Intense love does not measure; it just gives.
—Mother Teresa
You will recall that Dr. Hall believes that spirits may have played a critical role in his ability to push an ice pick through his cheek in such a way that he could (1) experience virtually no pain, (2) have minimal bleeding, and (3) manifest almost immediate wound healing. A research medium and a PhD psychologist both claimed that they saw a collection of spirits present during our exploratory investigation with Dr. Hall.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, it is scientifically responsible to consider first various horse-like explanations—such as fraud, misperceptions, and placebo or mind-body effects—before entertaining zebra-like explanations—such as genuine assistance from deceased physicians, angels, and ultimately, the Sacred.
However, a challenging question arises: is it possible to scientifically document whether Spirit was actually present in a given healing session? If we cannot address this fundamental question, it makes little sense to attempt to address the question of whether Spirit can play a guiding, if not mediating, role in the healing process. This chapter and the next present findings from two novel and exploratory proof-of-concept personal investigations conducted in my private life—and replicable in laboratory research—that addresses the question: can we document the presence of spirits in healing sessions?
Though both real-life investigations seemed to have occurred fortuitously and serendipitously, the healers and mediums involved claimed that a collection of spirits was intimately involved in orchestrating the opportunity for these most surprising discoveries. Moreover, the healers and mediums claimed that the effects we were documenting were actually about the giving of love.
A Healer’s Claim of Spirit Assistance from a Deceased Physician
Shortly after my millennium resolution, I met an energy healer with a PhD in psychology who claimed enthusiastically that his grandmother, a deceased physician, often helped him in his healings. To retain their anonymity, I will call the healer Dr. Michaels and his grandmother Dr. Jones (a few other minor details are also disguised).
Dr. Michaels claimed that sometimes Dr. Jones showed him where to place his hands, and at other times she literally entered Dr. Michaels body and guided his hands.
Dr. Michaels loved his grandmother and deeply admired her. Though Dr. Jones was a Western-trained physician, she was a deeply spiritual person. Many of his grandmother’s former patients were convinced that Dr. Jones’s healings involved more than the medicines she prescribed and the caring treatment she provided. She apparently prayed for her patients and asked for Spirit’s assistance in her patients’ recoveries.
Dr. Michaels consistently found through clinical experience that if he called on his grandmother’s help—in either his healings or his personal life—she would always assist him.
I asked Dr. Michaels how he knew that his grandmother was present. He said that he would sometimes see her at the foot of the massage table or would hear her, and at other times just feel her presence. Dr. Michaels said that some of his patients would report seeing a female spirit in the room, too.
Dr. Michaels claimed that he typically experienced his hands warming up and even becoming hot when Dr. Jones was ready to work with him. Sometimes his hands would get hot early in the session, just as he was beginning his energy diagnosis period, and at other times he would experience his hands getting hot later in the session, shortly before he was to begin his energy healing period. This particular claim caught my attention because I realized it was a procedure that could be potentially manipulated and measured.
My “disease called science” automatically kicked in: Dr. Michaels’s belief—"I sometimes experience my hands getting hot early versus later in the session, when Dr. Jones shows up"—was transformed into the question: Do Dr. Michaels’s hands get hot early versus later in the session depending on when Dr. Jones shows up?
This then led to a hypothesis with a prediction: If Dr. Jones shows up early in a session, Dr. Michaels’s hands will get hot early in the session; if Dr. Jones shows up later in the session, Dr. Michaels’s hands will get hot later in the session. I now thought about how we could test the hypothesis experimentally, the scientific term operationalize.
One approach was the possibility that a highly accurate research medium could communicate with Dr. Jones and might be able to work with her over multiple sessions to determine whether she would show up early or late for a given session with Dr. Michaels.
To understand my reasoning, it is helpful for us to recall how after their passing, some deceased people appear to sustain ongoing relationships with their loved ones as well as establish new relationships with people, in both the physical and the spiritual.
For example, in chapter 5 the deceased Susy Smith, besides assisting me in my research, appears to have developed a long-standing and successful relationship with a medium, Joan. We have observed on numerous occasions evidence that Spirit can show up in formal laboratory experiments or people’s cars on its own accord. You will recall how Susy Smith apparently showed up in Joan’s car, unannounced, and brought along a second, unknown deceased woman, who was later identified.
As it so happened, a medium I will call here Philip had previously done readings with Dr. Michaels and was able to obtain accurate information concerning Dr. Jones. Philip and Dr. Michaels lived in different states, so the readings had been conducted long distance over the phone.
I reasoned: what if prior to a given healing session, Philip could contact Dr. Jones, and together they would decide whether she would show up early or late in the session? Philip would keep a secret log of his communications with Dr. Jones and their decisions about the timing of his visits. Could Dr. Michaels, who would not know when Dr. Jones was scheduled to show up in the next healing session, remember when his hands got hot in the session and record it for subsequent analysis?
If positive results could be obtained in this proof-of-concept private investigation, sophisticated university experiments could be conducted in the future. One of my dream experiments would be to use a state-of-the-art thermographic (infrared) video camera to track the ebb and flow of a healer’s hand temperatures during healing sessions. The great advantage of this kind of camera is that it accurately records moment-to-moment changes in temperatures from a distance of at least a few feet; hence, it would not physically interfere with a healer’s spontaneous movements or with the temperature sensors attached to the healer’s hands.
I further reasoned that (1) if we could perform the pair of events ten times—with Philip and Dr. Jones secretly determining when she would show up in a particular session, and Dr. Michaels then recording when in the given session his hands got hot—and (2) if the results were as replicable as Philip and Dr. Michaels each believed they would be, then ten independent trials would be sufficient to obtain a statistically significant result.
