Healing and Prayer: The Power of Paradox and Mystery By Larry Dossey, MD

The most fundamental questions that arise during a client-therapist interchange are Where does healing come from? and How can we make it happen? If you wanted to have a major healing-what some might call a miracle-how would you go about it?

I invite you to suspend your beliefs and judgments about this topic-at least for the time being-and approach it in as open a way as you can. One way to do this would be to allow yourself to take what some artists call a "distant perspective". It involves a suspension of judgment and disbelief, taking a new angle on things, an openness to something higher, and a willingness to perceive or experience pattern beyond the immediate data presented by our normal senses. When it comes to looking at healing and the interaction of mind and body, that's what I invite you to do. Allow yourself an open, fresh perspective.

The Therapy Spectrum

People have been trying to heal other people for at least as long as recorded history. When one person gets better on account of what another person does, how are we to understand that? I propose that all forms of healing fit into a spectrum from "rational" healing to "paradoxical" healing.

In rational forms of healing, what matters is what you do. In paradoxical healing, by contrast, it is not what you do but how you are-your being-that is everything. You can put any kind of therapy at some point in a spectrum running all the way from rational to paradoxical healing. At one end, you'll see healing practices that make sense within today's dominant paradigm. They're reasonable, they're rational-including the use of medication, radiation therapy, and surgery. Then, as you move toward the paradoxical end, things begin to seem more unusual.

How about biofeedback? Many readers of this magazine have at some time, I suppose, used a biofeedback apparatus, and have some familiarity with how it works. If you pay attention, you find that the best way to ensure failure is to try your darndest. After a while, usually after five or ten minutes of impotent effort, something clicks. You realize that you've got to let go, without tuning out altogether. This dynamic is called "passive volition", and it really turns the modern medical agenda on its head. It is a paradox. Yet the fact of the phenomenon is there for anyone to experience personally.
G. K. Chesterton caught the essence of paradox when he defined it as "truth standing upside down to attract attention".

What about placebo effects? If a random group took a placebo pill to relieve pain, about one third would experience some relief. What's paradoxical about that? Well, for one thing a placebo is a dummy pill that can't possibly do anything because it is made up of inert ingredients. Placebos don't work very well if you know you are taking one. For another thing, research in dental schools has shown that placebos are not very good for mild pain but are terrific for severe pain. What's going on here? Where is the healing coming from? Who or what is causing relief of symptoms and healing the illness? When we encounter the "placebo-effect" on our spectrum we are clearly inching up on paradox. And, as most medical practitioners know very well, this effect is very common indeed. It happens in just about all forms of medicine.

Psychiatrist R. D. Laing has emphasized a word that captures the essence of what happens in paradoxical healing, and which is implicit in all psychotherapeutic counseling: "breakthrough". It is not an event that either therapist or client can predict, and when it occurs neither can fully understand what has happened. It has a numinous quality, it shares something of the miraculous. Nevertheless, when it happens it is unmistakable. It is empirical, observable and experienced by both patient and therapist. However, it cannot be controlled or made to happen at will. One can have such a "breakthrough" on the first day of therapy, only to wait around five years before another one happens. There's something radically unpredictable about having a breakthrough in psychological counseling. Psychological breakthrough, therefore, belongs somewhere in the paradoxical portion of the spectrum of therapy.

The Paradox of Prayer

One of the most paradoxical phenomena I've come across as a doctor is prayer. We have to pay attention to prayer as a paradoxical form of healing because the data are there. I regard the scientific evidence for the power of prayer as perhaps the best kept secret in modern medical science. Both the phenomenon and supporting data are virtually unknown by physicians.

There have been two major reviews of spiritual prayer or distant healing in the last ten years. One was by parapsychological researcher and statistician Jerry Solfvin¹. The most recent was done by a psychiatrist, Daniel Benor². According to a 1990 report Benor found 150 studies published in English dealing with this area. I want to emphasize that scientific data confirm a correlation between prayer and healing.

