A HEALER’S SPIRITUAL LESSON ABOUT
THE ILLUSION OF ILLNESS
January 31, 1904
I used to heal with a word; I have seen a man yellow because
of disease, and the next moment I looked at him and his color
was right; was healed. I knew no more how to it was done
than a baby; only it was done every time. I never failed; almost
in one treatment; never more than three.
—Mary Baker Eddy, from Notes
on the Course in Divinity
If there is one lesson I have learned in life, it is to always be prepared for surprises.
Curiously, despite having taken this simple lesson to heart, I have nonetheless from time to time been unprepared for the degree of novelty and mystery expressed in the seemingly impossible surprises that have jolted my life. Or were they Spirit’s designs?
The inspiration for writing The Sacred Promise came to me while I was suffering from what might best be described as a case of the superflu. The illness came on quite suddenly, seemingly with no warning, and it quickly incapacitated me. I ended up lying in bed with a fever for six days, followed by another five days of fatigue accompanied by chronic spasmodic coughing.
A week prior to the flu’s onset, I had traveled from Tucson to Toronto to give a keynote address on The Energy Healing Experiments to an energy psychology conference. While I was there, a series of twenty-four synchronicities involving tigers—yes, the large cats—began, which continued upon my return to Tucson. Let me add here that the phenomenon of synchronicity was, if not discovered, at least scientifically formulated by Dr. Carl Jung, the founder of Jungian psychology and Jungian psychotherapy. A common example of a synchronicity is that you spontaneously think about someone you have not heard from in a while, and then within hours or days, seemingly out of the blue, that person calls you.
Briefly, synchronicities refer to the occurrence of two or more events that happen in close proximity to each other. The co-occurrence of the events is typically highly improbable—meaning that the probability of their occurring, in sequence by chance alone, is very small if not minuscule. The co-occurrence of the events cannot be explained as one event causing another event—Jung called the connection acausal. To explain the nonrandom nature of the co-occurrences, one must hypothesize the existence of some sort of invisible influences or energies, or thread. The co-occurrences often occur at meaningful times in one’s life, whereas the actual meaning of the co-occurrences is typically more like dream symbology.
I have been a synchronicity watcher for more than twenty years. I shared my first convincing synchronicity experience, which happened when I was a professor at Yale, in my book The G.O.D. Experiments. The chapter was originally intended to be placed within the body of the book, but both my editor and writing partner felt it was too controversial—too “weird"—to be included in the book. (We placed it in the appendices.) However, the fact was that the unique co-occurrences that took place provided compelling evidence for the existence of some sort of Guiding-Organizing-Designing—the G.O.D. the book title referred to—process in the universe as expressed in our personal lives.
By the time I sat down to write the chapter you are reading, I had collected more than one hundred fifty sets of superimprobable co-occurrences of events. I now have come to the conclusion that the tiger synchronicities reported here and the context in which they occurred were showing my wife Rhonda and me that at times, if not in all cases, Spirit can use synchronicities to show the concurrence of its world and ours.
It is not essential for us to review the Toronto Tiger series here. What is important to realize is that as fate would have it, when the flu symptoms began, a set of compelling synchronicities occurred. I note and describe them because they help set the stage for understanding how their convergence was a prelude to the spiritual healings that I experienced. They led me to reexamine my understanding of the synergistic role of Spirit in healings as well as the role that synchronicities serve in revealing the presence of Spirit, acting like a calling card.
There was a set of three spiritual healings that were offered to me, without my awareness, during the course of my illness. The healings were secret in that I was not told that I would be receiving them, and when they occurred I did not know they were being provided.
In each case, the healing treatment was immediately accompanied by a dramatic reduction in my symptoms. Of course, their concurrence with a significant reduction in symptoms might be a coincidence. In other words, the appearance of one, or even two, spiritual healings with symptom reductions might have occurred simply by chance. However, when this happened not once or twice, but three times, the concurrence of a secret healing with symptomatic reduction became sufficiently interesting enough to deserve serious consideration.
