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quieting one's mind. These practices were foreign to Russell. Jane also recommended that he get reacquainted with his "community of spirit," which is one of the important aspects of what the health trade calls "social support." Local as well as nonlocal caring connections are important for healing, as well as health.
Russell followed these new behaviors, and he has been well ever since. He never returned to the hospital for medical treatment of cancer and never took any chemotherapy. Ensuing blood tests and x-rays showed no indications of illness. We will never know if he actually had metastatic cancer, or if it was a misdiagnosis, as some people believe. What we do know is that Jane's interaction with Russell saved him from chemotherapy, which could have killed him, even in the absence of cancer. Jane's part in this spiritual healing can be more fully understood by reading Chapters 7 and 8 about "The Making of a Healer" and "The Healing Experience."
Physician Larry Dossey has delineated three distinctively different "eras" of medicine, which distinguish the ways we have viewed the relationship of mind and body: physical, psychosomatic, and transpersonal. With our recognition of the nonlocal mind  our consciousness that is unconfined by either space or time  we have now entered Dossey's third era, which recognizes the importance of mind-to-mind connections for healing. We are just beginning to realize the potential effects of mind both within each person and between people, for information gathering (as in remote viewing), and for information sharing in psychic and spiritual healing. Regarding the effects of our thoughts, physicist David Bohm says, "A change in meaning is a change in being." 1 In other words, thoughts have effects in the physical world.
Because we still do not fully understand the mechanisms underlying spiritual and psychic healing, many people dismiss the possibility of their effectiveness. However, we believe that different states of nonlocal awareness allow us to access levels of information unavailable through our ordinary senses. We will see this demonstrated by the remote viewing and other psychic data reported later in this book. A mystic might call the healing information "universal love."

 
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