Mind Over Matter?

Critics say a new institute at West Virginia U. pushes junk science; supporters insist that it be given a chance

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

In the student union here at West Virginia University, Tom Rossman, a graying pool shark,

ALSO SEE: Inside the Principles of 'Innate Health'

is captivating the food-court crowd on a recent Friday afternoon. Warming up for his trick-shot routine, Mr. Rossman, a self-proclaimed doctor of billiardology, runs the table three straight times. Dr. Cue never misses.

What the students don't realize, though, is that while they are entranced by the good doctor, one of life's big mysteries is being explained right above their heads. In the Greenbriar Room on the second floor, 18 people -- mostly health professionals from Morgantown, Chicago, Aberdeen, S.D., and Columbus, Ohio -- are already halfway through a two-day workshop, "Understanding Equanimity." They are learning how mind, thought, and consciousness are the keys to kicking stress, being happier, and living in the moment.

They are being taught that those three principles, not theories and certainly not assumptions, explain everything there is to know about how humans experience reality. And even if we don't think they do, they do. It's like the principles of gravity or thermodynamics, the teachers say. We can choose not to believe in gravity, but that book we drop is still going to fall.

Mind, thought, and consciousness are the cornerstones of the Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, a year-old project at this public university's Health Sciences Center that has drawn the ire of many professors and the skepticism of some outsiders. Few of them have sat through any of the classes; most looked at the institute's Web site and say that's enough to turn them off. The critics say that, at best, it's junk science that doesn't belong at the state's research university. At worst, they say, it's a blatant injection of New Age religion into a public university.

"We might as well establish the Mary Baker Eddy Institute for Christian Science Healing," says one professor, asking to remain anonymous.

So far, the fallout appears to have been minimal. One professor -- a devout Christian and an orthopedic surgeon -- quit because he couldn't stand supporting the institute. Another professor stepped down from an administrative post because he grew tired of what he saw as "a medical school guided by gurus."

But a far greater concern is the institute's long-term effects on the university's reputation. Professors interviewed for this article, many of whom declined to speak on the record, fear that they may become known for what some have dubbed their "Institute for Inane Health."

Both the institute's director and the vice president for health sciences flatly deny that the institute has anything to do with religion. They ask critics to be patient as they gear up to scientifically test the efficacy of the teachings. And they wrap themselves in the mantle of academic freedom.

"Throughout the history of academia, there's been room for new ideas," says Robert M. D'Alessandri, dean of the medical school and vice president for health sciences, who introduced the principles to the university. "If we start saying we don't like these ideas as opposed to trying to understand them and put them to a critical test, then we start censoring things."

The university's president says criticism of the institute doesn't bother him. "I don't have a concern that the health-sciences center has gone off the deep end of things," says David C. Hardesty Jr. "They believe it is legitimate, and I'm not going to second-guess them. I don't think Dr. D'Alessandri would sanction junk science."

In 1973, Sydney Banks, then a 43-year-old welder in western Canada, had a series of insights into how thoughts create reality. In one epiphany, he felt he was being sucked down a tunnel and then shrouded in white light. "I knew I'd found the secret to life," he has said. "I found what they call God -- the true meaning of God."

Without any formal training in psychology, he began writing and lecturing about the principles of mind, thought, and consciousness. Mr. Banks and his disciples ask people to "move beyond the words" when trying to understand the concepts, or as Dr. D'Alessandri says, "put down your pen and listen to the feeling." But, at the risk of violating those admonitions, here is a brief sketch of the three principles: Mind refers to universal energy, both with form and formless. Thought is our ability to create form from that formless energy, and consciousness allows us to be aware of both the thought and the fact that the thought has been created.

Inspired by Mr. Banks, several psychologists have urged the teaching of the three principles, labeling the idea "psychology of mind" or "health realization." They say it has helped people in prisons, housing projects, and hospitals.

Dr. D'Alessandri was first exposed to "the understanding" -- as adherents call it -- in the mid-1990s, when George Pransky, one of the founders of psychology of mind, spoke at a meeting of medical-school deans. Dr. D'Alessandri says he immediately saw it as a great management tool.

