By Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Research on spontaneous cures of cancer, conducted in both the United States and Japan, has shown that just before the cure appears, almost every patient experiences a dramatic shift in awareness. He knows that he will be healed, and he feels that the force responsible is inside himself but not limited to him - it extends beyond his personal boundaries, throughout all of nature.

Suddenly, he feels, "I am not limited to my body. All that exists around me is part of myself." At that moment, such patients apparently jump to a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer. Then the cancer cells either disappear, literally overnight in some cases, or at the very least stablise without damaging the body any further.

This leap in consciousness seems to be the key. It does not have to come in a flash, however. Chitra was cultivating it deliberately, through her Ayurvedic techniques. Therefore, her ability to stay at a higher level of awareness was strikingly correlated with her condition. Somehow she could motivate the absence of cancer, but just as easily she could return to it. (I think of this as being like a violin string whose pitch varies as you slide your finger up and down it.)

The word that comes to mind when a scientist thinks of such sudden changes is quantum. The word denotes a discrete jump from one level of functioning to a higher level - the quantum leap.

Quantum is also a technical term, once known only to physicists but now growing in popular usage. Formally, a quantum is "the divisible unit in which waves may be emitted or absorbed," the definition given by the eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking. In layman's terms, the quantum is the building block. Light is built up from photons, electricity from the charge of electron, gravity from the graviton (a hypothetical quantum, not yet found in nature), and so on for all forms of energy - each of them is based on a quantum and cannot be broken down into anything smaller.

Both definitions - the discrete jump to a higher level and the irreducible level of a force - appear to apply to certain cases like Chitra's. Therefore, I would like to introduce the term quantum healing to describe what happened to her. Although the term is new, the process itself is not. There have always been patients who do not follow the normal course of healing.

A tiny minority, for example, do no waste away from cancer; others have tumors that grow much more slowly than what the statistics for their diseases predict. Many cures that share mysterious origins - faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the effective use of placebos, or "dummy drugs" - also point toward a quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a drastic jump - a quantum leap - in the healing mechanism.

This is an edited extract from Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra, M.D. ISBN 0553173324 and is available in the Soothingminds shop at £12.99, harmony for body and mind.