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PRAYER AND HEALING: FUTURE

Michael Lerner, author of ‘Choices in Healing’ makes the following predictions for the future:

• As physicians become increasingly comfortable with nonlocality as a legitimate concept in science, they will begin to use nonlocal interventions purposefully in both diagnosis and therapy. This will open the door widely to an Era of "nonlocal medicine" and will change the face of the profession. Nonlocal medicine will reject neither technological, mechanistic, Era I-type approaches, nor mind-body, Era II-type therapies, but will subsume them. The result will be a medicine that is both more effective and more humane, a medicine that works better and feels better.

• As nonlocal concepts find a home in medical science, prayer will become recognized as a potent force in medicine and will become incorporated into the mainstream.

• The use of prayer will become the standard in scientific medical practice in most medical communities.

• So pervasive will its use become that not to recommend the use of prayer as an integral part of medical care will one day constitute medical malpractice.

• The nonlocal nature of consciousness will be acknowledged in mainstream science because of conclusive evidence affirming it. It will become increasingly recognized that consciousness can do things the brain cannot.

• A new picture of human consciousness will emerge. No longer will it be considered an exclusive byproduct of the brain, destined to die with the body.

• The recognition that there is some aspect of the human psyche that is genuinely nonlocal will lead to a transformation of our ideas of who we are. We will see that this nonlocal aspect of ourselves cannot die-for, if nonlocal, it is infinite in space and time, and thus omnipresent and immortal by implication.

• This soul-like quality of human beings will no longer be just an assertion of religions, to be accepted only through blind faith; it will be considered a legitimate implication of rational, empirical science.

• The recognition of a soul-like quality of consciousness-by science on the one hand and by religion on the other-will constitute a bridge between these two domains. This point of contact will help heal the bitter divisions between these two camps. No longer will people feel compelled to choose between them in ordering their lives. At long last science and religion will stand side by side in a complementary way, neither attempting to usurp the other.

• With the recognition that there is an innately nonlocal part of us that cannot die, the goals of medicine will be transformed. We shall come to realize that our intrinsic nonlocality constitutes an ever-present, Radical Cure-immortality-for the Big Disease, physical death.

• This recognition will not prohibit us from trying to eradicate illness, increase longevity, and prolong life; we may continue to do so if we so choose. But if so we shall no longer be acting out of desperation and fear of ultimate destruction at the moment of death. Rather we shall do so out of wisdom, recalling always that the most essential part of us cannot die, even in principle.

• This understanding may lead to a transformation in the way we pray. No longer will we pray incessantly for things, such as our health, but our prayers will be predominantly prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving-our proper response on realizing that the world, at heart, is more glorious, benevolent, and friendlier than we have recently supposed.