The Return of Prayer by Larry Dossey, MD

If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where would I be now?
                                - C. S. Lewis

[Cont. from page 2] 

PRAYER AND PSI IN THE LAB

As a single example of how parapsychology (often called "psi")  and prayer are difficult if not impossible to keep separate, consider a study by Haraldsson and Thorsteinsson in which subjects attempted mentally to cause increases in the growth rate of yeast cultures.  The title of the paper, "Psychokinetic Effects on Yeast:  An Exploration Experiment," gives no hint that spiritual healers and prayer were involved.  The researchers recruited seven subjects -- two spiritual healers who used prayer, one physician who employed spiritual healing and prayer in his practice, and four students with no experience or particular interest in healing.  The subjects were asked to "direct their healing effects" to increase the growth of yeast in 120 test tubes. The study was well designed and employed appropriate controls.  The results indicated that "mental concentration or intention" indeed affected the growth of the yeast.  The bulk of the scoring was done by the two spiritual healers and the physician, which yielded a p value of <0.00014, meaning that the odds against a chance result were less than 14 in 100,000.  In contrast, the students, who had little interest in either prayer or healing, scored at chance levels.

The title of this paper suggests that it was a study in parapsychology and psycho-kinesis ("mind over matter"), but a closer look shows that it was clearly an experiment in the effects of prayer.  Because of its title, however, a survey of the prayer-and-healing literature would probably not identify this study. This experiment is a typical example of why the boundaries between prayer and experimental parapsychology are artificial.

LOVE IN THE LAB

There are other reasons for associating prayer and parapsychology. Subjects in parapsychology experiments often experience feelings that are central to prayer such as love, empathy, compassion, and a sense of connectedness, oneness, and unity with the object they are attempting to influence. Robert G. Jahn, former dean of engineering at Princeton University and the director of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, has recently begun to address the role of love in the mental interaction of subjects with electronic, random event generators and other physical devices. One of their most successful subjects said, "I simply fell in love with the machine."  Experiences such as these are extremely common in psi subjects.  In them, love seems to function as a form of intercession --  literally, a go-between -- that unites the subject and the object being influenced.  If love is crucial to the success of psi experiments, and if "God is love," then the Almighty appears to be less nervous than some of Her followers about entering the parapsychology lab.

Both religionists and parapsychology researchers should pay closer attention to the actual experiences of successful subjects in psi experiments.  If they did so, they might see that actual prayer or a sense of prayerfulness manifesting as love, reverence, and felt unity permeates the millions of trials of distant intentionality that exist in the parapsychology literature.  These experiences imply that a silent element of sacredness exists in the psi lab that is not often acknowledged.  If this reverential quality of psi research was recognized, it would expand the science-and-prayer literature to an immense degree.

On balance, therefore, the classic parapsychology studies which mention prayer explicitly are but the tip of a gigantic iceberg, and the data supporting the role of prayer is vaster than we have imagined. 

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