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.