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HealingBruce MacManaway1. Concept and Historical Background |
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The concept of healing by touch or thought without any medical help does not fit comfortably into our Western view of the world. Yet we still retain some vestiges of it in everyday life. If a child has a temperature, we know that sometimes we can calm him by smoothing his brow. When calm, his fever may diminish and he will be able to sleep, giving his body rest and the opportunity to combat illness.
What is this, after all, but the interaction between two people, a communication between caring adult and child or between healer and patient? Outside the family context, we all know of people who respond to one medical practitioner, having shown no improvement when treated by another with identical qualifications and even using the same treatment. 'Bedside manner', we call it; 'something to do with giving the patient psychological or emotional confidence', we may add.
But what is that 'something'? Is it some psychological approach on the part of the practitioner? Does it point to some psychological factor in the patient which needs attention before recovery can commence? Nobody knows exactly. But to the extent that it is possible to add an extra 'something', a multitude of those in the caring professions, be they doctors or nurses or any one of the many skilled therapists, are already practising healing. They are in fact using a gift as well as their knowledge, skill and patience and are opening themselves to respond to the patient's unspoken needs. This factor, which is currently played down, should surely be developed and used to the utmost of our capacity. We do not attach any but the vaguest labels to it at the moment and it deserves very serious consideration.
The Concept of Healing
I should say that the communication between healer and patient sets up an interplay of energy which accelerates the patient's own internal healing processes. This, amongst other things, enables him to respond more fully to orthodox treatment. From this it should be seen that while healing can and does achieve some astonishing results, it is not competing with orthodox medicine, nor seeking to supplant it. Surely it makes sense to use everything possible in the fight to restore and maintain individual health, and the many approaches should be complementary. I hope that healing will become one of the next in the long line of initially unacceptable practices which have subsequently been acknowledged and incorporated into orthodox medical practice. The list includes antiseptics, anaesthetics, orthopaedics and psychology.
Background
Before scientific medicine developed, healing in some form played a much larger role. Herbalism and other nature cures were important, but the power of healing on its own without recourse to other therapy has been known for thousands of years, and is still taken for granted in some societies (or the remnants of them) today. In the USA in 1981 I met a number of North American Indians and was introduced to some of their wise men. [1] None of them was at all surprised by my work.
The Tibetans who have left their homeland have brought with them enormous esoteric knowledge, including a great understanding of healing. One of their Supreme Abbots visited us in Scotland. I was earnestly trying to describe to him what we try to do in our Centre, but he cut me short with a gentle smile. 'We would regard what you are doing as orthodox medicine. Amongst Tibetans, it is your Western doctors who are regarded as unorthodox.' Explanations were unnecessary and we realised that he, of course, knew a great deal more about the subject than anyone in the West.
Healing was known to the Chinese as far back as 5000 BC and subsequently in virtually every culture. In Egypt, all cures were origin ally thought to be revealed by the gods and codified by Thoth, known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus. They were recorded in secret books for initiates kept in the medical schools associated with the temples of Sais at Heliopolis.
It seems that the earliest figure known for his healing powers is a man called Imhotep. He was court architect and court magician to King Zoser of the third Egyptian dynasty who lived about 2,700 BC. After his death he was deified and his tomb seems to have become the Lourdes of the ancient world. Numerous temples and shrines were erected to him and the sick were brought to them for healing. Imhotep was thought to inhabit the body of a snake, a symbol which has since recurred frequently in relation to healing, not least in the winged staff and serpent of the Western medical profession today.
The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus indicates that the Egyptians had considerable rational knowledge of medicine, but this was not divorced from religion, and various gods and goddesses such as Seklimet and Amenophis were considered to play an important part in sickness and cure. The cult of Imhotep seems to have been the most famous, however, as it spread via Persia to ancient Greece where the god was called Asklepios. The remains of healing temples and shrines dedicated to Asklepios can still be seen on the island of Epidaneos. The cult then spread to Rome in the third century BC where the god became known as Aesculapius.
Healing in the past was usually inextricably tied with religion, but then so was virtually every other aspect of life. All knowledge and learning was based in the temples, and the gods were considered to permeate and influence all the workings of man and his environment: the harvests, the rainfall, peace and war, sickness and health. All education, both what we would regard as secular as well as religious, was only available through the temples, and the wisdom acquired by the priests and priestesses and wise men and women (known in Egypt as the Scribes of the House of Life) [2] was of a high order, even if it was not recognised as independent of supernatural forces.
