9-10. Different experiences of physical healing
My main experience of physical healing was such a surprise to me that it shifted my mindset to be far more sympathetic towards other reports of similar experiences. It occurred in my NHS General Medical Practice consulting office. A young woman whom I knew to be living in very difficult and conflicted circumstances was pregnant. She had attended for a routine antenatal check-up at about 30 weeks, and said the baby was very disturbed and hyperactive within her, keeping her awake at night. I was amazed on examining the enlarging abdomen to feel the baby wriggling and kicking against my hands. I was suddenly filled with compassion, considering this to be the probable impact of a wider troubled situation on this baby’s potential for growth and brain development. With no more than a transient inner mental appeal for peace to enter this baby’s world, to my utter astonishment I felt a sudden shock of ‘something’ flash down both my forearms and out through my hands. Instantly, the baby stilled between them. It was as if awareness of a relationship palpably had formed between myself and the baby with the mother being the carrier of something way beyond all of us that had been dynamized in that moment. I could not name this larger ‘thing’ at the time, having just experienced it, but now several decades of thought and experience later I shall controversially call this a movement of the Holy Feminine Spirit.
I have never experienced the same again. The mother eventually decided to leave the disturbed home situation and moved away, but the pregnancy had continued well up to that point. She had noted the unusual physical change, and perhaps had gained hope and confidence through that to make a move to greater safety. I offer this experience now only as a source of reflection on the role of a compassionate mental disposition. My hope had only been strong enough to cast out an appeal into a wider unknown context of life. This seemed to be adequate, however, for a life-enhancing peace then to enter the situation. In medical model materialistic terms, this experience remains a mystery.
A less dramatic physical healing was attested to several years after the original intentional prayer. My wife Marian and I had been meeting regularly for over a year with two other junior doctors and a Health Visitor to explore the relationship between the medical model of healing and the spiritual healing offered in prayer by a charismatic type of Christianity. On one occasion the Health Visitor had said she experienced a longstanding weakness in one leg that limited her ability to get around after an injury. She asked for prayer, and we responded in faith by laying hands on her lower leg and opening our hearts to request a Holy Spirit intervention. None of us reported feeling anything. There was no dramatic change of appearance, so we left it at that and moved on. The incident was long forgotten until several years later when this lady and her husband were visiting the farm where Marian’s family still worked the steep hills, growing flowers, strawberries, and running a beef herd. Having climbed up from the River Tavy valley to where the views were inspiring, she said, “You know, I could never have done that if it hadn’t been for that prayer all those years ago.” We had to ask her for an explanatory reminder, and then recalled the utter normality of the former situation. I decided to make a note of this, because doubt will prevent people from reporting this psycho-spiritual connection with any psycho-somatic changes. A materialistic worldview that elevates a priority of somatic structure over relational, heart-level processes can scare others into silence. But these unique experiences are the evidence of how a greater unity of movement as potential change behind matter, mind, and socially-active spirit fuses these together into a process reality, of greater priority for life enhancement than somatic structure.
I shall briefly mention three other reported incidents of physical healing, because these have shaped my development and presentation of the vibrational model of material substance and mind that I call ‘triquetral cosmology’ (three-cornered process cosmology). The first was experienced by a General Medical Practitioner in Reading, who as a consequence started a national movement among caring professionals to question the relationship between medical and spiritual healing, in which our local Plymouth group was participating. Derek Munday had a confidence that fear was never an enduring feature of a healthy life, and so would pray with people against fear. A young woman with a serious congenital heart problem was due to travel to Bristol for open heart surgery, about which she was fearful. She welcomed the prayer that Derek offered, and he subsequently reported that, almost as an accident, the words slipped out praying that she would go to Bristol ‘wholeheartedly’. Pre-operative checks at Bristol later found a normally shaped heart. The former investigations were repeated, showing a complete physical healing. The woman said that all she had felt during the prayer was a slight frizzle run through her body. The healing was a surprise to everyone. This suggests that it is not the rational mind at work, but something closer to what might be called an ‘inner human heart’ disposition of openness to possible change. This open attitude will reappear in the triquetral cosmology developed to account for such unusual events in the midst of a normally predictable and stable life patterning.