So, at a cost of $70,000 (plus the fees charged by Mr. Pransky), he sent most of the deans, associate deans, and chairmen in the health-sciences center on a series of trips, in 1997 and 1998, to La Conner, Wash., a small town about an hour north of Seattle. About 35 administrators attended seminars there offered by Pransky & Associates, a group that offers counseling and training in psychology of mind. Dr. D'Alessandri asked them to take their spouses as well: "If your home life is stable and happy, then your work life is bound to be stable and happy as well," he says.

At the time, some thought the whole thing was a crock, a few suggested it was a cult, and they joked about being "Pranskized."

"It was kind of a feel-good kind of camp," says one chairman who attended, along with his wife. "It was kind of like the dean found religion, but it was mostly stuff that the rest of us had gotten in Sunday school."

Others embraced the La Conner training. Dr. D'Alessandri says that follow-up interviews found that one-third thought it was great and another third thought it was fine. John F. Brick, chairman of the neurology department, took his wife to La Conner and says it improved his marriage and his relationship with his children.

Initially a skeptic, Dr. Brick says he was intrigued that the teaching seemed related to works he remembered of Aristotle, Thoreau, and William James. "It's not the cure for everything," he says. "This is not the Rosetta stone, but it is useful."

Soon after the training, Dr. D'Alessandri brought Judith A. Sedgeman, a longtime psychology-of-mind consultant and a colleague of George Pransky's, to Morgantown, giving her an appointment as an assistant professor of community medicine. Precisely what he hoped she would do was left unclear, according to Ms. Sedgeman. "He said: 'You're here because I trust you, and I'm sure whatever you decide to do will work out great,'" she says.

Two years later, in 2000, the university received several donations totaling about $1-million to create the Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health. Additional gifts may be on the way, the dean says. The money didn't come from Mr. Banks or Mr. Pransky, according to Dr. D'Alessandri, who declines to reveal the donors -- other than to say that they include successful businesspeople who have incorporated the principles into their lives. Most of the institute's $500,000 budget is being met through donations. No state money is being used, Dr. D'Alessandri says, although some cash is coming from the faculty-practice plan, the vehicle for medical professors to provide local health care.

The institute's creation, in September 2000, surprised many professors. "We were trying to think of some way in which it could be a legitimate activity of a medical school," says Paul Brown, a professor of physiology.

Few other professors have taken their criticism to Dr. D'Alessandri because they feel pressure to support his pet project. But Mr. Brown fired off an e-mail message to the dean, encouraging him to find an eminent researcher to lead the institute. The dean instead tapped Ms. Sedgeman, who holds a master's degree in English from Trinity College in Connecticut and sees herself as an entrepreneur, not a scientist.

On and off the record, frustrated professors have two main criticisms of the institute: that its research is nonexistent or shoddy and that "this understanding" crosses the line into religious thought, representing an unconstitutional establishment of religion at the public university. One of them suggests that the teaching of mind as universal energy, both in form and formless, is "a kind of bastardized Buddhism." And some bristle when the institute talks of thought as a "spiritual gift" or a "divine tool."

Professors asked John Corrigan, a professor of religious studies at Florida State University, to examine whether the institute met the definition of a religion. Mr. Corrigan says that it certainly does not fit a Western, monotheistic version of religion, but that from an Eastern perspective, "it looks pretty much like a religion."

The professors say a 1977 New Jersey case involving Transcendental Meditation backs up their view. Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil-liberties lawyer who once represented the Church of Scientology in cases that raised similar issues, has looked at materials from the Banks Institute. Drawing a bright line between the religious and the nonreligious is difficult, he says. "But essentially [the institute] seems like a cover for a religious-type belief system which has been prettified in order to be secular and even scientific," Mr. Silverglate says. "What you call it is not important. You have to examine the belief system."

William Post, the orthopedic surgeon who quit the medical school because of the institute, has no doubt that Sydney Banks and the institute named for him are promoting a religion. The most decisive evidence, to him, is that the institute once referred to Mr. Banks as a "theosopher." It was a word that set Dr. Post off on a research trip. He started with the dictionary, became alarmed that the word "occult" was part of the definition, and before long had gathered pages and pages of information on theosophy and its founder, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Among other things, she taught that all major religions are derived from one original religious philosophy.

