An experiment verifies prayer helps healing

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey writes: “Most people today believe that in science there is no place for prayer. Perhaps this idea is a holdover from some three centuries ago, when ‘action at a distance’ was deplored by the best minds. Galileo condemned Johannes Kepler’s views on gravity as ‘the ravings of a madman’ when the latter proposed that invisible forces from the moon, acting across gigantic distances, were causing the earth’s tides.

“Obviously the modern mind has sided with Kepler,” Dossey writes, “by accepting the action at a distance that is gravitation, but we have not been so generous in our attitude toward prayer. However, in perhaps the most rigidly controlled scientific study ever done on the effects of prayer, cardiologist Randolph Byrd, formerly a university of California professor, has shown that prayer works and that it can be a powerful force in healing.

“Byrd designed his study as ‘a scientific evaluation of what God is doing.’ Dossey explains: “During his ten-month study a computer assigned 393 patients admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital either to a group that was prayed for by home prayer groups (192 patients) or to a group that was not remembered in prayer (201 patients). The study was designed according to the most rigid criteria that can be used in clinical studies in medicine, meaning that it was a randomized, prospective, double blind experiment in which neither the patients, nurses, nor doctors knew which group the patients were in. He recruited Roman Catholic groups and Protestant groups around the country to pray for members of the designated group. The prayer groups were given the names of their patients, something of their condition, and were asked to pray each day, but were given no instructions on how to pray.”

“The results were striking. The prayed-for patients differed from the others remarkably in several areas:

1. They were five times less likely than the unremembered group to require antibiotics (three patients compared to sixteen patients).

2. They were three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid as a consequence of the failure of the heart to pump properly (six compared to eighteen patients).

3. None of the prayer-for group required endotracheal intubation, in which an artificial airway is inserted in the throat and attached to a mechanical ventilator, while twelve in the unremembered group required mechanical ventilator support.

4. Fewer patients in the prayed-for group died (although the difference in this area was not statistically significant).

If the technique being studied had been a new drug or a surgical procedure instead of prayer, it would almost certainly have been heralded as some sort of ‘breakthrough.”

Dr. William Nolan, author of a book that criticizes faith healing, has acknowledged: “It sounds like this study will stand up to scrutiny.” Even suggesting, “maybe we doctors ought to be writing on our order sheets, Pray three times a day. If it works, it works.”

Dossey adds: “This rigorous study suggests that something about the mind allows it to intervene in the course of distant happenings, such as the clinical course of patients in a coronary care unit hundreds of thousands of miles away. In this prayer study the degree of spatial separation did not seem to matter.” And this fact “suggests that the effects of prayer do not behave like common forms of energy; that no ‘signal’ is involved when the mind communicates with another mind or a body at a distance.” In other words, no matter how those praying may conceive of their prayers “going somewhere”—to the patients or to God—there is no known energy that would explain prayer as actually moving from one place to another.

This “nonlocal’ characteristic of prayer should not be a surprise for anyone familiar with the major theistic religious traditions. For their teachings have never confined God to a particular place. Instead, God is everywhere, transcending space and time. In Dossey’s words, God “is nonlocal, an attribute shared by our own minds. Thus we can say without hesitation that something about us is divine.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 45-48.

Intuition, dreams, the unconscious, soul, God

Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul notes that: “Arthur Koestler stated in his monumental treatise on creativity, The Act of Creation, ‘Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.'” 

Is there any evidence to support this claim? The mathematician Jacques Hadamard in 1945 surveyed the most eminent mathematicians in America about their working methods. He concluded that most of the mathematicians “born or resident in America avoid not only the use of ‘mental words’ but even ‘the mental use of algebraic or other precise signs.” Instead, “The mental pictures [that they employ] are most frequently visual.”

Dossey says: “Perhaps the most astounding case is that of English physicist Michael Faraday, whom Einstein placed on a par with Newton. Faraday’s thinking was almost entirely visual, and strikingly devoid of mathematics. Indeed, he had neither a mathematical gift nor any formal training in mathematics, and he was ignorant of all but the simplest elements of arithmetic. Yet Faraday could see the stresses surrounding magnets and electric currents as curves in space, and he coined the phrase lines of force to describe them.”

