INTRODUCTION

Can Spirit Assist Us with Our Daily Problems?

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.

—John Dewey

In ancient times, people across the globe not only assumed that Spirit existed, but they fervently believed that their ancestors continued to play a central role in their personal lives and the life of the community. People were encouraged to connect with not only their deceased ancestors and the Great Spirit but also the living Spirit of the earth, animals, plants, and even the stars.

However, humanity gradually shifted from encouraging people to have direct connections with Spirit to sanctioning indirect contacts with a higher spiritual reality via rabbis or priests or other human leaders. In the process, daily spiritual contact was transformed into a practice primarily reserved for temple or church worship and even restricted to weekends.

Today, along with the increased separation of church and state, the idea of connecting directly with Spirit is viewed more as a myth or superstition, or an expression of the misguided experiences of New Age flakes.

I was raised in an agnostic home and was educated in the highly atheistic environment of mainstream Western science. If anyone was encouraged to dismiss the existence of Spirit and its potentially helpful role in human life, it was me. And yet, as I witnessed the extension of human life by the conquest of bacteria, I’ve also seen chronic lifestyle diseases like arteriosclerosis and diabetes replacing those infections. I began to wonder if our disconnection from Spirit was associated with the chronic emotional and spiritual problems plaguing humankind today.

For instance, one of the greatest public health crises facing humanity, especially people in the West, is excessive weight and obesity. There are numerous apparent reasons for this condition:

1. The easy availability of tasty, high-fat, and high-caloric foods and beverages

2. The massive advertising of fast food restaurants

3. The relative lack of exercise fostered by watching television, surfing the net, and playing extraordinarily realistic computer games

4. The stress and accompanying depression that we experience living in times of serious economic and environmental uncertainty

However, what if all of these causes, as great as they seem, are actually symptoms of an even greater, more fundamental and pervasive cause: our societal separation from Spirit?

What if our increasing feelings of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness are fostered by our belief in a Spirit-less Universe?

What if our physical hunger is actually a symptom of far greater spiritual hunger?

What if Spirit is actually all around us, ready to fill us with energy, hope, and direction if we are ready to cooperate with it?

What if Spiritual Energy is like air and water, readily available for us to draw within if we choose to seek it?

As a prelude to exploring how science is discovering not only that Spirit exists but also that Spirit can collaborate with us in our daily lives, let us consider a real-life situation in which Spirit appears to have played a surprising collaborative role. And as you read this story, I ask that you recall a similar crisis in your own life, or imagine what may have happened to you if you were aware of this resource.

What I find most curious about this story is that it happened to me: a scientist who is open to but also skeptical of such occurrences. Though a definitive scientific explanation for its effect awaits future research, I can attest to the fact that what you are about to read is not misperception or deception.

If we are open to the existence of Spirit and invite its active collaboration, can it actually help us with our daily problems? Since this is the theme of The Sacred Promise, I have decided to present this self-science story upfront, without a net, so to speak, or before I’ve laid the foundation for my case of Spirit’s involvement in our personal lives. I would ask the reader to respond with your heart; the rest of the book will present the case for your head.

A Spirit-Assisted Dental Healing

It was October 2008. I had completed most of the research reported in this book. I knew that contemporary science was not only verifying the reality of Spirit but it was also discovering that Spirit could potentially play a powerful role in our personal lives. And for a three-month period, I had been suffering from an increasingly severe gum infection, particularly involving two teeth in the upper right back of my mouth.

In the mid-1980s, an oral surgeon removed a large molar from my mouth. I was told that because the resulting hole was so large—it felt like a cavern to me—I could expect the adjacent two teeth to weaken and fall out within a few years.

Despite his prediction, twenty-five years later I still had those two teeth. However, in the late summer of 2008, the gums around those teeth had become seriously inflamed. The teeth had also become supersensitive to cold and hot substances. I could not put any pressure on them without experiencing severe pain.

Months earlier, my dentist told me that I needed to see a periodontist ASAP to avoid infection and that I would probably lose those teeth. I had intuitively felt that I should not seek further dental evaluations and invasive interventions at that time, and later it looked like this decision had been a mistake. (Please note: I am not recommending that anyone avoid obtaining responsible medical or dental advice, nor am I proposing that spirit-assisted healing should be a replacement for conventional medical or dental care.)

It had reached the point where I could drink only lukewarm liquids, and I was restricted to chewing entirely on my left side. Though I had been trained in various energy healing techniques while doing research for an earlier book, and had even begun giving a weekly workshop at Canyon Ranch on basic energy self-care techniques, I had not thought to try either energy healing or spirit-assisted healing on myself.

One night, as my mouth was throbbing and I was musing about all these implications, a novel thought popped into my head. I realized that although we were surrounded by all this air, it was up to us to breathe more deeply if we were to optimize its vitalizing and health effects, and that the same applied to water and that it was up to us to drink more to optimize its vitalizing effects. I wondered if the same applied to all this Spirit or Spiritual Energy around us, and that it was up to us to choose to use its vitalizing health effects.