Dr. Post says he took his concerns to the dean but was brushed off, prompting him to leave the medical school and go into private practice. "Within the university," he says, "there is plenty of room for differences of religion, but I shouldn't be using the fruits of my own labor to support this."

After Dr. Post began asking questions about the institute's connection to theosophy, Ms. Sedgeman changed the Web site, which now calls Mr. Banks a "lecturer and author." She says the institute has no connection to Blavatsky or theosophy and that "theosopher," as far as she knows, refers to a person who has gained insight through a direct experience. "I took it off the Web site because there's no point in generating that level of controversy," she says. "It's not an important concept to our work."

The dean dismisses constitutional concerns raised about the institute. "It has nothing to do with religion," he says. And Ms. Sedgeman says the institute, which has no doctrines, no rituals, and no congregations, is not a church.

"I would draw a very clear distinction between a religion and what I would call an acknowledgment that there are spiritual facts of life that are common to everybody who has any reverence whatsoever for life," she says. "All the things I would associate with a religion have nothing to do with what we're doing, which is helping people to become healthier and have a better life."

She then makes a dumbfounding assertion. "I see this work as profoundly scientific," she says. "If I were to say it bears a resemblance to something, I would say it bears a resemblance to the field of physics."

Critics on the faculty see that remark as simply silly, a glib retort to their well-founded concerns. "My whole beef with this is I don't think it belongs in a medical school, where we're supposed to be approaching the body in a scientific way," says David Blaha, a doctor on the medical-school faculty who scoffs at the institute's New Age-like ideas. "I'm an orthopedic surgeon. It's hard not to be concrete. We put screws in bone."

William Pettit, a psychiatrist who is moving to Morgantown next year to become the institute's medical director, says he hopes to encourage research into whether the understanding can help patients with migraine headaches, chronic pain, and high blood pressure.

And administrators point to one research project under way -- a survey-based study that suggests learning about the three principles reduces people's self-reported stress levels.

Dr. Blaha and others say they won't think much of that study until it is published in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike a center studying mind-body interactions generally, the Banks Institute is in the uncomfortable position of teaching people about the understanding while also examining whether the teaching did any good.

At most institutes, if studies show that a certain treatment isn't working, then researchers move on to something else. At the Banks Institute, such a finding might close the institute down. "If it proved the work we were doing was ineffective, then we should go out of existence," says Ms. Sedgeman.

In the meantime, though, the institute's fate rests with the very administrators who brought it to West Virginia. James M. Shumway, associate dean for medical education and a strong supporter of the institute, says he has heard the critics. "It's not about getting everybody to accept or like or do," he says. "But it needs to be another opportunity out there for people who may benefit."

A number of current professors agree. Anthony DiBartolomeo, chief of the rheumatology section, calls it a "a valuable addition" to the health-sciences center and says its greatest value is in helping students, residents, and patients deal with stress.

Still, some professors believe the institute is more than just a fringe idea that can be ignored by people who don't like it. Because the dean is so enamored of the principles, they maintain, the teaching has filtered throughout the health-sciences center. "Everything with regard to strategic planning is built around these silly core values," says one administrator. "At best it's silly, and at worst it's taken the focus off what it should be on."

Dr. Blaha sees the institute as part of a changing culture at the health-sciences center -- a culture that places too much emphasis on getting along. "I believe that medical schools have to have people that don't agree constantly challenging each other," he says. "Now it seems that agreement and consensus are the most important things." Dr. Blaha recently resigned as chairman of orthopedics. "Maybe," he says, "my personality doesn't fit here as a leader in the Land of Nice."

Back in the "Understanding Equanimity" class, Ms. Sedgeman and Dr. Pettit sit on wooden stools at the front of the Mountain Room, having fled the Greenbriar Room because of Dr. Cue's surprisingly loud billiard demonstration. The students are talking about people who don't understand the understanding. Everyone acknowledges that it's a hard thing to get. Students encourage one another to stop trying to grab it, to surrender to their own knowing.

And Ms. Sedgeman, like any good teacher, uses the digression to return to her central point. "The panoply of reactions to this is just proof of the power of our thoughts to create our own individual reality," she says. "It's all proof of the principles. If they think this is BS," she says of her critics, "then that's what's true for them."

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