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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835607148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 04/01/1995 |
| Edition description: | 2nd Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 348 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Spiritual Healing
By Dora Kunz
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 1995 Theosophical Publishing HouseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-0714-8
CHAPTER 1
The Future of Medicine
LARRY DOSSEY, M.D.
I believe that the concept of health and illness as isolated phenomena that can be confined to single individuals is hopelessly outmoded, and no longer fits with emerging clinical data in medicine. Medicine, thus, has its own correlates to a principle that has arisen from many areas of modern science: the world cannot be fragmented into bits and pieces.
We have seen this attempt fail at the microscopic level, where the notion of isolated, noninteracting, billiard ball-like atoms has been abandoned. Distinctions between the observer and the observed are not as crisp as they once were thought to be, and the universe is viewed by some physicists today as a gigantic "participatory" event. In biology the strict separations between the individual and the environment are fading, and the natural world is no longer seen as a mere physical container into which we have been haplessly thrust. It is clear that the interaction between individual and environment shapes the evolution of both, that one does not stand apart from the other.
The common message is that the traditional idea of an "out there" world is no longer appropriate. We interact with the universe in ways that are profound. Isolation, the view of the world as a collection and assembly of units, is being transcended in favor of a perspective that emphasizes dynamism and interaction—the notion with which our age, as Bronowski put it, is aflame.
This view is surfacing today in modern medicine. Disease and health can be viewed as isolated events, it seems to me, only for the sake of convenience. They are not external processes that we "catch," as we frequently speak of infectious diseases, or that we "acquire," as we often say about health. In medicine, increasingly, interaction seems paramount.
An example is that the death rate in surviving spouses—widows and widowers—is two to three times higher than the average for the age-matched married population. In some way the experience of a spouse's death translates into physical illness for the survivor, and can even be a matter of life or death. The fact that illness seems to be shared is not trivial, it is not merely a picturesque or freakish event.
From a physician's point of view, inexplicable findings under the old separatist model sometimes seem to be better interpreted using the hypothesis of the oneness of humanity. One such explanation which doctors confront every day is the unexpected cure, the unanticipated positive turn of events. This is attributed to what we euphemistically call the "natural course of the disease." This concept has no explanatory meaning at all, and says only that "that which happens, happens." It says less about the natural course of illness than about the natural state of our ignorance. I suspect that many unexpected turns in the course of illness can be better explained by invoking field factors than relying on solutions based solely on intra-person effects, or on interactions between person and drug, or person and surgery.
Another event confronting us is what we call human variability. We confront this every time we give a patient a medication: we see varying responses to what is administered, even in surgery. Another example is the placebo response. And, although I may be pilloried by my colleagues for mentioning this one, I think the phenomenon of psychic healing is an event which we are very hard-pressed to explain in ordinary terms. I suspect that we will have to face the possibility that human consciousness is a potent factor in health and illness if we are ever to arrive at a satisfying hypothesis that accounts for these kinds of observations in medicine. There is some consolation, it seems to me, that other disciplines—notably modern physics—have been forced to do the same, although the verdict on the precise role of consciousness in modern physical theory is by no means in.
Modern physics acknowledges that in some way consciousness does interface with the physical world, albeit in degrees upon which physicists cannot agree. But the notion of a purely objective world that follows strict causal chains of connections simply is not tenable in modern physics any more. We get into conceptual trouble in modern medicine because we still adhere to a belief in a rigid causal chain that leaves no place for consciousness. Because we do, we limit the potential for explaining many phenomena, among which may be those I mentioned. My point is that, if our most accurate science, modern physics, has begun at least to acknowledge the possibility that consciousness may be important in the evolution of what we count as real, medicine may at least begin to entertain the same possibility.
A basic goal in medicine is to know how healing occurs. At present we have no satisfactory explanation about what does the healing in many instances. We have managed to convince ourselves, of course, that "the treatment" is responsible, by which we ordinarily mean drugs or surgical procedures. But the new view says that consciousness may modulate, in some degree, the effect of all kinds of medical interventions. The clinical data now shows that in some instances this effect may be profound.
Consciousness operates not only within a person, such as when persons lower their cholesterol level by meditation; it also operates between individuals, as we have seen from studies showing that bereaved spouses have an increased death rate. States of consciousness either help or hinder health. Rarely, I suspect, are they ever neutral factors.
We are one human family and, although we may be indifferent to starvation or suffering somewhere on the globe, if we were sensitive enough to the reality of our interconnections we would know we're losing a member of our family when someone dies. The field effects I have been discussing seem to mandate the possibility, at least, of this extraordinary level of awareness. At present, I think our tools for demonstrating our far-reaching associations are lacking, although we can demonstrate the significance of certain shared events that are not too spatially isolated, such as between husband and wife. What troubles me in medicine is the generalization that on the ordinary day-to-day physical level these fields don't exist. Although Western common sense tells us that we are separate, we know that historically the mystics would tell us with a single voice that our way of sensing isolation is an illusion. Certainly the capacity lies within our species to perceive this oneness. I think that the appreciation of our essential interaction with the universe will lead to a heightened ability to sense and actually experience our oneness with each other, an ability which, in medicine, might well be a therapeutic breakthrough.
