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Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine Paperback – January 19, 1995
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Larry Dossey
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Print length320 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherHarperOne
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Publication dateJanuary 19, 1995
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Dimensions5.31 x 0.73 x 8 inches
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ISBN-109780062502520
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ISBN-13978-0062502520
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Editorial Reviews
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About the Author
Larry Dossey, M.D., is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Healing Words, and Prayer Is Good Medicine. An authority on spiritual healing, he lectures throughout the country and has been a frequent guest on Oprah, Good Morning America, CNN, and The Learning Channel. He is responsible for introducing innovations in spiritual care to acclaimed institutions across the country. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Saints and Sinners,
Health and Illness
What is to give light must endure burning.
-- Viktor Frankl
One of the most puzzling illnesses in history took place some 2,500 years ago when the Buddha-the Awakened One -- died from food poisoning, having been fed tainted meat in what proved to be his final meal. Not a very exalted way for a Buddha to go, I thought, on first discovering this account. Somehow I'd expected a more dignified cause of death than spoiled food. Later I found that this case was by no means unique, and that many great spiritual leaders have suffered ignominious ends marked by grotesque pain and suffering. Some of the historically recent examples include:
--Saint Bernadette, who in 1858 saw the vision of the Virgin at Lourdes, where thousands of healings are claimed to have occurred. Bernadette didn't receive such a healing when she needed one. Cause of death: variously called "bone cancer" or disseminated tuberculosis, at age thirty-five.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti, the famous spiritual teacher whose words have inspired millions around the world. Cause of death: cancer of the pancreas.
--Suzuki Roshi, who brought Zen Buddhism from Japan to the United States and established the San Francisco Zen Center. Cause of death: cancer of the liver.
-- Sri Ramana Maharshi, the most beloved saint of modem India. Cause of death: cancer of the stomach.
This list could be multiplied at great length. History is clear: the health records of many of the most majestic, God-realized saints and mystics are far from ideal.
Often the sickly saints seem to accept illness as part of the natural order. The great Indian sage Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), one day took a wrong step, fell, and broke his knee. This perplexed the physician who attended him. "How is it that you, a mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?" "I still have to carry this human body about me," Aurobindo replied, "and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws."
The "explanations" offered for these events are numerous. Some say the saint or mystic wasn't really as spiritual as he or she seemed. Or that he or she was indeed enlightened but was living out his or her karma, "paying back" for transgressions and shortcomings of previous lives. Others maintain that the great teacher has inadvertently taken on the illness of his or her devotees, like an unconscious sponge. We also hear the argument that the wise one has consciously chosen the illness. Sometimes this is done as a teaching device, in order to demonstrate that the connection between the divine and the human can remain even in the midst of hideous illness. Or the saint or mystic intentionally takes on the illness as a final test, to "bum off " any remaining vestiges of ego or self-consciousness.
These may or may not be valid reasons. Our task here is not to figure out in every case why God-realized people get sick and die, but simply to acknowledge that they obviously do -- and to ask what this might imply when illness occurs in our own lives. Above all, these accounts should make us question seriously the prevalent assumptions that (a) being holy is a guarantee of good health, and that (b) bad health and illness always imply spiritual shortcomings.
These assumptions are untrue not just for spiritual geniuses, but also for common folk like you and me. When Jesus encountered a man who was blind from birth, his disciples asked, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" This question comes in a variety of "New Age" contexts today. Who is at fault? Why did I "choose" this illness? For what current or previous shortcomings am I suffering? Who's to blame? Jesus' answer is illuminating, and should be emblazoned in every New Age book dealing with consciousness and healing: "Neither bath this man sinned, nor his parents. but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:1-3, King James Version (KJV), emphasis added). How could Jesus' message be clearer? This is a striking example of a profound physical problem in the total absence of spiritual imperfection. No one fell short, nobody was being punished for sin, nobody chose to be sick. Jesus implies also that there may be a higher purpose to the illness that we simply cannot grasp because we do not know the ways of the Absolute. This means that the meaning of a particular disease may be cosmic-that is, it may be opaque and hidden to us mortals, known only to the Divine. On balance, this case warns against equating spiritual and physical health, and cautions us against attributing shallow, superficial meaning to illness.
But the sickly saints and mystics are only one side of the coin. They are mirrored by what we could call the healthy reprobates -- individuals who have no obvious spiritual inclinations whatever, but who never get sick. Almost everyone knows or has heard of such a person. They break all the rules of good health, smoke and drink with abandon, and five to be a hundred without ever falling ill.
Sickly saints and healthy sinners show us that there is no invariable, linear, one-to-one relationship between one's level of spiritual attainment and the degree of one's physical health. It is obvious that one can attain immense spiritual heights and still get very sick.
Many people who believe in an invariable relationship between physical health and spiritual attainment accept the concept of "the Divine within," " the belief that an element or quality of the Supreme Being dwells inside every human. But even though the Divine may be present in everyone, it is obvious that human beings are imperfect reflectors, as it were, of the Divine Light. We fall short every day in a million ways. just as we may contain an element of the Divine, our physical bodies may contain something of our spiritual essence, which they sometimes reflect as imperfectly as we reflect the Divine.