Mozart described his composing as follows:

All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.

Dossey writes: “As a result of analyzing his own psychic life across decades, as well as treating thousands of patients and analyzing their dreams,” Jung concluded that humanity possesses “a definite psychic heredity. This consists of phenomena essential to life and which express themselves physically, just as other inherited characteristics express themselves physically. Among these are ‘psychic factors’ that are not confined to single persons, families, or races. These ‘universal dispositions of the mind’ are analogous to Plato’s forms or to logical categories that are everywhere present as basic postulates of reason—the difference being that they are categories of the imagination, not categories of reason. Following St. Augustine, Jung called them archetypes. They abound in the lives of everyone and take the form of familiar motifs—religious stories, myths, dreams, spontaneous fantasies, and visions. The unconscious layer of the psyche that is made up of these universal dynamic forms Jung called the collective unconscious.

“Jung found that the collective unconscious demonstrates the traits of nonlocal mind we have seen so far. It would not be pinned down in space and time, and it transcended the single self to envelop all minds.” Jung asserted that the unconscious “has its own time inasmuch as past, present, and future are blended together in it. Since all distinctions vanish in the unconscious,” Jung explained, “it is only logical that the distinction between separate minds should disappear too. Wherever there is a lowering of the conscious level we come across instances of unconscious identity.”

Jung wrote: “The two elements of time and space, indispensable for change, are relatively without importance for the psyche.” Yet, to know immortality we must realize that we are mortal. “This feeling for the infinite,” Jung maintained, “can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. In knowing ourselves to be unique [and therefore limited] we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!”

Our task in life, Jung asserted, is “to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.” Only in this way can we realize “the sole purpose of human existence,” which Jung says is “to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Jung described human consciousness as “the invisible, intangible manifestation of the soul.” Therefore, Dossey argues, by increasing our consciousness we recover the soul and regain “contact with the inner Divinity.” Today, however, this task is difficult for two reasons. First, science describes our lives as though souls don’t exist and asserts that the brain produces all our conscious experience. Second, religious teachings in the West generally reject the idea that the soul is “the radiant Godhead itself.”

Woman meditating "sees" white cysts on her ovary

Larry Dossey in Recovering the Soul writes: “One bright Tuesday morning in early December, Elizabeth took a trip. She’d planned the journey for months, except for one important detail: she had intentionally never set a date for departure. Elizabeth wanted to let the trip happen on its own and knew she would understand when the time was right. This was the morning. Without ever leaving her house, Elizabeth traveled—into her body.

“It was not an aimless excursion. Elizabeth wanted to know the reasons behind the nagging pain she had been experiencing for several months in the lower left side of her abdomen. Always given somewhat to introspection, she was confident that she could find our the reason behind it—moreover, that it was indeed her rightful task to do so. This job did not belong to others, even to her doctors, except perhaps as confirmation of her own knowledge. She did not know where her certainty came from, but it was there: an unpretentious, inner awareness that she could know her own body’s ways.

“She sat in her favorite wingback chair in a sunny spot by the big bay windows in the living room and closed her eyes. Her feet resting solidly on the floor, palms down on the chair arms, she took several slow, deep breaths and let her mind be free. This state of consciousness was not new to Elizabeth; she had regularly engaged in deliberate relaxation techniques for a decade and could enter deep states of tranquility at will. As usual she adopted no particular mental strategy, but let her consciousness be blank. I already know everything I need to know, she said to herself; I only have to let the knowledge surface. So, allowing her mind to be empty, she waited.

“Images came: something multiple, circular, ovoid, now inside a larger object, itself seemingly spherical. Soft, white, three of them. Not angry, this triad, but calm and placid—something that belonged inside her and something that, strangely, seemed to own pain as a rightful expression of its being. Something unmistakably her.”

