sent to his office at UCLA Medical School because she was resisting
　　　　  her doctors' urgent recommendations for a mastectomy.
　　　　  Cousins thought there would be no harm teaching her a few
　　　　  visualization techniques. He showed her a stock mental exercise that
　　　　  usually succeeds in slightly raising the skin temperature of the
　　　　  hand. The woman turned out to be an exceptional subject: Her hand
　　　　  temperature shot up 14 degrees. When she returned to the hospital
　　　　  after two weeks of practicing various meditations, the tumor, to his
　　　　  amazement, had completely disappeared.
　　　　  "Who knows what mind is capable of?" Hirshberg asks rhetorically.
　　　　  "For that matter, who knows what mind is? Certainly, it's thinking
　　　　  and feeling. But is mind only thinking, body only feeling? I mean,
　　　　  mind feels. Mind is also dreams, mind is altered states, mind is
　　　　  consciousness, consciousness is spirit. It's not like we scientists
　　　　  know.
　　　　  "Maybe the Dalai Lama knows," she adds parenthetically. "I met him
　　　　  once, and I think if there's a light in the world, he's it. I
　　　　  sometimes think the kind of understanding he has is where we'll have
　　　　  to go to look at what we're calling PNI."
　　　　  In a recent documentary, as sunlight streams in through the window
　　　　  from the icy, glittering peaks of the nearby Himalayas, the Dalai
　　　　  Lama can be seen bending over a desk, one hand pressing a jeweler's
　　　　  loupe to his eye, the other twirling a screwdriver in the entrails
　　　　  of an old-fashioned watch. "It is my nature," the exiled leader is
　　　　  saying. "As soon as I got a playtoy ...few minutes later, I try to
　　　　  open...see what is inside." He giggles delightedly, holding the
　　　　  watch up for inspection, then turns shrewdly to the camera: "That's
　　　　  the way to learn something." He laughs again.
　　　　  Try to open. See what is inside. Now imagine a whole society turning
　　　　  its mental jeweler's tools in the innards of the mind, investing
　　　　  1,200 years in a top-priority, national Inner Space Program. For
　　　　  eras, while the world blustered through the age of steam, spit
　　　　  electricity's cold fire in the face of the night, and unleashed the
　　　　  railing demons of the atom, Tibetan followers of the Lord Buddha sat
　　　　  calmly by the flickering light of millions of yak-butter lamps,
　　　　  calipering the depth and breath of the soul, doing essential R&D on
　　　　  consciousness itself, souping up the spiritual software.
　　　　  Westerners have viewed Tibetans as Mind-Body Masters on the World's
　　　　  Rooftop ever since French pilgrim Alexandra David-Neel secretly