This was obviously not a university laboratory experiment. I was sick and I happened to receive a total of three secret healings. Because I practice the philosophy of science in my private life, I was able to witness this demonstration of apparent spirit-assisted healing in the laboratory of my personal life. While such examples may seem subjective and anecdotal, they do fall within the parameters of proof-of-concept observations and experimentations as we explore the paradigm of spirit-assisted healings.
To ensure that we focus our attention on the three healing events or effects—and not the tiger synchronicities (which happen to be quite amusing)—I will begin by describing the first healing treatment that occurred after suffering six days of fever. I will then reveal the unfolding of the synchronicities, and explain how they set the stage for the second and third secret healing events. Since they began when my symptoms were just starting, the discussion will necessarily backtrack a bit as we review the first few days of my illness.
Spiritual Healing #1: Secret Treatment and My Fever Breaking
For six consecutive days and nights my temperature fluctuated between 99 and 101 degrees. I took my temperature with a state-of-the-art digital thermometer that displays temperature in tenths of a degree. During this period, I stayed in the bedroom. At night I would close the door. Rhonda graciously and wisely agreed to sleep in a separate room.
It was about midnight on Wednesday, November 12, 2008. At this point I was monitoring my temperature approximately every hour. I began to notice that I was feeling a little better, and at about 1 AM I noted that my temperature had dropped below 98 degrees. I continued to check it every hour, since I was constantly woken up by coughing fits. To my amazement, my temperature ranged between 97 and 98 degrees, never increasing to 99. For some reason, seemingly out of the blue, my temperature had finally broken.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Rhonda woke up around midnight, hearing a voice in her head saying that she needed to do some healing for me. Rhonda had been raised in a Lutheran and Christian Science home, and was trained in the practice of spiritual healing as a child. Though the scope of her adult knowledge and interests extends substantially beyond conventional Christianity and Christian Science—she has formal training in Reconnective Healing as well—she fervently believes in the fundamental premise that everything ultimately is an expression of Divine Mind, whose existence is perfection, and that the human mind can raise itself and be in harmony with the Universal Mind. This core premise is by no means unique to conventional Christianity and Christian Science; it is fundamental to many energy and spiritual healing traditions around the globe, including mystical Judaism and Sufism.
The reader should understand that I am neither a conventional Christian nor a Christian Scientist and I seriously question a number of their fundamental beliefs and practices. What matters in this chapter is not whether certain Christian or Christian Science beliefs or practices happen to be true but the factual occurrence and timing of the specific healing events and our sincere efforts to make sense of them.
Rhonda told me that she was led to go into her home office and select passages from Notes on the Course in Divinity, also called the Blue Book—a collection of teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, as recorded by her students. During the secret treatment, Rhonda noted passages claiming that Mrs. Eddy had experienced miracle-like cures by simply uttering certain phrases to the afflicted. For example, there was the man who had been paralyzed for years but walked after hearing her tell him that “God loves all.”
I quote from Notes on the Course in Divinity:
One of them was one of the worst cripples I ever saw. I was walking along the street—I walked because I hadn’t a cent to ride—and I saw this cripple, with one knee drawn up to his chin; his chin resting on his knee. The other limb was drawn the other way, up his back. I came up to him and read on a piece of paper pinned to his shoulder: help this poor cripple. I had no money to give him so I whispered in his ear, “God loves you.” And he got up perfectly straight and well. He ran into the house (told name of the people—Allen I think) and asked, “Who is that woman?” pointing to Mrs. Glover (afterward Mrs. Eddy). The lady told him, “It is Mrs. Glover.” “No, it isn’t, it’s an angel,” he said. Then he told what had been done for him.
Apparently Rhonda had been hearing the voice for the past couple of nights but had ignored it. For some reason, she decided to listen to it on Wednesday night. She invited her deceased mother, a Christian Science-certified practitioner, along with the late Susy Smith and higher spiritual beings (such as angels), to assist the Divine in this healing service.
After approximately one hour, Rhonda sensed that the treatment was completed, and she went back to the living room and fell asleep. I was startled the next morning to learn of the striking “coincidence” of Rhonda’s unplanned and secret spiritual healing and the timing of my dramatic fever reduction.
