with Dr Terence Palmer PhD
This experiment assesses the accuracy of a non-medically trained Spiritualist medium in her ability to identify a medically diagnosed disease. The case is also illustrative of the discovery of one earthbound attached spirit and one discarnate entity that uses energy for its own survival that is transmitted by a living human. The dynamic relationship between the disease and the discarnate entities is implied.
Click on the image for a transcription.
AbstractSpiritism is the third most common religion in Brazil, and its therapies have been used by millions worldwide. These therapies are based on therapeutic resources including prayer, laying on of hands, fluidotherapy (magnetized water), charity/volunteering, spirit education/moral values, and disobsession (spirit release therapy). This paper presents a systematic review of the current literature on the relationship among health outcomes and 6 predictors: prayer, laying on of hands, magnetized/fluidic water, charity/volunteering, spirit education (virtuous life and positive affect), and spirit release therapy. All articles were analyzed according to inclusion/exclusion criteria, Newcastle-Ottawa and Jadad score. At present, there is moderate to strong evidence that volunteering and positive affect are linked to better health outcomes. Furthermore, laying on of hands, virtuous life, and praying for oneself also seem to be associated to positive findings. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies on magnetized water and spirit release therapy. In summary, science is indirectly demonstrating that some of these therapies can be associated to better health outcomes and that other therapies have been overlooked or poorly investigated. Further studies in this field could contribute to the disciplines of Complementary and Alternative Medicine by investigating the relationship between body, mind, and soul/spirit.
Click on the image for the online paper.
BACKGROUND:Spiritual issues are rarely addressed by psychiatric institutions in daily routine practice.AIMS:
To report the prevalence of, and factors associated with, inpatients’ acceptance of religious assistance in a psychiatric hospital.
METHODS:
All patients evaluated by the religious assistance service in a psychiatric hospital were included. Patients admitted were asked about their need for religious assistance and were assessed on several religious aspects. Additional information was collected from patients’ hospital charts. A comparison between those who accepted the religious assistance and those who did not was performed.
RESULTS:
Most of the 213 patients evaluated requested religious assistance (85.0%), including those that reported having no religion (79.1%). Patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (p = .010) and lower intrinsic religiousness (p = .002) tended to request less religious assistance. More than 80% of patients requested assistance based on religious traditions other than their own.
CONCLUSION:
Most psychiatric inpatients were willing to participate in religious assistance sessions, even those without formal religious affiliations. Patients with lower intrinsic religiosity and schizophrenia tended to request less assistance. We believe the findings of this study can serve to foster discussion on whether psychiatric hospitals should provide a structured religious care service.
KEYWORDS:
Spirituality, psychiatry, religion and medicine, religious assistance
While there has been a large increase in scientific studies on spirituality, there has been too few of studies of the core of spirituality: spiritual experiences (SE), which often involve altered states of consciousness, reports of anomalous experiences and of consciousness beyond the body. This paper argues that SE, although usually neglected in debates regarding mind-brain relationship (MBR), may provide the much needed enlargement of the empirical basis for advancing the understanding of the MBR.
This paper briefly presents and discusses recent scientific investigations on some types of SE (meditative states, end of life and near death experiences, mediumship and alleged memories of previous lives) and their implications to MBR.
Neurofunctional studies of SE have shown that they are related to but not necessarily caused by complex functional patterns in several brain areas. The study of meditative states, as voluntarily induced mind states that influence brain states has been a privileged venue to investigate top-down (mind over brain) causation. End of life and near death experiences offer cases of unexpected adequate mental function under severe brain damage and/or dysfunction. Scientific investigations of several types of SE have provided evidence against materialistic reductionist views of mind.
The recent trend to scientifically investigate SE has already produced interesting and thought-provoking findings that deserve careful further exploration. Because of their potential implication, these findings may also contribute to the understanding of MBR, which remains an important, yet poorly explored way to investigate human nature.
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Consciousness, Mind, Mind–brain problem, Mind–brain relationship, Spiritual experiences, Spirituality
AbstractThis article expands psychosocial and cultural perspectives on the experience and expression of psychotic symptoms and the treatment of schizophrenia by exploring how Spiritism, a popular religion in Latin America, provides healing to persons with severe mental illness. Beliefs and treatment by Spiritist healers of persons with psychotic symptoms, some diagnosed with schizophrenia, are described. Reactions by mental health professionals (psychologists, mental health technicians and psychiatrists) to this alternative treatment are described. Qualitative data have been collected through in-depth interviews with 49 Spiritist mediums in Puerto Rico, and case histories of 22 patients and their family members, all of whom gave informed consent. In Brazil, interviews were conducted with a sample of 115 Spiritist mediums, with their informed consent. These mediums responded to semi-structured interviews and standard measures of social adjustment and mental health. As expected, beliefs and practices of Spiritist healers regarding psychotic symptoms, whether manifested by themselves or by clients diagnosed with schizophrenia or other disorders, differ substantively from conventional psychiatric constructs and treatment approaches. According to patients’ self reports and researchers’ observations, spirit healers often achieve positive results with persons manifesting psychotic symptoms or diagnosed with schizophrenia in that symptoms become less frequent and/or social adjustment improves. We suggest psychosocial mechanisms to explain these findings and raise questions for future research.
ABSTRACT
The mind-body relationship has prompted debate from the times of millennial religious traditions and the ancient Greeks through to contemporary neuroscience, and although these questions have yet to be decisively answered, therapeutic interventions today are guided by assumptions made in this respect. Research on the neural correlates of consciousness and mental expressions has made progress over the last 15 years by developing functional brain imaging methods. This approach may open up new perspectives for studies of the expression of presumed instances of spiritual consciousness, which would have major ethical, social and philosophical implications. We pose a promising new line of research in the neurosciences and discuss certain issues pertaining to the effective use of neuroimaging to investigate mediumship and advance the consensus comprehension of consciousness, alleged spiritual communication and its relations with the brain. We highlight methodological challenges and lessons gleaned from our neurofunctional study of mediumship to be considered for further research in this field when formulating hypotheses to address these phenomena, and discuss useful guidelines for neuroimaging studies of spiritual experiences in general.
