Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing
Russell Targ and Jane Katra, Ph.D.
Foreword by Larry Dossey, M.D.
1. Extrasensory perception. 2. Parapsychology. 3. Mind and body. 4. Mental healing. 5. Spiritual healing.
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| 219 p |
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eISBN-13
| 9781577313045 |
Copyright©
| 1998, 1999 by Russell Targ and Jane Katra, Ph.D. |
Introduction
The Illusion of Separation
There are only two ways to live your life:
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is.
I believe in the latter.
Albert Einstein
This book is about connecting to the universe and to each other through the use of our psychic abilities. These abilities, known collectively as psi, from the Greek word for soul, reveal numerous kinds of connections mind to mind, mind to body, mind to the world, and what some would call one-mindedness with God. The idea that our "separation is an illusion" is not new it has been a core premise of wisdom teachings for centuries, even before the time of Buddha, 2,500 years ago. Our ancient ancestors knew that the essence of our nature is consciousness. Extrasensory perception, or ESP, is one way of experiencing the mystery inherent in this consciousness that connects us across space and time.
Spiritual healing reveals the powerful effects that our consciousness can have in the presence of peaceful receptivity, trust, and loving intentions.
It is not necessary to hold any particular beliefs about spirituality or anything else in order to be psychic. No special rituals are necessary. And, contrary to what some writers or misguided friends might tell you, using psychic abilities is not something reserved for a select few talented individuals; it does not make a person go crazy, nor does it require having a near-death experience. Our experience and laboratory data clearly demonstrate that psychic abilities are part of our inherent nature. Psychic research from the past fifty years shows conclusively that our universe is both far more grand and more subtle than our science can presently explain.
The authors of this book have devoted most of their professional lives synthesizing the ideas presented here. Russell Targ was a pioneer in the development of the laser, and he is presently a senior staff scientist at the Lockheed Martin Research & Development Laboratory, pursuing the peaceful applications of lasers for remote sensing of the wind. He was also a co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) remote-viewing ESP program.
Dr. Jane Katra has been a practicing spiritual healer for more than twenty years, using her gift of mind-to-mind connection to heal and alleviate pain in others, both nearby and at a distance. She is also a university instructor with a doctorate degree in health education, who has taught nutrition and mind-body health both in private practice as an "immune-system coach," and at the University of Oregon.
"Remote viewing" refers to our psychic ability to experience and describe activities at distant places that are blocked from ordinary perception, and it reveals quite clearly the connection that exists between our minds and the universe. It is this same connection, which we call the "nonlocal mind," that we believe to be the means through which spiritual healing takes place. Because the SRI remote-viewing experiments provided such dramatic proof of the existence of nonlocal mind, we describe them in the first part of this book. Some of these experiments, which have only recently been declassified, took place as part of a series conducted by Targ and others as "ESPionage" for the CIA during the
Cold War. There are many states of nonlocal consciousness available to humankind, just as there are a variety of states of awareness within ordinary space-time. For example, right and left hemispheric tasks such as the activity of a dancer compared to an accountant, involve quite different mental states, though both are available in "local" sensory consciousness. Dr. Katra experiences kinesthetic, or physical, sensations and direct knowing in connection with her practice of spiritual healing. Her work is also characterized by an experience of serenity that can be described as universal love. Entering into a receptive, nonthinking, nonsensual state of awareness, which could be called a state of meditation or prayer, enables a spiritual healer to become a vehicle carrying healing information to her patients.
Jane Katra's work as a healer was largely responsible for the collaboration that resulted in this book. That partnership actually began in the winter of 1992, when co-author Russell Targ was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. Russell was sickly pale, and he had been losing weight. After two weeks of CAT scans and x-rays that revealed numerous ominous spots on Russell's internal organs, the doctors at his friendly HMO wheeled him out on a gurney cart. They gave him instructions to put his affairs in order, and to begin chemotherapy as soon as possible. Instead, he contacted Jane, whom he had met at Parapsychology Association conferences, and asked her if she would work with him in the dual
roles of spiritual healer and immune system coach.
Acting on her intuition, Jane felt compelled to tell Russell that he was not sick, and that he should not empower that concept by saying he was sick, or that he had cancer. "All we actually know is that there were spots on some film," she said. Russell had received the frightening diagnosis just a few days before Christmas, but the chemotherapy team was fortunately unavailable until after the first of the year. In addition to her spiritual healing, Jane worked with Russell exploring the theory of changing the host so the disease could no longer recognize him. During the ensuing weeks, she wrote out a five-page prescription for Russell's healing treatment, based on research literature and her experiences concerning immune system enhancement. She recommended changes affecting the physical body, as well as changes in attitudes, emotional expression, and social and spiritual connections.
