Spiritual Healing and the Non-local Gap

by Donna Ferri

Spiritual healing, also known as non-local or distant healing, has been practiced as a spiritual healing art form since ancient times by Far Eastern healers and teachers. And although this form of healing, also known as non-local healing, uses spiritual methods including meditation, it is difficult to explain in terms of Neutonian Physics.

According to respected physician and author, Larry Dossey, M.D., for there to be a "radical reinvention of medicine" that accepts the merging of spirit and medicine it's important to understand that this non-local aspect of spiritual healing exists and why the terminology its proponents adopt has not been accepted by conventional medicine which relies on empirical data supported by Neutonian physics.

Is there a solution? Let's take a look at what Dr. Dossey has to say about the science of the non-local gap of healing. Dossey has produced volumes of work that explores the role of prayer and other religious practice in health; it was Dossey who introduced the concept of the 'nonlocal mind'. He explains nonlocal mind as "unconfined to the brain and body, mind spread infinitely throughout space and time," a concept that has been adopted by leading scientists. Dr. Dossey's detailed explanation of the nonlocal mind has provided the legitimate foundation for what he proposes as the merging of spirit with medicine.

Larry Dossey discusses what he terms 'the three phases of distant healing' in his research work, How Healing Happens, pp5-7¹. The first phase involves "the activities and intentions" of the person performing the healing. Researchers know a lot about this stage and its physiological changes, some of which are cited in the article. Dossey also states evidence from controlled studies showing positive physical and physiological responses in the third stage of distant healing, which is the response of the person to whom this type of healing is directed. The first and third stages are easily recognized by science. It is the second stage that Dossey writes of in detail.

He discusses the second stage of distant healing, which lies between the first and third stage. He calls it the 'nonlocal gap', defining it as "the distance between the healer and healee." However, because Newtonian physics cannot help to explain how this gap is bridged, these 'classical, causal, local, energy-bsed explanations' cannot be applied to the 'in-between phase of healing' or spiritual healing.

However, although the conventional view of science considers consciousness to be completely local, or "confined to specific points in space (the brain and body) and time", Dossey cites philosophers who, exploring the phenomenon of consciousness, all agree that we are quite 'ignorant about the connections between consciousness and the brain."

Dossey' suggestion for doing science in this field is to use the language of science rather than the terminology used to clarify the underlying mechanisms that has not empiracly demonstrated the efficacy of distant healing methods. Rather than inventing a vocabulary about such mechanisms the meaning of which,  unfortunately, is not shared within the scientific community, he suggests simply admitting when we just don't know.

Spiritual healing is defined by Dossey as a "sense of connectedness with a factor in the universe that is wiser and more powerful than the individual sense of self and that is infinite in space and time," choosing to refer to this factor as the "Absolute". This of course is referred to in the world's religions as "God, Goddess, Allah, the Tao, Universe, and so on."

Dossey defines healing as the 'restoration of a sense of wholeness' involving a sense of mind-body oneness within the person, and can 'also include a sense of oneness with all there is'. Although most people in our culture believe that spirituality and prayer are part of healing, the founder of modern parapsychology, J.B. Rhine apparently disagreed. Rhine believed that prayer had more to do with phsychokinesis (popularly known as PK), or 'mind acting directly on matter'. There is more discussion on this research.

This introduction to distant healing, otherwise known as non-local helaing, has been but a snapshot of the full discussion by Dossey who provides a fascinating look into the science and philosophy of what happens in the unknown area or gap of spiritual healing. I recommend taking a deeper look at the complete article.¹

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1. Larry Dossey, M.D. , How Healing Happens: Exploring the Nonlocal Gap, an article published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 2002; 8(2)12-16, 103-110