Whole Life Magazine

August/September 2014

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experiencing a bond with the machine, of "falling in love," or "merging," or "having fun," just as healers o en describe falling into a state of "oneness." e driving force of the universe, according to Dr. Jahn: "It's Love. Love with a capital L." ALL ROADS LEAD TO CONSCIOUSNESS Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., now president emeritus of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, looked at another aspect of consciousness and its impact on the physical domain. Her work also establishes a scienti c method for studying heal- ing and other psychic experiences. Early in her career, as a researcher at the Mind-Sci- ence Foundation in Austin, Tex., Schlitz explored distant intentionality in experiments now considered classics. She and William Braud, Ph.D., examined whether one person could intentionally in uence the autonomic nervous system of another person in a separate room. In some cases they sim- ply asked the in uencer to stare at the subject's image on a video monitor. Equipment recorded electrodermal activity uctua- tions (similar to a lie detector test) as a way to measure the autonomic responses. ese studies, considered an- alogs to healing, measure direct physiological changes. When researchers at other institu- tions replicated these studies, 47 percent of the 30 experiments showed signi cant results, com- pared to the 5 percent expected on the basis of chance alone. Schlitz's focus on distant intentionality has taken the em- phasis for psi (parapsychological) phenomena out of the realm of religion and the supernatural. During her tenure at Noetic Sciences, she seeded research around the coun- try exploring spontaneous remission, dreams, prayer and energy healing. One of the more remarkable projects was a double-blind study of end-stage AIDS patients and long distance heal- ing. Elizabeth Targ, M.D., a psychiatrist and then director of clinical psychosocial oncology research at California Paci c Medical Institute in San Francisco, spearheaded the study. Published by e Western Journal of Medicine in December 1998, the study stripped away all known means of in u- encing another person's health: touch, attention, pills, even sugar pills. Half of 40 end-stage AIDS patients received distance healing sessions for an hour, six days a week, for ten weeks. ey and the healers never met. e results showed that the distance healing treatments signi cantly reduced the number of illnesses, number of doctor visits, length of hospitalizations and amount of medicines required, compared to the 20 people in the control group. " is is signi cant for everyone," Targ said when I rst interviewed her. "It suggests that we can always be help- ing each other, that we're more connected than we realize." Still, Targ, who has since passed away, noted, "One study never proves anything. What this study is, is a call to action." Marilyn Schlitz concurs. "Alter- native medicine is now unstoppa- ble," she says. "It's our obligation to do research on these topics. My belief is that it will lead to a more expanded view of human possibility." For anyone who has ever expe- rienced a distance energy healing or a psychic ash, the results of these and other studies of con- sciousness and subtle energy may not be a total surprise. Still, in to- day's world, there is nothing like scienti c con rmation. From all the data, Schlitz thinks a new model of reality may ultimately be needed. She notes, "I'd say there's a semi-permeable membrane between the physical world and consciousness." —Diane Goldner is a healer based in Santa Monica, and au- thor of How People Heal: Exploring the Scienti c Basis of Subtle Energy in Healing, and A Call to Heal, a memoir of transformation. www.DianeGoldner.com E N D I N G august/september 2014 25

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