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The Most Delicate Issue in Metaphysics
I would sooner stop writing than proffer false hope to sufferers of terminal illness. But modern medical literature does, in fact, record extraordinary healings
I honor the perspective of journalist Norman Cousins who wrote in Anatomy of an Illness in 1979: “Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect.”
As a critical but “believing historian” of alternative spirituality, I urge exquisite care and caution in approaching questions of anomalous healing. There is no room for shorthand, generalities, or false hope.
That said, I do not discount the possibility of extraordinary — even miraculous — episodes of recovery pertaining to the psyche, which I define as a compact of thought and emotion. Such episodes are very rare but no less authentic as documented in mainstream medical literature.
If the psyche possesses causative or extra-physical capacities, i.e., if it goes beyond cognition and motor commands, which I argue it does, that prospect opens onto vistas that the human search, while millennia old, has only begun to detect.
