Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD.: Hello and welcome. With me today is Dr. Stanley Krippner, one of the foremost scholars in the field of consciousness studies
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.: It’s a pleasure to be here.
JM: It’s a pleasure to have you here. I know you have an enormous depth, particularly in the fields of psychic and spiritual healing. Paranormal forms of healing have been studied in laboratories, with impressive results.
SK: Yes. There are a number of problems in studying patients who go to a faith healer, or who have been worked on by a folk healer in some foreign country. Many of these people get well, but you don’t know if the recovery was due to what we call a spontaneous remission or due to the powers of suggestion or whether to their work with an allopathic physician before they went to the alternative healer. Perhaps the best way to start isa with the work of Bernard Grad, who is a biologist and physiologist at McGill University. What he did was to take injured rats and to have healers do a laying on of hands on the rats. Medical students also did laying on of hands with the rats, and the healers’ rats recovered from their wounds much more quickly than did the medical students’ rats.
What Dr. Grad did then was to move to simply having the healer put his or her hands around a vial of water. Then there were control vials of water that were just left there or that non-healers held. This water was used to water seeds, and the person doing the watering didn’t know which came from the healers’ water and which came from the control water. This was done over a several-week period, and the results showed that the barley seeds that received the healers’ water had more rootage, more foliage, and taller plants than did the control seeds, which also did well, but not as well.
JM: Grad’s work is still considered the classic experiments in the area of psychic healing.
SK: Quite a different line of research was done by Dolores Krieger and her associates. She is a nurse and a teacher at New York University who did a laying on of hands without touching the patient. She used real live patients in a hospital setting and found that the hemoglobin values increased when people did laying on of hands, but not when nurses spent extra time with the patients or simply talked to or sat by the patients. But if the nurses had the intent to heal and held their hands over the patient, the hemoglobin values did improve. There’s been a long string of replications of Dr. Krieger’s work by other people, and almost all of them yielded positive results.
JM: Well, Stanley, you yourself have traveled all over the world. You’ve personally investigated, interacted with, and become friends with healers from many, many different cultures, haven’t you? Who has impressed you the most?
SK: There are a number of people who impressed me, and, of course, there are people who haven’t impressed me. As you are well aware, this field is filled with charlatans. And it’s filled with people who are well meaning but deluded, who probably do more harm than good. And there are people out to make money who aren’t really interested in their patients’ health.
JM: I’m glad you brought that up.
SK: The person who has impressed me the most would be Dr. Lawrence LeShan, and his associate, Dr. Joyce Goodrich — they’re both psychologists and they work within the scientific paradigm, and they don’t charge money for what they do. They’ve both done research in this field, are open to further research, and they’ve begun to train people to have a sense of love and compassion with the person that they are trying to heal.
JM: And LeShan finds from his clinical observations that people actually get better when another person concentrates on them in this way.
SK: Well, at least more often than not. And again, he has done some follow-up and has very meticulously collected some case studies on this. Now remember that people are coming for the healing, so we don’t know how much, if any, psi is operating here. It might be suggestion; it might be expectancy. Both of these people are excellent psychotherapists, so it might be their therapeutic skills that are producing the change.
JM: Psi is the scientific term used by parapsychologists to refer to either an extrasensory perception effect or a psychokinetic effect.
SK: Yes, and the person who wants to become well may be getting this message from the healer and then is allowing his or her own self-healing mechanisms to come into play. All that we know now about the body’s immune system and the endorphins and other chemicals in the brain indicates that there are many self-healing properties of the body that do much more to help a person get well than we have suspected in the past.
JM: I imagine that when you are working with native healers in other cultures, they make use of rituals and other types of images, music, drumming, that might activate these same self-healing systems, so that we needn’t necessarily invoke any paranormal explanation.
SK: If you watch them at work you see that they’re very excellent therapists. They use drama, they use suggestion, they use expectancy, they use their own charisma. And you can see that everything that they do elicits the self-healing properties of the sick person to take over.
JM: I guess it’s fair to mention that they work in a cultural milieu in which psychic functioning is accepted, both by the doctor and by the patients.