When Elizabeth came to see Dossey, she told him she didn’t have cancer but had three spots on her left ovary. Dossey writes: “Something about this woman was extraordinary. She had a presence that commanded great respect. She was delivering what for her was a simple, honest statement of fact.” A sonogram revealed three cystic lesions on Elizabeth’s left ovary, each appearing white. An operation confirmed that these lesions were benign, but they were removed and that ended Elizabeth’s pain.

Dossey concludes: “If cases like Elizabeth’s were rare, perhaps they would deserve no more than a raised eyebrow. But they aren’t. Medicine is thickly littered with similar examples showing that the mind’s range is beyond the brain. Frequently it appears that an illness or a crisis with one’s health is the key that turns on nonlocal ways of knowing . . . freeing the mind to behave nonlocally in space and time.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 19-23.

A patient born blind "sees" during her NDE

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey reports: “The surgery had gone smoothly until the later stages of the operation. Then something happened. As her physician was closing the incision, Sarah’s heart stopped beating. . . . The cardiac monitor suddenly showed ventricular fibrillation, a wild, chaotic, electrical storm in the heart in which no effective beat takes place. But the emergency was all over in a minute, for it took no more time than that for the anesthesiologist to defibrillate her with the LifePak device that was always at the read in the OR, the operating room.  

“Yet Sarah had something else to show for her surgery besides the ache in her side where the stone-filled gall bladder had been removed and the concentric, reddish rings on her chest left by the sting of the defibrillator’s paddles. She had something else to show that amazed her and the rest of the surgery team as well—a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the OR layout; the scribbles on the surgery schedule board in the hall outside; the color of the sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the names of the surgeons in the doctors’ lounge down the corridor who were waiting for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that her anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the cardiac arrest.

“But what made Sarah’s vision even more momentous was the fact that, since birth, she had been blind.” Her surgeon dismissed her visual memories during her cardiac arrest, but the critical care nurse told Sarah: “It happens pretty often around here after anesthesia. People come back with the strangest stories. A couple of years ago one guy had a cardiac arrest, and when he came to he told his cardiologist what the specific levels of all his cardiac enzymes in his blood would be for the next three days. The doctor didn’t believe him, either, but he hit it right on the money!”

Sarah’s visual near-death experience during her surgery left her without a doubt: “There’s more than one way to see!” Sarah now knew that the world worked differently than anyone supposed, that there were principles operating beyond the common view. No matter how poorly these ideas and her experience fit her previous model of reality, she could not dismiss them. She felt the impact of the event changing her. My vision cannot be completely in my body, she told herself, and it cannot really all be in my eyes and my brain. When my body was least functional during the arrest, my senses were most functional!”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 17-19.

"Nonlocal time” in quantum physics is “eternity”

In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey writes: “I shall follow physicist and philosopher Henry Margenau and regard mind and consciousness as ‘primitives’—things indefinable in terms of empirical facts. This choice, Margenau contents, ‘is justified not only by the rules of logic but is made cogent by the fact that consciousness is at once the most immediate personal experience and the source form which all knowledge springs.’1 For Margenau and this inquiry, mind equal consciousness. Furthermore, for reasons to be given, these entities are considered nonmaterial, infinite in space, eternal, unconfined to brains and bodies, and capable of exerting change in the physical world. Sometimes, when ‘mind’ is used in this larger sense, I will refer to it as Mind.

“Although Mind is neither confined to the brain nor a produce of it, Mind may nonetheless work thorough the brain. The result is the appearance of individual minds, derivative of the larger Mind, which we refer to as the individual self, the ego, the person, and the sense of I. The primary characteristics of minds are content and some level of conscious awareness: the myriad thoughts, emotions, and sensations that flood us daily. Individual minds are highly susceptible to changes in the physical body: moods, emotions, and even thoughts can be modified by changes in the brain and body.

“There are many levels of consciousness . . . that includes those levels commonly acknowledged in the West such as the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious. In addition, there are higher levels that have long been recognized in the elegant typologies of the East, but which are rarely spoken of in our culture. . . . I will frequently refer to the latter state of ultimate oneness as the highest Self, the Soul, and the One Mind, which contain attributes of the Divine. As this principle is frequently stated in in western religions, the ‘home’ of the soul is God; in the East, Atman (the individual soul) and Brahman (the Ultimate) are one.”