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Product details
- ASIN : 0062502522
- Publisher : HarperOne; 1st edition (January 19, 1995)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780062502520
- ISBN-13 : 978-0062502520
- Item Weight : 11.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.73 x 8 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#307,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #821 in Prayer (Books)
- #1,521 in Devotionals
- #1,826 in History & Theory of Politics
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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At times well researched but at times badly researched. For example chapter 4 attributes the quote “God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere “ to Hermes Trismegistus. Wrong! He never said that and it was Empedocles who said it. Then he talks about Era 1,2 and 3 healing approaches. Only era 3 is said to use the mind in remote healing. In fact remote healing has been practiced for thousands of years, most notably by Jesus .
Then we are told prayers work 20% of the time. The author whilst conceding this may be due to the pray-er, hedges his bets.
Rather long winded and repetitive and lacking critical instruction on how to pray. Also erroneously adopts Jungian and Freudian view on the subconscious, suggesting it causes ailments and cannot be controlled save in dream prayers. The author seems unaware that the subconscious was so named because it is subject to the conscious, and that’s why thoughts must be controlled to direct the subconscious to do what is desired.
There are few healing words here. Instead the author creates doubt-the very thing all knowledgeable mental scientists have warned against. The author, oddly in a book supposedly about prayer, seems unaware of scripture passages that explain it.
Better books are Troward Edinburgh Lectures, Larson, how to stay well, Holmes This thing called you, bailes Your Mind Can Heal You, Yogananda, The Second Coming Of Christ.
Top reviews from other countries
You don't have to be a therapist to find the book fascinating and uplifting and what is so exciting is that you know he is writing what he believes and the science that proves it is not his imagination.
Trish Niblock
The author is an American medical doctor, who had a hunch that prayer might help some of his patients. So he searched the medical literature for all the scientific studies about prayer, healing and medicine.
He was amazed to find so much research on the topic.
In half of 300 experiments, prayer positively affected blood pressure, the healing of wounds, heart attacks, headaches, anxiety, illness generally etc., all living things including animals, bacteria and viruses; and electronic equipment.
The author advocates praying not for a specific outcome for a particular person but that "God's will be done" for that person.
Prayers work at a distance. That they work is taken by the author as evidence for the existence of the soul and God; that the mind can exist separate from the brain.
References to all of the studies cited are listed in the book.
It was such an exciting read, I couldn't put the book down. Brilliant!
13 March 2003.
Healing and Prayer - an overview
By Howard A. Jones
In this book, Dr Larry Dossey, a physician with a practice in Texas, explores the healing power of prayer. In the Introduction, the author expresses his difficulty in defining precisely what we mean by prayer, because the word `prayer' tends to be associated with religious petitions to God. But Dr Dossey takes prayer out of a specifically religious context and makes it serve as a description of non-local mind communing with cosmic spirit, in any form in which we want to regard it, to envision the love and healing of others.
The author sees medicine over the past couple of centuries as having developed in three stages or eras: the first in the 19th century reflected physical medicine with the development of synthetic drug therapy and surgery with effective anaesthetics. The second phase developed after WWII and acknowledged the role of the mind of the individual in aggravating or healing their physical illness. The third era, which is the focus of this book, has emerged in recent decades as evidence has grown of the effect that one individual's mind could have on the mind and body of another - what Dossey calls `non-local mind'. He cites evidence that he believes shows that mind is not exclusively associated with the brain, as brain chemicals are found also in other tissues like the blood and gut. Then there is further evidence that mind is not even restricted to one individual with the effects, not only of prayer, but of telepathic or telesomatic events between empathic individuals.
The book describes numerous anecdotes of instances where prayer and healing thoughts have proved to be effective and some instances where they have not, with possible reasons for this. It also gives the results of many scientific studies into the influence of prayer. There are few practical details of the experiments in most of the book - simply the results. Details are confined to the third and final section on The Evidence; and there is more on that, together with possible explanatory scientific theory, in an earlier book, Recovering the Soul. Dr Dossey points out that nothing physical, not even a measurable energy, passes from meditator to recipient. Such events are comparable to those in particle physics where interaction between related particles occurs instantaneously, at a distance, regardless of separation in time or space.
I doubt that this book was written specifically as a self-help book, but Dr Dossey gives examples of what he considers to be effective methods and limitations of prayer so I'm sure that many readers will find the book not only helpful but inspirational: for if mind is not to be confined to the body in life, then there is the potential for non-local mind or soul to continue its existence in the discarnate. If the individual unconscious does indeed form part of Jung's collective unconscious, it is not incoherent to suggest persistence of non-local mind in a Communal Soul after mortal death. This is a very informative and encouraging book.
Dr Howard A. Jones is the author of The Thoughtful Guide to God (2006) and The Tao of Holism (2008), both published by O Books of Winchester, UK.
The book is esoteric rather than Christian. Some people may want that kind of book, but it is not for me.
