On Healing & Beliefs

Art by Joseph Rael

Last summer a woman came to me whose mother was going to have surgery on her hip. I said I was willing to dedicate a dance that we’d be doing in Australia in October for her mother’s healing, and, since I wouldn’t be going to Australia for another three months, her healing would be retroactive. Her mother went to the doctor two days later. They didn’t have to operate because, apparently, the hip was healing… I said her healing would be retroactive because Spirit told me to say it, though it didn’t make much sense at the time.
Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light.

I have been poking around trying to better understand the role of consciousness in healing.
Consciousness includes many levels: Spirit, emotions, beliefs. So, in this regard I came across an interesting article not so long ago. It was scientifically tight enough to have been listed in the NIH’s National Library of Medicine archives (Pubmed). The article is looking at the results of a study out of Harvard on the effects of prayer. It is discussing experimental design – how we need to think differently when studying consciousness with proper scientific controls.

Here is the passage that has stuck in my head the past few weeks. Let me also point out that the healing Joseph Rael describes occurred not only retroactively in time, but also at a distance, i.e. “non-locally.” The article describes an experiment designed to test just such a possibility:
Israeli immunologist Leonard Leibovici highly skeptical of claims of intention/prayer studies designed an experiment that only some kind of nonlocal linkage could explain… in 2000, Leibovici identified 3,393 adult patients each of whom suffered from a bloodstream infection while in the Rabin Medical Center between 1990 and 1996 – that is to say four to ten years earlier. All of these patients were long out of the hospital. These patients were randomized into two populations; 1, 691 were assigned to the intervention group and 1,702 to the control group. The treatment group was the focus of therapeutic intention in the form of prayer… the study discovered that “length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control (P=.01 and P=.04 respectively).” …For this study to have worked, it seems that therapeutic intention from the “future” must have affected the “past” when it was the present to produce a biased outcome – not to have changed the past, but to have produced the original effect in the first instance.
Nonlocality, Intention, and Observer Effects in Healing Studies: Laying a Foundation for the Future

This is all very curious to me. Time is trickier than you think. Meditators learn this, as do physicists:
People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between the past, the present and the future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

I think about my father. I have come to think of him as “a man ahead of his time” as it seems like every major discovery that I’ve made, Pop was already there. When I called home from college in 1969, wanting to learn TM but a bit scared to take the step, Pop knew all about it and encouraged me. When I discovered homeopathy, Pop knew about that too and shared his books with me. When I crashed badly after an awakening, Pop was the one who said “You have kundalini burnout.” I had never heard the term. And so it was with this precedence that in the early ‘80s Pop explored the Gerson Therapy. He met Charlotte Gerson. He attended seminars and talked with cancer patients who had survived the supposedly incurable. He bought all the books and tried to spread the word.

At the time, Pop’s deep interest in a cancer therapy, when no one in the family was affected, struck my sister as more than a little morbid. She fussed to me that she was afraid that this strange preoccupation would perhaps make Pop himself sick.
Now, I wonder if he was merely being true to something in his nature: he was a scientist open to the evidence. He was ahead of his time - at least in regards to his children’s interest. And he had an unwavering intention to always help and be there for us.
Thus, it was very natural this January when Evie needed to try yet another approach to cure her cancer, for us to turn to Gerson. Pop had done the due diligence research for us years ago.

My father died in 1996, but his prayer for us is clear and I am not so worried anymore about locality and time.
I am more concerned with being open to the gift. I’m discovering that with cancer being open means not only dealing with the body but dealing with our very understanding of reality. And the scientific moorings of our culture can make that very difficult. So, I’ll continue to look at beliefs both scientific and mystical as Evie walks her path of healing.

Dying to Have Known: A ten minute clip from a film about the Gerson Therapy that illustrates the solidity of the cultural beliefs that surround us as supposed truths.

Dancing Daffodils

Shadows, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Williams Wordsworth

I have one lone daffodil growing up outside my front door by the driveway.
Yesterday, morning to my surprise and joy I noticed it had begun to bloom. As I sat in my car, waiting for the motor to warm, I stared down at the little daffodil. It didn’t look so healthy. It has a washed out color, not the classic bright yellow. Looking closer, I noticed that it looked to me like some animal had chewed away the petals just a bit. That was strange and I kept looking.
That was when I noticed the little fellow was shaking and bobbing just a bit. I enjoyed that – until I noticed, there wasn’t the least bit of wind. That was simply odd.
I put the car into reverse and drove away.

That evening when I got home, I sat for a moment in the car, looking once again down at the daffodil.
Yes, it seemed a bit chewed around the edges. And yes, there it was again, bobbing and shaking its head, in the wind… except there wasn’t the slightest stir of air anywhere around.
How odd. And I got out of the car to collect my mail.

Would "true perspective" mean "the perspective that correctly and accurately describes reality as it is, beyond perspectives?"
If so, I'd say that it's an incoherent notion…
Perceptions that are usually called "physical" occur as a kind of language that has no inside or outside… But there's nothing Out There to which any of these ideas refer.
Greg Goode

This morning, as I came out to my car, I was looking up at the sky thinking about Greg Goode and his tight philosophical reasoning that there are many, many ways that we can describe reality. I was thinking, it was even something of a prayer, “Please let me be open to seeing from the different angles. Please let me be open.”
Then once more I noticed the daffodil. I sat there in my car. “Hey, are you shaking now?”
It was not. It was still as any other object in my un-kept garden area.
Then, I felt awareness drop from in my head and open softly in my chest.
“How are you doing today?” I felt the thought leave me in a gentle, caring, consciousness to consciousness manner.
I noticed that simple change within myself. And, at that moment the daffodil began to twitch and shake.
Stunned, I started crying and the daffodil stood silent.
I bowed internally to the flower, “Thank you for that teaching.” And the daffodil immediately responded with a bobbing and a shimmy.
Again, I looked around for currents and a breeze. Again, there wasn’t the slightest motion anywhere.
I looked once more at the flower. Back in my head, I wanted to try for yet a third time. Yet, I knew going in this time once more in the mode of scientist I would not get a response.
And there was none – at least not from the flower.

For me, this was a huge confirmation. It may sound silly to many others and a proof of nothing.
But, all I know was I felt myself get out of my head and into my heart.
I felt a connection with the flower. And there was communication.
There was also a deep, deep blessing.

Apparently our eyes are locked to the daily perceptual reality we live in; therefore we program our eyesight not to see too many vibrations in our lives. That is because we do not want to be distracted… Once I apply “puuh” (to-be –cast –awayness) I can then see with deer eyes, not only the image of the physical plant, but additionally the spirit that usually steps outside and stands beside its plant home and talks telepathically.

The plants taught me to eat them for their medicinal properties because they enjoyed traveling the human digestive tract, through the pleasing landscapes that could only be found in the human anatomy. I would eat the leaf of a plant, and then I would wait fifteen counts. The plant part I had eaten would send back a report to the plant that had given the leaf and translate the messages of the eaten plant leaf back to me. The transmission had to be done quickly because after fifteen to twenty seconds the eaten leaf of the plant went into a pure bliss state and connections were lost.
Joseph Rael