possibility for her to get well. Death would come in six months, or if a miracle would happen, in two years. It was a shock. It plunged me into all kinds of exploration. Until then, my life had first been devoted to the violin, totally. After that, I had started to work in films. I had never studied medicine, psychology, nutrition or healing. Actually, I had left school at fourteen so I could concentrate my energy on practicing and concertizing.
The doctors of the Mayo Clinic kept telling me, "Miss Archera, you must face reality. Your friend is going to die in about six months." I just could not accept what the authorities told me. And let me add that at that time at the Mayo Clinic the authorities were very kind and wonderfully supportive. In fact, I became a good friend with the Mayo family then, in 1950. But, I could not accept that death sentence. So I began to study everything under the sun. I went to lectures, and then started to actually practice on my friend. So that is the way it happened. Usually, it is a drama, a trauma that pushes us into something else, because I never thought I would be involved in psychology. It was completely out of my field.
RMN: So did it help her?
LAURA She lived twenty-three years longer. She is written up in all the case reports.
DJB: Wow. Well, I wanted to ask you about something that you talk about in your book
Between Heaven and Earth--a recipe for living
that involves the transmutation of energy through the imagination, the will, and the body. Can you tell us about this?
LAURA A powerful triangle: the imagination, the will, and the body. I mean the will is ultimately what is us. We are not speaking about that stiff will that betrays the body and does not accept the imagination, but the will that is attentive to the urging of imagination, and the needs of the body. That is a triangle that responds in all ways--because the body responds to the imagination. If you two would just imagine that there is a big tiger that is going to come right out and chew you.
DJB: The body responds.
LAURA Immediately. Because the imagination and the body are so close, the will has to take an overview and direct it. I have exercises for this triangle in my book
Between Heaven and Earth
. The will is basic, as are the two cooperators of the will--imagination and body. The will is the conductor of the rich vast orchestra of imagination and body.
DJB: Had you heard of this model from anyone else, or did you come up with it yourself!
LAURA No. I never heard it from anyone.
DJB: Well, I'll tell you, one time while I was in the midst of an altered state I wrote the following down in my notebook: Everything that exists comes through the imagination, is directed by the will, and expressed through the physical body. I considered it to be a profound insight.
LAURA Exactly the same thing, and so well expressed.
DJB: Then I opened up your book and found it there several months later.
LAURA Oh really? Well, that's extremely interesting. You and I seem to be the only people, because no one has paid much attention to this concept.
DJB: It is a good model for understanding how everything comes into existence.
LAURA Including the placebo effect. Years ago, if a patient's symptoms could not be given a diagnostic label, the doctor would say, "It's just your imagination." As you know a certain percentage of the population is cured by taking a medicine that has no curative property; it is just a pill with nothing in it. How do these people get well? It seems to me that their will to get well directs their imagination which on its own, in turn, influences body chemistry. This is again the triangle we're discussing. I suppose that those people who are healed by a placebo have a closer connection, maybe a direct line from the will to the imagination and body.
I remember when I was fourteen years old, I read a book entitled
Things Greater Than Himself
, by an Italian author by the name of Zuccoli. It recounts the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who had fallen in love with an older woman who was hardly aware of his existence. Well, I was a fourteen-year-old girl who had fallen in love with an older man who was hardly aware of my existence. The boy became so sad, so desperate that he died. I became so sad, so desperate; but I did not die. And even then, I wondered: why did he die and I didn't? Now I think that maybe his connection of will (in this case the will to die) to imagination and body was stronger than mine! Actually that feeling of being surrounded, propelled, sometimes, exhausted by things greater than myself is often with me; by now I should be used to it! But I am not.
DJB: I know that you're fascinated with the subject of nutrition. What have you ]earned, in a nutshell, about how one's diet can affect one's physical or mental well-being?
LAURA When I was helping my sick friend, I went to Rancho La Puerta, a spa on the Mexican border. Now it is a very well known, beautiful, and elegant spa. Then it was only a few houses. I think we paid five dollars a day. There was Professor Szekely--he's dead now, but his wife and son are constantly improving the spa. I learned from Professor Szekely basic elements of nutrition. I learned in 1950 what is now being discovered, a simple obvious fact of nature. Nutrition is a transformer of consciousness and touches every point of our lives. In fact, when I look in the Health & Cooking section of a bookstore, I can see that the subject of food and nutrition is involved in politics and finance, in war and peace, in loveand hatred.
Basically, all that has been written about nutrition from the point of view of the choice of food could be summarized in one page. I would say, buy food that is grown very near the place where you live, not something that is transported and preserved like a four-thousand-year old Egyptian mummy. Read
Diet for a New America
by John Robbins and you will learn just about all you need to know about food choices. But we must be aware that it is not just what we eat that's important; we must choose the food our body can metabolize. Now I don't eat any animal food, and haven't for a long time. I eat one egg once in a while, but no cheese or meat.
