Spiritual Healing: Its scientific proving and the authentic meaning
Abstract:Spiritual healing includes various phenomenons from simple physical phenomena which have not been tested scientifically yet, a healing explainable with the body-mind mechanism, and that of purely related with non local consciousness. In this article we overview the scientific inspection of spiritual healing and present the authentic meaning of the spiritual healing. Spirituality is a transcendental concept beyond mind and body, and spiritual healing works in the soul (non local consciousness) level. In psychology this means forgiveness, acceptance as it is and explained as self-realization. Then the attitude is followed by the high moral transformation. Therefore spiritual healing doesn’t necessarily result in the health of the individuals’ body and mind. We also warn of the common observed problem of spiritual harassment which is caused by the interaction of the aggressive spirituality and the adherence of physical healing from disease. Keywords: Spirituality, spiritual healing, CAM, non local consciousness, acceptance, forgiveness, self-realization, soul, moral, spiritual harassment
1. Introduction
As we realize the limit and experience the disappointment for scientisism and reductionism, CAM (complimentary and alternative medicine) and spiritual business seeking for self-realization and spiritual growth are in the limelight. On the other hand, the third generation medicine which admits the intervention of non local consciousness has been advocated by Dossey1, Mindell2, and Gerber3, and its scientific evidence has been accumulated. Spiritual healing generally means the healing from diseases by means of a non scientific method. Spiritual healing method usually includes methods that are invisible such as qui gong, reiki, therapeutic touch, prayer, music therapy, aroma therapy, light therapy, and methods using substances, like herb therapy, homeopathy, Bach flower remedy, crystal healing, and so on. In these methods, there are various types of therapies in which some of them have not been proven scientifically, but will be describable physically in the near future, like herb therapy and the methods that cannot be explained substantially, such as distance healing.
However the common purpose for these therapies are to recovery of mental and physical health. In this study, spiritual healing is defined as the “soul’s healing.” General uses of the term spiritual healing does not convey the authentic meaning, but is limited only on physical adherence, then cause spiritual harassment. There are people who pursue the highest level of morality sacrificing their own family and life and practices universal love, such as Christ and Buddha. They may not be healthy (mental, social, physical) in terms of the WHO definition of health, but their spiritual health is assumed to be at the highest level. The purpose of this study is to propose the authentic meaning of spiritual healing after overvieing the scientific reports about spiritual healing. We also warn of the common observed spiritual problem which is caused by the adherence of healing from disease.
2. The Change of Spirituality Research
The numbers of scientific papers about spirituality has been increasing for 10 years rapidly. 80 percent of these are from medicine and health science areas. From this, we assume that the concept of spirituality in medicine has been clarified beyond religion and metaphysics and the hope that spirituality may contribute to health has increased.
Fig.1 The change of number of published papers on spirituality based on SCOPUS
We have explored the scientific papers since 1990 about spirituality through the database SCOPUS using the keywords, spirituality, spiritual health, spiritual healing. We also picked up the articles by using keywords such as prayer, distance healing, touch, homeopathy, flower remedy, which use the double blind method with statistically significant sample sizes. The theme of the medical papers about spirituality has tendencies to limit the spiritual care for the patients who are terminally ill. Among them, spirituality is hoped to increase QOL, the attitude to find meaning in life and disease, and to accept death from the eternal point of view. In recent years, more papers report positive meaning of spirituality, and the field of study has spread to education and business 4. The definition of spirituality varies depending on the researcher’s field of study and their theories, and they are divided into three categories. They are:
1.from the point of view of wellness 5, 2.emphasizing the meaning and purpose of life 6,7 3.the connectedness with the true self, nature, and something great 8,9.
They take spirituality as an indicator of salut genesis. It can be summarized in two categories, such as positive psychological trait, like optimism, hope, explained in the first category of definition and existential meaning which includes the second and the third definition. We have reported the similarity of spirituality with SOC (Sense of Coherence): recognizing reality (comprehensibility), optimistic attitude (manageability) finding the meaning of stressful situations (meaningfulness), and trust in life. 10,11 SOC has a lot of evidence to contribute to mental and physical health, with its strong characteristics to overcome stress.