To ensure that the procedures were followed appropriately, I served as the middleman—in other words, I played the role of research assistant. I would contact Philip and ask him to have a secret session with Dr. Jones. I would wait for Philip to call me back to confirm that it had been successful and he had logged when Dr. Jones was to show up. I was kept blind to this information.
I would then contact Dr. Michaels and request that he record when Dr. Jones showed up in his next healing session. Taking into account everyone’s busy schedule—and that this private exploratory examination was included as part of Philip’s normal clinical work—it took about ten weeks to complete the ten trials.
I did not request that Philip and Dr. Michaels give me copies of their home and office long-distance calling records. I figured that if they were in collusion and wished to fool me, they could easily use other phones, or even email, to keep their cheating secret. However, because I knew both of these individuals reasonably well, I anticipated that their motivation was genuine. Though I would not accept positive results from them as 100 percent legitimate, I had good reason to give them the benefit of the doubt and treat the findings and the experimental design as deserving of further investigation.
The results turned out to be easy to score and analyze. According to Philip, on five of the ten sessions, Dr. Jones said that she would show up early, in the beginning of the respective healing sessions; on the five remaining sessions, Dr. Jones indicated she would show up later. As far as I could tell statistically, the order of early or late for any given session was completely random, like a coin flip.
When I compared Philip’s log of the order of Dr. Jones’s early and later appearances with Dr. Michaels’s log of when his hands got hot in each of the healing sessions, the match between them was 100 percent. The evidence not only supported Dr. Michaels experience, but it did so perfectly.
The observation of a seemingly perfect score should be tempered by the fact that they performed the tests only ten times over a ten-week period. For all we know, Dr. Michaels could have reported different times on the eleventh and on subsequent tests as well. The probability of getting ten out of ten heads by chance alone is small—one out of 1,024, or approximately 0.1 percent. However, it is not tiny, say one out of 1,000,000,024. Therefore, we should not overly interpret the “perfect” score in this experiment.
Does this kind of investigation “prove” that Dr. Jones was actually present? Though this experimental design is clearly novel and highly suggestive, it is not definitive.
Even if we conducted a formal university-based experiment and successfully replicated the basic findings many times using different mediums, healers, and deceased spirits; objective biophysical measures, such as supersensitive thermographic cameras; and convincingly ruling out any reasonable possibility of fraud, the findings would not justify the definitive conclusion that Dr. Jones, or any spirit, deceased or otherwise, had shown up. Other possible psychic hypotheses can be envisioned.
One hypothesis is that Dr. Michaels somehow read Philip’s mind, and Michaels’s hands warmed up because he psychically expected Dr. Jones to show up in a given session early versus late. We would have to conduct future experiments to determine if healers like Dr. Michaels could read a medium’s mind, and if the healer’s hands would warm up when he thought the spirits might show up versus when the medium’s log said they would.
A related hypothesis is that Dr. Michaels somehow used remote viewing and read what Philip had written in his log. We would have to perform future experiments to determine if healers like Dr. Michaels could read secret handwritten logs. However, future experiments have the potential to be even more innovative and convincing. For example, a medium like Philip could contact a deceased physician like Dr. Jones and instead of deciding when she would show up, they could decide if she would show up for a given session.
Science progresses step by step, result by result, investigation by investigation, experiment by experiment. Depending upon specific combinations of positive and negative findings that emerge over experiments, specific hypotheses can be confirmed or disconfirmed, ruled in or ruled out. If I were viewing the Dr. Michaels-Philip exploratory investigation in isolation, I would be inclined to predict that the superpsi hypotheses of possible mind reading or remote viewing were more probable than the presence-of-Spirit hypothesis.
If instead I consider all the information revealed in part II of this book and therefore view the Dr. Michaels-Philip investigation in this larger context, it becomes reasonable to consider the serious possibility that the presence-of-Spirit hypothesis is more probable then either minding reading or remote viewing.
The fact is that if we can see the big picture and hold the whole set of evidence in our minds, we will be able to draw a comprehensive and fair conclusion about the two core questions: are spirits real, and can they play a guiding role in our personal and collective lives?
Meanwhile, once again, I invite you to do a thought experiment.
This time, try to imagine what it might feel like to be in Dr. Michaels’s shoes. Try to envision not only what it would be like to experience the apparent presence of your beloved physician grandmother when doing healing work but then to courageously participate in a private exploratory investigation to test the validity of your belief that your grandmother was still with you.
How would you feel waiting to see if the investigation had been a failure or was merely suggestive of your hypothesis, and then you were told that the results could not have been more positive? (It is difficult to score higher than 100 percent.)
And if you are game, you might try to imagine what it was like being in my shoes: (1) Have the superweird personal experience of inviting Spirit to help you for the very first time and feeling your back pain quickly and dramatically be reduced, only to have it return in spades immediately following your asking the question, “Was this a placebo effect?” and hearing “We will take our support away.” (2) Later, while conducting a novel private investigation, see highly positive evidence appear that pointed clearly to the conclusion that a deceased physician could show up regularly at healing sessions.
I find it helpful to remember Dr. McCulloch’s wise statement that introduces this book: “Don’t bite my finger, look where I’m pointing.” Though the nature of this proof-of-concept exploration is often confusing and mind-boggling, and occasionally frightening, it is more often than not great fun and even exhilarating.
Meanwhile, I increasingly come in contact with gifted healers who recount amazing stories about how their healings are regularly aided by the assistance of deceased healthcare professionals, spirit guides and angels, and the Sacred itself.