Posted on 24 September 2013, 15:38

When we think about spiritual healing, we are often thinking in dualist terms: We think of God in the sky somewhere, answering our prayers; or if we are thinking of Hindu Akashic Records, Sheldrake’s memory fields, Plato’s Ideal Forms or David Bohm’s Implicate universe, we visualise it all as somewhere at a distance, somehow acting in our lives “down here on earth.” Old habits die hard, and if we can agree that the basis of all things is timeless, spaceless Mind, we need to work at putting these old mental pictures to one side. We have also to consider whether the weighing and measuring that belongs to science is as much a creation of mind as the physical world it measures. Can Mind be measured? I think not. Do language, symbols, archetypes, myths, hopes and fears create in the physical? Very likely. We need to take these things into consideration, whether we are thinking of disease in human beings, or things in general. With regard to medicine and disease, I have found a book by a medical doctor friend very helpful. He writes:

“Speaking from the perspective of the whole, our being is spiritual, is subjective, is material, is relational, is conscious, and is unconscious… I am sure there are spiritual realities or dimensions that are mostly invisible. But I resist too much division into the visible and invisible when it comes to spirit. Such division can imply that the ordinary world, the visible world, the world of matter and things, is fundamentally empty of spirit.”

Page 192 MEANING-full DISEASE: How personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness. Brian Broom. 2007 (below).

Thus, in thinking about disease, Prof Broom feels compelled to see it as an aspect of an unbroken spiritual/physical whole. We cannot pretend that our thoughts and emotions (and may be much else) have nothing to do with the disease from which we may suffer, or that Sheldrake’s memory fields, the Akashic records, (however we describe memory apart from the brain,) are not involved. Since reality is one undivided spiritual/physical whole, everything affects everything.

This is not to put to one side normal medical enquiry. If we consume much sugar, and become obese, we are likely to suffer from diabetes. But if we start asking why we consume too much sugar, our answers may become more complicated. They will involve thinking about our personal relationships, our spiritual maturity, the advertising industry and so on. In the end we find everything is interconnected. But Broom sees our language as one factor that fights against exploring and understanding things in the widest context. He writes:

“The separation of mind and body is at some level an artefact or by-product of human language-based handling of human experience which is nevertheless fundamentally unified.

But is not only the person that gets divided or “constructed” through language making. Lakoff and Johnson (ibid p.19-20) makes a further point that our experience of external reality, the world (not just the body and the mind), is also carved up into certain categories because we have the peculiar types of sensory perception (vision etc.) that we have.” (p.44)

While I was thinking about all this, I found a passage in a book on Celtic spirituality that appealed to me. For spirituality is very much part of Broom’s thinking about Meaning-full disease. Here is the passage:

“For too long, we have believed that the divine is outside us. This belief has strained our longing disastrously. This is so lonely since it is human longing that makes us holy. The most beautiful thing about us is our longing; for longing is spiritual and has great depth and wisdom. If you focus your longing on the faraway Divinity, you put an unfair a strain on your longing. Thus, it often happens that the longing reaches out towards the distant divine, but, because it overstrains its self, its bends back to become cynicism, emptiness, or negativity. This can destroy your sensibility. Yet we do not need to put any strain whatever on our longing. If we believe that the body is in the soul and the soul is divine ground, then the presence of the divine is completely here, close with us. Being in the Soul, the body makes the sensors thresholds of soul. [pp.84-5 Anam Cara, Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World: John O’Donohue]

This is how we should ideally see things. But Broom is daunted by the seeming impossibility of doing so.

“I actually wonder to whether a thoroughgoing non-dualistic conceptualisation is actually beyond the reach of ordinary human consciousness, simply because of the nature of thought and language. The activity of ‘talking about’ something is, in essence, a dualistic activity in the sense that talking always involves selecting one aspect, and therefore not another aspect. It is true that such language making involves the putting of things together. Metaphors, symbols, and other kinds of imaging… Language rests upon the dividing of things.” [Broom: ibid. p.135]

He comments: “We are nondualistic essentially, but language and thought are dualistic and therefore it is hard to get away from this dualism except by suspending thought and language. What we can do is become relatively more nondualistic in attitude and posture, and we should do so because that is the way things are.”

So when we speak of disease being full of meaning, we must affirm both that the asthma that the patient endures may be an allergic reaction to a particular substance, or it may be a bodily expression of grief, whatever the case, the analysis, the search for local causes cannot come to an end.  We can best think of a God who is in all through all and above all.

In practice, Broom has found that physical healing from a disease has often occurred through face to face counselling.  Once the underlying spiritual or emotional distress is acknowledged and explored through several counselling sessions, the symptoms of disease have often disappeared. Although he does not say so in his book, Broom has in at least two cases, found tumours to disappear in apparently inoperable cases of cancer, in the context of counselling and prayer. As an adjunct professor of MindBody Health Care (he is an immunologist and psychotherapist) he does not say this lightly. In the counselling room there is an encounter between two people, more than an interview between a professional and a “case”, and healing is often the result.

