Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Generation Bridge

Why do Chinese and Japanese families maintain the precarious parent-child relationship more successfully than the rest of us? Are they more tolerant of their children, or are the latter more respectful of their parents?

When I lived in the home of an American Colonel stationed in Japan, his Japanese servants practically ran the house, decided on menus, cleaning arrangements, even on what the Colonel and his wife should wear each day. It was a beautiful and efficient game, finally resulting in the Colonel paying the man servant’s way through medical school in the United States, and other well-deserved benefits accruing to the girl servants. This supposedly precarious relationship between two basically different cultures and resulting from a devastating war, turned out better and healthier than many of our most well-established domestic family relationships.

Un-bridged generation gaps or, for that matter, gaps of any serious nature between either age groups or other groups in a society or nation disturb and confuse the purpose and intent of such a society and makes sensible policies difficult or impossible to carry out. The gaps themselves and how to deal with them demand all the attention and energy of the decision- makers. All other plans and policies are left waiting, such as work priorities, and following those, employment opportunities so that, for example, gap -ridden societies drift into major unemployment. Recognize a case illustrating this, anyone?

When a Japanese executive reaches retirement age, he is retained; regularly, as a consultant; in particular, responsible for the proper training of younger executives. There is no generation gap, only a well-trafficked generation bridge. When an American executive reaches retirement age, battle stations are manned, the warring factions mobilizing all their skills demanding either the executive’s final retirement or, the other side, claiming he’s an exception and should be permitted to continue working for the good of the company. There is no free competition any longer, just a socially enforced handicap. Let someone calculate how much energy is spent, how many urgent decisions are postponed while debilitating fighting is going on.

Should we praise ourselves for being more fiercely independent and less respectful, thus serving efficiency? Are we serving efficiency that way?

The child, during his first years, is enjoying the parents’ firm guidance. The parents, in turn, enjoy being guides. In due time the child craves independence, more and more. Even if the parents comply, the memory of earlier firm guidance irritates the child at this period, if not. a Chinese or Japanese child, and the greatest. wisdom is required to rebuild a bridge that is falling apart. Every person develops certain concepts or thought patterns that become sacred, especial to the young. A parent must abandon any wish to impose his own concepts or thoughts, however apparently justified, be it in science, religion, morality or Just social amenities. But this is not enough — the attitude of the wise parent must be one of respectful silence, waiting for the youngster to talk rather than clamoring for attention to present one’s own indomitable concepts.

The entire human race may be too fond of concepts and theories today. Ancient Yogis and Sufis and modern minds of similar trends de-emphasize thought structures or ignore them. This may be a good idea to try for all of us, though some philosophers would have hysterics. Their science, lately, has deteriorated into a listing of concepts, mistaking this for schools of philosophy. Are the easier generation relationships in China and Japan due to less concept-ridden thought patterns in those countries?

But there must, be something sacred inviolate that everybody must accept. There is, though not in the shape of words or concepts. Life is sacred, living beings are. The concepts of these living beings are not sacred and need not be shared, but should be respected. When her only son turned out a yogi, at an early age, my mother of a lineage of Lutheran clergy, didn’t bat an eye. She showed deep and touching respect for my views as well as for my new yoga friends. When, at 27, I became a Sufi she was equally respectful. When I, a yogi and Sufi, saw my only son turn into a fundamentalist Christian, his minister boasting to me that he “would never return to that Sufi nonsense,” I kept my cool and my respect. Besides, I guessed what would happen; my son turned quietly away from the fundamentalists, and began questioning me guardedly about yoga and meditation.

An older man made inquiries about yoga and meditation at that same time, and for more compelling reasons. Dr. Carl Simonton had been involved in cancer research since 1966. In the following, the doctor’s own explanations are exclusively used to avoid inaccuracies, and because they represent the yogic view better than most yoga exponents do. There are also unusual and useful generation bridges involved.

Dr. Simonton began work with high hopes. After three years he was disappointed. He sensed a need for free and fresh thinking in this area, but with the tremendous responsibility of human life involved he dared not think, far less act, outside current concepts and teachings. Then he heard a talk by a prominent immunotherapist who held that every one had cancer many times during his or her life time and that clinical cancer only developed for one of two reasons: First, that particularly resistant cancer cells developed, or that particularly strong cancer cells invaded the body; second, that the body’s “immune mechanism” or host resistance broke down to some degree and allowed these abnormal cells to grow into a size which was detectable. This basic host mechanism is the same that destroys all abnormal cells presented to the body bacteria, viruses and the like.

The speaker had tested his theory on terminal leukemic patients who had failed on all other forms of chemotherapy. He had made a solution of concentrate of their abnormal white cells and applied this solution to a prepared area of the skin in the hope of evoking an immune response that would in turn attack disease in the body. He achieved a fifty percent remission rate in these leukemic patients. Then other doctors became interested and tried the same method. They obtained only half as good results, or less. Following the latter’s only moderate success, many more tried, and the results became less and less encouraging.

It was this apparent “law of diminishing return” that particularly interested Dr. Simonton. Obviously, the inventor’s drive and enthusiasm, born of hard work and resulting conviction, had inspired both himself and his patients. If he could emulate this enthusiasm, this drive, thought Dr. Simonton, he could do as well as the originator. This was, he decided, first and foremost a matter of the mind. This discovery made Dr. Simonton, in a sense, an inventor himself. He felt an enthusiasm comparable to that of the speaker he had heard. But the task of convincing and creating enthusiasm in the patient was another matter. He could find no acceptable source in the libraries or among his colleagues. He ended up taking a course in meditation from a 23 year old “uncredentialled” boy. “I was extremely skeptical, thought their claims were ridiculous, also that the course was far too expensive.” (Obviously, he had stumbled into a greedy outfit.) “In spite of the instructor’s youth and lack of credentials and all my skepticism, taking this course was like being shot out of a sting shot … It was as if all the work I had gone through to learn to teach attitude to patients had been put together in this class.”

