Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spritual Healing

Psychic Healing Is more Interaction than Operation How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change! We can change material things by operating on them, but to change people, we employ an interaction with them. One of our basic defining assumptions about humans is that we have choice. It's a weak assumption, one that is easily threatened by the specter of ESP. We assume our minds to be our personal, private castle, free from all uninvited intrusions. An unexpected experience with telepathy, however, especially the first time, often elicits the reaction, "it was creepy." ESP calls personal boundaries into question. Whether or not the acceptance into society of ESP will be a blessing or a curse depends upon how we will integrate the crisis in boundaries ESP will bring. It is a hopeful sign when the technological advances in ESP merge with developments in spiritual awareness to produce an enlightened approach to things psychic. A new book, Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing (New World Library) represents such a merger. The first author, Russell Targ, is a physicist and the foremost pioneer in research on remote viewing. His work has made it commonplace among consciousness workers to assume that your mind has a "nonlocal" dimension that enables it to interact with things, events and persons in other times and places. The second author, Jane Katra is a public health educator with a special gift for spiritual healing. When Targ developed cancer, he met Katra who shared with him her skills at "immune system coaching." Thus Katra introduced Targ to spiritual aspects of the nonlocal mind, such as prayer. In this book they each tell the story of their own individual research, and then explain how their two fields interact, providing a spiritual perspective on ESP and a psychic explanation for spiritual healing. It is an extraordinary synthesis of scientific research with spiritual wisdom. We find it important to spiritualize psychic ability because of its seemingly awesome power. For example, when we prepare for even a mild mannered psychic experience, such as meditation, we regularly surround ourselves with protective light. This ritual suggests we perceive the possibilities of danger in sitting alone with ourselves. When ESP is acknowledged, are you ever alone with yourself? Targ's research shows that psychic abilities can be used for spying. Furthermore, Russian research shows that one person can send telepathic suggestions of strangulation to another person and cause choking. It would appear that ESP can be used for immoral purposes. So it would seem that we need spirituality to shape the use of psychic abilities toward ethical ends. Katra's work in healing others seems like such a positive application. But a surprising paradox enters the picture. Katra distinguishes spiritual healing from psychic healing. It is a difference in world views, in paradigms.

I was fascinated and pleased to see how a scientist opens his mind and recognizes what is called the psychic reality which has been expressed by mystics over the centuries.

This hybrid work covers the phenomenon of spiritual healing from both a scientific (Rusell's) and a personal/subjective (Katra's) experience. The scientific part of the book will not convince anyone who is still in denial about the existence of psi phenomena, as it doesn't discuss hard statistical data and parapsychological methodology. If that is what you are looking for, read Radin's "The Conscious Universe" instead. However, for the reader who has accepted the reality of psi phenomena, but wants to learn more, it gives a good introduction to the recent history of parapsychological research, and to what this research has taught us about the factors that affect psi performance.For me however, the highlight of the book is Katra's part. Her deeply personal, moving account of healing people through spiritual means has an immensely uplifting quality, and it is because of that that I particularly recommended this book to people who are suffering from a chronic illness. This might help them to keep up hope, or to regain it if lost.

Russell Targ shares his personal experiences with remote-viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, and includes fascinating photos and sketches that show the amazing accuracy remote viewers have frequently demonstrated. Jane Katya shares her personal experiences with healing touch, and how she came to work in the field of healing using Therapeutic Touch. Targ and Katya gracefully take the reader from their real-life stories to the current physical theories which can best explain non-local healing and viewing. This book is spell-binding, since it so carefully examines seemingly inexplicable phenomena from a very down-to-Earth point of view. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in enriching their lives through remote viewing and healing.

"There is no doubt," write the authors, "that we have contact with the future in a way that shows unequivocally that we misunderstand our relationship to the dimension of time." There it is -- the turning point for the entire ballet of this stunning book. Thank you, Russell Targ and Jane Katra for bringing between these covers the stories of your professional lives and the pas de deux of such different approaches -- cutting-edge physics research and spiritual healing. It is a brave and beautiful book. Message to those who would disparage this book: first educate yourselves a little bit about quantum physics. Then come back and read it again with all your heart.