Report from Santa Fe; Larry Dossey

the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe our guest today is Dr. Larry Dossi. Thank you for joining us. There's no other way I'd rather spend my Sunday afternoon than with you, Lorraine. Thanks for your invitation. And that's how I feel too. I've been a fan of your work for a long time. You are a leader in bringing, marrying two worlds, bringing scientific understanding to spirituality, but also bringing proof to integrative medicine. So, tell us about your background. I know you're you were practicing physician. Tell us about how you got here.

Well, I got here through a very circuitous path and part of it had to do with physical illness. I, from adolescence, I only had severe migraine headache and it almost ended in my career because it was so severe. I tried to drop out of medical school. It was so serious. And the thing that was my salvation and career saver was my discovery of a relaxation technique called biofeedback, which is a way of sitting down, getting quiet and and relaxing your mind and body. This was a miracle for me. It almost made the problem go away totally. It was a short step from that to meditation. About the time I discovered meditation, studies began to come out in the culture about prayer and healing. I was hooked. I began to follow the literature and, you know, ten books later here we are. Yes, yes. Well, we're here to celebrate your new book, which is One Mind. And we'll talk about that in a minute because I want to go back. You have twelve books out. And you

have been, you were chief of staff at what hospital? Medical City, Dallas Hospital, one of Dallas major hospitals. And you worked with the NIH National Institutes of Health. That's correct. You were kind of their liaison on mind body. That's correct. And I have put the formal report, the NIH report together several years ago, own mind body therapies in modern medicine. You've been on Oprah and you've spoken with Deepak Chopra and Tom Brokha. You've been able to transmit a lot of your experience and wisdom to a very broad audience, which is why I'm glad you're speaking to our audience. You were pioneered in work with prayer. You would lecture at medical schools and now they're teaching prayer. Let me talk a little about these two books, I'll ask you to healing words of power, of prayer and the practice of medicine. This was a game changer. It was shot, followed shortly by prayer is good medicine. So, people, if you know anecdotally understand prayer, but they've actually

done experiments, talk to me. This is the shocker. And when I first began to write about this, almost nobody, even in my own profession, was aware that there were actually so-called double blind control studies looking at the effects of prayer on health outcomes and distant people who were not even aware they were being prayed for. But this is the direction in the late 80s that the research began to go in. And I was fascinated by that. I was also troubled by it because I knew that the world was not supposed to work like that. There was nothing in my education that had any room for that. And so, I had a choice. Do you go with the evidence or do you sort of rely on your narrow concepts which have been inculcated in you and your education? I think the latter is cowardly. And I thought that the way to go was to honor the science regardless of where it pointed. And that's what I did.

And you talk about that choice. You say in order to be honest with yourself as a physician, you had to take a stand on the power of prayer. Regardless of the implications of that. And the implications were that you're trying to take medicine back to the dark ages. And we spent a long time trying to divorce our profession from religion. And here you're trying to make that mistake all over again. Well, it wasn't a mistake. The evidence began to accumulate. When I wrote that book, Healing Words in 93, there were only three medical schools in the entire country that had any sort of course work looking at the connection between spiritual practice and health outcomes. Now, over 90 of the nation's 125 schools feature this work. So, you know, our medical schools don't give courses on the tooth fairy. You have to be scientific. And so, I'm happy about this track record because I think it speaks to the legitimacy of the whole idea. Well, everyone knows the spiritual art of healing is one of the history

of miracles. I mean, it's usually the lambs who are down there, crutches, the dead riders on the healing is very big. But how could they tell me some of the experiments where they quantified double-blind studies on the effect of prayer on healing? It's not all that complicated. Basically, the design of these experiments is like the testing of a new medication. You have patients who all have essentially the same sort of illness. You give part of them the therapy that you're testing, whether it's a new drug or being prayed for. Nobody knows who's getting which and you just simply follow the outcome. This has been done in coronary care units. It's been done in patients with advanced AIDS. It's been done in infertility. And so, a whole variety of human maladies and problems have been tested. And what we see is that the people who get what I call healing intentions or

compassionate thoughts are prayer, whatever term we want to use for that, generally do better on average than people who don't. So, this is empirical science. It troubles a lot of people, but there it is. I was astonished. People would ask you, well, does it matter how many people are praying for you if they're in the next room or across the world? But you say that it's the authenticity, the sincerity and the passion with which people are praying makes it most efficacious. Absolutely. That's a good summary. The number of people who are praying doesn't seem to matter. Ten people praying is not ten times the effect of one person praying. Distance does not matter. It doesn't matter if the person praying is on the other side of the earth or at the bedside. So, space and time just simply don't seem to matter. Numbers don't seem to matter. If I had to select one factor which is explanatory and all of

