Healing Beyond the Body

Subtitled 'Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind', this book consists of a series of essays written by Larry in his capacity as Editor of Alternative Therapies. It falls into three parts, Meaning, Mind and Non-Locality. Ever since his first book Space, Time and Medicine, which I must have read nearly 20 years ago, Larry has been pushing at the boundaries of medicine, encouraging his colleagues to consider neglected evidence about the extended capacities of the human mind (he coined the terms nonlocal mind in the late 80s) and to reconnect the science with the art of medicine. This means connecting the inner with the outer, intuition with reason, caring with science. His most recent work, as many readers will know, has been on prayer but, as this book shows, he has not stopped considering other issues. Here he writes not just as a physician, but also as a humanist in the true sense of the term, one to whom nothing human is strange. He succeeds in weaving experience and research together in a way that makes these essays eminently readable and informative. Larry begins with an apposite quotation from Sir Francis Bacon: 'The subtlety of nature is vastly superior to that of argument'. Especially of that argument is based on ignorance and/or prejudice. Larry has been fighting this battle, along with many other Network members on a number of fronts, to try to persuade their colleagues to look at certain kinds of experiences and scientific studies that point to the nonlocal nature of consciousness. These include much material discussed in this book and described as 'a different kind of DNA' (distant non-local awareness): precognitive dreams, distant intentionality, telepathy, near-death and out-of-body experiences, healing, shamanism, laughter and health. Larry's approach is exactly my own in that he analyses the data carefully before positing theories that may adequately account for them. He deplores a priori rejection of data on the grounds that a) what is described is known to be impossible (so must be fraudulent or flawed) or, failing that, b) there is no adequate theory to account for the data, which must therefore be set aside. Much of the argument comes down to the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. The central dogma of neuroscience is that the brain gives rise to consciousness, so that any phenomenon that contradicts this assumption must be ignored. This means all the data of parapsychology and all interpretations of exceptional human experiences suggesting that this theory is not enough. Part of the argument is that there is no known mechanism whereby consciousness might be transmitted through the brain. However, there is one snag here: the assumption that the brain produces consciousness is also a theory without a known mechanism. This puts it on a level footing with 'transmissive' theories. I think that Larry is right to put the word in inverted commas since the evidence points to the omnipresence of consciousness, not the fact that something might be transmitted from one place to another. Perhaps a theory along the lines of David Bohm's implicate order may be more suitable. All this is hard for us to envisage, localised as we seem to be in space-time. There is much original material in these essays, and many of the questions addressed are central to the development of medicine in the 21st century. The meaning of illness, the reconciliation of scientific medicine with healing attitudes, the future of prayer in clinical practice. 'Suffering on the Job' looks at health and illness in relation to work, both mental and physical. The next essay considers food in the widest sense and certain attested but strange healing practices that seem to work. The essay 'War: A Vietnam Memoir' is perhaps the most personal in the book. Larry was posted to Vietnam in the late 60s and became more than thoroughly immersed in the experience and its implications. Some of this descriptions are harrowing but it is his searing honesty that is most compelling here as he describes how he became caught up in the thrill of war and danger. This leads him to analyse theories about the origins of war, especially the work of Ehrenreich on the connections between war and religion. These include a theory of the transformation of prey into predator, the prevalence of human sacrifice and the close historical association of war and violence with religion right up to the present day. His own trauma and healing is vividly described, which makes one realise how much of this must be unresolved, and he movingly quotes Rilke in formulating seven principles for returning warriors. Can we transmute the warrior impulse into more noble and less destructive channels? Larry does not mention William James, who also considered this problem a hundred years ago but it requires urgent attention. The Mind section includes essays on reenchanting the world (the new animism), including a consideration of synchronicity and our relationship with things. Then humour and medicine, and a profound chapter on the trickster followed by an equally original one that effectively describes the relationship between fishing and spirituality (a version of which was first published, I believe, in a periodical many of whose readers were committed vegetarians!). The Trickster theme is intimately connected with the unconscious and, as Patrick Harpur showed in his Daemonic Reality a few years ago, is an aspect of life that we ignore at our peril. The rational, logical, analytical conscious ego is radically incomplete and cannot afford to take itself too seriously. The trickster is also related to creativity, which Larry discusses in a later essay. In the end we have only two choices: to be aware or to beware! The fish chapter contains some extraordinary, even mind-boggling phenomena such as 'fishfalls' (from the sky), but also some inspiring reflections about healing states and a programme in which fishing might prove to be a much less harmful 'addiction' than drugs for young people: 'Hooked on Fishing – Not on Drugs'. The final section is the most ambitious in its reach into distant nonlocal awareness, prayer research, love and empathy, creativity and, the ultimate question, immortality. Larry illustrates his theses with lively anecdotes as well as research findings. Much of the material will be familiar to Network readers but its cumulative force makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that a reconsideration of the evidence for nonlocality of consciousness by official science and medicine is overdue. Quantum theory has in a sense paved the way but one is dealing here mainly with scientific medicine, which is in turn dominated by molecular biology – science at its most reductionist, materialistic and manipulative. The new synthesis in medicine, and indeed in science, will surely be a both-and rather than an either-or position. The new and wider vision will transcend and include the older more limited approach. But it will also shift existing power structures and political interests, all of which forms an undercurrent in the present scenario. In the meantime, physicians and other readers can take Larry as a guide through some of this less well charted territory as they see new vistas opening up and connections where they had seen none before. A more 'joined-up' view will result to the benefit of all, and especially of medical education. The respiritualising of medicine, as Larry argues, is only a matter of time and his book is a seminal contribution to this process.