DJB: Is this for nutritional or for spiritual reasons?
LAURA First of all, I know the way that animals are treated, and they're full of drugs. If I want to take drugs, I don't have to take them through a cow or a chicken. I like to choose! The animals are killed when they are full of rage, when all the adrenaline is flowing. So it is for taking care of myself first, and also to protect the way animals are treated. I wrote at length about this subject in
Between Heaven and Earth
.
DJB: So you feel that if you eat an animal that was killed in certain way, then you would be absorbing some of that energy state?
LAURA Yes, we absorb the nutrition and we absorb the toxicity as well. Of course, the miracle is that our body eliminates much of what is harmful, but seeing the increase in degenerative diseases, even among the young, it is clear that there is a limit even to the immense wisdom of the body. I have been a few times, not very often, on a fast. After a fast, you are more sensitive and you will know pretty well what to eat. You will know that we all eat at least twice as much as we need.
RMN: We become very sensitized to what is healthy and what is not.
LAURA Oh yes; and you will eat much less and be better nourished when you eat simple food and enjoy it.
RMN: Do you believe in vitamins?
LAURA If you had a perfect environment, the perfect lover, and the perfect food, you obviously wouldn't need any vitamins. But the way we live, with tension and noise and pollution, supplements are necessary. I studied the mega vitamin system and then I studied homeopathy, which are the two extremes. It is difficult to decide because the person and his or her situation has to be taken into consideration first. Even with vitamins, the basic question is in the relationship we have with them. For instance, when I was young, I could take niacin in large doses and it did me a lot of good. Now I can take only a little.
RMN: On the theme of mental health I would like to ask you a question about mental health institutions, which from my experience are often places for retreat and stasis, rather than transformation. Why do you think that during the past hundred years there has been so much theoretical advance in the science of psychology, yet the practical applications of psychotherapy don't seem to have advanced that much?
LAURA Psychotherapy profits from the science of psychology but the basic difference, it seems to me, is that psychotherapy is understanding while psychology is knowledge. Psychotherapy is mainly a humanistic and artistic endeavor-psychology is involved in scientific research of actual human behavior--on the other hand the psychotherapist's premise is that in all of us there are valuable latent qualities, which, given the opportunity, can emerge and flower. Apart from psychology I am thinking of the extraordinary series of lectures Aldous gave at USC and MIT on many subjects, not only psychotherapy, but also for the ecological situation as it was in 1959. Everything he previewed is here: in other words, the ecological situation is enormously worsened. Moreover, the inexpensive, practical methods he suggested have not been taken into consideration.
It has been said that it takes twenty-eight years for any good idea to be accepted. Well, thirty-three years have passed now and prestigious conferences about ecology are happening. We have to hope. We all have had the experience of giving a simple suggestion to a friend: take a one hour walk every morning; eat an apple last thing before going to bed and another first thing when you get up. Those are simple, inexpensive Rx, but the person, rather than taking charge, chooses to get a pill or go to an expensive seminar or psychiatrist; which is also effective, but it seems to me that trying a simple thing first is to be considered. Primitive cultures sometimes use very simple means with effective results.
RMN: That's very true. In many non-technological societies, such as exist in Borneo and also in the Amazon, there are ritualized battles where very few, if any, people get killed and the tribe is offered a form of release from pent-up emotional stress. So do you think part of the problem with violent crime in the West is related to our not having a socially acceptable channel for our frustrations?
LAURA Oh yes. Look, I was visiting Brazil with Aldous, and in Rio on a Saturday night we went to see a ritual called the "makoommba" The people would dance together, sing and go on and on and on and on. By 3:00 A.M., they be sweating and breathing enormously, the frustration was gone and they be laughing and dancing. Aldous spoke enthusiastically about "makoomba," how more effective and less expensive it was than lying on the psychoanalyst's couch. Now we know that while dancing, running, and swimming, the body produces chemicals called endorphins which give us a happy, elated feeling. We have our own inner chemical factory. We have to learn how to use it well.
DJB: So are you saying that the problem stems from just repressed physical ? Would something as simple as playing sports be helpful?
LAURA Oh that is wonderful, yes. That was the Greek idea. They used sports and emphasized the mobility and the nobility of the body. But even if you would take groups of people out in the open, near mountains or water or forests, give them just a little bit of ritualistic direction, like you were saying, it would be much more effective than giving them advice. They know it all already.
RMN:Or think they do. What do you think are some of the major psychological differences between men and women, and how can these differences complement one another rather than being a source of tension?
LAURA Well, I think that there is not such a great psychological and emotional difference between men and women. I think that we make the differences and that if we would accept the fact of androgyny, there would be balance and cooperation, rather than competition. Each one is both: every man has some feminine elements and every woman some masculinity. When I asked Krishnamurti a religious person, he said (among other things) that a religious person must be both man and woman--I don't mean sexually, he said, but must know the dual nature of everything; the religious person must feel and be both masculine and feminine.