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manipulated by healers. These nonmaterial phenomena are just as real to healers as are the physical characteristics that can be perceived by ordinary sense perception, and detected by current instruments.
In the worldview of spiritual and psychic healers, according to another of Krippner's distinctions, death is not the end of human life  some immortal part of the human spirit endures. For healers as well as mystics, the human nervous system does not produce consciousness  rather, the brain and nervous system are viewed as instruments of perception, through which awareness of consciousness becomes possible for humans. As a result, says Krippner, healers perceive all human consciousness as being connected; and people are not seen as being isolated individuals, but rather as interconnected. 6 So, we would say that healers are aware of mind-to-mind connections that occur over spatial distances and across time. A physicist would call such connections "nonlocal mind."
Psychical research pioneer William James, author of the classic Varieties of Religious Experience, has said that the concept of "spiritual" entails a process that "establishes the self  however briefly  in a larger power and sufficiency."7 Joel Goldsmith was one of the great spiritual healers of this century. He wrote thirty-some books on healing and spiritual mysticism, and described the spiritual healing process this way:
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Treatment is a technique employed to lift consciousness to such an elevation that a contact with God is established, which permits spiritual power to flow into human activity. . . . This realization on the part of the person giving the treatment reveals the spiritual identity of the one who has asked for healing. . . .8
Goldsmith went on to explain that attempting to do good things or to think virtuous thoughts was helpful for people in their life, but these things would not lead to an ability to do spiritual healing. It is the opening to another realm of consciousness that allows healing to occur.
In the spiritual healing interactions in which I participate, what feels like a flow of energy being transported through me to the patient is wholly independent of any good deeds I may have done before, or anything I do with my

 
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