< previous page page_248 next page >

Page 248
including LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA; various methods of asceticism; and ritualistic breathing patterns such as the Pranayama Yoga breathing techniques. These consciousness-altering methods have proven valuable for self-inquiry and self-exploration, but they have yet to prove themselves useful for healing others.
Therapeutic Touch and Reiki healing both involve a type of mind-centering that resembles Buddhist or Yoga meditation. Such centering or meditation, combined with a healer's helping intent, seems to facilitate an occurrence that feels like a flow of physical force or energy to both healer and patient.
Chi Gong
Chi Gong healing is related to a Chinese martial art called "Empty Force," which involves the seeming transmittal of energy through space by means of thought. Both Chi Gong healing and Empty Force are traditional Chinese practices based on the concept of learning to direct one's external life energy by means of training one's breath, thought, and body. 31 Mind-to-mind connections are recognized as playing a part in both disciplines. Chi Gong practitioner Paul Dong reports that "The response to external chi [healing] treatment depends not so much on the nature of the disease as on the degree of the patient's receptivity to chi."32
Four scientists investigating chi at the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a report summarizing their understanding of the complex role of mind in chi (which is here spelled qi):
e8c94223c14200366ed5f9b24065440d.gif e8c94223c14200366ed5f9b24065440d.gif
It appears to us that qi is a much more complicated matter than we originally supposed it to be. Qi is probably a complicated organic combination of substance, energy, and message. At present, substance, energy, and message are studied separately in science. Scientists are very unfamiliar both in theory and in experiments with what conditions will occur when these three produce effects at the same time.33
Mind is also known to be a factor in pranic healing, the forerunner of many contemporary modalities of subtle energy healing. Twentieth-century

 
< previous page page_248 next page >