Was this simply a chance event, or was this connection, as Susy Smith was fond of saying, “too coincidental to be accidental”? I further wondered whether there was a lesson here.
To make sense of what transpired in the two subsequent secret spiritual healings, I will backtrack and examine the onset and course of my fever. (The unfolding of the tiger synchronicities turned out to be important because, as you will see, they eventually related directly to, of all people, Mrs. Eddy and, as incredible as it may seem, her explanation of Christian Science healing.)
The Tiger Synchronicities Pointing to the Big Picture
It was on a Thursday morning, November 6, 2008, that my sporadic bouts of coughing, which had begun a few days earlier, had become so severe that I could no longer speak without triggering a prolonged and uncontrollable fit of coughing. I ended up canceling all of my appointments that day, as I tried to lessen my increasing spasms of coughing with cough drops, fluids, and rest. That evening I noticed that I had a low-grade fever.
At one point I was moved to check the on-demand movie listings. I discovered that the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was playing. I had heard about this movie, but it seemed too complex for me to digest in my muddled state, so I simply noted its presence.
I slept quite badly that night. The next morning my fever was more than 100, and I felt miserable. I decided to remain in bed and give my body the additional rest it needed. When I get really sick, the only thing I am comfortable doing is rereading Robert B. Parker’s mystery novels, featuring a complex character named Spenser, the basis for the TV show Spenser for Hire. He’s a private eye in Boston and a former policeman who loves cooking and quotes poetry; his girlfriend is a Harvard-trained psychotherapist, and he is devoted to truth, integrity, ethics, and doing the best he can.
I went into the garage, opened the box that housed my Spenser novels, and pulled out the paperback at the top of the pile. It was titled A Catskill Eagle. As I was rereading the novel, I happened to notice that the author used the words tiger as well as crouching numerous times in the book. Twice the author mentioned an “Asics Tiger gym bag.” Once Parker used the word tiger in a surprising way: “Each door we opened was crucial. Was there a lady in there? Or a tiger?” And he once referred to someone as “holding the ass end of a tiger.”
I began rereading a second Parker novel on Friday (which did not mention a tiger), and continued reading it on Saturday. I also spent part of Saturday watching a college football game between the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University at LSU, which I discovered happened to be the home stadium of the Tigers. There was even a large portrayal of a tiger at the LSU fifty-yard line.
Meanwhile, the other college football game on another channel involved Penn State University and Iowa State University at ISU. To my surprise, I heard the announcers having a conversation about how every five minutes or so someone was bringing up Tony the Tiger. Two tiger mentions on television at the same time connected to football? I began to take notice.
I scribbled some notes about these potential synchronicities on the front page of A Catskill Eagle. I knew that I would forget the details and the timing if I did not record the events as they were happening, especially since I was groggy and not feeling well.
I then discovered that a James Bond movie was playing on another channel. When I switched to it, the scene in progress involved Bond being picked up in a car driven by a female agent with the bad guy’s car chasing them. The scene took place in Japan. Bond spoke by phone with a foreign male operative. To my amazement his code name was, you guessed it, Tiger!
Think about this: there were now three tiger mentions on television in the same time period. I made a point of adding the James Bond reference to the growing list of synchronicities.
The next morning, Sunday, November 9, 2008, I began rereading the third Parker novel, titled Taming a Seahorse. I noticed that one of the lead characters worked at a place called Tiger Lilies. The establishment answered the phone “Tiger Lilies” on page twenty-three and by page eighty-seven, there had been six tiger mentions. As I would soon learn, not only was the word significant here but its specific connection with lilies was important as well.
I took a break from reading and turned on the TV. I noticed that on a Spanish-speaking station, the program that happened to be playing was Fútbal Mexicano Tigres. A soccer team called the Tigers was playing? Hmmm . . .
Then Rhonda came into the bedroom and told me that a documentary about tigers was on TV called Growing Up Tiger. I pondered the improbability of a tiger documentary being on at that moment. Though I was having a hard time concentrating—between the aches and pains, dizziness, nausea, and general malaise—I could not resist watching the program. It featured two baby tiger cubs during their first year of life. The male tiger was named Sergeant; the female tiger was named Tiger Lily. That’s right, Tiger Lily.