A good, scientifically respectable account of the healing power of prayer-one of the best I've come across in the past decade-is the work by a quiet group called Spindrift³, in Salem, Oregon. They took a very straightforward approach. They tested prayer on simple biological systems, such as germinating seeds, getting their data by praying for the treatment group and not for the control group, and then measuring the respective germination rates of the seeds. Their experimental results were unequivocal: Prayer does work.

Prayer and Psychological Type

But what kind of prayer? If prayer works, they asked, what kind of prayer strategy is most effective-directed or non-directed? Directed prayer is the kind where you have some goal or endpoint as your focus. You say, "Joe has cancer, let's make it go away." Not only do you give God the diagnosis, but you make a recommendation for treatment as well. You're basically trying to help the universe along. Non-directed prayer doesn't do that. It doesn't try to focus prayer or push the outcome in any specific direction.

But why would you expend all that energy in prayer if you didn't have an outcome in mind? Some people can't imagine praying in a non-directed way, yet it may be a preferred form of prayer for countless people around the world. For example, one of the invocations tested by the Spindrift group was the simple phrase "Thy will be done." Another, taken from the old Beatles' tune, was "Let It Be." My all-time favorite non-directed prayer, however, was featured on the back cover of The First Whole Earth Catalog. It pictured Earth floating against a black background with the caption "You can't put it together, it is together." Implicit in this strategy is the idea that maybe the universe is smart enough on its own; maybe God, Tao, or the Organizing Force doesn't need to be told what to do.

Yet some wise and sensitive people seem to insist that actually the universe does welcome our help. These people are passionate about directed prayer. I have a friend in Dallas who leads one of the richest, most beautiful spiritual lives I've ever seen. This woman is not only an ordained Episcopal priest, she is a trained Jungian analyst. For about ten years she has been praying with a passion for my hopelessly introverted soul. She says, "Larry, you just don't get it. What you don't understand is that when you get out of bed in the morning and put your feet firmly on the floor, you've got to do everything in your power to help God jump-start the universe." For an introvert, this is just awful. But other people are equally repelled by what seems to them an unconcerned and uncommitted "let it be" attitude.

So which is it to be: directed or non-directed prayer? What works best? It probably depends on who you are. When the Spindrift people tested both prayer strategies, their experimental results showed that both worked. Nevertheless, in the Spindrift series of experiments, they found that the non-directed method was quantitatively two to four times more powerful than the directed method.

What are we to make of this? I have my own theory about why the results turned out as they did. On one hand we have introverts and on the other we have the extraverts. Extraverts are people who have no trouble telling the world what to do. They are much more at home with a directed form of prayer. Introverts, on the other hand, are much more at home with a "let it be, thy will be done, and may the best thing happen" non-directed strategy.

I've been interacting with the Spindrift people for many years, and I would say they represent one of the most introverted groups I've met. It is no surprise to me, therefore, that in their series of experiments the non-directed approach came out ahead. That's because it was used by introverted people who felt more at home and more genuine and authentic using it. In fact, I would wager that when these experiments are repeated using extraverts, the directed way of praying will come out on top.

Doing Nothing

What I want to emphasize here is that entry into the state of the void is a potent choice, and can actually save lives. I gave a talk once on this issue and a woman came up to me afterwards. You could tell she was an introvert because she waited until the big auditorium had completely cleared, leaving just the two of us. As I packed up the slides she looked around to make sure nobody could hear what she was going to say. "Twenty years ago I had metastatic cancer, and you know what I did to get rid of it? Nothing." And then she began to get her energy up and said "And nobody wants to hear my story." She was right. Her story is not exactly hot material for one of the talk shows like Oprah or Donahue. Our culture is not interested in stories about "nothing". "Nothing" never makes the 10 o'clock news. Yet as this woman and many others discover, "nothing" is not really nothing. I believe that because of the emphasis in our culture on one side of the story-on being "proactive"-we have come very close to disenfranchising the emotional and spiritual sensitivities of about half the population.

