Prayer and Mental Healing
The use of prayer in healing began in human prehistory and continues to this day. Contemporary surveys reveal that most Americans pray and that they pray frequently, and almost always when they or their loved ones are ill. The terms mental healing and spiritual healing are frequently used interchangeably. What does "spiritual" mean in this context? For many healers, spiritual healing is an integral part of their personal religion (e.g., healing comes from Jesus, Mary, a particular saint, God, and so on). Yet this cannot be the whole story, because spiritual and prayer-based healing is universal. It cannot be attributed to any particular religious point of view; it occurs in nontheistic traditions such as Buddhism just as it does in the theistic traditions of the West and in animistic societies as well. What is the unifying principle in mental-spiritual healing that seemingly transcends personal religious views? Is mental-spiritual healing a direct effect of mind or consciousness? Are personal religious interpretations irrelevant? What is the most fundamental, basic requirement for mental-spiritual healing, without which it cannot occur?~Techniques vary widely from culture to culture and are too diverse to be reviewed here. Overall patterns can nonetheless be discerned among mental-spiritual healers practicing in the United States. One of the most thorough and innovative evaluations of this field is by psychologist Lawrence LeShan, a pioneer in investigating the relationship between psychological states and cancer (LeShan, 1966). LeShan found that mental-spiritual healing methods are of two main types. In type 1 healing, which LeShan considered the most important and prevalent kind, the healer enters a prayerful, altered state of consciousness in which he views himself and the patient as a single entity. There need be no physical contact and there is no attempt to "do anything" or "give something" to the person in need, only the desire to unite and "become one" with him or her and with the Universe, God, or Cosmos. Type 1 healers uniformly emphasize the importance of empathy, love, and caring in this process. When healing takes place, it does so in the context of an enveloping sense of unity, compassion, and love. These healers state that this type of healing is a natural process that ~does not violate the laws of innate bodily function but rather speeds up ordinary healing--a very rapid self-repair or self-recuperation. LeShan's type 2 healers, on the other hand, do touch the patient and describe some "flow of energy" through their hands to the patient's area of pathology. Feelings of heat are common in both healer and patient. In this mode, unlike type 1, the healer tries to heal. Some type 2 healers see themselves as originators of this healing power; others describe themselves as transmitters of it. Type 1 healers do not have to be close to the patient to facilitate healing; for them, the degree of spatial separation from the person in need is irrelevant. Type 2 healers work on site in the presence of the patient. These healing techniques are offered only as generalities. Some healers use both methodologies, even in the same healing session, and other healing methods could be described.~Rationale. How does this type of healing occur? There is no explanation within contemporary medical science, particularly for type 1, nonlocal healing. The absence of an underlying "mechanism" is the greatest impediment to progress in this field, if such a word is even applicable. The lack of an explanation for these events prompts many people to dismiss them without investigating the evidence: since they cannot occur, they do not occur. Proponents of this foregone conclusion regard any "evidence" for mental healing as illusory, nothing more than artifacts of poor experimentation or data processing, or chance results of complex random processes. The absence of a known mechanism, however, does not necessarily mean that mental healing does not or cannot occur, or that the research supporting it is necessarily flawed. Until the turn of this century, scientists had no explanation for a very common event: sunshine. An understanding of why the sun shines had to await the development of modern nuclear physics. Of course, the ignorance of scientists did not annul sunlight. Likewise, although the evidence is not so immediate, mental healing may be valid in the absence of a ~validating theory. What might a future model of the mind that permits mental-spiritual healing look like? Such a model will almost certainly be nonlocal. The idea prevalent in contemporary science is that the mind and consciousness are entirely local phenomena--that is, they are localized to the brain and body and confined to the present moment. From this point of view, distant healing cannot occur in principle, since the mind cannot stray outside the "here and now" to cause a remote event. Studies in distant mental influence and mental healing, however, challenge these assumptions. Dozens of laboratory experiments suggest that the mind can bring about changes in faraway physical bodies, even when the distant person or organism is shielded from all known sensory and electromagnetic influences. They imply that mind and consciousness may not always be localized or confined to points in space, such as brains or bodies, or in time, such as the present moment (Braud, 1992; Braud and Schlitz, 1991; Jahn and Dunne, 1987). ~For medicine, the implications of a nonlocal concept of the mind may be profound. Among them are the following: • Nonlocal models of the mind may be helpful in understanding the actual dynamics of healing. They may help explain instances in which a cure appears suddenly, radically, and unexpectedly; or when healing appears to be influenced by events occurring at a distance from the patient and outside his or her awareness. • Nonlocal manifestations of consciousness may complicate traditional experimental designs and require innovative research methods because they suggest, among other things, that the mental state or expectation of the experimenter may influence the experiment's outcome, even under "blind" conditions (Solfvin, 1984). At the same time, however, nonlocal manifestations