First I read about Tiger Lily in the Parker novel, and then I saw a tiger cub named Tiger Lily the same day. What’s the probability? The answer is: miniscule. I could not wait to tell Rhonda about the apparent Tiger Lily connection.
After the documentary ended, Rhonda came back to the bedroom all excited. Before I could say anything, she reminded me that her beloved dog, a beautiful Borzoi who had died over a decade ago, was named Lila. Rhonda and I had been thinking about adopting one, and she had suggested that we name our Borzoi Tiger Lily—Lily, for short. Rhonda’s spontaneous inspiration about our future dog’s name could not have been more propitious.
As it so happened, one more remarkable Tiger Lily synchronicity occurred the next morning. I received a surprise phone call from Robert Stek, PhD, who at the time was in Regina, Canada, giving a presentation on our paper about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his history involving spiritualism, and our latest personal afterlife research involving Sir Arthur. I wrote about a string of tiger synchronicities in the second of two books, still in progress, and mentioned a few of them involving Bob. The two books illustrate how self-science can be used to discover and document the existence of strings of synchronicities in our personal lives—what I call supersynchronicities—and how science and spirituality are mutually advanced by examining them.
Bob had called not only to share what had happened at the International Sherlock Holmes Conference but also to tell me about a curious synchronicity involving the flag of Saskatchewan, Canada, of which Regina is the capital. In the center is a specific flower, which just so happens to be a tiger lily.
I was beginning to sense that there were too many tiger synchronicities occurring during my illness not to have some sort of meaning, but I had no idea what that was. At that point I had had the fever for four days, longer than I had experienced in years.
By Wednesday, the sixth day of the fever, I was fit to be tied. I had learned various energy self-healing techniques over the years, which I could have applied if I had a localized physical symptom, such as back pain or bleeding. Instead I found that among the fever, dizziness, nausea, pain, and fatigue, I could not focus my attention and use any of them. All I could do was watch a little television and reread Parker mysteries. Rhonda had our car repaired on Wednesday, and noticed in the window of a CVS drugstore a cute stuffed tiger. She bought it for me, and I named it Tiger Lily.
And then on Wednesday night around midnight, my temperature suddenly broke, and the next morning, as previously discussed, I discovered that I had received an unexpected spiritual healing from Rhonda. Notice that this spiritual healing had no obvious connection to tigers. Moreover, it never crossed my mind or Rhonda’s that somehow the unfolding tiger synchronicities might be connected to a spiritual healing.
Spiritual Healing #2: Secret Treatment
and My Night-Coughing Breaking
As far as I could tell, with the breaking of my fever, the tiger synchronicities stopped, too. I ended up rereading a total of fifteen Parker novels during the course of my superflu, and only the first and third mentioned tigers.
From Thursday through Saturday, I felt like I had been run over by a fleet of trucks. Though I was fatigued, the absence of the fever was a blessing. However, my coughing got worse, especially at night. I would wake up every fifteen to forty-five minutes with bouts of uncontrollable coughing. Rhonda continued to sleep in another room. The hacking would still sometimes wake her as well.
On Saturday night sometime around 1 AM, I had a particularly severe bout of coughing. It could well have been the worst I had experienced. After that I noticed that the urge to cough had greatly subsided. In fact, after an hour, I found I could finally go to sleep, and I actually slept until around 8 AM with virtually no coughing. I could not wait to tell Rhonda.
When I joined Rhonda in the living room, I learned that the night before she could not wait to talk with me. She said that she again had heard a voice saying that she needed to do a treatment. She went into her home office and this time selected, seemingly randomly, a section from Mary Baker Eddy’s classic Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Rhonda could not believe what she was reading. Mrs. Eddy was using a metaphor of a tiger!