We can be hopeful that awareness of group consciousness will evolve, and that the concept of "the family of man" will be a living reality. This will mandate a radically new way of looking at moral responsibility. Whereas it has been thought that only through philosophy or a spiritual and mystical state could one grasp shared destiny—the brotherhood of humanity—that message is now coming through at all levels. The old separatist philosophical notions stem from a time in history where our knowledge of physiology and biochemistry was naive and unsophisticated. Today we know that one cannot act in the world without affecting others—a fact that extends, even, to affecting their physiological functioning.
My perception of your caring (or callousness) toward me creates an avalanche of biochemical changes in my own body. Neural and hormonal events follow in a cascade fashion from my felt sense of how we interact. These are not remote or abstract philosophical issues, but concrete physiological consequences. This is vastly undervalued, I feel, and generally goes unnoticed not only by philosophers but by scientists and treating physicians as well.
There is, to put it plainly, a physiology of humaneness. If I treat you with kindness and compassion you are able to evoke a generally more healthy state. Let me give you an example of how this might happen clinically. In a recent study that was done at Harvard's teaching hospital, a group of patients were brought to the hospital for reasons of truly life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias—disorders of the electrical rhythms of the heart. In the twenty-four hours preceding the onset of these problems, fully twenty-five percent of these people experienced profound emotional upheavals, including anger, fear, and hostility. And, one has to ask, in response to what? To whom?
We can begin to talk about a social nexus even when dealing with something that traditionally has been considered totally objective, such as electrophysiological events in the heart. Proper therapy would be not only to administer whatever is necessary to quell the arrhythmia in the crisis period, but to look beyond. Are we going to send that patient, once the acute problem is treated, back to the same difficult environment? Is there any responsibility on the part of the significant others in social or family relations? This serves as another example that health is a shared phenomenon, with roots extending outside ourselves. We do live in each other's fields. Any theory of medicine that does not acknowledge that is bound to be, at best, incomplete. We would be shocked if a person were admitted to a hospital with malaria or plague, then treated successfully only to be released without any word whatsoever on how the disease was spread and contracted. Such an omission would be tantamount to malpractice. Yet when it comes to dealing with analogous interactions between humans which can deleteriously affect health, such as in the example of the emotionally induced cardiac arrhythmias, we suddenly become hesitant and frequently ignore life-or-death issues. We are frequently much more open to talking about (in malaria and plague) mosquito-human or rat-human interactions than about human-human dynamics.
Part of the hesitancy depends, of course, on an engrained idea that the noxious effects of one human on another are largely trivial. As such, they can be ignored, and no harm is done. We are discovering that this is far from true.
In the example I mentioned, the interchanges between the people around these cardiac patients literally had consequences in the invisible fields, the emotional and the mental This broke through into the physical field as a crisis that was life-threatening. Our way of talking about the crisis, the cardiac event, has been to consider the heart as a selfcontained, isolated organ. In the past few years we have found that this is far from true. There are actual anatomic neural pathways that connect the brain and heart, and the heart can be manipulated toward either greater or lesser electrical stability by events in what are referred to as higher central nervous system centers. Thus bioscientists now are able to talk of a larger field than just the heart, a field which now includes the brain.
Since we now know of these kinds of physiological interconnections which include the brain in the picture, we have to ask, what changes the state of the higher nervous system centers themselves? We know we can't isolate them as we did the heart: they are responsive to events in the world. In fact, human beings having a brain, elegant sensing capacities, and consciousness are perhaps the most un-isolable things we know. So by our own innate capacities we are tied, hand in glove, to the world around us—a fact which has enormous repercussions in clinical medicine.
Because of our intimate associations with others and with the world, I see no way to avoid invoking concepts of ethics and responsibility in a comprehensive theory of health and illness. We are all, so to speak, cells of one gigantic organism in which you can't draw an artificial boundary any more between inside and outside, between visible and invisible, between physiology, emotion, intent, and even words and action. Because we affect each other, responsibilities follow.
Even though we have singled out the heart as an easy organ to talk about, we must also recognize the groundbreaking work that has been done in identifying connections between higher central nervous system centers and other systems in the body, such as the immune system. It is established that neural and hormonal connections unite the immune system (which was once thought to be autonomous) with the brain. My prediction is that we will eventually be able to specify how the brain plays a fulcrum role in influencing most of the activities of the body.
The complexities of our interaction are so intricate that logistically we cannot possibly keep track of what we are doing to each other and to ourselves. The key may be simply to have good intent and to bear in mind that we do affect each other, that interaction is the rule. My hope is that this understanding will lead to a sense of caring and regard for our fellow human beings, a factor which is de-emphasized under an isolationist model of health.