suggest unmistakable spiritual qualities of the psyche, including the possibility that a nonlocal consciousness might survive the death of the local brain. The temporal barrier may also be violated: information apparently may be ~received by a distant person, at global distances, before it is mentally transmitted by the sender (Radin and Nelson, 1989). These events, replicated by careful observers under laboratory conditions, suggest that there is some aspect of the psyche that is unconfinable to points in space or to points in time. In sum, these events point toward a nonlocal model of consciousness, which at the very least allows for the possibility of distant healing information exchange and perhaps distant healing influences. A nonlocal model of consciousness implies that at some level of the psyche there are no fundamental spatiotemporal separations between individual minds. If so, at some level and in some sense there may be unity and oneness of all minds--what Nobel physicist Erwin Schroedinger called the One Mind.14 In a nonlocal model of consciousness, therefore, distance is not fundamental but is completely overcome--in which case the mind of the healer and the patient are not genuinely separate but in some sense united. "Distant" healing thus becomes a misnomer, and because of the unification of consciousness, the patient may be said to be healing himself or herself.~Offering nonlocality as the bedrock of mental healing merely shifts the question: instead of asking how mental healing occurs, now one must ask how nonlocality happens. Currently no one knows, not even the physicists whose many experiments have established it as a solid part of modern physics. The saying comes to mind, "Physicists never really understand a new theory, they just get used to it." Perhaps the same may be said of physicians and their attempts to understand mental healing. Nonlocal mental models imply "action at a distance," which has been an abhorrent concept to most scientists since Galileo. But that situation may be changing. Physicists have repeatedly documented that nonlocal phenomena occur in the subatomic, quantum domain, wherein information can seemingly be "transferred" between distant sites by processes that are "immediate, unmitigated, and unmediated."15 Whether quantum nonlocality is a possible explanation or rationale for biological or mental nonlocality is a question for future research. Nobel prize-winning physicist Brian D. Josephson of Cambridge University has suggested that nonlocal events occur in the biological world as well as the quantum domain. He proposes that human ways of knowing, particularly the human capacity to perceive patterns and meaning, make possible "direct interconnections between spatially separated objects." Josephson suggests that these interconnections permit ~the operation of "psi functioning" between humans, currently held by biomedical science as impossible (Josephson and Pallikara-Viras, 1991). In any case, the fact that nonlocal events are now studied by physicists in the microworld suggests a greater permissiveness and freedom to examine phenomena in the biological and mental domains--such as mental healing--that may possibly be analogous. Research accomplishments and major reviews. Anecdotal accounts of the power of prayer in "mental," "spiritual," "psychic," "distant," or "absent" healing are both legendary and legion. Countless books on these subjects are available, but this literature contains little scientific value. Scientific attempts to assess the effects of prayer and spiritual practices on health began in the 19th century with Sir Francis Galton's treatise entitled "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer" (Galton, 1872). Galton assessed the longevity of people frequently prayed for, such as clergy, monarchs, and heads of state. He concluded that there was no demonstrable effect of prayer on longevity. Judged by modern research standards, Galton's ~study contains many flaws, but he succeeded in advancing the idea that healing methods involving prayer and similar spiritual practices could be subjected to empirical scrutiny. Since Galton's time, a sizable body of scientific evidence has accumulated in the field of spiritual healing showing positive results. This information is little known to the scientific community. Psychologist William G. Braud, a leading researcher in this field, summarizes this research in a recent review: There exist many published reports of experiments in which persons were able to influence a variety of cellular and other biological systems through mental means. The target systems for these investigations have included bacteria, yeast, fungi, mobile algae, plants, protozoa, larvae, insects, chicks, mice, rats, gerbils, cats, and dogs, as well as cellular preparations (blood cells, neurons, cancer cells) and enzyme activities. In human "target persons," eye movements, muscular movements, electrodermal activity, plethysmographic activity, respiration, and brain rhythms have been affected through direct mental influence (Braud, 1992; Braud and Schlitz, 1991).~These studies in general assess the ability of humans to affect physiological functions of a variety of living systems at a distance, including studies in which the "receiver" or "target" is unaware that such an effort is being made. The fact that these studies commonly involve nonhuman targets is important; lower organisms are presumably not subject to suggestion and placebo effects, a frequent criticism when human subjects are involved. Many of these studies do not describe the psychological strategy of the influencer as actual "prayer," in which one directs entreaties to a Supreme Being, a Universal Power, or God. But almost all of them involve a state of prayerfulness--a feeling of genuine caring, compassion, love, or empathy with the target system, or a feeling that the influencer is one with the target. In addition to the review by Braud, two other major reviews of this field have been published in the past decade by researchers Jerry Solfvin and Daniel J. Benor (Benor, 1990, 1993; Solfvin, 1984). These reviews examine the results of more than 130 controlled studies of distant mental effects, approximately half of which show