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.



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.

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.

The problem is not a failure of programs; we have plenty of those. We have plenty of intelligence and ingenuity, but we are suffering a failure of will. We need to muster the will, the vision, and the initiative to dig in and do something. We're like a nation of anesthetized zombies, sleepwalkers, stuck in deep emotional mud, unable to find the vision to motivate ourselves.

Fundamental shifts are occurring in certain areas of science if one knows where to look for the indicators. They portend a huge transition in the way we see ourselves in terms of connectedness with the world. The area that excites me most, personally and professionally, is the evidence that our consciousness can make concrete changes in the world. Ancient wisdom held this to be true, but it is new to modern science.

Science can be a spiritual path. If used wisely, technology can be used for healing rather than destruction. Today, ninety of the 125 medical schools in the U.S. have courses devoted to exploring the links between spirituality and health. Ten years ago there were only three. This is a landmark development. It is an historic transition.

Medicine is on the threshold of a profound change. It is recognizing that emotions, feelings, and intentions are as much of the healing process as drugs and surgery. This realization is humanizing medicine, not just from a patient's point of view, but from the doctor's point of view. It is not fulfilling, as a doctor, to practice medicine as if people are just physical machines. The whole ambiance of the medical encounter is shifting. As I talk to young students now coming out of medical schools, they hold these values as self-evident. The medical profession has gone from rejecting prayer as “unscientific” to believing in it as received wisdom.