A further key to actualizing the ideal state of well-being will be to redefine what we mean by health. Oddly, we conceive of health as something that never changes—some stage of youth where we are perpetually unblemished and lovely and in perfect function. We reduce the dynamic harmony of function in the body to some static concept which biologically and physiologically has no correlate. We need to go beyond this naive notion of health. Ironically, when we renounce our preoccupation with health—the maniacal drive to possess or acquire it—the stage is set for becoming healthier. There is a sense of letting go that is important, and we can frequently realize healthiness by ceasing to strive to acquire it—for anxiety about health, anxiety about anything, has been shown to be a factor in promoting illness.
Implicit in letting go is the notion that health is a natural state for most human beings. The fact is that most persons spend the bulk of their lives entirely healthy. We aren't sick most of the time. The body is astonishingly wise. As Lewis Thomas has pointed out, most of the bacteria that inhabit us are our friends, not our enemies, and the occurrence of an infectious disease is almost an anomaly when one thinks about all the different kinds and incredible number of bacteria that exist on the face of the earth and in and on ourselves. The fact, even, that we are here as survivors amid this enormous bacterial population somehow attests that health for us is a natural state.
In Space, Time and Medicine I talked a great deal about time and the eternal present, the time and space of the mystic. This state of timelessness—the absence of hurry and self-induced stress—is the state in which we flower optimally health-wise, physically and psychologically. Modern medicine has demonstrated the correlation of anxiety with illness. If we dissect what anxiety really stems from we can see that the ultimate anxiety—our fear of death—depends on our notion of linear time.
In nonlinear time, death is a concept that makes very little sense. One cannot talk seriously about finalities such as death in a non-flowing time, because it is not possible to establish ultimate demarcations in the way that one can in linear time. So if anxiety, which is based upon a linear concept of time, makes us ill, we can ask whether or not an experience of nonlinear time makes us healthy.
Linear time is the time of day-to-day experience, the time that we segment into a past, present, and future. Experientially, it is the notion that time flows, that there is an external real time that is moving and that forms a backdrop against which, and in which, events in life happen and are anchored. Implicit in this idea is the fear that the flow of this river of time carries us downstream and hurtles us inexorably toward extinction—an obviously frightening and threatening model of time. The primary reasons I disagree with this model are, as the British physicist and mathematician P.C.W. Davies has said, there has never been any physical experiment to demonstrate a flowing time; and that the most sensitive representatives of our species, the mystics, who with a single voice in the written record talk about an experience of boundless, nonlinear time. To their observations we can add those of the most accurate science we have ever had, modern physics, which also speaks of non-flowing, nonlinear time. The physicists tell us that things do not happen, they simply are. And while there may not be total unanimity about what time actually is in physics, it does not seem likely that it will ever adopt the old classical idea that time is an external flowing substance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spiritual Healing by Dora Kunz. Copyright © 1995 Theosophical Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N.,Contributing Authors,
Part I Healing as a World View,
1 The Future of Medicine Larry Dossey, M.D.,
2 Wholeness, Hippocrates, and Ancient Philosophy Henryk Skolimowski, Ph.D.,
3 Philosophical Foundations and Frameworks for Healing Renée Weber, Ph.D.,
Part II Unseen Sources of Healing,
4 Spiritual Aspects of the Healing Arts Bernard S. Siegel, M.D., Barbara Siegel,
5 Many Doors to Healing Otelia J. Bengtsson, M.D.,
6 The Influence of the Unconscious on Healing H. Tudor Edmunds, M.D.,
7 Spiritual Awareness as a Healing Process George L. Hogben, M.D.,
8 The Spirit in Health and Disease Laurence J. Bendit, M.D.,
Part III New Dimensions in Healing Practices,
9 Holistic Medicine: Its Goals, Models, Historical Roots Dennis Chernin, M.D.,
10 The Healing Arts in Modern Health Care Janet F. Quinn, Ph.D., R.N.,
11 A Holistic Merger of Biofeedback and Family Therapy Erik Peper, Ph.D., Casi Kushel, M.F.C.C.,
12 Biofeedback and Transformation Elmer Green, Ph.D., and Alyce Green,
Part IV Broader Perspectives on Healing the Psyche,
13 Rediscovering Basic Wholeness John Welwood, M.D.,
14 Psychotherapy as Perceptual Training Roger Walsh, M.D.,
15 Karma and Therapy Vern Haddick, Ph.D.,
16 Finding the Message of Illness Ira Progoff, Ph.D.,
Part V Human Fields and the Energies of Healing,
17 Fields and their Clinical Implications Dora Kunz and Erik Peper, Ph.D. Part I; Part II; Part III; Part IV; Part V,
18 High-order Emergence of the Self during Therapeutic Touch Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N.,
19 Therapeutic Touch as Meditation Janet Macrae, Ph.D., R.N.,
20 Compassion, Rootedness, and Detachment: Their Role in Healing A conversation with Dora Kunz, conducted by Renée Weber,
Appendix: Fields and Their Clinical Implications: Part VI The Pain Process and Strategies for Pain Reduction Dora Kunz and Erik Peper, Ph.D.,