statistically significant results. The ~Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature, a scholarly, encyclopedic work by Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute, reviews the major research accomplishments in the field of mental healing and related fields and is a valuable guide (Murphy, 1992). The potential relevance of this area for medical practice has been examined by Larry Dossey (1993). Experiments in distant hypnosis deserve intense scientific scrutiny. In such studies a subject is hypnotized remotely, is unaware when the hypnosis is taking place, and has no sensory contact with the hypnotist. Several such experiments were performed in France in the late 1800s by Janet and Gilbert and were repeated with greater refinement in 260 laboratory experiments in 1933 and 1934 by Vasiliev and colleagues in Leningrad (Vasiliev, 1976). These studies offer tantalizing suggestions that the human mind may display nonlocal characteristics (see the next section). For reasons to be discussed there, exploring this possibility scientifically should be given high priority. Extent of the nonlocal perspective. The nonlocal manifestations of consciousness are not ~limited to prayer. Consciousness appears to manifest nonlocally in secular laboratory settings as freely as in a church, implying that prayer is only one of the possible avenues for the expression of these events. If nonlocal mental events are indeed ubiquitous, they may pervade all healing endeavors to some degree, even those that appear overwhelmingly mechanical, such as pharmacological and surgical therapies. Therefore it is unclear whether any therapy can be considered totally mechanical or "objective" (Braud, 1992). Nonlocal mental events may affect all therapies to some degree, and the nonlocal perspective may have to be considered when any therapy is assessed. Research needs and opportunities. In addition to demonstrating whether there is a distant healing effect of the mind, future research should examine the following questions: • How robust, reliable, and dependable is the mental healing effect? • What qualities in the praying person and the recipient facilitate and retard distant healing effects?~ • How can talented or potential healers be identified?16 • Is healing a "gift," or can individuals be trained to heal?17 • Do some prayers work better than others in mental-spiritual healing?18 • Why does the ability to heal fluctuate? Why is it not constant? Are mental healers like talented athletes, who can be either "hot" or "cold"? Since healing abilities seem to fluctuate, how can experimental protocols allow for this variation? Is it justifiable to apply the same experimental designs to healers as to penicillin, which presumably does not have an "off" day? • How can mental healing be integrated with orthodox medical approaches, particularly in hospital environments? Can medical and surgical approaches be used simultaneously with mental healing, or are these methods incompatible? ~ • Can mental healing be tested in the same way as a new drug or surgical procedure? Is the randomized, prospective, double-blind methodology equally appropriate for physically and for mentally-spiritually based therapies? • How can the public be protected from fraudulent or misguided mental "healers"? Is it possible to establish a requirement akin to board certification for healers in an attempt to ensure efficacy and protect consumers from worthless "healers" and predatory quacks?19 • What about more general ethical considerations? Is a mental healer justified in attempting to heal people without their knowledge and consent? • Is it possible to harm distant organisms and aid them through distant mental influences?20 There are two related but separate directions of research in the field of nonlocal therapy: (1) the need to develop actual healing methods, and (2) the need to shed light on the ~fundamental nature of human consciousness. The first goal obviously requires the use of some type of living organisms as the recipient, but the second need not. In fact, the effects of consciousness can be studied in certain laboratory settings that offer greater precision and control than is offered by the usual experiments that involve living organisms as recipients. An example is the sophisticated studies in remote human-machine interactions that have been done for a decade at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory by Robert G. Jahn, former dean of engineering of Princeton University, and his colleagues (Jahn and Dunne, 1987). Conclusions. Appallingly little is known about the origins of consciousness and how it relates to the physical brain. Although hypotheses purporting to explain consciousness abound, there simply is no consensus among expert neuroscientists, psychologists, artificial intelligence researchers, and philosophers as to its nature. Perhaps the lack of knowledge is not surprising; in medical research, scientists usually consign consciousness to last-place status and opt for "practical" research areas--the development of new drugs, surgical therapies, vaccines, and so forth.~Research in this area is analogous to basic investigations in other exotic areas of science such as particle physics, which have no immediate, bottom-line value. There is a need to know more about the basic, fundamental nature of consciousness--its spatial and temporal characteristics and its precise relationship with matter, including the brain. Without this basic understanding, progress in all forms of therapy, alternative and traditional, will be hampered, because the effects of consciousness are to some degree involved in all of them.

• When Therapy Isn't Enough: Prayer and Psychotherapy - Dr. Menahem's book explores healing through a universal, psychological approach to prayer, meditation and psychotherapy.

   

Health > Mental Health > Counseling and Therapy > Therapeutic Methods > Pastoral Counseling

• Living Rock Ministries - online ministry dedicated to fervent prayer, teaching Biblical truths, Biblical counseling, and other ministries for Jesus.
• Healing Love Outreach Ministries - a non-profit Christian organization dedicated to ministering to the needs of hurting women. Includes chat and prayer resources.