In addition, Jane did many healing meditations with Russell, and taught him to focus his thoughts with self-healing imagery and affirmations. She got him to try many new and unfamiliar behaviors: early morning jogging; expressions of gratitude, such as saying grace at mealtime; and even prayer. Healing experiences that involve union with a universal consciousness do not arise out of any particular beliefs, rituals, or actions, except one: quieting one's mind. These practices were foreign to Russell. Jane also recommended that he get reacquainted with his "community of spirit," which is one of the important aspects of what the health trade calls "social support." Local as well as nonlocal caring connections are important for healing, as well as health.
Russell followed these new behaviors, and he has been well ever since. He never returned to the hospital for medical treatment of cancer and never took any chemotherapy. Ensuing blood tests and x-rays showed no indications of illness.
We will never know if he actually had metastatic cancer, or if it was a misdiagnosis, as some people believe. What we do know is that Jane's interaction with Russell saved him from chemotherapy, which could have killed him, even in the absence of cancer. Jane's part in this spiritual healing can be more fully understood by reading Chapters 7 and 8 about
"The Making of a Healer" and "The Healing Experience."
Physician Larry Dossey has delineated three distinctively different "eras" of medicine, which distinguish the ways we have viewed the relationship of mind and body: physical, psychosomatic, and transpersonal. With our recognition of the nonlocal mind our consciousness that is unconfined by either space or time we have now entered Dossey's third era, which recognizes the importance of mind-to-mind connections for healing. We are just beginning to realize the potential effects of mind both within each person and between people, for information gathering (as in remote viewing), and for information sharing in psychic and spiritual healing. Regarding the effects of our thoughts, physicist
David Bohm says, "A change in meaning is a change in being." 1 In other words, thoughts have effects in the physical world.
Because we still do not fully understand the mechanisms underlying spiritual and psychic healing, many people dismiss the possibility of their effectiveness. However, we believe that different states of nonlocal awareness allow us to access levels of information unavailable through our ordinary senses. We will see this demonstrated by the remote viewing and other psychic data reported later in this book. A mystic might call the healing information "universal love."
The practice of quieting one's mental noise and creating coherence with a patient allows a healer's caring intentions and state of consciousness to become an avenue of this spiritual healing. The healing is available from a distance, whenever a patient is receptive to it. A healer's prayerful state makes available a type of "healing template," which appears to activate a patient's own self-healing capabilities. Thus, we believe a spiritual healer interacts with a distant patient by sending or revealing a healing message, rather than healing "rays." It is actually an information transaction, involving a relationship in which need, helping intentions, and quiet minds are the important elements. Spiritual
healing, when done in the presence of a patient, may also involve the transfer of a little-understood "vital life energy"
from a healer. Such "energy healing'' is postulated to occur during other forms of psychic healing, when the healing practitioner is not distant from the patient.
Psychic and spiritual healing are gaining new credibility in contemporary medical circles as well as governmental agencies. The National Institutes of Health have established an office to investigate alternative medicine, and physicians and hospitals are participating in double-blind clinical trials of spiritual healing. In this book we present the encouraging data from recently published experimental trials with both cardiac and AIDS patients. Such healing research has prompted Larry Dossey, physician, author, and executive editor of the new journal Alternative Therapies
in Health and Medicine, to comment that:
After scrutinizing this body of data for almost two decades, I have come to regard it as one of the best kept secrets in medical science. I'm convinced that the distant, nonlocal effects are real and that healing happens. We begin this book with Russell's autobiographical descriptions of a variety of extrasensory phenomena that point to the existence of mind-to-mind and mind-to-matter connections. We then broaden the evidence by examining the scientific basis provided by some astonishing remote-viewing experiments conducted by Russell at Stanford Research Institute. In these carefully controlled experimental tests spanning two decades, many different subjects sat in a windowless office,
closed their eyes, and explored the world outside. These individuals were consistently able to experience and accurately describe distant scenes and events from coast-to-coast and even continent-to-continent, in both present and future time. The SRI experiments demonstrated unequivocal evidence for extrasensory perception and the existence of the nonlocal mind, outside the brain and body. The ability of human awareness to make remarkable connections
apparently transcends the conventional limitations of time and space.