Dossey in Recovering Soul will refer to two types of time: (1) the time of common sense (linear, flowing, external time; the time of progress, development, and history), and (2) the time that is alluded to in modern physics (nonflowing, nonlinear time; the ‘time of eternity’; the time in which things do not happen, but simply ‘are’). . . . [T]here is a greater reason to explore the nonlocal nature of the mind than simply to ‘be accurate’ in some logical or scientific sense. This reason is conveyed by the Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles:

[S]cience has gone too far in breaking down man’s belief in his spiritual greatness . . . and has given him the belief that he is merely an insignificant animal that has arisen by chance and necessity in an insignificant planet lost in the great cosmic immensity. . . . We must realize the great unknowns in the material makeup and operation of our brains, and in the relationship of brain to mind and in our creative imagination.2

“The main reason to establish the nonlocal nature of the mind is, then, spiritual. Local theories of the mind are not only incomplete, they are destructive. . . . For if the mind is nonlocal, it must in some sense be independent of the strictly local brain and body. This opens up the possibility, at least, for some measure of freedom of the will, since the mind could escape the determinative constraints of the physical laws governing the physical body. And if the mind is nonlocal, unconfined to brains and bodies and thus not entirely dependent on the physical organism, the possibility for survival of bodily death is opened.”

1 Henry Morgenau, The Miracle of Existence (Ox Box Press, 1984), 72.

2 John C. Eccles, The Human Psyche (Springer International, 1980), 25.

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 3-7.

Recovering soul: a reenchantment of the world

Larry Dossey writes in Recovering the Soul: “If the mind is nonlocal in space and time, our interaction with each other seems a foregone conclusion. Nonlocal minds are merging minds, since they are not ‘things’ that can be walled off and confined to moments in time or point-positions in space.

 

“If nonlocal mind is a reality, the world becomes a place of interaction and connection, not one of isolation and disjunction. And if humanity really believed that nonlocal mind were real, an entirely new foundation for ethical and moral behavior would enter, which would hold at least the possibility of a radical departure from the in same ways human beings and nation-states have chronically behaved toward each other. And, further, the entire existential premise of human life might shift toward the moral and the ethical, toward the spiritual and the holy. Nonlocal mind potentially leads, to borrow historian and sociologist Morris Berman’s provocative phrase, to a reenchantment of the world.

“Suppose for the moment that we could show that the human mind is nonlocal; that it is ultimately independent of the physical brain and body and that, as a correlate, it transcends time and space. This, I believe, would rank in importance far beyond anything ever discovered, past or present, about the human organism. This discovery would strike a chord of hope about our inner nature that has been silenced in an age of science; it would stir a new vision of the human as triumphant over flesh and blood: It would anchor the human spirit once a gain on the side of God instead of randomness, chance, and decay.

It would spur the human will to greatness instead of expediency and self-service; it would assuage the bad conscience modern men and women feel when they dream of innate purposes and goals of life, to say nothing of immortality. With one sweep, this discovery would redirect the imperatives of medicine. No longer would it be the ultimate goal of the modern healer to forestall death and decay, for these would lose their absolute status if the mind were ultimately transcendent over the physical body. The mad, frenzied, life-at-any-cost dictum that prevails today could be modulated in its intensity, along with the despair that dying men and women feel.

“And once again we might recover something that has been notably absent in our experience of late: the human soul.”

Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 7-8.

We are all part of a collective One Mind

The 2014 Napier Banquet at the Pilgrim Place senior retirement community in Claremont California honored Nancy Mintie for her creative community service as director of Uncommon Good. When she spoke to us and the Napier fellowship university students, however, she did not as many expected issue a resounding call to struggle on for justice, peace and ecology. Instead, after acknowledging how little affect our good works will have on the crises of our time, she shared a new-found hope based on scientific arguments a global consciousness described in Larry Dossey’s book, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters, which ends with this statement of faith: “I believe that the concept of the unitary, collective One Mind, a level of intelligence of which the individual minds of all sentient creatures are a part, is a vision that is powerful enough to make a difference in how we approach all the challenges we face―not as a mere intellectual concept, but as something we feel in the deepest way possible.”1