The second report was a talk given by a man who had an inoperable brain tumour that so disturbed his behaviour that he had to be kept in a locked cell in a mental hospital. He reported that he had sufficient insight to regret the effect he was having, but was desperate that no cure could be found. Although he previously had no spiritual faith, in despair he called out in his inner heart and rational mind saying, “If you are there, please help me!” His demeanour changed, and his behaviour. He was investigated again, and no brain tumour was found. The psychiatrist said he must have ‘wished it away’.
The third episode is a video I have seen taken by someone during a prayer for healing. A couple we know well who had been greatly helped by the Emotional Logic method of adjusting to change had joined a team of people going to Kenya for healing missions with a leading local pastor. (The story of that pastor, Mike Brawan, is told in the Emotional Logic casebook Emotional Logic: Harnessing your emotions into inner strength.) A man in his late 30’s had a very large, still growing, benign tumour swelling from the side of his neck, a condition that can become life-threatening if it impinges on blood vessels and the larynx. In the video we see someone start to pray for him. As he turns his head towards that person and focuses his eyes and attention on him, the swelling is seen to shrink rapidly to a normally shaped neck, a process that is medically impossible. The aspect I want to draw out here is the disconnection of this man’s rational mind, who had been anticipating a slow death. By shifting his attention to a source of potential hope and change, a three-way open-potential relationship is established between the man, the person praying in faith, hope or love for him, and a wider context of potentially empowering change that is life-enhancing. That wider context of order mentioned in this triad are the dynamic ‘principles of organisation’ underlying physical matter that is missing from a materialistic worldview. In materialism, the bigger picture is rationally imagined to be only randomness, into which the human mind puts order. Triquetral cosmology attributes that stabilisation of order instead to a higher contextual process, in which a Golden Ratio proportionality of vibrational connections is the substantial ‘betweenness’ of the three core elements of dynamic relational systems.
11. An inspirational word brings psychological healing
A thick set, ex-navy man with a full beard was consulting me as his GP about a simple medical problem. I was writing out the prescription when in my head a heard that now familiar ‘voice’ of inspiration saying, “Ask him if he is feeling bitter about something.” As is usual for the rational ‘me’, I responded in my head with, “I can’t do that! It will be so out of context!” But the urge moved again in me, so having had sufficient experience by then of seeing the consequences if I did not respond to movements of this higher context, I decided to act on it. As I tore the ‘script’ off the pad and offered it to him I said, “Tell me, are you feeling bitter about something?” The impact was astonishing. His mouth dropped open, and he stared in shocked surprise at me as he froze in mid-reach for the prescription. “That’s incredible!” he said. He then opened up a conversation about an extremely difficult background situation that he hadn’t told anyone before. It began as series of meetings and conversations that led to a stabilisation of his inner heart and personal identity during a time of transition in his life. No medication was needed, except for the original presenting physical condition. This is an example of ‘a word of knowledge’ that transforms relational and inner life. Knowledge is not factual data, of course. True knowledge is a heart-to-heart movement that informs life-enhancing change in a wider context. Input-context-output is the way to think about change that does not ignore those principles of organisation moving behind the visible material world.