The wisdom and the power might be learned within the inner circle of a particular cult, but in many societies the initiates could then demonstrate very considerable powers to the rest of the population. Well known examples would include the yogis in India, the medicine man of North America and the Shamans in parts of Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
Religion and Science
It was the Greeks who laid the foundations of Western thought. From the concept of an integrated universe in which man, matter, mind and life forces, often identified as gods, were inextricably linked, a mechanistic, analytic viewpoint ultimately emerged which divided the world as man perceived it in separate unrelated compartments.
This led to the beginning of a scientific approach to medicine in the context of the belief that while the supernatural might perhaps interfere, the universe ran on mechanistic lines which man could ultimately master.
Western thought has developed from this point and it became axiomatic to despise most of the knowledge of the ancient cultures (or indeed the latter 'backward' societies) because of their underlying unscientific approach. It is worth commenting in passing that Western dependence on logic and science has led to a certain intellectual blindness. It has been able to dismiss all the old knowledge because of the 'superstitious' way in which it was expressed. Because Western thought could not appreciate the theory, it assumed the practice was beneath its notice. But the practice of engineering, for example, as shown by the cities of the Incas or the building of the pyramids should have given us a clue to the fact that however 'primitive' the beliefs, the knowledge, in practice, was exceedingly impressive. If, selectively, we have to accept some of the knowledge because of the remaining concrete proof, can we uncompromisingly dismiss the rest?
Over the last two thousand years the Western approach to medicine and healing has been moulded by two factors. One is the slow but accelerating development of science. The other is religion. Whatever the current state of religious belief, the Western world is firmly founded on the profound influence of Christianity or perhaps more accurately, on the influence of the Church. The two have not always been easy bedfellows and have at times led to double intellectual standards. I came across this for the first time in 1943. I had no intention of becoming a healer but having discovered while fighting in France three years earlier that I seemed to be able to help my wounded companions, I had no good reason to withhold any help I could give thereafter. During the North African Campaign, however, I ran into an officer who regarded my spare time activities with horror. I was used to friendly, tolerant disbelief and the argument that every intelligent, educated man must know perfectly well that what it was claimed I could do was nonsense. It was unscientific. It was impossible. But this was the first time I met the reaction that if lay healing was possible, then it shouldn't be allowed. A cleric who had bravely given up his cloth to join the army, this particular officer was convinced that only an ordained priest could invoke the power of God for healing. Anyone else, if they were not charlatans or deluded, must be in league with the Devil. I have our regimental chaplain to thank for getting me out of what promised to be a full scale row. He had known my grand father who was Bishop of Clogher and apparently persuaded my superiors that MacManaways were strange but harmless.
The 'doublethink' that lay healing can't happen but if it does, it shouldn't, has a long history.
Teachings of Jesus and the Early Church
Jesus of Nazareth was born in a country where, and at a time when, a number of cultural influences intermingled. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian and even Indian ideas were all in evidence and healers were not unknown. It is not denying His Divinity to say that He was a superb, perhaps unique exponent of the gift or power of healing, but He did not present something intrinsically new.
Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that healing not unlike that practised by Jesus was being taught before He was born. The sect who left us the Dead Sea Scrolls may have been Essenes who, according to the Roman historian Flavius Josephus (first century AD), undoubtedly practised various forms of healing. [3] Some authorities in fact argue that Mary and Joseph were Essenes and that Jesus received his early education in the temples of the Therapeutae, the Egyptian counterparts of the Essenes, in the years after fleeing from Herod. [4]
Jesus is emphasised as not only the Son of God but also the Son of Man. He instructed His followers (and here let us remember that He was not addressing scholars or doctors or priests but ordinary men and women) to go and put into practice what He had shown them. He emphasised that His followers had the potential to achieve even greater things than He, so presumably considered that man could, amongst other things, heal (St John 14:12). As a great spiritual teacher, He also emphasised that man must use this potential with care and follow His spiritual path.
St Luke, of course, could hardly be described as a layman as he is thought to have been a qualified physician. Tradition has it that he was also a healer, probably trained at a temple of Asklepios in Greece. He therefore represents to me the best of both worlds, having a developed gift of healing and medical training. I count myself extremely lucky to have known and worked with a number of gifted doctors who are overtly reviving this tradition of combining healing and medicine and! greatly hope that it will spread once more.