One of the most astonishing examples of remote viewing that we include in this book is a particular experiment in a series that was covertly funded by the CIA over a period of many years. In this case, a talented subject named Pat Price was given only the latitude and longitude coordinates of what turned out to be a secret Soviet atom bomb laboratory in Semipalatinsk, Siberia. With no other information of any kind to guide him, Price immediately described and sketched the plant with incredible precision. Not only did his drawings show previously unknown external structures that later were confirmed by satellite photography, but he also described, in remarkable detail, a complicated assembly process
being conducted indoors, inside a secure building. The existence of this completely secret process was verified by satellite photography several years later, after Price died, when the structure was moved outside.
This particular example of remote viewing occupies only a few pages in the book, but its importance far transcends the amount of space devoted to it. Price's drawings, which were recently declassified and obtained by Russell under the Freedom of Information Act, have never before appeared in book form. (Although initial support for Russell's work came in 1972 from the CIA; by 1995, a multitude of governmental agencies had joined in, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Army, Navy, and NASA, all of whom were stunned and impressed by the results.) Price's amazingly accurate drawings and descriptions, as well as the CIA acceptance of remote viewing as a way of penetrating the Iron Curtain, are a powerful testament to the existence of nonlocal mind.
As further evidence of these capabilities, we describe our personal experiences with high-quality psychic functioning, and Jane's involvement in spiritual healing interactions. We deal with psi inside and outside of the laboratory, as well as healing inside and outside of hospitals, during the past two decades. Physical models for psychic functioning are explored, as are the potential impacts of psychic abilities the mind-to-mind and mind-to-world connections on our society.
Psychic abilities and remote viewing are probes into what Carl Jung called our collective unconscious, and what the authors call our community of spirit. The reason we have a passion for our work with psi is that it allows us, as scientists, to keep one foot firmly in the materialistic twenty-fist century, and at least one toe in the "Divine." The data for our ability to share the feelings and experiences of others who are apparently separated from us show clearly that the Biblical idea of spiritual community can have a contemporary scientific meaning. We believe scientists will not come to a full understanding of the nature of consciousness until they recognize that there is no real separation between the observer and the so-called outside world they think they're observing. It's not an exaggeration, in our
opinion, to say that the reliable laboratory demonstration by worldwide parapsychological researchers of our human connectedness is an accomplishment on a par with the most notable scientific achievements of the twentieth century.
The field of psi research has its critics, of course. Despite irrefutable evidence for the existence of psi, it has been repressed and ridiculed in Western society because its mechanism is not yet understood. Magicians have gained fame and fortune assailing the ostensible spoon bending of Uri Geller. Many scientists who claim to understand nearly all of the phenomena of the physical universe apparently perceive psi to be a threat to their omniscience. Historically, much opposition to psi has been based on fear rather than intellect. Many leaders of organized religions have viewed psi
abilities as a kind of freelance spirituality they could not control.
In this book, we choose not to deal with spoon bending, astrology, or unidentified flying objects. The research we present here has appeared in the world's most prestigious scientific journals: Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), The Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association (APA).
The work we describe has been scrutinized and accepted in the halls of Congress, and by the House Committee on Intelligence Oversight, as described in Chapter 2. Our own view of psi functioning has been strongly influenced by the work of the distinguished physicist David Bohm, whose holographic model of the universe could be summarized by saying that any event that occurs is immediately available anywhere as information. That is, each portion of space contains information about all others.
We hope this book will help to overcome fear of our mind-to-mind connections, and inspire people to appreciate, use, and enjoy their natural abilities. Although we know that psi, like any other human ability, is not perfectly reliable, the experimental data discussed here show convincingly that it is widely distributed in the general population. ESP should
no longer be considered elusive. It is available and can be used.
Our psychic and spiritual capacities enable us to explore an important part of our true nature. Accepting and learning to use our nonlocal minds is important because it gives us direct access to the wider world in which we reside. It shows us that our consciousness knows no boundaries. We can each personally contact this expansive dimension of life, which evokes in us a greater sense of what our purpose here might be, and inspires us to reach for our highest potential as conscious beings.
