SPIRITUALITY, SCIENCE AND THE MEDICAL ARTS

After a century of neglect, spirituality is returning to the practice of medicine. Controlled studies in distant healing and intercessory prayer challenge ingrained assumptions of the nature of consciousness and the mind-body relationship. Current evidence suggests that consciousness can both insert information into the environment, and extract information ft-om it. Both these vectors are health-relevant. Although energy-based models of healing may suffice to explain many of the phenomena taking place within the healer and healee, and in the immediate vicinity of each, a genuinely nonlocal, non-energetic framework is necessary to explain how the spatiotemporal gap separating the two is bridged. The implications of nonlocal mind transcend health and illness, and involve the survival of bodily death and immortality. This material was originally presented as a Keynote Address at the ISSSEEM ElezJenth Annual Conference June 16, 2001