12. An unexpected episode of spiritual healing
The final story in this group about healing relates to a young middle-aged woman who presented in my consulting room saying, “Doctor, I have no problems in my life. I have two lovely children and a good supportive husband. We have no financial worries, and good health, but suddenly, completely out of the blue, I am getting repeated strong urges to kill my children.” As you can imagine, I put my pen down and listened carefully. Not only did I listen carefully to her repetition of some details, but I also started listening to the wider context of life, in short, not meditating, but I opened my inner heart and mind to pray earnestly for wisdom! While in that open-hearted, open-minded frame of willingness to change in response to anything I ‘heard’ (if it came with an inner assurance of its life-enhancing potential), I took an assertive and active line with this woman, saying I would phone to get an urgent appointment with a psychiatrist, and give her a letter in hand to take with her. As I was writing the letter by hand, an idea popped into my mind. In our small, exploratory and mutual support group, we had talked about open-handed ways of including spiritual issues in medical history-taking. I activated one now. “Tell me, are you the sort of person who prays?” This way of asking makes no assumptions about beliefs or faith community commitments. She responded, “No, I don’t have any particular religious beliefs.” I left it at that, gave her the letter, and when she had gone phoned the psychiatry department. A couple of days later she phoned me saying, “Doctor, you can cancel that appointment. After I saw you, I went for a walk on Dartmoor (Ivybridge is on the southern tip of the moor) and was thinking about your question whether I was the sort of person who prayed. And, do you know, I felt something jump out of my chest, and I haven’t had a single thought like that again since.”
Interpreting these unusual healing events
I am basically a scientist (and a creative), and the scientist in me knows that these events are facts. If a single fact does not fit with a prevailing hypothesis about life, then the hypothesis is wrong or incomplete, and it needs developing or rejecting. Materialism is a hypothesis from a particular phase of scientific exploration of life that has now, in the 100 years since quantum theory came on the scene, become a limited, special case, a local approximation only, mentally narrowed within a wider and more dynamic truth in which we participate heart, body, mind and spirit. A widely accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics among scientists is yet to be agreed, because its experimental findings are so counter-intuitive when interpreters are stuck in materialistic mindframe. The triquetral cosmology I am offering into the mix allows such unusual events as this spontaneous ‘deliverance’ from an oppressive ‘complex’, however, you would like to describe that event. The message I want to bring over clearly here is that there is no need to fear! Fear opens an unhelpful door into a person’s inner heart, allowing some other person with a different set of values to manipulate ‘as if from within’. But we are all bathed in the intelligent love of a life-enhancing context, as I have seen in a life-transforming way. From this substrate, orderliness emerges or re-emerges as healing with far greater strength than any temporary disruption. We just need to open our hearts to its dynamics, and take a risk to trust that we call on the source of life. Our rational minds, however, can screen out our awareness and openness to that strength and beauty in which we already participate, but easily forget. That is the Celtic spirituality behind the triquetral cosmology of healing movement and numinous mind. Forgetfulness is also easily forgivable. However, wilfully holding on to personal values that run counter to life is challengeable from a stabilised inner personal base that is open to life’s wider movements.
At the risk of saying too much in interpreting these several varieties of healing of ‘the whole person’ – body, mind, and relational spirit – the roots of Celtic spirituality are in a pre-Christian era starting from Anatolia (Galatia, present day Turkey) and spreading across Europe as far as Gaelic Ireland. The ancient Hebrew and Persian civilisations also from that Chaldean area had no direct word in their languages for ‘mind’. The notion of an all-containing mind, (nous) came from the Greek and later Roman civilisations with their fascination for reasoning and logic, downgrading the importance of personal values and the emotions that are generated from them. This trend is also reflected in the Sanskrit of western present-day Indian subcontinent, with its focus on consciousness as the characterising of the all-containing Brahman. By contrast, the ancient Chaldean Middle Eastern focus on the inner heart as the core of human life is reflected in the ancient Hebrew language use of leb (lev) for inner heart, which extended to lebab (levav) meaning ‘the thoughts of one’s heart’. There was a far greater integration of heart level values with the thinking mind in their ways of living than in the Greco-Roman roots of present-day Westernised civilisations. When word of the miracle-working man from Nazareth spread from the Middle East to Greece (Macedonia) and further West two Millennia ago, the Greek emphasis came with it. My impression is that the New Science of the last 100 years is initiating a new era also, in which the heart-mind-spirit balance will be restored to a higher priority BUT now fully integrated with the Greek quality of reasoning to counteract superstition and fear-mongering by psychological manipulators who wish to control others.
The evidence to support this thesis and belief is in the uniquely unrepeatable experiences that move people in life-transforming and life-enhancing ways. These follow accessing the intelligent love that is the substance between whatever forms of life we focus our attention upon.