At first I thought Rhonda was either joking or delusional; I quickly learned my initial thoughts were completely in error. I quote the complete paragraph with the tiger metaphor below:
Without the so-called human mind, there can be no inflammatory nor torpid action of the system. Remove the error, and you destroy its effects. By looking a tiger fearlessly in the eye, Sir Charles Napier sent it cowering back into the jungle. An animal may infuriate another by looking it in the eye, and both will fight for nothing. A man’s gaze, fastened fearlessly on a ferocious beast, often causes the beast to retreat in terror. This latter occurrence represents the power of Truth over error—the might of intelligence exercised over mortal beliefs to destroy them; whereas hypnotism and hygienic drilling and drugging, adopted to cure matter, is represented by two material erroneous bases. (italics added)
At that moment, Rhonda was in awe. Her husband was suffering with a bad case of the flu. She had waited six days to perform a spiritual treatment—you will recall that I had not asked her for healing treatment. She ended up doing the first treatment (and two subsequent ones) without my awareness. At the time she was performing the first treatment, she had no direct feedback that this was occurring at the same time that my fever was breaking.
My impression has been that Rhonda is a reluctant healer, respectful of other people’s beliefs and values. According to Rhonda she felt the need to provide me with a treatment only because she heard a voice in her head—this was her personal experience. And to her surprise (and mine), her efforts were validated with the breaking of my fever.
Now, try to imagine what it was like for Rhonda to awaken four nights later with the feeling that she must do a second secret treatment. She was hearing her husband coughing like mad. She went into her home office, thumbed through Science and Health, and began reading a section. Two pages later, what did she read but a specific passage referring to tigers and the process of healing!
This time Rhonda could tell that the timing of her treatment was associated with the reduction of my symptoms. She could hear that I had stopped coughing. Both Rhonda and I slept the rest of the night. It was only upon my waking in the morning that I learned of Rhonda’s second treatment and her reading about the tiger.
Later that day I went back to Rhonda’s office and reread the passage. The tiger synchronicities were pointing to the message of this passage for me, about the human mind and its beliefs that are in error and staring down this wild beast: “This latter occurrence represents the power of Truth over error.”
As I said, I had been contemplating writing a book about the subject of our partnership with Spirit but had been held up by the lack of hard-science experiments to verify what I knew in my heart and was experiencing in my life: that Spirit is there waiting to help us. Did I dare to go ahead using self-science as one of the measuring sticks? But I was also amazed by the delivery system. I might have thrown the I Ching and gotten a similar message, but apparently Spirit chose to show me how our lives are the ultimate metaphor for Spirit and its effects.
The Tombstone Tigers
I felt the need to celebrate the apparent emergence of some sort of lesson involving not only spiritual healing but also a better understanding of Spirit’s partnership with us, a gift that Rhonda and I were receiving individually as well as collectively. Moreover, our wedding anniversary was in three days. I suggested to Rhonda that, if she was willing to drive, we go to Tombstone, Arizona, have lunch at a low-key restaurant, and maybe purchase something to honor our upcoming anniversary coupled with the still-mysterious healing/tiger lesson that seemed to be unfolding.
Rhonda drove us to Tombstone. We had lunch at the Pioneer Grill, known locally for its wonderful home cooking, and then walked over to Tombstone’s best Native American art store, Arlene’s. We had previously purchased a number of pieces from there.
Native Americans do not, as a rule, carve or paint tigers, since tigers are not indigenous to North America. However, Rhonda asked the shop clerk what probably seemed to him to be an utterly foolish question: did they have any pieces of art with tigers?
To our amazement, the clerk explained that just last week they had received a set of kachina-like sculptures and one of them was of a tiger! In fact, the owner had requested a kachina tiger sculpture—something he had never done before.
This was ridiculous. A tiger sculpture in a Native American store? Unfortunately, the piece was too costly, so we did not purchase it, but they did allow us to take some photos.
The owner of Arlene’s has a second store that contains contemporary art. We visited that store and discovered a small, carved tiger statue that I purchased as a memento. I named the statue Mary, in honor of Mrs. Eddy, but also for Rhonda and her connection.
When we returned from Tombstone, I was wiped out. I had had more than enough adventure for one day. I turned on the television and noticed that the movie Evan Almighty was in progress. Evan Almighty is a spiritual comedy about God, played by Morgan Freeman, who asks Evan Baxter, played by Steve Carrell, to build an ark.