this, it would have to be the four letter word love. Whether we call it compassion or just nice bedside manner or something else, but it's compassion, love and deep caring. If you ask healers how they do this stuff, almost always they will say something like, you know, you've got to feel it inside. It's got to come from the heart. And they're generally referring to what we can just commonly call love. In your wonderful interview with Okra, she talks about people sometimes pray from fear, oh God, if you take care of my husband, I'll do anything you want. Or from give me, I want more. And yet you say it's that sincere impulse of love and compassion that is really the power. And talk about toxic prayers. Well, I did write a book about what I call the dark side of prayer. People do have a way of praying negatively for others. When I discovered this, this was just a shock to me. But it's out in the culture and there have been studies doing this. And it looks like

one out of 20 Americans on surveys, five percent will admit that they have actually prayed for harm for other people. And I think that it's that we have to tell the whole story. I mean, I don't want to be polyanesh about this and just make this look like sweetness and light. All cultures have had a place for things that they call hexes and curses and spells and all of that. But our culture hasn't wanted to look at that. But it's part of the whole picture. And there's sort of a portmanteau or carry-all phrase when you just surrender to the process and say to whatever deity is up for you, they will be done. It just kind of, it releases with love, whatever outcome. And maybe it makes more room for the positive outcome. Well, that's a beautiful way to express it. I have been fascinated by different strategies people use in these studies and experiments. And the ones who seem to do best are those

who don't try to micro-manage the outcome. They don't try to tell the universe how to behave. They feel more comfortable using a strategy like, may the best thing happen in this situation or may that will be done. In other words, they're not relying on their wishes and preferences. They're appealing to a higher wisdom. And I like that. I'm happy it works that way. I want to get quickly to this next book, The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things. And here you talk about dirt, bugs, music, optimism, magic, miracles, tears, plants. This is such a wonderful need. Well, what I intended to do is to point to the fact that most of us in our lives are not going to need high-tech, expensive medicine, the things that keep most people healthy or simple things, prevent things. And that's really the thrust of that book. There are issues in our lives which we just don't notice which are profoundly influential. One that has

come to the fore is the value of not cleanliness, but uncleanliness in stimulating the immune system. Encouraging, for example, children to go outside and play and get dirty or even one of my favorites is to make mud pies, which is seem to have gone out of style. But that's the general idea. We need to focus on those kind of issues. And they found scientific studies that kids who were exposed to pet dander, digging in the dirt, marching around barefooted, have actually are healthier in terms of, especially asthma and things like that, then kids who've been in this sterile environment. Oh, actually, that's what it shows. So the incidence of asthma, allergies and infections is lower in kids who live in dirty environments, such as, I'm happy to say, growing up on a farm, which is my background. So I like to think that dirt has contributed to my health. That's consistent with the science.

Well, many other books I'll briefly mention is the Science of Promenicians, because you use the work from this book and you lay such a foundation, we'll go right to one mind. This is quite a piece of work. And I want to talk about the way you layered. Well, no, first you tell me, what do you mean by one mind, because a subtitle is? Now, our individual minds are part of a greater consciousness, and why that matters. The premise of the book is really, and old ideas, it goes back 3,000 years in human cultures, it's the idea that all individuals' minds are nourished and are part of something greater than our individual conscious awareness. And this, however, is not just mere philosophy. The reason I put my name on a book, exploring this, was basically the science that is come out in the last 20 years, pointing in this direction. There's just no way you can account for the way humans manifest in their psychological life and maintain that mind

you're separate. That just doesn't work. And so what we're arriving at, kicking and screaming in psychology and neuroscience, is this idea that all minds, in some dimension, come together and form something greater than our individual minds? Well, you merge science and wisdom. You said that your studies kept leading you, leading you to this conclusion, and you make for a case for human consciousness as a singular entity. But the way you structure this, and by the way, it's beautifully written, wonderful stories, and then it's foot-moded so much. This is not nothing very fair here. This is scientific references. But you give many glimpses of what you call one mind that we're all familiar with. And I'd like to talk about some of them. You start out with an example of a man who jumped in the subway to save this other guy. Why would he, why was he not looking at for number one?