3. Issues on Spiritual Healing Research
The trial to describe the scientific evidence on spiritual healing has been increasing since the 90’s, and the results do not necessarily show the expectations for the effect of spiritual healing. Most of them reported that the effect of the healing was caused mainly by placebo, under its tightly controlled situation. Kurucoff reported the effects of noetic training on cardiac patients.12 They administered noetic training, which is an integrated method of music, imagery, touch, prayer, and found its effect on stress reduction, and also on the significant difference on the death rate six months after the intervention. The researchers use tightly controlled experimental designs such as the double blind method to avoid placebo effect. In actuality, the expectations, beliefs, and the consciousness of the patients and the healers had a lot of effect on the healing process. The scientists tried to exclude such effects as much as possible, and came to the conclusion of no scientific evidence on spiritual healing. Some of the research papers use animals, plants, and cells which is supposed not to have consciousness, thinking to exclude the placebo effect. To obtain a conclusion of spiritual healing on these experiments, more discussion about experimental environment, measuring methods, and also what the consciousness information of animals and plants are necessary. As in the quantum theory, observer’s effect is widely known, the experiment of psychic ability has a situational effect, as thus, psychic phenomena occurs among the expected people but not in the critical environment.3 The sincere scientific attitude to study spiritual healing is a critical one, not even neutral, which is naturally assumed that spiritual healing is difficult to occur. Therefore, it is understandable that the outcome of the study that controlled the environment tightly is not stable. Because the thrown away variables such as the patients consciousness are the most important to spiritual healing, when we hypothesize that the non local consciousness functions in accordance with the consciousness of the healers and patients. Proving the effects of spiritual healing has such limitations through conventional scientific method. It is necessary to make sure the actual existence of the healing by scientific method, to explain the phenomena through the frame of modern physics by the hypothesis of unknown system of information conveyance. 13, 14 Psychological assignment for spiritual healing is to describe it in a universally valuable manner from the narrative quantative data. The interdisciplinary approach for the spiritual healing is important to explain the consciousness phenomena, not deducted to physical phenomena.
4. Authentic Spiritual Healing
The issue here is what is happening in the process of spiritual healing on the patients. The physical changes caused by spiritual healing such as relaxation and stress reduction are observable. Recovery from disease by spiritual healing can be explained by the mechanism of body mind interaction. However, there are many cases that cannot be explained by the mechanism of body mind interaction at the clinical situation. In this study, we explore spiritual healing as soul’s healing beyond body mind from the authentic meaning. Christ said “your sins are forgiven” at the miraculous healing. This is a good example of the soul’s healing (spiritual healing). Spiritual healing authentically means soul’s healing, in other words, forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, and not only recovery from disease. This spiritual healing is descried in clinical psychology as congruence 16, self realization 17, individualization 18, self transcendence 19, which is the purpose of psychological growth and the ultimate development of humanity. At the same time, it is the process of awareness of non local consciousness (transpersonal self), coherent with it 20, this leads into the automatic transformation of morality to follow the universal rule. There are cases of spiritual healing which does not result in physical healing directly. Also, the case in which the healing process occurs in the physical level but not accompanies soul’s healing either is explainable by the authentic mechanism of spiritual healing. The conclusion that there are no spiritual healing because of the lack of physically describable evidence is not reasonable with this assumption. Spiritual healing has another direction from above, jihi, eko or grace, which is the opposite direction from one’s own struggles. The spiritual attitude to surrender all after the best effort is not giving up nor just following the destiny nor fighting against the disease but to trust and obey the flow of life. When the patient recognizes the meaning of his disease as a process for his growth, he will experience unity with non local consciousness, which is the spiritual healing.
Fig.2 Dual Direction of Spiritual healing
5. Spiritual Harassment
Spiritual harassment21 means the attitude to give anxiety, fear to others by mentioning that the diseases or troubles are caused by the previous life, karma, and curses. When we put the purpose of spiritual healing only on the recovery from physical disease, various problems take place. The false belief such as the reason for lack of recovery of disease is lack of faith and unrealistic optimism to hope impossible recovery are observed. Spirituality can be harmful by misunderstanding the original meaning. We should warn the danger of the unhealthy, destructive spirituality separated from healthy spirituality. Battista explained the concepts of defensive spirituality and aggressive spirituality as examples of false spirituality 22. Defensive spirituality is directly related to spiritual harassment. This is out of narcissistic acts, pride of one’s own spiritual level, and pushing their beliefs on others.
6.Conclusion
Spiritual healing is soul’s healing, and does not necessarily mean the recovery from physical disease. Soul’s healing is forgiveness, unconditional acceptance, congruence, self realization, individualization, and self transcendence, which is the ultimate development of humanity. At the same time, it is the process of awareness of non local consciousness (transpersonal self), coherent with it, this leads to the automatic transformation of morality, to follow the universal rule.