Based on extensive research into verifiable near-death experiences (NDEs), Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel concludes “the current materialistic view of the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers and psychologists is too restricted for a proper understanding of this phenomenon. There are now good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced conscious can sometimes be experienced separate from the body.2

For example, psychiatrist Raymond Moody tells of a seventy-year-old woman who, despite being blind since the age of eighteen, was able to see as she hovered over doctors resuscitating her body after a heart attack. “Not only could she describe what the instruments used looked like, but she could even describe their colors. The most amazing thing about this to me was that most of these instruments weren’t even thought of over fifty years ago when she could last see.”3

One survivor reports: “I don’t know how long it was before the ‘real me’ was floating close to the ceiling, face downward, looking down with great interest at the body lying on the bed. The interest was because the mind in that body was a total blankness, a complete darkness, like a TV screen switched off. ‘Real me’ was ethereal, had no shape, no substance, but had a mind, enjoyed sensation, could see everything in the room in detail, was a power over and above the body that lay inert. The body had no mind, no feeling, no eyes, no life.”4

These out-of-body experiences (OBEs) occurred during cardiac arrest, when according to current scientific knowledge the brain is incapable of observation and memory. Yet, an OBE is very common in NDEs and the many perceptions during these OBEs have been verified.5

Remembering that her “experience of death was wonderful” Hilda Middleton describes moving from above her hospital bed down “a tunnel with a very bright light at the end. Animals, pictures, everything was so beautiful and all the colors were shades of delicate pink, yellow, blue, etc. I was overwhelmed with joy.” Mary Lowther recalls “indefinable shades of pastel-like colors” and “what I can only describe as billions of beautiful shimmering forms, no outlines, and they were all ‘cloaked’ in what looked like a garment of translucent light.” Audrey Organ says, “I was in a tunnel or glorious golden light with my dad, who had died some years earlier. We were strolling side by side but with no physical walking. We were enormously happy, conversing but without the usual verbal speech, all via the mind.”6 On the basis of his study of NDE survivors, van Lommel reports: “This experience of consciousness can be coupled with a sense of unconditional love and acceptance while people can also have contact with a form of ultimate and universal knowledge and wisdom.”7

A NDE may also free a person to embrace the unknown with hope, as it did for Ella Silver. “I have never before or since had such a feeling of ‘knowing’ for sure I would know joy. It was totally different from happiness. I felt my heart would burst with the excitement of expectation.”8

 

1 Larry Dossey, One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why it Matters (Hay House, 2013), 253.

2 Pim van Lommel, “Pathophysiological Aspects of Near-Death Experiences,” in Mahendra Perera, Karuppiah Jagadheesan and Anthony Peake, editors, Making Sense of Near-Death Experiences (Jessica Kingsley, 2012), 90.

3 Raymond A. Moody, The Light Beyond (Bantam, 1988), 134-135.

4 Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkley Books, 1995), 39.

5 Michael Sabom, a cardiologist, compared the memories of those who had OBEs to the knowledge of patients with considerable hospital experience. “He found that most of the patients in the control group―twenty-three out of the twenty-five people―made mistakes in describing the resuscitation procedures. On the other hand, none of the NDE patients made mistakes in describing what went on in their own resuscitation.” Raymond Moody, Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2012), 127-128.

6 Ibid., 84-85, 94.

7 “Many argue that the loss of blood flow and a flat EEG do not exclude some activity somewhere in the brain because an EEG primarily registers the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex. In my view this argument misses the point. The issue is not whether there is some immeasurable activity somewhere but whether there is any sign of those specific forms of brain activity that, according to current neuroscience, are considered essential to experiencing consciousness. And there is no sign whatsoever of those specific forms of brain activity in the EEGs of cardiac arrest patients.” Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (HarperCollins, 2010), 165. For a video on this NDE research see “The Mystery of Perception During NDE” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avyUsPgIuQ0.

8 Fenwick, The Truth in the Light, 71.