Space prevents relating long case histories here, but readers may find a sample if they follow a link at the end of this blog. But I can include this passage from Broom’s book:

“Many years ago I visited Canon Jim Glennon at the Anglican Cathedral in Sydney, Australia. I had read of the weekly healing services be conducted there, and was interested to explore his approach. The healing service I attended involve the congregation of perhaps 3 to 500 people, and, frankly, it seemed a rather ordinary Anglican service. But I was fascinated by the story he proffered as we engaged in a discussion on how he got into the healing ministry.

“He had been visiting a parishioner in hospital. She had ovarian cancer, and it also advanced an extensive that she had what is called a frozen pelvis, that is, the solid tumour filled the pelvis. She asked him to pray for her, which he did, and then left. That night she experienced a sense of burning in the pelvis that went on for hours. The next morning she was taken to the operating theatre for insertion of radium implants, to provide radiotherapy treatment of the tumour.

But, first, she was examined, and to the surgeon’s astonishment the tumour was gone, and the procedure was abandoned.

“Spontaneous remissions of cancer are well documented (O’Regan and Hirschberg 1993), and I had no reason to doubt the veracity of Glennon’s story. I have pondered this many times, especially as I have come to realise that ‘matter’, as we know it through the five senses, appears very structured and stable, but can be equally well described as energy based and semi-stable.” [Broom, ibid. p.197] Broom continues on with reference to David Bohm’s Implicate and
Explicate orders.

Some of the case studies from Brian Broom’s book suggest that experiences, thoughts, and emotions play their part in the generation of disease:

http://existentialmedicine.wordpress.com/extracts-from-meaning-full-disease-by-brian-broom-case-studies-in-existential-medicine/

Here is a video of a patient of Dr Broom, describing the insights that led to her recovering from a serious illness: http://www.juliecee.com/#!story-doctors/ceui
Perhaps the first person that we think of when we consider the connection between traumatic experiences and disease is Dr Larry Dossey (below). Here is his homepage which contains a wealth of material for profitable study:

http://www.dosseydossey.com/larry/default.html

Here is a critique of Larry Dossey’s work. We may or may not agree with what is said, but such critiques can certainly point up important issues.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-mythology-of-larry-dossey/

Michael Cocks edits the journal, Ground of Faith.

Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

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Posted on 11 September 2013, 8:54

I do find it hard to get my head around some of the things that I read about how the World as we know it came into being. It is not that I doubt that the world and the universe that contains it is a creation of Mind: the question for me is, whose mind? Or the mind of what? If the world is illusion, whose illusion is it? I don’t really have answers, perhaps readers have suggestions.

It is said that things come into existence when something is observed causing quantum wave collapse: There is the example given by QM physicist, Erwin Schrödinger about a cat in a sealed box – either he is dead or not dead, and only the act of observation can determines that. It is the act of observation that brings physical reality into being. Counter intuitive as it may seem, there is a lot of agreement about the matter.

Even the 1700s philosopher Bishop Berkeley maintained that. The tree is there because we are observing it. For him the reason why it does not vanish when we walk away is that God is observing it.

It is pointed out that the picture of physical reality around us that we have, is very much dependent on our physical senses. The light spectrum for us ranges between ultraviolet and infrared. Ultraviolet and infrared we cannot see, but if we could, the world around us would seem very different. Our sense organs are insensitive to the radio energy spectrum: we have no consciousness of radio waves passing right through us and the seemingly impervious concrete walls that may surround us. What would the world feel like if we could sense radio or television waves?

We are told that the atoms that compose our bodies are almost entirely empty space, nothingness, in which infinitely more minute energy fields interact, themselves the product of distortions of the vacuum of space. All this of course makes it much easier to envisage a world of spirit that may coexist with the world of our physical senses.

But when we say that we create the physical world, and that it is a creation of the mind, and therefore that it is an illusion, (at least in the sense that it is not what it seems), what do we mean by “we” in this context?

I am inclined to think that it is important that we consider the work of the biologist Rupert Sheldrake in this respect. For him, memory is the key factor. In previous blogs I have explored the reasons why memory cannot be conceived of as “memory traces” in the physical brains. A Taiwanese friend Dr Simon Wu, has conducted neurological research in California, has been duplicating experiments conducted by Wolfgang Köhler and Karl Lashley, where animals have been trained to perform a task, and then random cuts were made in the cerebral cortex to interrupt possible “traces” or diminished patterns of resistance at synapses between the fibres of nerve cells. When the animals recovered, there was no discernible loss of memory in the subjects.

But there are many other arguments against the existence of such memory traces, including what has happened with people having Near Death Experiences. For Sheldrake memory is a function of non-physical reality, and exists in a timeless realm. Here is quotation I once copied out, (unfortunately without the page reference, which I didn’t record):

“While we know far more about migrating species today, there are still great mysteries: How does a fledgling American Golden-Plover make a journey of 10,000 miles along a route he’s never flown before?