References
1. Dossey L.: Prayer and Healing: Reviewing the Research, HarperCollins, Australia, 1993. 2. Mindell A: The Quantum Mind and Healing:How to listen and Respond Your Body’s Symptoms, 2004 3. Gerber R: Vibrational Medicine: New Choices for Healing Ourselves, 1988 4. Zohar D and Marshall I: SQ: connecting with our Spiritual intelligence, Bloomsbury Publishing 2000 5. Adams TB, Bezner JR ,Drabbs ME et al. :Conceptualization and Measurement of the Spiritual and Psychological Dimensions of Wellness in a College Population, College Health 48:165-173,2000 6. Elkins DN, Hedstrom LJ, Hughes LL et.al.: Toward a humanistic-phenomenological spirituality: Definition, description, and measurement. Journal of Humanistic Psychology ,28(4):5-18,1988 7. Seaward BL: Refractions on human spirituality for the worksite .Am jol Health promotion 9:165-168,1995 8. 9. Bellingham R, Cohen B, Jones T et.al. :Connectedness: Some skills for aspiritual health. Am jol Health promotion 4(1):18-31,1989 10. Ozaki M.: Development of an Assessment Tool on Spirituality Explained by Three Domains, Will, Joy and Sense: From a Holistic Educational Approach, J. Intl. Soc. Life Information Sci., 23(2): 364-369, 2005. 11. Ozaki M, Oku T and Sakano J: Authntic Spirituality Explained by Will,Joy, and Sense :The conceptual relationship with Sense of Coherence .Japaneses Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine, 46 (12):1029-1034,2006 12. Kurucoff MW ,Crater SW,Gallup D, et al .:Music ,imagery, touch, and prayer as adjuncts to interventional cardiac care :the Monitoring and actualization of Noetic Trainings(MANTRA)2 randomized study, Lancet 366 :211-217,2005 13. Kido M:
14. Oku T and Ozaki M: A Mechanism of Nonlocal Consciousness Medicine Based on Quantum Holographic Cosmology, J. Intl. Soc. Life Info. Sci. 24(1): 180-203, 2006. 15. New Testament 16. Rogers C. R.: On become a person, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1961. 17. Maslow A. H.: Toward a Psychology of Being, Van Nost, Reinhold, 1969. 18. Jung C: 19. Frankle V 20. Assagioli R.: Psychosynthesis, Psychosynthesis Research Foundation, New York, 1965. 21. Koda R: from Personal communication 22. Battista JR:Aggressive Spirituality and Spiritual Defence In Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology,Basic Books,1996
近年では、より積極的な意味をスピリチュアリティーに期待する報告が相次いでおり、その範囲は教育やビジネス場面にまで広がっている4。スピリチュアリティーの定義は研究者の専門や関心、よって立つ理論により異なるが、健康生成論的観点からは、次の三つに分類できる。?ウエルネスの観点から捉えている定義5、?人生における意味や目的を強調する定義6,7、?本来の自己、自然、サムシンググレイトなどとのつながりと捉える定義、8,9である。つまり、楽観性、希望などの心理特性と、実存的意味との関連を健康増進のひとつの指標と捕らえているといえよう。このようなスピリチュアリティーの定義は、健康生成論の中心的概念であるSOC(sense of coherence)との関連を示唆する。
1: Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2006 Dec;3(4):533-40. Epub 2006 Jul 21. Links
Johrei family healing: a pilot study.Canter PH, Brown LB, Greaves C, Ernst E.
Johrei is a form of spiritual healing comprising "energy channelling" and light massage given either by a trained healer or, after some basic training, by anyone. This pilot trial aimed to identify any potential benefits of family-based Johrei practice in childhood eczema and for general health and to establish the feasibility of a subsequent randomised controlled trial. Volunteer families of 3-5 individuals, including at least one child with eczema were recruited to an uncontrolled pilot trial lasting 12 months. Parents were trained in Johrei healing and then practised at home with their family. Participants kept diaries and provided questionnaire data at baseline, 3,6 and 12 months. Eczema symptoms were scored at the same intervals. Scepticism about Johrei is presently an obstacle to recruitment and retention of a representative sample in a clinical trial, and to its potential use in general practice. The frequency and quality of practise at home by families may be insufficient to bring about the putative health benefits. Initial improvements in eczema symptoms and diary recorded illness, could not be separated from seasonal factors and other potential confounders. There were no improvements on other outcomes measuring general health and psychological wellbeing of family members.