Simply stated, I realized that Spirit might be like air and water. We can’t live without these substances. We typically partake of them unconsciously and naturally. Yet, if we choose, we can learn to more effectively and mindfully partake of them for the sake of our vitality and health.

I wondered what would happen if I asked my purported Spirit helpers—including deceased people and angels—to assist me with my teeth and gum infection. In the same way that we must regularly breathe in air as well as ingest water every day, I wondered whether we needed to create a daily practice of inviting Spirit to assist us. And moreover, I wondered whether we should be mindful when we invite spirits to assist us, and intentionally and consciously collaborate with them.

I wondered if they worked with me in a Sacred Partnership on my teeth and gums, might we achieve a significant positive result together? Of course this was not a formal laboratory experiment; it was a personal exploration—an informal or anecdotal case study.

I was not attempting to confirm, for example, with the aid of a credible and experienced research medium, whether Spirit was showing up when I invited them to help me heal my gums, and I was not being monitored by biomedical equipment. What I was doing was lying in bed late at night, silently attempting to try something I had never done.

I then said to myself something that I hoped I would not regret; I made a specific promise to the Universe. I said that if my teeth and gums showed a rapid, dramatic, and permanent healing—even if they required my daily mindful attention (just as breathing extra air and drinking enough water does), as well as the daily invitation for assistance of Spirit—I would take this healing very seriously. I would not only respect and honor it; I would make sure that others might benefit from it as well.

To my utter amazement, over the course of the next few days, my inflamed gums returned to a healthier state. My gums stopped bleeding when I brushed them, and they were minimally sensitive to touch. The persistent heat and cold sensitivity, as well as the pain, which had been present for months, decreased dramatically.

I then extended the spirit-assisted dental practice and healing to the whole of my mouth. At the time I edited this chapter, in August 2010, my entire mouth was in the best shape it had been in for more than four years. I did not have the courage to return to my dentist and try to explain what may have occurred. Though he seemed like an open-minded healthcare provider, the idea of spirit-assisted dental healing might be too much for him to swallow.

Of course, we could speculate that my teeth and gums might have healed on their own, without any assistance from them or me. It’s called spontaneous remission. However, this was not my dentist’s prognosis based on more than twenty years of clinical practice. His prediction was that my gums and teeth would get worse, not better.

We could also speculate that the healing was entirely the result of a mind-body effect. Maybe because I believed that my dental problems would be healed, my teeth and gums followed my expectations—the placebo effect. Maybe no Spirit was involved.

However, the truth is that I did not know if my teeth and gums would heal. I had never read or heard of cases using one’s mind to treat severe gum and tooth disease. Such cases may exist, but I did not know of them. For me, this was a personal experiment in the sense that my attitude was, “I don’t know. Could be yes, could be no; show me the data, I’m open.” This is the essence of a proof-of-concept experiment: ascertaining that an effect happened and that research is needed to determine its true cause.

And of course, I do not know what will happen to my gums and teeth in the future. All I know is what has transpired over the past two years. My repeated experience has been that when I remember to invite Spirit to assist with my teeth, just as if I remember to take deep breaths or drink more water, my health increases accordingly.

By itself, my positive dental healing experience means nothing scientifically—though my mouth is very happy, regardless of the actual mechanisms involved. However, in light of the many controlled research experiments as well as exploratory observations you will read in this book, my positive dental healing is potentially noteworthy. It illustrates the possibility that Spirit assistance may play a meaningful role in dental as well as general healthcare.

Of course, only you live in your body and me in mine. Only you can make the choice of breathing more deeply, drinking more water, eating less food, drinking less alcohol, and inviting Spirit to be an integral part of your life. The same applies to me.

It is not enough simply to go to a house of worship, pray for help, and then assume that all will be handled. Being religious per se does not guarantee that we will be healthy or happy. What I am speaking of here is a sacred partnership, a true collaboration between Spirit and us. It is not an “either/or” relationship; it is an “and” relationship, an active partnership.

Many of us, consciously or unconsciously, assume there is no Spirit to assist us in our lives. Because of this self-imposed spiritual void, we may be prone to overeat, drink alcohol, and take more pharmaceutical drugs as a consequence.

But what if we are wrong? Then we are making a serious mistake.

If we live in a Spirit-full Universe instead of a Spiritless Universe, and if many of our greatest problems directly or indirectly stem from our false belief in a Spirit-less Universe, then it seems high time that we reexamine our potentially erroneous belief and do the necessary science to get a clear answer, one way or the other.

What do you think? Can you imagine asking Spirit to assist you with your health or economic crisis right now, or to heal the break with your mother, or to protect your child in the military? Think about it. Just asking may not be enough; you may have to believe and be open to it, and for most of us that means “show me,” which is why I’m writing this book.

As you take this journey of professional and personal scientific discovery with me, you may find that your thinking about this sacred partnership will be as radically and permanently transformed by the emerging evidence as mine was.

The journey awaits you.