Keywords: Mediumship, consciousness, dissociation, neuroimaging, SPECT.
Australian Journal of Parapsychology, Volume 13 Issue 1 (Jun 2013)
Wasney de Almeida Ferreira
The aims of this paper are to narrate and analyze some psychological phenomena that I have perceived in dead people, including evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in murdered people. The methodology adopted was “projection of consciousness” (i.e., a non-ordinary state of consciousness), which allowed me to observe, interact, and interview dead people directly as a social psychologist. This investigation was based on Cartesian skepticism, which allowed me a more critical analysis of my experiences during projection of consciousness. There is strong evidence that a dead person: (i) continues living, thinking, behaving after death as if he/she still has his/her body because consciousness continues in an embodied state as ‘postmortem embodied experiences’; (ii) may not realize for a considerable time that he/she is already dead since consciousness continues to be embodied after death (i.e., ‘postmortem perturbation’ – the duration of this perturbation can vary from person to person, in principle according to the type of death, and the level of conformation), and (iii) does not like to talk, remember, and/or explain things related to his/her own death because there is evidence that many events related to death are repressed in his/her unconscious (‘postmortem cognitive repression’). In addition, there is evidence that dying can be very traumatic to consciousness, especially to the murdered, and PTSD may even develop.
The degree of influence on a human being by a discarnate spirit entity can determine the label that is used to describe the phenomenon. For example, the Catholic religion uses the terms possession and exorcism, clinical spirit release practitioners use the terms spirit attachment and release, and Spiritists us the term obsession and dis-obsession. Here is a video that describes the Spiritist concept of obsession.
The Basic Causes of Disease
This is the problem with which all medical practice down the ages has wrestled. In our present
mechanistic age we have wandered far to the surface of things and away from the partially true point of
view of earlier centuries which traced disease back of the “evil humours” bred and festering in the inner
subjective life of the patient. In the evolution of knowledge on every hand we are now on the surface
of things (note I do not use the word “superficial”), and the hour has struck in which knowledge can
again re-enter the realm of the subjective and transmute itself into wisdom. There is today a dawning
recognition on the part of the best minds in the medical and allied professions, that in the subjective
and hidden attitudes of the mind and of the emotional nature, and in the life of inhibited or excessive
sex expression, must be sought the causes of all disease. (C) 1988 Lucis Trust.
Amazon Synopsis: Esoteric Healing is Volume IV of A Treatise on the Seven Rays. In this book, the seven ray techniques of healing are described; the laws and rules of healing are enumerated and discussed; the requirements for healing are given in detail; and basic causes of disease are shown. We learn, for example, that much disease can be karmic in origin; that certain diseases are inherent in the soil and in the substance of the planet; and that many others are psychological, arising in the emotional or mental bodies.
Amazon Synopsis: Occultism is concerned with the scientific facts behind the spiritual idealisms many accept because of a natural human tendency to idealise. One of the most highly idealised concepts is that of the brotherhood of man. Occultism shows that the scientific basis for that ideal rests on the fact of the one etheric structure underlying all forms within the solar system, energised and held in being by one life force. Mankind is, therefore, one in life and in form; he is merely unaware of unity in his own consciousness.
And evolution is essentially the means by which he becomes progressively conscious of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In this whole process the faculties of man play an important part – the five objective senses with their five higher spiritual counterparts. The mental principle or faculty is of tremendous importance to humanity at this stage in his evolutionary unfoldment. The three-fold mind unifies as one faculty the higher or abstract mind, the soul – the son of mind, and the lower concrete mind. As this condition of mental fusion and control develops, the disciple is learning to use the mind in new ways, particularly in wielding energy which, as it vitalises and animates his etheric body, influences through radiation his effect on others.
It is through this conscious, controlled use of mental energy that telepathic communication can be scientifically established with other minds by means of the etheric structure common to all. And by the same means the mind of the disciple, or of a group of disciples developing group consciousness, can be impressed by the clarity of thought and purpose of those members of the spiritual Hierarchy concerned with the working out of the Plan for humanity. The spiritual Hierarchy, we are told, works only through the minds of disciples, using the science of impression, and only for the purposes of the Plan.
The impression is conveyed as a stream of ideas – those ideas inherent in the Plan for man – which the disciple or the group can then interpret and translate into self-chosen action. The form of telepathy now developing within the spiritually awakened aspirants of the world is not, therefore, that of the solar plexus centre which is of the animal nature, but the result of a mental polarisation and penetration in consciousness towards the soul and the Triad. This produces an open channel of communication in two directions – vertically towards the spiritual Hierarchy of the planet, seeking to impress the Plan on all receptive minds, and horizontally towards the minds of men united within the mental substance of human consciousness as one.
The second part of this book discusses the etheric structure of the planet and the solar system of which each man and each form is an integral part; the pattern of the triangle in controlling energy flow and establishing a continuity of circulation through the whole system is of immediate importance to humanity. We are involved in the life of the Planetary Logos – in Him we live and move and have our being – and we are a contributing part of the present effort to bring the etheric body under the influence of the soul, symbolised by the triangle.
To the extent, and at the rate, that we succeed, so is the planetary etheric structure changing in form to become more consciously integrated into the energy system of which our planet is one small unit. So the living process of unity is exemplified – the part contributing to the whole, and the whole affecting the part through every cell and atom of every grade of substance which it contains.
