Non-Local Consciousness and the Revolution In Medicine : Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 4)

In 1998, the association of American Medical Colleges, to which all U.S. medical schools belong, drafted a resolution requiring all students be able to take a spiritual history from patients, and demonstrate an understanding that spirituality is important in the clinical encounter. In 1997, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Institutions mandated that all their members-some 19,000 clinics and hospitals-have a mechanism in place to take a spiritual history from every patient who comes through the door. Most don't do this diligently yet, but this policy expresses an awareness that spirituality is important. While it may be a formality today, it the next twenty years it will become integral to the practice of medicine.

The most profound change in medicine in the future may have nothing to do with diseases getting better more quickly, or people living longer. They flow from the enormous spiritual implications of these studies, which clearly show that there's some quality or aspect of consciousness that operates beyond the body. This goes a long way toward validating the old idea of the soul. Some quality of who we are is infinite in space and time, and does not perish with the death of the body. This implication dwarfs whatever contribution these studies make toward healing. This is the greatest story of hope for human beings: the most essential part of who you are cannot die.

Some quality of who we are is infinite in space and time, and does not perish with the death of the body.

Today, the beginning assumption of medicine is tragedy-we all get sick, and eventually die, no matter what the doctor does. This is "time-based" medicine, and everyone's time runs out sooner or later. Tomorrow, the beginning assumption of medicine will be immortality-what I call "Eternity Medicine." The new medicine assumes that the most essential part of who we are is immortal. It doesn't have to be repaired or acquired. It's factory issue original equipment. You don't have to develop it or create it. It's the hard drive, and it can't crash. Realizing this deep in your heart is the essence of spiritual work. The antidote to soul loss, then, is the restoration of soul. In William Wordsworth's immortal words in his great poem, Tintern Abbey, he says:

And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought
A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused
whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns
And the round ocean of the living air,
And the blue sky
And in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things
all objects of all thought
and rolls through all things

This presence that so enraptured Wordsworth constantly rolls through the human heart. The medical profession is now looking inside the human heart, and this is leading to a great rethinking. Spirituality is returning to modern medicine. Health care professionals steeped in Eternity Medicine approach their patients knowing that their most essential self is immortal, eternal, infinite.

Spirituality, for me, is that sense of connectedness with an absolute and transcendent power beyond the individual self and ego. Whatever name you use for that presence and that power-God, the Great Spirit, Jehovah, the Goddess, Allah, the universe, overwhelming beauty and logic and order-that for you is spirituality. It is not the same as religion. Religion is simply ritualized spirituality. It has to do with those traditional behaviors such as attending worship services, reading sacred texts, and observing codes of conduct. Religion often includes a sense of the spiritual. Some people can be spiritual without being at all religious, and people can certainly be religious without having a shred of spirituality. People can be both or neither.

There are certain operations of consciousness such as those we see in distant healing and prayer, to which the categories of space and time simply do not apply.

Whatever name we use for spirit, we are going to have to come up with a non-local picture of consciousness to accommodate the phenomena these studies point to. If you're going to think non-locally, here's what you've invented. You've come up with a picture of consciousness that has certain characteristics including being omnipresent, eternal and immortal. The most majestic contribution these studies make is to clearly show that there is some quality of consciousness that is unconfinable to specific points in space such as the brain, or specific points in time such as the present. There are certain operations of consciousness such as those we see in distant healing and prayer, to which the categories of space and time simply do not apply. The new physics teaches us that "non-local" is just a fancy word for "infinite." We have discovered a non-local or infinite quality of consciousness flowing from these studies. They reveal that there's some quality to who we are that's immortal. These studies are indirect evidence for the existence of the Soul, something that isn't born, doesn't die, and does not disappear with the death of the brain and body.

This is not a new idea. Irwin Schrödinger, a great quantum physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his Schrödinger wave equations, said, "Mind-by its very nature-is a singular entity. I should say the overall number of minds is just one." His reasoning went like this: If there is some factor of consciousness that is non-local or infinite, that means you can't put it into a box, and wall it off from all other minds. In some dimension, minds come together to form what he called the one mind; what our ancestors used to refer to as the universal mind. The poet William Butler Yeats said, "The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy."

© 2005 by Dawson Church and Geralyn Gendreau