Non-Local Consciousness and the Revolution In Medicine : Part 1

Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves: The Power of change Within to Change the World
by Dawson Church, Geralyn Gendreau

Healing Our Planet, Healing Ourselves is an ambitious collection of powerful ideas from some of the most advanced thinkers of our generation. In a series of interwoven essays and interviews, it explores the link between our individual wellness and the overall health of our ecosystems and planet, showing that they are inextricably linked. The thirty co-authors make their points using wit, experience, science, and penetrating observation; the book is full of touching personal anecdotes, moving case histories, and fascinating scientific studies. Together they make an impassioned plea for seeing the health of all in our personal wellness, and our personal health in the wellness of all.

Larry Dossey

My wife Barbara and I recently visited one of the largest hospitals in Manhattan to talk about new research studies showing the healing effects of prayer. Among the assembled doctors, nurses, and other staff was a rabbi. Employed full time by the hospice unit to pray with patients, he also acted as minister to the staff. When I visited the hospice later that day, the rabbi took me aside. "I've just got to get one thing straight with you," he said. "Are you claiming that prayer actually works?"

Many people-even ministers and priests-believe that prayer provides little more than mental comfort. Like the rabbi, they see it as simply a psychological intervention, and nothing more. New research directly confronts this belief, and shows that consciousness, prayer, and intention are powerfully and literally creative.

Physicians are even more shocked than the rabbi when they see the results of these studies. Prayer, as an effective treatment, is an outrageous notion for most of the medical establishment, since no accepted theory exists to explain this phenomenon. Studies of distant healing and remote intercessory prayer demonstrate that, when a loving, empathic, compassionate intention, formed in the mind and held in the heart, is directed as prayer, a powerful healing effect is produced. Prayer works even if the person being prayed for hasn't a clue that the prayer is taking place. Some 150 studies have now been conducted that support this general idea.

Studies of distant healing and remote intercessory prayer demonstrate that, when a loving, empathic, compassionate intention, formed in the mind and held in the heart, is directed as prayer, a powerful healing effect is produced.

Throughout recent history, our culture has believed that spirituality is an inward state, with little impact on the outside world. We think of spirituality as a private matter. Today, that perspective is being radically challenged by these studies. Science, the most powerful metaphor in our culture, is validating the power of consciousness to shift material form, and demonstrating that healing starts in consciousness. This is a breathtaking discovery.

The most high-profile study is being conducted at Duke Medical Center, one of the most prestigious medical centers in the world. Dr. Mitchell Krucoff and Suzy Crater, his nurse research assistant, are studying the effect of intercessory prayer on patients admitted to Duke University's cardiovascular center with severe chest pain. These patients are due for a procedure known as cardiac catheterization and angioplasty, a procedure in which doctors mechanically dilate the obstructed coronary arteries.

When these patients arrive in Duke's emergency room, they are asked, "Do you want to be a patient in the prayer study?" Those that say, "Yes," are randomized. They either go to the group assigned prayer, or the group not assigned prayer. Both groups receive identical treatment. The first names of those who fall into the prayed-for group are farmed out via email to various groups around the world. Buddhists in Tibet and Nepal pray for them. Hindus in India pray for them. They receive prayer from a group of Jews in Jerusalem called Virtual Jerusalem. Cloistered Catholic nuns outside of Baltimore pray for these patients. Fundamentalist Christian churches in the mid-Atlantic states participate. Silent Unity, an arm of the Unity Church, is part of this effort.

Findings from this study published in the American Heart Journal show that the people who received intercessory prayer had 50% to 100% fewer side effects from these invasive cardiac procedures when compared with people who were not assigned prayer. This is what scientists call "big data": a huge effect. Preliminary results are so promising that the study has been expanded to nine major American hospitals.

People who received intercessory prayer had 50% to 100% fewer side effects from these invasive cardiac procedures compared to people who were not assigned prayer. This is what scientists call "big data": a huge effect.

Traditional indigenous cultures have much to tell us about this phenomenon, and about why our culture has been unable to act on environmental challenges. Authors such as Constance Grauds, whose book, Jungle Medicine, chronicles her studies with shamans in the Amazon, and Sandra Ingerman, who wrote Soul Retrieval, tell us what indigenous peoples know: that souls can fragment, and portions can be lost or clouded. In the shamanic traditions, one of the reasons that souls are said to become fragmented is deep-rooted fear and insecurity. Our politicians nowadays have made fear and insecurity an art form. One of the symptoms of soul loss is apathy, ennui, the inability to experience passion. Those words describe today's America. We can't muster the political will to handle these problems. I suspect that we're suffering culturally, nationally, from a horrible case of soul loss. Our souls are paying the price of our inability to act.

We're suffering culturally, nationally, from a horrible case of soul loss.

On the positive side, surveys consistently show that the majority of taxpayers are willing to spend more of their tax dollars to protect the environment. People are willing to act, and they form a huge reservoir of potential power that can be tapped. But just as the momentum for alternative medicine did not come from the top, neither will the change in environmental practices come from the top. The move toward alternative and integral medicine began at the grassroots level. We may well see a similar phenomenon beginning, a huge surge of environmental concern, emerging from the same source. Although we certainly could use national leadership to capitalize on the groundswell of grassroots interest, a strong collective thrust will bypass politicians and the bureaucracies in many an instance. The movement has already caught fire in certain areas, including Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live, and other communities. Even in China, one of the most environmentally degraded countries on earth, a small but active environmental group exists. The Chinese government is beginning to respond. Hope begets hope, and we may soon reach a tipping point.

© 2005 by Dawson Church and Geralyn Gendreau