Miracles Of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness And Spiritual Healing. - Review - book review

MIRACLES OF MIND: EXPLORING NONLOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUAL HEALING by Russell Targ and Jane Katra. Novato, CA: New World Library, 1998. Pp. xviii + 325. $24.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1-57731-070-5.

Miracles of Mind is a synthesis of parapsychology and spirituality, accessible to general readers, that lucidly presents the authors' scientific studies, and at the same time goes extensively into their personal spiritual experiences. The goal of Miracles of Mind is not simply to make a scientific case for psi, but to lead to the kind of spiritual awareness that an acceptance of psi could facilitate. The authors state, "We believe that psi's greatest value will be found in its ability to help us discover a deeper understanding of who we are, to enable us to experience our most intimate relationships with each other, and to learn to more fully appreciate the wonder of the universe and our place in it" (p. 286). The strength of this book is that it gives an accurate overview of contemporary parapsychology research, while addressing experiential and spiritual questions.

Is psi only a laboratory curiosity, or is it the universal connecting link among all of us? The authors are well-positioned to explore these questions from the points of view of science and spiritual experience. Russell Targ is well known to parapsychologists for his role as a pioneer in remote viewing research and his familiarity with the experimental approach to psi. Jane Katra, as a spiritual healer, brings in the experiential side, with insights into the meaning of psi and its relationship to healing.

The book begins with several chapters reviewing scientific progress in parapsychology, enlivened by Russell Targ's anecdotes. Right at the start, Targ discusses his own psychic experiences and his attempts both to study psi as a scientist and to integrate his psychic experiences into his life. In the life-changing experience that eventually led to this book, he had an apparent spontaneous remission of cancer, which he attributes to healing by Jane Katra. The remote viewing chapters are especially interesting, with Targ's insider view of formerly classified research. He discusses his personal story of many years of government-sponsored projects on the military applications of psi, with details about the process of remote viewing and insights into the program that have not appeared in published papers.

In succeeding chapters, the book addresses what the authors call the "Golden Experiments" in parapsychology. Their examples are well chosen, and include such classics as the Maimonides Dream Laboratory studies, ganzfeld experiments, remote viewing by other investigators, Braud's work on healing, Schmidt's PK contributions, and the findings of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. The authors do not dwell on experimental methodology or evaluation of the quality of the evidence, but they provide extensive references for those readers who are inclined to explore the experimental literature in greater depth. For example, there are references to 14 papers by William Braud on various aspects of distant mental influence on living systems.

The book then changes emphasis and speaks primarily from Katra's perspective as a spiritual healer. Katra's account is autobiographical, beginning with her experiences with healers in the Philippines and continuing with the development of her own healing abilities. Katra values this healing ability, not just for its practical results, but for the changes in consciousness she experienced. To understand her experiences, she pursued a variety of approaches to spirituality, including Theosophy and A Course in Miracles. Her distinction of a spiritual healer as opposed to a psychic healer or energy healer is an important one. For Katra these are different experiential categories. "Spiritual healing is a nonanalytical practice, and unlike psychic healing or energy healing, there are no specific mental or physical moves that lead to success" (p. 255). Spiritual healing involves compassion, in the presence of surrendered egos. There is an aspect of loving service, as contrasted with merely manipulating energy. For Ka tra, spiritual healing is not based on technique, in contrast to remote viewing.

What, then, is the connection between Katra's experiential insights and Targ's experiments? The authors begin to address the question in a chapter titled, "Are Psychic Abilities Sacred?" They ask: Is psi a stumbling block on the path to enlightenment? Is it "spiritual" at all, or is it 'just a technology," as some remote viewing advocates would have it? The authors offer the classic contemplative perspective: "Many ancient sacred teachings emphasize the seductive distraction of psychic abilities; they entice us to stray off the spiritual path with thoughts of using them to enhance our individual power or prestige" (p. 138). On the other hand, the authors feel that "the acceptance of the reality of our mind-to-mind connection can inspire others, as it has done for the authors, to seek our highest potentials as human beings" (p. 138).

The authors explore a variety of spiritual, psychic, and energy healing systems. Although they carefully differentiate psychic and energy healing from spiritual healing on an experiential basis, they do not address how they would experimentally validate their classification: whether this is simply a difference in attitude on the part of the practitioners, or whether we are dealing with different categories of phenomena. If these are truly different phenomena (i.e., in psychic healing we may be dealing purely with psi, and in spiritual healing we may be dealing purely with God), then the results of parapsychology may be irrelevant to spiritual healing. At the other extreme, the mechanisms of psi and spiritual healing may be the same, and eventually explainable in physical terms, despite the experiences of the healers themselves of different processes and forms of energy and consciousness.

A major theme in the book is that both psi (in all its manifestations) and spiritual healing are examples of "nonlocal" consciousness, by analogy with experiments demonstrating nonlocal effects in quantum physics. There is a wide gap, however, between the possibility that the new physics may allow for psychic phenomena and distant healing and the ability of physics to provide testable hypotheses for either the experimental or the spiritual approach. Despite the authors' embracing of physics as an explanatory metaphor, referring to "holographic quantum interconnectedness" does little to bridge the science-spirituality chasm. We are still faced with the challenge of integrating a sincere, inward exploration of spirituality and healing with the scientific evidence of parapsychology.

Although it avoids a rigorous exploration of these issues, this book is a step in the right direction, as it highlights phenomena and concepts often neglected in discussions of either parapsychology or spirituality. Combining a thorough knowledge of the experimental evidence with a personal inward journey is an approach that holds great promise for stimulating a productive dialogue between the scientific and spiritual communities, and encouraging individuals to pursue their own highest development.

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