That's what we were supposed to do biologically. We were told that we want to save our own lives and perpetuate our genes. But this is an example of how one person can come together in such a sensitive way that one will risk one's life to save somebody who's another race, another occupation, somebody you've never met before. And this is extraordinarily common. I saw this every day in my experience as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam in 68 and 69. So for me, this is just not airy-fairy philosophy. This is personal stuff. But you also, having promised your family that you wouldn't take any unnecessary chances, you went in and saved somebody. What's going on in your mind? Yes, this was a solemn oath I made to my family before I went to Vietnam. I would never take unnecessary risks. And when I got there within six weeks, I found myself disavowing all of those vows, which I really meant when I made them. And so the, the, the, the, the

experience you're referring to is when a helicopter crashed near my battalion aid station out in the boonies. And I, without thinking, rushed inside this upside down helicopter, which was leaking jet fuel and should have exploded at any moment, but didn't and rescued this young pilot who was trapped in it. I didn't know why I did that. I mean, I swore I would never do anything like that. But this was an example, I think, and of, of what Joseph Campbell talked about that at the end, the critical moment, the rescuer's mind comes together so intimately with the person in need that you don't make any distinction between yourself and another person. And this is modern science now that we're working with quantum physics and, and you have several kind of maybe metaphors or images so that people can get how this works. Holograms was one, something called entanglements, fractals, if you could, in a few sentences. Talk about what we're learning from modern science and

how it reflects on this connected. Well, if we go back to the early days of modern science, Newton taught us that everything was sort of separate as billiard balls interacting with each other. That whole idea of separateness and isolation of those, the things that make up their world, including humans, has gone by the wayside. We're at a pivot upon in human history where we're emphasizing integration and coming together as in the one mind idea through highly sophisticated theories now called entanglement that come out of modern physics. The key point for people is this, those ideas in physics are no longer applicable only to little tiny things like electrons in the invisible world. They permeate our big scale world where we live and have our being. So these are powerful metaphors in explanatory principles to explain how one minds come together. And, and these are things that we intuitively know. There's one chapter here with the sense of being stared at. Yes. And this happens

in war and with celebrities being stopped. And, and, you know, we, we know stories of these, the ones I just love were from the natural world and animals. You've got a chapter called they move as one and you talk about how herds of buffalo move were schools of fish or flocks of birds. That's right. And, and in terms of physics, they're almost instantaneous. So what's going on with those species, one species movement? Right. Well, this is powerful information which shows that you cannot explain how huge groups of millions of creatures will behave spontaneously by just saying these, these, these behaviors are propagated by side, side, sound or hearing or anything like that. It appears spontaneous involving all of these creatures at one time. These flocks, these schools of fish, these herds of bison or, or wildebeest and so on. So we see this evidence of connectedness of consciousness, not just in people, but in other organisms. This is really important because if you can

show that a principle affects many different levels within nature, you've really got something. That's an important consideration about whether a scientific theory is valid or not. And that's true in our experience of species, if you've ever tried to swim with fish or them, they turn so fast, but it also works in your species. And, and we all know stories of pets and owners. One of my favorite experiments was when they had cameras at home and cameras on the guy at work, the pets on at work. And the moment the owner would decide to come home, the animals, the cats, the dogs, whatever would get all excited. That's right. And they were separated in time and space. There's no way it wasn't just at five o'clock, the animals got happy. If the owner decided to come home at two thirty, the camera would show at the same time, the animal picked that out. Precisely. And they tried to fake the animals out every way possible, but returning at different times and different conveyances, walking, bicycling, taxing, driving, you can't fake the animals out. This is good research

by Dr. Rupert Sheldrake in England, who was a Cambridge biologist. Another one, there are all these stories about the animal. Fluffy gets lost in Yellow Zone and comes back two thousand miles away. I was fascinated by it. And then that's when a door really started opening in my mind. Tell us your theory and tell us the common theories, since or smell, what have you. But my favorite example is Bobby the Colley. Bobby's families were moving from Indiana to Oregon. They had been there before, but Bobby had never been there. And about a little later after they first departed, Indiana, Bobby gets lost. Their heart broke them, but they have to go on. And so they settle in the new house in Oregon. Six months later, there's a scratch on the door and here's Bobby with the name tag and identifying marks and scars. And so how does this happen? I think that saying this happens according to chance or pheromones that are blowing from west to

east, unining these things, biochemists doesn't work. Pheromones don't work between people and animals. The same species are involved. I think the best possibility to explain these extraordinary examples is some sort of consciousness connection that bridges humans and animals. I think this is much more conservative than some of the other bizarre ideas that the materialists continue to offer up to explain how this happens ordinarily. I just don't think you can get there with common sense explanations. Let's move now from people to people. People near death experiences and reincarnation, things like that. Again, now we're getting where people are a little nervous about this, but there's so many examples of shared death experiences, near death experiences. The mother wakes up in terror when the kid is in an accident. Is that one mind that we're? I think this is one mind coming into reality before

