Skip to main content

Miracles happen



Lewis Carroll’s Alice could believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. Impossible things do happen around us not too unfrequently. Miracles have their own places in our lives.

In his 1961 book Persuasion and Healing, psychiatrist Jerome Frank describes a treatment performed by the German physician Hans Rheder on three bedridden patients. One patient had an inflamed gall bladder and chronic gallstones. The second had had a pancreatic surgery and the recovery process was becoming tough. She lost weight rapidly and was reduced to a mere skeleton. The third patient was dying from a painful uterine cancer that had spread throughout her body.

Medical science stood gaping helplessly at these three patients. There was little that could be done anymore. So Dr Rheder decided to do something unconventional. He told all the three women that he knew a faith healer who could cure with remarkable success simply by directing his healing power to a specific place. Each woman was told that this healing power was going to be directed to her room on a particular day and time.

The day and the hour passed. Within a few days, the patient with gallstones lost all of her symptoms, returned home, and remained symptom-free for a year. The ‘skeleton’ woman began to eat and subsequently gained nearly 15 kg. The patient with cancer was already a terminal case, but her bloated body excreted excess fluids, she gained strength, and her blood count improved. She returned home and lived for 3 months in relative comfort.

Our minds can perform miracles. A lot of what we call reality is a creation of our minds. A lot of all that reality depends on our attitudes, perspectives, and emotions. Dale Carnegie’s two men look out from prison bars. One sees the mud while the other sees stars. That is the case with all of us. We see what we choose to see. We shape our destinies by what we choose to see and do.

Miracle is a change of attitude. There are many religious gurus and healers who actually perform miracles. Illnesses are healed by them. What really happens is a psychological change within the patients. They undergo a psychological transformation. Their bitterness and jealousy and ill feelings are taken out. A lot of illnesses are born of those bad feelings. When tenderness and goodness replace those bad feelings, healing takes place.

As a young man, I once interviewed one of those faith healers in Kerala. He was (and still is) a Catholic priest who ran (and still runs) a retreat centre in central Kerala where a lot of miracles were (and still are) taking place. I asked him whether what he calls miracles weren’t just psychological transformations. “Psychology works at the mental level,” he answered me. “Religion works with souls.”

I had problems with that because I didn’t believe in souls. “If I bring a person whose one leg is amputated, can you create the missing leg?” I persisted. The priest didn’t like the question though he answered it: “It is God’s will. We can’t question God’s will.”

The truth is that such miracles won’t happen. The miracles happen only when the mind undergoes a transformation. The miracle is a change of attitude, I repeat.

But as an older man today, I am ready to grant the concept of the soul. There is something more than the mind at work in the whole process. If you have ever undergone an inner transformation, you will agree with me. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain this.

A clarification: I am still a non-believer as far as God and religions are concerned. But I believe in goodness and miracles.


PS. The anecdotes from Dr Rheder’s experiments are taken from Passer and Smith’s book Psychology: the science of mind and behavior.  

Comments

  1. The power of belief (attitude).I agree with what you have told.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When you say a miracle is a change in attitude, I totally agree. The human mind IS powerful. And when we are in a bad place mentally, there are physical manifestations. So the opposite, does mean healing.
    There's a post I'd like to write, soon. And I would love to link to this post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Look forward to your post. This is certainly a topic worth longer discussion.

      Delete
  3. Pranic healing and Reiki are also healing techniques which work along those lines. They too claim that it is more than a mere psychological change. I have undergone Pranic Healing treatment from family members but the results were so varied each time that I didn't know what to believe. Of course, our mental attitude affects our health but it has its limitations, doesn't it? I have heard stories of miracles, haven't sought explanations for them. They were just great to know and appreciate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Any transformation needs to be sustained through constant effort. Miracles are not once-and-for-all changes. The new attitude attained has to be fostered through regular introspection or meditation or other means. As Richard Bach says, once we have climbed certain peaks we don't want to descend but spread our wings and fly high. But unless we make a constant effort to maintain the height, descend we will. That's the law of nature.

      Delete
  4. "Miracles happen!" is what I have heard many times. Probably it means the change of perception that leads to fruitful results or one sees the benefit of not getting what one aspires.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Change of perception. Yes. I called it change of attitude in the post because attitudes control our perception.

      Delete
  5. They would be miraculous, despite not violating the laws of nature, because they lie beyond, well beyond, current and even near-future human capability and because they epitomize and are consistent with the motivations of a God-like entity. ucem um curso em milagres

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let