How does the small Savannah Sparrow manage to fly from Mexico to Alaska—6,000 miles distant—and still nest within a few yards of its previous home?”

“Adult bald eagles do not migrate with juveniles. Newly fledged eagles migrate before their parents. No one knows how the young birds know when and where to travel.

“Some fledgling eagles wander in a wide range their first few years. Some return to their origin, while others do not. Only the young eagle knows if this is a conscious decision, or if it simply loses its way.”

Sheldrake proposes that there exist what he calls non-physical Memory Fields. He would do so because in the cases just quoted, the fledglings could not have prior knowledge where to fly to, that it would the impossible to suppose that flight paths and destinations could somehow be present in the genetic material with which the fledgling is born. (Even granted that there could be “memory traces”.) Sheldrake’s idea is that former experiences of (in this case) a bird species are recorded in these hypothetical memory fields, and one could perhaps see them as like GPS satellites, with which the fledgling is in constant communication, both guiding and controlling the fledgling in its flight.

Of course, his theory also applies to our memories – they also reside in such fields, and such fields may not in turn be insulated from other fields, and thus we have a corporate memory of a wider all embracing Mind, somewhat similar to the Akashic Records of Hinduism. Wikipedia: “The akashic records – akasha being a Sanskrit word meaning “sky”, “space” or “aether” – are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and all experiences as well as the history of the cosmos encoded or written in the very aether or fabric of all existence.”

In the same way Sheldrake extends this concept and proposes a similar memory field to govern the so-called laws of physics. The so-called laws, Sheldrake proposes, are really habits of behaviour, or memories. If the physical world is the creation of Mind, then the memory fields, or if you like the Akashic records, explain the continuation of the set way in which physical phenomena occur. Physical reality may be the creation of Mind, or of individual minds, and the Memory fields, or Akashic records explain why that mind creation retains its fixed form.

In that case Sheldrake would disagree with Bishop Berkeley and claim that it is not simply the act of observation that constructs the physical reality detected by our senses, but also the memory fields which govern all things.

The disciple of Albert Einstein, quantum physicist David Bohm, would have agreed with the ideas of Sheldrake. In his book The Implicate Order he proposes an “infolded” or Implicate order where the patterns and memories of all things are contained, and an Explicate or “outfolded” order of the physical. Bohm’s picture is like that of Plato and his doctrine of Ideal Forms. I think by “Ideal” Plato means “belonging to the idea.” But the difference between Bohm and Plato would be that Plato seems to envisage a one-way process, with the “Ideal” world producing the physical world, whereas Bohm envisages a two-way process, where what happens in the physical or Explicate is “remembered” in the spiritual or Implicate world, which in turn influences the physical, (including determining the llight paths of migratory birds) and so on, back and forth.

Memory would be the key. We exist in the world of spirit, and also in the physical world because of our memories. Without memory and consciousness we would not exist.

Memory would be the key to everything. Memory brings stability of form and its continuation. Memories can be changed, patterns can be altered, but, as those of us who try to memorise, or to change our habits, often much effort, much effort is required. If because of bad memories and faulty habits we have become sick, then sometimes through hypnosis, or prayer, this can be corrected, and we become well. But it is not an easy process, and often much repetition is required.

So it would be true to say that we create the world, but it would seem that the word “we” would have to include not only other living beings, but the habits of the physical world would have to be included as well.

So where does “God” or the “Absolute” fit in to all this, in the view of Bohm and Sheldrake? For in this view, the creative process goes back and forth from Implicate to Explicate to Implicate and so on. What happens in the physical can produce an effect in the spiritual or Implicate. Is there no place for God? Well, it does depend on how you want to define that word.

In the New Testament there is talk of a God who is in all, through all, and above all, and in a God who shows himself in Love. In that case, we would have to see God in the whole Implicate-Explicate process, or in the process of the interaction of the “memory fields” “akashic records” and the physical.

In Afterlife Teaching from Stephen the Martyr we have Stephen speaking of the universal Christ bringing all things into being, of “imaging” the world, thus we are created in his “image.” And this is how the Gospel of John begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it”.

We are brought into being with the events in which we participate by the “Word”, the projection of the universal Christ.

The phenomenon of synchronicity is often seen as demonstrating this imaging process.

And this intuition about the nature of things, seems almost universal in the world’s religion, all talking in one way or another about the predestination of all things by God, Fate or whatever. All that happens is seen therefore as the will of
God. And I suppose, if we are to accept Sheldrake’s and Bohm’s back and forth between the eternal and the physical, that is how the will of God would be worked out.

Questions immediately arise about good and evil, and I cannot answer them, except to suggest that in the context of the wholeness of space and time, we might evaluate good and evil in some other way.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, Ground of Faith.

Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr by Michael Cocks is published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

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