His first patient was a 61 year old man to whom he explained the medical treatment to be applied and also how, through mutual imagery, they were going to attempt to affect his disease. This man could at that time eat no food, could barely swallow his own saliva. ‘I had him relax three times a day, mentally picturing his disease, his treatment and the way his body was interacting with the treatment and the disease, so that he could better understand his disease and cooperate with what. was going on. The results were amazing. When I explained to my colleagues what I was doing, they said to me, jokingly, ‘Why do you even bother to turn on the machine?’ My response to that was, ‘I just don’t know enough yet.’

“This patient was described in the fall of 1972 as being “a year and a half post-treatment, with no evidence of cancer in his throat.’ He also had arthritis and he used the same basic mental processes and eliminated that. lie also had trouble with impotence. He had been impotent for over 20 years. It took him TO days of relaxing and mentally picturing this problem and the solution in his mind’s eve and he was able to resume intercourse with his wife. He now states he is able to have intercourse two or three times a week. When he called me and told me of resolving his impotence, I had him explain how lie did it, just in case I should need the technique later in my own life.”

Before going on to more striking case histories, the connection between full employment and cancer should be noted. Today’s worker and, particularly, the highly developed researcher lives in constant fear that his work will be interrupted by whimsical decisions “for reasons of economy (! ! !),” so all his work may be in vain and his precious family may suffer, perhaps starve. For one not trained in mind preservation, such fear causes cancer by a chance of, say, 50%. The average man may be less apt to worry, so his chance of cancer is slightly less.

Generally speaking, then, unemployment is a major cause of cancer. Reversely expressed: Full employment is a cancer cure. Mind training is a cure for both cancer and unemployment. By building a generation bridge from himself to a 23 year old “uncredentialled boy”, Dr. Simonton discovered this.

Then, as he was through with his first patient, he was drafted. He was upset, for he thought he would not be able to go on with this work in the military. But fate favored him: He was sent to Travis Air Force Base and made head of a brand new department. He explained his basic approach to his commanding officer, General Reynolds, who was very receptive. The Air Force, with its General Reynolds and Colonel Mrazek, seems to be a pioneer in advanced medicine.

Dr. Simonton’s first patient at Travis was a nonsmoking navigator who had a squamous carcinoma in the roof of his mouth and a larger one at the back of his throat. The cancer in the roof of his mouth should have had a cure rate of 30 to 50% the one in his throat 5 to 40%. Collectively, however, the estimated cure rate would probably be no more than 5 to 10%, since two cancers at the same time worsen the situation.

This was an extremely positive patient, very cooperative. After one week, the tumor was beginning to shrink. After four weeks the ulceration had no growth evidence. “It was generally outside my experience to get such dramatic response in two separate tumors in such a short time. After a month there was one small ulceration, healing nicely, and after about ten weeks the roof of his mouth was essentially normal in appearance. The truly beautiful thing was that the lesion in the throat showed the same response as the one in the mouth and, on routine examination, it was impossible to tell where the throat tumor had been. Only three months after he had been taken off flying status this man had unanimous clearance from the head and neck tumor board to go back on flying status and resume his profession.

Another case involved a wart on a man’s index finger. The wart had been treated for a year and bad become progressively worse on all types of medical management. The man was brought back from Vietnam for amputation of the finger, because of the pain. lie also had a wart on the thumb of the opposite hand that. the Travis base was not planning to treat initially. They were going to see if the immune mechanism would be stimulated by treating of the first wart.

The patient was very receptive. As the wart. on the index finger was treated, the second wart responded with a one and one half day’s delay. After one month’s treatment there was essentially no evidence of any warty tissue on either finger.

A third case was a 55 year old woman with a large anal carcinoma. She had an extensive tumor and large clinically positive inguinal nodes that had not been biopsied. The tumor successively decreased in size. After three weeks most of the gross tumor was gone. After four- and a half weeks there was no gross evidence of tumor and the enlargement of the lymph nodes had nearly completely disappeared without treatment. After six more weeks she was virtually totally healed.

The first fifty Persons treated at Travis were divided into attitude groups, from negative to positive, averaged out from independent evaluations by five staff members. Only four out of the fifty were considered as having poor response. Twelve were considered excellent. Fight of these had less than 50% chance for a cure. Thirty-seven had either good or excellent response.

Lastly, Dr. Simonton writes about young patients from homes where communication between family members had been so poor that the patients felt unloved. The doctor then included the whole family in his consultation and treatment, and found that it was not love that had been lacking- but understanding. The family members had been unable to build those generation bridges. So those predisposed to illness became seriously ill. Dr. Simonton, using his unique experience and driven by his unusually strong desire to help, then became the expert engineer, fixing up those bridges–the same kind we need, and sometimes have, between groupings and professions in our society.

After all this success Dr. Simonton admits, “The most difficult person for me to convince as to the validity of my work has been my father.” His father was very ill and needed his son’s help. Finally even that was overcome.*

* The above is condensed from “The Dimensions of Healing” by the gracious permission of The Academy of Parapsychology and Healing in Los Altos, California.