I had watched Evan Almighty at least ten times, partly because John Debney—who wrote the music for it, as well as for Bruce Almighty and Dragonfly—is a dear friend, and Rhonda and I had the privilege of being present in Studio City when John conducted the orchestra and chorus that put the music to the movie.
The scene I chanced upon had tigers in it. I had not paid attention to the tigers in this movie before. I later discovered there were at least five scenes that included tigers. What was meaningful for me was the timing of seeing Evan Almighty with new eyes shortly after having placed Mary the tiger on my desk.
Just as the movie was ending, Rhonda came into my office and told me that the segment in the documentary The Brain, featuring Dean Radin, PhD, and me, was about to air. I switched to the History Channel. I had seen the film once before, but it had been a while. In fact, I didn’t remember what Dean had talked about concerning precognition research or what I had said about afterlife research.
As we watched the segment, to my delight I witnessed Dean discussing the relationship between psychic abilities and golf, and he used Tiger Woods as the exemplar! They even included a scene with Tiger making a putt.
I wondered, why the reappearance of the tiger synchronicities? I seemed to have had my ah-ha moment. Was there perhaps more for Rhonda and me to learn?
It was clear that I had experienced on two occasions—once with the fever and once with a coughing fit—an uncanny timing between the dramatic remissions of my symptoms and secret spiritual healing treatments by Rhonda. The combination could have been a double coincidence, two chance timings of spiritual treatments with symptom remissions. But a triple concurrence statistically would suggest that it was really too coincidental to be accidental.
As it turned out, there would be a third treatment. And it would be the charm, occurring on the morning of our wedding anniversary.
Spiritual Healing #3: Secret Treatment
and My Night-Coughing Ending
The adventure on Sunday was too much for my weakened immune system, because that night my coughing reappeared in full force. Rhonda heard me coughing but apparently was not moved—or was not prompted—to do another treatment. True to form, I did not ask her for a treatment. My coughing continued on and off during Monday and that night, they were epic. And Monday night Rhonda was inspired to do a third treatment. Once again, in the middle of the night, my coughing suddenly subsided.
On Tuesday morning, our anniversary, Rhonda confessed that she had done a third treatment. At this point, I felt the need and responsibility to learn exactly what was she doing. I had never asked her to write up, in detail, what her personal healing treatment experiences entailed.
Below, in Rhonda’s own words, is what she experienced. For the sake of clarity, I’ve inserted some commentaries where appropriate.
November 17, 2008
I went to sleep on the couch again tonight, wanting to give Gary space to relax and sleep peacefully.
At some point, I was awakened by him coughing violently. I immediately and with authority declared out loud but in a whisper, “No, no, no! That is not the truth about you. Gary is not sick; he has never had a cold or a cough. And I am not impressed by or afraid of what is being presented here. It is a lie, and I absolutely do not accept or believe what I am seemingly hearing.”
For those of you who are not familiar with Christian Science philosophy, practitioners believe that the essence of a person is spiritual, not physical, and that there is no disease in their spiritual essence. What is seen as physical disease is interpreted to be an illusion in the sense that what appear to be symptoms do not represent the true essence or reality of a person.
Of course the symptoms are occurring: the term illusion refers to our interpretation of the meaning of the physical symptoms, not the existence of physical symptoms per se.
Instead, the presence of physical symptoms is viewed as reflecting the consequences of errors in our understanding the essence of reality. Practitioners believe that when they forcefully and honestly connect with the higher essence of reality—what they call “Divine Truth"—that the true nature of a person can be expressed. In this sense they are “staring down the tiger of disease.”
I then mentally, completely turned my thought away from Gary, the sense evidence [the evidence we experience with our senses], and anything other than God. I let the all-ness of God completely [Rhonda’s underlining] fill my consciousness, leaving no room for anything else and continued with a metaphysical treatment of prayer that went something like this:
God, Spirit is All (All-in-all)—there is nothing else. God fills all space, and he created all that is, and his creation is spiritual and perfect, changeless throughout all eternity. Gary is a spiritual idea held by God in Mind—perfect in form, function, and outline. There is no inaction, over-action, or reaction in the Divine Action. And in the equipollence of God all pressures and temperatures are even because they are governed and controlled by God.
