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heart stopped beating completely and stayed silent for 17 seconds. The doctors standing around the
Swami were getting very nervous. According to everything they knew about medicine, once the heart
stopped, a person was dead. Without any special medical help no one, they thought, could survive
having his heart stopped as was happening right at that moment in front of them.
After 17 seconds, the Swami's heart began beating as quickly as it had stopped, his eyes fluttered
open, he stood up, disconnected the many wires attached to his body, and left for another
appointment. All the instruments studying his brain and body showed that, just like Jack Schwarz, at
the moment his heart had stopped, his brain had been producing soothing alpha waves which put him
in the right frame of mind to take over complete control of his body.
After seeing startling feats like these, many people began to wonder just how easy it was to learn
some of these yogi powers. Their question was answered when one man, Dr. Neal Miller of The
Rockefeller University in New York City, managed to teach some of the powers of a fakir not to a
human but to a small white rat.
Miller connected a small electric wire to the rat's pleasure center in its brain. Every time he pressed a
button, he could switch on the rat's pleasure center, making him feel good all over. With this pleasure
button, Miller rewarded his rat every time it, at first accidentally, controlled a part of its body. Before
long the little rat figured out how to speed up or slow down its heart, completely relax its stomach,
and even blush in one ear to get some electricity pulsed to its pleasure center.
After the news of Dr. Miller's amazing rat got around, others figured that if a rat could learn how to do
all these things, a person could too. As a result, some experts figured out a way to do it by a special
method that is now called biofeedback. Since the key to all the powers of the yoga is the special alpha
rhythm of the brain, experts have managed to build a special biofeedback machine that actually listens
to the human brain and signals a person with a buzzer or a blinking light, when he has his alpha
rhythms going in his brain. By learning how to make the lights blink or the buzzer sound, people also
learn how to put themselves in the yogi state of mind.
The way biofeedback usually works is that a person puts on a special metal, brainwave-detecting
headband, connected to a signal box. When a person starts making alpha waves in his head, the
headband picks them up and turns on the lights or buzzer in the signal box. Once the person sees or
hears the signal, he keeps on doing whatever he was doing to keep his alpha rhythms going. Usually
looking at or thinking of a completely relaxing scene, such as a quiet pond without a ripple on its
surface, or lying in the sun on a warm deserted beach is all it takes for most people to keep their alpha
waves going.
By keeping themselves in this serene alpha wave state, many people have been able to do some
intriguing things to their bodies. In some cases, for example, people who usually suffered from
excruciatingly painful headaches caused by too much blood concentrated in their brains would cure
themselves by rerouting the blood flow through their bodies. They did this by making blood rush to
their hands when they felt a headache coming on, taking the pressure off their head.
In other experiments, people with weak hearts learned how to take the strain off their hearts with
biofeedback. By putting themselves in an alpha wave state, they were actually able to slow down their
hearts, just like a fakir, and lower their blood pressure.
One doctor even managed to use the special powers of biofeedback to help a women whose face was
paralyzed because some of the nerves controlling it were dead. He managed to reconnect the muscles
on the face to live nerves in the woman's shoulders. Then, using biofeedback, the woman learned to
tell the tiny muscles and nerves in her back to take over control of the muscles in her face. She was
able to make her face come alive again using her back muscles and her brain's alpha rhythms.
Even athletes have been able to use biofeedback to improve their performances. In one case, a prize-
winning swimmer in Rochester, New York, found she couldn't swim at her best in some races because
she unconsciously tensed her shoulder and neck muscles while swimming. This cramped her
swimming style so that she lost some races she felt she could have won. After taking biofeedback
lessons, she learned how to get her brain to settle into an alpha wave state. Then she learned how to
keep those tense muscles relaxed when she wanted. She could even do this while swimming and it
wasn't long before she began winning more and more races.
Even with some of the elaborate electronic equipment that is used in biofeedback, no one has been
able to duplicate some of the more spectacular feats of the yogis. For example, while people can learn
to slow down their hearts, no one has been able to start and stop his heart the way Swami Rama did.
Another feat that biofeedback experts haven't done yet is duplicate a special kind of deep sleep the
yogis can turn off or on.
It is said that a skilled yogi's brain produces a different kind of brain wave called the delta wave.
While he is doing this, he suddenly drops into a sleep so deep that 15 minutes of it is equal to one
hour of normal sleep. In one instance, Swami Rama demonstrated another remarkable power he had
during this deep sleep - the ability to hear and remember everything that went on around him while he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]