We each create the reality that shapes our perceptions and experiences of everyday life. Daily, we are given the opportunity to decide if there will be psi in our lives. Our mental software, however, may need an upgrade in order to create this remarkable future. Otherwise, we will not be able to run the new programs and be part of what we envision as a Psychic Internet: the mind-to-mind connections available to all who wish to log on. If the truth be known, we are
all already hooked up. We just have to decide to pay attention.
One of our objectives is to help you to do this, by giving you the essential tools to expand your own potential. We do not promise that you will become more "psychic," but we can teach you to become more aware of the psychic aspects of your own mental processes. We can show you how to achieve a nonlocal connection with others, unlimited by space and time, acquired through trust, acceptance, and regular practice. Spiritual healing is one of the most important of these connections.
In this book, we include strong evidence for distant healing of both humans and animals, as well as theories and studies of noncontact, ostensible "energy healing" techniques such as Therapeutic Touch. We report studies of people affecting living systems from a distance, of remote mental-influence research in the former Soviet Union, and provocative accounts of remote diagnosis. All are further demonstrations of the range of our versatile human capabilities. Discussions of the roles of love, prayer, and surrender in spiritual healing; mental techniques used in studies of distant influence; and the differences between psychic and spiritual healing are also included.
In addition, we address the idea of precognition and the nature of time, and ask, "What does it mean to look into the future?" We explore the question of whether psychic abilities are sacred, or a secular expansion of our sensory awareness. Finally, we describe how a single-pointed focus of attention can be applied to helping others through healing. The basis of this spiritual healing resides in an attitude of openness and attunement to a greater universal mind, working through a person with helping intentions, in an environment of trust and surrender of personal ego.
We describe the many ways the magic of mind transcends our ordinary understanding of the space and time we live in. We hope to share our wonder, gratitude, and our experiences with you, and we invite you to join with us in the adventure of examining the relationship between what a physicist might describe as our "holographic quantum interconnectedness," and what a healer calls "God and our mutual community of spirit." Our goal is to open a door to all the riches of experience available in the world of mind-to-mind connections, and provide the tools to enable you to walk through that door.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual and political leader in exile, has written that our strongest tool for achieving peace among nations is education of our shared awareness. He has called upon scientists to assist in educating people of the world concerning our interconnected nature, and the interdependence of life. 4 We hope that this book will further that endeavor. It is partly through learning to quiet our minds that we become peaceful world citizens, and it is also through silencing our thoughts, memories, imagination, and sensations that we become aware of our mind-to-mind connections.
Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 1944) has been described as the most distinguished astrophysicist of his time. His view of the significance of these connections is one with which both the physicist and the healer can agree:
If I were to try to put into words the essential truth revealed by the mystic experience, it would be that our minds are not apart from the world: and the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our other deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are glimpses of reality transcending the narrow limits of our particular consciousness. . .
....
Table of Contents
Foreword
by Larry Dossey, M.D. xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Chapter One · The Illusion of Separation:
A Physicist's Description of His Psi Experiences 11
Chapter Two · Our Astonishing Nonlocal Mind:
CIA Spying at SRI Yields Unequivocal Proof of ESP 27
Chapter Three · What We Have Learned about Remote Viewing:
How You Can Learn to Do It Yourself 63
Chapter Four · The Masters of the Universe and the Mystery of Psi:
The Golden Experiments in Psi from This Century 83
Chapter Five · Precognition: Time and Time Again:
What Does It Mean to Look into the Future 113
Chapter Six · Are Psychic Abilities Sacred?:
Using Psychic Abilities in the World, Including Spiritual Healing 133
Chapter Seven · The Making of a Healer: Becoming a Healer,
Cosmic Consciousness, Mystical Experiences 145
Chapter Eight · The Healing Experience:
Mind-to-Mind Connections: Jane's Healing Experiences 171
Chapter Nine · Minding the Body:
Significant Mind-Body Experiments and Distant Influence 197
Chapter Ten · Ways of Healing:
Spiritual and Energy Healing, Therapeutic Touch, Diseases 223
Chapter Eleven · Prayer and the Healing Connection:
Healing Prayer, Love and Surrender, How to Do Spiritual Healing 255
Chapter Twelve · The Physics of Miracles and the Magic of Mind: A Theory of Unity Consciousness and Hope for the Future 273
Chapter Notes 289
Bibliography 307
Index 321
Screenbook
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Cover design by Big Fish
Cover photograph by Photonica
Text layout and design by Aaron Kenedi
First paperback printing, May 1999
ISBN 1-57731-097-7
Printed in Canada on acid-free, recycled paper
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West