Notice that this prayer is very different from the typical practice of energy healing as well as the various prayer-based spiritual healing practices. At no time was Rhonda consciously sending me loving healing energy. At no time was she consciously attempting to use her intentions and energies to selectively improve my immune function or suppress my coughing, or beseeching God to fix me, or asking God to return me to health. Also, Rhonda was not employing Reconnective Healing techniques at that moment.
Instead, Rhonda was making a series of philosophical statements about her belief in the ultimate essence and reality of the Universe, or the unity and oneness of all that is—and she was filling her consciousness with this core philosophy. The next part was news to me:
This would normally have been the end of my treatment, but since my mother, who passed a few years ago, had been a full-time practitioner/healer in Christian Science, I asked her to assist as well. She had shown me many times that she was still very much alive and involved in my life.
To honor Gary and his scientific interest in not only those passed on the other side but also the possibility of angels and guides as well, I invited Susy Smith and any councils, angels, guides, or beings of any kind, if they heard my request, to please help Gary be free and sleep comfortably that night.
For the record, after this secret treatment, I experienced the most peaceful and restful sleep. Moreover, my sleep was virtually perfect the subsequent nights. My coughing fits, for all practical purposes, ceased following Rhonda’s third and final treatment.
In my six decades of life, I had never experienced or witnessed anything quite like this healing sequence. In the process of coping with this eleven-day flu, I witnessed not once, not twice, but three times my severe symptoms subsiding immediately following three unrequested, secret spiritual healing treatments.
In a deep sense, I was blind to the actual occurrence of the treatments. The healings occurred without my conscious awareness. Once again my personal life was arranging itself to function as a living laboratory for proof-of-concept discovery and learning, for myself and, in this case, for Rhonda—and now, potentially, for you.
But What Does This Mean?
My personal healing experience was obviously not a controlled laboratory experiment conducted under the auspices of a university. It was, however, a true-life experiment, the kind that really matters. Scientists can design elegant laboratory experiments that do not generalize or apply to the real world. The real test is whether the theorems discovered in formal laboratory science can explain the operations of nature and the real world, or can the real world give inspiration to new theorems, like in Einstein’s case, when the relative movement of a train and people walking on a platform contributed to his theory of relativity.
The heart of science is observation of the natural world, and paradigm shifts come about when previous explanations or theories do not adequately account for a whole set of observed phenomena. Since it involves observation and scientific analysis, using myself as the subject in these self-science explorations of Spirit and its possible healing effects is the first step, with a hypothesis being the second, and then laboratory-based replication the third.
I could spend pages detailing the various possible explanations of the three healings that occurred, including:
1. Spontaneous remissions accompanied by highly improbable but nonetheless chance coincidences
2. Fraud and/or misperception by Rhonda and/or me
3. Subtle cuing on Rhonda’s part that somehow might have been picked up by me, a so-called subtle placebo effect
4. The direct effects of Rhonda’s focused love and compassion on my biochemistry and physiology—in other words, the effects of her loving energy and intentions on me
5. The assistance of Spirit—including a deceased practitioner/ healer, angels, and the Sacred itself
Part of the reason I seriously entertain some version of the fifth listed explanation is because of the presence of the uncanny tiger synchronicities surrounding the healings and how they persisted even after I seemed to have gotten the message. It seems this happened so that I could be exposed to a philosophy of healing and of the convergence of the Spirit world and ours as the basis of this Sacred Partnership.
The persistent occurrence of the tiger synchronicities, interwoven with Mrs. Eddy’s writings, speaks to the strong possibility that something more complex, intelligent, and awe-inspiring was taking place. The truth is, if Spirit can be involved in physical healing, we know next to nothing about how it works scientifically.
Using Mrs. Eddy’s label, which introduces this chapter—and this is especially the case scientifically—we are like babies in terms of our knowledge and understanding of the role of Spirit in health and healing. However, we do not have to remain in our infancy. We have the choice, and the opportunity, to use the gift of our discovering minds to address these most precious and profound questions.
If we are brave enough to ask these questions, we will stand up to the tiger and look it in the eye.