During the first and second centuries, the early Church endeavoured to carry out Jesus' teaching. There is considerable academic argument as to whether the early Church was ever purely a gathering of exponents of the Spirit or whether it had in it from the start the makings of an organisation. [5] It is beyond doubt, however, that at least during the lives of the Apostles what we would now call the charismatic gifts (healing, the gift of prophecy and speaking with tongues being the most obvious) were practised by men, and in many cases women, at the early services. These services were informal, held in private house holds and bore more of a resemblance to a Quaker meeting where anyone is free to express himself as the Spirit moves him (or her) than to a modern church service. [6] The Church in Corinth which was under the influence of St Paul was particularly famed for this and indeed St Paul wrote a wonderful essay on these gifts (the 'gifts of the Spirit') in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapters twelve to fourteen.
Broadly speaking, however, it would seem that from the earliest stages, there were two groups who might have some claim to authority over the Church members. One group included the healers and prophets who by their gifts demonstrated their contact with the Spirit. The other group was officialdom, the bishops and priests. That the priests found their authority threatened by the healers and prophets is obvious from the various documents in which the Christians were exhorted to show respect and duty to the Bishops. The Didache, [7] which probably dates from the middle of the second century, admonishes its readers: 'Therefore despise (the bishops and deacons) not, for these are they which are honoured of you with the prophets and healers.' Surrounded as they were by internal and external threats (persecution, schism and alternative cults such as neo-Platonism, Manicheism and the Mystery Cults), the early Church authorities were in something of a quandary. They did not wish to stop the activities of the healers (or at least they did not wish to be seen to be doing so) but they wanted unity and order. The crunch came over a group of churches in Phrygia in Asia Minor where Montanus and his followers, and in particular two very gifted women, were gaining a dangerous amount of influence by their prophesying and healing. According to the historian Tertullian, a priest called Praxeus [8] was largely responsible for persuading the Bishop of Rome to excommunicate the affected churches and brand their members as heretics.
From the point of view of lay healers, this decision was, to say the least, discouraging. They could either keep quiet and stay within the organisation of the faith they passionately believed in, or continue their practises and risk being thrown out in the cold. Ultimately, there was an effective if unspoken ban on lay healers. The ordained priests, while usually good and holy men, were more concerned with theology and with administration than healing.
With Constantine's conversion and the gradual adoption of Christianity as the predominant state religion, what had previously been a Church ban acquired all the penalties of secular law and for a layman to practise any of the gifts of the Spirit became a very risky business. The practising of the gifts within the auspices of the Church was allowed and the Church has had its 'saints'. Even they, however, were and are grilled pretty thoroughly before gaining acceptance. Anyone outside the Church's control ran the risk of the accusation of heresy or witchcraft with the concomitant danger of death. Until as late as 1951, I and others like me ran the theoretical risk of arrest under the Witchcraft Act which carried the death penalty, even if it had not been used for some time. By claiming a monopoly of the gifts of the Spirit, the Church has alternately brainwashed and bullied the population into thinking that any person trying to heal without the proper qualifications must be in league with the Devil. I maintain that this is not in accordance with the teachings of Christ himself, who lived and taught amongst laymen. It is not surprising, however, that healing went underground.
The Age of 'Enlightenment'
Leaving aside the religious connotations for the moment and regarding healing as an observed phenomenon practised in other civilisations before and after Christ, its suppression was completed by the tremendous intellectual progress of the West, culminating in the view that anything inexplicable by intellectual means could not exist. Luckily, a little of the knowledge was maintained underground. Rather like the bumble-bee which continues to fly despite the fact that its flight is considered to be aerodynamically impossible, those unimpressed by current logical conclusions continued to practise what to their satisfaction, demonstrably worked.
Current Intellectual Attitudes
In the light of recent progress, there is a need to reassess our understanding of the universe and our relationship with it. Our contempt for the ancient – and in fact still current – esoteric knowledge was that it was at best mystical and at worst superstitious and as such was unscientific and bore no relationship to reality. 'Reality' was based on an objective, scientific analysis of matter. Matter was solid, matter was concrete, matter was made up of 'building blocks' subject to comprehensible laws of cause and effect. Mind was totally separate and could have no 'real' effect on the mechanics of matter. In the context of human health, demonstrable disease was purely a mechanistic problem. The matter which makes up the human body was decaying or malfunctioning and the only way to combat this was to tinker with the mechanism, adding something here or subtracting something there. But, apparently, matter is not nearly so uncomplicated as we thought it was. According to modern physicists, it is not concrete at all, as even the atom is not a satisfactory 'basic building block'. Apparently, especially in 'quantum-relativistic' models of the subatomic world, totally objective study is impossible as any experiment inevitably includes the observer in an essential way [9]
I am no scientist, but it would seem to me that this means we can no longer regard 'matter' (which includes our own bodies) as something 'outside' and objective, divorced from mind. Perhaps disease is not such a simple mechanistic problem after all. Perhaps, at least in concept, the idea of healing is not totally outrageous. Perhaps the old (and current Eastern) concepts of a dynamic, inseparable universe were not far from the truth, even though they had no scientific basis.
