This article is taken from Dr. Larry Dossey's remarks at the July 17, 1996 workshop "Spirituality, Healing, and the Soul," part of the Center's series The Healing Force of Nature. Dr. Dossey serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center. He is the author of several bestselling books including Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine and its sequel, Prayer is Good Medicine.

You can't go through years of education here in the U.S. without being exposed to the idea that everything is physical. If you have a metaphysical, cosmic experience, well, that's just a chemical reaction. If you have a born-again experience, lithium will take care of it! We come out of our schools with no appreciation of the mind or even the presence of consciousness.

In reality, you can't find anything in the body that defines consciousness. It's hard to find anything that you can pinpoint as "the mind." It's time we admitted that nothing in chemistry or physics has even a remote bearing on consciousness. As David Chalmers, a philosopher at the University of California at Santa Cruz said in a recent article in Scientific American, it's time to bite the bullet and admit that consciousness is another force altogether, on a par with matter and energy.

When we talk of prayer we are talking about distant manifestations of consciousness. To talk in this way is to break some kind of taboo. We can accept the power of the mind in affecting bodily processes, but to talk interpersonally--that my consciousness can have an effect on other persons and events--is a major paradigm shift.

The first major shift in our thinking about health came in the mid 1800s when we began to view the body scientifically and mechanically. You identify what's not working right and fix it. The second era brought in the connection between mind and body. We began to talk about psychosomatic illness. The third era introduces the idea of non-local medicine.

Local medicine believes that my mind is localized in my brain. Non-local medicine says that my mind may not be localized to my brain and body or even to the present moment. One way to define intercessory prayer is as a "positive, distant, non-local manifestation of conciousness." This includes born-again Christians' prayers as well as the Buddhists'. It can include rejoicing, talking, silence, be addressed to God or to the universe. How you pray is up to you.

People get upset with this kind of broad definition. Most people in this culture define prayer as talking aloud to oneself or to some white, male parent figure, usually in the English language. But there are many cultures and religions with prayer practices. Unless you want to disenfranchize lots of people, we need a broader definition. And interestingly, the studies on prayer show no correlation between religious affiliation and the effects of prayer in the laboratory. The factors that seems to work are love, compassion, empathy and deep caring.

The most famous prayer study was conducted by Dr. Randolph Byrd, a cardiologist at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center. He took 393 people who had been admitted to the hospital with a heart attack. All of the subjects received the same high-tech, state-of-the-art coronary care, but half were also prayed for by name by prayer groups around the country. No one knew who was being prayed for--the patients, the doctors, the nurses. The prayed-for group had fewer deaths, faster recovery, less intubations, and used fewer potent medications.