Spiritual Understanding and Health

An old myth about rainmakers tells us that when the shaman gets himself right then the rain falls. This view has a correlate in New Age thinking: "If I straighten myself out, the disease will go away. And if I really straighten myself out-spiritually and psychologically-the disease will never occur in the first place." Well, this is non-paradoxical, linear, causal thinking. Reality may not be structured to respond so faithfully to this worldview.

There are people who break every commonsense rule of health and never get sick. They go to bed drunk every night, smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, live to be 100, and they're physically healthy to boot. I bet everyone knows somebody like that. Flip that over, though, and what you get are the unhealthy saints and mystics. These are the God-realized Olympic-class spiritual achievers, leading irreproachable spiritual lives. They do everything right spiritually, yet frequently their health histories are miserable.

If you don't think there are a lot of these people in history, read the lives of the saints. Three of the holiest people I've known in this century have died of cancer. Krishnamurti: cancer of the pancreas; Suzuki Roshi, who brought Zen Buddhism from Japan to the San Francisco Bay Area: cancer of the liver; the most beloved saint in modern India, Ramana Maharshi: died a horrible, grotesque death of cancer of the stomach. And then there's Saint Bernadette, who saw the Virgin at Lourdes: dead at 35 with what's been variously called bone cancer or disseminated tuberculosis. Jesus Christ, aged 33: death by trauma. Remember how the Buddha died? Somebody fed him tainted meat in what proved to be his last meal. Food poisoning does not sound like a very exotic way for a supremely enlightened being to go.

Now what's going on here? Is there a correlation between your thoughts, emotions and attitudes and your level of physical health? I've spent most of my adult life trying to demonstrate just that correlation. The correlations are there, they're strong, and we would be foolish to ignore them. But are they invariable? No. Profound spiritual achievement is no guarantee of physical health. Any model we make about the relationship between spirituality and physical health has to account for the large number of anomalies like those quoted above. We cannot ignore them. They are central to our model. The point is really very simple: It is possible to be highly spiritually realized and yet get awfully sick.

So why did the saints and mystics die the way they did? For all I know, there are legitimate, even spiritual, reasons why saints and mystics die of painful diseases. What I'm getting at is expressed clearly in the New Testament. In the ninth Book of John, Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. The disciples are troubled and ask a very New Age question: "Who hath sinned, this man or his parents that he is born blind?" And Jesus said "No one has sinned that this man is born blind, but that the works of God should be made manifest through him." This is a highly instructive passage. Here you have profound physical disease, congenital blindness, completely unrelated to any individual's wrongdoing.

It may outrage our sense of cosmic justice, but spiritual achievement and physical health do not always go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the wisdom of the world works the other way, and the saints and sages suffer more than the wicked. Therein lies a paradox and a mystery beyond our powers of scrutiny. And it is important to recognize this because otherwise it becomes all too easy to fall prey to the trap of self-blame when illness strikes.

Facing Into the Mystery

A great hero of mine, Albert Einstein, was a man who asked a lot of questions of the universe before he was laid to rest. One question he considered more important than any other was "Is the universe friendly?" My favorite saying from all of Buddhism is a response to that: "If you die before you die, then when you die you will not die." This masterful nugget of wisdom, charged though it is with paradox, is nevertheless brimful of meaning. It meets the mystery of Einstein's question with a mystery of its own. But here the mystery is sourced in the core of the self, of self-realization, and may serve as a probe into the deeper, darker mystery. You can interpret or put a spin on this any way you want. But to me it says that if we are willing to go beyond the small self and die to that self, while we are still alive, then we'll awaken to the realization that the most essential part of ourselves is not local; it is infinite in space and time, and therefore is immortal and eternal. In principle it can neither be born nor can it die.

If we can do that, if we can die to the small self, then we can understand the response that Einstein later gave to his own question, shortly before he died: "The beauty of it is that we have to content ourselves with the recognition of the miracle [the mystery, the paradox], beyond which there's simply no legitimate way out."

Another man who honored cynicism and skepticism along with paradox and mystery was H. L. Mencken. He said "Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."