In this new, humbler spirit of enquiry, some scientists have started to look around for some observed phenomena that they can measure which might be related to and cast light on the preposterous but tenacious claims for healing. Healing, as it needs no 'matter' to be supposedly efficacious, seems to depend on mind, so the obvious place to start was with the electrical patterns of the brain. It has been discovered that certain distinctive and unusual brain wave patterns are found in most supposedly effective healers, regardless of what they believe.
In the past, abilities such as healing had been associated with some form of religious or spiritual training, so the researchers studied some Eastern Holy men as well as healers in the West. They found that the various Holy men showed patterns similar to those of the healers, though in many cases the patterns were of even greater strength [10]. This research merits more discussion but for the moment it seems to me that it highlights two points. If people with a wide variety of beliefs or with no belief at all and united only in their purported abilities show a similar unusual brain wave pattern, it is probable that it is state of mind rather than belief that is important – though it may be that a strong religious belief is one of the variables affecting states of mind.
Secondly, religion and science may not be quite so far apart after all – or at least a bridge may be formed between the two if it can be shown that various religions and spiritual disciplines achieve special measurable states of mind that in turn can be associated with physiological changes. 'Religion', in its widest sense, may have known a thing or two, even if it was wrapped up in mystical language.
I will refer to further scientific research later but, while it is comforting that some scientific rationale is being built up, it is not my only concern. This book merely attempts to put forward some facts and some theories about what works, and as science is confirming, does so regardless of belief.
To state outright at this point that healing is natural rather than supernatural and works regardless of belief is likely to offend those who think of it as a God-given gift. I would say that the two attitudes are not mutually exclusive. Firstly, the fact that healing was known and practised before the birth of Jesus and later in ignorance of His teaching, gives more rather than less validity to Jesus' message. There is after all considerable point to Kipling's question, 'What should they know of England who only England know?'
Secondly, just because we find some rationale behind an observed phenomenon is not to say that the phenomenon is not God-given. Playing the violin, for example, is considered a natural talent, though undoubtedly some people play it better than others. The gift for playing the violin may come from God, but it is not a supernatural activity. The virtuoso may or may not believe in God, but he plays superbly anyway, and God does not appear to be small-minded enough to take away his ability to transport listeners to the heights because His part has not been given full credit.
So while the spiritual, God-given aspect of the healing gift is to me very important, healing can nevertheless be viewed on its own as a natural phenomenon.
Notes
1. See, for example, Storm, Hyemeyohsts. Seven Arrows. Ballantine Books U.S.A., 1972.
2. Sauneron, Serge. The Priests of Ancient Egypt. Evergreen Books, London; Grove Press, New York.
3. Allegro, John. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a Reappraisal. Penguin Books, 1964.
4. Hiebel, Frederick. Treasures of Biblical Research and the Conscience of the Times. Anthroposophical Press, 1970. Steiner, Rudolf. Fifth Gospel. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968.
Gospel of Matthew.
Christianity as Mystical Fact.
Cayce, Edgar. Early Christian Epoch, Vol. 6.
Szekely, Edmund Bordeaux. The Discovery of the Essene Gospel of Peace.
The Essene Jesus.
The Gospel of the Essenes.
5. W and, J. W. C. A History of the Early Church to AD 500. Methuen, 1975; University Paperback, 1977.
6. Tertullian. 'On the Soul' ('De Anima'), quoted in A New Eusebius, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to AD 337. SPCK, 1957. (It is disputed whether this document describes a Catholic or Montanist service.)
7. Quoted in A New Eusebius.
8. Tertullian. 'Against Praxeus' ('Adversus Praxean'), quoted in A New Eusebius.
9. Capra, Frithjof. The Tao of Physics. Fontana, 1976.
For a thoroughly readable summary of what he calls 'the perversity of physics' see also: Koestler, Arthur. The Roots of Coincidence. Pan Books, 1976.
10. Cade, C. Maxwell and Coxhead, Nona. The Awakened Mind. Wildwood House, London, 1980.
HealingA straightforward look into
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© Bruce MacManaway, 1983. This book may be quoted from and printed out in single copies only for personal use and study, without permission.
For publication on websites or for printing in larger quantities or for commercial gain please e-mail Patrick MacManaway for permission.