SK: I once saw Rolling Thunder, an intertribal medicine man who lives in Nevada, do a healing ceremony where he was working with a young Indian man who was severely alcoholic. Rolling Thunder preceded the healing with ninety minutes of drumming and chanting, while that man sat in a chair, fifty people around him, all demonstrating their love for him and their care for him. And then when Rolling Thunder started to use his ceremony with the feathers and the rituals and the evoking of the Great Spirit and the sacrificial burning of raw meat, the patient really lit up, and he became very enwrapped in this whole ritualistic ceremony. And then Rolling Thunder said, “Did you hear that owl who was hooting?” Everybody said, “Oh yes, we heard that owl.” I wasn’t sure if there was an owl or not, but he was saying, “Well, that owl is a symbol of death, so this might be Robert’s last chance to shape up. But the number of times that he hooted is a symbol of good luck, so it might be that he’s going to make it this time.” So that again was a superb dramatic ploy, and something that got Robert, first of all, very shaken up, and then determined that this might be the time that he had to break free of the alcoholism. And it worked. I checked into him ten months later. He was still on the wagon, and a year later he had still not gone back to alcohol.
JM: Some of these native healers will engage in the ritual chanting, and the chant may run nine solid days. It may take them years to learn a complicated chant like that. Until rather recently, Western medical traditions have scoffed at native healers, but even mainstream Western doctors are now saying there might be something there that we should look at.
SK: In the early part of the twentieth century the Spirit Dance was outlawed, the Ghost Dance was outlawed, and the Sun Dance was outlawed by the U.S. and Canadian governments. Now all the dances are back again; the laws have been revoked. The psychotherapists can see how these dances can help those who go through these native rituals and make contact again with their roots.
JM: Anthropologists used to say that these shamans, the healers of native tribes, were the schizophrenic ones. Now they’re coming around and saying no, they are in an altered state of consciousness; but they may be in a higher state of consciousness than the average person.
SK: Yes. My friend Michael Harner has addressed that issue. Many of the Native American shamans have been given psychological tests. People in their tribe have also been given the tests, and you find out that shamans have more imaginative capacity, but they’re more in touch with reality than people in their tribe. So they’re very much at home in both worlds, while the pseudo-shamans psychological test scores are very poor.
JM: Many of the native healers across many traditions have a kind of animistic or spiritistic worldview that healing must involve removing possessing spirits from the sick person. You’ve observed that in Brazil and elsewhere. How do you evaluate that, Stan?
SK: Well, exorcism is very popular among some Christian denominations in the United States. It runs rampant in the groups I’ve seen in Brazil, in the African-Brazilian movements. Most of the Brazilian healers I know do a lot of what we would call past life therapy. Now, who knows if what they’re integrating is a person’s past life or a part of their current-day personality that they’ve distanced themselves from? They become whole and strong. That sounds very therapeutic to me.
JM: That might even apply in situations where the healer is actually out-and-out using fraud, such as some of the alleged cases of psychic surgery, where fraud seems to be used and then people recover.
SK: The amazing thing is that there is a history of sleight of hand in shamanism, and sometimes the sleight of hand is used for very benign purposes. In other cases it’s used to earn a buck. But it’s the ritual that is so important. The shaman is saying, “I have sucked that poison out of you.” OK, the patient is sometimes willing to let go of what has been poisoning him or her, symbolically, and that can be very beneficial from a therapeutic point of view.
JM: I think that’s probably good advice — to keep an open mind. I wonder if in closing we can talk about what some of the common factors are in the various healing practices you’ve observed.
SK: I think there are four important factors. The treatments are most effective when they build upon the expectation of the patient; when they use the positive personal qualities of the healer; when they empower the patient; and when the healer and the sick person share the same world-view. The more that are present, the more quickly the person seems to recover.
Those four principles are the same with allopathic medicine. There’s more in common among the alternative healers and the allopathic healers than we realize, and there’s no reason why the two can’t work together.
JM: Stanley Krippner, it’s been a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much.
SK: It was a pleasure to be here.
Copyright (C) 1998 Thinking Allowed Productions. To read the full interview, go to www.stanleykrippner.com. Printed with Dr. Krippner’s permission.
Stanley Krippner will be leading a workshop on Personal Myths on September 15-17.
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