we're very eyes. These examples are so numerous that it gets very difficult at some point to say they're meaningless. I just can't do this. I'm an identical twin, and my twin brother and I have had these kinds of distant experiences all of our life. One I use in the book involves two little Spanish twin girls, four years old. One day the father takes one of them off of his grandparents, tens of miles away. The other little girl stays home to help her mother do chores. Unfortunately, she touched her hand to a red-hot iron and erupted in a second degree burn, a giant blister. At the same time, tens of miles away, her identical twin sister erupts in the same burn, in the same pattern. This was thoroughly investigated. This is one mind in action. There's no other way in my judgment you can explain this. The old go-to explanations of the skeptics that this is just chance. It's just one of those funny coincidence. If people

want to believe that, they can. I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever. Well, you talk about how we access one mind. There's so much. I wish we had more time, but we'll do. Science has revealed more and more, and you see you demonstrate how it's becoming an endless loop of spirituality and science. Why is there some resistance to that? Well, we've been hypnotized in science for the better part of a century that the mind is created and produced by the brain. Don't ask halve. That's just an assumption. And it can't operate outside the brain in the skull. This body of evidence says that that is not so. We have a choice of going with their preformed notions or going to another place to account for what we observe. You know, there are a lot of people with careers that are heavily invested in

keeping things like they are. The idea, biologically, that consciousness is just a product of the brain. If they were to switch over to a new way of thinking about the relationship consciousness of the brain, this would be a damning piece of evidence for what they, they're lifelong careers. And people are hesitant to make those kinds of switches, you know, after middle age at least. So we will eventually settle on this idea of the connectedness of minds in my judgment, because we have the data on our side. The other, the other way of looking at things is just bankrupt scientifically in my judgment. Besides having scientific experiments showing these connections, we have several thousand years of human experience. And when you bring those things together, you have a movement in culture and in science and philosophy that eventually is going to carry the day. The other question I'm sure you get is, is this one mind God? Every religion on

the planet has speaks about this experience. Right. And so, but you said you were born in the buckle of the Bible belt. The buckle, yeah. Is what do you say when people ask you, is this, is that what you mean by one mind? Is it God? It's similar to, to God, it has divine characteristics. For example, this one mind appears to be omnipresent. Space doesn't matter. It appears to be outside of time, which implies immortality, which is a, a attribute we attribute to God. But I think the best metaphor is to say that the one mind and the individual consciousness are like the, the wave in the ocean. You know, the wave is part of the ocean. It's the same chemically. It's all H2O, but it's profoundly different in terms of extent and power. So, it's the same and different. This is what we call a complementarity in science. You know, things can be alike and

dissimilar, dissimilar at the same time. So, our individual minds and the one mind come together in a divine light connection, but I'm not saying that it's the same thing as God. What is the way forward and what do we need to know? We need to apply science ruthlessly to our understanding about how consciousness manifests in this beautiful world. And we, in science, need to stop skimming off the top and just selecting things that fit our pre-formed ideas and theories. We need to have the courage to embrace all the experiences of people and all of the scientific experiments that currently do not fit with their pre-formed ways of how we think the world ought to work. So, I think if we did good science and we're rigorous about it, this would help us integrate our science with these stories that people have been telling us only

for about four or five thousand years. And this would be a great leap forward in our understanding of ourselves and hopefully integrating ourselves with all of sentient life on this earth, which is a move that we're going to have to make if we're going to meet the challenges environmentally that we face. So, that's what moved me so much was how timely, how important this is right now. And what a gift this is that you can lead people through the things they know into another way of looking things like you say we need a new paradigm and it's time. Well, it is time and our future and that of our descendants may depend on whether or not we can integrate ourselves, not with one another in a more compassionate, careful way, but also whether or not we can develop the love that's going to be required to honor all of sentient life. So, this is a way out of the greed and the selfishness that threatens to overtake us these days. Time is not on our side.

There is some urgency involved. And time isn't on our side anymore because we ran out of it. For our audience, I want to show you this with healing words. We spoke about it. The extraordinary healing power in ordinary things. And you're sort of magnus opus right now. One mind. Thank you, Dr. Larry Dossie, for being with us today. It's a pleasure, Louie. And I want to thank you our audience for being with us today on the special edition of Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, and organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation,

Taos, New Mexico.